by Steven Gore
Donnally was surprised. That wasn’t a name he expected to hear at San Quentin. And he wasn’t sure how a German fairy tale could be relevant to a Hispanic on death row.
“Or it was read to me,” Donnally said. “I know the story.”
“I didn’t get a look at it until I got in here.”
Dominguez gestured toward the other tables. And in that gesture, a cloudy thought that had been forming in Donnally’s mind crystallized into words. The prison had become Dominguez’s entire world and the condemned really were a village within it, and Dominguez had come to define himself by those he shared it with.
“A lot of us come in here reading at about a fifth-grade level. Simplified classics and kids’ stories are all there is for us to read. Short words and big letters.” Dominguez shook his head. “None of us understand much of what the lawyers were writing about us at the beginning, even during our trials. The lawyer says, we’re gonna file a Brady motion.” He smiled. “And we’re thinking, what’s a Brady motion?”
It was a motion that required the prosecutor to turn over all the evidence that might help the defense. And that included anything that indicated innocence or suggested mitigation or that might show a prosecution witness was lying or the detective had a history of dishonesty—and Donnally didn’t believe Dominguez had chosen Brady as an example by chance.
“It’s weird how all the court pleadings read. ‘Defendant claims’ or ‘Defendant asserts.’” Dominguez’s face flushed again and he thumped the table with his forefinger. “We don’t assert anything. It’s the lawyers doing all the asserting. And if it ain’t them, it’s some penalty phase psychologists talking a shrink language we don’t understand.”
“And you somehow learned more from a Grimm’s fairy tale than from what the lawyers and shrinks put together about you?”
“All the shrinks did was give the jury all kinds of reasons why I killed somebody I didn’t kill.”
“And Rumpelstiltskin?”
“Explained everything to me.”
Dominguez laid his forearms on the table, exposing his damaged hand as though he was now ready to reveal an inner truth about himself.
“It’s like this. Rumpelstiltskin was a little guy like me, and a criminal. He was an extortionist running a protection racket. He tells the girl, you give me your jewelry and your first baby and I’ll make sure you stay alive. Don’t give me what I want and I’ll let the king kill you.”
Dominguez raised his eyebrows, waiting for Donnally to indicate he was following the story so far.
Donnally nodded.
“Rumpelstiltskin spent his whole life hiding his identity, nobody knowing his name or, if they knew it, they didn’t know he was an extortionist.”
Donnally remembered a phrase from the story.
How good that neither man nor dame knows Rumpelstiltskin is my name.
And he was surprised by an image of Dominguez as a child that came into his mind.
Dominguez paused and his eyes went bright for a second, as though he’d just thought of an implication of the story he hadn’t considered before. Finally, he shrugged and said, “Maybe that’s why he became a criminal, because he didn’t fit in.” Dominguez blinked. “Anyway, it all came crashing down on Rumpelstiltskin when somebody matched him with his name.”
Donnally shook his head. “It was because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. It all came crashing down when someone heard him dancing around and bragging about what he did and saying his secret name out loud.”
“Except it wasn’t me. It was just my name.”
“It wasn’t just your name. You were IDed by guys who knew you.”
“They lied. I didn’t do it. Anyway, I don’t mean that. I mean name like in reputation, like when your name stands for something. And back then if you’re going to survive on the street, your name better mean something bad. That’s what all my fights were about.”
Donnally thought back on Dominguez’s letter. His claim that he was accused because he had a reputation as the kind of guy who’d commit this kind of crime. Now he was admitting it was a reputation he wanted, even made for himself as a kind of armor, and was claiming he then got imprisoned in it.
But Donnally didn’t have a clue how any of this answered the question in his mind. Why hadn’t Dominguez made the innocence claim before?
Then it started to come to him. It was the isolation of death row, the unreality of the place, and the disconnection from life outside, even from his own lawyers and the courts that would judge him.
“And when you got here you tried to go invisible again.”
“It was like nothing about my case had anything to do with me.” Dominguez tapped his chest with his withered hand. “With me.”
CHAPTER 18
Like I said after I read his letter,” Janie told Donnally as they walked on the beach that evening a few blocks from their house in San Francisco, “Dominguez is either innocent or a sociopath.” They stopped and gazed out at the rising moon streaking the water and at the star-speckled sky. “Or both.”
They remained silent for a few moments, then Janie looked over at Donnally.
“Sociopaths can be very convincing. They have a kind of superhuman verbal fluency. They’re masters of word play, not just because the truth means nothing to them, but because they see language as paint and brushes, as a way to make persuasive pictures.”
Walking from death row back along the sidewalk toward his car and thinking the same thoughts in different words, Donnally had been struck by nothing so much as by what Janie was calling Dominguez’s verbal fluency. Even though he’d slipped into gonnas and ain’ts as he spoke, Dominguez knew how to manipulate complicated concepts and deliver them to his listeners’ minds with emotional impact.
But none of that meant what Dominguez had said about himself and about his trial and the later appeals wasn’t true.
“And that fluency is often combined with a sense of entitlement, a belief that they aren’t bound by the same rules as everyone else. So they feel neither responsibility nor guilt.”
