14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) (20 page)

“That’s your way of putting it,” said Brand.

“Yes, it is,” said Yuki. “I have no other questions, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Parisi?” the judge asked. “Do you want to cross-examine this witness?”

Parisi spoke from his seat behind the defense table. He looked unfazed, like a man with all the right answers.

“Inspector Brand, did you have friendships with or loyalty to the drug dealers who were killed?”

“What? No.”

“Did you have anything against Mr. Kordell?”

“No. Not at all.”

“So, regarding your vigorous interrogation of Mr. Kordell: That’s what you do when you have a primary suspect, isn’t that right?”

“Correct.”

“Do you stand by the confession you obtained from this suspect?”

“Absolutely,” said Brand. “He said he did it. We saw him say it. We believed him.”

Parisi said, “Thank you, Inspector Brand. I have nothing else for this witness.”

“If Ms. Castellano has no further questions,” said the judge, “the witness may stand down.”

COURT HAD BEEN adjourned for the day when Yuki got a text from Brady saying,
Tony Willis was beaten. He’s in the prison ward at SF Gen. Asked for you.

Yuki ran to her car, got into the crush of traffic, and headed toward San Francisco General, where inmates requiring hospitalization were housed.

Tony Willis, aka Li’l Tony, had been a suspect in the jailhouse murder of Aaron-Rey Kordell. He’d denied that he’d been the doer, but when she’d talked to him last, he’d given her a sense that he knew who
had
killed Aaron-Rey.

Maybe he would tell her now.

If he lived.

The traffic was thick, and Yuki was determined not to have an accident or even a fit of temper. Leaving the parking garage, she took a left on Polk and crossed through the Mission. It took close to half an hour to drive two and a half miles to reach Twenty-Third Street and another twenty minutes to park the car and gain access to the hospital.

When she arrived at ward 7D, the surgical unit, Tony Willis was alive and breathing oxygen through a cannula. Leads came off his chest, and fluids were dripping through tubes to his veins.

The doctor told Yuki, “That young man lost a lot of blood. He has several puncture wounds in major organs. He’s on pain medication. I can’t promise he’ll know who you are.”

“He asked for me.”

“I understand. Keep it to five minutes, OK?”

Yuki walked down the aisle running the length of the ward. All of the eleven beds were occupied. Willis was at the far end on the left. She reached the bed, pulled the stall curtain around it, and moved a chair up to the bed.

Five-foot-tall Tony Willis had looked young before. Now he looked smaller and younger, with his defiant little hair twists and his thin cotton blanket pulled up to his underarms, monitors reporting on his vital signs.

“Tony? It’s me. Ms. Castellano.”

Tony Willis cracked open his eyes, winced, and put a bandaged hand on his blanketed chest. “Yo,” he said. “You came.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Like a lotta white dudes beat the crap out of me and then stuck me with shanks everywhere.”

“That’s what I heard. You stay strong, OK?”

“Right,” he said. “I have something to say.”

“OK.”

“I need you to be my lawyer so I got confidentiality.”

“You want me to represent you, Tony? There’s more to it than that. I have to look at your case. I don’t know what charges there are against you. And it’s not my decision. I don’t work for myself.”

“Mrs. Cassielandro, you got to listen. I need lawyer-patient confidentiality. Right now. You hear me?”

He was wheezing. He was clearly in pain. He could die.

“OK. OK, Tony. I’ll be your lawyer. What do you have to tell me?”

“Officially?”

She picked up his bandaged hand and shook it gently.

“It’s official,” she said.

“OK. I got a confession. I killed A-Rey.”

Yuki gasped. “
You
killed him?”

“I was told ‘Put Kordell down quick.’ After that, I was supposed get a transfer to Corcoran, and you can see, that didn’t happen.”

“I’m not getting this,” Yuki said.

She was
trying
to get it, but the pieces had very weird shapes and didn’t totally fit. Whoever got Li’l Tony to kill Aaron-Rey had also promised him protection. Who the hell would do that? Furthermore, as he said, they clearly hadn’t delivered it.

“Who told you to do this, Tony?” Yuki asked him.

“Listen to me, lady, before I fuckin’ die. It was a
cop
who told me to whack A-Rey.”

“What cop? Give me a
name
.”

