Incriminating Evidence (21 page)

“Busy day?” Pete asks him.

The young man nods but doesn’t say anything.

Pete tries again. “You from the neighborhood?”

Still no response. I notice an economics book sticking out of a beat-up backpack on the end of the counter. “You in school?” I ask.

“You guys cops?” He says it without expression.

Pete smiles. “I used to be.” The kid shows the hint of a grin. “My brother here is even worse. He’s a lawyer.”

That gets a full grin. “I was thinking maybe I could be a lawyer,” he says. “I’m at State.”

“Stick with it,” I say.

He studies me. “You’re the guy on TV You’re representing the DA.”

So much for anonymity. “Yeah.”

“Did he do it?”

“No.”

“He looks pretty guilty to me.”

“A lot of people think so. They’re wrong.”

“Whatever you say. Why are you guys here in the low-rent district? I thought you fancy lawyers worked downtown.”

I’m not a fancy lawyer, but I don’t want to burst his bubble. “We’re looking for information,” I say.

“Really? I didn’t know the DA spent any time down here.”

“He didn’t, but the victim had a friend who used to work here.”

Pete shows him pictures of Andy Holton and Johnny Garcia. “Recognize these guys?” he asks.

He studies the photos. “Yeah. They used to live at the Jerry. That’s Andy Holton. He worked here for a short time. Then he got a job at the Pancho Villa.”

“We’ve already been there,” I say. “Did you know him?”

“Not really. He kept to himself.” He points toward Valencia. “You might ask over at the Royan. He used to live there before he moved to the Jerry. Ask for Mario.”

I leave my business card and a twenty on the counter. “Thanks,” I say.

Pete and I walk past the small markets until we reach the corner of Fifteenth and Valencia, where a faded sign on the marquee of a dilapidated five-story building says “Hotel Royan, daily, weekly and monthly.” A burnt-out cheese steak shop sits behind metal bars on one side of the entrance. A boarded-up currency exchange is on the other side. Next door is an empty lot. It’s been a long time since the Royan has seen better days. It’s a pit. The entrance has a heavy steel mesh door. It’s open, and there’s a hand-lettered sign on it saying “No visitors between 7 P.M and 7 A.M.” The lobby, if you can call it that, consists of a folding chair on a black tile floor. It’s acrid with the smell of urine.

A wiry Hispanic man with a gold earring and a neatly trimmed goatee is sitting inside the old cheese steak shop. I presume he lives here. He’s reading the paper. He ignores a small black-and-white TV that’s tuned to a talk show. A cigarette smolders on a broken plate next to him. He doesn’t look up when we walk in.

Pete doesn’t wait for him to acknowledge us. “Are you the manager?” he asks.

“We’re full,” he replies without lifting his eyes from the sports section.

This doesn’t deter Pete. “Are you Mario?”

“Maybe. Who’s asking?”

“Pete.”

“Pete who?”

“Just Pete.”

Mario looks up. “You a cop?”

“Nope.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“I haven’t asked you anything yet.”

“Doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re asking, I don’t know anything. I don’t talk to guys named Pete.”

Pete looks at me. “This is my brother, Mike.”

This brings an eye roll. “So?”

“He isn’t named Pete. So you can talk to him. We’re trying to find somebody. If you don’t know him, you don’t know him. We’ll leave you alone.”

“I don’t know him.”

“I haven’t even shown you his picture.”

“I still don’t know him.”

Pete lowers his voice. “Humor me, Mario. I have a few friends over at Mission Station. They’ll pay you a visit if I ask them.”

I cringe. Somewhere behind the sports section and the TV, Mario undoubtedly has a gun that could blow my head clear out to Valencia Street. For that matter, I’m certain Pete
is carrying a gun, too. I don’t want to start my day with a shoot-out at the Royan. I begin to question my brother’s judgment and my sanity.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Mario says.

“Neither do we,” I reply. “We’re just looking for information.” I show him the pictures of Johnny Garcia and Andy Holton.

He points to the picture of Garcia. “I’ve seen his picture on the news.”

“He’s dead,” I say. “The DA is accused of killing him.”

