MD05 - The Confession

by Sheldon Siegel

  Quinn finally regains a small portion of his composure and turns the full impact of his venom in my direction. “What do you plan to do?” he asks.

  “Keep our mouths shut until the DNA results come back.”

  “That isn’t a legal strategy.”

  “It is until we know more facts.”

  “What if he isn’t the father?”

  “It may help us deflect the blame toward another suspect,” I say.

  “And if he is?”

  “It won’t.”

  He’s unmoved by my glib response. “I don’t like it,” he says. “We’re withholding material evidence.”

  He’s never tried a criminal case and I remind him we aren’t obligated to reveal anything that may tend to incriminate our client.

  “We’re lying,” he says.

  “No, we aren’t. Besides, that’s a moral issue, not a legal one.”

  “Some of us think they’re the same.”

  “I don’t.” Not anymore.

  “You sucker-punched me,” he says.

  “We told you the truth. The only people who know about Ramon’s visit to the sperm bank are the employees there and everyone in this room. I can assure you that Ramon and I aren’t about to say anything. If this information leaks out, I’ll take you before the State Bar for revealing privileged information.” I look at Shanahan and say, “The same applies to you.”

  “Are you threatening us?” Shanahan asks.

  Yes. “I’m reminding you of your legal obligations under the California Rules of Professional Conduct.” I turn back to Quinn and say, “The same goes for you.”

  He’s in no mood for a lecture from me, but he knows his cards aren’t good. He opens and closes his right fist and pushes himself up from his chair. “You’ve left us no choice,” he says. “For the moment, our official line is that we have no comment with respect to the autopsy report, except to say that we are deeply saddened by the news that Ms. Concepcion may have been pregnant.” He points a finger at Ramon and says, “You will have no contact with the outside world until your preliminary hearing begins on Monday.”

  It’s heavy-handed, but it’s also the right legal call. Good lawyers don’t let their clients talk to anybody before trial.

  Ramon’s voice regains its edge. “I didn’t kill her, Francis,” he says.

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “I don’t like your tone.”

  “I don’t like yours, either.”

  Quinn turns to me and says, “You haven’t heard the last of this.”

  I’m sure this is true. “It’s the correct decision, Francis.”

  “It’s morally reprehensible and you’ve put me into an impossible position.”

  This is one of the few times when I’m actually inclined to agree with him. “This isn’t about you, Francis,” I say.

  It isn’t the sentiment he wanted to hear. “I hope to God you know what you’re doing,” he says. “I’ve worked long and hard to protect the interests of the archdiocese. If this case comes back to bite the archbishop–or me–I promise I will bring both of you down with me.”

  I try to parry by diverting his attention to another subject. “Francis,” I say, “we got a copy of the phone records from Ms. Concepcion’s apartment from the night she died. It seems a call was placed from the archdiocese to her apartment.”

  “So?”

  “Do you have any idea who called her?”

  “I did.”

  Really? “What were you talking about?”

  His eyes dart toward Shanahan before they return to me. “I made a slightly increased settlement offer, which she rejected. That was the last time I talked to her.”

  # # #

  Terrence the Terminator’s high-pitched voice has an unusual sense of urgency. “Where are you?” he asks me.

  My left hand is on the steering wheel and my right is clutching my cell phone as I’m driving down Gough Street toward Market. I was a starting running back and all-conference pitcher at St. Ignatius, but I don’t seem to have the coordination to drive and talk at the same time. “I’m on my way back to the office.”

  “Rosie needs you to make a slight detour to the Tenderloin.”

  “Why?”

  “Pete found Jane Doe.”

  Chapter 30

  “Meet Jane Doe”

  “All tenants must check in at the front desk. Absolutely no visitors allowed.”

  — Alcatraz Hotel.

  Before the 1906 earthquake, the area immediately to the east of City Hall was a fashionable neighborhood with graceful apartment buildings and elegant shops, but those days are long gone. The Tenderloin, as it is now called, is a forgotten cesspool of decaying tenements and residential hotels whose teeming streets are populated by poor immigrants, welfare recipients, drug addicts, prostitutes and the homeless.

  The Alcatraz Hotel is typical of the accommodations in this heavily populated and largely ignored corner of downtown. The decrepit three-story building on Eddy Street is down the street from the Federal Building and next door to the YMCA. The first thing that strikes you is the indelible stench of urine that permeates the area in front of its grated iron door. The ground floor windows have been boarded up and a muscular young man with tattoos covering his arms is selling crack in plain view.

  I hand a homeless man a dollar and push my way inside the heavy door. The check-in desk is behind bulletproof plexiglass. It’s only five o’clock, but several hookers are already getting instructions on their cell phones. Their workday is just beginning and I realize I’m standing in their reception area.