“On the street, he called One. Like Numero Uno.”

“Tony. That’s not a name. What else can you give me? I can’t make a deal for you if all you’ve got to bargain with is that you killed Aaron-Rey. No one is looking for his killer anymore.”

Tony was straining to breathe. Any second now a nurse was going to chase her out. She touched his hand.

“You’ve got to give me something I can run with, Tony. You understand. Numero Uno isn’t going to cut it.”

“You don’t look it, but you are a tough lady.” He swallowed hard. Then he said, “Arturo. Mendez. Find him. He’s A-Rey’s fren’. He saw who shot those pushers.”

“How do I find him?”

Tony closed his eyes. His breathing was ragged.

“F-u-u-u-u-u-ck,”
he said. “I got to do everything? Ask A-Rey’s mom.”

“Hang in,” Yuki said. “I’ll do what I can.”

YUKI CALLED AARON-REY’S mother, Bea Kordell, who had her son’s phone, which showed a contact listing for “Arturo.” Yuki sent Arturo a text, replied to his response, then sent another.

An hour later, at nearly 8 p.m., she parked on Turk near Dodge, the bad-news block directly across the street from the peeling three-story crack house on the corner.

She didn’t have to wait long.

A kid came out of the Chinese restaurant next door to the crack house. He looked about five eight, one forty. He was wearing jeans hanging below his hip bones, striped boxer shorts, and a dark hoodie, and had iPod cords dangling from his ears.

He stood on the corner for a while, looking every which way, his eyes resting for a moment every time he swept his gaze across her bronze-colored Acura two-door sedan.

When the traffic thinned, the kid ambled across the street, nodding his head in time to music. Then he walked over to her window.

“Yuki?”

“Arturo. Get in the car,” she said.

Yuki thought if Brady could see her inviting a crack dealer into her car, he would go bug-nuts.

Arturo got in and pulled the door closed, saying, “I got one minute.”

“Mrs. Kordell told you? I need to know what happened that day in the crack house.”

“And what I get?”

“A chance to do the right thing.”

“And a free lawyer if I ever need one?”

“Yes. Free lawyer. Deal.”

They shook on that. She fished a card out of her bag and handed it to Arturo.
Christ.
She’d tripled her client base today. Meanwhile, Arturo’s eyes were working the streets from under his hood. The sidewalks were empty. He started talking.

“Aaron didn’t shoot no one. It was three men that did that. They looked like cops. They wore police jackets. They showed up on the second floor and everyone scattered—but I was coming out the bathroom and I saw it going down.”

Yuki was startled. More than that. She was shocked.

“The men who shot those dealers—were cops?”

“I don’t know if they were cops. They were wearing cop
jackets.
They had guns. They said ‘SFPD.’ But they were wearing plastic masks. They pushed Duane, A. Biggy, and Dubble D up against the
wall.
They kicked their legs apart, patted them down. They took they money, they drugs, they guns, they phones, naked pictures of they girlfriends for all I know.

“Then A. Biggy and his crew turns around and A. Biggy says, ‘You done?’”

“And one of them cops, seemed like the head dude, said, ‘I’m sorry. Put yourself in my shoes,’ something like that, and he just blew them away.”

Arturo’s expression drooped, like he was seeing it all over again. He shook his head like he couldn’t stop the images.

Yuki said, “Arturo. Why haven’t I heard this before?”

“’Cause I was the only living one that saw it go down. And then I see the three of them men go down the stairs like nothing happened.”

“Then what?” Yuki asked.

“I wait a couple of minutes, make sure the coast is clear, and then I’m ready to run out and A-Rey comes charging upstairs. He missed the shooting and he’s looking for his homies like always. They treat him OK. He doesn’t see anything yet. He says to me, ‘Lookit what I found on the stairs, ’Turo.’

“He had a thirty-eight in his hand that belong to the shooter.

“And I say, ‘A-Rey, get out of here, man.’ He sees the dead guys and he starts to go over to them. He loves them, man, and he’s crying and I just yell, ‘Let’s go!’

“And then we run down the stairs. Aaron-Rey is first. And by the time I get to the street, he’s running and a patrol car sees that big boy and they chase him in the car. Then they get out and throw him to the ground.”

Arturo went on.

