Natalie is not pleased about the prospect. “I have never been a witness at a trial,” she says.
Rosie tries to reassure her. “If it should become necessary, we’ll be there to help you,” she says, but Natalie is not persuaded.
A few minutes later, Turner escorts us out. “Listen,” he says as we’re standing in front of the house, “I would appreciate it if you would take it easy on Natalie. She’s been through a lot.”
I assure him that we’ll do everything we can. Actually, I’m glad to have encountered him. “Turner,” I say, “there is one other issue that has come up.”
His eyes question me.
“We had a chance to look at the records for Skipper’s cell phone. It seems that a phone call was placed to you at about one-twenty.”
He freezes for just a second. “He called me about scheduling.”
“At one-twenty in the morning?”
“I told him I’d be up late. He wanted to be sure we had enough lead time to schedule debates in both Los Angeles and San Francisco.”
Of course. “The police found out about it through the phone records. You never mentioned it until they asked, did you?”
“I don’t recall. I know I told them about it.”
Not a particularly convincing dodge. “Did Skipper sound agitated?”
“He sounded fine. All business. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“And there was nothing unusual about his tone or manner?”
“It was after one in the morning. He sounded tired. Otherwise, he was just fine.”
“Turner,” I say, “you were seen in the security videos in the lobby of the hotel at three twenty-five A.M. What were you doing there?”
He acts as if he expected the question. “I was concerned. We were told he might be under surveillance. A friend of mine at the Chronicle told me he thought Sherman’s people had hired a private eye to try to dig up some dirt. I came back to check things out.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing. I went upstairs, but there was no sign of a private eye, and I didn’t see or hear anything at his door. I didn’t knock. I figured he was asleep, so I went back home.”
Right.
“He’s lying through his teeth,” Rosie says. We’re in my car, heading downtown. “What do you think he’s up to?”
Damned if I know; he’s slippery. “Maybe he’s protecting Skipper?” I suggest, though as I say it I realize loyalty has never been a Turner trait.
Rosie is skeptical, too. “No way,” she says. “But I can see him covering for somebody else.”
“Like who?”
“Like himself,” she answers. “Or Ann. Or Natalie.”
My cell phone rings. It’s Pete. “Mama fell down,” he says. “She hit her head.”
Christ. I ask him where he is.
“I’m on my way to San Francisco General.”
“We’ll meet you there,” I say, and drive like hell.
25
“IT DOESN’T LOOK GOOD”
“Please respect the needs of our patients.”
—SAN FRANCISCO GENERAL HOSPITAL.
The drab walls and plastic chairs provide little comfort to those of us who are sitting in the waiting room of the intensive care unit at San Francisco General. A TV is attached to the wall. A local newsmagazine show is playing. The sound is turned down and nobody’s looking at it. We’re waiting for word on my mom. She’s in surgery. She fell down in the kitchen. The broken hip may mend. The blow to her head is much more worrisome. The nurse came by about an hour ago and said Mama’s in a coma. There’s fluid on the brain. They’re going to try to relieve the pressure. My head aches.
Pete’s always been the closest to my mom. He’s talking on his cell phone to our sister in L.A. I can make out the words “It doesn’t look good.”
Rosie is next to me. She licks her lips from time to time. It seems we’re spending a lot of time at San Francisco General. Our memories of this hospital are mixed. Grace was born here. Rosie’s dad died here. So did mine. We don’t need to speak. There’s nothing to say. I can’t imagine being here without her.
I pretend to be looking at a copy of Time. In reality, I’m replaying in my mind the highlight reel of the life and times of Margaret Murphy Daley. Born in San Francisco. Grew up in the outer Mission. Married my father when she was twenty. Moved to the Sunset. Raised four kids. Watched them all go to college. Lost one of them in Vietnam. Lost her husband too soon. Watched us get married. Celebrated when Grace was born and again when my sister’s son was born in L.A. Was there for us when we got divorced. Took care of my father when he got sick. Loved us all. Worried for sixty-nine years.
