by Steven Gore
“Because they were telling you too much?”
“Exactly. I may be drifting into attorney-client areas.”
They turned down Larkin Street and could see the grassy east end of Civic Center Plaza and the west end of the farmers’ market.
“Give me an example,” Donnally said.
“Calls with Reggie Hancock.”
Donnally’s stomach tensed and his fist clenched, even though he wasn’t surprised there might have been phone traffic between Hamlin and Hancock. It was the mere thought of Hancock.
Reginald Leotis Hancock had started out as LA’s Mark Hamlin in the seventies, drifted into handling big drug cases in the eighties, and then into high-profile homicide cases at the end of the nineties. Some of those he was hired on to from the start. Others he injected himself into. Countless times he’d worked his way from the sidewalk where he commented on cases for cable news networks to a spot behind the defense table. His audience, when he was speaking into the mikes, wasn’t the long distance voyeurs sitting in their living rooms, but defendants sitting in their nearby cells, desperate for a defense strategy that might win for them.
“Calls between guys like that wouldn’t be unexpected,” Donnally said. “I’m sure they worked together on north-south cases. And I’m not sure the fact of the calls themselves can tell you what the content was.”
“It’s the surrounding calls,” Navarro said, holding up the accordion folder like he was showing off evidence. “Hamlin calls Hancock, then calls the DEA, then calls the U.S. Attorney, then calls a cell number belonging to an old-time drug trafficker named Hector Camacho, and then calls Hancock back.”
Donnally stopped and turned toward Navarro. “How’d you know it was Camacho? Those guys don’t have phones in their own names.”
Navarro swallowed before answering. “I … uh … checked with our intelligence unit.”
The move reminded Donnally of Navarro’s preemptive search of Hamlin’s apartment.
Donnally let it go. Jamming him wouldn’t change what he’d done, and his face showed he knew he’d done wrong.
“You think Hamlin was planning on surrendering Camacho on a still secret indictment?”
“I don’t think that’s it. More likely Camacho is trying to cut a deal to roll on somebody. That had to have been the reason the DEA was in the loop. Hancock represented Camacho in the late 1980s in LA. He pled out and did seventeen years in the federal pen.”
“That was a big sentence back then.”
“And he was a big guy, and tough, too. He left a few murders in his wake the local DA couldn’t prove, so the U.S. Attorney hit him as hard as he could. And my guess is that Camacho is not up for doing another seventeen.”
“How old is Camacho?”
“Early sixties. Given life expectancy in the joint, another seventeen years would be a death sentence.”
“He’s back in the trade?”
“Intelligence says he’s moving a hundred kilos of cocaine a month. That puts him at the top of the federal sentencing guidelines.”
Donnally pointed ahead to indicate he still needed to get to City Hall, and they walked on.
“I think there are two ways to look at it,” Donnally said. “It isn’t all that privileged if the DEA and the U.S. Attorney are in on it. And if the telephone company can look at the phone records, they’re not all that confidential.” He looked over at Navarro. “Except they wouldn’t know that Camacho was using that particular phone.”
Navarro cleared his throat. “Sorry about that one. My finger is always close to the trigger.”
Donnally reached out his hand for the file. “How about I take it from here?”
Navarro passed it over.
“I’ll call this one a no harm, no foul,” Donnally said. “I don’t think it will go anywhere. If somebody was going to get hit, it would’ve been Camacho, not Hamlin. He’s the snitch, he did the damage, or is going to, so he’s the dangerous one.”
Chapter 40
He didn’t ask me if I wanted to inherit his duplex,” Lemmie Hamlin told Donnally, sitting across the table in her kitchen an hour and a half later. “He just did it.”
Lemmie pointed through her atrium window toward Golden Gate Park and beyond it at the sun flaming out in the Pacific Ocean. It was what the real estate brokers called a million-dollar view, but this one was out of a multimillion-dollar town house.
