by Steven Gore
When Donnally confronted him about what he’d overheard in the locker room, Grassner’s story had been that it was just a hypothetical he was using for training purposes, explaining what an officer should never do.
Donnally didn’t believe him and Grassner knew it.
Donnally failed in his attempts to identify the case. There were too many wiretaps in those years, too many dealers, and too many drug seizures.
He hadn’t spoken to Grassner for five years. He’d last seen him in a roofing supply store where Donnally had stopped in to pick up some shingles. Since Donnally hadn’t heard from Grassner after he was shot, it was like encountering an old friend who’d failed to send condolences after a parent died, and it framed an obligation Donnally thought he might now be able to exploit.
Donnally worked his way up the crowded North Beach sidewalk past a frat boy vomiting in the gutter, a middle-aged, midwestern couple giggling at vibrators in a sex shop window, finally passing a group of men in starched shirts and loose collars ducking into a club.
Grassner reached out his hand as Donnally approached, ready to greet another customer, then looked up, faked a double take, and rubbed his eyes.
“Well, come at me with a gold-plated dildo,” Grassner said. “Look who’s here. Never thought I’d see the day when Harlan Donnally would show up in perv country.”
Grassner glanced behind him at the bank of photos of naked women above the ticket counter, then pointed at the poster in the center announcing it was lesbian shower night.
“That the kind of thing you’re into now?”
Donnally forced a smile and shook his head. “Word around the Hall of Justice is that you’d gone from being part of the solution to part of the problem. I had to see it for myself.”
Grassner grinned back. “Just part of a different solution. I’m part of a secret crime suppression unit. Guys with boners don’t be out doing stickups.”
Donnally emitted the obligatory laugh, then asked, “You got a break coming up?”
Grassner nodded toward the entrance to the showroom.
“Wait in there until I can find somebody to handle the door.”
Donnally could see the bar facing just inside, most of the stools occupied by men staring toward the stage.
Grassner waved at the ticket taker behind the counter, then pointed at Donnally, indicating that he should be allowed into the show without paying.
Donnally walked in and slid onto a stool and ordered a beer. He put down enough money to cover the cost and a tip. He didn’t want to put into his pocket whatever residue his change might have scraped up.
The sign had been accurate. It really was lesbian shower night. Two women, who may or may not have been lesbians, were soaping and fondling each other within a three-sided glass enclosure set up the middle of a fake locker room. The fourth side, at the back, was formed out of gym lockers. Cheerleading outfits and pom-poms lay on wooden benches just out of splash range. The music was heavy on bass, but not so loud that the audience wouldn’t be able to hear the women’s practiced moans.
Donnally glanced around, classifying the men watching as tourists, after-work financial district partiers, and loners. He then divided them further into the cheerers, the starers, and the fantasizers who revealed themselves by their open mouths and wet lips. He was working on further subdivisions when Grassner walked up.
The bartender delivered a shot of bourbon to Grassner as he sat down on the stool next to Donnally. The move was as smooth and practiced as an NBA outlet pass. Donnally guessed Grassner spent his breaks each night on one of these stools.
“So, what’s on your mind?”
“Memory lane.”
“Yours?”
“Yours.”
Grassner raised his finger into the air, indicating that Donnally should wait, downed the shot, and then signaled the bartender for another. He smacked his lips and nodded at Donnally to continue.
“I’m trying to figure out what happened in a twenty-year-old murder case. Edgar Rojo Senior out in Hunters Point. He was shot when he was standing in his mother’s living room.”
Grassner stared toward the stage. The women were rinsing each other off, running and giggling. “Rojo . . . Rojo . . .” He finally blinked and looked back. “A Norteño guy?”
Donnally nodded.
“Yeah. I remember him, Rojo Loco.”
Donnally shook his head. “That’s the son. He’s still alive.”
Grassner scrunched up his face for a moment. “Now I remember. Blasted right through the front window. A big-time hit.”
“By a kid named Israel Dominguez. He’s been on death row since then.”
Grassner pulled back like someone had pushed a rotten fish up to his nose. “You haven’t gone private and become one of them bleeding hearts like those Innocence Project assholes.”
“I haven’t signed up with anybody. A friend of mine is puzzled about the trial and wanted me to look into it.”
Grassner shrugged. “I don’t know much about what took place either at the time of the homicide or the trial. All that happened when I was still on patrol. I heard a lot about it though after I started working with the feds. When they wrote out their affidavits to wiretap the Norteños, they’d do, like, a history of the organization. Who killed who, when, and why. Who had the drug connections in Mexico, how it got handed off over the years as people got taken out or sent to prison.”
The bartender slid another drink in front of Grassner.
“What was important about Senior?”
“Since he was the link between the cartel in Mexico and street corners up here, he was the guy all the black Hunters Point dealers dreamed of hooking up with. You make a connection with him or somebody like him and a month later you’re riding in an Escalade. Without him, it’s ratty old hoopties until you die.” Grassner rotated his stool toward Donnally. “You didn’t hear about him back in the day?”
Donnally shook his head. “I never worked out of any of the southern substations.”
