by Steven Gore
Navarro drove out from the thin shadows next to the police department into the late morning sun. He skirted downtown as he worked his way toward the Panhandle, a narrow arm of Golden Gate Park running along the north side of the Haight-Ashbury District.
Donnally’s cell phone rang as they passed the steep-sided Buena Vista Park, trees rising up from the otherwise house-and apartment-covered heights.
“I came home to pick up a file for work and found a television satellite truck driving away.”
The caller was Janie Nguyen, Donnally’s girlfriend, a psychiatrist at the Fort Miley Veterans Hospital. Donnally had come down from Mount Shasta a few days earlier to visit her and replace the roof gutters on the house they shared a few blocks from the ocean. He drove down two or three times a month, usually for three or four days. He always brought his tool chest in the bed of his truck to repair damage to the shingled bungalow inflicted by salt air driven hard by onshore winds.
“One of the neighbors told me they knocked on the door, then took a video of the house. You up to something?”
“The call that got me out of bed this morning and put that grumpy look on your face was about Mark Hamlin.”
Donnally felt Navarro’s eyes on him. He covered the phone and said, “Janie.”
Navarro raised his eyebrows. “Still?”
Donnally nodded.
Navarro reached up and tapped the wedding ring on his left hand, gripping the steering wheel.
Donnally shook his head, and then said into the phone, “I’m helping out Ramon Navarro on the Hamlin investigation.”
“I saw it on the news,” Janie said, “and the first word that comes to mind is ‘byzantine.’ ”
“And the second?”
“Whichever one means you should have your head examined. Any route that took Mark Hamlin from wherever he started last night to the end of a rope at Fort Point this morning had to have been very unpleasant, and it will be unpleasant to relive it.”
Donnally understood what she was saying. The only other investigative work he’d done since he left SFPD, looking into the thirty-year-old murder of the sister of a deceased friend, had devolved into weeks of agonized confusion that had enveloped her, too, and almost shredded their relationship.
But he wasn’t sure how to respond with Navarro listening.
Before he found an answer, Janie said, “I know why you’re doing this.”
“It’s because Hamlin asked for me and Judge McMullin appointed me to be the special master.”
“You could’ve turned it down. I suspect you’re less interested in who murdered Mark Hamlin than in how a guy like Mark Hamlin became a guy like Mark Hamlin, lived the life he lived. For you, it’s kind of like a physics problem, what bent Hamlin toward corruption and how he bent other people whose life trajectories brought them near him, and this is your chance to find out.”
He felt himself cringe. She’d already gotten inside his head and figured out what he’d been thinking earlier, even repeating his own half-spoken words to him.
He now wondered whether his puzzlement was less a carryover from his own past, and more just residue from the resignation he’d felt, that every San Francisco cop felt, after they’d spent a few years in the investigations bureau, especially in homicide, where he had been assigned when he first met Janie.
Early in their careers, anger defined cops’ attitudes toward the Hamlins of the world. Later it transformed into outrage that neither the judges nor the DAs were willing to take them on. Finally, they just got beaten down and felt themselves reduced to note takers, surrendering their role as law enforcement officers after coming to accept that the enforcement of the law was out of their hands.
Donnally had sometimes felt queasy when he looked at the words “Hall of Justice” as he walked up the wide steps and into the building, for it seemed to proclaim a fact when those inside had yet to prove it up, and never would since they had allowed lawyers like Hamlin to corrupt the process.
“You’re right,” Donnally said. “I’ve never understood these guys. Maybe I’ll learn something.”
And maybe I’ll learn why I’m doing this. And why I couldn’t walk away.
He knew it wasn’t just curiosity. There were lots of things in the world to be curious about.
It was—
He felt his body push back against the seat as Navarro began a twisting ascent up the hill on which Hamlin’s house sat. Then again as the car downshifted.
Donnally surprised himself when the answer came. It was an old anger, an old outrage, not only at the death of Hamlin and at whoever murdered him, but at Hamlin the man.
But he wanted to think through what that meant before expressing the thought to Janie.
“Be sure to take good notes,” Janie said, “and maybe you can explain him to me.”
She paused for a moment, then said, “But don’t kid yourself, pal. Whether you solve the enigma of Hamlin or not, now that you’re in it, you won’t be walking away until you figure out why his life ended this way. And it’s not that I think you’ll like doing it. You won’t. You’ll despise every minute of it, but your world will seem disjointed until you get the answer.”
Donnally’s thoughts continued moving after they disconnected the call, first returning to those that had begun the day, the ones about matter and motion, and then toward Hamlin’s body at rest in the medical examiner’s office, and finally toward Jackson’s terror. And he wondered whether he had it backward. Maybe he’d been wrong and Janie only partially right. Maybe it wasn’t just whether the world was done with Hamlin, but whether Hamlin was done with the world—for the momentum of the lawyer’s existence—the chains of causes and effects, of things done and suffered—hadn’t ceased with his death.
And Donnally wondered whether that was the real source of his anger.
