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

Автор книги: Steven Gore

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 27

Hamlin’s reception area seemed hushed, even kind of funereal, when Donnally walked in. For the first time he noticed the thud of his shoes and the muted squeaks of the worn wood-planked floor.

Jackson rose from her desk chair. She’d already called to warn him Hamlin’s family would be coming in. She intercepted him, pointed at the inner office, and said in a low voice, “Mark’s parents and sister are in there already. Matthew and Sophie and Marian, but everyone calls her Lemmie.”

Donnally took in a long breath and exhaled. He had nothing good to say about Hamlin, and therefore nothing to supplement the standard condolences that were due a grieving family.

The moment he reached the door he grasped that not all the family members were grieving.

Hamlin’s parents sat in chairs facing the desk.

His sister stood next to the couch, looking out the window at the brick façade of the building across the street, poised like a tourist guessing at the type of architecture or an artist deciding whether a scene is worth painting.

They all turned toward him as he crossed the threshold.

Donnally introduced himself and expressed his sympathies. He didn’t want to be seen as supplanting their son and brother by sitting behind Hamlin’s desk, so he pulled a chair away from a wall and placed it so it formed a semicircle with the couch and the chairs in which the parents sat. He waited until Lemmie took a seat on the couch, then sat down.

On his second look he recognized Lemmie. He’d seen her photo on the backs of best sellers that had migrated on and then off Janie’s nightstand over the years. She appeared to be at least ten years younger than her brother. He didn’t find it surprising that he’d run into a writer during the investigation. Writers crowded San Francisco the way actors crowded LA and painters crowded New York. He just hadn’t connected the Hamlin last name from her to her brother. Maybe because she was always referred to in conversation and in the press by her first name alone.

Under Janie’s prodding, he’d tried to read one of Lemmie’s novels, but got through only ten or twelve pages, put off by too many adjectives and adverbs and everything being said sweetly, or intriguingly, or bewilderingly.

As he put the book down for the final time, Janie said, “Too girlie, huh?”

Donnally figured he’d be safer by answering with a shrug.

After that, Janie came to accept that Donnally was a noun-and-verb kind of guy. And that had shown in his work. When he was a patrol sergeant, he’d made an officer remove the word “brutally” from a report of a stabbing in the Pink Palace, asking if a single stab wound was brutal, what was a dismemberment or a stabbing followed by a rape?

And sitting with the parents and sister of Mark Hamlin, he found it hard to imagine that any literary flourish or device could add to the knowledge they shared about his death.

Rope.

Tied.

Hung.

Strangled.

Dead.

And, worst of all:

Erection.

“We got into town from Boston this morning to help Marian with the funeral arrangements,” Matthew Hamlin said.

The family’s naming scheme hit Donnally when the father said the name Marian. Matthew, Mark, and Marian.

Donnally’s own father, Donald Harlan, Sr. had also imposed a naming scheme on his children. Donald, Jr. and Donnally. And it had been part of Donnally’s rebellion to reverse his name, from Donnally Harlan to Harlan Donnally, in order to disguise his connection to his father.

He wondered whether Marian’s adoption of the name Lemmie was part of hers.

“And to find out where you stand in the investigation,” Lemmie said, leaning forward on the couch.

Lemmie sounded more like a reporter asking a question than a mourning sister. It was the sort of tone that can turn a family member from source of information into a suspect, like a husband seeming too interested in the mechanics of how his wife died or a son too anxious for the police to take the yellow tape off his elderly parent’s front door and release the crime scene.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you any of the details of the investigation,” Donnally said. “The court appointed me special master so that means—”

“Do you have any leads?”

Matthew glared at her. “Let the man talk.”

Lemmie pulled back as though evading a punch.

Donnally was surprised by the force of the old man’s personality. He had to be in his late eighties, an age when most parents have long since begun deferring to their children, sometimes even their grandchildren.

His wife looked down and twisted a tissue in her hands.

“It’s all right,” Donnally said, focusing on Matthew, and feeling Lemmie’s role in his mind shift from murder suspect to domestic victim. “I understand. What happened to Mark is bad enough, it’s far worse when you don’t know why or who did it.” He looked at Lemmie. “We’re pursuing some information we’ve received.” Then back toward Matthew. “This is a complicated situation since my work may involve attorney-client matters in the sense that—”

Now Matthew cut in. “No need to explain. I practiced law for over fifty years, young man.”

