A Criminal Defense (19 page)
“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.”
D
onnally stopped by the sheriff's substation in Guerneville and obtained Little Bud's true name and identifiers and the name of the San Franciscoâbased 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 evidenceâthey'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 backgroundâ
Then a laugh.
“Guess who his lawyer was?” Navarro asked.
The laugh had already given Donnally the answer: “Mark Hamlin.”
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?”
“Some
thing
. Not some
one
.”
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.”
D
onnally spotted a parking place in front of Hector Camacho's Taqueria Michoacan at Twenty-fourth and Mission. He also spotted a lookout leaning against the wall of the liquor store at the end of the block. He took the next corner, drove down the street until he found a space just beyond a machine shop driveway, and slid in. He figured he'd only be gone from the office for an hour, so he'd slipped out and left the parking garage by the rear exit, leaving Mother Number Two in her surveillance position. He also instructed Jackson to leave the lights on after she left for the day to suggest he was still working inside.
His cell phone rang. It was Janie. “I was near Hamlin's building so I stopped in. Looks like I just missed you.”
“I'm out trying to get ahold of a guy.” Donnally didn't want to tell her it was in the Mission. His worries were her worries, and hers were his. No reason to put her through it again.
“Takiyah was just closing up when I got there. It was interesting.”
“Personally or clinically?”
“Both. You have a run-in with her today?”
“She started the sexualized little girl thing again and I had to shut her down.”
“Whatever you said left her teary-eyed and bewildered. I had the feeling she's starting to see what she's been doing and she didn't like what she saw. I think she wanted to apologize to me for trying to move in on you or wanted to explain herself to me or maybe wanted me to explain her to herself. She called me Dr. Nguyen, so I think she knows I'm a psychiatrist. Did you mention it to her?”
“No. But she could've asked around, checking me out. How'd it end?”
“She stammered and then froze up and ran out of the office. She was in the elevator and going down before I could catch up.”
“I'll keep that in mind when I see her tomorrow. Maybe it means she's getting close to opening up to me.”
Donnally looked up. Fog was crawling over the western hills and darkening the city, graying the pastel apartment buildings in the next block and chilling the air. His gaze lowered to street level. A couple of mid-twenties Norteños wearing red plaid shirts stared at him from where they leaned against a bus bench in front of a body shop. His hand went to his holster and he checked the strap.
“Mind locking up for me? Just make sure the desk lamp in Hamlin's office is still on. I'll see you at home.”
Reaching for the door handle after he disconnected, thinking of Jackson and of himself, a phrase came to him.
Being of two minds.
He'd heard people use the expression over the years, even used it himself, but he hadn't really thought about what it meant for a long time. But he did now as he got out of his truck and felt the stab of pain in his hip as his foot hit the pavement. And, on second thought, he wasn't sure he understood it right even then. He just knew that in walking back around the corner, he'd have to push through the resistance of the past, force his way into the presentâand not blow the brains out of the lookout, thereby making him the victim of a memory not fully understood or overcome.
A minute later, heading down the shadowed Mission Street sidewalk, watching the lookout's head swivel toward him, he knew all he really grasped of the shooting was the mechanics of it, not the meaning.
How did it happen that the Norteño and the Sureño had been stationed on opposite ends of the block?
Who had been the target?
Him?
Or the informant waiting in the booth inside?
The only thing the detectives in the gang task force would say was that dead men tell no tales. And by the time Donnally had gotten through rehabbing his hip, whatever trail there might have been had been overgrown by a jungle of other crimes.
Little girls in Catholic school plaid skirts stepped out of a pandaria, giggling and biting into sugar-covered empanaditas. Donnally felt his legs tense and his knee bend for a run toward them, his mind racing ahead to thoughts of a crossfire. He forced himself to stop and turned toward a clothing store window and took a breath, listening to the girls' laughter as they walked behind him.
When his eyes refocused, he realized he was staring at rows of women's spike-heeled pumps like he was a fetishist from South of Market. He imagined the lookout watching him, laughing to himself, dismissing him as a threat. The crook coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reason.
Hector Camacho was sitting in a rear booth, his fingers working an electric adding machine, the gears grinding out the paper against the background of banda music drifting down from dusty loudspeakers wedged into the upper corners of the dining room.
Donnally wondered whether he was counting up the money he'd have left after the government was done seizing his house and cars.
As Donnally zigzagged through the three rows of empty Formica tables, through the smells of roasted chilies and grilled meats and fresh tortillas, he heard a whistle from behind the counter and saw Camacho's right hand slide from the table down to his lap.
Donnally raised his hands, slowed, but kept walking. Only now did he wish it was still the old days when he had his we're-the-good-guys detective's shield clipped two inches to the right of his belt buckle.
Ten feet away, Donnally said,
“Quedate tranquilo.”
Stay cool.
“Yo tengo identificación.”
I have ID.
Camacho raised his left palm.
“Muestrame de donde es usted.”
