A Criminal Defense

by Steven Gore

“Can I help you?” It was a woman’s voice coming from a neighboring porch. Her tone announced she was the captain of the neighborhood watch, or aspired to be. She wore a pink robe, her hand clutching the lapels together under her chin.

  Donnally pointed down the hill. “I was supposed to meet Sheldon at Peet’s Coffee an hour ago, but he didn’t show up.” He walked toward her, then bent over the railing and looked along the side of the house toward the backyard. “I’ll check back there. Maybe he’s working in his garden.”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t.”

  Welcome to Berkeley.

  Donnally’s cell phone rang. He glanced at the screen and recognized Navarro’s number. He then looked back at the woman and answered, “Detective Donnally.”

  The woman’s face went hot red and her jaw clenched as though Donnally had ripped off her block captain’s insignia in front of all her neighbors.

  “You’re starting to take this all too seriously,” Navarro said. “You signing up again to wear a badge?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Donnally said, then continued on for the neighbor’s benefit. “Galen didn’t show up for our meeting this morning. I’m at his house.”

  The woman turned and huffed her way back through her front door.

  “I didn’t know he was supposed to.”

  “I’ll explain that later, too.”

  “You think he skipped out?” Navarro asked. “If they’re gonna run, this is about the time they start thinking about it, before they’ve done any real damage to anybody.”

  “I don’t know. Hold on a sec.” Donnally walked down the steps and around to the side of the house, and then toward the back. He peeked into the living room and dining room windows as he went. Everything neat. Coffee table books fanned out. Asian-themed tables, credenzas, and hutches clean and slick. “What’s going on at your end?”

  “Two things,” Navarro said. “The first is that Frank Lange had a massive dose of Rohypnol in his blood, and I don’t think it was because somebody intended to sexually assault him while he was out.”

  “They just didn’t want him waking up as his house heated around him.”

  “Exactly. And second is we’ve ID’d the woman who you photographed fighting with him. A former employee recognized her. She worked for him for a while, ending a few months ago. Her first name sounds like river—spelled with a Y and two V’s—R-Y-V-V-E-R. Middle name Moon, normal spelling. Last name Scoville, normal spelling.”

  Donnally squinted through the kitchen window as he repeated the name to himself. The light he’d spotted when he’d walked up the front steps fell on a remodeled kitchen. Gray marble counters, matching stainless steel stovetop, oven, and refrigerator.

  “Ryvver Moon sounds like the love child of some hippie kids,” Donnally said, “and she looked to be about the right age for it.”

  Donnally knocked on the back door.

  “Bingo. I found out she’s the daughter of a lesbian couple Lange was friends with in the late seventies. He called them his Lost Years because he was stoned all the time. Hamlin and Lange both. Or at least Lange told it that way.”

  Hearing neither footsteps nor Galen’s voice, Donnally worked his way around toward a rear-facing window.

  “The woman we talked to couldn’t figure out why Lange hired her. She was a little loony. Maybe even clinical, with ups and downs like she was on her meds only half the time. And not all that competent, even for shuffling papers in the office. Hiring her must’ve been a favor to her mothers.”

  Through a slit between the curtains Donnally could see a made bed in what appeared to be the master bedroom. He imagined Galen really had gone down to Peet’s to get his morning latte or whatever was now the fad in Gourmet Gulch.

  “Have you caught up with her?” Donnally asked.

  “No. Her last real address, or at least the last one she paid rent on, was in Santa Monica. We had local officers go by. The person she sublet to says she hasn’t shown up there. She crashed with some friends a few blocks away from Lange’s place when she worked for him, but the apartment is empty now.”

  “What about her mother and mother?”

  “Running a bookstore in Guerneville along the Russian River. She’s had no contact with them for over two months.”

  “Or that’s what they say when the cops come calling,” Donnally said. “They may be frozen in seventies paranoia like bugs in amber.”

  “Very literary. Who you been hanging out with?”

  Donnally decided to accede to Lemmie’s wishes not to disclose that Mark Hamlin was her brother.

  “A writer.”

