by Steven Gore
Now Donnally looked up. “Like you were an indentured servant?”
“Let’s just call it pro bono.” Galen didn’t smile.
“Did the victim’s people come after Hamlin? Maybe Tub or Sanders’s wife.”
“That Tub is an asshole. He was big in the Oakland Hell’s Angels chapter until he got caught skimming dope money and they stripped off his patches and kicked him out. Have you seen him?”
Donnally nodded.
“Meth cost him his house and about a hundred pounds of fat and muscle. You bet he wants the money, all of it, both shares. He knows Burger killed his brother-in-law in self-defense—even Sanders’s wife believes that. Sanders had gotten all paranoid and crazy and had taken to pounding her, too. Burger killing Sanders probably saved her life. If Tub wasn’t always chasing meth and desperate for cash, he’d say Burger deserved the money so he could hire Hamlin to help him beat the case.”
“Did you ever witness Tub—”
Galen nodded. “Out there on Harrison Street, behind the Hall of Justice, under the freeway. We were walking up to Mark’s car after court. Tub must’ve scouted out the place and hidden down the block. He comes riding up with a couple of guys from the East Bay Devils, leathered up like they were heading for the Fourth of July outlaw rally in Hollister. They all pull guns—right behind the police department. I looked over my shoulder and could see cops getting in and out of their patrol cars. Tub says, ‘Look over there one more time and it’ll be the last thing you see.’ Then Hamlin told him he’d get the money, just needed some time, a week. One of the bikers climbs off his motorcycle and punches Mark in the gut. He doubles over, but doesn’t go down to the pavement. Nothing else said. And they’re back on their bikes and gone.”
“Did Mark pay them?”
“I don’t know. He was supposed to. I collected some cash from clients who owed me and gave him ten thousand.”
Donnally thought of the currency with Galen’s fingerprints on it and the other stash they found under Hamlin’s bed. It struck him that Galen’s relationship with Hamlin was like a sick marriage, the kind in which they go after each other with knives, then turn together against the cops or the relatives or the neighbors who arrive to intervene.
“Isn’t that a little peculiar?” Donnally asked. “Mark extorts money out of you and you try to save him from Tub.”
“I’ve got a big mortgage, and forty percent of my income came from Mark. I needed to keep him in business. I knew he was under financial pressure, too. He always spent every nickel he made. That was part of what was driving him, and he would’ve made it up to me in the end.”
“Is that why he went to the old guys in The Crew to cover what he loaned you?”
Galen nodded, chewing on his lower lip. Finally, he said, “I know about Mark taking the money out of Burger’s garage and the perjury in the Thule case—”
“And snitching off the judge and extorting money out of that homicide victim’s husband, Rudy—”
“Rusch. I know. All of that and more. But he wasn’t a complete scumbag. He did some good in the world.”
It was news to Donnally and it also seemed like a non sequitur, unless Galen knew something about the reason Hamlin had collected all the cash.
Or maybe Galen had already arrived at the point in the program when he started lying.
If Hamlin wasn’t so bad, after all, maybe he wasn’t either.
“Like what?”
“The kids. The gymnasts.”
“The what?”
The puzzlement Donnally felt must have shown on his face.
“You know, in Southeast Asia. I don’t know the details, but I know a lot of money went that direction.”
Chapter 36
Here’s an overview of Mark’s calendar for the last six months,” Jackson said, as she walked into his office. She laid it on the blotter in front of Donnally, then leaned over, turned the pages, and ran her finger down each one. “You can see by the blank weeks when he was in Asia.”
Galen had left to meet with a longtime client in the jail to help him choose a new lawyer. He and Donnally had decided Galen’s cover story for resigning would be that he had a life-threatening medical problem that he had disclosed in private to Presiding Judge Ray McMullin. Donnally had called Goldhagen and gotten her consent, and then McMullin agreed to ask the judges hearing Galen’s cases to allow a new lawyer to substitute in. Donnally had no doubt that Galen’s pale face and uncharacteristic agitation would convince everyone in the court system the illness was real.
“Mark never talked about it,” Jackson said. “But I checked once or twice, and his trips coincided with gymnastic competitions in Thailand and Vietnam. They’re kind of a big deal over there. National pride involved. Got a lot of press coverage because the program was a ticket out of poverty for lots of village kids. There are even some videos on the Internet.”
“How come he was so secretive?” Donnally asked.
Donnally felt Jackson’s breast rub against his shoulder. He leaned to his right to break the contact. She bent down a little further and made contact again.
“I have no idea.”
He thought back to what Navarro had told him about her background and her sexually abusive father and the kinds of things Janie had told him over the years about the abused women she’d treated. He suspected fear and panic about what he might discover about Hamlin and her had led her to revert to the use of a teenage weapon of self-defense: Buy off Daddy with sex. He also wondered whether she’d run that routine on Hamlin and whether he’d exploited it. He imagined her standing in Hamlin’s shower on a morning after, cursing herself for sleeping with him and bewildered about why she’d done it.
But this wasn’t the time to confront her about the facts of her current behavior or to try to test his speculations about her relationship with Hamlin.
