by Steven Gore
Rosa shrugged. “All my family is here and this kind of job doesn’t pay enough to live on my own except in neighborhoods like this one.” She fell silent, then said, “I don’t have it in me anymore to start over on my own.”
CHAPTER 30
Donnally watched the freeway off-ramps sweep by as he drove north toward San Francisco. The chain restaurants and service stations glowed like lit oases in the slim sliding fog, and, in the distance, the faint lights of farmhouses and grain elevators blinked in the dark.
He let his mind try to orient itself, trying to merge what he had learned before he met Rosa with what she had told him. He had the sense Rosa and Chen had been talking about the same thing, one knowingly and one not.
Donnally called Judge McMullin and asked him whether there was any mention in pretrial discovery motions or during the trial of an internal Norteño power struggle that might have either motivated the Rojo murder or whose outcome had been affected by it.
“I don’t recall any internal conflicts being part of the D.A.’s theory,” McMullin said. “It’s nothing any of the percipient witnesses were asked about or even could’ve been asked about. It would’ve been speculation on their part.”
“Unless they were Norteños themselves and were involved in the struggle.”
“I don’t remember anything about that coming up in trial. And there’s something else.” Donnally heard paper shuffling. “I read over my notes and skimmed through the court file after you left. Paul Ordloff filed a pretrial motion to keep the D.A. from presenting evidence of gang membership and of Rojo’s drug involvement in the trial. I thought at the time it was mostly a stunt, trying to set up an issue on appeal.”
Donnally wasn’t sure what kind of issue that would be, but guessed how it might work as a trial tactic.
“You mean Ordloff thought information about Rojo being a gangster would somehow prejudice the jury against Dominguez?”
“The logic was that the worse Rojo appeared to the jurors, the more likely he’d be the victim of a contract killing, rather than just the inadvertent victim of a stunt.”
Donnally thought back on Benaga saying, Anybody do something like that to Edgar and miss, he might as well have put a gun to his own head.
“In any case,” the judge said, “the jury had the right to know the context and meaning of the tattoos and the cocaine packaging material found in Rojo’s house. And even though motive isn’t an element of the crime, the jury needs to be able to draw some conclusions about it to determine intent.”
“Who’d the D.A. use to explain the drug and gang stuff to them?”
“Jimmie Chen, since he was the department’s gang expert and was in on the search of Rojo’s house. He even came to me with a warrant so they could broaden the search from the immediate area around where Rojo’s body was found to the rest of the house and to a storage area in the carport.”
“Looking for . . .”
“He said drugs. He didn’t want to be embarrassed later if they’d cleared the scene leaving kilos of cocaine behind.”
But Donnally suspected that Chen, and probably Grassner with him, was looking for a lot more than just drugs. He imagined the detectives picking through the apartment, gathering intelligence not only about the cocaine distribution network, but also about the Norteño organization, how they communicated, what other body shops they were using to receive the drugs, who were the other captains in the Bay Area, like Rojo Sr. had been, and who might take over from him, and which black and Asian street drug dealing organizations they distributed to.
“I saw in my notes I suspected at the time that for Chen it was just a fishing expedition, but a murder is a murder and there was reason to believe that evidence relating to it could be found elsewhere in the house.”
Donnally recalled the initials “JC,” which he now understood meant Jimmie Chen, among the judge’s scribblings in connection with a warrant and Ordloff’s motion to exclude the evidence.
“You remember from the other day what was on the search warrant inventory of what they took out of the apartment?”
“No. I only skimmed it, but it’s in the file. I still have it in my chambers.” McMullin blew out a breath, almost a sigh. “In the end, and regardless of what was gathered up from the apartment, the gang identifications alone were probably enough to satisfy the jury that it was a first-degree, premeditated murder, even without the drug evidence.”
Neither had to say why. With movies like Goodfellas in the theaters back then, and a history of Godfather films preceding it, none of the jurors would be able to imagine one gangster shooting at another without an intent to kill.
“Did you allow testimony about the cartel connection or only about the drugs?”
“I read over my ruling. It was that the D.A. could use the drug and gang evidence and expert testimony about it since all that showed up in the crime scene photos. But nothing about Mexico and cartels. That would’ve been too prejudicial.”
The highway narrowed going through Gilroy. Donnally could smell the garlic in the air and see bits of light against the invisible foothills.
“And that must have included packaging material.”
“A lot. And all labeled with a scorpion with a black body and red feet.”
Donnally recognized the brand as a Cali Cartel product from those days.
“You think the jurors figured out the D.A.’s theory that the Sureños were trying to take over the distribution from the Norteños even though it wasn’t directly presented to them?”
McMullin didn’t answer right away. “That’s an interesting question,” he finally said. “Only if they’d read about the case in the newspaper or . . . Was there an Internet back then?”
“Barely.”
