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

Автор книги: Steven Gore

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 12

Donnally dropped into a chair across from Ramon Navarro in the Golden Phoenix, a shotgun Chinese café composed of six tables, two fish tanks at the back, and a cook who doubled as the waiter, halfway between the Hall of Justice and the Mission District bar of Rudy Rusch. It was long past sunset and they figured they owed themselves both lunch and dinner. Only one other table was occupied, by an old man hunched over a bowl of soup and watched by a lobster sitting shoulder-level behind the glass.

“A waste of time,” Donnally said. “My guess is Madison knew he was dead on the case and figured he’d be dead for real in a year or two, so he sent Hamlin to threaten Rusch and extort some cash in order to cushion his fall. Maybe they split the money.”

Navarro displayed an I-was-right-about-Hamlin smirk. “So it wasn’t so pro bono after all.”

“Looks that way.”

Donnally reached for the menu standing between the napkin dispenser and the wall.

“You sure it wasn’t Rusch who sent the Aryan Brotherhood after Madison?” Navarro asked. “The rumor years ago was that they backed him in buying the bar.”

“In a credibility contest between Madison and Rusch, I’ll take Rusch. He still calls his wife The Bitch, even though saying it paints crosshairs on his forehead.”

The cook walked up. Donnally ordered chicken chow fun. He’d missed Golden Phoenix’s version of the dish, nutty, dry-fried, and spicy, during the years since he’d moved up to Mount Shasta. Since he was doing cop work, he felt like eating cop food, at least in San Francisco. Long gone were the days when officers limited themselves to a Norman Rockwell diet of burgers and fries and roast beef or turkey plate specials.

Navarro ordered the same.

“You get any prints off the money?” Donnally asked.

“Some.” Navarro reached down and withdrew a file folder from his briefcase and handed it to Donnally, who passed over copies of his cell phone research and Hamlin’s calendar. “We’ve dusted most of the bills and recovered a few prints so far. The techs are still going through them.” He pointed at the folder. “Those are the people we’ve identified so far.”

Donnally spotted Takiyah Jackson’s name, along with Hamlin’s and one he didn’t recognize.

“How’d you happen to have Jackson’s prints on file?” Donnally asked.

“She got arrested in a raid on a Black Prisoners Union hideout in the eighties.”

“Which one?”

“The one in which Bumper was killed.”

Donnally now understood why Jackson had been drawn to Hamlin. It had been one of the most notorious cases of the era. The medical examiner’s autopsy had confirmed witnesses’ testimony that the ideological leader of the Black Prisoners Union had been killed by police officers while lying facedown on his bed. Donnally guessed from then on Jackson’s world was made up of cops and cons, and she saw herself as a con.

“What was she doing there?”

“A runaway from the East Oakland housing projects. Sexually abusive father. Heroin-addicted mother. She’d been in the BPU house for a couple of days. I pulled the file when we got the match. Her real name is Jeanette. They gave her the African name Takiyah. It means righteous.”

Donnally read off the second name. “Who’s Sheldon Galen?”

“Defense lawyer. Been around San Francisco for about eight years. Shares Hamlin’s point of view, but doesn’t have his brains. Hamlin would bring him in on codefendant cases. Hamlin always took the heavy and gave Galen the lightweight and expected Galen to make sure the client didn’t turn snitch and roll on Hamlin’s guy.”

“He have a criminal history, too?”

“No. His prints were in the applicant file from when he tried to get a job in the public defender’s office.”

“If his prints were on the cash,” Donnally said, “that suggests he must’ve been the bagman, collecting the fees and bringing them to Hamlin.” He smiled. “I don’t see Hamlin handing anybody a hundred grand and then telling him to strip off a couple as his cut.”

Donnally leaned back and held the sheet against his chest as the cook delivered their plates of chow fun. The peanut-oiled noodles in brown sauce shimmered under the overhead fluorescent lights. He could tell by the aroma that nothing had changed in the kitchen of the Golden Phoenix since he’d last eaten there.