Donnally rolled back his chair and stood. Jackson straightened up and put on her most suggestive Tina Turner face. He could feel the sexual tension coming from her and sensed her filtering everything he was saying and doing, and measuring it against her subconscious intent. And the fact that her eyes displayed a certain kind of vacancy, a vacuum of unthinking, told him it was motivated in a way she didn’t herself understand.
But it was real. Blood-and-flesh real.
“How about gathering together all you can on what Mark was doing over there.”
He suspected she already had some of the answers he was looking for, but he needed to use his question as a way to force them both beyond what could’ve become an impasse.
Jackson nodded and her shoulders settled. He felt the connection break and her emotionally backing away.
She licked her lips and her brows furrowed as though she’d just become aware of her desire and was wondering why it arose just then.
He decided to push her past the awkwardness of the moment.
“See if you can find out who else was involved,” Donnally said. “Where they’re located over there. How he paid for it. Anything else on the Internet.”
She nodded again, then turned and headed to her desk. He watched her and recognized by the slight wobble in her step that she knew he was watching her. It was like she was aware that she was being captured on film for the first time and felt her everyday gestures turn into self-conscious performances.
Donnally waited until she passed out of his view, then sat down and scanned the calendar. Even if Hamlin’s work in Asia was a kind of charity, that didn’t mean the money funding it was clean. Using dirty money to do good and to buy legitimacy was the San Francisco way. All the tong and triad leaders made a show of contributing to the benevolent societies and funding the Chinese New Year parade, the Italian gangsters shoveled money to the churches, even the Hell’s Angels bought turkeys for the poor at Thanksgiving and ran toy drives for Christmas.
Thinking of the cash in the safe and in Hamlin’s bedroom hiding place, Donnally wondered whether Hamlin was engaged in transferring the money to someone in t
he old country on behalf of the man with the Vietnamese accent who’d held a gun at Donnally’s back.
Donnally resisted the temptation to reduce the coincidence of the Vietnamese gunman’s intervention and Galen’s disclosure of Hamlin’s Southeast Asian charity into effect and cause or even into links in a chain.
He also realized he had another temptation to resist.
No one had mentioned women in Hamlin’s life. No wife or ex-wife. No girlfriend or ex-girlfriend. No boyfriend or ex-boyfriend.
Maybe the charity was a pretext for sex tourism, for hitting the brothels of Bangkok and Hanoi. Maybe Hamlin had a girlfriend over there. Maybe—he felt a shudder of disgust pass through him—maybe the half-naked kids who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of his charity were actually his targets.
Chapter 37
Money.
More and more Donnally was convinced the route to whoever killed Mark Hamlin would follow a money trail—
And he hated money trail cases.
As a cop, he hadn’t lied to himself. He knew he didn’t have the talent, he didn’t have the mind for it. He couldn’t see patterns in numbers and abstract the character of human actions from deposits and withdrawals and balance sheets.
He had a hard time just keeping track of the pluses and minuses of his café’s money flow.
And now he found himself sitting at Hamlin’s conference table surveying stacks of bank statements. Eight bank accounts, personal and business. All with connected ATM or credit cards.
Donnally felt straitjacketed. Paralyzed. Hamlin could’ve laundered money just by moving it among these accounts and Donnally knew he wouldn’t be able to figure it out.
Sensing motion in the doorway, he looked up to see Jackson walking in. She’d undone the top two buttons of her blouse. He felt a surge of annoyance. He wasn’t in the mood for the manipulation. He was interested in the truth she was in a position to expose, not the cleavage she was intending to reveal.
Jackson stopped at the opposite side of the table, leaned over at the waist, and tapped one of the piles of bank statements with her fingernail. “There’s an easier way to get the answers you’re looking for.”
Donnally fixed his eyes on hers, resisting the temptation to let his gaze fall where she wanted it to. Her maneuver made him recall a female suspect who’d cozied up next to him in the bar where he’d sought her out, and had asked, “Is there any physical way we can resolve this?”
“How do you figure?” Donnally asked.
“We have a sophisticated accounting program, not your in-a-box, buy-it-off-the-shelf kind. We bought it to make it easy to export the financial data to Mark’s accountant so he could calculate his quarterly tax payments and prepare his returns.”
“How complicated is it?”
“Not too. I can show you how to search it and to create reports.”
Donnally wished Janie was around to sit Jackson down and take her back to the critical moments in her childhood and then return her to the present so she could understand what she was doing.
As he looked at her, he wondered whether her behavior was just an expression of grief and dislocation after the loss of a father figure, for Hamlin might have been the most important person in her life.
At the same time, maybe she’d begun to fear Hamlin, as she feared her own molesting father, even before Hamlin’s death, perhaps as though he was her own Peoples Temple Jim Jones.
“Maybe you can give me the manual to look at,” Donnally said.
Jackson straightened up, but lowered her gaze, her lips pursed into a little girl’s pout. She folded her arms below her breasts, forcing them up into the opening in her blouse, her skin reflecting the fluorescent light shining from above.
Donnally thought he had better give her some encouragement until he could figure out how to deal with her.
