Act of Deceit

by Steven Gore

“I knew it the second she asked for Craft and Simpson. That bitch. She’s never stopped being a public defender.”

  Donnally cast Blaine a sour look.

  “Skip the performance,” Donnally said. “It was your job to get this guy to trial and now you’re dead in the water.”

  Blaine spun toward Donnally, his finger jabbing.

  “You—”

  Donnally raised his palm.

  “Now you’re going to blame me?”

  “I don’t know why you opened up this can of worms in the first place.”

  “That’s not the point. The question is what you’re going to do about it.”

  Blaine dropped into his chair, thought for a moment, and then said, “Since it looks like Nanston has already made her decision, I’ll try to smoke her out and make a record for the appeal.”

  He glanced out of the window, then looked back at Donnally with a half smile.

  “Wait a second … wait a second. Maybe we can block the speedy trial hearing altogether. Maybe we can argue that no decision can be made on anything in the case until he agrees to talk to the shrink and is found competent. That way Nanston can’t dismiss the case and he stays in custody.”

  Donnally locked his hands on his hips.

  “Let me get this straight,” Donnally said. “You’re going to trade places with the defense? You arguing he’s not competent and them arguing he is?”

  Blaine’s smile turned into a grin. “Exactly. You saw how Brown has been acting in court. If his own lawyer calls him a lunatic, I sure as hell can.”

  “Who are you trying to kid, me or yourself?”

  The prosecutor’s grin faded. “Apparently not you.”

  Blaine tapped his pen against the edge of his desk. His eyes blurred, then he started to nod.

  Donnally sensed the prosecutor’s mind gaining traction on the slope of his impromptu strategy.

  Blaine’s head snapped up and he aimed a forefinger at Donnally’s chest.

  “You’re still going to be my first witness,” Blaine said. “But this time to show that he’s crazy. You’re gonna testify about Brown’s delusion that he was in the nut ward for thirty-theven yearths.” Blaine laughed as he imitated Brown’s lisp.

  Donnally glared down at the prosecutor. “Not … a … chance.”

  Donnally walked down the courthouse steps and turned toward the eight-story county parking garage a half block away. It loomed over the surrounding buildings like a nuclear cooling tower. He stopped at the corner crosswalk.

  I did my part, Donnally said to himself as he stared at the red “Wait” sign. Maybe I delivered a different message to a different recipient, but it got delivered.

  Moments later, Donnally found himself crossing the intersection, away from his car and toward the lake. He felt suffocated by the rumbling of traffic that reverberated off the government offices behind him and the faces of the apartment buildings along the encircling boulevard.

  Donnally traversed the grass between the sidewalk and shoreline trail, sickened by the trash littering the bank: the squashed malt liquor cans and scattered pork rinds, the yellow-brown butt ends of joints, the Taco Bell wrappers.

  He stopped along the shore and watched the foamy water lap up against the moss-covered rocks. He took in a breath infused with the decay bubbling to the oily surface.

  The air was thick with an odor of rot and deceit that seemed to seep through his clothes and into his skin.

  He exhaled.

  It was time to head home.

  I’m done playing postman.

  Chapter 19

  “Hey, Harlan, you in there?”

  Donnally’s body jerked forward, as if the voice had jabbed him in the back of the neck. The sound broke his mind free from the accounting scrawl lying before him on top of Mauricio’s desk.

  In the previous two hours he had discovered that the little guy had done well by living cheap. He had about thirty thousand dollars in cash in the bank and at least ten times that amount in equity in his property.

  The question that had been troubling Donnally as he stared at the figures was what to do with the money now that Anna wasn’t alive to collect it.

  He looked over and saw Will with his hands cupped around his eyes and pressed against the dirty office window, his cook’s apron splattered with beaten eggs and pancake batter.

  “Harlan?”

  “Yeah, what do you need?”

  Donnally walked over and worked the bottom of the weathered double-hung window back and forth until he could raise it a few inches.

