by Steven Gore
Walking from his car to the building and looking up at Ryan’s name and remembering the Nation members encaging him and Navarro in front the Rojo apartment, Donnally wished more than ever that he was up in Mount Shasta serving breakfasts in the café. For he felt less like he was engaging in an investigation and more like he was suffering an immersion, as though the floor of the kaleidoscopic maze was made of quicksand.
At the same time, entering the building, getting out from under the Leo Ryan sign, felt to Donnally like an escape from confusion and speculation into the safety of a library and the quiet comfort of fact.
Donnally displayed his ID and the records request form he’d e-mailed over. The clerk walked down a long hallway and returned rolling a cart. On it were stacked the dockets for the federal indictments targeting Hispanic narcotics traffickers from the two years bracketing the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. and bracketing the attempted murder of Israel Dominguez ten years later. There were only six cases, but at least fifteen, two-inch-thick volumes each.
That is, at least fifteen public volumes.
He knew there were more of them containing filings by the prosecution and the defense that had been made under seal: informant cooperation agreements and discovery motions that included information or allegations that one side or another didn’t want disclosed to the public, even notes the judges may have taken for their own use during the case.
As Donnally took a chair in the reading room, he found himself wondering whether there existed a record of McMullin’s thinking at the time of the Dominguez trial. And he realized that it would be wise to test the judge’s memory to make sure nothing he had said to him had been distorted by anxiety or depression brought on by the oncoming execution or by an impaired mind.
He called McMullin. “Did you take notes during the trial?”
Not all judges did, preferring that the official transcript be the only record.
After a moment of silence, McMullin said, “Not likely. My practice was only to take notes in complex civil cases. I’ll ask my clerk to check. I’ll call you back if she finds any.”
Donnally disconnected, plugged in Janie’s laptop, and opened the first volume. It covered an investigation into the transportation of cocaine and heroin from Mexico, up through the Central Valley and then to middlemen in San Jose and San Francisco.
The affidavit in support of the wiretap application began with a listing of the targets and with an outline of the crimes of which they were suspected. Then it moved on to a genealogy of Hispanic drug trafficking, starting from the founding of the Nuestra Familia during the 1960s to protect Northern California Hispanics in prison and later the formation of its out-of-prison arm, the Norteños.
As Donnally read through the affidavits, he typed out lists of events and names as he went, looking for crossovers with the Rojo Sr. murder.
Oscar Benaga and Junior had both been targets of a couple of the wiretaps, but Junior had been taken out of the mix by a five-year prison sentence for mayhem and Benaga seemed to have found a way to insulate himself from the day-to-day operations of the gang, graduating from street captain to consigliore, adviser to senior members of the gang.
Donnally wondered what Benaga had done or what talent he had that had advanced him in the organization, in addition to his skill in concealing his crimes.
The calls involving Benaga reported in the affidavits had less to do with past crimes and future conspiracies and more to do with matters of loyalty and fidelity to the gang constitution and the supreme power structure. There were even some bizarre calls from Benaga to underlings displaying an amateur’s knowledge of the Aztec culture and language the wire room agents had tried to interpret as code.
Eagles as heroin.
Cactus as cocaine.
The ruler Itzcoatl as the drug source.
Each affidavit described the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. as a threshold moment, not just in the Sureños’ attempt to insert themselves between the cartels in Mexico and the street dealers in San Francisco, but in the war between the Norteños and Sureños and the Sureños’ attempt to move the north-south territorial dividing line up from Bakersfield in the Central Valley to Highway 80 running between San Francisco and Sacramento.
And each affidavit repeated that the Sureño given the job of eliminating Edgar Senior had been Israel Dominguez—El Búho, the owl, the night hunter—a young, aggressive gangster trying to shoot his way to the top.
CHAPTER 24
Donnally felt his mind lose focus as he read through the fifth affidavit. The boilerplate paragraphs the agents had copied and pasted from one to the other over the years made it like a landscape that was so familiar parts of it became invisible. It wasn’t a problem of not seeing the forest for the trees, it was a problem of seeing the same trees over and over again.
But he couldn’t skip even a sentence. He didn’t know whether the pattern might break and a new fact or allegation slipped in.
Even the gang’s genealogy became repetitious. The same names. The same crimes. The same methods.
The list of informants had grown from Informant A through Informant C in the first affidavit to Informant A through Informant W in the one he was reading, the investigations building on each other as members were caught dirty and agreed to cooperate in exchange for lesser sentences.
And after the informants were identified by the gang and murdered and there was no further need to protect them, their names were revealed.
Informants A, C, D, H, and M left the gang as Junior had said everyone did. Blood out. Murdered on orders from the generals in Ad Seg in Pelican Bay State Prison. A, C, and H were killed because earlier affidavits had revealed enough about their criminal history and background that their identity became obvious to members of the gang, and D and M were killed because they were the only ones present in all the places and at all the times the affidavit had described.
