A Criminal Defense Read online

  He’d become a cop as a form of rebellion, and he recognized it at the time. It had been against his filmmaker father, a man who treated fiction as more real than fact because it made possible the evasion from responsibility he’d sought for most of his life. For his father, justice had been no more than a kind of fictive irony, a subversion of cause and consequence, of effect and responsibility, because real-world justice would’ve meant facing up to what he’d done to his older son. Donnally’s older brother had believed the propaganda his father had created as a press officer in Saigon during the Vietnam War. His father had falsely claimed that North Vietnamese regulars had massacred a group of Buddhist monks near the DMZ, and the lie not only provoked worldwide outrage, but persuaded his brother to enlist. He learned the truth—that the killers had been Korean mercenaries working for the U.S.—just days before he was killed in an ambush.

  Years later, his father became a movie director, playing out his evasions on film, and liked to say that Hollywood wasn’t a place, but an idea, while Donnally had always thought of it as no more than a patch of concrete and viewed the motives of those who worked there as more base than artistic—and his father was proof of that. After all, what was post-Vietnam Hollywood, the years in which his father first achieved fame, but an escape from reality into drugs, sex, and money.

  Donnally pushed aside the memory and worked his way back to where their conversation had started, with Jackson and what had connected her to Mark Hamlin, where it began, how it grew, its character just before his death and whether it might have transformed afterward.

  “What you’re saying,” Donnally said, “is that I need to understand Jackson’s transition from victim of a police crime into …” He spread open his hands on the table. “Into what?”

  “Someone whose identity was somehow tied to Hamlin’s ends-justifies-the-means mentality.”

  Donnally had the feeling Janie was right. That could be the reason why Jackson could be terrified of being prosecuted for the illegal means Hamlin had chosen, but could still be loyal to him.

  “Even though,” Donnally said, “whatever ends were hers over the twenty years she was with him may not have been his anymore when he died.”

  “But I suspect that she doesn’t quite see it yet. And if you push her too hard, she’ll never let herself see it. It would be just too terrifying.”

  Chapter 14

  The note on Donnally’s windshield had read:

  We decided to flatten only one tire so you could use your spare to get yourself out of town. Next time …

  Donnally hadn’t noticed the listing right rear end of his truck when he walked out of the house and into the predawn shadows at 7 A.M. He felt a surge of anger as he examined the tire under the streetlight and realized that he’d overlooked a ground rule when he met with Judge McMullin. Who was going to pay for the damage.

  The note was still pinned under his wiper blade. Four thoughts came to him as he retrieved it.

  The first was that whoever left it probably wrote for a living. They didn’t split the infinitive and they knew how to use an ellipsis.

  The second was that he wished Hamlin’s friends and enemies would stop leaving notes.

  The third was that the absent words “Fuck you, asshole” meant that the author probably hadn’t been one of Hamlin’s clients.

  The fourth was that the “we” was really an “I.”

  Twenty minutes later, Donnally had changed the tire and was driving toward Hamlin’s office. He parked in an underground garage up the block, then walked over and waited for Takiyah Jackson behind a pillar by the building entrance.

  Donnally spotted her coming down the sidewalk before she noticed him. He stepped toward the brass and glass door as if he was just arriving, then looked back as she made the turn, and smiled.

  “Good timing,” Donnally said.

  Jackson didn’t smile back. She pointed upward, toward the higher floors. “You setting up shop?”

  “Might as well. Looks like I’ll be in town awhile. Can I buy you some coffee?”

  “I thought you cops liked to start the grilling cold, then offered coffee as a pretended act of friendship to fudge up a little warm feeling in the interrogation room.”

  “Crooks never fell for that except on television. I always relied on charm.”

  Jackson rolled her eyes. “I’ll take the coffee instead.”

  They turned together and walked to the Starbucks on the corner. She ordered regular house blend. He ordered the same out of solidarity, otherwise he would’ve gotten the decaf. He’d learned over the years that it wasn’t enough just to break bread, but you had to break the same bread, or to drink the same coffee.

  Sometimes he didn’t want to try to rely on charm alone, and this was one of those times.

  Jackson raised her cup in what Donnally took to be a silent toast to Hamlin, then they both took sips and headed back out the door.

  “Mark must have really trusted you,” Donnally said as they headed back up the sidewalk.

  “How do you figure?”

  “We found your fingerprints on the cash in his safe.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t have trusted me. How do you know I didn’t reach in and grab some for myself?”

  Donnally glanced over at her and smiled. “A do-it-yourself severance package?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ve been around long enough, seen enough screw-ups by crooks, to have learned how to cover your tracks by wearing gloves.”

  “You find anyone else’s prints?”

  “Yes.”

  Jackson stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Donnally to stop and face her. Office workers brushed by them, some making a point of bumping their shoulders. Donnally pointed toward the front window of a copy service and they stepped over to it.

  “It really wasn’t a yes or no question,” Jackson said.

  “How about you tell me whose prints they are.”

  “It’s better if you take the lead. I’m not gonna snitch on anybody.”

  “Even if they did something wrong?”

  “Who am I to judge? People make mistakes.”