Chapter 6
The uniformed officer standing on Mark Hamlin’s porch raised his hands as though in a protestation of innocence as Donnally and Navarro climbed the stairs of the three-story Victorian duplex facing Buena Vista Park and overlooking the distant downtown.
They’d just pushed their way through four reporters from local television and radio stations, two from national cable channels, and five from newspapers, all jabbing video cameras and microphones toward their faces and asking nonsensical who, where, how, and why questions that if they already had the answers to, they wouldn’t be bothering to search Hamlin’s residence.
“I didn’t do it,” the officer said, “I didn’t touch a thing.” He turned and opened the front door of the multimillion-dollar property and gestured toward the interior. “It’s just the way we found it.”
Donnally and Navarro drew on latex gloves and slipped on polyethylene shoe covers and crossed the threshold into the foyer. Straight ahead was the hallway leading to the kitchen. They turned left and examined the living room. The plaster walls were eggshell white and pristine, looking as though they’d never felt the impact of a child’s ball or a bicycle tire, seeming as though never touched by life at all. The couch, chairs, and tables, on the other hand, were as strewn with trash as the passenger seat of Hamlin’s Porsche. Books, pleadings, and files were also piled on the Oriental rugs covering the parquet floors. The only unlittered furniture were the bookcases standing along the wall opposite the fireplace and framing the television and DVD player. These bore dozens of Asian artifacts, from pottery bowls to brass statues to a collection of long-stemmed clay pipes, all spaced and positioned as if part of a museum exhibit.
“Try not to focus too long on paper you’re not supposed to be looking at,” Donnally said to Navarro as they walked through the living room.
“Unless there’s blood spatter on it or it’s a signed confession from the killer, I won’t be paying much attention.”
Navarro stopped and glanced at the chaos of half-used legal pads and scattered folders lying on the dining room table. Interleaved were misfolded newspaper sections, legal journals, and flyers announcing politi
cal events.
“I know Goldhagen was playing like she wants to leverage this investigation into a way to reopen a bunch of Hamlin’s old cases,” Navarro said, “but I don’t see her doing it. I suspect that his closet has got a few bones from her skeleton in it, too.”
Donnally looked over at Navarro. “What do you mean?”
“A lot has happened since you moved north. Hamlin and a bunch of his pals did some fund-raisers for her reelection campaign.”
“You’ve got to be—” Donnally remembered Goldhagen’s aggression—apparent aggression—toward Hamlin and his practice, and realized it was an act for his benefit, or maybe for the judge’s or Navarro’s as a way of demonstrating her independence.
“It’s true,” Navarro said. “He’d done enough posturing over the years about civil rights and lesbian and gay rights and transgender rights and immigrant rights and dog and cat rights that he could deliver up to any politician any group that devoted itself to playing the victim. It’s like a …” Navarro flicked his fingers next to his head like he was flipping through note cards in his mind. “What do you call it where two people share the same delusion?”
Donnally guessed that Navarro assumed he’d know the word because the nature of Janie’s work—and he did.
“A folie à deux,” Donnally said.
“That’s it. That’s what he has with the LGBT groups. They act like we live in a Jim Crow world, but they control who gets elected in this town, who gets appointed police chief, and who gets the big city contracts. Whenever something bad happened, Hamlin would undergo some kind of mind meld with them in their fake victimization. Some transgender idiot would get his ass kicked, and Hamlin was on TV declaring a hate crime. Never considered the possibility that the asshole might’ve deserved it. Lot of rough stuff happens in the Castro and most of it people bring on themselves.”
“Sounds like you’ve joined the Log Cabin Republicans,” Donnally said. “I wouldn’t have expected it.”
“Being gay doesn’t mean I have to follow the party line and wiggle my ass in a conga line at the pride parade. I moved out here in order to fit in and live a normal life, not to keep drawing attention to myself.” Navarro tapped his chest. “I’m a cop. Not a gay cop, or a fag cop, or a ho-mo-sex-u-al cop. A cop. If I hear somebody yell one more time, ‘We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it,’ I’ll rip out his vocal cords. Everybody in San Francisco is already used to it.”
“How about just give him a bus ticket out of town?”
Navarro half smiled in embarrassment, realizing that his rant was irrelevant to their task, then said, “That’ll do, too.”
Navarro turned and led the way into the kitchen.
“Doesn’t seem to be part of the same apartment,” Donnally said, as they stood looking at the clean granite counters, the bare butcher-block island, the slick Sub-Zero refrigerator, and the polished walnut table and chairs. “Either he’s got a cleaning service or somebody did a helluva job destroying evidence.” Donnally pointed through the doorway toward a bathroom across the hall. “Check that one for anything that smells like lavender. I’ll take a look upstairs.”
Donnally walked back to the foyer and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He glanced into two small bedrooms as he made his way down the carpeted hallway and then turned into what appeared to be Hamlin’s master suite, shadowed within closed curtains. The blanket and spread were draped off the side of the bed and both pillows showed depressions. He resisted the temptation to conclude that they had been used the previous night. That was a fact not yet in evidence, and might never be.
The only illumination in the room came from a shaft of sunlight spreading out from the bathroom. He followed it inside and sniffed the air.
