by Steven Gore
Gordon paused in thought and he gazed out toward the bay.
“Anyway,” he finally said, moving his gaze to Donnally, “if anybody was gonna get hit, it would’ve been that scumbag investigator.”
Chapter 27
Hamlin’s reception area seemed hushed, even kind of funereal, when Donnally walked in. For the first time he noticed the thud of his shoes and the muted squeaks of the worn wood-planked floor.
Jackson rose from her desk chair. She’d already called to warn him Hamlin’s family would be coming in. She intercepted him, pointed at the inner office, and said in a low voice, “Mark’s parents and sister are in there already. Matthew and Sophie and Marian, but everyone calls her Lemmie.”
Donnally took in a long breath and exhaled. He had nothing good to say about Hamlin, and therefore nothing to supplement the standard condolences that were due a grieving family.
The moment he reached the door he grasped that not all the family members were grieving.
Hamlin’s parents sat in chairs facing the desk.
His sister stood next to the couch, looking out the window at the brick facade of the building across the street, poised like a tourist guessing at the type of architecture or an artist deciding whether a scene is worth painting.
They all turned toward him as he crossed the threshold.
Donnally introduced himself and expressed his sympathies. He didn’t want to be seen as supplanting their son and brother by sitting behind Hamlin’s desk, so he pulled a chair away from a wall and placed it so it formed a semicircle with the couch and the chairs in which the parents sat. He waited until Lemmie took a seat on the couch, then sat down.
On his second look he recognized Lemmie. He’d seen her photo on the backs of best sellers that had migrated on and then off Janie’s nightstand over the years. She appeared to be at least ten years younger than her brother. He didn’t find it surprising that he’d run into a writer during the investigation. Writers crowded San Francisco the way actors crowded LA and painters crowded New York. He just hadn’t connected the Hamlin last name from her to her brother. Maybe because she was always referred to in conversation and in the press by her first name alone.
Under Janie’s prodding, he’d tried to read one of Lemmie’s novels, but got through only ten or twelve pages, put off by too many adjectives and adverbs and everything being said sweetly, or intriguingly, or bewilderingly.
As he put the book down for the final time, Janie said, “Too girlie, huh?”
Donnally figured he’d be safer by answering with a shrug.
After that, Janie came to accept that Donnally was a noun-and-verb kind of guy. And that had shown in his work. When he was a patrol sergeant, he’d made an officer remove the word “brutally” from a report of a stabbing in the Pink Palace, asking if a single stab wound was brutal, what was a dismemberment or a stabbing followed by a rape?
And sitting with the parents and sister of Mark Hamlin, he found it hard to imagine that any literary flourish or device could add to the knowledge they shared about his death.
Rope.
Tied.
Hung.
Strangled.
Dead.
And, worst of all:
Erection.
“We got into town from Boston this morning to help Marian with the funeral arrangements,” Matthew Hamlin said.
The family’s naming scheme hit Donnally when the father said the name Marian. Matthew, Mark, and Marian.
Donnally’s own father, Donald Harlan, Sr. had also imposed a naming scheme on his children. Donald, Jr. and Donnally. And it had been part of Donnally’s rebellion to reverse his name, from Donnally Harlan to Harlan Donnally, in order to disguise his connection to his father.
He wondered whether Marian’s adoption of the name Lemmie was part of hers.
“And to find out where you stand in the investigation,” Lemmie said, leaning forward on the couch.
Lemmie sounded more like a reporter asking a question than a mourning sister. It was the sort of tone that can turn a family member from source of information into a suspect, like a husband seeming too interested in the mechanics of how his wife died or a son too anxious for the police to take the yellow tape off his elderly parent’s front door and release the crime scene.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you any of the details of the investigation,” Donnally said. “The court appointed me special master so that means-”
“Do you have any leads?”
Matthew glared at her. “Let the man talk.”
Lemmie pulled back as though evading a punch.
Donnally was surprised by the force of the old man’s personality. He had to be in his late eighties, an age when most parents have long since begun deferring to their children, sometimes even their grandchildren.
His wife looked down and twisted a tissue in her hands.
“It’s all right,” Donnally said, focusing on Matthew, and feeling Lemmie’s role in his mind shift from murder suspect to domestic victim. “I understand. What happened to Mark is bad enough, it’s far worse when you don’t know why or who did it.” He looked at Lemmie. “We’re pursuing some information we’ve received.” Then back toward Matthew. “This is a complicated situation since my work may involve attorney-client matters in the sense that-”
Now Matthew cut in. “No need to explain. I practiced law for over fifty years, young man.”
Donnally felt his face warm. He expected, or maybe hoped, Matthew’s wife would reach over and pat his hand and say, Now, dear. But she didn’t stir and didn’t raise her head. She seemed to withdraw inside herself, and it seemed like a practiced move. He suspected he had discovered a clue about why Mark Hamlin had authority problems, seemed to view all authority as an enemy to be subverted or overcome, but his focus at the moment wasn’t to solve that mystery. It was to solve another one.
