"Is it pertinent to this case?"
"Yes, it is."
Daggers from Sherenian, looks of horror from Bearden.
A few dozen people in the courtroom sensed something happening and stopped, waiting for the next move. I made a point of passing the defense table on my way to the bench. Stopping barely two feet away, I looked up at the clock, then looked first Bearden and then Sherenian straight in the eye.
"Remember the time and the date, gentlemen," I said, nodding toward the clock. "It's the exact moment when your bullshit came to an end."
Vince and I approached Judge Walters.
"Your Honor," Vince said to Walters, "I have a written motion requesting you to have two deputies accompany Mr. Fagen here to the following banks—there are eleven in all—for the purpose of removing the contents of certain safe-deposit boxes and returning them to Mrs. Farragut. I have Mrs. Farragut's signature on an affidavit and power of attorney to Mr. Fagen and myself."
"That's an unusual request, Mr. Halloran. Personal property is not usually the jurisdiction of the marshal's office, nor of the court, unless there's a legal matter involved. You better have some good grounds, Counselor."
"I do, Your Honor," Vincent continued. "We believe that Mr. Sherenian and Mr. Bearden conspired to convict their own client, that they met with and bribed Tommy Rivera to offer perjured testimony, in hopes that Mrs. Farragut would be sent to prison. Had that happened, Mr. Sherenian would have been executor of William Farragut's estate and would have destroyed the personal diaries that Mr. Farragut kept in those safety deposit boxes listed in our request. There are a number of crimes, we believe, detailed in those diaries, and Mr. Sherenian wanted desperately to keep them from being made public."
Walters looked at Halloran with astonishment, then over at Bearden and Sherenian, who were already packing up and getting ready to run.
"Mr. Sherenian, Mr. Bearden. Please wait a moment," said Walters. I looked at them and winked.
"I've heard some outrageous charges in my brief time, Mr. Halloran, but you're bucking for the blue ribbon. Let's stick with the issue here: what proof do you have that Sherenian and Bearden bribed Mr. Rivera?"
I pulled out the photos of the meeting at the Woodside house and the hotel tape recording from Sherenian's safe, as Vincent explained that Sherenian knew all along that Colleen never offered Tommy money to kill her husband.
Walters really liked the photo of Bearden holding out the briefcase to Tommy while Sherenian shook Tommy's hand. I even gave her records of all the stuff Tommy bought with the money, the new suits and the silk boxer shorts and all.
"Bailiff, please take Mr. Sherenian and Mr. Bearden into custody."
That really started the place rocking again. Walters gave up trying to contain it.
"How long have you known about this, Mr. Fagen?" she asked.
"Mr. Fagen is not an officer of the court, Your Honor," Halloran answered for me. "He came to me this morning with this evidence, and I drafted these documents today." I just smiled sheepishly. Walters knew I'd gotten away with one.
"Any more surprises, gentlemen?"
I was on a roll. "Nothing big, Judge Walters, but we're looking into the possibility that Bearden and perhaps even Mr. Sherenian murdered a few people. At the request of Supervisor Helen Smidge."
"That's not funny, Mr. Fagen."
"I know, Your Honor. Especially when you see the evidence we're accumulating and you find out who else is involved."
"Humor me."
"Inspector John Naftulin, Assistant Coroner Michael Wentworth—"
"If you have any evidence to support these wild accusations I want it turned over to the district attorney's office immediately, or I'll hold you both in contempt."
"It'll be our pleasure, Judge Walters," Halloran told her, "but we need those diaries from the safe-deposit boxes to do it."
She speed-read the order and signed it.
Chapter 36
By calling the banks from the courthouse and telling their officers we had a court order to remove the contents of certain safe-deposit boxes and an escort of two marshals, Vince Halloran, Zane Neidlinger, and I were able to collect 138 diaries bound in black, blue, and brown leather. The diaries went back to 1886, the year William Farragut I started the family tradition. Some years were so busy they needed more than one diary. They filled the entire trunk of Vince's Mercedes.