“I see that, but what I’m supposed to do, huh? It was cops who shoot those boys. I just fade out of sight.”

Yuki said, “You know what happened to A-Rey in jail?”

“I heard, yeah. He thought everyone was his friend.”

“Arturo. Could you ID those men in the police jackets?”

“Not really. Definitely not the head dude. One of the other two, maybe. He had a little tat on his neck. I might have seen a tat like that on a narc.”

Yuki felt the adrenaline shoot straight through her, but she kept her expression as neutral as possible. She said, “I’m suing the City on behalf of A-Rey’s family. I need you, Arturo. I need you to testify for Aaron-Rey.”

“And then what? I’ll be dead, too.”

“Let me see what I can do,” said Yuki.

“Oh, yeah. Right,” said Arturo. He started to get out of the car, but Yuki reached over and gripped his forearm.

She said, “I’m your lawyer. I’ve got pull. If I call you, take my call. It means I can get you whatever you need.”

Arturo got out of the car and didn’t look back.

Yuki sat in the car and watched him cross the street the way he’d come. Then she did the unthinkable. She called her former boss and current opponent, Red Dog Parisi. When he answered, she said, “Len. It’s Yuki. I’ve got two new witnesses who can turn this case upside down. We need to meet right away.”

ON THE WAY home from another fruitless day of interviewing the Calhoun family’s friends and neighbors, I found myself thinking about Tina Strichler.

Taking a chance, I phoned Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Gosselin from the car.

The Gosselins had been on Balmy Alley when Dr. Tina Strichler had been knifed in the crosswalk, and Mrs. Gosselin had actually seen the killer, although from behind and with several people between her and the man with the knife.

Conklin had interviewed Nathan and Allyson Gosselin on the scene, and Inspectors Michaels and Wang, the two homicide cops in charge of the case, had also spoken to them that day.

But because the Gosselins had said they couldn’t make an ID, they’d been written off. In fact, I was pretty sure the entire case had been shelved now that every cop in the Hall of Justice was working some portion of the Windbreaker cop case.

The Gosselins sounded glad I’d called and told me they hadn’t thought about much other than the woman who’d been killed on the street since it had happened. Mr. Gosselin gave me their address, which turned out to be a well-kept apartment building at Elizabeth and Diamond Streets. Mrs. Gosselin buzzed me in, answered the door, and welcomed me into her home.

“Thanks for making time for me,” I said. “I just want to go over the events of that day one more time.”

After my brush with death at Wayne Broward’s house, I was cautious when entering, keeping my eyes on Mrs. Gosselin, walking practically sideways to the kitchen, where Mr. Gosselin was sitting at the table with the remains of his chicken dinner.

“No, please don’t get up,” I said.

“Have a seat,” said Nathan Gosselin. “What can I get you?”

“Nothing, thanks,” I said. “I only need a few minutes of your time.” I said that, but I hoped the few minutes would be full of newly recollected information that would give me a toehold on the case.

I sat at the table and asked the basic questions:
What did you see? Are you sure you didn’t see the killer’s face? Can you think of any detail that may have seemed insignificant at the time?

Allyson Gosselin sighed.

She said, “I’ve thought about this night and day. You have to understand, not only did it happen fast, the street was jam-packed and people were trying to make the light, and I wasn’t looking directly at the man who did that wretched thing.”

“I understand.”

“So, as I said at the time, I’m pretty sure he was white. He had brown hair, a black baseball-type jacket. He looked to be normal height. He never turned to face me. When Dr. Strichler dropped, most people panicked and ran. Me, too. I just wanted to find Nate and call nine-one-one, so when I finally did look for that man, he was just gone.”

I said, “Allyson, you are obviously a very astute woman, the kind of person who notices small details. And frankly, that’s the best kind of witness. Using your mind’s eye to search for detail, is there anything else, no matter how small it might seem?”

Allyson Gosselin said, “I have had a thought and didn’t say anything about it.”

“Well, it’s not too late,” I said, scootching my chair closer to the table.

“Well. I saw a lot of threes that day.”

“Threes?”

“Yes. There were three people between me and the man who killed Dr. Strichler. There were three squad cars that arrived first, and three policemen spoke with me. And I saw three blackbirds sitting on the telephone line.”