  “Nothing,” Will said, tilting his narrow head to speak through the gap. “Deputy Sheriff Asshole came by the café a few minutes ago. Said he had to speak with you, personal. I told him I didn’t know where you was, and I didn’t, till now.”

  “He say why?”

  “Nope.”

  “You ask?”

  All the skin not concealed by Will’s black eyebrows and the wide soul patch springing from beneath his lower lip flushed red.

  “I didn’t think to do it until he drove away.”

  “That’s okay. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Donnally glanced over at the few cars left in the café’s gravel parking lot. Two had snowboards clamped onto rooftop racks.

  “How many came in for breakfast?”

  “I think forty. I wish it had been thirty-nine. Deputy Asshole was saying that if his father was still sheriff there’d already have been some kinda investigation of Mauricio to find out what he was hiding. Asshole kept calling him Pancho just like his father used to. Can’t we just ban him from the café?”

  “You mean put up a sign? No brains. No sense. No service.”

  Will laughed. “But you’d have to add, This Means You, Deputy Pipkins, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to figure out that it was aimed at him.”

  Donnally stood by the window after Will returned to the café. He wondered whether Wade Pipkins Jr. was just doing what his father would’ve done, but for which he no longer had the authority beyond what he commanded as the patriarch of his Sunday dinner table.

  Whatever the answer, Donnally knew he had to destroy what remained of Mauricio’s real identity.

  Three hours later, Mauricio’s fireplace had consumed all the documentary remnants of his hidden life, and five hours after that, not one of Mauricio’s fingerprints remained on a countertop, refrigerator, doorknob, bed table, or dresser. Even his truck interior, which had never seen a dust rag or vacuum cleaner, had been wiped clean and now bore a coating of Armor All.

  If latents still existed from the forty-five-year-old murder, now they’d never be matched to Mauricio.

  Deputy Pipkins appeared again at the café during the dinner rush.

  “I need to talk to you, Harlan,” Pipkins said, standing in the kitchen doorway, blocking the waitress’s path.

  “Coming through,” she said, jabbing him with her elbow and squeezing by with a tub of dirty dishes.

  Donnally glanced over from where he was grilling a steak.

  “We’re kind of busy around here.”

  Pipkins straightened his five-foot-nine body that matched his father’s pound for pound, mustache for mustache, pudgy jowl for pudgy jowl, and said, “That’s not my problem.”

  Donnally pressed down on the beef with a fork. The meat’s slight resistance told him it was medium rare and ready to come off the fire. He slid it from the pan to a plate, then passed it down the stainless steel counter to Will, who was waiting with a ladle of mashed potatoes.

  Only then did Donnally turn to face the deputy.

  “If you’re going to use one of your father’s lines, you better learn to use it at the right time.” Donnally gestured toward the chaos of the dinner rush. “Otherwise you’re just going to keep sounding stupid.”

  “Fuck you, Harlan, one way or another we’ll be having a little talk about your pal Mauricio.”

  Donnally lowered the fork.

  “You find out who stole Pete Johnson’s ma
re?”

  The deputy shook his head.

  “What about the backhoe from Tractor City?”

  Another shake.

  “The graffiti at the elementary school?”

  Clenched teeth.

  “Unless you’ve got a victim claiming that Mauricio did them wrong, you better get back to doing your job.”

  Donnally turned again toward the stove.

  “And I’ll get back to doing mine.”

  Chapter 20

  Moments after Donnally passed him on the forest road, Deputy Pipkins flicked on his overheads and siren, and then spun a U-turn that took him off the blacktop and into the gravel. Even in the twilight, Donnally could see in his rearview mirror a cascade of rock and dirt enveloping Pipkins’s cruiser. The stunt reminded him of Will’s golden retriever who once knocked itself dizzy running into a tree stump while chasing a cat.

  Looking over at Mauricio’s mutt, Ruby, sitting in the passenger seat, Donnally saw an expression as close to a smile as he’d ever seen on a dog and wondered whether Ruby had made the same connection.