Donnally felt his face warm. He expected, or maybe hoped, Matthew’s wife would reach over and pat his hand and say, Now, dear. But she didn’t stir and didn’t raise her head. She seemed to withdraw inside herself, and it seemed like a practiced move. He suspected he had discovered a clue about why Mark Hamlin had authority problems, seemed to view all authority as an enemy to be subverted or overcome, but his focus at the moment wasn’t to solve that mystery. It was to solve another one.

“Then you’ll understand why I have to be even more careful in what I say, even to family members, than I might be in another investigation.”

“What assurance do we have that you’re capable of this kind of investigation at all?” Matthew tilted his head toward the reception area behind him. “My son never seemed to be able to surround himself with competent people, and the press keeps hinting about some mysterious link between you and Mark.”

Lemmie made a movement as if she intended to interject herself on behalf of Donnally or apologize for her father’s rudeness, but then sat back, the gesture orphaned in the silent office. Donnally suspected if it hadn’t been her brother’s death that had brought her into this room with her parents, she might’ve expressed what was on her mind.

Donnally recounted his background, his single contact with Hamlin after he left police work, and how it was that he came to be chosen by Judge McMullin. He was in the odd and uncomfortable position of having to minimize his connection with their son even more than it was in order to buttress his own credibility. Lemmie’s downcast eyes told him she also understood and felt the sad irony.

Matthew seized the opportunity supplied by Donnally’s offering of his thumbnail biography to offer his own. Once a name partner in Boston’s largest civil firm, he had represented most major U.S. airlines and pharmaceutical companies, and had served as ambassador to Ireland under Ronald Reagan. After that, he worked as an informal adviser to George H. W. Bush, and then retired from politics after the election of, in his words, “that son of a bitch Bill Clinton.”

Until that moment, Donnally had assumed Lemmie had picked her parents up at the airport and had driven them to the office. He now imagined there was a limousine double-parked around the corner, and he wished they were already in it and driving away.

“When is the funeral?” Donnally asked, trying to transition the conversation toward their exit.

“We’ll have a service here in a few days,” Lemmie said, “then they . . . we . . . will take his body back to Boston for the burial.”

Lemmie said the word “we” in a way that suggested she’d already prepared her living will and it specified that there would be no Marian next to Matthew and Mark in the family plot.

“I assume you’ll have someone there to videotape the attendees,” Matthew said.

Her hand shot out. “Please stop, Father. He knows how to do his job.”

“I had intended to,” Donnally said, “and expect to be there myself.”

Donnally and Lemmie rose, and after a moment’s hesitation, the parents did also.

As he walked them to the elevator, he overheard Lemmie tell her parents she had an appointment and would meet them at their hotel. From the incline of her head and the lean in her body, Donnally felt a kind of tension being broadcast toward him.

After shaking their hands, Donnally waited as the doors closed. He then stepped back and leaned against the wall. Two minutes later, the doors opened again and Lemmie stepped out.

Chapter 28

Mark turned into our father,” Lemmie said as they sat facing each other in a booth in the Backroom Bar on the first floor of a gray colonnaded former bank building around the corner from Hamlin’s office. “Or at least his mirror image, and I hated him for it.”

Lemmie took a sip from her neat double bourbon, then tilted the tumbler and rotated the bottom edge on the oak table. She worked the liquid up the side near the top, then back down again, as if tempting it to overflow. She stared at the revolving glass, upper teeth working against her lower lip.

Donnally didn’t think she stopped speaking in order to elicit a response from him. It was more that she seemed to be saying that the way things stood between her and her brother were what they were, now fixed in space and time like a name etched on a marble headstone. His agreement or disagreement, approval or disapproval, was irrelevant.

“It was once both of us against Father, then sometime in the last fifteen years it became each of us in our own way against him. Mark set out to fight him on his own turf, the law, and I set out to fight him on the page.”

