Act of Deceit Read online

  Mauricio Aguilera had simply been a prism that had refracted away the truth of the who, and the what, and the where of Mauricio Quintero.

  And the foundation on which his life had been built lay not in Mount Shasta, but in a Central Valley town that nobody in Siskiyou County had ever heard of or would’ve cared about if they had, except for Donnally.

  The image of Livingston stuck in Donnally’s mind like a live moth on flypaper. In the late eighties, as a young officer working the SFPD fugitive detail, he’d driven down the heart of the state through fog yellowed by agricultural burning, breathing in smoke and diesel fumes, hunting for a wino who’d stabbed a postal worker in a skid-row hotel lobby. In morbid irony, the killer, who’d been drunk on the fortified wine marketed to alcoholics that had made the Gallo brothers rich, had sought refuge at the Gallo labor camp.

  For years Donnally’s memory of Livingston had been anchored in a single image: walking into the shed, finding the killer hanging from a rafter, his neck snapped, his dead body still rocking above an overturned crate. And by a single thought: that the last sounds the man had heard were Donnally’s footsteps on the wooden porch and the squeak of the turning doorknob.

  Now that memory had broken free and all Donnally saw when he imagined that place was a little girl molested by her father … a young Mauricio … and a gunshot.

  A snowdrift climbed up Donnally’s windshield. He took a sip of coffee and wondered what it was about death that got your mind interlocking things, like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without having the picture to tell you what you’re aiming for, and not even knowing whether all the pieces came from the same box.

  What’s the picture supposed to be? he asked himself as he rolled down his window and drained the cup on the ground. And what am I supposed to say when I find her?

  Hi, Anna, my name is Harlan. Your father molested you as a kid. I thought you should know.

  Hi, Anna, my name is Harlan. You used to have a brother. I thought you should know.

  Hi, Anna, my name is Harlan. Your brother murdered your father. I thought you should know.

  Donnally turned the ignition and flicked on the wipers. He stretched his arm along the top of the bench seat and looked through the rear cab window as he backed up between the pines and the rows of headstones until he reached the dirt road that bisected the cemetery. He then shifted into drive and headed toward Main Street.

  Screw him. I ain’t nobody’s postman.

  Chapter 3

  Son of a bitch.

  The words rushed through Donnally’s mind even before he was awake, as though he was providing a voice-over for his own dream.

  He saw himself in the mid–1970s standing across the street from Berkeley High School. He was wearing a serape and a soiled cap and holding a short-handled hoe. Hippies were flashing him two-fingered peace signs or raising clenched fists in claimed solidarity with farmworkers striking in the Central Valley.

  Cops kept ordering him to move along, but he circled back hour after hour, day after day, until he spotted a Mexican girl walking toward the bus stop.

  Son of a bitch.

  Even after Donnally rolled over and looked at the glowing digital clock, the image stayed with him. He knew he was awake. No doubt about that. It was just that he was still dreaming.

  Now the girl turned toward him and headed down the sidewalk, her hand jittering against the chain-link fence enclosing the basketball courts.

  She stopped two feet away and said, “Everybody’s got to be from somewhere, Harlan. Where am I from?”

  A Buddhist monk in an orange robe walked up to them. Not a Hare Krishna chanting bullshit and beating drums, but a real one. Bald as citrus and skinny as a carrot.

  They turned toward him.

  Then a clash of cymbals.

  Donnally reached for the telephone before he understood it was ringing.

  “We’re out of half-and-half,” his waitress said, not giving him a chance to say hello.

  He sat up on the edge of the bed. “Go get some from Mauricio’s.”

  “I’m sure whatever he had is spoiled by now,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t have a key.”

  Donnally rubbed his temples to clear his mind.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Mauricio’s dead. He looked again at the clock. Five A.M. The Food Mart wasn’t open yet. “I’ve got some in the fridge. I’ll bring it down.”

  He lowered the handset back into its cradle, wondering why he’d never before made the mistake of thinking someone was alive after they’d passed away.

