A Criminal Defense (5 page)
D
onnally looked at his watch as he hung up the telephone. An hour-and-a-half drive out to Vacaville in the Central Valley, an hour with Madison, and the trip back. A decade earlier he could've badged his way into the facility; this time he'd have to rely on Navarro to make the appointment for him and get him inside.
After a drive that took him over the spot where Hamlin's body was found under Golden Gate Bridge, up through the hills of Marin County, skirting the north end of the bay, and past suburbs and outlet malls spread out in a series of wide valleys, he pulled into a parking spot outside the California Medical Facility. He unclipped his holster and slipped his semiautomatic into the glove compartment.
Madison's correctional counselor met Donnally in the small administration building, a one-story, wooden structure set into the razor wireâtopped fence surrounding the prison.
“Five years nobody comes to see this guy,” Rich Taylor said after Donnally showed him the court order appointing him special master, “and now you're third in the last month.”
“Who else?”
Taylor pointed at the order. “Hamlin was the first. Then a lawyer who specializes in getting convictions overturned. Not as sleazy as Hamlin, may he rest in peace, but close.”
“Why is Madison in here rather than in a regular prison?”
“You'll have to ask him. That kind of medical information is covered by HIPAA.” Taylor paused, biting his lower lip, then said, “But I can tell you this. We're moving him out of here in the next few weeks. He's about to start doing some really hard time in supermax. Maybe up in Pelican Bay.”
Taylor pointed toward the security station. “Why don't you go through and I'll take you to him.”
Donnally emptied his pockets, took off his belt and shoes, and put everything in a plastic tray. He waited until it got moving toward the scanner tunnel, then stepped through the metal detector.
Taylor met him on the other side and walked with him into the main building and up to his second floor office. A middle-aged prisoner with scraggly white hair sat handcuffed to a chair, a soiled manila envelope lying on his lap, a cane leaning against the wall next to him. A guard wearing a protective vest and a shielded riot helmet stood across from him.
Taylor introduced Donnally to Madison, then uncuffed him and led them inside.
“You guys can talk in here,” Taylor said, then directed Donnally to his chair behind the desk and Madison to the one in the front. He pointed at the phone. “Call the operator and they'll page me when you're done. Just hit zero.” Taylor then nodded toward a red alarm button on the wall next to the desk. Donnally got the message and nodded back.
Donnally waited until Taylor closed the office door behind him, then said, “I know who you are and you know who I am, so let's skip the preliminaries.”
Madison smiled. “You're just as advertised.” He tilted his head toward the window overlooking the rows of cell blocks. “Some guys remembered you from your cop days.”
Donnally didn't respond, just stared at him.
Madison nodded. “Oh, yeah. That's right. No preliminaries.” He hunched forward, resting his forearms on his thighs, looking up from under his eyebrows. “I'll start with the punch line. Hamlin hired me to ride the beef.”
Donnally didn't know what to make of the claim. The problem with the truth and nothing but the truth is it sometimes sounded like a big lie.
And this sounded like a big lie.
“Why would you take the job?” Donnally asked. “Twenty-five to life would pretty much take you past retirement age, maybe even to an eternity in a pine box.”
Madison leaned back, turned the side of his head toward Donnally, then separated the hair above his ear.
Donnally could make out a four-inch scar.
“Brain tumor. The doctors at the county hospital took it out and I did radiation and chemo, but it came back again. They said I had no more than a year to live. I figured, why not? I'd get better medical treatment in here than on the outside and Hamlin said he'd keep me happy. Money every month. Nice TV in my cell. Any kind of drugs I want, prescription”âhe flashed a grinâ“or otherwise. Hamlin has a lot of old clients in here, guys with connections. They can smuggle in anything. Anything at all. It's just like being on the outside.”
“But you're still alive.”
Madison made a smacking sound with his lips, then said, “I hadn't counted on that. The law changed and the government started letting prisoners be in clinical trials. I hit a home run doing one of them and went into remission.”
This was the only thing Madison had said so far that seemed credible. After accusations of reckless experimentation, the Department of Corrections had barred prisoners from participating in trials. The legislature had reversed the ban a few years earlier.