I pulled out the ones covering the years I was most interested in: 1906, to see if there was any mention of the incident involving my grandfather, and the five years preceding Warren Dillon's murder of Mayor DiMarco and the five years after, up until Dillon's parole and alleged suicide. I also took the diary for the last year of William Farragut IV's miserable life.
The remainder was locked into an antique four-ton Wells Fargo safe in the basement of Vince Halloran's house in Pacific Heights, where Zane Neidlinger would spend the weekend getting an eyeful and a bellyful.
Slipping Colleen past the media had been surprisingly easy for Martha, Arnie, Henry, and Phillip. When I returned home that evening, their shouts of congratulations rattled the windows, hitting a 9.1 on the We-Kicked-Their-Ass scale.
That evening, Colleen and I took my Corvette to Santa Cruz, escorted the entire way by Arnie and Henry in the Firenze Plumbing van.
Colleen had bribed Virginia Riley, her retired schoolteacher friend, to let us have her Victorian mansion in Capitola by buying her a plane ticket to Seattle so she could see her sons and her grandchildren. We spent the next two days, Saturday and Sunday, eating, falling in love, fucking, reading the Farragut diaries, falling in love, fucking, watching the news, fucking, planning our lives, falling in love, and fucking.
When I told Colleen about Calvin's plot, about his bribing Rivera to testify against her, the withholding of the Candira information, and the Sausalito hotel tapes, she sagged into a chair, speechless for almost an hour. Her dismay at my withholding the information from her vanished quickly. She was too happy to hate me.
We drank a toast to the news-at-eleven shot of Calvin and Bearden being taken from the courthouse in handcuffs, followed by a clip of two burly cops dragging a screaming Tommy Rivera up the steps of the city jail.
William II's 1906 diary provided a great deal of insight into the murder of my great-granduncle Byron "Bunky" Fallon. According to numerous entries, Byron had waged a lengthy battle to bring down political boss Adam Rolf and his puppet mayor, Eugene Schmitz. But Byron allegedly fell off a launch in San Francisco Bay en route to deliver the arrest warrants on April 17, 1906 – the day before the great San Francisco Earthquake struck. It was to be the greatest corruption trial in American history, a plot that was hatched in Theodore Roosevelt's office at the White House. But the earthquake, and Byron's death, gave Rolf and Schmitz a chance at rehabilitation by painting themselves as the 'heros' of the earthquake and fires, the latter which burned for three days. Fires that burned because Mayor Schmitz let the Army run around with dynamite, blasting wood frame buildings and spreading the conflagration.
When Byron drowned, his son Hunter – my granduncle – and his partner, Francis Fagen – my namesake grandfather – took over the investigation sought to prove that Adam Rolf was behind Byron's death. They never proved it. But when Rolf and Schmitz were toppled from power during the corruption trials that took place during the rebuilding of the city, the Farraguts moved into the vacuum by bribing city officials for one construction project after another. Since that time, their power had been second to none.
Farragut's own handwritten missives revealed a soul as twisted as any of his numerous progeny. One of his favorite pastimes was buying runaway teenage girls from a flock of kidnappers/procurers, keeping them in a Sausalito brothel and forcing them into sexual servitude when the urge overcame him. My forebears tried in vain to put him away for that as well, and failed.
As for my own war with William IV, it's too bad he died, because I might have gotten him thirty or forty thousand years in prison for the b
ribes, extortion, kickbacks, tax evasion, money laundering, and strong-arming that started when he was still in college.
Among the recipients of the felonious Farragut largess were more than a few cops, including my favorite Inspector John Naftulin—two judges, a San Francisco assistant DA, Assistant Coroner Michael Wentworth, a former state attorney general, several California state senators, a U.S. senator, two congressmen, and, of course, the delightful supervisor for life, Miss Helen Smidge. No wonder Farragut worked so many hours; he had a lot of mouths to feed.
Willy IV and Smidge had also orchestrated the murder of Charles Simcic, after Simcic tried to extort money from Farragut in exchange for a promise to keep Farragut's affair with Lynne McBain a secret, as well as the murder of Flynn Pooley, who dared to tell San Franciscans that the sky as well as the earth would fall if they built high-rises along the Market Street corridor.
