Текст книги "A Criminal Defense: A Harlan Donnally Novel"

Автор книги: Steven Gore

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 44

Donnally left the city just before noon by way of the Golden Gate Bridge, heading north through Marin County on the Redwood Highway toward the Russian River. With “Proud Mary” playing in his head, he realized that what Lemmie had seen as merely juvenile—Hamlin and Hancock getting stoned and singing and pounding the table—was worse, it was corrupt and cynical. In their minds, “rolling” referred not only to smoking pot, but to snitching one client on another. It was nothing less than a celebration of betrayal.

He knew he’d be going back to Mission Street. He knew that soon enough he’d pull up in front of Camacho’s taqueria, get out of his car, look up and down the sidewalk, and head toward the entrance—

Just . . . not . . . yet.

The Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit to coastal Highway 1 rose up like a suppressed temptation, and not just because a longer trip up along the ocean to the mouth of the river then inland to Guerneville would delay his return to Mission Street. But because he hated the outlet malls and car dealerships that were filling in the land between San Rafael and Novato, and between Novato and Petaluma, and between Petaluma and Rohnert Park, and between Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa. Driving past them was like walking down the aisle of an Eddie Bauer outlet store filled with people buying clothes they didn’t need and pretending to themselves they’d go places where they’d never go. Or maybe it was like a dollar store, the oppression of too much stuff overwhelming the necessities of life.

A minute later, the urge to cut off the highway had faded and he was shooting north past where redwoods used to be. And a few minutes after that, the Marin County Civic Center appeared on his right. He remembered driving there soon after he completed the police academy to pick up a suspect, wondering where else but in Marin did people hire an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright to design a jail. But then San Francisco built one that looked like a European art museum, undulating like a wave that seemed to wash the jail out of jailed.

An hour later, Donnally slipped off the freeway onto the Old Redwood Highway, turned west on River Road, and headed toward the bookstore owned by Ryvver’s mothers.

Donnally felt a tingle in his fingers and a bump up in his heart rate when he got his first glimpse of the Russian River, wide like a lake and blue like a lagoon except where sunlight painted yellow and gold on the moving surface. He knew that people fishing for steelhead were working the riffles and holes downriver, maybe one now stood waist-deep in waders near the sand and gravel spit where he’d caught his first one, each turn and run by the fish, each pump of the rod shooting adrenaline through his body. It was that moment, more than any other, that fated him to someday move north to Mount Shasta where redwoods still grew and close to where steelhead and salmon still ran. That someday had come a lot sooner than he’d expected, but he’d made it nonetheless.

River Road turned into Guerneville’s Main Street, a few mostly one-story commercial blocks north of the river that was just inside the far border of quaint and that had become too gay even for Ramon Navarro. He’d once told Donnally that anyplace referred to as a playground wasn’t for him.

As Donnally stepped down from his truck in front of Mothers’ Books & Café, a blue-façade Tudor storefront, he wished he wasn’t wearing cowboy boots. He should’ve checked with Navarro about local politics, whether the leather-soles-in-cow-shit locals from the dairy farms in the foothills were still at war with the Vibram-never-leave-the-sidewalk outsiders.

At least in Guerneville, unlike San Francisco’s Mission District, he didn’t have to worry about finding himself in anything worse than a verbal crossfire as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

A tinkling bell announced his arrival as he pushed open the door.

He’d checked the bookstore Web site before he left Hamlin’s office, so he recognized Scoville Mother Number One behind the drinks counter in the café half of the store. She was a little shorter and a little wider than her picture, but was wearing the same wire-rimmed glasses and a similar tan work shirt with the business name stenciled in brown on the front. He walked up, ordered a decaf coffee, and asked if he could talk to her.

“About what?”

Only loud enough for her to hear, Donnally said, “Ryvver,” and then tilted his head toward the end of the counter, ten feet beyond the tattooed teenage boy working the espresso machine.

Mother One bit her lip, anxious and uncertain, then came around and walked with him to a corner table at the back of the café. She folded up a local newspaper and slid it aside as they sat down.

“Aren’t you supposed to show me a badge or something,” Mother One said, then flicked her thumb toward the entrance. “And aren’t there supposed to be two of you?”

“I’m an ex-cop, so my badge wouldn’t mean anything,” Donnally said. “And I was never very good at pairing up.”