  “Like Sheldon Galen?”

  Jackson took in a long breath and looked past Donnally up the sidewalk. He noticed part of what had made him think of Angela Bassett when he’d first looked at her. The severity of her nose and cheeks and her eyes, less windows than screens. He wondered whether over the years her face had become her or she had become her face.

  Finally, Jackson exhaled and said, “That’s a complicated one. Sheldon showed up a while back all tense and excited. Really pressured, like there was a lot on the line. Him and Mark talked in the office for a long time and then Mark cleaned out the safe and gave him all the cash inside. They were in such a tizzy I thought maybe they’d landed a big case and Mark was giving him his cut upfront.”

  “That matches what I’ve heard,” Donnally said. “That Mark often hired Galen to work on cases with him. But I’m not sure how money with Galen’s fingerprints ended up in Mark’s safe. It should’ve been all outgoing, and none incoming.”

  “That’s not the end of the story.”

  Jackson took a sip of her coffee. Donnally thought she was buying time to decide how much of the tale to tell. He didn’t imagine he’d get the whole thing. Jackson wasn’t there yet.

  “A week later the money was back. I asked Mark about it. He told me it was some kind of loan. I flashed on how Sheldon acted when he came for it and realized what I was prepared to see as tension and excitement because of all the cases they’d worked on over the years might have been desperation.”

  “And when the cash showed up again?”

  “I figured that Sheldon had returned the money, or at least part of it.”

  “How much?”

  “I think about eighty thousand dollars.”

  “Why do you think it was Sheldon?”

  “There were a bunch of conference calls the day before. Sheldon, Mark, and a
bunch of the lawyers in The Crew.”

  “The Crew?”

  “A group of old lefty lawyers from the sixties and seventies. I got the feeling they took up a collection so Sheldon could pay Mark back, because the money showed up right afterwards.”

  “Is that the same money that I took out of the safe yesterday?”

  “Some.” Jackson stared past Donnally again, but this time her eyes didn’t seem to register the commuter traffic on the street or the office workers rushing by. Whatever she was seeing was playing out in her head.

  After a few moments, she looked back at Donnally.

  “Sheldon is a weasel. He graduated from NYU law school and worked as a court-appointed lawyer back there for a couple of years. Why he showed up in San Francisco, I don’t know. But he knew how to talk the talk, how to pump up his credibility. It was all about how he’d represented terrorism suspects and about all his trial victories. It was all bullshit. He only represented terrorism suspects because they couldn’t afford their own lawyers and the federal judges needed attorneys who’d work cheap.”

  “How’d you find out the truth about him?”

  “Him and Mark did a heroin importation case back there a couple of years ago. They were brought in by a local lawyer. I talked to her paralegal. She told me all his money came from CJA.”

  Donnally cast her a puzzled look.

  “Federal Criminal Justice Act. Indigent defense. Sheldon never had a paying client until he came out here.”

  “What kind of weaseling led him to need eighty thousand dollars all of a sudden?”

  Jackson shrugged. “I told you. I ain’t a snitch.”

  Donnally anticipated the dodge and had his answer prepared. As he readied himself to give it, he wondered whether it had been Jackson who’d left the “Follow the Money” note in the envelope under his doormat, a way of snitching without being seen to snitch.

  Donnally backed off the idea of pressuring her; instead he said, “Then point me in the right direction so I can find out myself.”

  She paused, then aimed her finger down the street in the direction from which they’d come.

  “Go see Warren Bohr. His office is in the Frederickson Building. He put some money in, so he must know why.”

  Donnally recognized the name. Bohr had been a defense lawyer who represented Black Panthers and other radical political groups in the sixties, then criminal defendants in big drug and racketeering cases in the seventies and eighties, and finally migrated into public interest law after he grew wealthy enough that he didn’t need the money. The last time Donnally had heard his name was before he’d left San Francisco, when Bohr had filed a suit to stop the federal government from leasing part of Alcatraz Island to the Marriott corporation to build a hotel. But that was fifteen years ago.

  Donnally glanced at his watch. It was 8:25.

  “What time does he get in?”

  “You know how these old guys are. In at 7 A.M., and tell everyone they meet that they’ve never missed a day of work in the gazillion years they’ve been practicing.” She gestured with her cup toward Bohr’s office. “He’ll be there.”

  Chapter 15

  Donnally headed back up the sidewalk toward the Frederickson Building. Every cop in town knew the place, a three-story Victorian composed of tiny offices filled with aging sole practitioners. Most were so lousy at law that their mortgage payments depended on indigent defense cases, state and federal court appointments, for clients either without the money, or without the sense to borrow the money, to hire someone competent.

  Donnally hated their pretense. The court-appointed attorneys swaggered around the courthouses like they had real paying customers. In the end, nearly all their clients pled out. The defendants were unwilling to risk trials with appointed help, and the DAs and federal prosecutors were willing to cut deals just to clear the calendar. The attorney who managed the Frederickson Building set the tone for the rest. Donnally had heard him praised by prosecutors as a clown with great client control, and they were willing to put up with his clowning because he never failed to find a way to make his client cave.

