“Why did you come into this room?”
Father Martin’s stomach gripped, then lurched. “I think I’m going to be—”
He bent forward and threw up his dinner, splattering the detective’s black wingtip shoes.
After the dry heaves and waves of nausea had passed, Father Martin sat up, fighting to catch his breath. He watched Detective Dixon Connor duck beneath the police tape strung across the doorway. Stocky, with a square jaw and well-trimmed crew cut, Connor strode toward them looking like he’d walked off a Marine Corps recruiting poster. Father Martin had crossed paths with Dixon Connor more than once. On the most recent occasion, Connor had come to the shelter looking for a particular boy. When Father Martin refused to provide him any information, Connor accused him of harboring prostitutes and drug dealers and threatened to shut him down. Father Martin told Connor he could arrest the boys from now to eternity, and each time they’d be back on the streets before Connor finished the paperwork. He was offering an alternative.
Connor didn’t see it that way.
Connor spun a folding chair and straddled it. His right hand held two plastic bags.
“Found it,” Connor said holding up a bag with what looked to be Father Martin’s letter opener, a gift from a South American missionary. The teak handle, carved with the image of Christ on the cross, appeared stained with blood.
“Along with these.” Connor handed Begley a second plastic bag, this one containing a brown nine-by-twelve-inch envelope.
Begley, already wearing blue latex gloves, unzipped the bag and folded open the envelope tab. He pulled out what appeared to be photographs. His face contorted in disgust. “Where?”
“Office across the hall,” Connor said. “Inside a file drawer.”
Begley looked from the photographs to Connor, about to say something, but his cheeks puffed as if swallowing his words. He turned, raincoat splaying like a cape. “Listen up, people.” Everyone in the room came to a sudden stop—the patrol lights swirling and the radios crackling. “We’re going to freeze the building,” Begley said. “Right now! Bag everything and catalogue it. Do not leave this room. Do not open doors.”
After a beat the room started up again, the men and women quickly going about their business.
Connor grabbed Father Martin by his shoulder and pulled him to his feet. A sharp pain radiated from his wrist, buckling his knees and bringing another wave of nausea.
“Connor,” Begley said.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Connor said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney . . .”
Danny Simeon stood in the hallway behind a uniformed officer stationed at the recreation-room door. Simeon had heard the sirens, which were not unusual in the Tenderloin. He’d paid little attention to them until the windows of the dormitory lit up in strobes of flickering color. Looking out the window, he saw police officers exiting patrol cars and hurrying up the building steps to the front door. The boys, well versed in police procedure, scattered from the dormitory like billiard balls.
Simeon hurried into the hallway in time to see beams of light bouncing off the staircase walls, the officers’ boots pounding up the stairs. He did not see Father Martin in the hallway and quickly checked the office. The door was locked, but Simeon had a key and quietly slipped inside.
The first wave of officers came up the stairs and entered the recreation room across the hall. Those who followed fanned out throughout the building. Simeon stepped from the office and got as far as the double-wide doors when an officer stopped him. Inside the recreation room he caught a brief glimpse of Father Tom kneeling on the floor with his back to the door. Another officer shoved him down the hall and started asking him questions.
Now he watched as two uniformed officers stepped into the hall, Father Tom between. His arm was immobilized in a sling and his T-shirt covered in blood. Simeon stepped quickly toward him. “Father T? What happened? Where are you taking him?”
But just as Simeon neared the priest, Dixon Connor exited the room. Before Simeon could react, Connor had grabbed an officer’s nightstick, jabbed the end into Simeon’s stomach, and whipped the other end across his jaw.
Chapter 5
December 22, 1987
Donley drummed his fingers on his desk and dismissed another case summary as not helpful. Frustration had set in. He’d come into the office early to search for legal precedent on which to base an argument that a man who’d professed to be Elvis Presley could somehow also be sane enough to decide how to dispose of his estate. The stack of books on his desk grew, but so far, Donley had nothing to show for it.
