Act of Deceit

by Steven Gore

  In thinking back to the smile with which she greeted him, it now seemed like the kind that fellow sufferers offer each other in doctors’ offices.

  He now wondered whether she’d been swept along by events just as he had been.

  “The Albert Hale Foundation mustn’t be too thrilled with their poster boy pleading guilty,” Donnally said. “Makes Brown look a whole lot less of a victim. In fact, it shows he worked the system better than the folks who run it.”

  Perkins stopped to take a breath next to one of two potted orange trees bracketing the entrance to a Chinese restaurant.

  “The word from on high is that Hale is fine with it,” Perkins said. “And his underlings are finally acknowledging what we told them at the start. It was a mistake to jump into the case without looking into it a little deeper. Charles Brown was the wrong guy to build a cause around.”

  Donnally looked at his watch. It was almost 12:45.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  Perkins nodded.

  He pointed at the framed menu hanging on the green stucco wall next to the front door.

  “How adventurous are you?”

  Perkins grinned. “I think we’re about to find out.”

  “What do you call this, again?” Perkins pointed at her almost finished bowl of hand-rolled wheat noodles, beef, pork, scallops, shrimp, mussels, and onions in a spicy red sauce. Her face was pink and sweating.

  Donnally smiled at her.

  “In Chinese it’s called ma mien. Horse noodles. The Koreans call it jambong. The name of this restaurant is Yantai. It’s a city in China right across the Yellow Sea from Seoul.”

  “And you know that because …”

  “I had a fascination with maps as a kid.”

  She set down her chopsticks and spoon and wiped her lips with her napkin.

  “Why was that?”

  Donnally felt himself stiffen. He hadn’t come down to San Francisco to talk about himself, but to find a way to torpedo Brown’s deal.

  Perkins must have seen something in his eyes. “Come on,” she said, “spill it.”

  He pushed his bowl forward, then folded his arms on the edge of the table. While some of his childhood memories came back to him like half-remembered episodes from the storybooks his mother had read to him, this wasn’t one of them. This was real and he knew it was the incident that started his downhill slide from the innocence of childhood.

  “I was in the third grade,” Donnally finally said. “It was after my brother was killed in Vietnam. I went outside into our backyard, up in the Hollywood Hills—”

  Perkins stopped him with furrowed brows.

  “My father is in the entertainment business.”

  Donnally pushed on before she could begin the line of who-what-where questions everyone asked.

  “Up there, above the city lights, before I could identify constellations, it just looked like a chaos of stars. And that night they all seemed to be moving together, like you could actually see the universe expanding. Looking back, I suspect that it was a thin layer of clouds passing by that made the stars look like they were moving the opposite way.” He paused for a moment, then shook the image from his mind. “In any case, it was unnerving. Ever since that moment I’ve needed to know where I stand.”

  “So you’re always triangulating your position.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “And now Charles Brown has been sprung free from the place he was supposed to hold.”

  “And where he was supposed to spend the rest of his life.” Donnally paused as a wave of sadness passed through him, followed by anguish and then anger. “Brown tried to rape Anna Keenan and she resisted. That’s not manslaughter. It’s capital murder.”

  Perkins closed her eyes and took a breath.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she said, looking at him again. “I also have a place in the world where I fit in. And it comes with obligations not of my own choosing.”

  Donnally sat in silence for a moment, letting the hollowness of Perkins’s final sentence linger, then said:

  “At your age and at mine, with money in the bank and a place to live, everything is of our own choosing.”

  Chapter 23

  “I understand we have a disposition in this matter,” Judge Nanston said, after sitting down behind the bench in the crowded courtroom.

  Donnally sensed relief in her voice, and he knew why. Brown’s guilty plea had excused her from the obligation of acting on her legal conclusion that the case had to be dismissed on speedy trial grounds. By accepting the deal, she’d escaped a week of infamy on conservative talk radio, maybe even a recall election.

