Act of Deceit Read online

  “That nut was never going be competent to stand trial. Charles Brown was crazy and retarded.” Chief Assistant District Attorney Thomas Blaine tossed his pen on his desk and grinned. “Sorry, mentally ill and developmentally disabled.” His grin faded and his face hardened. “It was a waste of taxpayers’ money to keep bringing him back to court.”

  Donnally hadn’t bothered to sit down. He’d marched from the Criminal Clerk’s Office into the elevator, then ridden up the nine floors to the Office of the District Attorney. Blaine, who’d been the prosecutor in the case, had agreed to see him because twelve years earlier they’d served together on a Bay Area gang task force.

  Looking at Blaine now, from a distance of years and experience, Donnally saw that the prosecutor’s ambition had so melded with his duty that his aging frat-boy face had come to display the same cunning and self-righteous rectitude as the preachers who ran the annual tent revivals in Mount Shasta.

  “So he got away with it?” Donnally said.

  Blaine shrugged. “If you want to put it that way.”

  “Can you think of another way?”

  “I don’t make the laws,” Blaine said. “Anyway, things have to come to an end someday.”

  An image of Mauricio’s now maggot-ridden body flashed in Donnally’s mind. He shook it off.

  “Where’s Brown now?” Donnally asked.

  Blaine shrugged again. “How should I know? Napa State Hospital. Atascadero. Some loony bin where—”

  “Where he can prey on women just a little bit crazier than he is because nobody ever bothered to bring him back to court and send him to prison where he belongs?”

  The prosecutor’s face went sunburn red. “I mean … I assume … Look. We’ve had thousands of murders in this county since then. We can’t track every—”

  Donnally’s gesture of disgust cut the prosecutor short.

  Blaine reached for the telephone resting on the desk that had been used by Earl Warren during the 1920s when he was the Alameda County district attorney. Donnally remembered once looking at it during their task force years and imagining a Senator Lloyd Bentsen–type figure telling Blaine, a Dan Quayle standin: “I knew Earl Warren. Earl Warren was a friend of mine. Blaine, you’re no Earl Warren.”

  “Send an inspector up here,” Blaine said into the telephone. “I don’t care which one. Anybody who’s sitting there with his thumb up his ass and nothing to do.”

  Donnally cringed. Blaine hadn’t changed, and he was sure that the rest of the pretty-boy prosecutors in the office hadn’t either. They all still thought that jousting with defense lawyers in court was fighting the real war and that cops and DA inspectors were just stable boys.

  Blaine set the phone into its cradle. “We’ll know where he’s at in a couple of hours.” He then leaned back in his chair, a satisfied look of command on his face. “Why the interest in a decades-old murder?”

  “I’m not sure that has anything to do with why you let this guy get away with it.”

  “Don’t go Lone Ranger on me, Harlan. Everybody’s got an angle. Even you.”

  Blaine walked Donnally to the kitchen after the inspector came by to receive his assignment.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have sounded so cavalier about it,” Blaine said, pouring Donnally a cup of coffee. “I sure as hell didn’t feel that way at the time. That’s why I still remember Brown after all these years.”

  Blaine paused with the pot still in his hand. His eyes went blank for a moment as though he was trying to stare into the past.

  “Berkeley was a swamp back then,” Blaine finally said. “One lunatic after another coming through the court system. We didn’t know what to do with them. There wasn’t enough room in the locked wards, so unless the defendant started beating on the bailiff right in the courtroom, we just kicked them back out on the street. The whole city was littered with them. One more or less didn’t seem to make a difference, it was like just another drop of water in the bay.”

  Blaine pointed down the hallway toward his office, then led the way.

  “What about Brown?” Donnally asked, dropping into one of the two wooden chairs facing Blaine’s desk.

  “He came through half a dozen times during the first year I was assigned to Berkeley. They kept sending him over to the county hospital on forty-eight-hour psych holds. But they never kept him. The diagnosis was always the same: crazy and retarded. We didn’t bother sending him back after that. The judge just told him to go see his shrink at the city mental health clinic and to take his meds.”