Lavender.
He spotted a bar of soap on the shower floor, then opened the glass door and kneeled down to inspect it. A brown hair was stuck to it and partially wrapped around. A curled black one lay on the tile next to it. At least two people, or one with dyed hair, had used it. He suspected that the black one was from Hamlin, but only forensic testing would tell.
Donnally pushed himself to his feet and returned to the bedroom. He flicked on the overhead light and checked the visible portions of the pillows and sheets for hair or semen stains. He found none. He figured he’d leave it to the evidence technicians to do a more thorough search.
After he walked back downstairs, he found Navarro talking on his cell phone in the laundry room beyond the kitchen, reporting their address.
Navarro pointed at a frayed length of rope lying on the floor, visible in the inch-wide gap between the washer and dryer, and then said to the person on the other end of the call, “I think we may have found the crime scene. Let’s get some people over here.”
Chapter 7
Donnally didn’t know whether Hamlin’s apartment was the crime scene or not, but needing the techs to go through it freed him to return to Hamlin’s office.
A uniformed officer was waiting for him at the building entrance on McAllister Street with a printout of Hamlin’s cell phone calls for the last two weeks.
“What did Mark use to keep track of contacts?” Donnally asked Takiyah Jackson as he walked into the reception area.
Another officer sat along the wall opposite her desk with views both into the conference room where files were stored and into Hamlin’s private office. Donnally wanted all the cabinets guarded until he could install locks to keep Jackson out of them.
Jackson pointed at her monitor. “His e-mail program and his cell phone.”
“Were they synced?”
She nodded.
“How about getting me into it?”
Jackson leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you need a search warrant for that?”
“What do you think?”
She chewed at her lip. Donnally could see that she was torn between what Hamlin would’ve said to protect a client—whether it was well-founded in the law or not—and what Hamlin would’ve said in order to help catch his own killer.
Donnally then remembered what Navarro had said about a folie à deux and what Janie had once told him about how it operated. When the dominant person is gone, the submissive one tends to break free from the grandiose or persecutory delusion they had shared and that had bound them together.
“I guess you don’t need a warrant,” Jackson said, then rose and led him into Hamlin’s office, where she turned on his monitor and activated his e-mail program. She returned to her desk as he sat down in Hamlin’s chair.
It took Donnally half an hour to compare the telephone numbers from Hamlin’s call log with his contacts. He found matches for only about a third. He wondered whether any of those whose names he’d identified so far would turn out to be the source—or sources—for the hairs he found in Hamlin’s shower.
Now he was ready to question Jackson about who Hamlin might have been talking to or meeting with during the last days. He hadn’t wanted to start that line of questioning until he had something to compare her answers with. Her knowing he’d looked at both Hamlin’s contact list and his calls would make it harder for her to lie. She’d assume that he knew more than he actually did, a mistake witnesses with something to fear or hide nearly always made.
Donnally noticed the icon for Hamlin’s appointment calendar and then drew another fine line. He didn’t have any basis yet for invading privileged attorney-client material, for engaging in the fishing expedition that the judge had warned them all against. At the same time, the fact that Hamlin had met with someone couldn’t be considered privileged, only the content of the consultation, the he-said, she-said of the case. Based on that distinction, Donnally accessed Hamlin’s list of recent appointments and printed it out.
Donnally saw that Hamlin used his calendar to track not only client meetings, court appearances, and motion due dates, but also personal lunches and dinners and political meetings.
While looking through the names of the people Hamlin h
ad met with, Donnally realized that his having moved north so many years ago was a disadvantage. A local might’ve recognized many of the names he had in front of him now and others that he would come across.
On the legitimate side, he didn’t know who was now on the board of supervisors, who had the confidence of the mayor, who were the power brokers in the city.
On the underworld side, from where Hamlin drew most of his clients, Donnally didn’t know who were the gang leaders out in Bayview–Hunters Point or who ran the Big Block gang in the housing projects, or even if it still existed, or which tongs were running the protection rackets in Chinatown, or which Russians had moved in to take over organized crime in the Richmond District.
To him, the names were inert, mere labels on imaginary stick figures. And instead of seeing live conflicts and connections, he was just seeing dead letters on a page—and he recognized Jackson would have an advantage on him. She knew the players and understood how the game was played in the city, at least those players and games that related to Hamlin. He now realized he’d have to rely on Navarro more than he wanted to, and share more with him than he had intended to, for the detective would see relationships Donnally couldn’t and understand their meaning.
Jackson appeared at the office door. “Can I go to lunch?”
“You coming back afterwards?”
“What?” She smirked. “You think I’m starting my job hunting already?”
Donnally didn’t like the sarcasm. “That’s not what I meant.” He rose from the desk and walked over to her. “We need to figure out some way to work together. I don’t see me finding out who killed Mark without your help.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then lowered her head and picked at her thumbnail.
“Shit … shit, shit, shit. I didn’t sign up for this.”
“What did you sign up for?”
“I don’t know anymore.” She looked up again, shaking her head. “All I know is that this place seems more and more like Jonestown on the night before they served the Kool-Aid.”