She glanced at his left hand. “No ring.”

Donnally got the feeling that she was in no hurry to talk about her daughter.

“Never married.”

She smiled. “I never would’ve guessed.”

Donnally smiled back. “You?”

“That’s kind of hard to say at the moment.” Her smile faded. “I’ve got a ring and a certificate, but there’s three levels of appeals courts between us and the promised land. Once they tell me what the law is, I’ll know whether I’m married or—”

“Or just civilly united?”

Mother One shrugged. “I guess you could say it’s mostly civil.”

Donnally saw an inadvertent opening.

“Does the uncivil part have anything to do with Ryvver?”

Her eyes widened as she saw herself being pushed into the gap.

“How come you want to know?”

“I was appointed special master in the murder of a lawyer in San Francisco.”

“Mark Hamlin. I read about it.”

Donnally nodded. “I’ve been trying to get in contact with people—”

“Suspects?”

“Ryvver isn’t a suspect,” Donnally said, and finished the sentence in his mind: At least in the murder of Mark Hamlin.

“Then why . . .”

“She had an argument with Frank Lange the night before he died and I think Hamlin and Lange were in the middle of something together.”

“They were in the middle of something together for decades. They shared what they called the Lost Years.” Mother One paused, then the tinkling bell drew her attention to the door. She watched an old couple walk hand-in-hand up to the counter. He thought he saw envy in her fixed gaze. She blinked and looked back at Donnally, then leaned forward and folded her arms on the table.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Mother One said. “Ryvver didn’t kill Frank Lange.”

“I didn’t accuse her of—”

“Close enough. It would be called patricide.”

Donnally drew back. “Lange was her father?”

Mother One nodded. “From the days before artificial insemination, or at least before lesbians got access to it.”

She gave a shudder from which Donnally understood that he was supposed to assume her act of intercourse with Frank Lange in order to conceive Ryvver was the most distasteful thing she’d ever done.

Donnally decided to display that he did, and said, “I hope she appreciated your sacrifice.”

Mother One took in a long breath, then exhaled, “Not always. But it wasn’t exactly my sacrifice, it was my partner’s.”

Donnally understood that Mother One’s sacrifice was pacing a living room floor while Mother Two had sex with Lange. He wondered how they decided who’d be the one to spread her legs under him. Maybe they picked straws or maybe they just measured their levels of revulsion on some kind of scale, like a noise meter. Or maybe they just got high and flipped a coin, each praying to the Her Who Art in Heaven as it spun in the air.

Donnally also wondered how Ryvver’s life could ever have seemed normal when it began with what the mothers considered to have been an original sin against their nature.

“How’d you pick Frank?” Donnally asked.

“He was the best of a narrow range of options and he wasn’t yet the fat asshole he turned into.”

Mother One sighed as though saying, If I only knew then what I know now.

“Do you know why Ryvver was upset with Frank?”

“In general or in particular?”

“Start with the particular.”

“There are too many possibilities. Mostly father-daughter possibilities, or maybe I should say the sort-of-father-sort-of-daughter possibilities.”

“Then how about start with the general, non-sort-of-father-daughter type.”

Mother One gazed around the restaurant with a how-did-I-get-here expression, then said, “She didn’t have a whole lot of contact with Frank growing up. Just a week or two during the summers. That changed after college, what she did of it. It was only after she started working for him that she got a good look, and she didn’t like what she saw.”

“What had she expected to find?”

“You ever see Frank on television or read in the newspaper the kinds of things he said?”

“I don’t remember seeing him at all or reading any quotes from him.”

“You’d think he was the guarantor of the U.S. Constitution, sounding like Earl Warren. Equal justice and all that shit.” A bitter laugh burst from her mouth. “He used to call himself The Equalizer. Almost sued the production company when that TV show came on in the late 1980s using that same name. But the fact was he was a louse. A fucking louse. He was a dirty-dealing, money grubbing Un-Equalizer. We kept our mouths shut and never poisoned her thinking about him, but that’s what he turned into.”

“Turned into from what?”

She thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. We might’ve been wrong about him right from the beginning, and just didn’t see it.”

“And do you think there’s a connection between the general and the particular that got her fighting with him?”

