by Steven Gore
She sat down in the chair to his right. “You really didn’t expect him to admit it, did you?”
Donnally pulled back and looked at her. “What?”
“At the beginning, they almost never do.”
CHAPTER 16
Donnally slipped his gun and badge case into the glove compartment as he turned inland from the Marin Rod and Gun Club along San Rafael Bay and down Main Street toward San Quentin Prison. He couldn’t take a chance one of the trustees collecting trash in the parking lot or sweeping the sidewalks might spot him and make a move to grab them after he entered the building.
The badge and ID: a prisoner’s ticket to walk out.
The gun: a correctional officer’s way out in a body bag.
Donnally cut down to the waterside lot just before the main gate across from the post office, then walked up to the hallway outside the visitor processing office. He filled out the visitor’s form and sat down on the bench along with relatives of death row inmates waiting to get buzzed in and processed through security.
The best Ramon Navarro could do for him was get him scheduled to meet Israel Dominguez in the family visiting room, the interviewing cages being reserved for attorneys, their paralegals, private investigators, and psychologists. Navarro also reviewed the list of inmates scheduled to have visitors to make sure none had been sentenced out of San Francisco and might have grudges hard enough toward Donnally that they’d fight through the guards to get at him and get even.
Death row inmates could only be executed once, so taking out Donnally in revenge for putting them on the row wouldn’t make their punishment any worse.
Donnally noticed he was the only male over the age of seven waiting. The rest were wives, mothers, and children, all weary eyed from long drives from their faraway homes to the only prison in the state housing condemned men. All the women carried clear plastic purses with their cash and ID inside. Some of the younger ones wore tattoos, none wore jewelry, and the older women’s breasts sagged in the absence of the support from underwire bras that would’ve set off the metal detector and barred their entry. Donnally had noticed them closing their jackets or sweaters and folding their arms over their chests when he entered.
A guard came to the window and pointed at Donnally. He rose. The door lock was already buzzing by the time he reached it. He felt the eyes of the women needling his back, asking how come he got to go in first since they’d all arrived before him. Because he had no expectation of accomplishing anything in the meeting with Dominguez, he had no explanation he felt he could offer them to justify his moving to the head of the line.
The door closing behind him felt like an escape.
It only took a few minutes to process him through. Displaying his ID, emptying his pockets, removing his shoes and belt, pushing them toward the scanner and stepping through the metal detector.
A correctional officer put him through the same search a second time a hundred yards further in, along a concrete walkway just before the inner prison gate.
The officer then directed him along a curving paved road toward death row.
Another door buzz, but no search this time, and he stepped into a cafeteria-sized room with a forest scene painted on the wall at the far end and vending machines along the near. In between were rows of metal tables and plastic chairs. Most were empty. Inmates dressed in blue sat at the others with one to four visitors.
One correctional officer perched in a booth overlooking the scene. Two others walked the floor monitoring contact between inmates and their visitors, watching for drug and weapons smuggling.
A door at the rear opened. A short Hispanic inmate carrying a brown accordion file stepped into the room and looked around. His eyes finally settled on the table at the opposite corner near the vending machines with one visitor sitting alone. The inmate nodded toward Donnally and then headed down the aisle.
None of the other prisoners looked at him as he walked between the tables.
Donnally wasn’t sure whether it was because whatever inmates had to say to one another they could say back in the cell block, or because Dominguez was getting close to his execution date, or maybe because the other inmates had already made Donnally out to be a cop.
Donnally rose as Dominguez approached and extended his hand. Dominguez braced the file under his right arm and shook hands with his left, and then sat down. Donnally spotted Dominguez’s withered right hand just before he slid it onto his lap under the table.
Donnally couldn’t remember anything about it in the police report and there was no issue raised about whether Dominguez had fired at Edgar Rojo Sr. using his right or left hand.
“Did your counselor tell you why I’m here?” Donnally asked.
“Only that you wanted to talk about my case.”
“And just to make sure we can, you’re not represented by counsel anymore?”
Dominguez shook his head.
“I’m not an attorney and I’m not a private investigator, I’m an ex—”
Dominguez raised his hand. “I know who you are. It was after my time, but I heard about you and the shoot-out on Mission Street.”
Dominguez looked Donnally over like he was expecting to see bullet scars.
“And to make sure we understand each other,” Donnally said, “my loyalty isn’t to you. I don’t know you. Judge McMullin asked me—”
Dominguez’s eyes widened and he leaned in.
Donnally nodded. “That’s right. Judge McMullin. He asked me to look into what happened during the investigation and the trial and help him figure out whether he’d made mistakes it isn’t too late to correct.”
Dominguez’s face reddened. “You know the law as well as I do. Innocence is no defense this late in the appeals. That’s the law.”
Donnally fixed his eyes on Dominguez’s. “And I have no reason to think that innocence is the issue.”
He expected Dominguez to rise and march back toward the door leading to the cells, but he didn’t. He just stared back.