Madison slid the manila envelope across the desk.
“The report of my last PET-CT is in there. Clean as clean could be.”
Donnally read it and handed it back.
“If you didn't do the crime, who did?”
Donnally guessed what Madison's answer would be, true or not, assuming that Madison knew the homicide statistics as well as he did.
“The woman's husband,” Madison said. “She was cheating on him. And he's a hard guy. Real hard. Story was he grabbed her as she was getting cash out of the ATM to buy her boyfriend something. It was the boyfriend's birthday and she didn't want the payment for his present to show up on her credit card.”
“What about your confession to the jailhouse informant?”
“He's the guy who recruited me and sold the deal to Hamlin. He got five grand out of it.”
“And the knife?”
Madison smiled again. “You studied up. Hamlin's PI got it from her husband and hid it in my sleeping bag for the police to find.”
The fact that the story sounded like something Hamlin would do, didn't mean to Donnally that he'd done it.
“How long have you been in remission?”
“A year and a half, but I didn't want to make a move until I was sure it was gonna stick.” Madison's face darkened and he slapped the edge of the desk. “But then that asshole Hamlin tried to fuck me. He stopped putting the money on my books like he was supposed to.”
“And so you sent him a letter threatening to file a motion to withdraw your plea.”
Madison nodded. “A little sooner than I'd planned. I was hoping to wait until after my next scan. But I'd gotten used to the finer things in prison life, and doing without was pissing me off, so I made my move.”
“How do you know it wasn't the husband who stopped paying Hamlin, so he had to stop paying you?”
“Because the deal was there would always be a hundred grand on account, in cash. I could draw out as much as I needed every month. The husband would add to it if it went under. Even if the guy stopped paying, it would've taken a couple of more years for the money to run out.”
“I guess they didn't expect you to live so long.”
“So what? That's not my problem. A deal's a deal.”
“And you figure the husband killed Hamlin.”
“Has to be. Only way for a surefire cover-up.”
“Wouldn't it have been simpler just to take you out?”
“They tried.” Madison pointed out the window toward the prison blocks. “I've been in isolation for the last month, after an Aryan Brotherhood guy tried to shank me. Since then, if hubby was gonna break the chain, he was gonna have to do it at the Hamlin link. Ain't no way they're getting to me again.”
Madison pointed toward the door. “That guard outside? He ain't standing there to protect you from me, but me from them.”
T
akiyah Jackson was sitting at her desk when Donnally arrived at Hamlin's office.
Donnally had called Navarro while he was driving back from Vacaville and got confirmation his earlier theory had been right. Navarro knew the players in town. He'd recognized the name of the victim's husband, not because he'd worked on the Bennie Madison case, but because the husband owned a well-known biker bar in the mostly Hispanic Mission District. It now made sense that the husband could've sicced an imprisoned gang member on Madison.
Navarro walked in a few minutes after Donnally had taken Jackson into the conference room.
Donnally glanced over at Navarro, pointed at the two-foot-square safe in the corner, and said to Jackson, “I have reason to believe there is evidence related to Mark's death in that thing and I wanted a witness when we opened it up.”
Jackson swallowed and twisted her hands together on top of the conference table. Her daunted gaze shifted between Navarro and Donnally.
“Why do you need a witness?”
“There may be money in there and I don't want anybody accusing me of stealing any.”
She tilted her head toward the row of filing cabinets. “You tell him about the file?”
Donnally shook his head, hoping Navarro wouldn't react and give him away.
“It wasn't relevant to any of the leads we're working on.”
“You have the combination,” Navarro said. The sentence came out as a statement, not a question.
“Mark gave it to me only for emergencies.”
Donnally understood her to be saying she wasn't responsible for what they would find inside.
“I'd say this was an emergency.”
Donnally followed her over to the safe, where she kneeled and spun the combination right, left, right, and then pushed the handle down and pulled the door open. She then raised her hands and backed away as though trying to break her connection with whatever they would find inside.
“You got some latex gloves?” Donnally asked Navarro.
Navarro reached into his inside suit jacket pocket and gave him a pair and slipped ones on his own hands. He lowered himself to one knee, pulled out a digital camera, and took a couple of photos of the inside of the safe.