He drained cold coffee from his mug, grimacing at the taste. He rarely drank coffee, which was likely part of the reason he felt on edge, but he needed the caffeine after working three late nights in a row. He wanted to clear his desk so he could enjoy the Christmas holiday but was quickly learning the truth of another of Lou’s adages. “The law,” Lou liked to say, “is a jealous mistress, and she will take all of your time if you let her.”
In need of a mental break, Donley stood from his desk to stretch. When he did, he sensed something out of the ordinary. The accordion-style radiator beneath the window hissed and spit, but otherwise, the office was quiet. Too quiet. Eerily quiet. He checked his watch. Lou was late.
Lou was never late. Lou was as regular as the spit and hiss of the radiator. He’d stormed through the office door at precisely seven thirty every morning for better than forty years. Within minutes, he had his jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled up, and the phone pressed to his ear. Once Lou arrived at the office, quiet went out the window. His volume dial was loud, louder, and loudest. If Lou wasn’t talking on the telephone, he was shouting for Ruth-Bell to get him another file, lunch, or more coffee. No shrinking violet, Ruth-Bell gave as good as she got, usually yelling back something like, “I have two arms. If you wanted a receptionist with eight, you should have hired an octopus!”
How the two of them had worked decades together without killing each other was one of life’s great mysteries. Donley just tried to avoid the cross fire.
Donley walked into the reception area and refilled his mug from the well-stained coffeepot, figuring edgy was better than sleepy in court. He again considered his watch, confirming the time with the German cuckoo clock on the wall to the right of the door. This was getting downright unnerving.
The door opened, nearly hitting him. Lou burst in, briefcase and brown-bag lunch in hand, a raincoat over his arm.
“Where in the love of Christ were you last night?” Lou didn’t stop for an answer, walking into his office. He tossed his raincoat at a cigar-store Indian, one of the many knickknacks he’d accumulated from appreciative clients. The coat hit the wooden figure and slid to the throw rug.
Donley followed him, picking up the coat. “What are you talking about? I was at home.”
Lou removed his sport coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He’d already pulled down the knot of his tie and unbuttoned the collar. “I called.”
“When?”
“Late.”
Donley recalled the phone ringing and not allowing Kim to answer it. He draped the coat over a chair. “I must have missed it. Why? What’s going on?”
“Did you watch the news?”
“Please don’t tell me Albert flew off on the six o’clock news.”
Lou didn’t smile. The good lawyers, like Lou, had short memories. Albert was already a distant memory.
“I got a priest at SF General,” Lou said.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
Lou handed him the folded newspaper. “Page one. I’ve been on the phone with Don for an hour already this morning. They took him to the hospital.”
“The archbishop?”
Lou looked at him like he was nuts. “What? No, the priest.” Lou pulled open the door behind his desk, revealing a water closet with a sink and medicine cabinet. He shot a plug of sh
aving cream into his palm and began to lather his face. “Three hours to put a cast on his wrist. What were they doing, grinding the plaster? I got the Martinez trial this morning. Don is going to call to find out what I know, which is jack at this point. Tell him I’m in trial, but tell him I’ll try to call him when we break.” Donley cringed as Lou swiped the old-fashioned double-edged razor down his cheek, the blades scraping the coarse stubble. “I called a friend of mine last night, a private investigator named Frank Ross. Ruth-Bell has his number, if she graces us with an appearance this morning. I asked him to run some things down for me. Call him this afternoon, and find out what he knows. In the interim, I need you to get a hold of the district attorney, and find out what they have and when I can have it. They’ll jerk you around, but just get the five w’s,” he said, meaning who, what, when, where, and why. “Then get down there and talk to him.”
“The archbishop.”
“The priest. He’s at the county jail, Hall of Justice, sixth floor. Ruth-Bell can help. And have her cancel everything on my calendar for the rest of the week. What she can’t cancel, you’ll have to handle.”
Donley saw his Christmas break evaporating.
