Power Blind

by Steven Gore

  “Walk me through how they did it,” Gage said.

  Alex Z picked up a yellow fluorescent marker from the worktable behind him and started at the left side of the chart.

  “A million dollars showed up in the Pegasus Limited account after Meyer’s firm got hired by TIMCO. It was later wired out to Hawkins. Then after the superior court ruled it was just a workers’ comp case, TIMCO transferred another two million into Pegasus—”

  “The fee for Anston and Meyer making the case go away.”

  “But I don’t see anything that could have been a payoff to the judge who dismissed it,” Alex Z said.

  “I don’t think there was one,” Gage said. “If he’d been paid off, his decision would have been a lot more definitive than it was. He had to dismiss the case on legal grounds because the plaintiffs couldn’t shake Hawkins or Karopian.”

  Gage scanned the complex chart. “Is that it for TIMCO?”

  “It pops up again after Meyer was appointed to the bench. A TIMCO subsidiary got cited for toxic dumping into San Pablo Bay. The general manager was charged in federal court.”

  “Meyer’s court?”

  “Bingo. According to Skeeter Hall’s research, Meyer forced the U.S. Attorney to knock it down to failure to report a spill, rather than an intentional release. No jail time. Just a fine.”

  “And the payoff?”

  “A TIMCO subsidiary wired two hundred thousand into Pegasus a week before sentencing, and another two hundred a week after.” Alex Z shook his head. “No one seemed to have noticed that TIMCO was a client of Meyer’s old firm.”

  “Wouldn’t make a difference,” Gage said. “Meyer wasn’t the attorney of record in the explosion case. That’s all that counts in conflict of interest rules for judges.”

  “Makes you wonder whether Meyer is paying off clerks to direct the cases he wants into his court,” Alex Z said.

  “Possible,” Gage said, “but untraceable. The payoffs would have been small and paid in cash, not hundreds of thousands of dollars wire transferred into offshore bank accounts.” He pointed at the chart. “What about Moki?”

  “That’s even easier.” Alex Z highlighted a series of lines. “Charlie’s spreadsheets show four separate two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar payments into Pegasus.”

  “One transfer from the parents of each of the kids?”

  “That’s what it looks like. And a day later, four hundred thousand gets wired to the witness in Cabo San Lucas.”

  “So Charlie got rid of witnesses in the cases Meyer handled when he was a lawyer,” Gage said, “and Judge Meyer got rid of cases that landed in his court.”

  Gage sat down and picked up the Pegasus spreadsheet.

  “The problem,” Gage said as he examined it, “is we have no way to connect Meyer directly to Pegasus.”

  Gage skimmed down to the bottom.

  Alex Z pointed at the last line. “There was about nine million dollars in the account before Charlie closed it a week before he died. But I can’t figure out where it was transferred.”

  Gage leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I know where. Socorro showed me a Pegasus insurance policy. Two million dollars for each of their children. And another seven million went into an annuity for Socorro.”

  “You mean he stole it?”

  “Either that or it was his cut for a career of criminality.”

  “Is that why they broke into his house? Trying to find where the money went?”

  “At this point there’s no way of knowing.” Then a question came to Gage in an image of a writhing Charlie Palmer during his final moments. “It makes me wonder whether Charlie’s death really was from natural causes.”

  Chapter 46

  Gage kept Lieutenant Spike Pacheco company on a wooden bench outside San Francisco Superior Court Department 23 while he waited to be called in to rebut defense claims at the tail end of a homicide trial. Gage surveyed the long marble-floored hallway, normally packed with defendants, attorneys, and the relatives of the in-custodies, but not at four o’clock on a Friday. It satisfied him there was no one close enough to overhear their conversation.

  “Somebody who was trying to trace the money wouldn’t have murdered Charlie,” Gage said. “That would guarantee they’d never get it back.”

  Spike jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the courtroom.