Donnally began moving the safe's contents onto the conference table. Financial records, checkbooks, file folders, and notes. On the third reach, he pulled out a rubber-banded stack of hundred-dollar bills, almost five inches high. He looked over at Jackson.
She shrugged.
“Does that mean you know where this money came from?” Donnally asked.
“There's always cash in there. Usually about a hundred thousand. Sometimes less. Sometimes more.”
“And . . .”
“No, I don't know where that particular money came from.”
Donnally reached in again and removed another stack and laid it next to the other. He estimated that each held between forty and fifty thousand dollars.
After emptying all the paper out of the safe, he felt around and discovered a small metal box against the back wall. He held it by the edges, pulled it out, and set it on the table. He used the end of a pen to open the latch. Inside he found diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and old gold coins.
Donnally suspected it might be stolen property Hamlin had taken in legal fees.
He glanced over at Jackson. Her teeth were clenched. He wondered about her psychological makeup since her only ways of expressing emotion seemed to be tapping her finger or clenching her teeth.
He took this clench to be anger.
“He told me he'd never do that,” Jackson said, speaking through an unmoving jaw.
“You sure he didn't get this stuff from a relative's estate?” Navarro asked.
“He would've made me look at it. He was a showoff about money and shit.”
“At least he had the good sense to keep this a secret from you,” Donnally said. “It shows he was at least embarrassed.”
She stared at the box for a few moments. “I don't think so. I don't think it was that at all,” and then she turned away and left the room.
F
uck that bitch,” Rudy Rusch told Donnally from behind the bar in the grimy and shadowed Hideaway Lounge just off Mission Street, a few miles southwest of the Hall of Justice. Rusch stopped toweling the dark oak surface and leaned his hairy-armed, six-four frame down toward Donnally and lowered his voice. “If Madison hadn't killed her, I would've done it myself.”
Rusch's delivery had a practiced tone, almost rhythmic. Donnally wondered how many times he'd repeated those phrases since the night of his wife's murder.
“He's saying you did do it,” Donnally said, “and you paid off Mark Hamlin to get him to plead to the sheet.”
“Sure I gave Hamlin some money. I don't deny it. A lot of money. He came to me and said he could make the case go away, and fast.”
“Why the hurry?”
“Shit, man.” Rusch surveyed the crowd, bikers hunched over tables and talking low, and skinny girlfriends with tangled hair and windblown faces sipping beers and wine coolers in the booths and waiting for the men's business to get done. “Hamlin was gonna try to frame me, expose the stuff that goes on in here to make me look like the kind of guy who'd kill his wife for cheating on him.”
Donnally smiled. So far, his story made as much sense as Madison's.
“But you are the kind of guy who would kill his wife for cheating on him,” Donnally said. “And I take it she was.”
“Yeah. With some asshole in the office she was working in. Some fucking stockbroker. We were short on cash and she got herself hired on as a temp. It started out with her being his drug connection.” He glanced toward one of the biker tables as though her source was sitting there now. “Then they started hooking up after work. Every fucking time I turned my back.”
What he meant to say was that every time he turned his back they were fucking. Donnally wondered why he didn't just come out and say it. Maybe he wasn't as tough as he pretended.
Rusch reached down, filled a glass with beer from the tap, and slid it to Donnally.
“On the house.”
Donnally nodded thanks and took a sip.
Rusch cocked his head toward the front window and pointed up the block toward Mission Street.
“I'd just bought this place when you got shot out there. At least ten years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday. People are still talking about it. You're a legend . . . a leg-end.” Rusch smiled and made a trigger motion with his thumb. “Like at the O.K. Corral. Bam-bam, bam-bam-bam.” He laughed. “All my customers go running out the back door like they didn't want to be anywhere near the Mission District when the cops showed up and started patting people down. Then sirens coming from everywhere. Whoopâwhoopâwhoop.”
Donnally had gotten caught in a crossfire between Sureño and Norteño gangsters after he climbed out of his car to meet an informant at Morelia Taqueria. He put fatal slugs into both of them, and the Norteño put the one into him that ended his career.