Grassner took a sip of the second bourbon, making this one last. Donnally wondered whether Grassner had limited himself to two drinks during his break, or management had.
“Senior wasn’t in place long enough to spread north into the Fillmore or the Tenderloin,” Grassner said, “maybe four or five months altogether. Then bam.”
“What about Israel Dominguez? The shooter. You ever hear about him?”
“Sure. A Sureño. El Búho. They all had nicknames like that. I remember him as a teenager when I worked the Mission but didn’t have much contact with him because he spent a lot of time in juvenile hall for assaults. He was just the kind of sneaky backstabber the Sureños always had a use for.”
“What about Oscar Benaga?”
“El Lobo.”
“So it says on his neck.”
“He ain’t no wolf, he’s a snake.” Grassner made a weaving motion with his hand. “Slithered out of one case after another.” Then a chop. “I really wanted to lop his head off.”
“What made it so hard?”
“Shrewd guy. We thought we had him once, got him indicted in a federal racketeering case. Not at the top with the other heavies, but down on the bottom. He was a big guy in the business, but the whole case against him rested on one call.”
Grassner fell silent, then a half smile came to his face.
“Benaga and his guys were distributing cocaine out of a meat market a couple of blocks from where his shop is. Listening in on their calls over the months, we figured out their operation, from sources to code words. Finally we got a call with Benaga ordering a goat and saying where he wanted it delivered. Goat was always a code word for a kilo. Always. The DEA and FBI guys and us were doing high fives all around the wire room.”
Grassner blew out a breath, like an expression of relief. It felt to Donnally like a setup for dramatic effect.
“All we needed was one overt act on his part to make him part of the conspiracy and make him liable with eve
ryone else for the whole thing. He’d be 10-7 for twenty years.”
That had been another of Grassner’s expressions. He took the code meaning “out of service” from the police world and applied it to crooks as if both sides were somehow equal and opposite, somehow morally equivalent. Donnally wondered whether he’d applied it not only to Donnally, but also to the gangsters who shot him, both 10-7. Donnally out of the department and the gangsters dead.
Grassner laughed. “What did we find out in the end? The only time we intercepted him in half a year of wiretapping, the asshole was really ordering a goat. A real goat to roast at a real party.” He shook his head. “You should’ve seen the look on Jimmie Chen’s face when Harvey Madding—you know him, he was the prosecutor in the case—called us into his office.”
Donnally felt a vibration pass through him. Madding was the D.A. who’d prosecuted Israel Dominguez.
“Why Madding?” Donnally asked. “He was never a U.S. attorney.”
“On special assignment. They were thinking they would charge some of the gang-related homicides in federal court and they needed someone with both narcotics and death penalty experience. He was there to supervise some wiretaps and train the AUSA’s in capital trial tactics.”
“For how long?”
“A year, more or less. Anyway, Madding showed us all the photos taken at the party the defense attorney had brought him. A dozen pictures of the goat roasting over a big, backyard fire ring and Benaga standing there next to it drinking a Coors and turning the spit. And Madding was pissed, starting to wonder whether his fifty-page indictment was just the world’s longest menu.”
Grassner held up his hand, the tips of his thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart.
“We had about this much credibility left with Madding. Him thinking that one attorney after another was gonna show up at his office with photos of chorizo and chickens and rib eyes on the grill and him having to go into court dismissing case after case until everybody in the indictment was back at the meat market and doing business again.”
Grassner paused and looked out toward the stage. The women were drying themselves, spreading their legs and bending over, their butts toward the men in the crowd, who were now clapping and whistling and yelling.
Finally, Grassner looked back at Donnally. “I still don’t get what all this has to do with you and why you’re knocking on my door now.”
“The California Supreme Court will be issuing its final decision in the Dominguez case. When exactly we don’t know. They never announce in advance the day their decisions come out. But soon.”
Grassner snorted. “Sounds like a real rush to judgment. It’s only been twenty years.”
Donnally ignored the crack.
“Judge McMullin is worried that he may have made some bad rulings in the case.”
Grassner flopped his hand forward in a dismissive wave.
“Nothing new there. Judges all start to worry when the needle starts inching toward the vein. Especially now because people are finally getting executed. Back then nobody believed it would actually happen.”
Donnally remembered those days. Death sentences didn’t seem real, just symbolic notches on the prosecutor’s belt. Prosecutors went into capital cases already pissed off, convinced they’d never be carried out because throughout their careers they’d watched state and federal appeals courts finding ways to set aside the penalty or inject delays until the defendant died of old age or disease. He now wondered whether that had played into McMullin’s unwillingness to set aside the jury’s recommendation and sentence Dominguez to life without parole. Maybe he believed Dominguez would never get executed.
“Madding had no confidence Dominguez would ever take the long walk to the green room. That’s part of the reason he volunteered to work for the Justice Department. He wanted to see one of his death sentences actually get carried out. And the feds don’t waste time. Timothy McVeigh got the needle less than four years after he got convicted.”
“McMullin is wondering whether the right verdict might have been second-degree murder or even manslaughter.”
Grassner drained the last of his bourbon, then blew out a breath through his teeth.
