Act of Deceit

by Steven Gore

  “Did Anna even know what was going on up here?”

  “Sure. She didn’t like her mother doing it, but couldn’t stop her. Anna grasped what Trudy had refused to. Peace and love were dead and marijuana had become a business no different than heroin and speed. By the early 1980s even the Hare Krishnas were into the drug trade and had left a trail of bodies from Twin Peaks in San Francisco to the New York harbor.”

  “Somehow I don’t see Trudy being capable of marijuana growing. It’s tough work. Hiking the hills, planting and harvesting.”

  “She wasn’t always that way.”

  “You mean she didn’t have these symptoms when Anna was growing up?”

  “They kicked in later.”

  “When?”

  Sonny laughed and accelerated down the dirt road. “I’ll let you answer that one yourself.”

  It wasn’t until Donnally once again heard the popping gravel that he got it: Trudy hadn’t gone into hiding after the police knocked on her door to question her about Tsukamata, but only after her daughter’s murder in 1986. And her guilt revealed itself, to everyone but herself, in the form of her psychosomatic symptoms.

  “You mean it really was R2T2 who killed Anna, trying to find out where the marijuana operation was?” Donnally asked. “And Trudy had once protected the guys who later came back and killed her daughter?”

  The question died in the rumbling of tires and grinding of gears, and Sonny answered with his silence.

  Donnally was glad that Mauricio’s cowardice had kept him from looking for Anna himself. It had saved him from the truth, and from the tragedy that he’d delivered his sister up to an equally cowardly woman that Anna had sacrificed her life to protect.

  He remembered a line spoken by a janitor, leaning on his broom in an army hospital hallway during one of his father’s movies: A hypochondriac is just a sociopath without courage.

  That was Trudy Keenan.

  And in that moment, Donnally felt sadder for Anna than at any time since he first read her name in Mauricio’s letter.

  Chapter 35

  “Where is she, Sonny boy?”

  A grim voice shook Donnally awake. He looked out from the bed of the Willys and recognized the side of the apartment building bordering Sonny’s driveway. He propped himself on an elbow and looked over the driver’s seat toward the front of the wagon. Two men, one black, one white, both in their mid-fifties, stood facing Sonny, who was leaning back against the hood.

  “We’re tired of screwing around, asshole. You’ve been fucking with us for over thirty years. It stops tonight. Where’s Trudy?”

  Sonny held his hands out and looked at the black one.

  “Come on, Jenkins, I don’t know where she is.”

  Donnally glanced toward the street to see if there was backup. A vacant Ford Expedition blocked the driveway, probably the one that got cut off in San Rafael. He heard a thud and a grunt, then looked back to see Sonny doubled over.

  Jenkins pointed a leather-gloved finger at Sonny’s head. His other hand was still formed into a fist.

  “I’ll tell you all I know man,” Sonny said. “Just go through my lawyer.”

  Jenkins punched down toward Sonny’s face. His head rocked to the left.

  “Fuck your lawyer.”

  Donnally eased toward the rear door.

  The white one stepped between his partner and Sonny.

  “Take it easy. He won’t be able to talk through a broken jaw.” He then set his hand on Sonny’s shoulder. “You better come up with something, Sonny. I’m not sure how long I can control him.”

  “Give me the address,” Jenkins said.

  Donnally turned the handle to flip up the top half of the gate and gripped the lower latch. He yanked it hard and in one motion kicked the bottom gate and slid out. By the time he’d pulled his gun and crouched down at the back of the truck, there were two Glocks pointed at him.

  “I’m a cop,” Donnally called out. “Back off.”

  “You used to be a cop, asshole,” Jenkins yelled back. “Why don’t you go back up to Mount Shasta and flip your flapjacks?”

  “Not a chance.”

  A light came on in a second-story apartment window. Donnally glanced up as the curtain was pulled aside.

  The window slid open and a female voice called out, “Everything okay?”

  Donnally lowered his gun and slipped it into his back pocket. Jenkins and his partner holstered theirs.

  “Yeah, fine,” Donnally said to her, “Sonny just got drunk and passed out. We’ll take care of him.”

  “Why don’t you just cut a deal and get this over with?” Donnally asked.

  Sonny pressed the ice pack against the side of his head as they sat at the kitchen table, then quoted back Donnally’s earlier line about Mauricio: “There’d be too much to explain.” He took in a long breath, then exhaled. “Look, man. Anna was everybody’s baby, not just Trudy’s. She was a little goddess that appeared out of nothingness. Everybody showed up at the house after she was murdered. I mean everybody. Crooked and straight. People who were still in the movement and some who’d long left it behind. Even that asshole Sherwyn showed up, but we chased him away.

  “We were going to handle it ourselves. It was insane, man, a crazy fantasy. People who’d never touched a gun were buying them on the street, ready to posse up like it was some Western movie.”

  Sonny paused, his eyes went vacant for a moment, then he continued.

  “Some already had them. The guys that had gone into the drug trade. They’re the ones who figured out that Artie was in Berkeley the day Anna was killed, that he needed money and was trying to find Trudy. He was broke and homeless. Everybody knew it.”