I glance at Pete. He nods toward a doctor and a nurse who are approaching us and swallows hard. “This isn’t good,” he whispers. “They always come together when it isn’t good.”
We stand. The young internist tells us the inevitable. I barely hear the words, “There was nothing we could do for her.” The trauma to her brain was too severe. The internal pressure was too extreme. She never regained consciousness.
“We’d like to see her,” I say.
The nurse says she’ll return in a few minutes to escort us to see Mama. She asks us if there is anybody we would like to call.
We sit in the waiting area with each other and our memories. Pete calls our sister. Tears are streaming down his face.
Rosie calls her mom to tell her, then asks to talk to Grace. I hear her say, “It’s going to be all right, honey. I know you’re sad, but Grandma is in heaven with Grandpa now. They’re together again with Uncle Tommy.” She turns back to me, tears in her eyes. I ask her how Grace sounded. “Fair,” she replies, her voice cracking. She takes my hand. “I’m so sorry, Mike,” she whispers.
“I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye.” I bury my head in her shoulder and sob.
—————
Sylvia Fernandez says, “Margaret was a very special lady.”
We’re sitting in her kitchen a few hours later. I’ve been on the phone making funeral arrangements and calling friends and family.
“Thanks, Sylvia.”
“You know, we didn’t always see eye to eye on everything.”
I am well aware of this. Sylvia and my mom were not pleased when Rosie and I told them we were getting married. Sylvia thought Rosie could do better. My mom expected me to marry a nice Irish woman. The two of them were similar in many ways. They were both fiercely independent and very protective of their children. I smile at Sylvia and say, “We had an inkling about that.”
Rosie chuckles and says, “You guys seemed to get along a lot better once Mike and I split up.”
This is true. When we separated, they pooled their resources. They thought our custody fight was going to ruin Grace’s life. They were right. I dropped the battle after they interceded. It isn’t hard to figure out where Rosie got her independent streak.
“Looks like I’m the last one of this generation left,” Sylvia says.
“It isn’t easy when you outlive your immediate family,” Rosie says.
“And many of your friends,” Sylvia adds. She lifts her teacup and says, “Here’s to my wonderful friend, Margaret Daley. I’ll miss you, my dear. I’ll do my best to keep an eye on everybody for as long as I can.”
The obituary for Margaret Murphy Daley says she lived to the age of sixty-nine. It says she was married to Thomas James Charles Daley, Sr. for forty-two years. It says she had four children and two grandchildren. It doesn’t say that she gave everything she had to us. It doesn’t note that she made all of us feel special every time we saw her. It can’t begin to describe the sparkle in her eyes every time she saw her grandchildren.
The gatherings for the wake and the funeral are small. The priest from our old parish in the Sunset delivers a beautiful eulogy. He talks about family. He conveys the essence of her life when he says, “She was always there when anyone needed her.”
On Friday, October first, Margaret
Murphy Daley is laid to rest between my dad and my brother in the old Irish cemetery in Colma. Grace places flowers on the casket. Pete stands next to Rosie and me. My baby sister, Mary, holds hands with her husband and her son. I watch the casket being lowered and think how small the grave looks.
I’ll miss you, Mama.
26
A RAT IS STILL A RAT
“It is unfortunate that we must take time away from the important issues to address the legal problems that concern Mr. Gates.”
—DAN MORRIS. NEWS SCENTER 4 DAYBREAK. MONDAY, OCTOBER 4.
Monday, October fourth. There’s been little time to mourn; we have a trial starting in two weeks. Skipper vetoed the possibility of asking for a continuance. He expects the trial to be completed before election day in the first week of November. We’ve hired an attorney to handle Mama’s small estate. Pete and I sorted out her personal belongings. We’ve decided to hold off putting the house up for sale until after the first of the year.