  Pete is talking to Terrence the Terminator just inside the lobby. They make an oddly intimidating pair, and the residents give them a wide berth. My brother is wearing his beat-up bomber jacket with a pair of black jeans and a flannel work shirt. Terrence towers over him by almost a foot, and his shaved head, massive shoulders and sleeveless Gold’s Gym t-shirt suggest he could still stand toe-to-toe with Mike Tyson. Ironically, Pete is far more likely to inflict serious damage. Terrence’s rap sheet may be a mile long, but he isn’t as tough as he looks.

  I nod to Terrence and address my brother. “Where’s Rosie?” I ask.

  “Upstairs.”

  “By herself?”

  “She’s fine, Mick. She wanted to talk to her alone.”

  I’m less than reassured. “How did you find Doe?”

  “I did some poking around.”

  I never ask him for specifics. Working with Pete is always a need-to-know deal. I look around at the decaying lobby and observe no discernable police presence anywhere in the vicinity. “Why aren’t the cops watching her?” I ask.

  “She’s a plaintiff in a civil case. It’s out of their jurisdiction.”

  I remind him of the prostitution charge.

  “She’s out on bail.”

  “She may be a witness in a murder investigation.”

  “I’m sure they know where to find her. I saw a couple of undercover cops out on the street. As far as I can tell, they aren’t involved in the Concepcion case.”

  I ask Pete if anybody followed him here.

  “No.”

  I turn to a more immediate question. “Did anybody follow me here?”

  He gives me a sheepish grin and says, “Just Vince, but he’s on our side.”

  “When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “About two minutes ago. He’s been watching you all day.”

  “And?”

  “Nobody’s following you, Mick. Either somebody got word to the guy in the Impala to stay clear or he’s taking the day off.”

  I look my brother straight in the eye and say, “Is Vince reliable?”

  “Only the best for my brother.”

  “I’ll have to meet him someday.”

  “Not until the case is over.”

  Pete leads me past the non-working elevator and up a rickety stairway with a missing banister. You see some marginal accommodations when you represen
t criminals for a living, but the squalor upstairs is more disturbing than I had anticipated. The heat is on and the stairwell reeks of feces. We stop at the first landing and he opens the door to a stifling hallway that’s piled with discarded mattresses and bed frames. The tile floor is sticky and the only illumination comes from a bare light bulb. The odor of frying Spam fills the corridor. We pass the open door to the bathroom, where a young woman with scanty clothes is smoking crack.

  Pete bangs on the steel-reinforced door of room six, and Rosie answers immediately. I follow her inside and Pete takes a post in the hall. The drab room measures no more than ten by ten and is dominated by a sagging double bed. There is a cracked white pedestal sink with a dripping faucet. Jane Doe’s panties and bras are hanging on a line strung across the room.

  Rosie nods toward a petite Caucasian woman who is sitting with her arms crossed in the middle of an olive green bed spread. “Meet Jane Doe,” she says.

  Her razor-thin body appears to have about thirty years of mileage and her facial features are strikingly similar to those of Julia Roberts, but her dull eyes look considerably older. Her frizzed hair and eyebrows are an enhanced jet black with red highlights, and her full lips are covered with purple lipstick. She’s wearing a black leather miniskirt and a skimpy halter top. Her deep voice is a tired mixture of worldliness and sarcasm when she says, “Welcome to my office. I was explaining to your partner that I can’t help you. My attorney advised me not to speak to anybody except her.”

  And now she’s dead.

  “I’m not going to talk about my case until I find another lawyer,” she says.

  I need to put something on the table in a hurry. “We can help you,” I say.

  The street-wise operator immediately senses an opportunity to barter. “I might be willing to talk to you if you’re willing to take my case against the archdiocese–for free.”

  The possibility of a contingency fee is enticing, but it would create a conflict of interest if she’s asked to testify at Ramon’s trial, not to mention the fact that we’ve never handled a civil case. “I’ll give you the names of a couple of attorneys who might be willing to help you,” I say.

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  It’s all I have to offer. “For the time being.” And if you don’t cooperate, we’ll come back with a subpoena and make your life a lot more unpleasant.

  She’s savvy enough to realize that she may be able to get more if she plays along. “Are you willing to keep my identity a secret?”

  “Of course.” That’s the truth.

  “Are you willing to keep my answers confidential?”

  “Yes.” That’s a bald-faced lie. If she tells us anything that might exonerate Ramon, we’ll sprint to the Hall to tell Roosevelt about it.

  She remains legitimately skeptical. “I have to leave in ten minutes,” she says.

  I’ll have to work quickly. “Where are you from?”

  “The lower Sunset.”