  “And he figured Trudy was making a lot of money from marijuana?”

  “That wasn’t it. They’d loaned Trudy most of the cash from the armored car robbery to buy her house. If they hadn’t done something like that, it would’ve rotted where it was buried. Artie came back to collect what she owed him, and he was desperate, desperate enough to show his face in Berkeley.”

  “What happened?”

  “You can guess.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “You want the dollar back and I’ll go find out myself?”

  Sonny smiled, then winced and touched his busted lip.

  “All I can say is that some people … some people … tracked Artie down. He blamed Robert and led the folks to where he was hiding. Things went sideways and it got kind of bloody.”

  “Does Trudy know what happened to Artie and Robert?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “She can’t keep her mouth shut. She admitted buying the guns they had used to kill Tsukamata the first time the cops leaned on her. The last thing anybody wants is for the police to start testing DNA from every unsolved double murder in those years to see if it matches any ex-members of New Sky.”

  “So all this time she’s been hiding from dead people and she doesn’t know it?”

  Sonny shrugged. “I guess you can say that.”

  Donnally walked over to the kitchen counter and refilled their coffee cups. He turned back toward Sonny.

  “And for over thirty years you’ve been fending off the cops for her?”

  “It wasn’t just for her.” Sonny touched his swollen eyes. “I had no choice.” He tried to smile. “But like the paranoid, at least I was never lonely.”

  Donnally returned to the table and set down the cups. He remained standing, arms folded over his chest.

  “And that means that you folks were willing to let Charles Brown take the fall for a murder he didn’t do?”

  “We knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

  “You knew that because …” The last piece fell into place in Donnally’s mind before Sonny could answer. “Because of Sherwyn. It was Sherwyn’s job to make sure Rover never went to trial.”

  Sonny nodded. “He was the only one in a position to d
o it and we had leverage to make sure he did. And things went along fine for decades. Until you showed up. Trudy collapsed into a pile of symptoms because she was terrified, afraid that Rover, as nuts as he is, would go to prison for the rest of his life for a murder that R2T2 did. Everybody knows what happens to mentally ill people in the joint. But then he pled no contest and she thought it was finally over.”

  “Then why’d she see me? And why was she so sick-looking if she really believed it was over with? I would’ve thought she’d be dancing among the pine trees.”

  “I guess she needed to feel like the book is finally closed on the past.”

  “But it isn’t.”

  Sonny shook his head. “No matter how hard she tries to slam it shut.”

  Chapter 36

  “You mean it was true?” Janie said, as she moved a stack of books from a shelf to a box in her bedroom.

  It was 8 A.M., an hour after Donnally had left Sonny’s house.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Donnally said, standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry about what I said. You don’t need to move out.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. You did me a favor by knocking me out of orbit. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”

  Donnally shrugged. “Have it your way.”

  “You may want to try it, too.”

  “So this is for my benefit?”

  She stared at him for a moment. “Your orbit was never around me.”

  But it was once.

  He knew it and she knew it, from the moment he’d entered her office, sent by SFPD under the assumption that he needed to get his head straight after being shot and killing the two gangsters. He had taken a look at her, underwent what felt like the Big Bang, then asked, “Can a patient date his shrink?” She smiled and told him no. He then turned around and walked back out the door. Thirty seconds later, her phone rang, she said yes to a new question, and he hadn’t asked another woman out since.

  Standing there looking at her now, he realized the problem was not that there wasn’t an orbit, but that there was.

  For too many years, they had been like bodies in motion, pulled together by attraction and pulled apart by inertia, and it was momentary acceleration in one direction or another that had replaced the exhilaration that had swept them along for the first few years. In the end, there hadn’t even been enough passion to carry them through with their plan for her to join him in Mount Shasta and work in the nearby VA clinic.

  Donnally walked out of her room, already imagining the house empty. Then he noticed a worn spot on the hallway carpet and scuff marks on the wall and a chip out of the paint on the corner near the top of the stairs.

  All of that had been invisible just two minutes earlier.

  He couldn’t decide whether he was already starting to think like a landlord or it was just guilt about how he had let the house deteriorate.

  By the time he arrived at the bottom of the stairs he’d almost worked himself around to the sort of place he always did: It didn’t make any difference which it was or how he felt about it.

  Things just are the way they are.

  He’d fix the place up, rent it out, and head back up to Mount Shasta.

  Except there was a new void in his life. An emptiness. And not just because Janie was leaving, but because the trail from Mauricio’s deathbed to Anna’s killers had ended almost a generation earlier, in a history he wasn’t part of and that didn’t feel real to him.

  Donnally walked into Janie’s office and used her computer to run a news archive search for articles about Artie and Robert Trueblood, but he couldn’t find any murder victims with those names. He discovered that the true names of the suspects in the New Jersey armored car case were Willie Carley and Julius Moran, but those didn’t show up in local homicide reports either. Finally he searched for double murders during the weeks after Anna was killed, and there it was.