“Then it would’ve had to mostly be in the newspapers. Reporters made a big deal about the Colombia and Mexico connection and used anonymous sources to speculate about it.”
“You mean like Grassner and Chen.”
Donnally had almost said, Chuck and Chink.
“I assume so. They always took it on as a personal mission to taint the jury pool in the cases they had an interest in.”
CHAPTER 31
Chico Gallegos’s mother was a liar.
All it took for Donnally to discover it was a skimming of her cell-phone and credit card records now spread out on his kitchen table.
Why Rosa was lying, he wasn’t certain. That she was, he was positive.
She wasn’t anyone’s victim or trapped in her life or job or neighborhood.
Donnally didn’t know what Rosa’s hourly wage was, but the amount she spent during this month had to at least be double. Combine this with what she was probably paying in cash and by check, then she was spending at least three times what she was earning.
The credit card bills showed purchases at grocery, discount, and auto supply stores, the charges for the previous month paid in full and on time. There were no interest or late fees and the payments were automatic, transferred from a linked account at the bank.
Rosa had the means to get out at any time, unless she was part of what she had called “the cause” or was still getting payments from the organization. If so, Donnally suspected it was less because Chico had been important to the Norteños and more because his father was a member with a key job in the Pelican Bay kitchen and her brother-in-law served on La Mesa.
The cell-phone records for her number in the 831 area code showed call after call from and to a 408 number somewhere in or around San Jose. All brief. Most under a minute. Just long enough to issue or take an order.
Looking at the records spread out before him like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, Donnally wished he’d waited until the next morning to look at them and instead had gone up to bed where Janie lay sleeping.
But now that he’d begun matching pieces together and a partial image was forming before him, he couldn’t prevent his hands from reaching for ways to make that image whole.
Donnally carried the cr
edit card statement into the first-floor bedroom, opened the calendar on the computer, and located the month it covered. The purchases were made on the second and fourth Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Donnally clicked the calendar forward, looking for where the pattern would show itself this month.
If Rosa kept to her schedule, she’d be in San Jose in two days.
He then checked the addresses of the stores where she’d used the card. They were all within a block of each other in the Little Saigon area. It was the home of the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam, about a hundred thousand people, at least one of whom drew Rosa to San Jose every two weeks.
A search of the telephone number Rosa called turned up nothing except that the prefix indicated it was a cell phone.
Donnally’s own cell phone rang. He glanced at his watch. It was 1:00 A.M. Then at the lit screen. It was his mother.
“Is everything all right?” Donnally asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Then why . . .”
“Your father was just up here.”
By here she meant her second-story bedroom where her advanced Parkinson’s had now trapped her.
“He just stood in the doorway, not realizing I was still awake. When I pulled myself up a little, he came over and sat down on the edge of the bed. He was all fidgety and talking about how things would change tomorrow and that he was going to be okay and that everything would go back to the way it used to be.”
Donnally could think of lots of what might be considered used-to-be’s in his father’s life, but he could think of none that were worth returning to and most still needed to be overcome.
“I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but he mumbled something and laughed and said, ‘The Immortal Don Harlan returns.’”
Donnally flashed on Buddy Cochran’s grin fading as he’d said the phrase in Canter’s Deli and talked about his father’s sudden confrontation with his own mortality and his suspicions about his father’s mental state, not sure whether it was psychological depression or organic Alzheimer’s.
“You want me to come down?”
“Please. It was a little scary.”
CHAPTER 32
Twelve cars were parked in the circular driveway and lined up in front of the garage when Donnally pulled up to his parents’ house a little after noon. It looked to him like the parking lot of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Convertible coupes for those of the Hollywood elite wanting to be seen in body and fashion and sedans with dark, tinted windows for those wanting to be seen only in the imagination.
Donnally wondered whether his father’s bizarre behavior the night before had just been a stunt, a way of tricking his mother into calling and asking him to come down when he knew that the presence of others would prevent the confrontation both he and his father knew was coming.
His father was already walking down the front steps toward him when Donnally got out of his rental car. He held his palm up as he approached, fixing Donnally in place.
Donnally pointed at the other cars. “Nice stunt.”
His father shook his head as he came to a stop. “Mother didn’t know I had planned a showing of my new film.”
“To who?”
“The actors who were in it. They have a right to know how I wove their work together before it goes into theaters.”
Donnally remembered Buddy telling him, None of us knows what the real truth of the story is. It was like getting to the end of a mystery novel and discovering that somebody ripped out the last chapter.
“They’ll be asked lots and lots of questions from the press about the story and their roles. I thought I’d give them something to work with.”
“Very thoughtful, but off the point.” Donnally pointed at his father. “And there’s no soft way to say it. I’m not here to watch a movie. I’m here to find out whether you’ll agree to get tested. I need to know whether you can still take care of Mom.”