“All I know is that a friend of hers committed suicide in prison. She went racing down to see Frank right after she found out about it. I got the feeling she’d tried to get Frank to help him just after he got arrested and while she was working for Frank, but he refused.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“We called him Little Bud.” She waved her hand in a high arc behind her, as though beyond the confines of the café. “He had a marijuana grow up in the hills. For decades. Lived like a sharecropper in a shack above it. Helluva view of the river from up there. No electricity. No television. No radio. Just a wood stove for cooking and a gas lamp for reading. Ryvver used to spend hours up there with him.”

She paused and her eyes and face took on a kind of longing.

“Little Bud was like an older brother to her and she loved him in that way. I mean really loved him. He did for her what the meds could never do, what we could never do. Calm the racing thoughts and anchor her back into the world—then he got busted. Thirty fucking years in prison.”

She glanced toward the book section of the store, and a hard edge entered her voice. “From Call of the Wild to The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“He must’ve had a hillside of plants to get that much time.”

Mother One spread her hands like she was making a plea at a sentencing. “It was just pot, and he gave almost all of it away to medical marijuana clubs he thought were legit. And him being five-two and a hundred and twenty pounds and stuck in the federal pen with real crooks and heavy-duty gangsters . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“And he couldn’t take looking at the rest of his life caged up.”

“Hung himself after two months.”

“Why didn’t he cooperate? Give them someone else. Isn’t that how the game is played in federal court?”

“Somebody had to be the last domino, and he decided it would be him. The DEA wanted everyone he sold to or gave away stuff to and everyone he knew who had grows going and everything about what they did with their money. Especially that.” She looked through the front window. Donnally followed her eyes toward a real estate office across the street. “They really, really wanted the real estate brokers who structured deals so the growers could turn their cash into land and houses. But he refused to do it.”

“I’m not sure what Frank could’ve done to help him,” Donnally said. “Some cases can’t be beat. And if Little Bud was living right on the property he grew the pot on, I don’t see what kind of defense he could’ve cooked up.”

Donnally then had a thought. Maybe Mother One was looking at this thing backward. Maybe Ryvver was angry because Lange hadn’t been willing to play the Un-Equalizer and play dirty on Little Bud’s behalf. Maybe pull a John Gordon routine on whoever the government’s witness was or maybe find somebody to take the fall in exchange for money like the formerly brain-tumored Bennie Madison had claimed. A guy like Lange could come up with lots of angles.

But Donnally didn’t transform that thought into speech. Instead, he asked, “And you think she blamed Frank?”

“I don’t know. This is all theory, anyway. She hasn’t been back up here to tell us about it.”

“You have any idea where she went?”

“Nope. And she hasn’t been answering her cell phone since two days before Frank died.” She shuddered again. “I can imagine what she’s going through. She was devastated by Little Bud’s death, and she was a fragile person to begin with.” She half smiled. “How two dykes like us ended up with a daughter who wouldn’t pick flowers as a kid for fear of causing the plant pain, I’ll never know.”

Donnally reached into his pants pocket for a pen and tore off a piece of paper from his notepad. He wrote down his cell number and handed it to her.

The bell tinkled again. Mother One looked over. “Shit.”

Mother Two moved like a subatomic particle. One instant she was standing at the door, the next she was leaning over the table.

“I can tell a fucking cop when I see one.”

Her face burned with outrage and her fists were hard by her sides.

Mother Two glared down at Mother One. “Why are you talking to this guy?”

It wasn’t a question.

Then to Donnally, “What do you want from us?”

This one was a question, and he answered it.

“I’m trying to get in contact with Ryvver.”

Mother Two’s palm shot out toward him in a straight arm that stopped inches from his face.

“Not through us, you won’t.”

Chapter 45

Donnally stopped by the sheriff’s substation in Guerneville and obtained Little Bud’s true name and identifiers and the name of the San Francisco–based DEA agent who’d supervised the joint narcotics task force that had targeted him. He then drove east toward the Redwood Highway, thinking a mother bear couldn’t have protected her cub with more aggression than Scoville Mother Number Two had shielded Ryvver. Donnally had the feeling even while he was stepping back out onto the sidewalk from Mothers’ Books & Café to the sound of the tinkling bell, that she’d been doing it all her daughter’s life.

The odds were as low as the Russian River in a drought year that Ryvver had drugged and murdered her father in the planned and calculated manner in which Lange had been killed. Donnally had learned in homicide training, and his experience never contradicted it, that patricides were usually Lizzie Borden crimes of passion, not premeditated murders.