  Charles Brown, no longer chained and handcuffed to the chair next to Margaret Perkins, stared up at Judge Nanston. His hair had been cut and his beard had been shaved, and he looked ten pounds heavier. Donnally guessed it was from lithium or another manic-depressive drug he’d been given in custody. The innocent expression and gray suit Brown wore gave him the appearance of a minister who was stunned and bewildered by his drunk-driving arrest. Only Brown’s eyes betrayed the racing thoughts within.

  Perkins rose. “I’m sorry, Your Honor, but I don’t believe we have a disposition.”

  Donnally felt his body tense with expectation. Maybe Perkins had found an escape from what seemed like an ethical straitjacket. Maybe justice would be done after all.

  Perkins continued, “The defendant’s position is that he’s not guilty of the offense.”

  Blaine’s head jerked toward Perkins, his face flushing with fury and betrayal.

  Judge Nanston slumped back in her chair.

  “Does this mean you want to renew your incompetence motion?” Nanston asked.

  “No, Your Honor. We’d like the court to set a trial date.”

  Donnally spotted Blaine’s left hand hanging by his side, rubbing his fingers against each other like he was trying to wipe off pine sap. Donnally didn’t expect Blaine to look back. He had avoided Donnally from the moment he’d entered the courtroom ten minutes earlier.

  “May we approach, Your Honor?” Blaine asked, his voice taut, suppressing the anger raging within.

  Judge Nanston nodded. She rolled her chair to the edge of the platform on which the bench stood, and then leaned over into the huddle of Blaine, Perkins, and the court reporter. Every few seconds, one of them would glance over at Brown, who sat staring down at the defense table.

  Donnally glanced up at the courtroom clock, at the silent second hand lurching along against the background of the unintelligible whispers at the front of the courtroom. He scanned the faces of the reporters sitting in the gallery behind him, each one’s head angled toward the bench, as though their ears were parabolic microphones.

  The group dispersed.

  All eyes followed Perkins as she returned to the defense table and sat down. She and Brown leaned in toward each other. He stared at Perkins as she spoke. Finally he swallowed hard and nodded.

  Perkins stood and looked up at Judge Nanston.

  “We have reached a disposition, Your Honor. Mr. Brown will plead no contest to the count of manslaughter.”

  Donnally pushed himself to his feet. Everyone in the courtroom turned toward him, except Blaine.

  “No contest?” Donnally said, eyes fixed on Blaine’s back. “No contest? Like it was a crime that nobody committed?”

  Both bailiffs rose, hands on their guns.

  Donnally saw the clerk reach under her desk, finger poised to press the alarm that would flood the courtroom with sheriff’s deputies.

  Perkins faced toward him, her hands extended as though pleading for forgiveness for an act her duty required.

  Judge Nanston glared at Blaine like a neighbor demanding that he control his off-leash dog.

  Blaine turned and took the few steps toward the low barrier behind which Donnally stood.

  “Take it easy, man,” Blaine said, reaching for Donnally’s shoulder. “This isn’t the time—”

  Do
nnally pushed away his hand.

  “I know this isn’t the time, it’s the last time anybody will have a chance to stop this. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “The best that I can, under the circumstances.”

  “Then change the circumstances. Nothing says you have to take this deal. Make him go to trial.”

  “For what? Given a choice between letting him walk on reasonable doubt and a first-degree murder conviction, the jury would’ve compromised on manslaughter anyway.”

  “I’ll tell you for what,” Donnally said, jabbing a forefinger against Blaine’s chest, ignoring the approaching bailiffs. “So Anna Keenan, wherever she is, can hear the word ‘guilty.’”

  Chapter 24

  Donnally thought he’d probably looked like a lunatic as he pushed past the television cameras and reporters outside the courthouse on his way to the parking garage.

  Watching the eleven o’clock news in Janie’s living room confirmed it, for him and for her.

  But at least Blaine hadn’t blamed him for the outcome of the case during the press conference afterward.