“I saw him around here a few times,” Mario says. “I think he was a hooker.”

I point to the picture of Holton. “Ever seen him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Pete leans on the counter. “He used to live here. You know him, don’t you?”

“No,” he says.

Pete glares right into his eyes. “If your memory clears up,” he says, “give me a call.” He hands him a business card. “You might save his life.”

The Mission police station is a modern low-rise building that takes up half a block on Valencia, between Seventeenth and Eighteenth. Pete and I are sitting at the desk of Sergeant Ron Morales. His face looks younger than forty-two, but his hair is almost completely white. The day-to-day life of a cop tends to age you. “Still no luck on Holton,” he tells us. “We’ve been going door-to-door looking for the last week. Nobody has seen him since the night Garcia was killed. We want to find him as much as you do.”

We keep hitting dead ends. I ask him whether he thinks Holton is still in the area.

“He could be. It would be pretty easy for him to blend in, but no one’s talking.”

“It’s still worth looking,” Pete says. “If he needs money, he may be back to look up some of his old customers.”

We spend the afternoon and the early evening going up and down Mission and Valencia, still hoping to find somebody who might have seen Andy Holton. One guy thought he had seen him delivering pizzas. A woman says he may have been near the BART station. No IDs. No real leads.

Eventually, we head back to Twenty-fourth and meet Rosie and Tony at the produce market. Rosie’s mother is staying with Grace. I take an apple and Pete sips a beer. Tony is counting today’s receipts. The evening rush is over. Rosie is sitting on the counter and drinking a Diet Coke. She asks, “Any luck?”

“Nothing,” I say. “We’re striking out so far.”

She has news for us. “To make your day complete,” she says, “we have another problem. They found another prostitute.”

Hell. “Male or female?”

“Female. She says she’s prepared to testify that Skipper paid her for sex.”

“I understand that’s the usual procedure.”

“And she’s prepared to testify that he liked to handcuff her to a bed in a room in the Fairmont.”

“Where did you hear about this?” I ask.

“The producer of the Jade Warner show called. They wanted me to comment. I didn’t.”

Jade Warner is a former housewife who was married to a heavy hitter in one of the high-tech companies in Palo Alto. Her husband left her for a younger woman. She found the nastiest divorce lawyer in Silicon Valley and took the guy to the cleaners. After the dust settled, she had time on her
hands and she started giving advice on a local cable access station. She developed a cult following when the president of a dot-com said she thought Jade’s tough-love approach was the wave of the future. That was two years ago. Now she’s considered a marriage guru and has her own show on Channel 4. She’s running head to head against Oprah in the Bay Area.

“When is she going to be on?” I ask.

“Tomorrow.”

“Great. What else?”

“We got more phone records.”

“I thought we had them all. The police already gave us the records for the phone in Skipper’s room.”

“They did. Now they have provided the records for Skipper’s cell phone. At one-twenty, there was a call placed to Turner’s house. It lasted about five minutes.”

Turner never mentioned it. For that matter, neither did Skipper. More unanswered questions. I ask, “Any other good news?”

“Nope. We’ve got enough. But it might be a good idea for one of us to go down and watch the taping of the Jade Warner show.”

An excellent thought. “I’ll go,” I say.

“That might not be such a good idea,” Rosie says. “They’ll recognize you. For that matter, they’ll probably recognize me.”

That’s true. I pick up my cell phone and punch in Carolyn’s number. When she answers, I ask, “What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”

18
“HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING AT THE FAIRMONT?”

“The evidence against District Attorney Gates continues to mount.”

—CNN’s
B
URDEN
OF P
ROOF
. T
HURSDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
23.

Later that night, I’m with Joseph Wong, who is sitting in an armchair in his modest apartment. A small, dignified man in his late fifties with tired eyes, he tells me with pride that one of his two daughters went to Cal, the other to UCLA. His wife is sitting in the rocking chair in the corner. A picture of their daughters sits on the top of the TV, which is tuned to the Chinese newscast on Channel 26. The sound is off.

“How long have you been working at the Fairmont?” I ask.