As he squared the block to get turned around to head back to San Francisco, he tried to remember the first-degree murders of parents in California. The only one he could think of was the Menendez brothers in Beverly Hills in the late 1980s. It was a case that involved a dummied-up defense, too. It rested on false allegations the father had sexually abused the boys and had emotionally abused their mother, and on a bizarre claim that the boys killed her to put her out of her misery. It also involved a defense attorney who leaned on the psychiatrist to alter his report, a move that later left her taking the Fifth twice during questioning by the judge.

Hamlin in Northern California and Reggie Hancock in Southern California didn’t have a monopoly on manipulating psych evidence—they’d just never been examined under oath.

Donnally slowed while driving over the River Road bridge. He watched a truck shoot past him, then looked down toward the sandbar that narrowed the wide water flow into a roiled chute a hundred and fifty yards downstream. It was right there more than two decades earlier, standing waist-deep, drifting salmon roe, sweeping it across the current at the end of long riffle, that his first steelhead had struck.

And in that instant, the mystery of whether there were any fish moving through that part of the river ended with a bucking rod and a pounding heart.

As he looked again at the road in front of him and accelerated, he realized his trip hadn’t served as a sandbar to narrow his case and now he wasn’t sure he was even fishing in the right river to catch the killer of Mark Hamlin, or even of Frank Lange.

He reached for his phone. Ramon Navarro answered on the second ring.

“I was just about to call you,” Navarro said.

“That mean Galen has returned to the world of the conscious?”

“No. He’s still out and we’ve got no ETA. But that’s not today’s topic. I got Judge McMullin to issue an order for a pen register and trap and trace on Ryvver’s cell phone and for cell site and GPS info so we can track her and her calls.”

“Her mother, or at least one of her mothers, said it was turned off.”

“I think she has at least two. It looks like she bought a new pay-as-you-go phone and is using it to check messages on her old one. If so, she’s still in San Francisco. All of the calls are from a cell site out in the avenues near Golden Gate Park.”

“All?”

“All.”

“That means she’s not moving around,” Donnally said. “She’s probably holed up somewhere.”

“Or maybe only going as far as the corner store.”

“Or maybe is using a phone we haven’t ID’d yet.”

Donnally noticed a service station coming up, then glanced at his fuel gauge and saw it was low. He pulled in next to the island.

“Hold on a second. I need to get some gas.”

As he was getting out, he spotted the truck that had passed him on the bridge. It had pulled off to the side of the road fifty yards away, the driver’s side mostly shielded by a freestanding metal sign in front of a café.

“I think somebody is following me,” Donnally said. “Hold on again. Let me try to get the plate.”

Donnally raised his phone like he was checking for a telephone number or a text message, and took a photo of the truck. He then zoomed in, targeting the front plate, and read it off to Navarro.

“Can you check that quick?”

“No problem.”

Donnally heard keystrokes in the background as he removed the gas cap, fed the nozzle into the neck of the tank, and started pumping.

“Scoville, Leslie,” Navarro said. “Goes to a 2006 Ford pickup.”

“That’s it. Mother Number Two.”

“What do you think she’s up to?”

“Maybe she thinks I have a better chance of finding her daughter than she does and wants to piggyback off me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Navarro said. “I asked some guys in the department who hang out around Guerneville on weekends in the summer. They say she’s a pretty tough cookie who gets what she wants. I’m thinking she wants to stay close to you in case you get close to Ryvver. That way she can forearm you to give Ryvver time to get away.”

“From what? Chances are slim she killed Lange. She’s his daughter.”

“No shit?”

“None at all.” Donnally thought for a moment, then said, “I wonder if Ryvver is hiding because she knows something and doesn’t want to be questioned about it. Maybe something Lange did. The thing they argued about. Mother One told me about a guy named Little Bud who committed suicide in federal prison after he got thirty years on a marijuana beef. Robert Earl Bowling.”

Donnally watched the numbers rise on the gas pump as he listened to more of Navarro’s typing in the background—

Then a laugh.

“Guess who his lawyer was?” Navarro asked.

The laugh had already given Donnally the answer: “Mark Hamlin.”

Chapter 46

I never saw the Little Bud file,” Takiyah Jackson told Donnally when he got back to the office.