“As far as I can tell at this point,” Donnally said, “the issues don’t go beyond what’s bothering Judge McMullin. And that’s whether the D.A. was correct that it was a first-degree murder, or whether your attorney was right to argue it was a second-degree under a recklessness theory, or whether there was ineffective assistance of counsel because your lawyer didn’t put on manslaughter evidence and ask for a manslaughter instruction.”
Dominguez hunched over, staring down at the worn tabletop, his body expressing bone-deadening weariness. Finally, he took in a long breath and exhaled, shaking his head, and spoke without looking up.
“I . . . just . . . don’t . . . want . . . to die.”
Donnally hadn’t anticipated that Dominguez would come out and say it. It was a whole lot more truth than he’d expected.
“And that’s all that this is about, isn’t it? And everything in your letter was a lie.”
Dominguez didn’t answer right away. After a few moments, he rotated his face toward Donnally.
“It’s not that simple.”
Donnally watched the fingers of Dominguez’s left hand flexing on the table.
“Everything in the letter was true. It’s my life that’s been the lie.” Dominguez sat up again. “But not one I created. I’ve been living someone else’s lie.” He peered over at Donnally. “You know what I mean?”
Donnally knew exactly what he meant. He’d grown up with his father’s mythologies about the death of his older brother and with his father’s evasion of his own responsibility for it. But that wasn’t something Donnally was willing to share with a death row inmate. His gut told him it was a mistake to have divulged to Edgar Rojo Jr. who his father was and the damage his father had done directly to his family and indirectly through his movies to American’s self-understanding. And Donnally still couldn’t figure out why he’d told him.
“I know what you mean,” Donnally said. “But I’m not sure what the lie is. Just like you said. It’s way too late
in the process to start claiming innocence.”
Dominguez’s face flushed. “I didn’t just start saying I was innocent. It’s what I said from the beginning. I told the cops. I told my lawyer.” He slapped the table. “But no one would listen to me.”
A correctional officer looked over but didn’t make a move to come toward them.
“My whole trial was about life or death, my life or death, not my guilt or innocence. I could tell by looking at Judge McMullin’s face all during the guilt part of the case that he was already thinking about the penalty phase and how everything would play out. Just like my lawyer was doing.”
“I heard you had an argument with your lawyer. What was it about?”
“Which argument? There were lots of them.”
“Take your pick. Start with when the judge stopped the trial and sent you and him out to an interview room to talk.”
Dominguez paused as though trying to picture the scene. “I wanted to tell the jury I was innocent. My lawyer wanted me to testify I did it, that it was just a prank that went bad.”
“And use your testimony to support his argument that it was a second-degree murder.”
Dominguez nodded.
“What about manslaughter under a mistaken self-defense theory? You two argue about that, too?”
Dominguez’s face flushed. “You’re not listening to me. Just like he didn’t listen to me. I . . . didn’t . . . do it.”
Donnally caught the motion of a couple walking behind him toward the vending machines. He glanced over. A woman was putting change into one dispensing coffee ten feet away. The inmate standing next to her was staring at Donnally, bulldog-like, shoulder muscles tensed, as though he was trying to decide whether Donnally was a threat.
Donnally didn’t recognize him, but recognized the meaning of the shamrock tattoo on his forearm: Aryan Brotherhood.
The inmate strode toward Donnally.
Donnally saw the correctional officer across the room alert to the drive in the inmate’s steps and push off against the wall.
Donnally rose.
The inmate stopped two feet away, his fists tight by his sides.
Donnally glanced down at them, looking for a sharpened pencil or piece of plastic the prisoner could stab him with.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” the inmate said.
The correctional officer walked up behind the inmate, hand on his baton.
Donnally shook his head and fixed his eyes on the inmate’s. If he was about to make a move, it would show there first. A clenched jaw or a turned head, then a swing.
“George Foster.”
Donnally didn’t recall the name or the face. “I don’t remember you.”
“Fifteen years ago. A rumble between the Aryan Brotherhood and the Hell’s Angels at a motorcycle show at the Cow Palace.”
Donnally could picture the fight, but not the man.
“You broke my brother’s arm.”
Then it all connected.
“He swung,” Donnally said, his tone flat, like he was reading from an offense report. “I blocked him with my baton.”
The inmate snorted. “So you say.”
A second correctional officer walked up, forming the third side of a triangle, shoulders back.
“There a problem?” the officer asked.
Foster shook his head, still staring at Donnally. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, man.” He winked. “I’m a cold-blooded murderer, not a heat-of-passion kind of guy.” He turned toward the correctional officer and said in a lower voice as he walked by him, “If you believe what they say in the press.”
Donnally sat down again.
Moments after Foster returned to his table, a correctional officer pointed at him, then at the door leading to cells. Foster gave Donnally a hard look, then hugged his female visitor and left the room.
“Is this going to be a problem for you?” Donnally asked.
Dominguez shook his head. “That’s between you and him, not him and me. Anyway, this is our home, it’s like a small town, and we usually don’t mess with each other.”
“Usually?”
Dominguez removed his right hand from under the table and showed Donnally his palm. A scar ran across it.