The fifth affidavit brought Donnally to the year before he had been shot and Benaga had ordered the attack on Israel Dominguez on death row.
Donnally fought against assuming a connection between them, but he nonetheless read the affidavit with a dual agenda, half looking for clues that would illuminate the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. and half looking for clues to why the shoot-out between the Norteño and Sureño happened just as he was walking in to meet the potential informant.
Then a thought. Donnally wondered whether the taqueria owner was one of the lettered informants in the racketeering affidavits and wondered whether this had been the reason he’d agreed to the meeting to discuss the terms under which he would identify the shooter in the case Donnally was investigating.
It would’ve just been a variation on a theme, not a new tune, and maybe he was hoping to get rewards from two different pockets, from SFPD and from the FBI, doubling his money for doing the same job.
Until this moment, Donnally’s theories had been limited to only three possibilities.
That he’d walked into the middle of an attempted Sureño hit on a Norteño or a Norteño on a Sureño.
That he’d stepped in the path of the Norteño or the Sureño on his way inside the restaurant to take out a fellow member, the taqueria owner, who the gang believed had turned snitch.
That he’d walked by chance in between a Norteño and a Sureño who’d both posted up on the same block, both obligated to try to take out the other for the sake of what they called respect.
Donnally leaned back in his chair and stared up at the high fluorescent-lit ceiling.
Then a moment of unease. The same narcotics cops he’d relied on in exploring what happened to him, including Grassner and Chen, were also working in those federal investigations. They would’ve known the identities of the lettered informants and would’ve known whether the taqueria owner he’d been on his way to meet was one of them.
Even more, some of those informants might have disclosed, if not to Donnally, at least to Grassner and Chen, the real background to the shooting.
But both Grassn
er and Chen had written it off as coincidence, to chance, to just an OK Corral shoot-out on Mission Street in San Francisco. But it had been crooks against crooks, not cops against robbers, except for the cop caught in the cross fire.
Donnally had accepted this explanation as it related to him since most of the street homicides he’d investigated arose out of chance and circumstance—gangsters and drug dealers bumping shoulders in the mall or at a concert or a car show—but he knew even as he lay in the hospital that the parents of the couple killed by the Norteño’s and Sureño’s wild shots would never be able to accept that kind of explanation.
For them, chance was an irrational moment, not the end event of a chain of causes and effects understandable, but not yet understood, that had led to their children slumped over a sidewalk table and bleeding out onto wedding magazines.
As soon as he learned to get around on crutches and was able to drive, he had visited both sets of parents.
At first, the solace Donnally had offered them had been met with suspicion.
Had it been Donnally’s bullets that had gone astray and killed their children?
Why should they believe that the San Francisco crime lab and a police administration, terrified of potential parents’ lawsuits, hadn’t switched the slugs or mangled them to disguise the gun barrel that had rifled them.
Why should they believe that the internal affairs reconstruction of the event wasn’t anything more than an attempt to deceive them and the lawyers who were soliciting them as plaintiffs in a suit against Donnally and the department?
Unlike the patrol officer who’d rolled up on Donnally and Junior outside of the Cliff House and mentioned the training video, Donnally knew the real reason for the reenactment. It had been created to assure the parents that Donnally hadn’t killed their children.
The department had made a hero out of Donnally in order to defend him, to show that it all couldn’t have happened any other way.
Except Donnally knew it could have.
As his father would say, inevitability was a fact of fiction, not a fact of life. In the real world, everything could have been otherwise.
What if he’d been more alert?
Looked first to the left, instead of the right?
Caught the motion of the Norteño reaching behind his back instead of the Sureño ducking toward the trash can?
If he had, he could have yelled a warning that might’ve saved the young couple.
Driving away from the home where they met, he knew that for the parents, chance—bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time—wasn’t an acceptable explanation for death. It was an evasion, and he’d felt it then and felt it now as he looked at the affidavits lined up on the cart next to him.
Coincidence and chance were, for survivors, like walking on a trampoline, the earth seeming to give beneath their feet as they tried to follow a path of cause and effect back to solid ground.
For cops, coincidence itself was the solid ground, but if and only if—like a high-wire walker ignoring the hundred-foot drop—they didn’t think about it too much.
How many crimes had he solved because he’d once been assigned a similar case, or because he’d remembered the nickname of a victim he’d met years earlier when he was a patrol officer that later gave him a lead to a killer, or a building he remembered only because he’d run through it chasing a suspect a month before?
If it weren’t for these kinds of coincidences, many crimes would’ve been left unsolved, perhaps been unsolvable.
Except cops called it experience or street knowledge, not coincidence.
That was another thing his father had said. Coincidence in fiction was merely a device. For Donnally, in real life, it was everything.
For his father, life was a series of if-onlys. If only Donnally’s older brother hadn’t seen the press conference in which his father lied about the Buddhist massacre. If only he had enlisted in the navy instead of the army and served on the sea instead of land. If only he hadn’t been ordered up to Hue. If only he hadn’t been sent to the village where the executions took place. If only he hadn’t been able to find a survivor willing to tell him the truth.