Writing in the diaries, Farragut was lavish with detail, exorbitant in his praise for his own genius. I had to give him credit for the latter. Keeping it all a secret had been his family's twisted masterpiece.
The one thing I'd hoped to prove was that he and Smidge had been directly involved in the murder of Mayor DiMarco, but that turned out not to be the case. The key word being directly.
There were pages and pages, chronicling the long and frightening involvement of Farragut and Smidge with Warren Dillon.
It had taken considerable maneuvering by both Smidge and Farragut to get Dillon accepted into the police force, for several of his fellow officers knew of Dillon's high school propensity for getting drunk and bashing blacks and gays with baseball bats and five-irons.
"He was perfect," William IV stated in one entry, "and Helen recognized it when he was still in high school. Handsome, wellspoken, a sports hero, a poster boy for those old-fashioned yahoo values we can still market by the carload, regardless of what lurks beneath. We coached him endlessly, got him into the department, made him a spokesman for traditional mores, and only a few of us knew the unstable, hate-mongering psychopath that he really was."
From the moment that DiMarco was elected, they encouraged—and financed—Warren Dillon's campaign of hatred against him.
When Dillon was fired from the department for receiving bribes from several of Farragut's cronies to cover up everything from money laundering to hate crimes, Smidge, Sherenian, and Farragut negotiated his resignation, avoiding an embarrassing dismissal.
"We really worked on him after that," Farragut wrote, "we told him it was the mayor's fault, that the old queer hated him, that DiMarco alone could give him his pension and his shield back but was out to destroy him and his family."
An entry dated the day after the murder read, "I guess poor Warren just snapped. Today he crawled through a window at City Hall and put five shots in His Honor. My heart is broken, the champagne is chilling."
Another entry detailed the fix in his trial, the travesty of justice that allowed Dillon to serve only four years.
"We owned everything and everybody," Farragut stated. "We either bought them or convinced them that poor Warren was a victim, not a criminal. Just another Bible-quoting, tie-wearing, hardworking white heterosexual gone temporarily over the edge from junk food, job stress, and too much TV. It was our finest moment. Half the investigating team, the judge, and incompetent prosecutor:it was our tune they danced to. That's the secret to the family's hundred years of success: you deify the dishonest and then pander to the gullible. Progress is our biggest enemy."
He concluded with, "Even the jury was shocked when they heard the sentence that Dillon got. Had they known, every one of them would have voted for first-degree murder instead of manslaughter."
After parole, they went at Dillon relentlessly, telling him a "liberal hit squad" of "queers and Communists" had a contract on his life, until finally he committed suicide.
Neither Smidge nor Farragut had held the smoking gun, they had been too clever. All they were guilty of, as far as involvement in the murder, was a well-orchestrated campaign of feeding the hope and hatred to a pinstripe suit with a white-hooded mind.
But the trial was different. Farragut's notes on the corruption and co-opting of the trial were everything I'd hoped for. When the sections were published, everyone would know that I been fired unjustly, that I was not a lunatic, that justice had been raped on that horrible day in San Francisco.
I went to bed that night and slept the sleep of vindication—Colleen and I were both too tired to do it again.
Chapter 37
We returned from Santa Cruz to San Francisco on Monday morning, driving at an almost leisurely pace north on Highway 1. We talked about our plans for leaving the city, for hiding out in the Italian Alps until the fury expired, which we reckoned would be ten years at least.
I turned Colleen over to Martha, Arnie, Henry, and Phil when we arrived in San Francisco. She had a lot of banks to visit, a lot of papers to sign to free up her property. She was making arrangements to sell everything, to give a tithe to a dozen charities, which would come to a good thirty million dollars. Later she planned to give a lot more. Christmas was coming early for a lot of people who needed it. I sat in my house, alone for the first time in weeks, looking at it the way a college kid does when returning home for his first vacation. Everything seemed different, strange, as though I'd been gone a long time instead of a few days.
