“My father did twenty-one years in San Quentin,” I said, trying to draw her out. “I think if he had to choose between dying out here and going back, he’d choose death. But he’s an old man.”
This earned me a glance, then her gaze went back to the static on the TV screen, as if those cascading patterns held some secret meaning for her.
“He was in prison for murdering my mother. He didn’t do it, but I never believed that he hadn’t. I was the one who found her, you see. For the next two decades I held to my belief. And because of this experience I learned to doubt the easy answers, even the obvious ones. No one ever knows the whole story, is what I also learned. When everyone agrees, the majority’s probably wrong. That’s all I came up here today to tell you.”
My real purpose, though, was to make her realize that the world beyond her room here was still turning. Therefore, like it or not, she was alive and had to go on living.
But she said nothing. I sat there, listening to the silence.
“I’m going to find out who you are,” I announced finally, standing up. “Next time you and I see each other, I’m going to call you by your name, and you and I are going to talk about real things, important things. Like what you’re doing here and how to get you out.”
The handcuff rattled on the bedrail. Because of the restraints and the thick bandage around her neck she couldn’t roll away from me. I checked to make sure my pen was in my pocket.
Too little, too late.
I went out and nodded to the deputy to resume his post.
I was living that year in a studio apartment in a newly remodeled high-rise in the Tenderloin, which made me a harbinger of gentrification in one of the last neighborhoods that still resembled the city in which I’d grown up. In another five years, San Francisco as I’d known it—as a regular place where working people lived—would be a collection of nostalgic images to marvel at in movies set in the past. What had once been a place was fast becoming a museum of itself, an urban playground for the rich, home only to the 1 percent and an ever-decreasing wedge of ordinary wage earners. Most of my clients couldn’t afford the price of entry, and the rest of the city was anxious to push them out.
The year before, I’d at last given up the SRO room where I’d lived after my attempt at solo practice in Oakland had gone up in smoke. Living in a hotel, even a long-term residence like the Seward, had given me a feeling of temporariness I liked. Often I’d imagined climbing into my car and driving until I reached a place where Bo Wilder couldn’t touch me. But I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my family behind.
The evening of that Wednesday after my client’s suicide attempt I met my investigator at my office.
Car was tall and lean, between forty and fifty years of age, though younger in appearance, with a shaved head and elaborate tattoo sleeves like jungle foliage. His accent was vaguely Eastern European. He’d worked cases for me on and off over the last eight years, and in the ten years before that he’d worked almost exclusively for my brother, back when Teddy had been the city’s go-to trial lawyer. The details of Car’s past remained obscure, but no prosecutor had ever succeeded in digging up dirt on him. Maybe that meant there was no dirt to dig, or else maybe Car had somehow succeeded in burying an equivocal history. In any event, he was the best investigator I’d ever worked with, even if it meant tolerating his frequent unfavorable comparisons between me and the lawyer Teddy once had been.
“So you’ve got a client who prefers to remain anonymous,” Car said, sipping his take-out coffee. “You think maybe you ought to respect her wish?”
“Respect’s got nothing to do with it. It’s my job to defend her. I guarantee you, the ADA’s going to learn her name sooner or later. I’d like to know before she does.”
“Your father can’t help you there?”
Normally Car preferred pretending our San Quentin connection didn’t exist. This was the closest allusion I’d heard him make to my new role in Wilder’s organization.
“Putting his past as a jailhouse lawyer aside, my father isn’t much help with legal work.”
Car looked at me with faint condescension before throwing a curve. “You didn’t notice you were down a pen when you walked out of that holding cell the other day?”
“Fuck you.”
The Teddy he’d once worked for, we both knew, would never have found himself gazing down at a client lying in a pool of arterial blood because of his own carelessness.
“You want me to find out who she is, okay. I can try; one-forty-five an hour plus expenses buys a lot of ‘try.’ But I can’t just fill in a blank. She didn’t give you anything solid?”
“Only the deed itself,” I said. “We’ll have to start there and work our way backward.”
“I’ve already started, thank you very much. Beginning with the victim, Randolph Edwards. Let’s assume she knew him from somewhere, that the motive was personal. By tracing his life back, we should be able to find where it intersects hers.”
“She’s got to connect with him somewhere,” I agreed. “I suppose it’s possible she never met the vic in her life, that someone hired her to do the job. Still, she hardly strikes me as a pro.”
“And if it was a contract of some kind, you’d think she’d have tried to get away.” Car said this as he made a note on his pad. “So what’s on the agenda tonight?” he asked, looking up.
“I’ve got a guy coming by. A former PD client. Name Carl Menendez. He deals when he’s holding, and spends the rest of his time hustling to get high.”
“I think I know the guy you’re talking about,” Car said, but clearly he didn’t. It probably made him uneasy that my year at the PD’s office had put me ahead of him in my familiarity with the characters who filled the streets of the Tenderloin after dark, bit players in a self-renewing, self-consuming theater of illicit commerce.
Car asked: “What do you even want me for, then, if you’ve got this guy?”