I saw Roosevelt at the funeral. He told me the police had no new leads on the man who slugged me at the Royan. Rod Beckert has declared Andy Holton’s death an accidental heroin overdose. I’m not surprised and I’m not convinced.
Skipper is subdued when I see him. The gravity of his situation seems to be sinking in at last. He’s changing from belligerent to modestly helpful, though he has nothing new to say. Unfortunately, the same is not true of his daughter. Ann is becoming even more contentious, if that’s possible. I don’t understand it. She tells me she plans to announce her candidacy for mayor after the first of the year. She isn’t letting her father’s murder trial get in the way of her political ambitions.
At ten o’clock this morning, I’ve managed to get an appointment with Ann’s boyfriend, Dan Morris. Ann told us it’s official: He’s her new campaign manager. He gives me a lukewarm greeting as we sit in his memorabilia-filled office. It’s overcast outside.
He leads off. “I don’t get it, Mike,” he says. “It’s staring you right in the face.” His cufflinks are in the shape of little gold American flags. The stars are made of diamond chips.
“What’s that, Dan?” I try to sound innocent.
“Your client. Everybody can see it. He’s guilty as hell. He should withdraw from the race. You guys should stop wasting everybody’s time and see if McNulty will go for a plea bargain.”
They can wear designer clothes. They can wear diamond-studded cuff links. They can sit in a fancy office. Any way you cut it, a rat is still a rat. It also strikes me that Ann may not be sharing all the details of her father’s case with her new squeeze. Unless he’s sandbagging me, it seems she hasn’t mentioned McNulty’s overtures about a plea bargain to him.
I decide to approach from another angle. “Dan,” I say, “we were looking at the security tapes.”
His face is expressionless. “So?”
“We saw you leave the building at one-thirty.”
“So?”
How do I say this politely? I hate this guy. “So, you told me a while back that you and Jason left around twelve-thirty, right after the meeting ended.”
He feigns exasperation. “What difference does it make? We left shortly after the summit conference broke up.”
Bullshit. An hour later is not “shortly.” “What were you doing there?”
“Talking about logistics for the debates.” He glances up at the wall of campaign posters as if he’s trying to remember. “We met in the room next door to Skipper’s.”
“How long were you there?”
“I guess it must have been about an hour, if that’s what the security tapes show.”
I ask him who else was there.
“Just Jason.” He says he didn’t hear anything in Skipper’s room.
“You didn’t happen to see Johnny Garcia?”
“Of course not.”
Damn. “And you went straight home?”
“Yes.”
I take a deep breath. “Dan,” I say, “I understand you’ve been asked to run Ann’s campaign for mayor.”
“She’s hired me,” he says. “We’re going to hold off on the announcement of her candidacy until after the first of the year. We want to get her father’s trial out of the way.”
Right. “Does any of this strike you as a little odd?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re running a vicious negative campaign against her father. Now you’re going to run Ann’s campaign. Isn’t that kind of like switching sides?”
“It’s business. You know that. I run campaigns. She needs a manager. I’m good. She knows it. So she hired me.”
There I go again—turning every tiny issue into some sort of morality play. “You realize that you may be called as a witness at Skipper’s trial?”
“I have nothing to hide.”
“Some gossipmongers around town have suggested that you and Ann may be seeing each other socially.”
“We’re friends.”
“Some people have suggested that you’re more than just friends.”
His tone remains measured. “What if we are?”
“You’re a suspect in the murder for which her father has been accused.”
“That’s absurd.”
I point out that everybody in town knows that he and Skipper had a big falling-out.
“Are you really suggesting I killed Johnny Garcia?”
“Maybe.”
“I didn’t. Forget it. And for the record, Ann and I are seeing each other.”
“Mind if I ask Jason a few questions?”
“Be my guest.” He starts to pick up the phone.
I stop him. “Dan, I’d like to talk to him alone.”
“Suit yourself.”