  Donnally had already parked his truck in a turnout and was leaning against it by the time Pipkins pulled up. Frozen air sliding up the canyon from the Trinity River where Donnally had spent the day fishing bit at his face and hands, but he wasn’t about to give Pipkins the satisfaction of watching him reach for the jacket behind the bench seat.

  “You should’ve just called and asked me to stop by if you wanted to talk about something,” Donnally said as Pipkins approached, bundled in a department-issued green parka and wearing a cowboy hat.

  Pipkins reddened. “How come you’re always telling me what to say and when to say it? You’re not my—”

  “Father?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Pipkins rested his right hand on the butt of his gun and his left hand on his baton.

  “I’m sick of you screwing with me, Harlan. You may’ve been a big-city detective once, but you’re just a short-order cook now.”

  Donnally glanced back and forth between the two weapons, their outlines framed by Pipkins’s headlights. He then noticed that the silence of the forest hadn’t yet been broken by voices over the deputy’s radio, not even background static.

  Pipkins had gone ten-seven. Out of service.

  “You follow me across two counties to tell me that?” Donnally asked.

  “Nope.” Pipkins smirked as he reached into the inside breast pocket of his parka. “To give you this.” He unfolded a subpoena and handed it over. “A DA down in Alameda County wanted this served ASAP.”

  Donnally didn’t look at it. He just reached into his truck window and said, “Ruby, how about do me a favor and ruminate on this.”

  Pipkins laughed like someone had just played into his hand at poker.

  “He said you’d do something like that and that he’d be just as happy to have you testify in handcuffs.”

  “And I guess you’ve already assigned yourself the task of hooking me up and hauling me down there.”

  “I’ll be waiting for my phone to ring on Tuesday morning with the DA’s call. You’re either going to be on the stand at 10 A.M. in Oakland or in the back of my patrol car at 10:05.”

  Donnally grinned. “Don’t let the anticipation keep you awake the night before.”

  “It won’t, but something else will.” Pipkins leaned back against Donnally’s truck and crossed his arms over his chest. “I hear you’re good with numbers, Harlan. How about helping me with a little addition?”

  The self-satisfied expression on Pipkins’s face told Donnally that they’d finally arrived at the real reason Pipkins was putting a dismal end to his good day on the river.

  “I get this subpoena,” Pipkins continued, “then I call a guy I know in the Sheriff’s Department down there and he fills me in about the Charles Brown case. So I backtrack a little bit and find out that you headed on down there right after Mauricio kicked off. It gets me to wondering if there’s a connection.”

  “Apples and oranges,” Donnally said. “That’s all.”

  “I don’t think so. When the DA called to see if the subpoena arrived, I asked him about how you got into the case. He said you didn’t tell him and he doesn’t know. That alone tells me you got something to hide. And combine that with the name on the headstone …” Pipkins arched his eyebrows. “It kinda gets me thinking that there’s a lot more to that little wetback than I thought.”

  “Which means what?”

  “That maybe we should have the city attorney—”

  “You mean, your uncle Bud—”

  “The city attorney … tie up Mauricio’s assets until we figure out if it’s all legit.”

  With that comment, Donnally grasped the Pipkins family’s preoccupation with Mauricio. They wanted his land. For twenty-five years Pipkins Sr. had used rigged auctions, usually of property seized from pot growers, to build a real estate empire. Everybody in town knew it, but nobody wanted to risk a marijuana plant showing up on their property followed by a zero-tolerance seizure. Now Pipkins Jr. was playing a variation on his father’s theme, maybe trying to prove to his father that he’d someday be ready to sit at the head of the family table.

  And what more satisfying way of doing it than by robbing a dead Mexican of his land and his legacy.

  Pipkins grinned, then reached down and turned on the radio holstered on his belt. He then spoke into the mike attached to his shoulder strap.

  “This is Pipkins. I’m ten-eight again.”

  Chapter 21

  “There’s no way you’re going to put me on the stand,” Donnally told Blaine over the phone the following morning. He was sitting at his desk in the café office. “You’re just covering your ass.”