“You’re the interviewer, not me. These people’ll think Menendez might be holding, so they’ll talk to him first. He’ll vouch for you. I can’t go out on the street and butt into people’s business. That’s your line.”
“Then let me handle it my way.”
“Trust me about this guy.”
My phone buzzed before he could express any further misgivings. I parted the blinds and saw, standing below on the sidewalk facing the street, Menendez, the angle giving me a clear view of his lantern jaw, his skeleton arms, and a round bald patch in his gray-black hair. I’d met him before without ever realizing he was bald on top. Then again, he was six-foot-four.
We three sat at a table in my small conference room with its view up Mission Street, which at this hour was starting to host its own nighttime stream of commerce. He snatched a chocolate glazed from the box I’d had the foresight to pick up, biting off half.
“There had to have been fifty people within a two-block radius before she shot Edwards,” I said, explaining. “Our Jane Doe didn’t come out of nowhere. I need to trace back her movements, find out what else she was doing that night.”
“I already talked to a few people who say they saw Edwards go down,” Menendez now offered. “They were probably lying, though. A thing like that, everyone tries to say they saw it.”
Car’s boredom had morphed into a look of skeptical interest.
Menendez bit off another chunk of doughnut. “You want my help, you got to make it worth my while. Two hundred bucks. I’ll use that to get the word out, so people’ll come to me.”
I held up a hand, keeping him from telling me any more about his intended method. I pulled ten twenties from my wallet. Car rose and went to the mini-fridge for a bottle of water, his disgust apparent.
“I don’t care what you do with this,” I told Menendez. “Consider the two hundred an advance on a long night’s work. It’s your fee to spend however you want. For every genuine witness you bring to me, you’ll get twenty more. But I’m not paying you to haul in a bunch of liars. Meani
ng, it’s your job to exercise quality control.”
I could feel Menendez weighing the immediate reward of cash in his pocket against the possibilities for profit I’d sketched. Nothing stopped him from keeping the dough, buying a package of drugs, and slinging it free and clear of any obligation to me. He could double his money if all went well, but dealing was a risky business, and he had no great talent for it. Plus, he knew I had more, and he didn’t have to risk being robbed or arrested to get it. All he had to do was talk to people—an activity he was much better at than at selling drugs.
“Take me an hour to connect with my hookup and get started,” he said, decision made. “After that, piece of cake. If I were you, I’d be paying a visit to the nearest cash machine right now.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t want people who saw the shooting, or the aftermath. I know exactly what she did. I don’t need to waste time hearing about that. I want to know what she was doing before.”
“Then let’s talk price. Fifty per head, not twenty.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “And keep in mind, if this works out, I may have other jobs.”
Once Menendez was gone, Car rose. I watched him move around the room, moodily examining the shelf of law books, the view of the whores and other nighttime denizens moving through the shadows and streetlights down Mission Street.
“You want to go and keep an eye on him, feel free,” I said.
“He’ll do better on his own. I just don’t like waiting around.”
I’d given Menendez Car’s number. When he had a subject, he’d text Car, who’d meet the two at a prearranged spot and conduct his interview.
“Admit it,” I told Car. “You were at a dead end.”
He shrugged. “I spent most of today going around to all the businesses in a three-block radius from the shooting, looking at security camera footage from the hour before it happened. What I found amounts to about thirty seconds of footage of her running through the Tenderloin. I can’t place her anywhere else before she pulled the trigger.”
“There must be videos you haven’t seen.”
“Sure. Some owners wouldn’t talk, told me to come back with a subpoena or not at all. Others don’t have cameras, or their systems weren’t working that night—or so they claim. Others, the footage had already been erased.”
“So let’s assume for now that we don’t find a recording of her walking to the scene. What’s that tell us?”
“Someone dropped her off.” Car shrugged again.
Car was a superb investigator. But like all investigators, he was only as good as the attorney holding the strings. I’d let him treat me like Teddy’s little brother for most of my career; now, those days were over. In the trouble I feared was coming, I needed to be the one who called the shots.
“So who gets dropped off in the Tenderloin?” I asked, to keep the conversation going.
“Hookers. That the obvious answer you’re looking for? Does Jane seem like a hooker to you?”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “It’s possible.”
“She’s female. Great deduction. But if she was a prostitute, it’s about ninety-nine percent certain she’d have been arrested before, I don’t care how young she is.”
We were saved from rehashing the obvious by the chime of a message arriving on his cell phone. “Menendez speaks,” Car said, not bothering to conceal his relief as he headed toward the door. “Let’s see what kind of bullshit he’s selling.”
With Car gone, I eased gratefully into the familiar stillness of my office at night. In my hours I was beginning to resemble my brother, whose natural talents had been complemented by obsessive work habits. I was one of four tenants on the fifth floor. Only after I signed the lease had it occurred to me how much this office was like the one Teddy had rented before he was shot. The door from the windowless entrance hall opened onto a reception area, but having no staff, I’d slid the reception desk against the wall, where it supported a flat-screen TV.