  Blaine paused for a moment. “I mean, it wasn’t like he was committing serious crimes. We may have charged him with burglaries a couple of times, but they were just aggravated trespassing. Breaking into businesses, usually corner markets, for a place to sleep and something to eat. County jail was no deterrent to loonies like him. And he’d get violent if he was locked up, like a caged animal. The Sheriff’s Department couldn’t protect him or protect other inmates from him, so the court kept putting him on probation. Then, when he stopped taking his meds and started acting out again, the cops up on Telegraph Avenue or at People’s Park would tie him up and haul him to the county shrink in Oakland to get dosed. It would take him a couple of days to find his way back to Berkeley.”

  Donnally followed Blaine’s eyes as he gazed out of his window toward Lake Merritt on the north side of the courthouse, grayed by winter fog, its surface ruffled by the gusting wind, the broad boulevard encircling it crowded with soundless traffic.

  “Damn.” Blaine sighed. “Anna Keenan was a sweetheart. Not one of those tie-died Berkeley do-gooders. She was something special. The kind of teacher every parent wants their kid to have.” Blaine’s eyes went blank for a moment. “And to die like that, looking up into the face of the maniac who killed her.” He looked back at Donnally. “It was the first homicide I ever got called out on. I swaggered in like an old pro, then about cried when I saw who it was.” He paused, reliving the moment. “You remember Eddie Washington?”

  “Got killed executing a search warrant in nineteen-ninetysomething.”

  “Ninety-eight. He was in homicide back when Brown murdered Anna. Eddie’s daughter was in her third grade class. He used to drop her by Anna’s house on Saturday mornings for tutoring. She wouldn’t take any money for it. Not a nickel. Once she let him change the oil in her car, but that’s all she ever let him do.” Blaine closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “You should’ve seen Washington’s face when he looked at her body. Hurt and fury like I’d never seen on a man before or since.”

  “So he went on a mission.”

  Blaine looked back at Donnally and nodded. “Like a linebacker. And it only took him an hour to link the homicide to Brown. Anna had let him sleep in her shed so he wouldn’t keep getting arrested. He’d been there a few months, off and on. He’d help her in the garden and in her greenhouse. Neighbors heard some kind of yelp or scream, then saw Brown escaping over her back fence. We found his fingerprints on the sill of the window where he climbed out and let himself down into the backyard. His hand size matched the bruises on her neck. We snagged him four days later hiding out in an encampment by the marina. He’d slipped into some hippie girl’s tent and she shrieked like hell. A bunch of Dead Heads corralled him.”

  “Did he make a statement about killing Anna? I didn’t see one in the court file.”

  “Unintelligible. He acted like he was caught by his parents after killing the family cat. And by the time the hospital got him on his meds, the public defender was representing him so we couldn’t talk to him anymore.”

  The court file had told Donnally how it ended. “Then he was found incompetent to stand trial.”

  Blaine shrugged. “We fought like hell. We had an informant in the county jail telling us that Brown was faking and that he had a fantasy that Anna wanted him to come into her bedroom to have sex with her. He strangled her when she refused.”

  “That would’ve made it a capital case.”

  B
laine smirked. “Not in California and not in Alameda County. No way a jury here would sentence a lunatic to death. Anyway, there wasn’t any forensic evidence of an attempted rape, no semen, no vaginal bruising.”

  “Maybe Brown just didn’t get very far before she started resisting.”

  “That was our theory. If he’d gone to trial we probably could’ve gotten the attempted rape in through the informant, but that didn’t happen. We lost the competency hearing. Brown came back three years later with reports that he was still incompetent so he got transferred into the civil commitment system—”

  “And no one ever bothered to evaluate him again.”

  Blaine reddened again. “That’s the way the system works.”

  “That’s the way the system doesn’t work.”

  Donnally set his coffee cup on the desk, then rose and walked to the window. He looked out over Oakland, from the hills to the bay, and north toward Berkeley.