“Homicides are usually about drugs, sex, or money,” Donnally said after he walked away. “Maybe I should drop in on Galen tomorrow.”

“Let me make a few calls first and see if any of the courthouse gossips know if there was anything going on between them. Maybe a fight over a case or fees or something. Some kind of falling out. Give you something to work with.”

Donnally nodded. “It’s tough to go after a witness cold, especially a lawyer.”

Navarro grinned. “You mean a professional questioner like yourself has no chance against a professional liar like him?”

“My professional days are long over. Now I’m just a guy who runs a café.”

Donnally pointed at Navarro’s plate, then took a bite from his own. They didn’t speak again until they’d gotten a few mouthfuls down.

“What did you turn up from the apartment?” Donnally asked.

“A few latents, but none from the kitchen. Somebody did a helluva clean-up job. The people in the other half of the duplex were out of town, and neighborhood canvass got us nothing at all. Hear no evil, see no evil. But we haven’t given up. We’re looking for some local kids who hang out in the park across the street at night.”

“What’s your thinking about the hairs in the bathroom and the rope left behind?”

“Maybe they got panicky or something made them rush at the end.” Navarro smiled again. “Like you used to say, nobody gets murder right the first time. It takes practice.”

“You sure this was a first time?”

“At least in terms of MO. I’ve never seen anything like it in San Francisco before.” Navarro took a sip of tea. “It’s so bizarre the loonies are all coming out. A couple of them called the tip line. Apparently a conspiracy of Martians and Scientologists did Hamlin in.”

Navarro reached into his briefcase again. Donnally expected him to take out the legitimate leads from the calls. Instead, it was his department-issued iPad. He turned it on, tapped an icon, and handed it to Donnally. It displayed a story about Hamlin’s murder on the home page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“You’ll love this,” Navarro said, pointing at a second paragraph.

Donnally read it to himself.

“It is a monumental loss to the legal community of San Francisco,” District Attorney Hannah Goldhagen said late this morning. “We’ll miss his intelligence, his aggressive advocacy, and his humor that informed as much as it entertained. I can guarantee the people of San Francisco we will find and prosecute whoever murdered him to the fullest extent of the law.”

Donnally passed it back. “She had to say something other than good riddance. It’s Bay Area politics in its most perfect state.”

Navarro’s fists tightened on the table. “That bitch has never prosecuted anyone to the fullest extent of the law. She’s spent her whole career oiling the hinges on the revolving door.”

“And somehow I get the feeling you’re hoping whoever did Hamlin in is one of those who slipped through.”

“Yeah. With him holding it open.”

Chapter 13

Donnally noticed the letter-sized envelope protruding from under the doormat as he reached into his pocket to dig out his house keys. He bent down and rolled back the corner of the rubber pad, then squeezed the envelope by opposite edges and picked it up. The words printed on the paper inside showed through when he raised it up toward the porch light: “Follow the Money.”

What do you think I’m doing? was his first thought. His second was Who gave you the right to come to my house?

He unlocked the door of the two-story bungalow and followed the distant light through the living room and into the kitchen where Janie was working on her laptop at the table. Handwritten case notes from her psychotherapy sessions at Fort Miley lay next to it. He set the envelope on top of the newspaper lying on his side of the table, then kissed her on the forehead.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the envelope.

“A love letter from somebody who’s one step behind me, but who thinks they’re one step ahead.”

“Better for you than the other way around.”

Donnally made a point of scratching his head. “I’m not sure I understand that one.”

Janie smiled. “Ever since Freud and Jung, shrinks are allowed to be cryptic and nonsensical. It adds to our aura of enlightenment.” She pointed at the chair across from her and closed the laptop lid. “Tell me about your day. All I know is what’s been on TV.” Her smile transformed into a grin. “I kind of like the title special master, especially since in San Francisco it sounds kind of sexual. Dungeons. Dominatrices. And special masters.” She raised her eyebrows. “Did they give you a little whip?”