“Then you’ll understand why I have to be even more careful in what I say, even to family members, than I might be in another investigation.”
“What assurance do we have that you’re capable of this kind of investigation at all?” Matthew tilted his head toward the reception area behind him. “My son never seemed to be able to surround himself with competent people, and the press keeps hinting about some mysterious link between you and Mark.”
Lemmie made a movement as if she intended to interject herself on behalf of Donnally or apologize for her father’s rudeness, but then sat back, the gesture orphaned in the silent office. Donnally suspected if it hadn’t been her brother’s death that had brought her into this room with her parents, she might’ve expressed what was on her mind.
Donnally recounted his background, his single contact with Hamlin after he left police work, and how it was that he came to be chosen by Judge McMullin. He was in the odd and uncomfortable position of having to minimize his connection with their son even more than it was in order to buttress his own credibility. Lemmie’s downcast eyes told him she also understood and felt the sad irony.
Matthew seized the opportunity supplied by Donnally’s offering of his thumbnail biography to offer his own. Once a name partner in Boston’s largest civil firm, he had represented most major U.S. airlines and pharmaceutical companies, and had served as ambassador to Ireland under Ronald Reagan. After that, he worked as an informal adviser to George H. W. Bush, and then retired from politics after the election of, in his words, “that son of a bitch Bill Clinton.”
Until that moment, Donnally had assumed Lemmie had picked her parents up at the airport and had driven them to the office. He now imagined there was a limousine double-parked around the corner, and he wished they were already in it and driving away.
“When is the funeral?” Donnally asked, trying to transition the conversation toward their exit.
“We’ll have a service here in a few days,” Lemmie said, “then they. . we. . will take his body back to Boston for the burial.”
Lemmie said the word “we” in a way that suggested she�
�d already prepared her living will and it specified that there would be no Marian next to Matthew and Mark in the family plot.
“I assume you’ll have someone there to videotape the attendees,” Matthew said.
Her hand shot out. “Please stop, Father. He knows how to do his job.”
“I had intended to,” Donnally said, “and expect to be there myself.”
Donnally and Lemmie rose, and after a moment’s hesitation, the parents did also.
As he walked them to the elevator, he overheard Lemmie tell her parents she had an appointment and would meet them at their hotel. From the incline of her head and the lean in her body, Donnally felt a kind of tension being broadcast toward him.
After shaking their hands, Donnally waited as the doors closed. He then stepped back and leaned against the wall. Two minutes later, the doors opened again and Lemmie stepped out.
Chapter 28
Mark turned into our father,” Lemmie said as they sat facing each other in a booth in the Backroom Bar on the first floor of a gray colonnaded former bank building around the corner from Hamlin’s office. “Or at least his mirror image, and I hated him for it.”
Lemmie took a sip from her neat double bourbon, then tilted the tumbler and rotated the bottom edge on the oak table. She worked the liquid up the side near the top, then back down again, as if tempting it to overflow. She stared at the revolving glass, upper teeth working against her lower lip.
Donnally didn’t think she stopped speaking in order to elicit a response from him. It was more that she seemed to be saying that the way things stood between her and her brother were what they were, now fixed in space and time like a name etched on a marble headstone. His agreement or disagreement, approval or disapproval, was irrelevant.
“It was once both of us against Father, then sometime in the last fifteen years it became each of us in our own way against him. Mark set out to fight him on his own turf, the law, and I set out to fight him on the page.”
Lemmie fell silent again, staring at her rotating glass, then furrowed her brows and looked at Donnally as though she just realized that they hadn’t started the conversation at the same place and with the same knowledge.
“You know who my father is, right?”
“Only what he told me.”
“How about I’ll start with a prologue?”
Donnally nodded.
“He was a staff lawyer for the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. He was hired at the same time as Bobby Kennedy, but stayed on after Bobby wised up to what was going on and left.”
Now Donnally recognized the name. Matt Hamlin, known in the press at the time and now in history books as Mad Matt. He’d read about him in a political science class at UCLA.
“After that blew up, my father stopped using the name Matt and only used Matthew, and always stuck in his middle name, Hutchinson, to help in the disguise. Matthew Hutchinson Hamlin.”
“But your father was young in the Red Scare days, and young people get in over their heads.”
“He was no younger than Bobby and Bobby knew when to get out. My father stayed and enjoyed every minute of it.” Lemmie smirked. “You know why he asked you whether you’d be videotaping the memorial service?”
“I assume it’s because experience suggests that killers sometimes appear at the funerals of their victims, just like some arsonists join the crowd to watch the fires they set.”
“What experience suggests has nothing to do with it. He only thought of it because if he’d been the killer, he would’ve shown up to enjoy his work. That’s what he did in the old days. Look at the photos from when people who’d refused to testify before McCarthy’s committee got arrested and perp-walked down the steps. He’s always there, in the crowd watching, wearing his G-man fedora, glorying in their humiliation.”
Donnally now understood why all of Lemmie’s novels were about dysfunctional families and psychologically abused children, most from the perspective of bewildered little girls or alienated women. He imagined that in one or more of those books was a scene of a mother cowering under her husband’s stare.