Lemmie fell silent again, staring at her rotating glass, then furrowed her brows and looked at Donnally as though she just realized that they hadn’t started the conversation at the same place and with the same knowledge.

“You know who my father is, right?”

“Only what he told me.”

“How about I’ll start with a prologue?”

Donnally nodded.

“He was a staff lawyer for the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. He was hired at the same time as Bobby Kennedy, but stayed on after Bobby wised up to what was going on and left.”

Now Donnally recognized the name. Matt Hamlin, known in the press at the time and now in history books as Mad Matt. He’d read about him in a political science class at UCLA.

“After that blew up, my father stopped using the name Matt and only used Matthew, and always stuck in his middle name, Hutchinson, to help in the disguise. Matthew Hutchinson Hamlin.”

“But your father was young in the Red Scare days, and young people get in over their heads.”

“He was no younger than Bobby and Bobby knew when to get out. My father stayed and enjoyed every minute of it.” Lemmie smirked. “You know why he asked you whether you’d be videotaping the memorial service?”

“I assume it’s because experience suggests that killers sometimes appear at the funerals of their victims, just like some arsonists join the crowd to watch the fires they set.”

“What experience suggests has nothing to do with it. He only thought of it because if he’d been the killer, he would’ve shown up to enjoy his work. That’s what he did in the old days. Look at the photos from when people who’d refused to testify before McCarthy’s committee got arrested and perp-walked down the steps. He’s always there, in the crowd watching, wearing his G-man fedora, glorying in their humiliation.”

Donnally now understood why all of Lemmie’s novels were about dysfunctional families and psychologically abused children, most from the perspective of bewildered little girls or alienated women. He imagined that in one or more of those books was a scene of a mother cowering under her husband’s stare.

For the first time since he stood gazing at Hamlin’s body, he was beginning to get a sense of what had made Mark Hamlin, Mark Hamlin.

“And you and Mark grew up identifying with the victims.”

Lemmie nodded. “I think that’s how Mark got into the mind-set that the cops were the real crooks.” She let go of her glass and spread her hands. “Think of the people McCarthy and my father went after. Dashiell Hammett. Langston Hughes. Arthur Miller. Lee Grant. Garson Kanin. Martin Ritt. Joseph Losey. Orson Welles.”

It wasn’t lost on Donnally that the last four were movie directors, like his father.

Before he had a chance to comment, she flattened her palms on the table and said, “I know who you really are.”

Donnally felt his body tense, not because she’d somehow figured out who his father was, but because her voice had the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been tone about it.

What he was, and had always been, was the son of Don Harlan. And because of his name change, she must’ve put some work into tracking him.

But who he was inside and separate from his role as an ex-cop and the special master in her brother’s murder, she was never going to find out.

He decided to punch back. “Nothing turns a person more quickly from a witness into a suspect than them taking the time to investigate the investigator.”

Lemmie smiled. “Then it looks like I’ve been a suspect for twenty-five years.”

“How do you figure?”

“I’ve always been interested in what happens to the children of famous people. You’ve been on my radar since I saw your father’s first Vietnam movie in film class in college, Shooting the Dawn, and found out your older brother had been killed in the war.”

Donnally cringed, flashing back to himself staggering out of the movie’s premiere as a young boy, as bewildered and horrified as one of Lemmie’s fictional little girls.

“And I learned in the Pentagon Papers that your father himself made up the lie that had led to your brother’s death.”

Donnally had made the same discovery in high school. That’s what prompted him to move out of the house at sixteen and to change his name at eighteen.

“Your father portrayed the Vietcong as pure evil, and the Vietnamese villagers as if they’d brought the My Lai and Korean massacres on themselves, and he portrayed every American soldier as a maniac driven to wanton violence by the enemy. If that’s how he viewed your brother, I wondered how badly he twisted up his surviving kid.”

Donnally didn’t respond. She was right about his father, but she was only partly right about him. He’d moved up to San Francisco and became a cop as a way of untwisting himself.

“And as bent as your father was,” she continued, “I couldn’t figure out how you came out so straight, until today.”

Donnally had no interest in heading down the road of amateur psychoanalysis; he had a professional back at his house.

