A Criminal Defense (18 page)
I
'm not sure how long I can hold out on these guys,” Navarro whispered to Donnally in the hallway outside the intensive care unit of Berkeley's Alta Bates Hospital. He motioned with his chin toward two BPD homicide detectives who had just gotten off the distant elevator and were walking toward them.
“You don't need to tell them about the cooperation agreement,” Donnally said, “just that he was helping us find out who killed Mark Hamlin.” He glanced toward the window into Galen's room. “We don't know yet whether this was an attempted suicideâ”
“Or maybe one that will still be successful.”
“Or an attempted murder. But the agreement couldn't have been a motive for someone to kill him because no one knew about it.”
“Unless there was a leak from the DA's office,” Navarro said. “Galen's not a popular guy.”
One of the detectives stopped at the nurses' station, while the other continued toward them.
“I almost dropped my cell phone when dispatch said a Harlan Donnally had kicked in the door,” Detective Dan Edwards said, as he shook Donnally's hand.
Edwards and Donnally had hit it off at a California Homicide Investigators Association meeting fifteen years earlier and they had fished for steelhead together on the Klamath River a few times after that.
Donnally introduced Navarro, then said, “You're probably wondering how I happened to be at Galen's house.”
“It crossed my mind,” Edwards said, looking through the window at Galen. “Then I remembered reading about the special master business in the Hamlin case.”
“Galen was helping me figure out who Hamlin's latest enemies were.”
Edwards pointed over his shoulder at his partner. “You can put both of us down as suspects.” He wasn't smiling. “I don't mind a lawyer attacking the evidence. I don't even mind him attacking me, trying to make me out to be incompetent. I can defend myself. But that asshole had a way of trivializing victims and how much they suffered. There's no excuse for that.”
One of the things Donnally appreciated about Edwards was that he never did that himself. No defensive sarcasm. No sick humor at crime scenes. No minimizing the value of a life, no matter how its owner had wasted it with drugs or devoted it to crime.
Edwards's partner walked up and nodded at Donnally and Navarro. “The doctor will be out in a minute. They don't have a tox result yet, but”âhe looked at Donnallyâ“they think it's more than just sleeping pills from the bottle you found.”
“That's probably right. The prescription was for thirty and there were still twenty-five left.” Donnally tilted his head toward Galen, lying fifteen feet away, comatose and hooked up to a ventilator, with IVs spreading upward from both forearms to infusion pumps. “I don't think five would've done that.”
“I don't know what it would be,” Edwards said. “I had a patrol officer who used to be a paramedic go through the house. He found lots of medications, which means lots of interactions. He's on his way over here with a list so the doc can run them through the pharmacy database to see if it might be a combination of drugs that did put him out.”
Donnally looked at Edwards's partner. “The doctor think Galen will wake up?”
“He didn't say.”
They turned at the squeak of rubber soles on the linoleum floor and widened their circle to give the doctor a place. He didn't introduce himself, letting the name “S. Sugarman, M.D.,” stitched on his lab coat, do it for him.
“It's watch and wait,” Sugarman said. “We were too late to pump anything out of his stomach. Whatever it was had already been absorbed.”
Edwards asked, “Any idea whatâ”
“His mother called saying that he'd started taking an antidepressant a day or two ago. She thinks it was an MAO inhibitor.” He shook his head. “It can work like a blasting cap if he was using any of a hundred other things. Legal or illegal.” He looked back and forth between Navarro and Donnally. “People in Berkeley take all kinds of idiotic concoctions without telling their doctors. Take enough St. John's wort, and an MAO will kill you.”
Donnally felt Navarro's eyes on him and knew they were thinking the same thing. That Galen had run from his collapsing legal practice to a psychiatrist's office in order to find himself a chemical place to hide.
“Did you find an MAO card on him?” Donnally asked.
He knew, from Janie's expression of worry about prescribing the drug to veterans for whom nothing else worked, that some users carried special ID cards because of those interactions.
“No,” Sugarman said. “Nothing.”
“You find any bruising or other injuries that would suggest he was forcibly given whatever it was?” Edwards asked.
“Just the normal kind of redness on his arms and legs that's associated with the EMTs lifting him onto a gurney and the orderlies moving him to a bed. But feel free to check yourself. I could've missed something.”
The tone of Sugarman's last words was not that of an admission, but an exit line. He turned and walked away.
“You want to do it?” Edwards asked Donnally.
Donnally extended his open palm toward Galen. “It's your case.”
H
ector Ignacio Camacho-Fernandez, aka Nachoâand if Ramon Navarro had come to the right conclusion from his analysis of Mark Hamlin's cell phone trafficâaka
Raton.
A rat. A snitch.