  “You know what that scumbag in there told me after he murdered his wife and tossed her off Devil’s Slide into the Pacific Ocean? ‘I just wanted her back, I just wanted her back.’ What did you beat into my brain when I got promoted into homicide? Don’t look for reasons, look for motives, for what really drives people, because the reasons killers give can be nonsensical.”

  “And that’s what’s been nagging at me. Porzolkiewski. He’s got the motive, triggered by bumping into Brandon Meyer on the street. Maybe it pushed him over the edge. First he shot Charlie when he came to retrieve the wallet and later got inside his house to finish him off. Then he figured from what I told him that Karopian was in on it and had been paid off to submit the false OSHA report on the cause of the explosion, so he went after him.”

  “Somehow.”

  “That’s the problem. We’ve got a truck load of motive, but no suspicious cause of death. Porzolkiewski wasn’t even on Bethel Island when Karopian died, and he sure was in a hurry to tell me he wasn’t.”

  “Did you check?”

  “He admitted to being about ten miles away from Karopian’s house earlier in the day, but claimed he was at the Ground Up Coffee Shop on Geary at about the time of death. I talked to a couple of employees. He was there all right. He’s known to most of the people who work there.”

  “What about the day Charlie died?”

  “No idea. I made a deal with him. In exchange for copies of what was in Meyer’s wallet he got to listen to part of my tape of Hawkins’s confession. I didn’t ask him anything about Charlie, not even about the shooting. I’m still not sure I know enough to ask him anything in a way that’ll get an answer that would make a difference.”

  The courtroom door swung open next to them. The DA stepped out. “The judge needs a five-minute break,” she said, “then you’re on.”

  Spike nodded and she walked back inside.

  “How about taking a long shot with a little of the county’s money?” Gage asked.

  “For what?”

  “Another toxicology analysis. The only way Porzolkiewski could have killed Karopian is by remote control.”

  “And you figure he might’ve done the same thing with Charlie?”

  “And doing the tests here is a lot cleaner than getting the local cops in a tizzy out on Bethel Island.”

  Gage’s cell phone rang the next morning as he was sitting at the conference table in his office puzzling over a printout of Charlie Palmer’s Pegasus spreadsheet.

  “The medical examiner just sent me the results. He feels like an idiot.”

  Spike wasn’t laughing.

  “What was it?”

  “It’s called sodium monofluoroacetate. Nobody would’ve thought to do a tox screen for poison in a case like Charlie’s. It’s banned in the States, but it’s used in Canada to kill wolves. They put it in a collar around a cow’s neck and when the wolf attacks he gets a mouthful. Let me read what the ME e-mailed me: white powder, no taste, no odor, attacks the cardiovascular and central nervous systems simultaneously. A tenth of a gram is all it takes to kill a human being.”

  “So you could put it in someone’s coffee—”

  “And the victim would think it was Splenda.”

  “What does it look like in action?”

  “Seizures, convulsions, and cardiac arrest.”

  “Sounds horrendous.”

  “And there goes Porzolkiewski’s alibi if it shows up in Karopian’s blood, too,” Spike said. “It can take as long as twenty hours to show itself.”

  Gage rested an elbow on the conference table, then ran his hand down the back of his head
.

  “It’s hard to imagine John Porzolkiewski as a cold-blooded murderer,” Gage said. “A manslaughter, heat of passion, enraged enough to shoot Charlie down in the street—that I can see. Sneaking into Charlie’s house, lacing his juice or sticking a needle in him—I don’t see him doing it. Or to Karopian either.”

  “We’ll find out. I just called the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. Bethel Island is their jurisdiction. Usually they just find the bodies of dead meth dealers out there, and never find the killers. They’re drooling over this one. They’ll have the tox results by this time tomorrow.”

  Gage felt himself losing control of the investigation. In another forty-eight hours, the links—proven or not—among Porzolkiewski, Charlie, Karopian, and Meyer’s former law firm would be front-page news. Reporters would be pawing through the search warrant affidavit and the police reports, the “what ifs” becoming “and thens.” Unless . . .

  “I’m worried about publicity,” Gage said.