Donnally smiled back, holding up his empty hands, and then filled her in on what had happened since he’d climbed out of their bed at 4 A.M.

“I’ve got to handle Takiyah Jackson carefully,” Donnally said when he came to the end of the story and began to think about next steps. “I’m convinced that folie à deux really does capture her relationship with Hamlin.”

“Or maybe a folie à plusieurs,” Janie said. “A madness of many. He had lots of people willing to work for him and lots of attorneys willing to work with him, like Sheldon Galen.”

Donnally narrowed his eyes at her. “How do you know about Galen?”

“He was on the news. And not easily forgotten. He has a New York accent and a face like a greyhound.”

Janie paused in thought for a moment, then said, “ ‘Madness’ may be too strong a word, but I see why you’d latch on to it.”

Donnally felt himself stiffen and his stomach tighten. The problem with having a shrink as a girlfriend is the continuing risk of getting shrunk.

Janie stared at him. He knew she was waiting for permission to say what was on her mind. He nodded.

“It’s because you can’t accept that people like Hamlin feel morally justified in what they do.”

He knew she was right.

“I think that’s why you never really understood narcotics officers who planted drugs on gangsters and then committed perjury to make the cases stick. You always believed their motives were more basic, like it was only about power. Cons playing the part of cops. Same with Hamlin, you always thought attorneys like him were motivated by greed alone and they merely disguised their motives in moral language.”

Donnally always thought one of his strengths as a detective was that he never believed either cops’ or crooks’ justifications for their criminal offenses. Rather, he saw the crimes graphically and abstractly, like moves in a game, or as forms of self-deception or as attempts to justify the unjustifiable.

Janie hadn’t known him during those years. He had been referred to her after he was shot. It wasn’t that the department thought he’d gone nuts and needed treatment. It was just a requirement of the general orders that an officer who killed a suspect in the line of duty undergo a psych evaluation. He considered it a sign of his sanity that at the first meeting he decided he’d rather date her than get shrunk by her.

She ended up doing both, starting with the dating.

“I think that’s why you sometimes sound like you operate on a kind of mechanistic and reductionist theory of homicide and view them as motivated only by drugs, sex, or money.”

It was like she’d been sitting at the next table in the Golden Phoenix listening in, but in truth it was that she’d paid close enough attention over the years to be able to tell him how he saw the world, and why he did so.

“But I’m not sure you really believe that. It’s just that thinking in terms of power, of brute causes and effects, seems more honest to you than the way your father thinks about the world.”

Donnally felt himself tense. Every time Janie started down this kind of analytic road, his past washed over him like a flash flood, the storm triggered by the mention of his father. It made him feel like he’d spent too many years circling in an eddy.

He’d become a cop as a form of rebellion, and he recognized it at the time. It had been against his filmmaker father, a man who treated fiction as more real than fact because it made possible the evasion from responsibility he’d sought for most of his life. For his father, justice had been no more than a kind of fictive irony, a subversion of cause and consequence, of effect and responsibility, because real-world justice would’ve meant facing up to what he’d done to his older son. Donnally’s older brother had believed the propaganda his father had created as a press officer in Saigon during the Vietnam War. His father had falsely claimed that North Vietnamese regulars had massacred a group of Buddhist monks near the DMZ, and the lie not only provoked worldwide outrage, but persuaded his brother to enlist. He learned the truth—that the killers had been Korean mercenaries working for the U.S.—just days before he was killed in an ambush.

Years later, his father became a movie director, playing out his evasions on film, and liked to say that Hollywood wasn’t a place, but an idea, while Donnally had always thought of it as no more than a patch of concrete and viewed the motives of those who worked there as more base than artistic—and his father was proof of that. After all, what was post-Vietnam Hollywood, the years in which his father first achieved fame, but an escape from reality into drugs, sex, and money.

Donnally pushed aside the memory and worked his way back to where their conversation had started, with Jackson and what had connected her to Mark Hamlin, where it began, how it grew, its character just before his death and whether it might have transformed afterward.