“Except his last film,” Lemmie said. “It was like a confession to all his past sins. I saw it in one of the art houses downtown.” She smiled. “It didn’t get much in the way of distribution. I doubt it played up in Mount Shasta.”

When Donnally didn’t engage the issue by offering a smile back, hers faded and she said, “Is that how he communicates with you, through movies?”

Donnally pursed his lips and shook his head. His father’s recent movie represented more than just an attempt to communicate with the public, it was also—in a fitful, stumbling sort of way—an attempt to communicate truthfully and honestly with his wife and son.

But opening this door further into his and his father’s lives wouldn’t get Donnally closer to understanding who might have wanted to kill Mark Hamlin, so he tried to slam it shut.

“Is this a hobby of yours?” Donnally asked. “Or a form of self-defense?”

Lemmie drew back. “Touché. I guess I was getting a little intrusive.” She paused, her face displaying the uncertainties and anxieties within, her hand now gripping her unmoving glass. “The truth is I do it to try to figure out whether I’m normal or not. To try to gain some perspective. Otherwise I’d just have my brother to compare myself to.”

“And how twisted was he?”

“I think he had no more respect for the truth than your father did. He fictionalized everything.” Lemmie’s upper teeth worked against her lower lip again, then stopped. “Is there such a word as ‘theatracized’? If so, that’s what he did. Truth wasn’t real. Victims’ suffering wasn’t real. Everything was an act in a play.”

Lemmie’s eyes went wide and her mouth fell open.

Donnally could tell she was seeing something in her mind that wasn’t visible to him.

Tears formed and squeezed out onto her cheeks as she blinked.

“I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid even death didn’t seem real to him until the moment he faced it himself.” She swallowed hard. “Do you . . . do you think he knew he was dying?”

Donnally knew the truth. There was no reason to think Hamlin was unconscious when he was strangled. But that wasn’t the answer he chose to give.

“I don’t know,” Donnally said. “There’s no way of knowing.”

He never viewed himself as a human polygraph, but Lemmie’s last sentences had taken her off the suspects list.

Lemmie reached into her purse, withdrew a tissue, and wiped her eyes. Her voice hardened again as she asked, “Doesn’t the condition of his body mean . . .”

Donnally understood she was referring to her brother’s erection and answered, “Not necessarily, that happens sometimes when a victim has been strangled. We still haven’t gotten the toxicology report, so we don’t know whether it was induced medically.”

“And you don’t know about other drugs yet, either?”

“You know something?”

“Will my parents find out?”

“That depends on where it leads. If it leads to the killer, then it will eventually come out in court. If it fades, it’ll stay with me.”

Lemmie took in a long breath and exhaled. “Mark chased the dragon.”

“Opium?”

Lemmie nodded. “Didn’t you find a long clay pipe in his apartment?”

Donnally thought for a moment. “There was a collection of them on a bookcase in his living room. Old ones, maybe even antiques.”

“Hiding in plain sight can be the best camouflage.”

“How long was he doing it?”

“Off and on for about ten years.”

“Where did he get it?”

Lemmie shrugged. “Somebody in Chinatown, I guess. Or maybe Little Saigon down in San Jose.”

Donnally pulled out his phone and called Navarro. “Did you get the tox report yet?”

“Just came in. Looks like Hamlin may have had a heroin problem. The preliminary results showed opiate metabolites in his blood. I checked the autopsy report. No track marks, so he must’ve been smoking it.”

“I think it may be opium.” He looked up at Lemmie, but said to Navarro, “Do me a favor. Hustle over to Judge McMullin and get a court order sealing the report.”

“Will do. I already told the medical examiner to hold it close because some media people have been lying in wait for it.”

“Anything else show up?”

“Alcohol. It was at .04. The blood was otherwise clean—and there’s one more thing. Dr. Haddad says it was a heart attack that actually killed him. Strangling, panic, death.”

Donnally disconnected. He decided to keep Lemmie on the drug path and not risk diverting her into speculations about the murder and to painful imaginings of her brother’s last moments.

“Did he do it alone or with other people?”

“Recently, I don’t know. When he started, it was with a private investigator he hung out with, Frank Lange. They tried it for the first time on a trip to Thailand on a case. Their client hooked them up.”

“How’d you find out about it?”