The other name for all those if-onlys was regret, and maybe Alzheimer’s would be his father’s escape from the prison formed by them.
Donnally rubbed his eyes, gone dry as he stared into the what-might-have-been past and what-soon-might-be future, then moved on to the next affidavit.
In this one, the genealogy and history were compressed. It began after the death of Edgar Rojo Sr. and after the war between the Norteños and Sureños had broken out. It was as though a new generation had taken over the Norteños and Edgar Rojo Sr., long dead in body, was finally dead to the underworld.
Junior had been wrong. His father hadn’t died for a cause. He’d died a pointless death and the gang that had sworn never to forget had forgotten.
An hour later, Donnally turned to a sixth affidavit. The attempted death row murder of Israel Dominguez didn’t even warrant a footnote.
CHAPTER 25
Where are you?” Donnally asked Judge McMullin over his cell phone, waiting in the foyer of McMullin’s mansion in Pacific Heights.
“Shoot, I should’ve called you. I had to stay late in chambers to read and sign some search warrants.”
“How long . . .”
“Twenty minutes.”
Donnally knew McMullin was lying about why he hadn’t shown up, but he didn’t confront him, just disconnected the call. The housekeeper had already told him McMullin had come home early, planning to meet Donnally, but had left to go out for dinner. She’d assumed McMullin had either canceled or had moved the meeting to the restaurant or to another time altogether.
He wondered whether McMullin had been subconsciously avoiding him, maybe feeling silly he had involved Donnally in what Grassner had suspected. That the whole thing was about nothing more than a judge getting queasy when forced to face the mortal consequence of a decision.
But standing just inside the judge’s door, Donnally wondered whether what he was really searching for was a way to relieve McMullin of responsibility, find something the judge could use to excuse or justify himself.
Then a sudden, tense, sour, self-accusatory moment.
Why was he willing to do this for McMullin, but not for his own father?
The answer came to him just as fast.
While his father had always hidden from the truth and then finally revealed it only on his own terms, McMullin was not afraid to risk putting his career and reputation on the line for the sake of the truth, and on Donnally’s terms, and at the risk of public exposure of his weaknesses and failings either at the time of the trial or now, or both.
Donnally heard a phone ring in the house. Thirty seconds later the housekeeper reappeared and directed him into the judge’s first-floor study. As he entered, he found the room reminded him that McMullin had a heritage that extended back through generations in San Francisco. The Gold Rush, the Barbary Coast, the Great Earthquake, the 1936 World’s Fair, the building of the cross-bay bridges. The city’s history was his family’s history.
Portraits on the wood-paneled walls showed his ancestors posing in this same mansion, or cutting ribbons at City Hall, or giving electioneering speeches in Union Square. Hanging between them were plaques and gavels from civic organizations, city councils, and state and federal courts displaying a history of civic duty.
Glancing around, Donnally guessed that the Georgian desk and block-front chests and hutches had probably been shipped around Cape Horn from Boston during the early part of the nineteenth century, back when his Irish relatives were indentured sailors, maybe even laboring on those same ships.
But despite the feeling of permanence and solidity and binding to the past, it reminded Donnally of something else. That McMullin was the last of his line. Widowed, no children, no brothers or sisters, and cousins probably too far removed to matter.
Donnally turned as McMullin enter
ed the study. The judge tossed his overcoat onto the couch and walked over and shook Donnally’s hand. The still-shiny grease stain on the judge’s tie proved what his housekeeper had told him was true; he’d gone out to dinner, not worked in his chambers.
Donnally decided not to confront him. There was nothing to be gained, for nothing had been lost but a few minutes.
On the other hand, maybe something had been gained, some evidence of the deterioration of the judge’s mind.
A half hour after they sat down, Donnally finished his report of what he’d learned and what he’d done.
As he watched the judge looking over the notes he’d taken of their conversation, Donnally thought back on something McMullin had said sitting by the Smith River.
I think I thought he was guilty of at least second-degree murder.
I think I thought.
It almost sounded like part of a child’s nursery rhyme.
I think I thought. I think I thought. I think I thought.
Donnally watched the judge reading, adding words or phrases, underlining sentences. It was as though McMullin was alone in the room, his concentration isolating him from his surroundings.
His mind returned to a call he’d made to the judge from the federal archive.
“Did you check with the clerk about whether there are any sealed notes in the file?”
The judge gave him a blank look.
Donnally felt a rumble of frustration. The judge had forgotten to ask. There was no point in showing his annoyance and embarrassing the judge, so he said, “Let’s check together tomorrow.”
The judge nodded, then his brows furrowed. “I thought you were done with this. Isn’t that the point of this meeting?”
“That’s what I thought, too. But I’d like to see if there are any leads left to follow.”
In fact, he only wanted to find out whether he’d wasted his time, time that would’ve been better spent trying to ascertain his father’s actual mental state.
