by Steven Gore
From the front passenger seat, Gage watched the cacophony of architecture passing by-Italianate, Spanish Mission, Beaux Arts. It struck him that they had nothing in common but the arbitrary whims of a long-dead Barbary Coast elite made wealthy by gold and gambling, prostitution and corruption, each family attempting to impose its architectural will on an untamed city. Observing them now, Gage wondered whether that was the reason Charlie had insisted on buying the mansion in which they lived: an instance of glory-by-proxy, just as with his Hollywood clients.
Viz pulled his Yukon to the curb and shut off the engine. Gage reached for the door handle while gazing up at the Palmers’ four-story Victorian, now restored to a perfect balance of yellow and blue, with accents in red; the colors stark and brutal in an afternoon sun that also shone down on a freshly turned grave.
A blur of motion and then a flash of blue against green caught Gage’s eye. He jabbed a finger toward the bushes at the side of the house.
“A guy just went over the fence.” Gage swung open his door. “Black hair. Levi’s. About five-ten. Heading north.”
Gage looked back at his wife and Socorro, then at the trailing car containing Socorro’s son and daughter.
“Don’t let anyone go inside,” Gage said. He then realized there might be confidential client files in Charlie’s home office. “And don’t call the police yet.” He turned to Viz. “You circle around. I’ll try to cut through the block.”
Viz sprinted up the steep street while Gage ran down a neighbor’s driveway and into the backyard. He spotted vertical scrape marks on the weathered wood fence, then called Viz on his cell.
“Looks like he’s trying to get out to Union Street.”
Gage pulled himself over. A bullmastiff crouched at the opposite gate, barking at the memory of the burglar. The dog’s eyes followed his ears around toward the crunch of Gage’s dress shoes hitting the rock garden, mouth foaming, licking its lips. Gage slipped off his suit coat and wrapped it around his forearm, knowing a trained dog would go for his arm, while an untrained one would follow its instincts toward his throat. He knew he’d have to sacrifice the arm in either case.
A raspy female voice yelled from his left, “Get the hell out of my yard.”
Gage kept his eyes fixed on the dog, now poised for the attack, snarling, seeming to be begging for her command.
“A burglar just ran through here,” Gage said. He then glanced toward the open kitchen window and caught a glimpse of a tree stump of a woman with a bleached-blond flattop. “How about you control your dog so I can get after him?”
“Stallone! Sit.”
Stallone sat, still blocking the gate.
Gage’s cell phone rang.
“I’m out… on Union.” Viz’s breathing was explosive. “I missed him… Jumped into a new Lexus SUV… and took off.”
“You get the plate?”
“Too far away… didn’t even get a good look… at the guy
… Where are you?”
“In the backyard of the house just northeast of your sister’s. A dog got in my way.”
“Need help?”
“The owner is coming out. I’ll meet you on the front steps of Socorro’s. Let’s search the place before anyone else goes in and then check with the neighbors.”
G age and Viz found Socorro setting a steamer of tamales on the cooktop when they walked into the kitchen after their fruitless neighborhood canvass. She was tall and slim; the pale brown skin of her mother combined with the gentle Irish features of her father.
“Anything missing?” Viz asked her.
“Not that I could see.” Socorro covered the pot and set her hot pads on the counter. “I’m not sure the burglar even made it past the living room.” She turned toward Gage. “Charlie once told me about criminals who read the obituaries and do break-ins during funerals.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s what it was. I’m glad we got back in time so he didn’t get anything.”
Gage pointed upward. “Did you check Charlie’s office?”
“It’s always a mess. I’m not sure you’ll be able to tell anything. Faith and I glanced in. His computers are still there.”
“Mind if we look?”
“Of course not. But why his office? We keep the valuables in a safe in the bedroom. I already looked. It’s untouched.”
Gage didn’t want to worry her with his suspicion it was Charlie’s work, not their personal possessions, that had been the target, so he said, “Just to be thorough.”
Gage and Viz walked down the hallway to the front staircase, passing Faith sitting with the Palmer children in the living room. They climbed three flights to reach Charlie’s attic office. A month-and-a-half-old newspaper lying open on his desk told them the room had remained as Charlie had left it hours before he was shot. The shredder bin was overflowing. The bookcases were stacked with files and books both lined up and piled sideways.
“What was the guy searching for?” Viz asked as they surveyed the room.
Gage didn’t have an answer.
“You think it has something to do with what Charlie wanted from you?”
“Has Socorro told you what it was?”
“She hasn’t wanted to talk about it yet.”
Gage sat down at Charlie’s desk, then jiggled the computer mouse, waking up the monitor. In a few clicks Gage found the list of recently accessed documents.
“Looks like the guy wasn’t your everyday burglar,” Gage said. “He was opening files starting about an hour ago.”
“And your everyday burglar doesn’t drive a new Lexus SUV.”
Gage’s gaze shifted back and forth between the laptop and desktop computers, and asked, “Why didn’t he just grab them and run?” But then he answered his own question. “He’d have to turn them off and he was afraid he couldn’t get back in because he wouldn’t know the passwords.”