They were standing on the rug in front of Hamlin’s desk. He suspected from her outfit, a V-neck sweater and a push-up bra, that he would have a problem with her again. He felt himself in the middle of a sort of crossfire with Jackson poised next to him and a mother bear parked in her truck down the block.

It had made no sense to try to lose Mother Number Two since she could catch up with him whenever she wanted, at Hamlin’s office or at Janie’s house, which was still in his name. He also didn’t want to clue her in that he knew she was following him by making any quick moves.

“I’m not sure there even was a file,” Jackson continued, “or at least much of one. It was a bang-bang thing. I think Mark only made three appearances. When Little Bud was arraigned, when he pled guilty, and when he was sentenced.”

“Didn’t he even file a motion to find out the name of the informant who snitched him off? Or to suppress the evidence in the case? I thought that was routine.”

“It is, but he didn’t. And not out of laziness. It didn’t make any difference who the informant was and there’s no way to suppress evidence that’s in plain view. The DEA flew a helicopter over the site. Even hidden among the ferns and tomato plants, the pot glowed in the infrared camera like landing lights.” She pointed upward and made a circling motion, then curved her hand down toward the floor and leveled it off like a landing airplane. “And they swooped in.”

“And I take it he didn’t try to negotiate for a better deal.”

“The U.S. Attorney played hardball. She threatened thirty years, figuring Little Bud would cave and cooperate. She put it to him as an ultimatum. First, last, and best offer. Snitch or do the time. She couldn’t back down. He couldn’t back down. Because of the length of his sentence, they sent him to a level four prison. Hard-core.”

“Did Frank Lange have anything to do with the case?”

Jackson’s eyebrows narrowed like it had never crossed her mind Lange had a role in it, then she shrugged and said, “I don’t think so.”

“What about his daughter?”

Her brows went deeper and the skin folds between her eyes seem to crevasse. “How’d you know about her?”

It was Donnally’s turn to shrug.

“Frank didn’t talk about it much,” Jackson said. “He wasn’t the fatherly type. But I knew.”

“You know her?”

Jackson looked away. “Ryvver didn’t spend much time in San Francisco.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

She looked back. “It’s complicated.”

“Then uncomplicate it for me.”

“I’d see her once in a while at Frank’s when she was a kid and she stayed with me for a couple of months after she got out of . . . of . . .”

For some reason, Jackson couldn’t get the words out. It made Donnally want to hear them all the more.

“After she got out of what?”

“She . . . uh . . . lived in Mann House.”

Donnally hadn’t heard the name for more than a decade. It had been a home for mentally disturbed kids.

“You know what the diagnosis was?”

Jackson shrugged again. Donnally knew she knew, but didn’t press her for fear she would feel he was trapping her into attacking Ryvver, or perhaps reducing her identity to a mental illness, by saying it aloud.

“I didn’t want her to go back to Guerneville and into the mess with her mothers. She was a lost soul and I didn’t think she could find herself up there. And I couldn’t bear her living with Frank. He couldn’t even take care of a dog, much less someone as troubled as her. She finally got herself together and went home after a few months, but then came back to San Francisco to work for Frank.”

“You know who she stayed with down here?”

“She shared an apartment with a couple of guys out near Golden Gate Park. But they’re gone. Moved overseas somewhere, Thailand or Vietnam or someplace, but not the same thing.”

“The same thing as what?”

She didn’t answer, only smiled at the implication. She reached out and gripped his upper arm.

“As far as I know they had no interest in teenage kids. They were straight up do-gooders, like in the Peace Corps.”

Donnally glanced at the computer monitor and used that to set up an excuse to turn away and break her grip.

“Maybe I can find some notes in his computer,” Donnally said, then pulled his arm free and walked around to the other side of the desk. He didn’t sit down, waiting for her to return to her desk.

“I didn’t mean anything by that,” Jackson said.

“I think you did.”

She forced a smile. “I’m just a touchy-type person. Black people are like that, you know.”

“Don’t try that cultural bullshit,” Donnally said. “I think you’re afraid of something.”

“You?”

“Something. Not someone.”

She tilted her head toward the couch along the wall below the window. “You want me to lay myself down so you can play therapist?”

“No. I want your help, and I don’t like these games getting in the way of my getting it.”

Jackson straightened herself and folded her arms above her breasts. “Is that better?”

“It’ll do for now.”