  There were exceptions, good defense lawyers who were bad at self-marketing or who were committed to defending the poor, but most of the appointed lawyers were less advocates than fixers.

  The whole game of deal cutting had pissed off Donnally and the other cops in the department, at least with respect to the cases they cared about, because some victims needed their day in court, needed to have their suffering seen, not reduced to a penal code section entered on a form and passed from judge to clerk to file and then consigned into the dark eternity of a storage room.

  Donnally suspected that were it not for Hamlin lifting him up, if only to use him as a tool, Sheldon Galen would have spent his career as one of those Frederickson Building lawyers. And Galen had to know and dread that Hamlin might someday decide he was done with him and drop him back onto the pile.

  As Donnally approached the edge of the financial district, he wondered why Bohr still had his office in there. Bohr had to feel like the odd man out since he couldn’t have much in common with the hand-to-mouth lawyers that worked out of the place. He wondered whether Bohr stayed there because he liked knowing he was the guy all the others wanted to be when they were young, and maybe having him around made them feel like they had made it. Maybe he was an artifact, or a totem, from a time when law was a mission in San Francisco, instead of the chiseling it too often revealed itself to be.

  On the other hand, maybe he was still there only because he had always been there, like a backyard tree stump that was just too much trouble to haul away.

  Donnally paused at the bottom of the front steps and called Navarro.

  “You find out anything about whether there was any kind of problem between Hamlin and Sheldon Galen?”

  “Not between them. Only between Galen and an old client that threatened to sue him. But it settled before the papers got filed, so I couldn’t find out the details. His client was charged with beating up a security guard who wouldn’t let him take his dog into a bank. Galen lost the trial. Maybe the guy wanted his money back. His name was Fisher except with a C, Tink Fischer. I’ll text you an address when I come up with one.”

  Donnally heard the sound of papers rustling through the fine static on the line.

  “We got a few more latents off the money,” Navarro said. “I’ll have the results later this morning. But no guarantee that we’ll be able to ID them.”

  Donnally then told Navarro about the note telling him to follow the money and the slashed tire warning him to leave.

  Navarro laughed. “Maybe somebody’s telling you to follow the money all the way out of town.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Donnally said. “You were always good at putting one and one together.”

  “I’ll make sure it’s not two and two. I’ll have the beat cops do drive-bys for the next few days, see if they can snag whoever he is, or at least scare him away.”

  Chapter 16

  Old-people smell. That’s what it was called. Donnally recognized it at first breath when he entered Warren Bohr’s reception area. It was the background odor of nearly every elderly suicide he’d ever investigated.

  It wasn’t just the dust on the desk and in the built-in bookcases, or the grime worn into the marble floor, or the months of legal newspapers stacked on the low table in front of the leather couch.

  It was something else.

  It was what it meant: the kind of cognitive impairment that always seemed to go with it. That had been the first sign that his grandmother was heading toward Alzheimer’s, what the doctors called impaired odor recognition.

  Bohr must have heard the door open, for he appeared at his inner office door.

  “Can I help you?” Bohr asked, looking up from under eyebrows lowered by his hunched back.

  Donnally recognized the middle-aged lawyer under the smudge and tarnish of old age. His wool suit draped his thinned body, his once
angular nose had softened, his ears drooped like overgrown botanical specimens, and his once black hair had turned fungus yellow-gray.

  “I hope so.” Donnally crossed the room and shook his hand, saying, “I’m Harlan Donnally; Judge McMullin appointed me special master in the Hamlin case.”

  “I didn’t expect someone would be coming by so soon.”

  “So soon?”

  “You couldn’t have run out of leads this fast, that you needed to start shaking the bushes to see what falls out.”

  Donnally pointed through the door and toward Bohr’s desk. “Can we?”

  Bohr nodded and led him inside his wood-paneled office. Donnally waited until Bohr shuffled his way around to his high-back chair, then sat down facing him. Hanging on the wall behind the lawyer were photos of him with former mayors George Moscone and Willie Brown, Harvey Milk, César Chávez, Carol Doda, and Eldridge Cleaver.

  “I can save you some time and trouble,” Bohr said. “I hadn’t spoken to Mark in a year.”

  Donnally raised up his hands in a football timeout motion, then realized that it might have been preemptive.

  The old-people smell. Maybe Bohr didn’t remember.

  “I understood you spoke to him within the last few months.”

  Bohr glanced over at his wall calendar. It hadn’t been turned in half a year. He sighed. “That keeps happening.” He looked back at Donnally. “Refresh me.”

  “I was told that you participated in a conference call about money. Somebody needing money real bad and real quick.”

  Bohr nodded. “I remember. Sheldon Galen.” He pretended to spit. “That putz. The idiot borrowed from a client, then couldn’t pay it back. Could’ve lost his bar card for doing it.”

  “Why’d you help him out?”

  “I didn’t. Mark stepped in right away and paid the client to keep him from suing Galen. The rest of The Crew then put in money so Mark wouldn’t be out on a limb alone.” Bohr glanced at the calendar again. “I think Mark was supposed to pay me back by now.”