  “You’re not the only one.”

  Gage’s mind wound its way through a forest of dangers, then he had a thought about how to skirt around them all:

  “I’ve got an idea of how to conceal what we’re doing. Use me as a confidential informant and get an order sealing the search warrant affidavit for my safety.”

  Spike laughed. “Won’t that be a little embarrassing when it comes out? People thinking you turned wimp.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  “I’ve got a better plan,” Spike finally said. “I’ll just say there’s an ongoing investigation that would be compromised. A little bullshit about CIs, pending search warrants, and means and methods. Judges like that kind of crap. It makes them feel important. And I’ll get the DA to lean on the judge for a gag order if it looks like the case might break open. Judges like that, too, since it makes them the center of the media coverage. Nobody gets to talk except them.”

  Chapter 47

  John Porzolkiewski wasn’t paying attention when the chubby Hispanic in the outdated brown sports coat walked into his Tenderloin store. His eyes darted back and forth between the two homeless men huddled by the beer display cooler on the opposite wall and the three high school girls giggling at the latest issue of Penis Envy at the front of the porn-lite magazine rack.

  He still wasn’t paying attention when the Hispanic man stopped in front of the counter behind which he was standing, when he pulled a single piece of paper out of a leather folder, and when two uniformed officers stationed themselves by the front door.

  The words, “I’m Lieutenant Pacheco of SFPD. I have a warrant to search your store,” finally broke through the auto-pilot haze of decades running a skid-row market.

  Porzolkiewski reached out to accept the paper from Spike’s hand. He spotted the words “Search Warrant” in bold letters on the top, then shook his head and looked up.

  “Busting my place apart because of some health code violation? What do you expect to find, plague?”

  Porzolkiewski’s eyes locked on a spot past Spike’s left shoulder, then he threw his arm forward, jabbing his finger at the homeless men.

  “Put that back and get out of here.”

  Spike glanced over and spotted the top of a silver and black King Cobra forty-ouncer protruding from a grimy army-jacketed armpit. The two patrol officers grabbed the homeless men, patted them down, removed four cans of malt liquor from their coat pockets, and pushed them out the door. Spike pointed at the girls, then toward the entrance. They slipped the magazine onto the rack, and slinked past him and out to the street.

  Porzolkiewski was staring down at the search warrant when Spike turned back, his hands shaking and his eyebrows furrowed on what seemed to Spike to be a permanently sad face.

  “I need you to keep your hands in view and come around the counter,” Spike told him.

  Porzolkiewski backed up a half step, then glanced under the countertop.

  Spike pulled his coat back and rested his hand on the butt of his semiautomatic.

  “It’s not that,” Porzolkiewski said. He bent down, reaching under the counter.

  Spike yanked out his gun. A double-handed grip aimed it at Porzolkiewski’s forehead.

  “Don’t do it.”

  Porzolkiewski looked up at the barrel just inches away, then toward Spike’s face.

  “What are you doing? It’s not like I killed someone.”

  “It’s exactly like you killed someone.” Spike jerked the gun up an inch. “Back away.”

  Porzolkiewski straightened and stepped back. Spike skirted the counter, spun Porzolkiewski around, and pushed him up against the condom and hard liquor shelves. He reholstered his gun and snapped on handcuffs. He then gripped the chain linking the two cuffs with one hand, grabbed the back of Porzolkiewski’s shirt collar with the other, and guided him around the counter toward the door. A uniformed officer waiting on the sidewalk took Porzolkiewski by the arms, leaned him over the hood of a patrol car, and patted him down.

  Spike pointed at one of the patrol officers waiting in the store to execute the search warrant and said, “Check for a gun under the counter.”

  The officer crouched down, grunting as he moved items around on the two shelves.

  A woman entered wearing a white disposable hazmat suit and pushing a cart bearing a portable chemical vapor detector. Black rubber boots encased her feet and neoprene gloves protected her hands. She breathed through a respirator attached to the plastic face shield of her hood.

