“Nice work.” He showed it to me. “The technology has gotten better, Mikey. This looks very authentic.” He gave it back to Grace. “How much did it set you back?”
“Seventy-five bucks.”
“Things have gotten cheaper, too.” He reached below the bar, pulled out a bottle of Hart, and instructed me to pour it into a glass for my underage daughter. Then he turned to Grace. “Would you go out in the back and see if anybody needs anything?”
“Will do.”
“Thanks, darlin’.”
As I watched her head out to the patio, I spoke to my uncle. “You know that you’re the only person on Planet Earth who can get away with calling her ‘darlin.’”
“There are still a few privileges at my advanced age.” He gave me a knowing smile. “She’s a beauty, Mikey.” He caught himself. “Am I still allowed to say that?”
“Yes.”
“Looks just like Rosie. And every bit as smart.”
“Indeed.”
“So, how does my favorite nephew—the ex-priest—feel about his daughter’s business?”
I was afraid you might ask. “I’ve been a lawyer a lot longer than I was a priest.”
“You going to answer my question?”
Eventually. “I take it this means that you know about her little side hustle?”
“Everybody does, Mikey. Why do you think all the young people come to my homely little watering hole out here in the fog? I’m a D-List celebrity. Around here, I’m known as the Love Goddess’s great-uncle.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“How did they find out?”
“I might have let it slip.”
“My eighty-five-year-old uncle is cashing in on the popularity of my twenty-year-old daughter’s sex-advice app?”
“Don’t be such a prude, Mikey. It’s good for business. If I play my cards properly, this humble tavern is going to put another generation of Dunleavys through college. So, how does an ex-priest-turned-lawyer feel about his daughter running an app called the Love Goddess?”
“I’m conflicted. It wouldn’t have been my first choice for a career path. Then again, it’s paying for her senior year at USC, a nice apartment, and that new car parked outside.” And if the number of her followers continues to grow, it may be enough for a down payment on a house.
He arched a bushy eyebrow. “You don’t sound that conflicted.”
I’m not. “I’ve become more open-minded as I’ve gotten older.” And I’m not a priest anymore. “Besides, she isn’t hurting anybody, and she’s doing something she enjoys.” And she’s hauling in a boatload of cash.
“How does her mother feel about it?”
Not great. “She’s become more open-minded, too.”
Big John’s smile broadened. “Is Grace still going to take the job at Pixar?”
“I think so.” If she decides that she can afford the pay cut. “They’ve agreed to let her continue to run the app on her own time. They like to encourage their employees to develop their, uh, creativity.”
“Gotta admire her entrepreneurial spirit.”
“Just like you, Big John.”
“And her tenacity.”
“Just like her mother.”
His voice filled with pride. “Don’t let this go to your head, Mikey, but you and Rosie have done a nice job with your kids.”
Especially since we got divorced eighteen years ago. “Thanks, Big John.”
“Is little Tommy here?”
“He’s out in the back.” And he isn’t little anymore. Our fourteen-year-old son, Thomas James Charles Daley, was taller than I was. “You aren’t going to offer him a beer, too, are you?”
“Absolutely not. The drinking age for family is fifteen.”
“Happy birthday, Big John.”
“Thanks, Mikey. I’m going to take a lap and visit with my guests. Mind keeping an eye on the bar?”
“My pleasure.”
* * *
At one o’clock the following morning, the Public Defender of the City and County of San Francisco was sitting next to the ex-cop-turned-private-investigator in a weathered booth beneath a faded autographed photo of Juan Marichal in the back of Dunleavy’s. The most decorated homicide inspector in SFPD history sat across from them. The P.D., Rosie Fernandez, was my ex-wife. The P.I., Pete Daley, was my younger brother. The retired detective, Roosevelt Johnson, was my father’s first partner. Rosie was looking at the big-screen TV, her ever-present iPhone pressed to her ear. Between scowls, she was drinking a Bud straight from the bottle. Pete nursed a cup of coffee. Roosevelt sipped a club soda.
I slid into the seat next to Roosevelt and put my bottle of Anchor Steam on the table. Roosevelt and my dad had spent countless nights in this booth after their shifts had ended.
Rosie lowered the phone. “The kids took my mom home.”
“Good.”
Rosie’s eighty-four-year-old mother, Sylvia Fernandez, still lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow in the Mission that she and her late husband had purchased in 1962. Rosie’s occasional suggestions that her mother cash in her chips and move into a condo requiring less day-to-day maintenance had not been well received.
I turned to Roosevelt, who was wearing his usual charcoal suit and understated necktie. “Janet okay?”
He responded in the familiar baritone that still had a hint of his native Texas. “So-so.”
His wife had been waging a heroic fight against multiple forms of cancer for almost a decade. “You working on any cold cases?”
“Not at the moment. I’m trying to focus on my grandchildren.”
“Sounds good.” I looked at my brother. “Nice party.”
Pete’s brown hair and mustache used to be a half-shade darker than mine. Now they were a distinguished shade of gray. His pockmarked face bore the scars of a decade as a cop and almost twenty years as a P.I. He adjusted the sleeve of his bomber jacket and spoke in a Clint Eastwood rasp. “Yup.”