  “You on your way back to this side?”

  “This place is empty. I’ll be out of here in a couple of minutes, but I think I’ll head up to Guerneville to talk to Ryvver’s folks. Maybe they’ll have an idea what Lange and her were arguing about. I’ll call Goldhagen on the way and tell her Galen has skipped and ask her to get Judge McMullin to issue a warrant for embezzling from his trust account. No bail so we won’t lose track of him.”

  “I can’t say I’m all that surprised. I just hope I’m the one who gets to slap the cuffs on him. It’s every cop’s dream to haul in a criminal defense attorney.”

  Donnally stepped around a collection of rakes and shovels leaning against the side of the house, and headed toward the front gate. The double-hung bathroom window was raised an inch.

  He peeked in.

  He took in a quick breath.

  “What’s going on?” Navarro asked.

  Galen’s body lay sprawled on the floor in front of the toilet. Vomit splattered the seat and the surrounding tile. He was wearing the same clothes as the day before.

  “I found him,” Donnally said, as he turned toward the rear of the house. “Call an ambulance and the Berkeley police. Let them know I’m kicking in Galen’s back door.”

  Chapter 42

  I’m not sure how long I can hold out on these guys,” Navarro whispered to Donnally in the hallway outside the intensive care unit of Berkeley’s Alta Bates Hospital. He motioned with his chin toward two BPD homicide detectives who had just gotten off the distant elevator and were walking toward them.

  “You don’t need to tell them about the cooperation agreement,” Donnally said, “just that he was helping us find out who killed Mark Hamlin.” He glanced toward the window into Galen’s room. “We don’t know yet whether this was an attempted suicide—”

  “Or maybe one that will still be successful.”

  “Or an attempted murder. But the agreement couldn’t have been a motive for someone to kill him because no one knew about it.”

  “Unless there was a leak from the DA’s office,” Navarro said. “Galen’s not a popular guy.”

  One of the detectives stopped at the nurses’ station, while the other continued toward them.

  “I almost dropped my cell phone when dispatch said a Harlan Donnally had kicked in the door,” Detective Dan Edwards said, as he shook Donnally’s hand.

  Edwards and Donnally had hit it off at a California Homicide Investigators Association meeting fifteen years earlier and they had fished for steelhead together on the Klamath River a few times after that.

  Donnally introduced Navarro, then said, “You’re probably wondering how I happened to be at Galen’s house.”

  “It crossed my mind,” Edwards said, looking through the window at Galen. “Then I remembered reading about the special master business in the Hamlin case.”

  “Galen was helping me figure out who Hamlin’s latest enemies were.”

  Edwards pointed over his shoulder at his partner. “You can put both of us down as suspects.” He wasn’t smiling. “I don’t mind a lawyer attacking the evidence. I don’t even mind him attacking me, trying to make me out to be incompetent. I can defend myself. But that asshole had a way of trivializing victims and how much they suffered. There’s no excuse for that.”

  One of the things Donnally appreciated about Edwards was that he never did that hims
elf. No defensive sarcasm. No sick humor at crime scenes. No minimizing the value of a life, no matter how its owner had wasted it with drugs or devoted it to crime.

  Edwards’s partner walked up and nodded at Donnally and Navarro. “The doctor will be out in a minute. They don’t have a tox result yet, but”—he looked at Donnally—“they think it’s more than just sleeping pills from the bottle you found.”

  “That’s probably right. The prescription was for thirty and there were still twenty-five left.” Donnally tilted his head toward Galen, lying fifteen feet away, comatose and hooked up to a ventilator, with IVs spreading upward from both forearms to infusion pumps. “I don’t think five would’ve done that.”

  “I don’t know what it would be,” Edwards said. “I had a patrol officer who used to be a paramedic go through the house. He found lots of medications, which means lots of interactions. He’s on his way over here with a list so the doc can run them through the pharmacy database to see if it might be a combination of drugs that did put him out.”

