“It’s because you can’t accept that people like Hamlin feel morally justified in what they do.”
He knew she was right.
“I think that’s why you never really understood narcotics officers who planted drugs on gangsters and then committed perjury to make the cases stick. You always believed their motives were more basic, like it was only about power. Cons playing the part of cops. Same with Hamlin, you always thought attorneys like him were motivated by greed alone and they merely disguised their motives in moral language.”
Donnally always thought one of his strengths as a detective was that he never believed either cops’ or crooks’ justifications for their criminal offenses. Rather, he saw the crimes graphically and abstractly, like moves in a game, or as forms of self-deception or as attempts to justify the unjustifiable.
Janie hadn’t known him during those years. He had been referred to her after he was shot. It wasn’t that the department thought he’d gone nuts and needed treatment. It was just a requirement of the general orders that an officer who killed a suspect in the line of duty undergo a psych evaluation. He considered it a sign of his sanity that at the first meeting he decided he’d rather date her than get shrunk by her.
She ended up doing both, starting with the dating.
“I think that’s why you sometimes sound like you operate on a kind of mechanistic and reductionist theory of homicide and view them as motivated only by drugs, sex, or money.”
It was like she’d been sitting at the next table in the Golden Phoenix listening in, but in truth it was that she’d paid close enough attention over the years to be able to tell him how he saw the world, and why he did so.
“But I’m not sure you really believe that. It’s just that thinking in terms of power, of brute causes and effects, seems more honest to you than the way your father thinks about the world.”
Donnally felt himself tense. Every time Janie started down this kind of analytic road, his past washed over him like a flash flood, the storm triggered by the mention of his father. It made him feel like he’d spent too many years circling in an eddy.
He’d become a cop as a form of rebellion, and he recognized it at the time. It had been against his filmmaker father, a man who treated fiction as more real than fact because it made possible the evasion from responsibility he’d sought for most of his life. For his father, justice had been no more than a kind of fictive irony, a subversion of cause and consequence, of effect and responsibility, because real-world justice would’ve meant facing up to what he’d done to his older son. Donnally’s older brother had believed the propaganda his father had created as a press officer in Saigon during the Vietnam War. His father had falsely claimed that North Vietnamese regulars had massacred a group of Buddhist monks near the DMZ, and the lie not only provoked worldwide outrage, but persuaded his brother to enlist. He learned the truth-that the killers had been Korean mercenaries working for the U.S.-just days before he was killed in an ambush.
Years later, his father became a movie director, playing out his evasions on film, and liked to say that Hollywood wasn’t a place, but an idea, while Donnally had always thought of it as no more than a patch of concrete and viewed the motives of those who worked there as more base than artistic-and his father was proof of that. After all, what was post-Vietnam Hollywood, the years in which his father first achieved fame, but an escape from reality into drugs, sex, and money.
Donnally pushed aside the memory and worked his way back to where their conversation had started, with Jackson and what had connected her to Mark Hamlin, where it began, how it grew, its character just before his death and whether it might have transformed afterward.
“What you’re saying,” Donnally said, “is that I need to understand Jackson’s transition from victim of a police crime into. .” He spread open his hands on the table. “Into what?”
“Someone whose identity was somehow tied to Hamlin’s ends-justifies-the-means mentality.”
Donnally had the feeling Janie was right. That could be the reason why Jackson could be terrified of being prosecuted for the illegal means Hamlin had chosen, but could still be loyal to him.
“Even though,” Donnally said, “whatever ends were hers over the twenty years she was with him may not have been his anymore when he died.”
“But I suspect that she doesn’t quite see it yet. And if you push her too hard, she’ll never let herself see it. It would be just too terrifying.”
Chapter 14
The note on Donnally’s windshield had read:
We decided to flatten only one tire so you could use your spare to get yourself out of town. Next time. .
Donnally hadn’t noticed the listing right rear end of his truck when he walked out of the house and into the predawn shadows at 7 A.M. He felt a surge of anger as he examined the tire under the streetlight and realized that he’d overlooked a ground rule when he met with Judge McMullin. Who was going to pay for the damage.
The note was still pinned under his wiper blade. Four thoughts came to him as he retrieved it.
The first was that whoever left it probably wrote for a living. They didn’t split the infinitive and they knew how to use an ellipsis.
The second was that he wished Hamlin’s friends and enemies would stop leaving notes.
The third was that the absent words “Fuck you, asshole” meant that the author probably hadn’t been one of Hamlin’s clients.
The fourth was that the “we” was really an “I.”
Twenty minutes later, Donnally had changed the tire and was driving toward Hamlin’s office. He parked in an underground garage up the block, then walked over and waited for Takiyah Jackson behind a pillar by the building entrance.
Donnally spotted her coming down the sidewalk before she noticed him. He stepped toward the brass and glass door as if he was just arriving, then looked back as she made the turn, and smiled.
“Good timing,” Donnally said.
Jackson didn’t smile back. She pointed upward, toward the higher floors. “You setting up shop?”
“Might as well. Looks like I’ll be in town awhile. Can I buy you some coffee?”
“I thought you cops liked to start the grilling cold, then offered coffee as a pretended act of friendship to fudge up a little warm feeling in the interrogation room.”
“Crooks never fell for that except on television. I always relied on charm.”
Jackson rolled her eyes. “I’ll take the coffee instead.”
They turned together and walked to the Starbucks on the corner. She ordered regular house blend. He ordered the same out of solidarity, otherwise he would’ve gotten the decaf. He’d learned over the years that it wasn’t enough just to break bread, but you had to break the same bread, or to drink the same coffee.
Sometimes he didn’t want to try to rely on charm alone, and this was one of those times.
Jackson raised her cup in what Donnally took to be a silent toast to Hamlin, then they both took sips and headed back out the door.
“Mark must have really trusted you,” Donnally said as they headed back up the sidewalk.
“How do you figure?”
“We found your fingerprints on the cash in his safe.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t have trusted me. How do you know I didn’t reach in and grab some for myself?”
Donnally glanced over at her and smiled. “A do-it-yourself severance package?”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve been around long enough, seen enough screw-ups by crooks, to have learned how to cover your tracks by wearing gloves.”
“You find anyone else’s prints?”
“Yes.”
Jackson stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing Donnally to stop and face her. Office workers brushed by them, some making a point of bumping their shoulders. Donnally pointed toward the front window of a copy service and they stepped over to it.