“What you’re saying,” Donnally said, “is that I need to understand Jackson’s transition from victim of a police crime into . . .” He spread open his hands on the table. “Into what?”

“Someone whose identity was somehow tied to Hamlin’s ends-justifies-the-means mentality.”

Donnally had the feeling Janie was right. That could be the reason why Jackson could be terrified of being prosecuted for the illegal means Hamlin had chosen, but could still be loyal to him.

“Even though,” Donnally said, “whatever ends were hers over the twenty years she was with him may not have been his anymore when he died.”

“But I suspect that she doesn’t quite see it yet. And if you push her too hard, she’ll never let herself see it. It would be just too terrifying.”

Chapter 14

The note on Donnally’s windshield had read:

We decided to flatten only one tire so you could use your spare to get yourself out of town. Next time . . .

Donnally hadn’t noticed the listing right rear end of his truck when he walked out of the house and into the predawn shadows at 7 A.M. He felt a surge of anger as he examined the tire under the streetlight and realized that he’d overlooked a ground rule when he met with Judge McMullin. Who was going to pay for the damage.

The note was still pinned under his wiper blade. Four thoughts came to him as he retrieved it.

The first was that whoever left it probably wrote for a living. They didn’t split the infinitive and they knew how to use an ellipsis.

The second was that he wished Hamlin’s friends and enemies would stop leaving notes.

The third was that the absent words “Fuck you, asshole” meant that the author probably hadn’t been one of Hamlin’s clients.

The fourth was that the “we” was really an “I.”

Twenty minutes later, Donnally had changed the tire and was driving toward Hamlin’s office. He parked in an underground garage up the block, then walked over and waited for Takiyah Jackson behind a pillar by the building entrance.

Donnally spotted her coming down the sidewalk before she noticed him. He stepped toward the brass and glass door as if he was just arriving, then looked back as she made the turn, and smiled.

“Good timing,” Donnally said.

Jackson didn’t smile back. She pointed upward, toward the higher floors. “You setting up shop?”

“Might as well. Looks like I’ll be in town awhile. Can I buy you some coffee?”

“I thought you cops liked to start the grilling cold, then offered coffee as a pretended act of friendship to fudge up a little warm feeling in the interrogation room.”

“Crooks never fell for that except on television. I always relied on charm.”

Jackson rolled her eyes. “I’ll take the coffee instead.”

They turned together and walked to the Starbucks on the corner. She ordered regular house blend. He ordered the same out of solidarity, otherwise he would’ve gotten the decaf. He’d learned over the years that it wasn’t enough just to break bread, but you had to break the same bread, or to drink the same coffee.

Sometimes he didn’t want to try to rely on charm alone, and this was one of those times.

Jackson raised her cup in what Donnally took to be a silent toast to Hamlin, then they both took sips and headed back out the door.

“Mark must have really trusted you,” Donnally said as they headed back up the sidewalk.

“How do you figure?”

“We found your fingerprints on the cash in his safe.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t have trusted me. How do you know I didn’t reach in and grab some for myself?”

Donnally glanced over at her and smiled. “A do-it-yourself severance package?”

“Maybe.”

“You’ve been around long enough, seen enough screw-ups by crooks, to have learned how to cover your tracks by wearing gloves.”

“You find anyone else’s prints?”

“Yes.”

Jackson stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Donnally to stop and face her. Office workers brushed by them, some making a point of bumping their shoulders. Donnally pointed toward the front window of a copy service and they stepped over to it.

“It really wasn’t a yes or no question,” Jackson said.

“How about you tell me whose prints they are.”

“It’s better if you take the lead. I’m not gonna snitch on anybody.”

“Even if they did something wrong?”

“Who am I to judge? People make mistakes.”

“Like Sheldon Galen?”

Jackson took in a long breath and looked past Donnally up the sidewalk. He noticed part of what had made him think of Angela Bassett when he’d first looked at her. The severity of her nose and cheeks and her eyes, less windows than screens. He wondered whether over the years her face had become her or she had become her face.