For the first time since he stood gazing at Hamlin’s body, he was beginning to get a sense of what had made Mark Hamlin, Mark Hamlin.
“And you and Mark grew up identifying with the victims.”
Lemmie nodded. “I think that’s how Mark got into the mind-set that the cops were the real crooks.” She let go of her glass and spread her hands. “Think of the people McCarthy and my father went after. Dashiell Hammett. Langston Hughes. Arthur Miller. Lee Grant. Garson Kanin. Martin Ritt. Joseph Losey. Orson Welles.”
It wasn’t lost on Donnally that the last four were movie directors, like his father.
Before he had a chance to comment, she flattened her palms on the table and said, “I know who you really are.”
Donnally felt his body tense, not because she’d somehow figured out who his father was, but because her voice had the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been tone about it.
What he was, and had always been, was the son of Don Harlan. And because of his name change, she must’ve put some work into tracking him.
But who he was inside and separate from his role as an ex-cop and the special master in her brother’s murder, she was never going to find out.
He decided to punch back. “Nothing turns a person more quickly from a witness into a suspect than them taking the time to investigate the investigator.”
Lemmie smiled. “Then it looks like I’ve been a suspect for twenty-five years.”
“How do you figure?”
“I’ve always been interested in what happens to the children of famous people. You’ve been on my radar since I saw your father’s first Vietnam movie in film class in college, Shooting the Dawn, and found out your older brother had been killed in the war.”
Donnally cringed, flashing back to himself staggering out of the movie’s premiere as a young boy, as bewildered and horrified as one of Lemmie’s fictional little girls.
“And I learned in the Pentagon Papers that your father himself made up the lie that had led to your brother’s death.”
Donnally had made the same discovery in high school. That’s what prompted him to move out of the house at sixteen and to change his name at eighteen.
“Your father portrayed the Vietcong as pure evil, and the Vietnamese villagers as if they’d brought the My Lai and Korean massacres on themselves, and he portrayed every American soldier as a maniac driven to wanton violence by the enemy. If that’s how he viewed your brother, I wondered how badly he twisted up his surviving kid.”
Donnally didn’t respond. She was right about his father, but she was only partly right about him. He’d moved up to San Francisco and became a cop as a way of untwisting himself.
“And as bent as your father was,” she continued, “I couldn’t figure out how you came out so straight, until today.”
Donnally had no interest in heading down the road of amateur psychoanalysis; he had a professional back at his house.
“Except his last film,” Lemmie said. “It was like a confession to all his past sins. I saw it in one of the art houses downtown.” She smiled. “It didn’t get much in the way of distribution. I doubt it played up in Mount Shasta.”
When Donnally didn’t engage the issue by offering a smile back, hers faded and she said, “Is that how he communicates with you, through movies?”
Donnally pursed his lips and shook his head. His father’s recent movie represented more than just an attempt to communicate with the public, it was also-in a fitful, stumbling sort of way-an attempt to communicate truthfully and honestly with his wife and son.
But opening this door further into his and his father’s lives wouldn’t get Donnally closer to understanding who might have wanted to kill Mark Hamlin, so he tried to slam it shut.
“Is this a hobby of yours?” Donnally asked. “Or a form of self-defense?”
Lemmie drew back. “Touche. I guess I was getting a little intrusive.” She paused, her face displaying the uncertainties and anxieties within, her hand now gripping her unmoving glass. “The truth is I do it to try to figure out whether I’m normal or not. To try to gain some perspective. Otherwise I’d just have my brother to compare myself to.”
“And how twisted was he?”
“I think he had no more respect for the truth than your father did. He fictionalized everything.” Lemmie’s upper teeth worked against her lower lip again, then stopped. “Is there such a word as ‘theatracized’? If so, that’s what he did. Truth wasn’t real. Victims’ suffering wasn’t real. Everything was an act in a play.”
Lemmie’s eyes went wide and her mouth fell open.
Donnally could tell she was seeing something in her mind that wasn’t visible to him.
Tears formed and squeezed out onto her cheeks as she blinked.
“I’m afraid. . I’m afraid even death didn’t seem real to him until the moment he faced it himself.” She swallowed hard. “Do you. . do you think he knew he was dying?”
Donnally knew the truth. There was no reason to think Hamlin was unconscious when he was strangled. But that wasn’t the answer he chose to give.
“I don’t know,” Donnally said. “There’s no way of knowing.”
He never viewed himself as a human polygraph, but Lemmie’s last sentences had taken her off the suspects list.
Lemmie reached into her purse, withdrew a tissue, and wiped her eyes. Her voice hardened again as she asked, “Doesn’t the condition of his body mean. .”
Donnally understood she was referring to her brother’s erection and answered, “Not necessarily, that happens sometimes when a victim has been strangled. We still haven’t gotten the toxicology report, so we don’t know whether it was induced medically.”
“And you don’t know about other drugs yet, either?”
“You know something?”
“Will my parents find out?”