Viz pointed downward. “And a lot of the files are stored on a server Charlie has hidden behind a wall in the basement. It would’ve taken the burglar hours to find it.”
Gage felt a moment of unease, almost of dread, for Socorro and her children. The ghosts of Charlie’s past had not died with him, but had instead mutated into flesh and blood and had invaded their lives, and would again, unless-
He pointed at the computers.
“Let’s copy everything onto one of our laptops so we can access the files later, then pack them up, along with the server, and take them to the office. And we better make a show of it so if the crook didn’t get what he was searching for, he won’t be coming back thinking there’s something left to find.”
Viz locked his hands on his hips. Mouth tight. “It pisses me off. How could he do this to his family? They’ve got to live in fear for who knows how long because of the shit he pulled.”
Gage glanced at a twenty-five-year-old photo on the bookshelf of Charlie in his SFPD uniform. Even as a rookie, he had the dead eyes of a snake and a predator’s grin.
“Your sister should’ve divorced him years ago,” Gage said. “At some point the illusion of first impressions must’ve worn thin enough to see through.”
“Even if it did-which I doubt-she’d never divorce him,” Viz said. “She’s too damn Catholic for her own good.”
Gage rose from the chair. “How come you’re not?”
“By the time I was twelve, I was bigger than any two priests in the parish put together. They couldn’t scare me anymore.”
Gage expected Viz to smile, but he didn’t.
“I even coined my own two-word catechism. It came in real handy in Afghanistan.”
“What’s that?”
“Fuck eternity.”
Chapter 6
After Gage and Viz returned downstairs, Socorro asked Gage to walk with her into the screened-in back porch. They sat in wicker lounge chairs facing a lawn enclosed by mature oaks, pistache, and weeping willows, their trunks wrapped with ivy and surrounded by flowering shrubs. Years ago it had seemed like a refuge from the chaos of San Franci
sco, but Gage now realized that to Socorro it must have felt like a prison exercise yard.
“Charlie called me the other day,” Gage said.
“I know. I dialed the phone for him. I was surprised. He always seemed afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me?”
As Gage turned toward her, he noticed in the corner the small table on which she had written a series of children’s books before her twins were born. It was covered with flowerpots and planting soil.
“I hadn’t even talked to him since the last time I was in this house, and that was over twenty years ago.”
“I think it started as jealousy,” Socorro said. “He applied for homicide, but got turned down, but they handed you the gold badge without you asking. Even now, everyone in the department still sees you as a legend and Charlie as just a guy who once dressed in blue.”
Gage shook his head. “His father was the legend, not me, and that wasn’t easy in a town that hates cops.”
“As far as Charlie was concerned his father was a failure. Officer Friendly who spent his whole career walking a beat and never even put in for a promotion.”
An image came to Gage of the last time he’d seen Charlie. It was also the last time he’d seen Charlie’s father. Both smiling, in uniform, standing behind a head table, the son saluting the father.
“That sure wasn’t the impression I got at his father’s retirement dinner,” Gage said.
“What else could he say? The whole department was listening.” Her eyes blurred as though reliving the event, maybe even the same moment that had come back to Gage, then she focused on him again. “Even after Charlie went out on his own and the movie crowd made him their rescuer and confidant, he knew the world-or at least the part he cared about most-would never see him as any better than second best.”
Gage felt himself being straitjacketed into a conversation he didn’t want to be involved in and wondered whether he was listening to the voice of grief forgiving all sins or the obliviousness of a too-kind heart. As he looked over at her, he recalled Faith once saying Socorro had the soul of a Hallmark card grandmother, living a life framed by transitions: by weddings, births, anniversaries, and deaths, but otherwise shut off from the world. She’d never gone with Charlie to celebrity parties, because, in their serial marriages and public funerals, they trivialized what she believed was sacred.
“I still don’t see how that adds up to fear,” Gage said.
“I don’t either. But somehow that’s what it turned into.” Socorro fell silent, then shrugged and said, “I guess that’s one of many things I’ll never understand.”
W hen Gage returned from bringing Socorro a cup of tea from the kitchen, he found her staring out toward the silent tulip leaf fountain centered in the garden, her brows furrowed in concentration.
“There was something I was going to ask you.” Socorro closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “The world’s been turned upside down. Sometimes my mind just goes blank, especially about things that just happened.” She shook her head as if trying to jar loose the thought. “I know what it was. Who is Moki Amaro? Charlie fell apart when he heard the name.”
“The son of my receptionist.”
“Did Charlie do something to him?”
“It depends on your point of view. Law can be rough.”
Gage knew this also wasn’t a conversation he wanted to get into, not with a grieving widow, and not with his own regret for having failed to find a way to shut Charlie down decades earlier. He wondered whether part of what had restrained him over the years was that breaking Charlie would have also broken her.
Gage decided to circle back. “You know why Charlie called me?”
She took a sip of her tea and set the cup on the table between them.
“He wouldn’t say. He even asked me to leave the room if you came on the line, but I left the phone on speaker and listened just outside the door.”
“You think he wanted me to assign one of my people to finish up his cases? I’m sure there are clients who still need their work completed.”