Jason Parnelli is on the phone when I take a seat in his office down the hall. Evidently, political lackeys-in-training work in small, windowless rooms. He’s wearing one of those headsets that used to be the sole province of telephone operators. Now everybody has them. It’s the status symbol of the electronic age. I suspect he spends most of his life working the phones, trying to raise money for the candidate of the week. At the moment, he’s refilling Leslie Sherman’s campaign tank. In politics, the fund-raising never stops.
Parnelli and his headset sit behind a small teak desk. There’s a poster of Leslie Sherman thumbtacked to the wall behind him. He punches a button on his phone console and grins at me. His boyish good looks are beginning to show some signs of wear and tear. It happens to the best of us, I guess. There are a few crow’s-feet around his eyes. “Raising money is the toughest part of this job,” he says.
I agree with him. Then I ask him to tell me what happened after the summit conference ended. I have to see what I can get as fast as I can. He’ll start dialing for dollars in a moment.
“Did you talk to Dan?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He glances toward the door. He doesn’t want to contradict his boss. It would ruin a not terribly promising political career before it ever gets off the ground. “What did he tell you?”
No way I’m going to give him the answers. I decide to lob a softball to him to see if he’ll start talking. “He said you guys stuck around for a while and had a meeting next door.”
“That’s true.”
I try again. “What were you talking about?”
“Strategy.”
I mask my irritation. I ask him how long they stayed.
“Not long,” he replies. He may as well have added “Dan told me not to say anything to you.”
I spend fifteen minutes trying to draw him out. It’s a tedious exercise. He responds to my open-ended questions with one-word answers. Finally, I ask, “What time did you leave?” I’m curious to see how his story jibes with Dan’s.
“Around one-thirty. I went straight home.”
He’s more forthright than his boss—and his story accords with the security tapes. “Was anybody still there when you left?”
“No.” He reaches for his
phone.
I’m losing him. “Jason, did you guys have anybody watching Skipper?”
He pauses and takes off his headset. “What do you mean?”
“Did you hire anybody to follow him around to try to dig up some dirt? Maybe a PI?”
“Of course. It’s a standard part of politics these days. You try to find out anything you can.” He shrugs. “Usually the press does most of the legwork for you.”
This is true. “Did your PI find anything?”
He looks uneasy. “Yes.”
Uh-oh. “What?”
“He caught Skipper sleeping around with hookers.”
“Male or female?”
“Just female, as far as I know.”
We knew about the hookers. The fact that they were women is little consolation. I ask him why they didn’t make the information available to the public.
He gives me a knowing grin. “We didn’t need to. Your client was kind enough to get himself arrested for murder. That was more than enough to kill any chance he had in the election.”
True enough.
“Of course,” he adds, “if the charges are dropped, we’re prepared to make the information available to the public.”
And they say lawyers play dirty. “Did you report this information to the police?”
“Yes. We gave them some of the pictures.” He pauses and adds, “By the way, those two prostitutes who appeared on the Jade Warner show were telling the truth. We have the pictures to prove it.”
“Has your PI talked to the cops?”
“Yes.”
I’m troubled that Roosevelt didn’t mention this to me. “Mind telling me his name?”
“Sure. You may know him. He’s the little guy who works out of North Beach. His name is Nick Hanson.”
We’re dead.
“Nick the Dick?” Rosie shouts. “They hired Nick the Dick to watch Skipper?”
Rosie, Molinari and I are meeting in the martial arts studio. I have just reported on my conversations with Morris and Parnelli. Rosie sits in disbelief. Molinari is stone-cold silent. His neighbor, “Nick the Dick” Hanson, has been working as a private investigator in North Beach for more than sixty years. Now in his mid-eighties, he started out as the lead investigator for a flamboyant criminal defense attorney named Nunzio Delia Ventura, who was the law partner of Ed Molinari’s father. All of Nick’s children and a couple of his grandchildren work for him. He’s a natty, pint-sized man-about-town who writes mystery novels in his spare time and relishes publicity.
MD02 - Incriminating Evidence Page 21