This represented chattiness for him. “You okay?”
“Fine, Mick.”
“I saw Donna.”
“Margaret wasn’t feeling well. Donna took her home.”
Margaret—named after our mom—was Pete’s twelve-year-old daughter and my niece. Pete’s wife, Donna, was a patient soul who had the profoundly thankless job as the chief financial officer of a big law firm downtown. Donna had adapted—at times grudgingly—to Pete’s unpredictable hours.
“You and Donna okay?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“‘Fine’ as in ‘good,’ or ‘not so good, but we’re dealing with it’?”
“We always work it out, Mick.” He changed the subject. “Could you believe all the tech kids here tonight? Big John is going to have to hire another bartender.”
“Maybe we could take a couple of shifts.”
“I got more work than I can handle.”
“I was kidding. You working tonight?”
“Later.”
“Cheating wife?”
“Cheating husband. Everything you’ve heard about sex, drugs, and misogyny in the tech world is true—only worse.”
“I assumed that much of it has been exaggerated.”
“You’d be amazed.”
Rosie finally ended her call. “We need to get down to the office.”
“It’s one a.m. on Christmas Eve.”
“We have a new client.”
It wasn’t unusual for defense attorneys—including the Public Defender—to get calls in the middle of the night—even on Christmas Eve. “What is it, Rosie?”
Her cobalt eyes gleamed as she played with the collar of her Armani Collezioni blouse. When we had met almost twenty-five years earlier in the file room of the old P.D.’s Office, her straight black hair had cascaded down to her waist, and her wardrobe consisted of jeans and denim work shirts. When she ran for Public Defender two years earlier, she had shortened and styled her hair and acquired a wardrobe more suita
ble for her occasional TV appearances.
She pointed at the TV. A reporter from Channel 2 was standing in front of a Victorian. Flashing red lights reflected off the house. The caption indicated that she was on Twenty-First Street, above Mission Dolores, where a bunch of tech moguls had refurbished several blocks of turn-of-the-century houses. “You see that?”
“Something happened on Billionaires Row?”
“One of the billionaires is dead. They’re saying our new client killed him.”
2
“THE PRINCE OF DISRUPTION”
“Which billionaire?” I asked.
Rosie was still looking at her iPhone. “The ‘Prince of Disruption.’”
I was more familiar with the players on the Warriors than those in the tech industry. “Does he have a name?”
Pete answered. “Jeff King. Founder of Y5K Technologies. If you believe the hype, his company is going to make cloud computing obsolete.”
I was fairly adept at using my iPhone and laptop, but I lacked the capacity and the interest to obsess about every incremental advance in technology. “Who gave him that nickname?”
“He did. At his Ted Talk a couple of years ago.”
Why am I not surprised? “How much is he worth?”
“You mean ‘How much was he worth?’”
“Uh, yes.”
“Supposedly, about ten billion.”
As a practical matter, that figure was incomprehensible to the son of a San Francisco cop who made ends meet on a P.D.’s salary and was hoping to retire someday on a civil servant’s pension. In the Bay Area’s tech Neverland, King was just another billionaire.
Pete was still talking. “In Silicon Valley, the scuttlebutt is that his company can compete with Amazon Web Services.”
“Don’t believe the hype.”
“It’s also an open secret that King was one of the biggest jerks in the tech space. That was quite an accomplishment—he had a lot of competition.”
It wasn’t a news flash that bad behavior was prevalent in the tech universe—along with every other industry, including the legal profession. I asked Rosie how he died.
“Looked like an overdose, but it’s too soon to know.”
He wasn’t the first high-profile entrepreneur to OD, either. “It could have been an accident.”
“The cops are saying our new client gave him a hot shot of heroin.”
“Who is he?”
“She. Her name is Alexa Low.”
“Where is she?”
“Homicide. They took her in for questioning.”
The Homicide Detail was housed in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant, next to the I-80 Freeway.
She stood up. “I’ll give you a lift downtown. We need to talk to her right away.”
I turned to Pete, who was pulling on his jacket. “You want to tag along?”
“I’ll head out to Billionaires Row and see what I can find out.”
“I thought you were tailing a cheating husband.”
“I’ll get somebody to cover for me.” He gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Betcha I’ll have company. Half the P.I.s in town were watching the Prince of Disruption.”
* * *
“What do you know about King?” I asked Rosie.
“Just what I’ve read in the papers.” She gripped the wheel of her Prius as we drove east on Lincoln Way along the southern border of Golden Gate Park. A mist covered the windshield. “His company is supposed to go public next year. It’s the hottest offering since Facebook.”
I didn’t pay close attention to such matters. “Is he really worth ten billion?”
“It’s all funny money to me.”
Me, too.
Her eyes were on the road, where traffic was light. “Late forties. Serial entrepreneur. Made money on a couple of startups, but had more failures than successes. This company was supposed to be his big payday.”
She knew more than I expected. “Inconvenient time to OD.”
“If he did, in fact, OD. For all we know, somebody could have given him rat poison. Either way, a lot of people may lose millions.”