Lou tapped the razor on the porcelain sink, making a metallic clinking. He started on the other cheek. “Your aunt isn’t going to like this; she had her heart set on Christmas in Florida with her sister. Me? I’d just as soon do without the heat and her sister, but you know your aunt.”
Donley rushed to get in a sentence when Lou ran the blade under the stream of water. “What happened? What did the priest do?”
“Read the paper, and you’ll know as much as I do at this point. Can you handle it? Good.” Lou grabbed the white towel hanging on the bar inside the door and wiped the remaining foam from his face. Then he unrolled his shirtsleeves, buttoned his cuffs, and grabbed his brown blazer. “I’ll be back sometime after five. We can go over it then. I’ll try to call during a break, but I cross Dr. Kinzerman today, and I’ll be lucky to get one straight answer out of that SOB.”
“OK, I’ll—” Donley started, but Lou had already picked up his briefcase and stepped into the lobby, nearly colliding with Ruth-Bell.
“Talk to Peter. He knows everything.”
Ruth-Bell stepped in. The office door slammed shut, the fogged glass with the stenciled letters rattling. Ruth-Bell turned to Donley. “You don’t know anything, do you?”
“Not a damn thing,” Donley said.
“Everything was in plain sight,” Dixon Connor said, not surprised his partner was not supporting him.
“Then you must have X-ray vision,” John Begley said. “You must be Superman, Connor.” Begley turned to Lieutenant Aileen O’Malley and continued to stab Connor in the back. “The office was across a hall. That door was locked. I know. I checked it when I came up the stairs. He should not have gone in there without a warrant.”
“It was a fucking crime scene,” Connor said.
“We came upon a crime scene after the crime was committed. We needed a warrant to search that office.”
Connor wanted to bust the black son of a bitch in the mouth, and just being in O’Malley’s cramped, glass-enclosed office made him want to puke. There had been a time when room 450 of the Hall of Justice had felt like his living room. San Francisco’s homicide detectives, men like him who’d spent years paying their dues, sat at cramped desks amid battered file cabinets solving San Francisco’s murders. Now Connor felt like an unwanted guest, and Begley and O’Malley represented the poster children for what had gone wrong with the department: quotas. Blacks like Begley and women like O’Malley got promoted so the department could meet its quotas while more-deserving white male candidates got early retirement packages or the pleasure of humping their asses on the street, knowing they were entitled to the next promotion but wouldn’t get it.
“I’ve been doing this job for better than twenty-five years. I got a dead body in a building, not a private residence; that makes the whole operation subject to search.”
Begley continued to direct his comments to O’Malley. “The crime took place in the recreation room across the hall. The priest keeps a bed in his office.”
“We don’t know where the crime took place,” Connor countered. “We found the body in the recreation room, but we also found drops of blood.”
“Not in the office, we didn’t,” Begley said.
Connor shifted in the chair. The thin fabric cushion offered little comfort for the deteriorating disc in his back, the pain a lingering reminder of a bullet still lodged near his spine. His back bothered him when he sat too long, lay too long, or stood too long. It always bothered him. Some mornings he couldn’t open his eyes without feeling as if someone had jolted him with five thousand volts of electricity. The Vicodin helped, but not enough. The Vicodin and Jameson’s, a lot of it, usually did the trick.
O’Malley rubbed her forehead as if fighting a headache. Dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked more like a Pacific Heights PTA mom than a cop. Thanks to a husband pulling in several hundred grand as an investment banker, that’s exactly the role she played. She spoke to Connor. “Were you concerned there was an imminent chance of evidence being destroyed?”
She sounded like a goddamn police manual. “When I enter a building and find a dead body, everything is possible evidence, and everyone present a suspect, a witness, or a problem. Who knows what they could have destroyed while we were getting a warrant?”
“Is that why you busted that kid’s jaw?” Begley said.
Connor glared at him. “He isn’t a kid. He’s eighteen. And he attacked a police officer.”