  Never once had he thought of picking up the phone and calling his grandmother after she died, even though he felt a connection to her that transcended her death. He’d heard about other people doing that, and other things, too. Looking for birthday cards after the birthdays had stopped. Worrying about whether their grandmother would fall and hurt herself. Wondering how white carnations would look on her dining table.

  Except Donnally never forgot that his grandmother’s table was out in his garage, disassembled and leaning against the wall, and her chairs were lined up by the café door for people to sit on while waiting for a table to open up.

  It was only Mauricio who wouldn’t go away.

  He slipped on Levi’s and a parka, retrieved a carton of half-and-half from the refrigerator, and drove it downtown. He parked behind the restaurant and entered through the back door because he wasn’t in the mood to banter with the guys from the Caterpillar dealership, or from the Valley Bank, or from the feed store, or with the retired sheriff who planted himself at the counter each morning as if the red Naugahyde stool on which he sat was his throne.

  Donnally knew that Mauricio was dead for them; it was only his possessions that were still alive. He’d already heard people talking about how Mauricio’s house could be used as a real estate office and how his front yard would be perfect for displaying tractors or snowmobiles. Just about everybody in town had been driving by and wondering what was going to happen with the Aguilera place, and many were conniving about how they could get it cheap.

  Donnally glanced toward the dining room and spotted ex-sheriff Wade Pipkins’s waves of white hair mounding up beyond the pass-through counter from the kitchen. He suspected that Pipkins was going to miss Mauricio more than anyone else. Not miss Mauricio the person, just the idea of him. Miss the opportunity to opine about what was wrong with U.S. immigration policy loud enough for Mauricio to hear. Miss giving Mauricio the stare he otherwise reserved for homeless people and suspects and Hispanic day laborers.

  For Pipkins, all Hispanics were Mexicans. Even the Guatemalans, and Salvadorans, and Peruvians. He called them Pancho or Paco or Pedro. And when he looked at them, all he wanted to see was their hats off and their gazes lowered, especially when he was hiring them to clear brush on the dozens of properties he owned in the county.

  The popping of bacon grease on the grill brought Donnally back to the present and to the cold half-and-half in his hand.

  “Thanks, boss.” Will, Donnally’s cook, reached out a tattooed arm to take the carton. “The funeral go okay?”

  Donnally shrugged. “What could go wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” Will smiled, then pointed through the window toward the abandoned cars and rusting washing machines in Mauricio’s side yard. “He never seemed to get around to finishing anything he started.”

  Will’s smiled faded and he lowered his voice, as if not wanting to be overheard by Pipkins.

  “What’s this I hear about the name on the stone? Singleton came by. He said the name was Quintero or Quintana or something.”

  That was another reason not to bother with a headstone, Donnally thought. There would be less to explain.

  Donnally responded with the lie he’d worked out as he’d driven back from the cemetery the day before.

  “Mauricio always used his grandfather’s last name out of respect,” Donnally said, “on his mother’s side.”

  “That the kind of thing Mexicans do?�
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  “Yeah,” Donnally said, “lots of them.”

  Donnally looked around the kitchen, then glanced at his waitress standing behind the counter.

  “Can you two handle things for a couple of days?” Donnally asked.

  “Sure, boss. I’ll even keep Ruby at my place if you want. Where’re you going?”

  Donnally thought for a moment. He wasn’t sure of the where, or even the why. He finally settled on an answer that didn’t even satisfy himself.

  “Let’s just say I’m going to deliver a letter.”

  Chapter 4

  “Get off my property,” a deep male voice yelled at Donnally through the closed front door of the West Berkeley cottage.

  The smell of rot and mold infused Donnally’s nostrils, seeping from the yard behind him that had long since gone native with generations of intermingled grasses and weeds: the green, the yellow, and the brown composted by rain and heat and trampling shoes. Even the house’s blue paint seemed to have surrendered, fading into the gray of the bleached wood siding underneath.