“It’s not like I need the money.”
“Wanting and needing are different things.”
Her brows furrowed. “Did you ever read any of my books?”
Donnally smiled. “You mean, all the way through?”
Lemmie nodded.
He shook his head.
“Then you’ll have to trust me on this one. I know the difference.” Lemmie’s face seemed to wince, then she said, “I guess you could say that I’m compelled to write, not to hunt and gather and acquire money. And I can write what I want, because people buy whatever I put on the page. I don’t have to write for the market, or try to time it.”
“No compromises.”
Lemmie nodded again. “I know it’s a luxury others don’t have.”
Donnally took a sip of the coffee Lemmie had poured for him.
“Then why did he impose his duplex on you?”
“Maybe guilt. Maybe to make me a coconspirator in his compromises.”
“I’m starting to think his problem was far worse than mere compromising.”
“You’re probably right. I’m not even sure he could’ve articulated what position he was compromising from. And I’m not sure any of the people he worked with, and who acted like he acted, could either.”
“Like Reggie Hancock?”
Lemmie drew back. “Why do you mention Reggie?”
Donnally was surprised by her reaction. “Why, why?”
“Mark once set us up on a date. Reggie made my skin crawl. He’s beyond arrogant. He has no values at all, believes in nothing. He bragged about things other people would be embarrassed even to admit.”
Lemmie glanced toward her laptop on a table in the corner, overlooking her garden. Her writing desk.
“He’s a character in my new book, except I made him a medical researcher who falsifies his clinical trial test results instead of a lawyer and I made him East Indian instead of black. He figures that since thirty percent of people have a placebo effect anyway, he can claim a thirty percent success rate. For some drugs on the market that’s not so bad. Where he goes wrong—where he deceives himself—is that it’s a cancer drug he’s developing. There is no placebo effect on cancer, and people will die.”
“Did Reggie ask you out again?”
“Yeah, when he came into town to meet with Mark or appear in court up here. And I went. For research.”
Lemmie leaned back in her chair. She closed her eyes and took in a long breath and then exhaled as though steeling herself for an assault of memory.
“Reggie was a petri dish of corruption.” She opened her eyes again. “I watched it grow over the years like a virus that escapes from the lab and infects others.”
“Like Mark?”
“Like Mark. He turned my brother’s rebellion against my father from a fight for justice into a kind of nihilism. Into a justification for substituting his own judgment for the law’s. It’s like … like …” She winced again. “Shoot. I can’t think of the word. It’s when a jury sets aside the law.”
“Nullification.”
“That’s it. Nullification. The jury finds someone not guilty who everybody knows is guilty because they think the law is bad or the defendant’s motives were good, or at least not evil. The problem was that for Reggie his aim became nullification in every case and by any means necessary.”
“Except it wasn’t in the interest of some notion of justice.”
“At the beginning, it may have been. At the end, no. I think Reggie was opposed to drug laws on principle. He felt virtuous fighting those kinds of cases, and he was good at it, a
nd got rich doing them.”
Donnally watched the sides of her mouth turn up as a thought came to her.
“I guess you could say virtue is easy when there’s money to be made, then it somehow transforms into the virtue of easy money.”
Donnally smiled. “You should write that down and use it in a book.”
“I did.” Lemmie smiled back. “That’s what you get for not reading my novels all the way through. It’s a continuing theme.”
“And you got on that road because of people like Reggie?”
Lemmie’s smile faded. “No, my father. None of the people he persecuted were guilty of anything, they simply refused to snitch on people like themselves who did nothing but exercise their constitutional rights. For my father, the law was merely an instrument, sometimes a scalpel, sometimes a hammer, sometimes an ax.”
“And you think Reggie had a role in leading your brother down that same path.”
She shrugged. “Maybe it was Mark running to catch up. I’m not saying Mark wasn’t ambitious all on his own, didn’t want the money and the notoriety. He did. It’s just that how he chose to do it changed. And that was his own responsibility. He couldn’t blame that on our father or Reggie.”