The words were a lie in the form of a question, for Gage knew whatever Palmer wanted, it wasn’t that. But Gage didn’t have a clue what it was. Was it help? Or protection? And for whom? Himself? Or her? Or, even more burdensome, maybe he wanted Gage to do exactly what he was doing: protecting her from the truth about him.
“He always used to joke that you were too straight for your own good,” Socorro said. “I guess that means despite everything he trusted you.”
Gage pointed up in the direction of Charlie’s office. “Viz and I were thinking it would be a good idea to pack up his files and computers and move them to my building.”
Socorro’s eyes welled up and she shook her head.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to face the emptiness. When I walked in the other day I still expected to see him sitting at his desk, staring at his monitor, even though he hadn’t been up there since before he got shot.”
“We’ll bring everything back when we’re done,” Gage said. “Set it up just the way it was.”
She sighed. “Thanks for understanding. His work was as much a part of him as his clothes in our closet.” She wiped at the tears with a tissue. “Maybe it’s better if you take it all. I wouldn’t be able to make sense of it anyway.”
“I’ll send over our computer guy, Alex Z.”
Socorro smiled, still wiping her eyes, the skin surrounding them raw and red. “The cute rock-and-roller with the Popeye tattoos and silver earrings who makes the girls in San Francisco go gaga?”
Gage nodded. San Francisco Magazine had recently done a feature on club scene bands, with Alex Z’s picture on the cover.
Her smile broadened. “I think I better make sure my daughter isn’t home when he comes by. I don’t want to take a chance of her going weak in the knees like all the rest of the girls.”
“Don’t worry. He’s got a girlfriend.”
“Then he can drop by anytime.” She touched her lips. “That was the first time I’ve smiled since Charlie was shot. It felt strange. I guess I’m out of practice.”
“You’ve had a tough time. The kids, too.”
Socorro’s eyes settled on the gas barbecue standing on the brick patio.
“In some ways he was a good father, other ways not. I’m not sure what they’ll think about him after the grief passes. A few months ago, Charlie Junior told me his father’s clients appeared to trust him more than respect him. Junior found it very troubling.”
Socorro looked over at Gage, as if for an explanation. It seemed to him she’d used the words of her son as a proxy to ask questions she was afraid to ask for herself, as though she was trying to protect herself from the abyss by looking at its reflection in a mirror held by another.
Gage felt a wave of sadness for the courage she’d lost during the years she’d spent in a world walled off by Charlie. This wasn’t how he remembered her when she was young and fearless, backpacking with Faith in the Sierras and talking long into the night, no subject off-limits, no thought stifled or left unfinished.
He avoided responding to her veiled question by changing the subject.
“Did Charlie have any ideas about who shot him?” Gage asked.
Socorro shook her head. “He just said a man stuck a gun in his back and demanded money. Charlie spun around swinging, but missed and lost his balance. Then the man pulled the trigger. Charlie never got a good look at his face. Just a tall, thin, white guy.”
“Do you know what he was working on that day?”
“A tax fraud case, something to do with yacht donations.”
“Which side?”
“The broker and the appraiser. A lawyer down in Beverly Hills figured out his clients could get bigger tax deductions for donating their boats to charities than they’d make back by selling them, if the appraisals were pumped up two or three times. Charlie didn’t think the case had anything to do with him getting shot, but is it possible?”
Gage
shook his head. “People don’t go to war over tax cases. The penalties are too light.”
“I think that’s all he was doing that day. He was winding down his practice even before he was shot. With the twins graduating from college in the spring, he could retire.”
Socorro stared down at her hands folded together on her lap.
“It doesn’t seem real,” she finally said. “Everything feels hollow. Even the cars driving by seem to echo in my ears.” She dabbed at new tears. “Hardly anybody called, even after the Chronicle article. I guess Charlie was just hired help to the people he worked for.”
“People pretend, but there isn’t much loyalty in the legal community,” Gage said, knowing the people who hired Charlie to do the dirty work would now want to pretend they never had their hands in the grime.
“Judge Meyer was the only ex-client who called.”
Gage felt his body tense. Brandon Meyer had Charlie on speed dial during their years working as San Francisco’s stable boys cleaning up after clients with more money than morals. Apparently, their connection hadn’t broken when Meyer grabbed on to the coattails of his brother, Landon, and hoisted himself onto the federal bench a decade earlier.
“What did he say?” Gage asked.
“That he was sorry to hear about Charlie and something about whether Charlie had learned anything new since they’d last talked.”
“About what?”
Socorro glanced over her shoulder toward the inside of the house, then lowered her voice. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”
“I won’t pass it on.”
She took in a breath, then nodded. “Brandon was mugged a week or two before Charlie was shot. His wallet was stolen. Charlie was looking into it.”
“Did Charlie tell that to Spike? After all-”
Socorro shook her head. “Charlie was positive the two robberies weren’t related. The man who mugged Brandon was Hispanic. Brandon was too embarrassed to report it himself because it happened in the Tenderloin. He cut through one night on his way from the Federal Building to a law office on Van Ness. He thought it would play badly in the media, him getting mugged a few yards away from drug dealers and prostitutes. I can’t blame him.” Socorro shuddered. “I’m afraid even to drive through there.”