“A Norteño put a contract out on me ten years ago. April fifteenth. They can reach in anywhere and they got me when the guards were taking me to the dentist in the main part of the prison. I saved my life by deflecting the shank with my hand.”
“You ever put a name to the contract?”
Dominguez nodded. “That wasn’t hard at all. It was Edgar Rojo Junior.”
CHAPTER 17
By noon, the visitors had bought picnic lunches at the vending machines. Fried chicken, potato salad, chips, and sodas lay on all the tables, including the one between Donnally and Dominguez.
Inmates and their wives strolled up and down the aisles as though they were couples walking the tree-lined paths of Golden Gate Park. Whispering. Holding hands. Children trailing behind.
Donnally now understood the reason for the forest scene painted on the far wall. Prisoners and visitors were posing for photos in front of it.
Officers operated the camera, alert for the inmates’ flash of hand signs just before the shutter click. Gang photos wouldn’t leave the institution.
Also, by noon, Donnally had heard Dominguez’s story.
Dominguez had admitted lying to the police about not being in the area of the Rojo apartment on the night of the murder.
Admitted to having been recruited into the Sureños by an uncle in L.A., but claimed to have been trying to get out in the months before the shooting.
Admitted knowing the Southern California Sureños wanted to become the connection between the cartel in Michoacán and the Northern California street corners.
Admitted he knew Edgar Sr. was the link in the chain the Sureños wanted to take out and replace.
And the reason he thought he’d been IDed by witnesses as the shooter?
It was just as Rojo Jr. had said. It was a war and it didn’t make any difference to the Norteños or the Sureños who fell on the other side, as long as somebody did.
Dominguez also told Donnally the Sureño leadership hadn’t ordered any particular soldier to kill Rojo Sr. and didn’t care how it got set up and how it got executed. Anybody could do it and rewards would follow.
It wasn’t until years after the trial that word got around to Dominguez about who might have pulled the trigger, and by that time he, too, was dead and there was no proof that he’d done it, just rumors.
But Donnally wasn’t ready to believe any of it.
Despite Dominguez having had twenty years to come up with an exculpatory story, there remained a contradiction, not in the story itself, but in his life.
On the one hand, Dominguez had teams of lawyers handling his state and federal appeals not only to help him create the story, but to translate it into legal arguments relating to actual innocence.
On the other hand, over two decades, they hadn’t done that translation, made the claim of factual innocence.
“Why take that route now?” Donnally asked. “If you’re right about the law, it’s too late. Sounds like you’d be better off pursuing some kind of legal gimmick. Cruel and unusual punishment, an angle like that. Maybe you bring the whole machine to a stop.”
Dominguez shook his head. “Six hundred guys are on the row. They all got lawyers and paralegals. If they haven’t been able to come up with something to jam the gears, I won’t.”
“The question remains, why’d you wait?”
Dominguez didn’t answer right away. He looked down at the table and flicked aside a chunk of batter that had fallen from his fried chicken.
“I’ve been thinking about that, a lot. Seems stupid to have waited, except it didn’t feel like I was waiting.” He looked up again. “It was something else.”
Donnally didn’t respond, didn’t ask the obvious question. The burden was on Dominguez to ex
plain himself, not on Donnally to draw it out of him. He hadn’t come to death row to play therapist.
“It’s like this,” Dominguez said. “It comes out of my childhood.” He took in a long breath and exhaled. “I guess you could say I grew up wanting to be invisible.”
Donnally felt tension in his legs, ready to rise. He wasn’t in the mood to listen to self-serving psychological insights aimed not at fact, but at sympathy. It was bad enough that these guys had lawyers helping them construct false stories to disguise their guilt, it was worse that they had shrinks to fudge up a psychiatric diagnosis to excuse it.
Donnally guessed his thoughts must’ve shown on his face when Dominguez raised a palm toward him.
“Just hear me out. There’s a point to this.”
Donnally didn’t answer. He just stared back.
“I was pretty good at sports when I was in elementary school, but during recess when we were choosing sides, and all the other kids were yelling ‘Pick me, pick me,’ I was always wishing I could just disappear into the ground.”
Dominguez’s eyes went blank, as though blinded by the image of the sunlit schoolyard in his mind, then nodded.
“That’s really why I dropped out. It wasn’t about brains or grades.”
He glanced over at the other inmates.
“Lot of guys here are like that. Just wanted to be left alone. The difference is this. When somebody edged into my space, I wanted to disappear. Evaporate. The rest of these guys wanted to strike back, hurt someone. When somebody came into their space, that somebody was gonna get hurt, maybe die. They were all just murders waiting to happen.”
Donnally wondered whether Dominguez was taking a mazelike route toward excusing his actions, implying that if these killers had no control over their actions, then he didn’t either and he couldn’t be held responsible for murdering Edgar Rojo Sr.
Donnally knew from both Judge McMullin and Navarro that Dominguez had a history of violence that predated the homicide, so it was clear he hadn’t done much evaporating when he’d been threatened in the past.
“You ever read Rumpelstiltskin when you were a kid?” Dominguez asked.