Lemmie gazed toward the window as though the view would provide some kind of mental escape, but night had fallen and the glass mirrored the inside of the kitchen. Donnally watched her eyes settle on a spot, his reflection, but he wasn’t sure she was actually seeing him.
Finally, she looked over and asked, “How did Reggie’s name happen to come up now?”
“He and Mark were trading lots of calls during the last month. I checked previous years and it seems to be part of a pattern. One month a year. Lots of calls.”
“Maybe they went on vacations together.”
The words came out of her mouth fast, then she reddened as though she’d opened a door to something obscene, or set him up to open it. And he did.
“Like little jaunts to Southeast Asia to look at muscled kids?”
Lemmie clenched her fists on the table. “I don’t know what they did over there. Anyway, it was something Reggie got him involved with.”
Donnally reached down to the floor and picked up a manila envelope containing printouts about Hamlin and his alleged charity that Jackson had left for him at the office. He opened it and slid the contents onto the table.
Lemmie reached for a photo showing her brother receiving an award from the Southeast Asia Youth Gymnastics Association. Hamlin looked awkward, uncomfortable, standing in a row of middle-aged Asian and Australian men under the stage lights.
“You ever work the prostitution detail?” Lemmie asked, as she stared at the pages. “Especially ones that targeted child predators.”
“Only as part of the arrest team.”
She pointed at the man standing to the right of her brother. A heavy-set Thai, with his belt drawn tight across his stomach, just below his rib cage, Humpty Dumpty–like, sweat glistening on his forehead and darkening his dress shirt collar.
“Look at the eyes on this guy,” Lemmie said. “Look at the eyes on all of them. I’ve gone down to the Tenderloin, watched men cruising, looking for teenage boys and girls. They’re the same eyes these guys have. Somehow both dead and calculating.”
“But not on your brother.”
“He just looks embarrassed.”
Donnally spread the papers on the table. Some of them showed other photos from the same association meeting.
“I don’t see Reggie in any of these,” Donnally said.
“As I said, I don’t know what they did over there.”
Other photographs showed teenagers posing in tiny outfits. The thin girls encased in spandex and the boys with arms and leg muscles like bodybuilders, so lean and defined they looked like they’d been skinned.
Donnally looked again at Hamlin standing with the certificate in his hands.
“You think this was a pretext to travel over there to buy opium?” Donnally asked.
“It would be a weird one and wouldn’t make a very good cover story. Everybody who knows he made regular trips over there would think—or at least entertain the idea—he was a child molester.” She glanced up at Donnally. “Just like you do.”
Lemmie slid the photos back, saying, “Another weird thing. Reggie and Mark used to smoke pot together and drink Black Label and sing along with that old Creedence Clearwater song ‘Proud Mary.’ ” Crank it up and pound the table. And we’re rollin’ ”—she tapped the tabletop in time with the tune—“rollin’ on the ri-ver.”
Donnally was just a child when the song came out. When he was growing up all the kids assumed that “Proud Mary” was code for marijuana and “rolling” meant rolling joints. Grown men like Hancock and Hamlin getting high and singing it just seemed childish.
But sitting there listening to Lemmie he realized there was something sophomoric about everything Hamlin did, absolutely everything, maybe even fatally so.
Chapter 41
Sheldon Galen didn’t show up on time for his 8 A.M. debriefing with Donnally. He didn’t answer his cell phone and he hadn’t gone to his office.
Donnally wasn’t surprised Galen had chosen to arrive late, like a six-year-old testing his parents’ limits, so he figured he wouldn’t lean on him too hard, yet.
Donnally spent an hour searching Hamlin’s computer for Web sites he’d visited, expecting that if Hamlin had a sexual interest in children, it would show up on his hard drive. Navarro had referred him to a child exploitation specialist in SFPD who’d walked him through the steps to check Hamlin’s Internet search history, Web sites visited, temporary files, and other trails. He didn’t find anything. This either meant it wasn’t there or that Hamlin was good at concealment.