Show me from where you are.
Donnally stopped, reached into his back pocket and pulled out his retirement badge, and turned it toward Camacho.
“My name is Harlan Donnally.”
Camacho pointed at Donnally's left side, then slid his finger over until it pointed at his right.
Donnally pulled back his jacket and showed the gun on his hip.
Camacho nodded and covered his paperwork. He signaled Donnally to come forward and said in English, “Sit down and keep your hands on the table.”
Donnally slid in across from Camacho and laid his palms flat in front of him. Close up, the man looked weary, wearing a face like those of the World War II and Korean War vets his father employed as extras in his first combat movies. The sort who lived in the ghosts of dead comrades and revisited the battlefield each night in their dreams. Donnally had the feeling that while Camacho had the will to fight, he preferred to be done with fighting.
“I want to talk to you about Mark Hamlin,” Donnally said. “I was appointed by the court to look into his death.”
“I saw something about that on the news.” Camacho smiled. “Special master made it sound like you'd be some old white-haired guy.” His smile left his face. “You talking to all his clients, or just me?”
“I can't answer that.”
“And you're darkening my door because . . .”
Donnally caught motion of a cook walking from the kitchen toward the counter with a takeout order.
“Is it safe to talk in here?”
Camacho waited until the cook finished his return trip and disappeared from view, then said, “Good as anywhere.”
Donnally leaned forward and lowered his voice. “My understanding is that you cut a deal.”
Camacho didn't respond.
“Somebody rolled on you and you rolled on someone else, and Frank Lange was with you during the debriefing.”
Camacho's face hardened. His hand came up from under the table. Donnally tensed, ready to dive and roll and come up shooting. Camacho's hand was empty.
“You been talking to that flaky throwback hippie chick?”
“Which?”
“Moon River or River Moon or some bullshit name like that. A couple of months ago she was poking around about who snitched on who. A hundred pounds of crazy, and pathetic as hell.”
“I can't tell you whether I talked to her or not, but I can tell you I saw some paperwork in Hamlin's files. All of his records are still privileged, but the judge is letting me look at anything I need to.”
Camacho spread his hands in a kind of defeat. “What happened, happened. Somebody was gonna snitch me off someday. I shouldn't have gone back into the trade. Sure I was pissed it was one of Hamlin's other clients, butâ”
“What?”
“Just what I said. One of his other clients rolled on me. Since Hamlin could see it coming, he was able to work something out for me before they kicked in my door.” Camacho flashed a grin. “Gave me time to clean things up a little.”
Donnally thought of the line in Hamlin's notes.
Split 40/60 from Guillermo, 60/40 from Nacho, and 40/60 from Rafa
.
“Who rolled on you?”
“Didn't she tell you that already?”
“Was it Guillermo?”
Camacho nodded. “Guillermo Gutierrez.” His lips pressed together as though he was a disappointed parent thinking about an ungrateful child. “And I gave the motherfucker his start, gave him my connection when I went to the federal pen.”
“And you gave up Rafa.”
“Is that a question?”
“No. I saw his name in Hamlin's file. Was he one of Hamlin's clients?”
“No. Reggie Hancock's. In LA. Rafa was big down there”âCamacho grinned againâ“until last month.”
Donnally now understood the splits. Hamlin and Hancock split sixty-forty or forty-sixty depending on whose client was rolling. And he wondered how far back the scheme went, since, according to Navarro, Hancock had been Camacho's attorney in the case he was convicted on decades earlier.
“And how would you know the details of his operation, or at least enough to roll on him?”
Camacho smiled. “The flake didn't go running to you, did she?”
And Donnally had the answer. It was Lange. Lange fed Camacho the information he needed to set up Hancock's client, which meant that Hancock fed the information to Lange first. And Ryvver must have figured it all out and was looking for a way to use it to help Little Bud.
“I told you,” Donnally said. “I can't say who I've talked to.”
“Have it your way.”
“What about the money?”
“You mean Hamlin's fee?”
Donnally nodded.
“He was gonna take it out of the reward, from my cut of whatever the government forfeited from Rafa. They found almost half a million in his house. I got fifty thousand out of that. The DEA said I could get up to two hundred and fifty altogether, depending on how much they find.”
Donnally thought of the Vietnamese gunman who kidnapped him off the street and took him into the garage. He wondered whether the quarter-million-dollar figure was a coincidence.
“I take it the DEA would send a check to Hamlin,” Donnally said, “and he'd deduct his cut and forward you the rest.”
Camacho nodded. “In cash. I didn't want no kind of trail between the government and me.”
Listening to Camacho, it was clear to Donnally he was no genius. But he didn't have to be to succeed in the drug trade. He just needed to be able to count the money and protect his link in the distribution chain.
Was it possible Camacho hadn't yet figured out that if Guillermo got a cut of his property, and he got a cut of Rafa's, and Hancock and Hamlin got a cut of everybody's, the whole thing must have been a setup from the start?