Finally, Jackson exhaled and said, “That’s a complicated one. Sheldon showed up a while back all tense and excited. Really pressured, like there was a lot on the line. Him and Mark talked in the office for a long time and then Mark cleaned out the safe and gave him all the cash inside. They were in such a tizzy I thought maybe they’d landed a big case and Mark was giving him his cut upfront.”

“That matches what I’ve heard,” Donnally said. “That Mark often hired Galen to work on cases with him. But I’m not sure how money with Galen’s fingerprints ended up in Mark’s safe. It should’ve been all outgoing, and none incoming.”

“That’s not the end of the story.”

Jackson took a sip of her coffee. Donnally thought she was buying time to decide how much of the tale to tell. He didn’t imagine he’d get the whole thing. Jackson wasn’t there yet.

“A week later the money was back. I asked Mark about it. He told me it was some kind of loan. I flashed on how Sheldon acted when he came for it and realized what I was prepared to see as tension and excitement because of all the cases they’d worked on over the years might have been desperation.”

“And when the cash showed up again?”

“I figured that Sheldon had returned the money, or at least part of it.”

“How much?”

“I think about eighty thousand dollars.”

“Why do you think it was Sheldon?”

“There were a bunch of conference calls the day before. Sheldon, Mark, and a bunch of the lawyers in The Crew.”

“The Crew?”

“A group of old lefty lawyers from the sixties and seventies. I got the feeling they took up a collection so Sheldon could pay Mark back, because the money showed up right afterwards.”

“Is that the same money that I took out of the safe yesterday?”

“Some.” Jackson stared past Donnally again, but this time her eyes didn’t seem to register the commuter traffic on the street or the office workers rushing by. Whatever she was seeing was playing out in her head.

After a few moments, she looked back at Donnally.

“Sheldon is a weasel. He graduated from NYU law school and worked as a court-appointed lawyer back there for a couple of years. Why he showed up in San Francisco, I don’t know. But he knew how to talk the talk, how to pump up his credibility. It was all about how he’d represented terrorism suspects and about all his trial victories. It was all bullshit. He only represented terrorism suspects because they couldn’t afford their own lawyers and the federal judges needed attorneys who’d work cheap.”

“How’d you find out the truth about him?”

“Him and Mark did a heroin importation case back there a couple of years ago. They were brought in by a local lawyer. I talked to her paralegal. She told me all his money came from CJA.”

Donnally cast her a puzzled look.

“Federal Criminal Justice Act. Indigent defense. Sheldon never had a paying client until he came out here.”

“What kind of weaseling led him to need eighty thousand dollars all of a sudden?”

Jackson shrugged. “I told you. I ain’t a snitch.”

Donnally anticipated the dodge and had his answer prepared. As he readied himself to give it, he wondered whether it had been Jackson who’d left the “Follow the Money” note in the envelope under his doormat, a way of snitching without being seen to snitch.

Donnally backed off the idea of pressuring her; instead he said, “Then point me in the right direction so I can find out myself.”

She paused, then aimed her finger down the street in the direction from which they’d come.

“Go see Warren Bohr. His office is in the Frederickson Building. He put some money in, so he must know why.”

Donnally recognized the name. Bohr had been a defense lawyer who represented Black Panthers and other radical political groups in the sixties, then criminal defendants in big drug and racketeering cases in the seventies and eighties, and finally migrated into public interest law after he grew wealthy enough that he didn’t need the money. The last time Donnally had heard his name was before he’d left San Francisco, when Bohr had filed a suit to stop the federal government from leasing part of Alcatraz Island to the Marriott corporation to build a hotel. But that was fifteen years ago.

Donnally glanced at his watch. It was 8:25.

“What time does he get in?”

“You know how these old guys are. In at 7 A.M., and tell everyone they meet that they’ve never missed a day of work in the gazillion years they’ve been practicing.” She gestured with her cup toward Bohr’s office. “He’ll be there.”