“Rambo here hit one of the residents with a nightstick. The kid’s at SF General.”
Connor shook his head. “I thought he was going for the gun. And he isn’t a resident. He works there.”
O’Malley put up a hand and nodded to the door. “You can go, John. Get started on the paperwork. Keep me apprised. The press is already calling. So is the brass.”
Begley left the office without looking back.
“Where’s the priest now?” O’Malley asked.
Connor fingered his father’s Marine Corps ring, spinning it on his finger. “Bryant Street,” he said, referring to the jail.
“Why’d they take him in to General?”
“He broke his wrist.”
“How?”
“Unknown.”
“Who was the first officer on scene?” she asked.
“Cameron.”
“Scott? How’d the call come in?”
“Anonymous source. Likely a pay phone on Polk. Don’t have the tape yet, but the operator said it was short. ‘There’s a dead body in the shelter.’ Something like that.”
O’Malley paused. “I take it the kid in the hospital isn’t talking?”
Connor shrugged. “Ain’t a kid.”
“Is he talking, or isn’t he?”
“His jaw’s busted, and they won’t let us near him.”
“Any other witnesses?”
He couldn’t hide a smile. She really didn’t know shit. “They scatter like ghosts, those kids; I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
O’Malley shook her head. “You’ve testified a hundred times.”
“Seventy-eight.”
“Then tell me why you would go in a locked office if we had a secure building? Why give the defense attorney something to argue? Why not wait for the warrant?”
“I told you why.”
She pushed back her chair and stood. “I’m trying to work with you here. If the door was locked, you should have waited for a warrant. I don’t need to tell you that.”
“No . . . you don’t.”
O’Malley stared at him. “Internal Affairs needs to look into the kid with the broken jaw and sort this out.”
“Are you suspending me, Aileen?”
“Enjoy the holiday.”
“I’m not using my personal days. You want me gone, suspe
nd me.”
“Fine,” she said. “Leave your badge and gun on your desk.”
Connor stood. His back ached like it was on fire. He thought of a number of things to say, but none were as good as what he wanted to do. He wanted to grab Aileen O’Malley right between the legs. The look on her face would be the final Kodak moment in a scrapbook spanning twenty-five years, but he wasn’t going to make it that easy for them. She’d suspended him, his prelude to retirement, and that little bullet would be his gold mine. A full pension and disability, unlike his father, whom they’d kicked to the curb. That was the only reason he didn’t grab her. His father.
“You have a Merry Christmas, Lieutenant,” he said.
Donley stepped from the cab onto Bryant Street and looked up at the heavy gray clouds cloaking the city. The chilled morning air seeped through his suit jacket. “Here we go again,” he said.
For the past three years, Donley had felt like he’d stepped onto a treadmill operating at high speed. It had started the day he’d taken the oath to be a lawyer at city hall. Lou shook his hand, handed him a file, and told him he had his first trial in municipal court. It had been only a traffic-crash dispute, and the trial lasted all of an hour, but Donley had not had a clue what he was doing. Still, he’d managed to get through it and prevail. When he’d returned to the office that afternoon, Lou had family and friends waiting and a spread of food.
“That trial was your baptism by fire,” Lou had said. “You’ll never be less prepared, but you did it. Now, you know you can handle anything. There’s nothing like standing in front of twelve people with your ass hanging in the wind.”
When the pace in the office seemed out of control, Lou just worked harder. “You’ll have time to rest when you’re at Crosby-N. Gray,” he’d say, referring to a well-known local funeral parlor. Donley just hoped he didn’t get there sooner than he wanted. The long hours were killing him, especially with Benny now old enough to do more than eat and poop. Benny and Kim were the reasons Donley had kept Max Seager’s business card, and why it was now burning a hole in his pocket. He intended to call Seager’s assistant and set up a meeting for after the holidays. He owed it to his family. They needed the money. They could buy a home on the peninsula, and Benny could go to a better school.
The 7th Canon Page 3