Other than saying hello when she arrived at the office, Jackson had avoided him. She’d arrived buttoned up. Overcoat belted tight around her waist, lapels overlapping, all three suit buttons snug, blouse closed up to the neck. She had tied her hair back like a 1950s librarian, and her usual array of gold rings and bracelets was missing.
Donnally was relieved not to have to deal again with yesterday’s erotic assault, but was troubled he didn’t understand Jackson’s latest incarnation. It was starting to feel like a game of tag, except that every time Jackson popped up from behind a bush, she was someone else.
The clock on Hamlin’s computer told Donnally that it was 9:15. Time to go on the hunt for Galen.
He wasn’t angry because he’d expected it, and while Galen might be feeling unique and might be telling himself what he thought were unique excuses for not showing up, Donnally knew that every informant had the same feelings and made the same excuses.
Hamlin’s contact list gave Donnally Galen’s home address in Berkeley. He called Navarro as he drove across the Bay Bridge, but Navarro didn’t answer. Donnally left a message asking whether he’d identified the woman who had argued with private investigator Frank Lange on the evening before he died, and whether he knew how to find Hector Camacho, whose number had shown up in the middle of Hamlin and Hancock’s telephone traffic.
Navarro still hadn’t called back by the time Donnally arrived on Galen’s block. It was off a tree-divided, commercial avenue in the north end of town in an area known as Gourmet Gulch.
Donnally had driven by Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Restaurant on his way up from University Avenue. Passing it, he remembered when Janie had taken him there for his birthday. It was at a time when the place was just getting focused on slow food. He hadn’t realized going in that four courses over three hours was what they’d had in mind.
That had annoyed him more than Galen not showing up.
Donnally glanced at Galen’s hedge-bordered house as he drove past looking for a parking place on the crowded street. He spotted an SUV that took up most of Galen’s driveway. There was no room for him to park behind it without blocking the sidewalk, but at least it suggested that Galen was home.
As he drove on, he noticed tha
t some of the vehicles on the street hadn’t been moved in months. Dusty windshields, oak leaves and pine needles had collected on the pavement and surrounded the tires, rain-spotted handouts were stuck under wiper blades. With parking places so hard to find, he wondered whether the residents had decided they would walk or take the bus rather than give them up.
Creeping along, he wished he was still a cop and all he had to do was slide into a red or yellow zone and hang his mike over the rearview mirror to show he was official. But civilians got tickets and he was now a civilian and he didn’t want to pay the fine. It was costing him enough money paying his cooks and waitresses overtime up at the café to make up for his absence.
And all this was costing him time. He was supposed to be in town just long enough to replace Janie’s rain gutters, but he’d now spent days in a legal sewer.
After ten minutes, he found a spot three blocks from Galen’s bungalow, down the hill and near Chez Panisse. He walked past a homeless guy zipping his pants as he stepped out of the bushes along the side of a student apartment building and then by two Indian-looking Hispanic laborers who angled their faces away as he approached. He took a right onto Galen’s street and got a stomach-turning reminder of one thing he hated about detective work: the queasy feeling the guy you were trying to run down had walked away two minutes before you’d arrived.
Donnally’s stomach flipped back when he spotted Galen’s San Francisco Chronicle still on his porch and through the open front curtains saw a light on in the kitchen.
As he climbed the steps, he steeled himself for the “Yeah, I was just on my way” or the “I’m waiting for AAA to jump-start my car” or the “I thought you meant tomorrow.”
But he’d learned over the years that informants and cooperating defendants are like baby chicks and puppies; they needed to be cradled, not confronted, at least at first. He knocked on the door and listened for footfalls. He heard none. He stepped to the living room window and peered in. No movement.