Donnally watched a seagull wheel above the water, wings flashing in the moonlight reflecting off the ruffled white surf.
“I’m not sure that’s it. He seemed more resigned than anything else, like he had spent his life living in the shadows.”
“Maybe, but pulling the trigger sure yanked him into the daylight. If his Rumpelstiltskin analogy is accurate and if my theory is correct, it’s not at all surprising to me that he would cocoon himself again right after the shooting and try to hide there.”
Donnally closed his eyes and interlaced his fingers on top of his head. “That means there’s no way he could ever admit to anything having to do with the murder, even if it costs him his life in the end.” He held up one hand to his left. “On one side, he couldn’t bring himself to claim it was second degree, testify to it, and maybe get a life sentence.” He held up the other hand to his right. “And the logic of the case was that a claim of innocence would guarantee his execution.”
“That’s the way it works out psychologically.”
Donnally lowered his arms and opened his eyes. He now recalled that he’d heard two different endings to the Rumpelstiltskin story and described them to Janie. In one, Rumpelstiltskin stamped his foot so hard after he was discovered and identified that he sank into the ground, consumed by the earth. In the other, Rumpelstiltskin plunged his foot so deep into the earth that his whole leg went in and in a rage he pulled at it so hard he tore himself in two.
“You want me to go see him,” Janie asked, “and try to find out which it is?”
Donnally thought for a moment. He worried that if it was the former, Dominguez would take her visit as an invasion.
“Not yet. Let me talk to some witnesses and try to find out more about what happened.”
Even as he spoke the words, Donnally wasn’t sure what he really meant. He was starting to think the pieces of the puzzle were somehow already before him, but that h
is mind wasn’t putting them together into a picture that made sense.
Maybe because Dominguez had just painted a new one.
A young man and woman passed by behind them. Their shoes made crushing and shooshing sounds in the sand as they walked. Then they giggled and ran off.
Donnally felt a rush of annoyance at the normalcy of the couple, and at himself. He was only entangled in the Dominguez case because he’d become reacquainted with Judge McMullin after a lawyer Donnally knew had been murdered in San Francisco. And he’d only become reacquainted with that lawyer because a dying friend had asked him to locate his sister who he’d abandoned at a Berkeley commune in the 1960s. None of it was anything he would’ve chosen to do. He turned to face them, nothing more.
As he stood there, shoes settling into the sand, feeling the weight of Dominguez’s life pressing down on him, Donnally felt an urgency, a need to break his connection to San Francisco. He felt like sweeping the unfinished puzzle into the trash, walking back to the house, getting into his truck, and heading north. The problem was that Janie was his anchor and pulling free from San Francisco meant breaking up with her, or asking her to come north. Maybe that’s what he should do, ask her to go with him. Get himself away from San Francisco and from a past that kept ensnaring him in other people’s problems and ensnaring her in his stumbling efforts to try to solve what seemed like the unsolvable.
Even more than that, he had his own father to deal with and he no longer wanted to bear the burden of McMullin’s doubts or of Dominguez’s confusions and evasions—
Evasions.
The word emerged from the whirlwind of his thoughts and hung there before him.
He looked down at Janie.
“Dominguez wanted to testify at his trial,” Donnally said. “His attorney talked him out of it. Doesn’t that suggest something? That he was willing to come out of hiding to proclaim his innocence, regardless of the risk, regardless of whether it torpedoed the penalty phase?”
Janie squinted up toward the stars for a moment, then looked over at Donnally. “I have two answers for you. First, in the end he didn’t testify. And second, guilty sociopaths often get on the stand and lie. They figure that they can convince anyone of anything at any time.”
“You mean his crying about his lawyer making him back down was just an act?”
“Why not? You told me his life was based on a fictional character anyway.”
Donnally shook his head. “Not based on a fictional character, explained by one. Those are two different things.”
CHAPTER 19
Get out of my shop.” Oscar Benaga gripped a torque wrench in both hands, braced across his body. “It’s ancient history.”
Donnally stood his ground in the doorway between the office and the garage of Benaga’s Elite Auto Repair in Hunters Point, a few blocks from where Benaga had claimed to have witnessed Israel Dominguez murder Edgar Rojo Sr.
Even though there were three lifts with cars raised on them, Benaga was the only mechanic working and no one had been in the office Donnally had passed through.
“Only as ancient as Israel Dominguez getting the needle in a week.”
Benaga, now twenty years older than the twenty-four-year-old who testified in Dominguez’s trial, secured the wrench under his armpit and wiped his hands on a red cloth, seeming to spread the axle grease around his palms and fingers rather than removing it. His brown pants and shirt were soiled with oil and transmission fluid.
Of the two witnesses who’d identified Dominguez as the killer, only Benaga was still alive.
“That’s his problem, not mine.”
Donnally spotted the number 14 tattooed on Benaga’s thick forearm, representing the fourteenth letter of the alphabet. N for Norteño.
It made sense that Benaga was using a red cloth and wearing brown clothing, rather than the standard auto shop blue. Blue was the gang color of the Sureños and the Mexican Mafia, enemies of the Norteños.