  “Subpoena me or leave me alone,” the man said. “My lawyer told you assholes that already.”

  A gap appeared between the frame of the window on the right side of the door and the blue wool blanket that served as its curtain. Brown fingers gripped the material, the fingernails ragged and yellowed, and two eyes looked out from the shadowed interior.

  Donnally took off his Giants cap as if disarming himself, then scratched his head and said, “I’m not here about anything that involves subpoenas.”

  A wry smile exposed tar-stained teeth. “But you’re a cop, right?”

  There was no point in pretending. Once you’ve got a cop’s eyes, a cop’s walk, and a cop’s face, no one is going to mistake you for anything else.

  “Once,” Donnally said, “but not anymore.” He then made a show of glancing back toward the sidewalk, where a handful of crack and marijuana dealers were waiting for the mid-afternoon rush, then side to side at the apartment buildings flanking the house and framing the yard like the walls of a box canyon. “You think a cop would’ve come here alone?”

  The gap widened and the rest of the face appeared. Mid-sixties. Long, thin. The scleras of his jaundiced eyes were just a shade lighter than his skin, and there was too much of that, as though he’d suffered a sudden weight loss. The man pulled the curtain further aside, then looked to Donnally’s left, checking for a second person.

  Donnally spotted the man’s right elbow extending from behind his body, but his hand was concealed. He couldn’t stop his mind from transforming itself into a booking sheet. 12021 of the California Penal Code. Felon in possession of a firearm.

  “What do you want?” the man said.

  “I’m trying to get a hold of Willie Goldstine, the guy they used to call Sonny.”

  The man’s face didn’t change expression.

  “How come?”

  “About the New Sky Commune.”

  “Son of a bitch. Another asshole writing a book.”

  “That’s not it,” Donnally said. “I’m trying to locate a girl, I mean a woman. Her name is Anna. She was dropped off there by her brother in 1965.”

  The man’s eyes flickered. Donnally couldn’t tell whether it was recognition or calculation.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Somebody in her family left her some money.”

  “So you’re a PI.”

  “Just playing the part to help a buddy.”

  “Maybe he should’ve come himself.”

  “He would’ve, but he’s dead.”

  Donnally watched the man’s smile fade.

  “Then he should’ve come sooner.”

  “Look, man, I need to know if you’re Sonny. If not, I’ve got to move along.”

  “How do I know you’re not really here about Tsukamata?”

  Donnally repeated the name, then said, “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It’s not a that. It’s a him. The cop who got killed.” The man laughed. “You stupid or do you think I’m stupid?”

  “Neither. I’m just not from around here.” Donnally pointed north. “I’m from Shasta. I didn’t even know a cop got killed. Haven’t even read the paper since I arrived and didn’t hear it on the radio driving down. When did it happen?”

  “Nineteen seventy-five.”

  Donnally threw up his hands. “How am I supposed to know what happened over thirty years ago?”

  “It’s been on the news a lot lately.”

  “And it had something to do with you?”

  The man shook his head.

  “You lost me. Then why are we—” Donnally then understood the why. “I get it. Somebody’s now saying you did it and you’re thinking I’m somehow trying to box you in?”

  The man flashed a smile. “If I was Sonny.”

  Donnally didn’t smile back. “Yeah. If you were Sonny.”

  More of the picture came into focus.

  “Let me guess,” Donnally said. “People have been trying to break your alibi. And you’re thinking I’m one of them … if you were Sonny.”

  “About every five years some retired cop gets a bug up his ass, wanting to be some kind of cold case hero. Get his face on 60 Minutes or a cable TV crime show, then make a buck selling his memoirs.”

  Donnally folded his arms across his chest and exhaled. “How do we get around this roadblock? I really want to find this gal.”

  Sonny let go of the blanket. A moment later the door opened.

  “Wait here,” Sonny said. “I’m gonna call my lawyer. He’s in the city.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Sonny narrowed his eyebrows. “I thought you wasn’t from around here.”