Donnally was at least as worried that his father would soon not be able to care for himself, but he feared putting it that way would be seen by his father as an attack on him, his personal dignity. He had been, and wanted again to be, The Immortal Don Harlan.
“I’ve been tested.”
Instead of surprise, Donnally felt an upsurge of anger. “You what?”
“Just what I said. Every which way. Psych. Neurological. Blood. MRI. PET. At the University of Kentucky.” He gestured toward the city below. “I couldn’t take a chance anyone would recognize me so I went a long way away and used a fake name.” His father grinned. “You can do that when you pay cash.”
“That means you suspected you had it.”
“Not at all. I just wanted to understand the Alzheimer’s experience, from all perspectives. I even went to some family support group sessions back there.”
“Then why’d you put Mother through this? Or did the counselor tell you it was right and fair to deceive the woman who loves you?”
His father winced as if Donnally had jabbed him. He lowered his gaze, shaking his head.
“Tell me, why’d you put her through it?”
“Because I’m a self-absorbed fool.” He looked up again. “I didn’t realize what I was really doing. I was . . .”
“You were what?” The words came out of Donnally’s mouth like an uppercut.
His father drew back.
“I . . . I was too focused on today, everything coming together. This was supposed to be the last day of the act, or at least the day when I clued everyone in on it.”
His father glanced up toward his mother’s second-story window.
“In order to make the movie I wanted to make, I needed to live the life, like a method actor . . . but I wasn’t thinking.”
“It was worse than just not thinking. It was idiotic and mean.”
“I’ve been so protective of your mother, isolating her from the chaos of my work, that I didn’t realize how close she was watching, how worried she’d become until she told me she called you last night to come down.”
Talking with his father was for Donnally like talking with a six-year-old.
“Have you explained everything to her now?”
Even as he spoke the words, Donnally understood that his father couldn’t have explained everything. How could anyone explain what he had done? The most he could do was to try to explain it away.
His father nodded, then glanced toward the cars. “Everybody’s waiting. Let’s finish talking about this later.”
Donnally wanted to finish it now, then go up and see his mother, and head back to the Burbank airport. Instead, he succumbed and followed his father inside, feeling like he was trailing behind a mental patient into a facility’s arts and crafts room.
Buddy Cochran and about a dozen other actors were seated in the basement screening room. They all glanced back as one and nodded or waved as Donnally and his father entered. Buddy fixed his eyes on Donnally, then looked heavenward as if to say, God help us.
The only person Donnally didn’t recognize was a thirty-year-old man in rimless glasses leaning against the back wall. Donnally wondered whether he might be the assistant director Buddy had told him about.
As Donnally’s father sat down at the control console, he pointed at the chair next to him. Donnally settled into it somehow feeling like a prisoner in an interrogation room, first to be confronted with evidence, then leaned on to confess to something, as if it was him on trial, not his father.
The lights dimmed and the screen brightened.
Buddy, made up to look like President Ronald Reagan, appeared sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office, staring into the camera and saying:
A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.
“Everybody thought Reagan was lying,” Donnally’s father whispered to him. “But he wasn’t. It was just undiagnosed Alzheimer’s.”
For the following hour and a half, Donnally watched Buddy, playing Ronald Reagan, struggling during the last years of his presidency trying to figure out what had happened during Iran-Contra and what had been his role.
One after another of his senior staff were brought into the Oval Office—
Donnally remembered Dr. Pose telling him that she’d seen four different actors on the DVD facing the camera, then turning and entering a room—
George Schultz, Casper Weinberger, Don Regan, and Oliver North each telling the president their version of the events that involved selling arms to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, in an effort to free the U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon, and using the profits to fund the terrorist Contras in El Salvador.
There were even scenes relating back to discussions in which the president had been a participant, but that he couldn’t later recall.
His father used long flashbacks to events that took place in the Pentagon and in Tehran and in Central American jungles to display the stories on the screen.
Donnally thought back on Buddy telling him about his father trying to tell the story from four points of view, as was done in Rashomon and The Outrage, but using different actors for each version, each actor in the scene, like each government official, convinced his version was the true one.
In between were scenes of Reagan alone, at his desk, in his bed, staring out his window, struggling to remember what he had just been told by the four men, trying to coordinate and synchronize the accounts in his own mind, but each time his thoughts floating away, drifting back to scenes in the movies in which he’d appeared, those fictions seeming more real to him than the real war in Central America and the missiles in the Middle East poised to fire.
Midway through the film there were a series of jump cuts from one Reagan speech after another in which he talked about filming Holocaust victims in a concentration camp just after it was liberated, about a Medal of Honor winner going down with his plane during World War II, about a Christmas truce between American and Nazi troops, and finally a scene displaying his visit to a German SS cemetery in the 1980s where he’d said that no one was still alive in Germany who remembered the war.