“You think somebody killed him to stop the IPO?”
“Don’t know.”
“Any chance our new client killed him?”
“No idea.”
I asked her if King was married.
“The third time was the charm. A pretty wife and a baby daughter. If you believe the Chronicle, he was a dedicated family man.”
“Who died of a heroin overdose administered by our new client.”
“Allegedly administered. And we don’t know for sure that it was heroin or an overdose.”
“Right. Am I correct in assuming that our new client is not King’s wife?”
“You are.”
“What was her relationship to the deceased?”
“We’ll find out when we talk to her.”
3
“WE NEED TO SEE OUR NEW CLENT”
Four a.m. The veteran homicide cop fingered the lapel of his Men’s Wearhouse suit jacket. Inspector Ken Lee leaned back in a rickety swivel chair behind his metal desk in the bullpen housing SFPD’s Homicide Detail on the third floor of the Hall of Justice. He spoke to Rosie as if I wasn’t there. “Kids okay?”
“Fine.”
“Your mother?”
“All good.”
“Glad to hear it.”
After we made our initial request to see our new client, Lee had let us cool our heels for almost three hours in the otherwise-empty hallway in the drab fifties-era building squeezed between Bryant Street and the I-80 Freeway in the South of Market neighborhood that was rapidly transforming from an industrial area into a tech hub. The fortress-like, asbestos-laden edifice had been declared unsafe from earthquakes, and many departments had moved to safer quarters in other buildings. The D.A.’s Office, Homicide, several courtrooms, and a few dozen jail cells were still housed in the old warhorse with leaky windows and spotty plumbing. Visiting the Hall was like going to a Giants’ game during the last season at Candlestick. If anything broke, the City wasn’t going to fix it.
Lee was still talking to Rosie. “You going to run for re-election?”
“That’s the plan.”
“You could take early retirement with a decent pension.”
“We have another kid to put through college.”
“I have two.”
“Then I guess we’ll just keep rolling.”
Rosie and I feigned interest as Lee talked about the complications of sharing custody with his ex-wife. We understood the issues. Then again, Rosie and I were a permanent—albeit unmarried—couple, and we got along reasonably well most of the time. We also knew that it was essential to observe protocol when you’re trolling for information from a homicide inspector in the wee hours on Christmas Eve. Never a chatty soul, Lee worked alone because he liked it that way. After two decades working undercover in Chinatown, he was rewarded with a promotion to Homicide. His boyish good looks had given way to a leathery complexion, and a scar ran across his right cheek. His hair was more gray than black, and he walked with a limp.
Rosie tried to ease him into the matters at hand. “We didn’t expect to find you here.”
“Criminals don’t keep regular hours.”
“We figured you’d still be up on Billionaires Row.”
“I’ll be heading back shortly. Looks like I’ll be working today and tomorrow.”
So will we.
Rosie’s tone remained even. “We need to see our new client.”
“Which one?”
As if you don’t know.
Rosie held up a hand. “Alexa Low.”
“I didn’t realize the P.D.’s Office was representing her.”
“That’s not your concern.”
“You’re sure that she’ll qualify? Her LinkedIn page says that she’s a programmer for a FinTech startup, so she must be pulling down some coin. Her driver’s license indicates that she lives in one
of those new loft buildings near the ballpark. And she was at a party at the house of the founder of a hot startup.”
Rosie folded her arms. “We’ll ask her about it. I presume that she’s still here?”
“She’s still down in intake.”
“You shouldn’t have questioned her outside our presence. You’ve already violated her right to remain silent.”
“I advised her of her rights. She spoke to me voluntarily.”
“Anything she told you is inadmissible.”
“Other than her name and date of birth, she didn’t say a word.”
“We need to see her now.”
“After she’s processed.”
“You are denying us the opportunity to talk to our client.”
“No, I’m not. I’m simply informing you of her whereabouts. You’re free to talk to her after she’s completed intake.”
Rosie kept pushing. “We understand that the decedent was Jeff King.”
“I cannot confirm or deny that information at this time.”
“It was on the news.”
“I cannot officially release the name of the victim pending notification of family.”
“Have you decided on a charge?”
“We booked her on murder-one. We will, of course, forward everything to the D.A., who will decide on the formal charge in court.”
The D.A. could hold our client for up to seventy-two hours (not including weekends and holidays). It was likely that she would be held until after Christmas.
“Has a time been set for the arraignment?”
“Not yet.”
Rosie glanced my way, and I took the cue. “Would you mind telling us what happened?”
“I can’t talk about it now.”
You mean you won’t talk about it. “Just a few highlights?”
“Off the record, there was a gathering at King’s house to celebrate his company’s forthcoming IPO. Your client was there.”
“Was King’s wife at the party?”
“As far as we know, she was at their house in Palo Alto.”
“They have places in Palo Alto and San Francisco?”
“And a co-op on Central Park West, a townhouse in La Jolla, a bungalow in Malibu, a beach house in Maui, a chalet in Lake Tahoe, a cabin in Aspen, and a pied-à-terre in Paris.”
Nice life. “Was anybody at the party mad at him?”
Higher Law Boxset, Volume 3 Page 52