  “I was a cop in San Francisco.”

  “Mark Hamlin.”

  Donnally felt his stomach tighten. Hamlin hated cops, loved money, and made every case into a political cause. Ten years earlier, he was on TV almost daily. Rimless glasses. Black hair slicked back like snake scales. Just an hour after the shootout that ended Donnally’s career, Hamlin was on television claiming that the cops—Donnally and his police department conspirators—had instigated it in order to start a Mexican gang war.

  “You don’t need to call—”

  But Sonny was already dialing.

  Sonny glanced back and forth between a business card on the coffee table and the number pad on his cell phone, then waited as the call connected.

  “It’s Sonny … doin’ okay … Look, a guy’s here about the old days … no … New Sky … I don’t know.”

  Sonny looked back toward the door. “What’s your name?”

  Donnally told him and Sonny repeated it. He listened for a moment, then handed over the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Donnally put it to his ear. “This is Donnally.”

  “How you doing, man?”

  Donnally recognized the nasal whine, but not the tone. Hamlin sounded like he meant it.

  “I felt really bad about you getting shot,” Hamlin said. “What do you want with my client?”

  Donnally said as much as he’d already told Sonny.

  “How’d you end up knocking on his door?” Hamlin asked.

  “I found a bunch of names in an old book about Berkeley communes and he’s the first one I got a lead on who wasn’t dead, drugged, or deranged.”

  The old Hamlin voice returned. Half question. Half accusation. “Is this for real?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know how to prove it.” Donnally looked over at Sonny. He could see the outline of a small revolver in his front pants pocket. “Wait. Maybe I can.” He held his palm up toward Sonny, telling him not to panic. “I checked over at the courthouse. Sonny’s got two felony convictions, and he’s got a gun on him. The feds could lock him up in Leavenworth for twenty years.”

  Sonny glared at Donnally, clenching his fists.

  Donnally kept his hand up. “But I’m not interested in hurting the guy.”

  “
Shit,” Hamlin said. “I told him to get rid of that thing. One of these days his door’s gonna get kicked in. They won’t even need to convict him on the murder. At his age, twenty years on a federal gun beef would be a life sentence.” Hamlin fell silent for a moment. “I’ve got an idea. How about you work for me?”

  “I thought you hated—”

  “Just so you can’t use anything he tells you to hurt him. Attorney-client privilege. You had a reputation as a straight shooter. I’ll trust you in this.”

  “But if he killed a cop—”

  “He didn’t kill Tsukamata. Back then Sonny was so doped up he’d fall over trying to pull on his pants. He could barely hit a vein with a needle much less shoot a cop in the head from two hundred yards away. Give him the phone.”

  Donnally extended it toward Sonny, who reached back as though he expected handcuffs to emerge and snap around his wrist.

  Sonny took the phone into the kitchen. He returned a couple of minutes later, then walked over to the dining table and removed a dollar from his wallet. He was nodding as he crossed the room and handed it to Donnally. “I gave him the money … yeah, I’ll talk to you later.”

  Sonny disconnected and looked up at Donnally, who was still standing in the doorway.

  “She’s dead. Murdered in nineteen eighty-six.”

  “What?” Donnally felt himself flush. “Then why’d we do this stupid dance? Why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?”

  Sonny backed up a step.

  “Take it easy, man. Not because of her. Because of her mother. I mean the woman who got her, Trudy Keenan. She’s alive. And the police have been trying to find her since the seventies because she … uh … did some stuff.”

  Sonny again looked past Donnally toward the street, then tilted his head toward his living room.

  “You’re not gonna like what you’re gonna hear, especially if whoever sent you was a pal, but maybe you better step inside and hear it anyway.”

  Chapter 5

  Donnally glared down at the Alameda County prosecutor.

  “Are you telling me that the crook who murdered Anna Keenan hasn’t been examined for competency in twenty years?”