  BODIES FOUND IN HUNTERS POINT

  Thomas Peele

  Chronicle Staff Writer

  Two unidentified men were found bludgeoned to death in an abandoned Hunters Point warehouse on Sunday night. The bodies were discovered by a homeless man looking for a place to sleep. Police reported that it appears the men were beaten to death after being tortured, and they suspect the homicides were the result of a drug deal gone bad.

  Sergeant Pete Peterson said the hands of both men had been cut off, most likely in an attempt to prevent their identification by fingerprints.

  “What’s this?” Janie said, her soft footsteps coming to a stop on the carpet behind him.

  “I’m just tying up some loose ends that Sonny left me with. It doesn’t all seem quite real yet.”

  “That’s the problem with history.”

  “The tragedy is real,” Donnally said, staring at the monitor, “it’s just not anchored to anything.” He thought for a moment. “If Mauricio was still alive, it would be different.”

  “I know,” she said, squeezing his shoulder, “and he would’ve been proud of her. Charles told me that Anna helped out lots of people. Food, medicine, advice. Some would come right to her door once a week, like clockwork. She’d give them boxed lunches or, for the ones she trusted, money to buy things for themselves.”

  He looked up at her. “Like clockwork?”

  Janie nodded. “My phrase, but his idea.”

  “Did he say who?”

  She shook her head, then sat down next to the desk.

  “He told me she even borrowed money to pay for all the charity.” She smiled. “He said she took out a ‘mortuary.’ It took most of the session to figure out why he picked that word. It turned out that the bank she went to was next to a funeral home and what she got was a mortgage.”

  Donnally raised his eyebrows as he looked over at Janie. It sounded less like charity and more like guilt.

  “It seemed a little excessive to me, too,” Janie said.

  “When are you seeing him again?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Ten o’clock.”

  By noon Donnally was sitting before a different monitor, this one at the Alameda County Recorder’s Office, and paging through scans of Anna Keenan’s loan records. He became more and more puzzled as he looked through the documents. Between the day her mother signed the house over to her in 1980 and when she was murdered, she’d refinanced three times.

  He wondered whether she’d discovered the violent origin of the money that went into buying the house and had decided to turn evil to good by giving it away.

  Then why not just sell the house and give the money back to the armored car company?

  The answer again arrived in Sonny’s words. “There’d be too much to explain.”

  And with her remaining in the house, Artie and Robert would believe their money was still invested there.

  Is that why they killed her? Because they found out she’d given their money away? And because they wanted to get past her to Trudy so she could make good their loss?

  Donnally leaned back in his chair and stared up at the tiled ceiling.

  But then strangling her? Kneeling over her on her bed and strangling her?

  It didn’t make sense. Not with his years investigating homicides. A knife at her throat, yes. A gun at her temple, yes. But strangling? Not very likely. And by hand? Even less likely. Strangling hands were a weapon of passion, not calculation.

  Donnally found that his eyes had lost focus. He blinked, then logged off the computer.

  It just didn’t make sense.

  Donnally’s cell phone rang as he drove across the Bay Bridge. It was Janie.

  “Charles said that one of the two regulars she gave money to was named Art or Artie. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Chapter 37

  Donnally flashed his badge for just the second time in his ten years of retirement. He couldn’t tell whether he felt like a priest of lapsed faith giving Communion or an actor playing a part that just happened to reveal his true self.

  The cel
lular company’s security chief in San Francisco bought Donnally’s lie that he was investigating the theft of his cell phone. His raised eyebrow and slanted grin revealed his conclusion-by-fantasy that the thief was a woman who’d run out on Donnally.

  The chief handed him off to a clerk who walked him to a windowless office and printed out a list of the cell sites that had picked up Donnally’s calls as Sonny drove him from Trudy’s cabin back to Berkeley. Donnally got the clerk talking about everything but the report he was printing out so he wouldn’t notice that all the calls from the cell phone were to the same landline and only a second in length, and wouldn’t then ask whose number it was.

  The electronic trail dissolved into the coastal range northeast of Fort Bragg. The clerk displayed a topographical map on the screen that showed a road heading north from the highway, and pointed out that for the first half hour, the signal had alternated back and forth on the border between two cell sites. The sites covered a little more than five square miles. Donnally was grateful that Trudy had chosen a hideaway in the hill country. Unlike the flatlands where cell sites can be twenty miles apart, antennas in the mountains are stationed close together so reception isn’t lost in the canyons.

  Two hours of inspecting satellite maps on Janie’s computer narrowed his search down to three probable locations, each composed of a cabin and two outbuildings laid out in the form of a triangle within a clearing. He plotted a course from one to the other, starting at Fort Bragg along the coast and ending at the east end of the highway bisecting Mendocino County.

  Each route would take him far to the north of his targets, then down fire roads to within hiking distance, and each would require camping overnight in the forest.

  None of the routes was one he would’ve taken during pot-growing season, when the hills were patrolled by armed guards, patches were booby-trapped, and the earth was damp enough for the anonymous burial of an intruder.