  Spike watched Porzolkiewski struggle against the handcuffs as the woman came to a stop in front of the cash register.

  The officer stepped back.

  “No gun, Lieutenant.”

  “Then what the . . .”

  The officer reached down and pulled out a box. “This.” He tilted it toward Spike.

  Spike shook his head. “I nearly shot this guy over a Siamese kitten. What is it about these psychos? Poison two men to death, then almost give it up over some pound-worthy animal. It’s like some 1950s B-movie.”

  He nodded at the woman, then said to the patrol officer:

  “Let’s get out of here and let her do her work.”

  Chapter 48

  Gage wasn’t surprised he didn’t recognize the deputy on the other side of the bulletproof window on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice. It had been over twenty years since Gage had been a regular visitor booking murderers into the jail. And like a snake that sheds its skin, it was almost a new sheriff’s department. Only a few from Gage’s generation were left, now in the upper ranks.

  The deputy accepted Gage’s PI license as a ticket inside, then activated the locks on the barred gate and the sliding metal door.

  Gage stepped into the hallway and signed in on the visitor’s log. He heard a baritone voice call out his name from behind the booking counter to his left. He looked over to find its source: a sixty-year-old freckled face below a bald head. It was a sergeant from the old days, now wearing a captain’s insignias.

  Gage walked over and stuck out his hand.

  “I used to know a guy who sort of looked like you,” Gage said. “We called him Red, but I don’t see the red anymore.”

  Red shook his hand and smiled. “Your day will come. You ain’t gonna keep all that hair forever.”

  Red glanced at the sign-in sheet across the hallway, and asked, “Who you here to see?”

  “John Porzolkiewski.”

  “The poison guy?”

  Gage nodded.

  “Weird dude.”

  “Weird dude?” Gage laughed. “Haven’t you been out of this place in the last thirty years? No one says ‘weird dude’ anymore. That went out with ‘put a cap in his ass’ and ‘what’s up bro.’ ”

  “Okay, forget the dude part. He’s still weird. He didn’t say peep other than ‘I want my phone call’ after Spike hooked him up at his market. He never even invoked. Spike says he read him his rights a
nd the guy just stared back like a beached whale.”

  Gage looked down the hallway through a gate separating the visiting rooms from the rows of cells facing each other fifty feet away. He could see hands and forearms extending from the cells, some resting on flat cross pieces, others gesturing. Mostly brown and black. A staccato of hard voices, knife-sharp cackles, and assaulting laughs reverberated against the concrete and steel.

  “He’s not in main line.” Red jerked his thumb toward the other end of the hallway. “We put him on suicide watch last night.”

  “You have a shrink talk to him?”

  Red shook his head. “No point if he’s not gonna talk back.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Porzolkiewski said, just as Gage crossed the threshold into the interview room.

  “Then what were you doing with a pound of sodium monofluoroacetate in your storeroom?” Gage pulled back a plastic chair and sat down across the table from him. “That’s enough to kill everyone who works at TIMCO.”

  “I never saw it before.”

  “It was on a shelf. Eye level.”

  “In a bag of flour. I don’t open every bag of flour to see what’s inside. Those cops planted it. Brandon Meyer and Marc Anston must’ve paid them off.”

  “Spike Pacheco isn’t buyable.”

  “Then it was the hazmat woman.” Porzolkiewski folded his arms over the front of his orange jumpsuit. “You going to vouch for her, too?”

  Gage shook his head. “I don’t need to.”

  He pulled out the timeline Porzolkiewski faxed over to attempt to prove his innocence after the newspaper reported the discovery of Karopian’s body.

  “I went out to talk to the woman you visited in the Delta. You told me she called you. She told me you called her. You put yourself within ten miles of Karopian on the day he was murdered, then lied to me about why you were there.”

  Porzolkiewski stared at the page, face rigid.

  “I also talked with Karopian’s wife,” Gage said. “She hasn’t touched the boat since he died. SFPD and Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputies are dusting the cabin for prints right now.”