  “And how many are there out there?” Donnally said without turning around. “Commit a murder, get declared incompetent, get sent off to some institution and forgotten.” He turned back toward Blaine. “What’s your guess? How many?”

  Blaine swallowed hard. “I … I don’t have the slightest idea.” He reached again for his telephone and punched in two numbers. “Is he in? … I need to see him.” Blaine looked at Donnally. “You want to come with me to see the boss?”

  Donnally shook his head. “Just call me when you find out where Brown is.” He then turned and walked from the office.

  As he rode the elevator down, Donnally was overcome with an amorphous rage that tried to focus on Brown, then on Blaine, and then on the court system itself. Instead it locked on a thought: if only—and painted crosshairs on Mauricio’s face.

  If only Mauricio hadn’t taken Anna to Berkeley, if only he hadn’t left her at New Sky, if only he’d gone back to get her … she’d still be alive.

  The chain of causes and effects snapped tight.

  If … only.

  And Mauricio’s “I had no choice” just wasn’t good enough.

  But as Donnally started down the steps of the courthouse, a wind whipped his face and ripped at the web of blame his mind had constructed.

  Mauricio had been a fifteen-year-old kid who’d done the best he could, but had not only been too young to decide to take a life, but too young to take his own and his sister’s lives into his hands. And that single act had dispossessed him of his family, tormented his heart, and deprived him of the good death he deserved.

  Donnally stopped on the sidewalk and stared at the lake. He tried to imagine what Anna must have looked like as Mauricio walked her past their dead father’s body and out the door and toward the highway heading north. He struggled to force his mind to compose a picture of a tiny girl with brown skin and round cheeks and black hair and dark eyes, but all that appeared was the mournful face of his own older brother, fair and angular and framed by his marine dress blue tunic and cover, who’d been killed in Vietnam when Donnally was eight years old.

  And surging outward from that image came the molten terror of his childhood, of loss and helplessness in a world spun out of control.

  An hour later, Donnally’s cell phone rang as he pulled into the driveway of his ex-fiancée’s house in San Francisco.

  “I need your promise you won’t go to the media with this,” Blaine said.

  “With what?”

  “I need to hear you say the words.”

  “Okay. No press.”

  “Sorry, man. Brown’s out.”

  Chapter 6

  The dull glaze of the owner’s eyes didn’t sharpen after Donnally spoke the name: Charles Brown.

  Lumps of skin oozed from the sleeves of the flowered shift encasing her body. The smell of coffee and urine wafted past her from inside the East Oakland group home and swirled around the porch. Cigarette butts littered the concrete landing of the three-story converted house. Two vacant-eyed men with nicotine-stained fingers sat in white plastic chairs and stared at the street, oblivious to the tension building in the doorway.

  Elsa Coady squinted toward the setting sun, then repeated: “Charles Brown … Charles Brown …”

  “The Fresno Developmental Center sent him here six years ago.”

  Her difficulty in placing the name assured Donnally that the prosecutor, busy putting together a task force to identify and hunt down all the lost defendants, hadn’t yet sent out a posse to round up Brown.

  And that was fine with Donnally. He didn’t want to give Blaine a chance to screw it up again.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “He’s not here. He walked away.” She glanced at the two men as if they were living repositories of the history of the house. “About five years ago.”

  “Didn’t you notify anyone?”

  “Who’s there to notify? If he’s the one I’m thinking of, there wasn’t nobody. He wasn’t on no probation or parole.”

  “Didn’t you know he still had a homicide case pending?”

  Elsa’s blotchy face darkened.

  “This isn’t a jail and I’m not a jailer.” Her voice hardened as she spoke. “A roof over their heads, three meals, and their meds. That’s all we do. People want to walk away, they can walk away.”

  The two sentences had a practiced feel, sounding to Donnally like she’d given that same answer many times before.

  “You still have his file?”

  “Sure. We have to keep that stuff. But I can’t show it to you.” A smirk emerged on her thin lips. “Confidentiality and all that.”