  My old stomping grounds. She isn’t exactly the type that my mother always wanted me to marry. She says she went to St. Anne’s and Mercy High School. I leave out any mention that I may have heard her confessions twenty years ago. I ask if her parents still live in the neighborhood.

  “Yes.” There’s an awkward silence before she adds, “I haven’t spoken to them in years.”

  “Why not?”

  “Among other things, they don’t approve of what I do for a living.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m a dancer.”

  I’m guessing she isn’t a lead ballerina at the San Francisco Ballet. “Where?”

  “The Mitchell Brothers.”

  The pieces are starting to fit together. In its unique way, the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theater is as much a Bay Area institution as Coit Tower. Jim and Artie Mitchell were fun-loving brothers from the East Bay who opened a girlie theater on Independence Day of 1969 in a converted vaudeville house a few blocks from here. Roosevelt Johnson and my father had the privilege of participating in the first raid a few weeks later, which foreshadowed decades of turmoil. The brothers got lucky in 1971 when Marilyn Chambers, the star of their X-rated feature film, Behind the Green Door, also appeared as a model on boxes of Ivory Snow soap. The attendant publicity made the film a huge hit and landed the plucky Mitchells right up there with Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt in the higher echelons of adult entertainment purveyors. The savvy brothers were among the first to bring high-class porn to a mass audience, and their empire soon expanded to a dozen locations. The lawsuits brought by local communities trying to keep them out generated substantial press coverage and free publicity. It was front page news when Chambers was arrested for solicitation at the theater in 1985, and she spent most of her brief jail time posing for photos with the cops. In response to changing times and the AIDS epidemic, the astute businessmen produced a sequel to Green Door starring porn diva Missy Manners, which was widely-recognized at the time as the first safe sex adult film.

  The train started to derail in the late eighties as Artie’s drug and alcohol problems worsened, and things came to a tragic head when Jim shot his brother to death in February of 1991. At Jim’s murder trial, his lawyers argued that Artie’s death was an accident arising out of a drug and alcohol intervention that had gone awry. The prosecutors pointed out that Jim had parked his car a few blocks from Artie’s house, kicked the door down and shot him three times, including one to the brain. He was convicted of manslaughter and he served three years at San Quentin before his release in 1997. He worked at the theater until he died of a heart attack in 2007. More than three hundred people attended his funeral, including a former San Francisco mayor and a retired San Francisco DA. Jim was buried next to Artie.

  I have to ask. “How did a nice girl from St. Anne’s Parish end up working for Jim and Artie Mitchell?”

  “Things don’t always work out the way you’d hope after your father touches you in inappropriate places and beats your alcoholic mother. I left home as soon as I got out of high school and enrolled at State. I got my degree, but I need to support a pretty spectacular drug habit and dancing pays more than flipping burgers. I’m not especially proud when I take off my clothes in front of strangers, but I’m making a living and I’m not hurting anybody.”

  You always get a dose of reality in the Tenderloin. Rosie asks her if she ever considered the possibility of bringing legal action against her father.

  “I talked to Maria about it and she said it would be difficult to win a swearing contest against my father. He can afford good lawyers.”

  It’s a realistic analysis.

  I take her in another direction. “We understand you were arrested a few weeks ago.”

  “It was a set-up. An undercover cop asked me for a date and they were all over me. I should have seen it coming. The archdiocese wanted to smear me before the start of the O’Connell trial.”

  “Who fingered you?” I ask.

  “The PI who’s been following me for the last two months–Nick Hanson.”

  Nick the Dick strikes again. “Was he arrested, too?”

  “Of course not. He didn’t do anything illegal.”

  “It’s entrapment.”

  “If I ever find a new lawyer, he’ll argue it at the trial.”

  The fact that she may end up in jail doesn’t seem to faze her. I ask if anybody is representing her on the solicitation charge.

  “At the moment, no.”

  Rosie darts a glance in my direction and then turns back to her and says, “We might be able to do it.”

  The conflict isn’t as blatant as if we agreed to represent her in her case against the archdiocese, but it’s a liberal interpretation of the rules that prohibit offering legal services in exchange for favorable testimony. We aren’t going to quibble about it for now.

  “I don’t have any money to pay you,” she says.

  Rosie tells her that we’ll handle it pro bono.

  “Why?”

  “Yo
u have information about Ms. Concepcion. You can play ball with us or we can come back with a subpoena, in which case you’ll have to tell us everything and you’ll have to find somebody else to represent you.”

  The pragmatic hooker makes the call. “Maria was my lawyer,” she says. “I guess you could say she was my friend. I got her name from the Tenderloin Legal Clinic after I was picked up for solicitation last year. She got the charges dropped and I asked her to help me sue Father O’Connell.”