  Donnally had it figured out even before he’d driven a mile from where Deputy Pipkins had pulled him over to serve him with the subpoena. As soon as the judge dismissed the case, Blaine would call a press conference and praise Donnally as the one who exposed it, then hint that it was Donnally’s fault for losing it because he’d refused to testify in support of the DA’s motion to have Brown declared incompetent to stand trial.

  Blaine laughed. “Fun, isn’t it? It must remind you of what you left behind when you got out of police work. This is like one of those noir movies from the forties, hard to tell who the good guys are.”

  “Maybe I should go all the way and sign on as a defense witness. I’m sure Margaret Perkins would be glad to have me on her team.”

  “You missed your chance, pal. We cut a deal late last night.”

  Donnally’s body stiffened and he caught his breath.

  “You what?”

  “Brown pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter and gets credit for the time he served in the loony bin.”

  Donnally’s hand clenched the telephone receiver. “And that means he gets out …”

  “The end of next month.”

  Donnally pushed himself to his feet, as if the force of his body in motion would deflect the course of the case.

  “Is that what a life is worth down there?”

  “It’s the best we could do,” Blaine said. “The judge didn’t want to take the political heat for dismissing a murder on speedy trial grounds. The defense gets to wash its hands of the case. And I get a conviction. It works for everybody.”

  “It sure as hell doesn’t work for Anna Keenan.”

  Blaine snorted. “Well, she’s never gonna find out, is she?”

  Chapter 22

  For the first time in his life, Harlan Donnally felt like he’d become a hick. Sitting on a leather couch in the lobby of Schubert, Smith, and Barton, looking out at the San Francisco financial district, wearing jeans and a Levi’s jacket, with his gray Stetson lying on the coffee table.

  He could’ve worn a suit. He had one left over from his detective days that still fit.

  But when he was getting dressed to drive down from Mount Shasta, he felt like he needed to let Margaret Perkins know that there remained a real fle
sh-and-blood working world where people still cared about the truth and tried to do the right thing.

  But now he wasn’t so sure.

  After all, what was the real difference between the Blaines and the Nanstons, and the Pipkinses and the Mauricios?

  Sitting there, watching the starched shirts and silk ties and eight-hundred-dollar shoes walk from the elevators into the glass-walled conference room bordering the lobby, he concluded that the only difference was the area code.

  Donnally rose when Perkins came out from the hallway to the left of the receptionist. He was surprised not just by her genuine smile, but by her pink tennis shoes.

  Perkins stuck out her hand as she approached and said, “Maybe we should get out of here and take a walk. There’s never been a conversation inside here like the one I think we’re about to have.”

  Donnally nodded, then picked up his hat.

  “Do I think he did it?” Perkins said as they walked up Stockton Street toward Chinatown. “I assume so, but I’m too scared of him to give you a rational answer.” She reached over and took Donnally’s hand for support as the hill steepened, then pointed at her hip. “Brand-new. I’m still getting used to it.”

  Donnally wondered if she’d done some research on him, learned about him being retired out on disability after the ambush, and was trying to position herself on common ground.

  “Then why plead him out?” Donnally asked. His voice was more accusatory than he wanted it to be. “If you believe he’s incompetent—”

  “No, we argued that he was incompetent—”

  “Then how can it be ethical to go through with it?”

  “Because it’s the best disposition for him and I’m obligated to do what’s in the interest of my client. And it’s not like a felony conviction will change his life. I don’t see him applying for a job requiring a top-secret clearance.”

  Donnally wasn’t sure what he’d had in mind as he’d driven down through the Central Valley toward San Francisco, but he’d expected that it would look a lot more like an argument than the conversation it was turning into. He’d even fantasized that Perkins would come into the reception area gloating like all the rest of the imbeciles in the defense bar who celebrated every murderer going free and couldn’t grasp that it was a tragedy, not a victory, when the criminal justice system failed.