“Sounds just like McMullin. He should’ve been a law professor instead of a judge. Thinks too much.” He glanced over at Donnally, his eyes cold, but his mouth smiling. “As I recall, that was your problem, too.”
CHAPTER 23
Driving south toward the National Archives in San Bruno on the peninsula where closed federal court files were stored, Donnally remembered what the narcotics team of Grassner and Chen had insisted everyone call them in the old days.
Chuck and Chink.
They even had business cards made up in the name of Chuck & Chink, Inc., with a drawing of a two-handled battering ram and a slogan:
Door Busters R Us
The chief suspended both of them for a month after an investigative reporter on special assignment discovered one of their cards while looking into an allegation that Grassner and Chen had kicked in the door to the wrong house, thrown an eighty-five-year-old woman to the kitchen floor, and jammed the barrel of a Glock into her ear.
The newspaper editor later demoted its regular crime reporter because Grassner had given him one of the cards a year earlier and he’d failed to write a story about it, justifying the failure with the claim that the card was neither newsworthy nor reflective of the officers’ real attitudes.
Donnally had no doubt it was.
The journalist had gotten too close to them, had become too dependent on them for feeding him stories, not only about their cases, but about others, even about Donnally’s shooting. And Donnally owed them a debt for their doing it for they directed the public focus away from him. Not enough to call them Chuck and Chink as they wanted, but he owed them nonetheless.
When the department was under attack from radical attorneys and the left-leaning police commissioners were speculating that somehow Donnally was at fault in his own shooting, Grassner and Chen had fed reporters incriminating story after incriminating story about the two dead gangsters, some real, some fictitious, some fantastical. One had them as secret members of a cartel-backed organization fighting to take over both the Sureños and Norteños. They even gave it a name absurd enough to lend credibility to the story: Los Chingasos Locos, The Crazy Pricks.
In a later story, Grassner and Chen had the two gangsters fighting over a woman they were both in love with. In the following one, the two were fighting over a man they were both in love with.
Donnally wasn’t sure of their motives. He’d never noticed altruism to be among them and, while he was the beneficiary, he doubted they’d done it for his benefit.
For a couple of news cycles, they’d pushed the shoot-out as a ludicrous attempt to ambush Donnally in which the gangsters had mistakenly shot each other. They weren’t bothered at all by the fact that the ballistics examination would soon disprove the tale. Donnally had found it more troubling than ironic when it struck him that his brother had died in a real ambush while he had survived one that was entirely fictional. But instead of receiving a silver star attached to a body bag like his brother, Donnally received a retirement badge.
Staring at the highway ahead as it wound through the hills south of San Francisco, Donnally wondered whether he’d made a mistake in talking to Grassner or Chen, or both, or in mentioning McMullin’s name to Grassner. He hadn’t forgotten about Grassner’s connection to the reporter, but he hadn’t worked out how it could come back to hurt the judge until too late.
Donnally thought of a private investigator who once was a detective in the department about whom it was said that he was always aware of what he was thinking, that his mind never idled or drifted unobserved. But Donnally knew he’d never be that man. His mind didn’t work that way. Even worse, sometimes his own thoughts came back to him feeling like a déjà vu experience, something seen or felt in a dream that had now become real.
Donnally now reali
zed he’d risked embarrassing McMullin with a news story that would expose the judge’s doubts about a pending execution and, if the historical unwillingness of governors to commute death sentences held true, was unstoppable.
The public, especially in a city like San Francisco, enjoyed the sport of second-guessing judges but wouldn’t accept a judge second-guessing himself. That would strip McMullin of the protection of his robe and subject all the decisions he’d made throughout his career to psychological analysis, maybe even expose to the world what Donnally had discovered on the banks of the Smith River, that there was a man behind the man, or perhaps, within the man, and this had imparted a double intent and a double meaning to everything the judge had done since the Dominguez trial.
Donnally buried his concern over the risks he’d taken with the hope that his trip to the archives would get him closer to what McMullin needed to know. And that wasn’t just whether the Rojo shooting was a hit or a stunt gone wrong, but whether the judge was fair to himself in fearing his whole career had been a fraud. And despite the feeling he was navigating a maze through the lens of a kaleidoscope, Donnally understood the case and McMullin’s sense of himself were linked not only in the judge’s mind, but in fact.
One thing that remained certain in this anarchy of uncertainty was that the murder was part of a complex set of events that was meaningful only in a context Donnally still didn’t understand, and that Grassner didn’t fully remember, or had chosen not to disclose. And he hoped this context could be discovered in the Leo Ryan Federal Building, the concrete bunker housing the archives, that was coming into view.
The letters over the entrance to the campuslike facility reminded him that San Francisco was a city of too much context, and too much of it tragic. Congressman Ryan had been murdered by the city’s Jim Jones and his People’s Temple followers in Jonestown, Guyana, in the 1970s.
And being in San Bruno reminded Donnally that Aasim, the leader of another cult, the Muslim Nation, was probably sitting right now at his kitchen table a mile or two away drinking his coffee and plotting how to terrorize the Hispanics into moving out of Hunters Point.