  Donnally looked at Edwards’s partner. “The doctor think Galen will wake up?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  They turned at the squeak of rubber soles on the linoleum floor and widened their circle to give the doctor a place. He didn’t introduce himself, letting the name “S. Sugarman, M.D.,” stitched on his lab coat, do it for him.

  “It’s watch and wait,” Sugarman said. “We were too late to pump anything out of his stomach. Whatever it was had already been absorbed.”

  Edwards asked, “Any idea what—”

  “His mother called saying that he’d started taking an antidepressant a day or two ago. She thinks it was an MAO inhibitor.” He shook his head. “It can work like a blasting cap if he was using any of a hundred other things. Legal or illegal.” He looked back and forth between Navarro and Donnally. “People in Berkeley take all kinds of idiotic concoctions without telling their doctors. Take enough St. John’s wort, and an MAO will kill you.”

  Donnally felt Navarro’s eyes on him and knew they were thinking the same thing. That Galen had run from his collapsing legal practice to a psychiatrist’s office in order to find himself a chemical place to hide.

  “Did you find an MAO card on him?” Donnally asked.

  He knew, from Janie’s expression of worry about prescribing the drug to veterans for whom nothing else worked, that some users carried special ID cards because of those interactions.

  “No,” Sugarman said. “Nothing.”

  “You find any bruising or other injuries that would suggest he was forcibly given whatever it was?” Edwards asked.

  “Just the normal kind of redness on his arms and legs that’s associated with the EMTs lifting him onto a gurney and the orderlies moving him to a bed. But feel free to check yourself. I could’ve missed something.”

  The tone of Sugarman’s last words was not that of an admission, but an exit line. He turned and walked away.

  “You want to do it?” Edwards asked Donnally.

  Donnally extended his open palm toward Galen. “It’s your case.”

  Chapter 43

  Hector Ignacio Camacho-Fernandez, aka Nacho—and if Ramon Navarro had come to the right conclusion from his analysis of Mark Hamlin’s cell phone traffic—aka Raton. A rat. A snitch.

  And Navarro was right. The file lay on Hamlin’s kitchen table in front of Donnally. He and Jackson had searched Hamlin’s office cabinets, desk, and storage room, but hadn’t been able to locate it. Donnally had then driven to Hamlin’s house and pawed through the mass of papers on his living room floor and dining table, until he found what he hoped was all of it. But he couldn’t be certain. Hamlin’s filing system seemed geographical, with related pages sharing a general area of the house, rather than specific, with everything fitted into a particular folder.

  Scribblings on a page torn from a legal pad told most of the tale.

  At the top were Hamlin’s notes of meeting with Camacho.

  Camacho knows he’s under surveillance. Thinks his calls are being tapped. A fifty-kilo load of cocaine from Mexico was seized from a shed in Salinas. The spot had been mentioned only in a single call from his Mission Street taqueria to Juarez.

  That was followed by notes of a call to Hamlin from an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.

  DEA is agreeable to considering a cooperation agreement with Camacho as long as he doesn’t get a complete walk on the case.

  Conditions: He names his sources in Michoacan and in Long Beach, identifies everyone in his organization, agrees to a full debriefing, surrenders drug profits including the house in Daly City and his cars. Can keep his taqueria. Will consider a reward of up to $250,000, based on assets seized from targets he IDs.

  Then notes of a call between Hamlin and Reggie Hancock.

  Deal possible. Camacho willing to roll on Rafa.

  Split 40/60 from Guillermo, 60/40 from Nacho, and 40/60 from Rafa.

  The flurry of calls ended with notes from Hamlin’s meeting with Camacho.

  Agreed. Debriefing in a week. Lange will sit in.

  Even as he searched for other notes, a phrase kept repeating itself in Donnally’s mind like a tune he couldn’t get out of his head.

  Can keep his taqueria.

  The last time Donnally walked toward a taqueria on Mission Street to meet an informant was also his last day on the job as a police officer.

  Can keep his taqueria.

  Donnally pushed the notes aside and thought back on that day, then winced at the clash of past and future in his present memory, and closed his eyes. He saw himself getting out of his car on the west side of Mission Street, looking over his hood toward the restaurant door.