“The ICE beagle at SFO sniffed out a pipe they brought back and agents questioned them for a couple of hours. I know because I was in the arrivals hall waiting. The supervisor came out and told me what the holdup was. Their story was that they bought the pipe at a souvenir shop in Bangkok. It was a lie. My brother and Frank were laughing about the whole thing as I was driving them home. It could’ve cost both of them their licenses, but they thought it was a laugh.”

“Do you know where he hid his opium?”

“I’m not sure, but he hinted once that he had a secret compartment somewhere in his bedroom.”

Chapter 29

Except for the motion and whoosh of cars and trucks, there was little change from the shadow and neon of the Backroom Bar and the night and neon of the sidewalk onto which Donnally and Lemmie stepped. It reminded Donnally of what a deceased friend used to say. Walking from a dark bar into sunlight reflecting up off concrete was like descending into hell.

The distress still showing on Lemmie’s face suggested she was stuck in purgatory, and Donnally knew he could do nothing for her. He wasn’t sure that even solving her brother’s murder would provide an escape. He thought he’d at least try to break the mood by asking her how she got her nickname.

“When we were kids, I was the adventurous one. Whenever we went someplace new, like the circus, when there was a ride to try or a high dive at the pool, I would always scream, ‘Let me, let me, let me.’ Over time, that became Lemmie.”

She paused and gazed at the oncoming traffic, seemingly oblivious to the headlights jittering on the uneven pavement and the rumble of tires. Finally, she said, “As it turned out, Mark was the aggressive one as an adult, and I’ve spent my life holed up in front of a computer monitor living the lives of imaginary people.” She half smiled. “My nickname now should be Leemee, as in leave . . . me . . . alone.”

“Does that include me?” Donnally asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

Donnally nodded. “Have any reporters made the connection between you and your brother?”

“Not yet. My parents are refusing to talk to the press and I haven’t placed an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle. After time passes and things have died down, maybe I’ll step out of the closet on that one.”

Donnally hailed her a cab, watched it take her down toward Market Street, then turned and started back toward Hamlin’s office. He stopped with an after-work crowd at the crosswalk and waited for the switch from “Wait” to “Walk.” Most of those around him already wore their bovine BART faces, preparation for the see-nothing, hear-nothing, think-nothing, no-eye-contact commute from urban work to suburban home. Even the eyes of those texting on their cell phones seemed vacant.

He sensed people crunching up behind him, followed by jostling, then someone crowding him from behind. He felt something hard dig into the middle of his back, then a male voice with a light Vietnamese accent whispered into his ear, “Don’t move.”

A hand locked onto his left bicep.

“And don’t look around.”

Donnally pressed his right arm tight against his side so the man couldn’t too easily get to his gun, then looked down, trying to catch a glimpse of the man’s shoes and pants. Neither was what he expected. He spotted creased wool suit slacks and black alligator penny loafers, unblemished.

“Let the people pass around you.”

The signal changed.

What Donnally understood to be a gun barrel jabbed hard against his spine. He also understood that even a small caliber slug would paralyze him from that spot down to his toes. And spinning and grabbing for the gun would likely cause it to discharge into one of the pedestrians, shocking them awake from their after-work slumber just in time to watch one of them die.

He decided to do what the man said until they were in a spot that would be safer for him to make a move.

Those to the front of him stepped off the curb and into the street. The ones behind him worked their way past.

“You look at me and I might as well shoot,” the man said, once the area around them had almost cleared. “I may shoot anyway, but there’s no need to force the issue.”

As the last of the pedestrians ran to beat the light, the man said, “Keep your eyes facing the direction you’re going and turn right and head down the sidewalk. There’s a parking garage a half block up. We’re going in there.”

It was the same eighty-year-old structure where Donnally had parked his truck. He wished both that he’d paid more attention to the layout and that he’d chosen one to park in with better lighting. Walking toward it now, he imagined the third floor where he’d left the truck was more shadow than light. But, at the same time, it might not be too isolated since office workers would be coming to collect their cars for the ride home.

After they made the turn onto the ramp rising to the first floor, the man prodded him toward the stairs. Now Donnally was certain that they were heading toward his truck.