Somewhere in the late afternoon, I opened the diary covering William Farragut IV's last days on Earth, wondering what he'd been up to before he died.
It was then, while reading the pages of his last diary, that a tiny memo gave me my biggest shock.
At six thirty, Colleen arrived at the house, escorted by the City Lights crew. She gave me a check for one million dollars. I handed pre-written checks to Arnie, Martha, and Henry for $166,666.66 each, thanking them for their help, and asked Arnie to wait downstairs for me.
I took Colleen upstairs and looked at her. She sensed trouble, but I could see she didn't want to speak if she didn't have to. "I know," I said.
"What do you know?" she asked.
"About the plates."
She held her head down in shame. "How do you know about the plates?"
"Your husband was fanatical about his diaries. He recorded everything. One of the last notes he entered on the day he was murdered mentioned Consuela's brother driving from San Jose to pick up Consuela and take the plates back to his shop. Consuela's brother works for a silversmith, he's an expert on cleaning and restoration. William gave him five hundred dollars cash as a down payment. Candira Anne Chandler and Magdallena Mason never stole the plates, never sold one of them to Oscar Appell. You had them hidden after the murder. Tell me the story. Don't leave anything out."
It took her a few moments before she could speak. "William and I were arguing in his room, as I said. I found out that day that he had evicted some old man from an apartment he owned. The old man had lived there for thirty-five years and couldn't afford a forty-dollar rent increase. The old man hung himself in the apartment.
"William's words were, 'One less parasite on social security'. I screamed at him, and he screamed back. In the middle of the argument he went downstairs to get another drink. When he walked into the den, he surprised two burglars. When they ran he grabbed his gun and chased them through the back yard until they made it over the wall."
"I watched the whole thing from my window upstairs. He looked up and saw me and he screamed, 'Get down here, you fucking bitch, you whore'!"
"I went down. He was crazy, he thought I'd sent them. He thought they were the 'trash' that I was giving his money to, and this was how they wanted to pay him back. He threw the gun at me. I ducked—it just missed my head. Then he slapped me across the face, just like my stepfather did when he tried to rape me when I was fifteen."
"I went berserk. Somehow I got away from William. I grabbed the gun, pointed it at him, screaming I would kill him if he ever touched me again."
"He dared me to do it, he called me a
gutless tramp, a whore, he started toward me."
"I shot him twice."
The tears were streaming. She looked at me like a child, totally lost and helpless.
"I was hysterical. I didn't think anyone could hear the shots. After a few minutes, I checked his pulse . . . An hour later Consuela called. I asked her and her brother to come up, to help me. When they got there, they told me not to admit to anything. They said if the police caught the burglars, the burglars would deny it, and I would deny it, and maybe they wouldn't be able to pin it on anyone."
"But the burglars hadn't touched or taken anything. To make it look better, I did that lousy job faking the burglary—my heart almost stopped when Inspector Naftulin figured it out. Afterward, I took a shower for thirty minutes, I washed my clothes, I sent Consuela and her brother back to San Jose. They're the only ones who know the truth."
"And you kept the plates."
"I kept the plates in San Jose, in Consuela's brother's house. He adored me. I'd helped him and his family out a dozen times."
"And what about Magdallena, Candira, the pawnbroker? Or should I figure it out, and you stop me if I'm wrong?"
She nodded, unable to continue.
"You knew if the burglars were never found, you'd be dead meat. You knew the burglars were women, but you couldn't admit it because you'd have to admit having seen them, and if you saw them, you'd have to explain why you didn't call the cops or come down to check on your husband. You waited to call until the next morning because you were scared, because you had to think everything through."
"When Hayden Phillips and the cops couldn't find the burglars, you came to me. Did you suspect Calvin was doing a job on you?"
"I suspected the cops, the DA, everyone but him. He was so supportive, so helpful when I got arrested. I wouldn't have made it as far as I did without him. I still have a hard time believing it."
"So you hired me because you knew my desire to redeem myself would mean you could be sure I wouldn't be bought off by someone."
Bohemian Heart Page 22