When Benaga turned to toss the rag into a barrel, Donnally caught a glimpse of the letters of N-O-R-T-E tattooed on the back of his bald scalp.
“You have those tattoos when you testified against Dominguez?”
Benaga’s eyes hardened into a stare. “Look, man, I didn’t testify against nobody. I just said what I saw.” He jabbed a finger at Donnally. “And don’t call him Dominguez, like he was a human being. His gang name was El Búho, the Owl, always coming out of the shadows, backstabbing, never fighting straight up, man to man, in the light of day.”
Rumpelstiltskin.
Then it hit Donnally that it was the El Búho nickname, what Dominguez referred to as his “name,” his reputation on the street, that had lent credibility to Benaga’s identification of him as the killer.
“That’s not the question. The question is whether you had those gang tattoos when you testified.”
Benaga shrugged. “Lots of people got tattoos. Don’t mean nothing.”
Donnally spotted another tattoo on his neck with the words El Lobo written in fine script under it.
The Wolf.
Another gang-named, maybe even self-described, predator whose ends were just as deadly and which were always explained as nature’s means to nature’s ends.
Edgar Jr.’s words came back to him. It was a war, as though that was a natural state of the world, and because of that fact, anything, everything, was justified.
The tattoos and membership may not have gone directly to the issue of guilt, Donnally thought, but it certainly went to Benaga’s bias as a witness and should have been brought out at trial by his attorney.
Benaga’s testimony had been that he knew Israel Dominguez only as a kid in the neighborhood, rather than as an opposing gang member, and that even though the streetlights had been shot out, the moon was high, and the muzzle flash lit up Dominguez’s face.
“Did Dominguez’s attorney ask you if you were a member of the Norteños?”
“Of course he did.”
“And you said?”
“No, but that I’d do what I needed to do to live in the neighborhood. If that meant joining a side, I’d join a side. I didn’t officially hook up with them until I went to the joint a couple of months later. So I wasn’t lying.”
The rumble of a car slowing and then idling drew their attention toward the street. It vibrated with the thumping of its subwoofers, thundering behind the music of a group Donnally recognized, Intocables, Untouchables. The red-bandannaed passenger riding low in the restored 1980s Caprice Classic rotated his head toward Benaga, then back toward Donnally. Benaga waved them on and the driver gunned the engine and the car lurched and sped off.
“Did you know Edgar Senior?” Donnally asked.
Benaga blocked the question by raising his hands in front of his chest. “I’m done answering questions, man. You want to know something, read the transcript. It’s all in there. I’ve had lawyers showing up at my door for twenty years asking me the same questions, and the answers never change. Never will.”
They stared at each other for a few moments, then Donnally said, “One more. You can decide whether to answer it or not.”
Benaga didn’t respond.
“Do you believe that Dominguez intended to kill Senior?”
Benaga smirked. “Nobody would try to just scare a guy like Edgar, especially shoot into his house. He wasn’t scareable and he’d do anything to protect his family, especially his boy. Anybody do something like that to Edgar and miss, he might as well have put the gun to his own head.”
CHAPTER 20
Donnally’s cell phone rang just before he turned into his driveway and just after he spotted Junior’s car parked down the block, mostly hidden behind a panel van. It was forty minutes after he’d left Benaga’s. He didn’t have time to say hello before the caller yelled, “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to see Benaga?”
As Donnally expected, it was Junior.
“And why didn’t you tell me you had my house staked out?”
Junior took in a breath, surprised to have been spotted, then he said, “I’m not staking out your house. I just wanted to see you in person.”
The phone disconnected.
Donnally walked to the sidewalk at the opening to his driveway wondering why Junior had such an indirect way of approaching him, first following him and now waiting for him down the block and calling instead of just parking in front of the house. It was something he was certain Janie would understand, but all that came to him was an image of Junior as kind of a lost, nowhere man.
An older immigrant Chinese woman weeding in her yard across the street held her trowel like a knife as she watched Junior roll up and get out of his car. Donnally raised a hand toward her, half a wave, half a signal that everything was okay.
Junior stopped just a foot and a half away. “Don’t you know who he is.”
He’d said the words not as a question, but as an accusation.
“He was a witness to your father’s murder. I don’t care what else he is besides that. I’m not writing his biography, or his obituary.”
“Fuck you.”
“Then who is he?”
“He’s the guy who keeps the Muslim Nation from driving my grandmother out of her place and keeps all the other Mexicans safe in the neighborhood.”
“That’s a job for the police.”
“Fuck the police.” Junior pointed at Donnally as though he was still one of them. “Cops don’t do shit. One of them Muslims beats up a Mexican and runs into the mosque, nothing happens. Cops just knock on the door and beg Aasim to send the guy out, but he never does and they never go in after him. They’re afraid. They just walk away. That’s why the neighborhood needs Benaga.”
Donnally had read that the police had a hands-off policy toward the Black Muslim sect in Oakland, but he hadn’t realized San Francisco had also adopted it.
“Aasim calls his group a nation,” Junior said, “and the police treat him that way. Ask anybody. The politicians are afraid of him, too.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with me talking to Benaga.”