He was wrong.

As they approached the second floor door, the man said, “This is where we get off. Step through and hang a left along the wall.”

Donnally followed his orders and saw that the gunman had planned well. All of the spaces were taken up by vehicles used by a medical delivery service, their workday done, the engines cooling, ticking in the silence. The man had either cased the area searching for the perfect place for what he had in mind or worked in a nearby office building and already knew the layout.

Fifty feet farther, Donnally found himself boxed in by the soot-caked corner of the building and a gray panel van. The shoulder-width space was too tight for him either to make a go for his gun or spin and take a swing.

That was also smart planning on the crook’s part.

“Don’t you think you should tell me what this is about?” Donnally said. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong guy.”

The gun jabbed him in the back again.

“Raise your arms.”

Donnally followed the order and felt the tug and rip of Velcro and the yanking of his semiautomatic from its holster. He then felt two barrels against his back.

“I know exactly who you are,” the man said, “and I’ll tell you exactly what this is about. First, I want to know where my money is, and second, what was the deal you had with Hamlin.”

“What money?”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“I found some money, but it’s been seized by SFPD. I couldn’t get it for you now even if I wanted to. And with that gun at my back, trust me, I want to.”

“I don’t believe you. The only reason you’re involved in this is because you and Hamlin had to be partners and you’re protecting your interest. Last thing you’d do is let the police grab a quarter of a million dollars.”

“I didn’t find two-fifty. I found about one-forty in cash, that’s it. There are witnesses who watched me count it and hand it over. A homicide detective and Hamlin’s assistant.”

The man didn’t respond. Donnally felt the gun barrels move against his back, the man’s outward movement reflecting inward uncertainty.

Finally, the man said, “What do you mean seized? Like forfeited?”

Using the word “forfeited” sounded to Donnally like an inadvertent admission that the funds were the proceeds of crime.

“No, just booked into evidence.”

The man mumbled to himself. Donnally could only make out the words “none” and “cash” and “¯d·u má,” a Vietnamese swearword that Janie’s father had taught him: motherfucker.

“I take it that it wasn’t supposed to be in cash,” Donnally said.

“That son of a bitch.”

“Maybe you should’ve checked into that before you killed him.”

“If I killed him, we wouldn’t be standing here. I would’ve gotten what I wanted first.”

“Sometimes accidents happen.”

“Keep playing the fool and an accident may happen to you.”

He’s wrong about that, Donnally thought. Nothing would happen to him as long as the slick-shoed gunslinger believed Donnally controlled Hamlin’s money.

“You have to give me a hint,” Donnally said, “How will I go about finding it if I don’t know who it’s from, or what it’s from, or why you gave it to him, or how you gave it to him.”

The man didn’t respond.

“Or were you expecting me to write a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check made out to To Whom It May Concern?”

The man still didn’t respond.

“There was no inside deal that brought me into this,” Donnally said. “And I didn’t want to do it. Other than when Hamlin cross-examined me in homicide trials, I only talked to him once. And that was a year ago and on the phone.”

The man mumbled again. Donnally could only make out the swearwords, and they seemed directed at himself, rather than at Donnally or Hamlin. There must’ve been something the man had been good at, or at least good enough to afford the clothes he was wearing, but it wasn’t kidnapping. As if to confirm Donnally’s opinion, what the man said next just sounded stupid.

“If he had the cash you found,” the man said, “maybe there’s more. In fact, I’m thinking that there has to be. Lots.” Another jab with a barrel. “And you’re going to find it and hand it over.”

“You got a business card or something?” Donnally said. “We’ll need to keep in touch.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll hear from me.”

“Maybe we can do lunch.”

“Fuck you.”

Donnally heard the shoe scrapes of the man backing away, and asked, “What about my gun?”

“I’ll . . .” The man hesitated. He hadn’t thought this part through. Donnally guessed he had to decide whether he was a crooked businessman trying to recover money or a just a mugger. “I’ll leave it in the wheel well of the car nearest the stairs.” He forced a laugh. “I suspect you’ll need it. Mark Hamlin kept a lot tougher company than me and I need you alive.”

“That’s something we can agree on,” Donnally said. “I need me alive, too.”