“After I get familiar with the program, maybe you can show me some of its tricks.”
Jackson smiled and headed back toward her desk, nearly on her toes, almost like she was skipping.
Donnally followed her and waited while she located the manual on her bookcase. He turned away after she handed it to him, but before she could offer any more help, and then took it into Hamlin’s office.
But it was hard to concentrate.
He felt like Jackson was looking over his shoulder, breathing against his ear and neck. It made him feel like she’d won a round, gotten into his head, but he wasn’t going to show it.
He found the application icon on the screen and activated the program—
And she won another round.
Jackson knew he’d need to come to her to get the password.
In order not to have to do it in person, he called her on the intercom. She insisted on coming into the office to give it to him.
Donnally rose and stood by the wall behind the desk. She slipped by him, leaned over, entered the password, and then clicked a box on the screen to make it visible: “showmethemoney.”
He didn’t need to write it down.
Jackson straightened, gave him a we’ve-got-a-secret smile, and then returned to her desk. He wasn’t sure whether the secret was the password itself or the fact that the phrase “show me the money” was at least a subliminal confession on Hamlin’s part that he’d left the greater good behind him in his race to the bank.
Or maybe the word Donnally wanted was subconscious, not subliminal, a manifestation of a professional schizophrenia.
Except that Hamlin had to have been aware of his metamorphosis from a soldier of justice into a soldier of fortune. For, eventually, even for people like Hamlin, the self-justifications have to run out.
Chapter 38
Donnally closed the office door and then sat down and called Janie. He described what he called Jackson’s “symptoms.”
“I’m thinking it’s some kind of defense mechanism,” Donnally said. “Like she’s acting out.”
Janie laughed. “Who appointed you shrink for a day? A defense mechanism, Dr. Freud?”
He knew she’d caught him. He’d felt a little awkward saying the words, like he’d been paddling into her professional pond on a makeshift raft.
“You have a better idea?”
“Transference.”
“You mean like she and Hamlin were sexually involved and she’s switched to me?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she had some kind of psychological dependence on him, like a father figure.”
“I guessed at that one. At least give me a gold star for that.”
“Let’s make it a cigar, it’s more Freudian. That kind of thing happens all the time between patients and their therapists. The therapist becomes a substitute for the parent or for the abusive boyfriend and the feelings get redirected from one to the other, or from the past to the present.”
“What do you make of her acting like a sexualized little girl? Who am I supposed to be in that fantasy?”
“I wouldn’t make too much of the sexual part. It’s a weapon of the weak.” Janie paused for a moment, then said, “If you can understand the nature of the transference, what she’s trying to communicate, you’ll better understand her relationship with Hamlin.”
“And whether she’s now trying to protect him or herself?”
“Very good, Sigmund. Insights like that will make you famous someday—got to go. I have some paid shrinking to do.”
Donnally hung up, realizing that he had now crossed borders into two territories he wasn’t good at. Finance and psychology.
After gazing at the door and imagining Jackson on the other side, he decided numbers were more manageable and looked again at the monitor. He spotted a command button titled “Reports” and clicked on it. The drop-down list showed one named “Current Year–Combined.” He accessed it and discovered Hamlin didn’t have much in the way of fortune, at least in his bank accounts. The bottom-line figures for money in and money out were almost equal. Unless he owned his duplex free and clear or had investments or a retirement account, mo
st of his assets were composed of the cash Donnally had discovered.
He opened a browser and checked San Francisco County Recorder’s and Assessor’s Office records. They showed that Hamlin had paid off the duplex he lived in six months earlier and then had transferred it into the Mark Hamlin irrevocable trust. He knew from his parents’ tax planning that making a trust irrevocable meant it couldn’t be changed without the beneficiary’s permission. Hamlin had thereby given up all control over the assets in the trust to the beneficiary. But the answer to the question of who that was didn’t show up in the online records.
Donnally wondered whether Hamlin had made the trust irrevocable because he didn’t trust himself, maybe because of his opium problem.
He checked his watch. There was enough time to make it to City Hall before it closed to try to find out who Hamlin did trust.
Later, after he’d discovered who killed Hamlin, he figured he’d also discover whether that trust was well-placed.
If his guess about the value of Hamlin’s duplex was anywhere close, whoever the beneficiary was had cleared an easy couple of million dollars the instant Hamlin’s heart seized up.
Chapter 39
When Donnally stepped out of the elevator and into the marble-floored lobby, he spotted Navarro coming in through the double front doors.
Donnally flashed a palm, holding him in place, as he approached.
“What do you have?” Donnally asked, looking down at the four-inch-thick accordion file in Navarro’s hand.
“More phone records.”
“How about walk with me over to City Hall?” Donnally pointed at the clock above the elevator doors. It showed 4:40. “I need to check something quick.”
Navarro nodded and followed Donnally out.
Donnally glanced down at the file. “Anything interesting?”
“A problem Judge McMullin may have to resolve. After getting court orders for the subscriber information for all of the phones Hamlin called and the ones that called him for the last month, I started to flowchart the calls. But I had to stop.”