“I ran out there. I could see by the way them EMTs were working on you that your cop days were done.” Rusch pointed down at Donnally's hip. “All the blood coming out of there told me that's where you got shot. I didn't figure that you'd be doing much running and gunning after that.”
Rusch rubbed his side as though in sympathy. “That joint back to working okay?”
In fact it wasn't. Donnally woke up to the stabbing memory of that day every morning and went to sleep with it every night.
But that was none of Rusch's business.
Donnally nodded and changed the subject. “I found some cash in Hamlin's safe.”
“Not from me. I gave him thirty grand altogether. It's got to be gone by now. Long gone.”
“Madison seemed to think that the deal was for life with a hundred grand always on deposit.”
Rusch smiled again. “He should've taken up that little misunderstanding with Hamlin.”
“He tried.”
Rusch paused and pursed his lips, then squinted at Donnally and asked, “What kind of bills did Hamlin have?”
“Hundreds.”
“You won't find my fingerprints on that money.” Rusch gestured toward the cash register. “Biggest bills I get coming through here are fifties and most are twenties.”
Rusch didn't need to say that the denomination of choice in the biker drug trade was the twenty.
“Then why the attempted hit on Madison in prison?” Donnally asked.
Rusch's brows furrowed and he drummed his fingers on the bar. “Where's this information going?”
“You see me taking notes?”
“That's not an answer.”
“In my head unless you're lying to me.”
Rusch stared out into the bar until he got the attention of a biker wearing a black vest and a green T-shirt with a shamrock printed on the front, then he nodded at the stool next to Donnally.
Donnally recognized the shamrock as an Aryan Brotherhood emblem. One of the first homicides he investigated was an execution of a Hell's Angel named Irish by an Aryan Brotherhood member wearing a similar T-shirt, except with the words “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” printed below it. He now wondered if this gang connection was the reason Rusch remembered his name and the day he was shot down. Donnally was known throughout the Aryan Brotherhood because he'd chased down scores of members, their wives, girlfriends, hangers-on, and associates and until he'd gathered enough leads to identify the killer.
The biker walked over and slipped onto the stool. He had a windburned, middle-aged face that had seen a lot of sun and grit, and teeth that had met a lot of cigarette smoke.
“You know anything about a stabbing in CMF Vacaville? Guy named Madison.” Rusch looked at Donnally. “When?”
“Little over a month ago.”
The biker rotated his chair toward Donnally and inspected him. “What's your interest?”
Rusch cut in. “My interest.”
“He looks like a cop,” the biker said, still eyeing Donnally, but not recognizing him due to the passage of time. “Who is he?”
“He was a cop. Now he . . .” Without lifting up his hand, Rusch flicked his forefinger at Donnally. “What do you do now?”
Donnally noticed that Rusch had avoided introducing him by name, probably fearing the biker would take a swing at him, with the rest jumping in, because he'd put a gang brother in prison for life.
Looking at bikers reflected in the mirror behind the bar, Donnally imagined that after the police cleared the scene on the day he was shot, some of these same men had returned to celebrate. Laughing, backslapping, high-fiving, and laying bets on whether he'd ever walk out of the hospital.
“I run a restaurant in Mount Shasta.”
“Which one?” The biker asked the question like he'd been through the town enough to catch Donnally in a lie.
“You know it,” Donnally said. “Lot of motorcycle club guys stop in on their way up to Washington and Oregon. Lone Mountain Café.”
The biker nodded, spun his stool around, and walked back to his table. Moments after he sat down and whispered a few words to the others at the table, one of them withdrew a cell phone and made a call. It rang a few minutes later and the biker returned.
He looked at Rusch. “Bennie Madison? The guy whoâ”
Rusch nodded.
The biker turned toward Donnally. “His nickname is Shitty. He refused to pay for some crystal meth he got from
somebody
.” The biker emphasized the last word, then paused, implying the somebody was the Aryan Brotherhood. “He was supposed to hand over some Oxycontin tablets he got from the doc.” The biker pointed at his own head. “He was milking some kind of brain thing. Scamming the hell out of it. Shitty claimed the meth was bunkâit wasn't. And
somebody
couldn't let that kind of disrespect pass.”