“Almost forty years.” His manner is forthright, his deportment professional. You don’t get to work at the Fairmont for as long as he has without being competent—and discreet. I’m certain he has found guests in compromising positions from time to time. The sticky situations have been resolved expeditiously through the payment of modest gratuities.

“I understand you found Mr. Gates and Mr. Garcia.”

“Yes.” He explains that he was delivering a continental
breakfast at seven o’clock that morning. “Coffee, muffins and fruit,” he says.

In Joseph Wong’s world, it’s important to get the orders right.

“I knocked on the door,” he continues, “but there was no answer.”

I ask him what he is expected to do in such circumstances.

“Knock again. If there’s still no answer, I’m supposed to open the door with my key and leave the food. I’m supposed to be careful not to wake anybody.”

“And if you do?”

“I’m supposed to apologize and leave as soon as possible.”

Sounds right. I ask him what he saw when he first opened the door.

“Mr. Gates was asleep in his chair. Mr. Garcia was on the bed.” He’s been trained to refer to guests this way. “I woke Mr. Gates and he called security. I believe security called the police. Mr. Evans came upstairs right away. Then Mr. Gates tried to wake Mr. Garcia.”

“Did you see Mr. Gates touch Mr. Garcia’s body?”

He glances at his wife. “He tried to remove the handcuffs. He removed the tape from Mr. Garcia’s face.”

So far, he’s confirming Skipper’s version of the story. “Did Mr. Gates have a key to the handcuffs?”

He looks around. “Yes.”

Bad answer. Skipper said he didn’t. “And did he use the key to open the handcuffs?”

“He tried. It didn’t work.”

“Did you see what he did with the key?”

“No.”

I decide to change the subject. “Was Mr. Gates helpful when you woke him?”

“He was confused.”

“Was he helpful when the police arrived?”

“Yes.” He tells me about the arrivals of the paramedics and the police. He talks about his interview with Elaine McBride and Roosevelt Johnson. He describes Skipper’s arrest. His delivery is credible.

I thank him for his time and leave. He’ll be a strong witness.

It’s going to be a long night. At ten-thirty, Pete and Carolyn are sitting in front of the TV that we keep in the martial arts studio. “What are you guys watching?” I ask.

“The Giants,” Carolyn says with a grin.

I glance at the black-and-white footage. “It doesn’t look like a baseball game to me.”

Pete smiles. “It’s a rain delay, so we decided to look at something a little more interesting.”

I ask him what that would be.

“The security tapes from the Fairmont. I’m like a football coach. I can’t tell you what happened until I study the videotapes.”

I pull up a folding chair and join them. We watch the grainy videos for twenty minutes without saying a word. “We haven’t seen Johnny Garcia,” Pete says. “We’ve been trying. We’ve gone through the tapes a couple of times.”

We stare at the TV screen for an hour. Then another. We see dozens of unrecognizable faces. We rewind several times when we think we might have spotted Johnny. I hear the clock on the ferry building chime two A.M. An hour later, we are looking at footage from three o’clock in the morning. The Fairmont lobby was quiet but not deserted. The camera flashes to the California Street entrance to the hotel. “There!” Pete says.

I’m startled. “What?”

Carolyn rewinds the tape. Pete walks toward the TV “Run it in super slo-mo,” he says. He studies the videotape for a moment and then says, “Stop!” He points to the doorway. A bearded, well-dressed young man is entering the building behind an attractive couple. He heads inside. The white numerals in the lower left corner of the tape indicate that the footage was shot at three-oh-two A.M. Then the tape shifts to an entrance in another part of the hotel. “That’s Andy Holton,” Pete says.

We rewind the tape three more times and run it in slow motion. “You’re right,” I say. “He’s wearing a baseball cap, but that’s him.”

“What do you suppose he was doing there at three in the morning?” Carolyn asks.

“Maybe he came to pick up Johnny Garcia,” Pete suggests.

“Or maybe he came to kill him,” I say.

19
THE JADE WARNER SHOW

“Today, Jade Warner will interview two women who claim they were forced to have kinky sex with a prominent Bay Area politician.”

—C
OMMERCIAL FOR THE
J
ADE
W
ARNER
SHOW
. F
RIDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
24.