  Donnally leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes as he listened to Blaine uttering hateful platitudes about justice and closure, spoken with prosecutorial authority, calculated to make the obscene disposition palatable to the public.

  For a moment, the target of Donnally’s fury oscillated between Blaine and his audience, both now willing to put someone else’s past behind them.

  Then another wave of embarrassment.

  Donnally cringed as he thought back on his final words to Blaine. He didn’t believe in an afterlife, and he sure didn’t believe that dead souls wandered among the living, waiting for human justice to release them from the mundane world of their battered flesh.

  He knew that it wasn’t Anna who needed to hear Brown say the word “guilty.”

  It wasn’t even Mauricio who needed to hear it.

  It was himself: a short-order cook in a two-bit town dwarfed into insignificance by its namesake lump of dirt and rock towering above it.

  Janie reached over and touched his arm as a reporter quoted Donnally’s final words in court.

  He looked again at the screen. The woman stood with the lake behind her, face framed by auburn hair, the microphone held high. She said again, now whispering, “So Anna Keenan, wherever she is, can hear the word ‘guilty.’ ” She lowered the mike as her eyes welled up and the camera panned past her toward the shimmering water.

  Donnally then knew why he chose those words. He was yelling fire in a complacent world’s theater, only to have it transformed into melodrama for the eleven o’clock news.

  He also knew that his father would be so very, very proud.

  Donnally rose from the couch and walked upstairs to the bedroom. He closed his eyes after he lay down, wondering if that melodrama had been his plan all along, wondering if he’d once again let himself be seduced by his father’s magic in turning life into fiction.

  He thought back to his father entering his ICU room at SF Medical where he lay after he had been shot. Even in the gray haze of morphine, he’d seen his father hesitate in the doorway as though framing the scene, choosing the camera angle, the point of view, the distance.

  In that moment, Donnally had felt himself break in two, as though his mind had risen above his body, suspended like a lens, watching, recording, as if what happened to him had actually happened to someone else, to a character in a movie.

  OPENING SCENE: Squad Room. Undercover operation run-through. Homicide Detective Harlan Donnally will park his car next to Morelia Taqueria and walk past the Norteño bodyguards and into the restaurant. He’ll slide into a bench seat across from Alberto Villarreal and make the trade: a get-out-of-jail-free card for a name.

  CUT TO: Shootout. Donnally firing at Norteño Gangster Number One and Sureño Gangster Number Three, both too preoccupied with shooting at each other to notice the detective with the double-handed grip leaning over the hood of his car.

  JUMP CUT/HIGH ANGLE: A top-down view of Donnally sprawled on the Mission Street sidewalk next to the wheel well of his bullet-ridden undercover Chevy. Unmoving legs. Back riveted to the pavement. His Levi’s and leather jacket soaking up splotches of Coke and salsa.

  TRAVELING SHOT: The whoop-whoop of patrol cars bursting through the South of Market intersections from the police station a half mile away.

  PAN SHOT: Following behind the siren blasts reverberating against the storefronts lining the street: Carniceria Michoacan, Tortilleria Juarez, Tacos Guadalajara.

  FREEZE FRAME AND CLOSE-UP: A bra and panty-clad manikin in a store window. A bullet hole in her throat.

  POV: Donnally’s vertigo as the paramedic flops him away from the curb and toward the shattered plate-glass shop windows. Then a view past the black boots of the EMT squatting near his head and toward the Starbucks fifteen yards away.

  “Cut!” his father yells.

  Donnally watches director Donald Harlan point his finger at the couple slumped over the wrought-iron table in front of the coffee shop, their fake blood dripping through the latticed top onto the sidewalk.

  “Don’t just slump,” his father says, throwing up his arms. “Audiences don’t want slumping. They want wrenching, spasmodic writhing. And knock over the goddamn coffee cups. Nobody’s going to believe you’ve been killed unless you knock over the goddamn coffee cups.”

  VOICE-OVER:

  NEWSCASTER

  Officer caught in a crossfire.