My private office, located directly off the conference room through a door to the right, was my sanctuary, lined with bookshelves on two sides. There was also a couch with nice firm cushions on which I slept at least one night per week. This left little floor space, making the office seem like a cockpit from which, after twelve or fourteen hours in my desk chair, I seemed to be hurtling through the city lights.
I turned on the desk lamp and slid the thumb drive Car had left me into my computer’s USB slot. It held half a dozen files, all the surveillance video footage he’d located during his afternoon tour of local businesses. I watched each clip, confirming Car’s assessment that each showed her running, just as witnesses had claimed. But none of the videos showed what had made her run. It was as if she’d materialized out of thin air to gun Edwards down, then had been unable to repeat the trick and disappear.
Or maybe getting caught was part of the job. But in that case, why the suicide attempt? And if she was going to kill herself, why not simply turn the gun around and eat the bullet after completing the execution?
The answer wasn’t in any of the video clips Car had obtained, and I finally forced myself to stop studying them. Whatever her secret was, it was safe from me for now.
CHAPTER 6
It was late when Car finally reported in—just after 2:45 A.M. I was dozing on the sofa, my laptop warm as a cat on my chest. His voice was tense, low. “I’ve found someone worth talking to,” he said.
Following his suggestion, I went to meet Car and the witness at the all-night Wendy’s off Market Street. Still blinking away sleep as I arrived, I found him crammed into a booth near the back with Menendez and another man. As I approached, Menendez slid out, nodded to me, and left the premises. I took his spot.
The guy was about forty-five, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with clear, intelligent eyes that held a mixture of guardedness, despair, and longing, framed by a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with a bent stem that caused them to tilt up on one side.
“No names,” he said. “I’m not a junkie. I just, you know …”
“I understand,” I told him. “There’s no need to explain.”
But he needed to make clear he wasn’t one of the lowlifes I was used to dealing with. “I’ve got a good job, driving a delivery truck for a company in the South Bay. If they find out where I
was that night, they might start asking questions, make me submit to a drug test. I can’t have that.”
“This is off the record,” I reassured him. I glanced at Car, who gave me a nod, which I interpreted as meaning he could ID the guy in case we needed to subpoena him. If this guy turned out to offer valuable testimony, I wouldn’t hesitate to call him to the stand. At the same time, I wasn’t recording every word he said.
“You were in the Tenderloin last Friday night?” I asked.
He nodded. “I had this knee injury, and I got hooked on oxy. When the prescription ran out I tried so hard to quit, but I couldn’t. Now the only thing that keeps me going …”
“Is heroin.” I finished the sentence for him. “I used to hear that story every day. Or a version of it. In my opinion, what the medical industry’s doing with these narcotic painkillers is a crime. Big Pharma convinces the docs to prescribe them, but, at the end of the day, the patients are left holding the bag. And it’s they, not the docs or the drug companies, who end up taking the blame.”
He licked his lips. It wasn’t hard to perceive his craving for a high.
“Just like what I told Mr. Car here, I wasn’t anywhere near the shooting. I was over in the TL, trying to scope out some action quick so I could get out of there, get back home, and have my fix. Soon as I heard the pop, all the people yelling, I took off in the opposite direction. I’ve been in way too much shit in my life.”
“It’s what you might have seen before the shooting that interests me.”
“I saw the girl, if that’s what you’re getting at. Later on, when they showed her mug shot on the news, I remembered. She loo
ked so young, is why she stuck out in my mind. And she didn’t have the same expression on her face that everyone else down there has got. They’re either jonesing or selling. I had to step out of her way, and she didn’t even look at me as she went past. Like she was on some kind of mission.”
“Was she walking or running?”
“Walking,” the witness said.
“What was she wearing?”
He easily rattled off the correct details: black hooded sweatshirt and jeans.
“She had a nose stud,” he added after a moment’s thought. “I remember noticing that. Just a little metal sphere on the outside, like a ball bearing. It surprised me, because I usually think of that as more of a white-girl thing.”
I had a copy of her property inventory in my email, and was able to call it up on my phone. Sure enough, one nose stud was listed among the belongings that had been confiscated from her at the jail. I tucked the phone away again and nodded for him to go on. I figured there must be something more. Car hadn’t called me out here in the middle of the night just to meet someone who’d seen Jane Doe before the murder.
“Tell him what you told me,” Car said.
“Okay,” the guy said. He swallowed. “There was someone with her when she walked past me. A white guy. He had his arm around her and was talking to her as they went. Then before they parted he gave her a little pat on the back, and he turned and came back the way they’d come. Walking faster now.”
“Can you describe him?”
“About five-eight, stocky. Maybe thirty, thirty-five years old, with a lot of muscles up top. The kind you only get with free weights and steroids.”
I looked into his face, the wheels turning in my brain. I was all too aware of the corrupting role suggestion plays in any investigation. For that reason, I was exceedingly cautious when it came to the possibility of tampering with the unsullied memory of any witness, especially one whose story might later come back to bite my client in the ass. The worst thing I could do now would be to plant an idea in the man’s head that hadn’t been there when I sat down.
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