  A laugh from his left. A young couple, maybe Salvadorean or Guatemalan, compact bodies, Mayan faces, sitting at a wrought-iron table in front of a coffee shop. Magazines spread on top. A woman posing in a wedding dress smiling from the cover of one.

  He had taken a step toward the front of his car, then—

  Bam-bam-bam.

  Gunshots from behind him, but not at him, from a Norteño gangster up the sidewalk, ten yards away, maybe fifteen, shooting at a Sureño down the other way.

  He’d ducked behind his hood, reaching for his gun and yelling to the couple, “Down! Down! Down!”

  Too late. The male slumped over. The female screaming.

  Bam-bam from Donnally’s left. He caught the motion of the Sureño’s black, silver-toed boot and pressed Levi’s pant leg disappearing behind a trash can.

  Donnally’s gun had followed his eyes. Barrel steadied by a double-handed grip braced against his car. So focused on each other, neither the Norteño nor the Sureño had spotted him yet.

  Bam-bam … bam-bam-bam. The Norteño firing. But Donnally had lost sight of him. He was using the cars behind Donnally’s as cover.

  The Sureño tumbled forward and over the curb, then raised his semiautomatic, but Donnally fired first.

  Bam-bam from his right.

  The Sureño slumped onto the oil-slicked pavement.

  Then again from his right. Bam-bam … bam-bam.

  Donnally felt a thud against his hip and his leg gave way. He reached up, locking the fingers of his left hand into the gap between his hood and the windshield. Pain from shattered bone lit up the wound, then vibrated down his leg and up his side.

  Thunking leather. Boot heels on concrete getting louder, running toward him.

  Metal scraped against metal as the Norteño jammed in a new clip.

  Bam.

  Glass fragments burst from holes in the back window and windshield.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Bam-bam-bam.

  The clunk of punched metal and the tink, tink of fractured glass.

  He pulled himself up and fired at the Norteño through his own car windows.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-click-click-click.

  The Norteño reached for his chest and staggered into the street.

&nbs
p; Screeching tires. No thud.

  The Norteño dropped to his knees, balanced for a moment, then pitched forward. A head-thunk against a bumper.

  The smoke of burned rubber swirled and attacked Donnally’s eyes. He looked toward the woman, now splayed over the table, dead arms reaching in a final gesture toward her fiancé.

  Distant sirens, then silence.

  Coming to consciousness again.

  An EMT putting pressure on his hip. A paramedic leaning over him, speaking into his radio.

  Officer down. Four dead.

  Donnally opened his eyes. The legal pad a bright, painful yellow on the desk in front of him. He thought of Hector Camacho sitting in his office at the back of his restaurant. El Raton. Norteño gangsters at one end of the block. Sureños at the other …

  I don’t want to do this again.

  Chapter 44

  Donnally left the city just before noon by way of the Golden Gate Bridge, heading north through Marin County on the Redwood Highway toward the Russian River. With “Proud Mary” playing in his head, he realized that what Lemmie had seen as merely juvenile—Hamlin and Hancock getting stoned and singing and pounding the table—was worse, it was corrupt and cynical. In their minds, “rolling” referred not only to smoking pot, but to snitching one client on another. It was nothing less than a celebration of betrayal.

  He knew he’d be going back to Mission Street. He knew that soon enough he’d pull up in front of Camacho’s taqueria, get out of his car, look up and down the sidewalk, and head toward the entrance—

  Just … not … yet.

  The Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit to coastal Highway 1 rose up like a suppressed temptation, and not just because a longer trip up along the ocean to the mouth of the river then inland to Guerneville would delay his return to Mission Street. But because he hated the outlet malls and car dealerships that were filling in the land between San Rafael and Novato, and between Novato and Petaluma, and between Petaluma and Rohnert Park, and between Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa. Driving past them was like walking down the aisle of an Eddie Bauer outlet store filled with people buying clothes they didn’t need and pretending to themselves they’d go places where they’d never go. Or maybe it was like a dollar store, the oppression of too much stuff overwhelming the necessities of life.