  CRANE SHOT: Dead Mexican gangsters lying in the street, all but their snakeskin boots covered by the medical examiner’s plastic sheets.

  JUMP CUT: The shooting review board.

  VOICE-OVER:

  SFPD CAPTAIN

  Let’s hear your version, Detective. Tell us what led up to the ambush.

  “Ambush,” Donnally mumbled.

  “What?” Janie leaned up on an elbow. It was still dark out. “What did you say?”

  Donnally rubbed his eyes. “Nothing.”

  “It sounded like you said ‘ambush.’ ”

  “I must’ve been dreaming.”

  “About the shooting?”

  “No, not now. It was last night as I was falling asleep.”

  Janie reached over and ran her hands through his hair. “Are you fighting a battle in there, or planning one?”

  Donnally stared up at the invisible ceiling.

  “I don’t know what I was doing.”

  “I can’t let this go until I hear him say it,” Donnally said to Janie, as they walked along the fog-curtained Ocean Beach after breakfast. Far ahead of them in the semidarkness stood a shivering crowd drawn to the shoreline by a rough tide’s exposure of the wreckage of the King Phillip, a clipper ship that went aground in the nineteenth century.

  “Because of how you think you looked on television?”

  “No,” Donnally said. “This isn’t about me.”

  They stopped and watched the fog reach inland, over the surf and sand, insulating them, isolating them, the gulls wheeling away, their calls and shrieks fading like distant echoes.

  Donnally took in a long breath and exhaled, then looked over at Janie.

  “Tell me,” Donnally said. “Which is worse? Them failing to get Brown convicted over all those years or letting him plead no contest and drift away like he did nothing at all?”

  Janie didn’t answer right away, her eyes moving, seeming to search the gray around them for something solid to attach her thoughts to.

  Finally she said, “I’m not sure there is a worse.” She looked up at him. “Or even that they’re all that different. It seems to me they did the same thing twice.”

  Donnally nodded. “And I’m not going to let it end this way.”

  Chapter 25

  The burglar wasn’t after money.

  Donnally recognized that the moment he stepped into Mauricio’s office. The petty cash tin lay open with the same fifty dollars inside that had been there since Mau
ricio checked himself into the hospital. Someone was either looking for something more valuable or trying to send a message, or both.

  The voice on the blinking answering machine gave Donnally the answer.

  “Interesting thing, Harlan,” Deputy Pipkins said on the recording. “I checked DMV and birth records and the only Mauricio Aguilera born in California on January 14, 1956, died on January 15, 1956. What do you make of that, Detective?” Pipkins chuckled. “Oh, yeah, there’s one other thing. Strictly speaking, can you call them wetbacks if they snuck in across the desert?”

  The next voice he heard was Will’s, but coming from within his own head:

  Deputy Asshole.

  Donnally extracted the tape and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He didn’t put in a new one. Mauricio was done receiving messages.

  While he straightened the papers on the desk, Donnally wondered what difference it made whether Pipkins found out the truth about Mauricio. Maybe he’d been resisting not because the truth would hurt anybody, but simply because Pipkins was Pipkins, or maybe because Pipkins was his father’s son.

  By the time he’d stepped back and uprighted a chair, he realized that it made a difference for the same reason that promises made to the dying did.

  And it sure as hell wasn’t because the dead cared afterward.

  It was because the living had to live with themselves.

  Donnally checked the rear door and each of the rooms until he found where Deputy Pipkins had broken in. Scuff marks showed that he had climbed through a bedroom window that was concealed from the café parking lot by an overgrown pyracantha.

  After retrieving a flashlight from the kitchen, Donnally leaned over the sill and shined the beam toward the ground and among the intertwined and leaf-cluttered branches.

  A glint of silver flashed back.

  He swept the beam past the same spot a second time.

  Another flash.

  He locked on it and squinted until he could make out the outline of a basket-woven rectangular square of leather with a chrome clasp: Deputy Asshole’s ticket book.