  Donnally folded his arms across his chest, then lowered his head and looked hard into her eyes.

  “Let me tell you what my concern is,” Donnally said. “In a couple of days, the press will be looking for someone to blame for Brown slipping away. It can be the court system, some weak-kneed judge, the county, the California mental health system, the Fresno Developmental Center, or it can be Elsa’s Home for Men.”

  He made a show of inspecting the weathered wooden windows, the cracked and faded pink stucco, and the two men wearing grimy surplus overcoats that looked like they hadn’t been washed since summer.

  “Who do you think all these folks are going to gang up on? You’re damn lucky I got here first.”

  Elsa bit her cheek for a moment, and then said, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Chapter 7

  Donnally separated the damp pages and hung them on a clothesline in Janie Nguyen’s unfinished basement. Some were moldy. Some were unreadable. Others were only readable against the light. It seemed to Donnally that the file, sent along with Charles Brown from the developmental center, had been stored in Elsa’s often flooded garage for the purpose of letting it dissolve into a past that no one wanted to think about.

  He called it Janie’s basement even though he still owned the house and rented it to her for just enough money to cover the mortgage, taxes, and insurance. He came down every few months to make repairs, but otherwise treated the place as hers.

  And not out of guilt. Or, at least, not out of guilt in an ordinary sense.

  He and Janie were simply permanent features of each other’s landscapes, like California place names weighted with history: Meeting of Two Springs. Creek of Sorrows. Canyon of Hunger. They both knew they wouldn’t grow old without each other, but also not quite together.

  The grinding of the garage door opener broke Donnally’s concentration, and a minute later he heard her footfalls on the wooden stairway. He glanced up at her bare calves coming into view and imagined them already wrapped around him. A few more steps and her skirt came into view and he forced his mind to change the subject.

  “You find him?” Janie asked, as she took the turn onto the concrete floor.

  “He’s in the wind.”

  Janie smiled. “More likely the bushes.”

  She held her nose when the odor of the moldy pages reached her.

  “Jeez, those stink. Why don’t you let some air in?�
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  She walked over to the workbench and pushed open the window set into the cripple wall between the foundation and the first floor of the two-story house. She turned back and pointed at the hanging sheets.

  “What’s that?”

  “Charles Brown’s file from the group home.”

  “You’re not supposed to have those.” Janie knew the rules. She was a psychiatrist at the VA hospital at Fort Miley, a half mile north. “You didn’t steal it, did you?”

  “The owner gave them to me.”

  She gave him an up-from-under look.

  “It’s true,” Donnally said. “Turns out I was the least of many other evils.”

  A gusting Pacific wind that had skimmed the beach a few blocks away, now pushed in through the window and rocked the pages on the line.

  Donnally glanced in the direction of the basement door. “You better close that or the house is going to get a dose.”

  Janie nodded, then headed toward the stairs. “Are you going to want to have dinner?” She looked back over her shoulder and winked. “Or just dessert?”

  Donnally turned back to the file. The smile that Janie left him with died when he read through the fragments of Brown’s diagnosis not obliterated by mold: bipolar … psychotic episodes … homicidal and sexual ideations.

  He held the handwritten log up to the overhead fluorescent light. The chronology showed that Brown had been sent first to Atascadero State Hospital, then on to Napa five years later, when he was considered less dangerous. Ten years after that, the doctors got his mental illness under control and sent him to the Stockton Developmental Center, hoping that despite his mental limitations, he could be trained to control his violence. But he started assaulting female patients, so they moved him on to the more secure Fresno center.

  Brown’s violent outbursts lessened until he had two consecutive trouble-free years and the Fresno Superior Court released him to a local group home. He stayed there until he got caught fondling a sometimes delusional female resident. The local DA declined to prosecute, arguing that unless the staff could prove she didn’t consent, there wasn’t a crime. He recommended justice-by-bus-ticket and Brown was sent to Elsa’s men-only home in East Oakland.