And Navarro was right. The file lay on Hamlin's kitchen table in front of Donnally. He and Jackson had searched Hamlin's office cabinets, desk, and storage room, but hadn't been able to locate it. Donnally had then driven to Hamlin's house and pawed through the mass of papers on his living room floor and dining table, until he found what he hoped was all of it. But he couldn't be certain. Hamlin's filing system seemed geographical, with related pages sharing a general area of the house, rather than specific, with everything fitted into a particular folder.
Scribblings on a page torn from a legal pad told most of the tale.
At the top were Hamlin's notes of meeting with Camacho.
Camacho knows he's under surveillance. Thinks his calls are being tapped. A fifty-kilo load of cocaine from Mexico was seized from a shed in Salinas. The spot had been mentioned only in a single call from his Mission Street taqueria to Juarez.
That was followed by notes of a call to Hamlin from an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.
DEA is agreeable to considering a cooperation agreement with Camacho as long as he doesn't get a complete walk on the case.
Conditions: He names his sources in Michoacan and in Long Beach, identifies everyone in his organization, agrees to a full debriefing, surrenders drug profits including the house in Daly City and his cars. Can keep his taqueria. Will consider a reward of up to $250,000, based on assets seized from targets he IDs.
Then notes of a call between Hamlin and Reggie Hancock.
Deal possible. Camacho willing to roll on Rafa.
Split 40/60 from Guillermo, 60/40 from Nacho, and 40/60 from Rafa.
The flurry of calls ended with notes from Hamlin's meeting with Camacho.
Agreed. Debriefing in a week. Lange will sit in.
Even as he searched for other notes, a phrase kept repeating itself in Donnally's mind like a tune he couldn't get out of his head.
Can keep his taqueria.
The last time Donnally walked toward a taqueria on Mission Street to meet an informant was also his last day on the job as a police officer.
Can keep his taqueria
.
Donnally pushed the notes aside and thought back on that day, then winced at the clash of past and future in his present memory, and closed his eyes. He saw himself getting out of his car on the west side of Mission Street, looking over his hood toward the restaurant door.
A laugh from his left. A young couple, maybe Salvadorean or Guatemalan, compact bodies, Mayan faces, sitting at a wrought-iron table in front of a coffee shop. Magazines spread on top. A woman posing in a wedding dress smiling from the cover of one.
He had taken a step toward the front of his car, thenâ
Bam-bam-bam.
Gunshots from behind him, but not at him, from a Norteño gangster up the sidewalk, ten yards away, maybe fifteen, shooting at a Sureño down the other way.
He'd ducked behind his hood, reaching for his gun and yelling to the couple, “Down! Down! Down!”
Too late. The male slumped over. The female screaming.
Bam-bam from Donnally's left. He caught the motion of the Sureño's black, silver-toed boot and pressed Levi's pant leg disappearing behind a trash can.
Donnally's gun had followed his eyes. Barrel steadied by a double-handed grip braced against his car. So focused on each other, neither the Norteño nor the Sureño had spotted him yet.
Bam-bam . . . bam-bam-bam. The Norteño firing. But Donnally had lost sight of him. He was using the cars behind Donnally's as cover.
The Sureño tumbled forward and over the curb, then raised his semiautomatic, but Donnally fired first.
Bam-bam from his right.
The Sureño slumped onto the oil-slicked pavement.
Then again from his right. Bam-bam . . . bam-bam.
Donnally felt a thud against his hip and his leg gave way. He reached up, locking the fingers of his left hand into the gap between his hood and the windshield. Pain from shattered bone lit up the wound, then vibrated down his leg and up his side.
Thunking leather. Boot heels on concrete getting louder, running toward him.
Metal scraped against metal as the Norteño jammed in a new clip.
Bam.
Glass fragments burst from holes in the back window and windshield.
The footsteps stopped.
Bam-bam-bam.
The clunk of punched metal and the tink, tink of fractured glass.
He pulled himself up and fired at the Norteño through his own car windows.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-click-click-click.
The Norteño reached for his chest and staggered into the street.
Screeching tires. No thud.
The Norteño dropped to his knees, balanced for a moment, then pitched forward. A head-thunk against a bumper.
The smoke of burned rubber swirled and attacked Donnally's eyes. He looked toward the woman, now splayed over the table, dead arms reaching in a final gesture toward her fiancé.
Distant sirens, then silence.
Coming to consciousness again.
An EMT putting pressure on his hip. A paramedic leaning over him, speaking into his radio.
Officer down. Four dead.
Donnally opened his eyes. The legal pad a bright, painful yellow on the desk in front of him. He thought of Hector Camacho sitting in his office at the back of his restaurant.
El Raton
. Norteño gangsters at one end of the block. Sureños at the other . . .
I don't want to do this again.
D
onnally 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 juvenileâHamlin and Hancock getting stoned and singing and pounding the tableâwas 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 entranceâ
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 orâ”
“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 peopleâ”
“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 ofâ”
“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 worldâthen 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.