“It really wasn’t a yes or no question,” Jackson said.
“How about you tell me whose prints they are.”
“It’s better if you take the lead. I’m not gonna snitch on anybody.”
“Even if they did something wrong?”
“Who am I to judge? People make mistakes.”
“Like Sheldon Galen?”
Jackson took in a long breath and looked past Donnally up the sidewalk. He noticed part of what had made him think of Angela Bassett when he’d first looked at her. The severity of her nose and cheeks and her eyes, less windows than screens. He wondered whether over the years her face had become her or she had become her face.
Finally, Jackson exhaled and said, “That’s a complicated one. Sheldon showed up a while back all tense and excited. Really pressured, like there was a lot on the line. Him and Mark talked in the office for a long time and then Mark cleaned out the safe and gave him all the cash inside. They were in such a tizzy I thought maybe they’d landed a big case and Mark was giving him his cut upfront.”
“That matches what I’ve heard,” Donnally said. “That Mark often hired Galen to work on cases with him. But I’m not sure how money with Galen’s fingerprints ended up in Mark’s safe. It should’ve been all outgoing, and none incoming.”
“That’s not the end of the story.”
Jackson took a sip of her coffee. Donnally thought she was buying time to decide how much of the tale to tell. He didn’t imagine he’d get the whole thing. Jackson wasn’t there yet.
“A week later the money was back. I asked Mark about it. He told me it was some kind of loan. I flashed on how Sheldon acted when he came for it and realized what I was prepared to see as tension and excitement because of all the cases they’d worked on over the years might have been desperation.”
“And when the cash showed up again?”
“I figured that Sheldon had returned the money, or at least part of it.”
“How much?”
“I think about eighty thousand dollars.”
“Why do you think it was Sheldon?”
“There were a bunch of conference calls the day before. Sheldon, Mark, and a bunch of the lawyers in The Crew.”
“The Crew?”
“A group of old lefty lawyers from the sixties and seventies. I got the feeling they took up a collection so Sheldon could pay Mark back, because the money showed up right afterwards.”
“Is that the same money that I took out of the safe yesterday?”
“Some.” Jackson stared past Donnally again, but this time her eyes didn’t seem to register the commuter traffic on the street or the office workers rushing by. Whatever she was seeing was playing out in her head.
After a few moments, she looked back at Donnally.
“Sheldon is a weasel. He graduated from NYU law school and worked as a court-appointed lawyer back there for a couple of years. Why he showed up in San Francisco, I don’t know. But he knew how to talk the talk, how to pump up his credibility. It was all about how he’d represented terrorism suspects and about all his trial victories. It was all bullshit. He only represented terrorism suspects because they couldn’t afford their own lawyers and the federal judges needed attorneys who’d work cheap.”
“How’d you find out the truth about him?”
“Him and Mark did a heroin importation case back there a couple of years ago. They were brought in by a local lawyer. I talked to her paralegal. She told me all his money came from CJA.”
Donnally cast her a puzzled look.
“Federal Criminal Justice Act. Indigent defense. Sheldon never had a paying client until he came out here.”
“What kind of weaseling led him to need eighty thousand dollars all of a sudden?”
Jackson shrugged. “I told you. I ain’t a snitch.”
Donnally anticipated the dodge and had his answer prepared. As he readied himself to give it, he wondered whether it had been Jackson who’d left the “Follow the Money” note in the envelope under his doormat, a way of snitching without being seen to snitch.
Donnally backed off the idea of pressuring her; instead he said, “Then point me in the right direction so I can find out myself.”
She paused, then aimed her finger down the street in the direction from which they’d come.
“Go see Warren Bohr. His office is in the Frederickson Building. He put some money in, so he must know why.”
Donnally recognized the name. Bohr had been a defense lawyer who represented Black Panthers and other radical political groups in the sixties, then criminal defendants in big drug and racketeering cases in the seventies and eighties, and finally migrated into public interest law after he grew wealthy enough that he didn’t need the money. The last time Donnally had heard his name was before he’d left San Francisco, when Bohr had filed a suit to stop the federal government from leasing part of Alcatraz Island to the Marriott corporation to build a hotel. But that was fifteen years ago.
Donnally glanced at his watch. It was 8:25.
“What time does he get in?”
“You know how these old guys are. In at 7 A.M., and tell everyone they meet that they’ve never missed a day of work in the gazillion years they’ve been practicing.” She gestured with her cup toward Bohr’s office. “He’ll be there.”
Chapter 15
Donnally headed back up the sidewalk toward the Frederickson Building. Every cop in town knew the place, a three-story Victorian composed of tiny offices filled with aging sole practitioners. Most were so lousy at law that their mortgage payments depended on indigent defense cases, state and federal court appointments, for clients either without the money, or without the sense to borrow the money, to hire someone competent.
Donnally hated their pretense. The court-appointed attorneys swaggered around the courthouses like they had real paying customers. In the end, nearly all their clients pled out. The defendants were unwilling to risk trials with appointed help, and the DAs and federal prosecutors were willing to cut deals just to clear the calendar. The attorney who managed the Frederickson Building set the tone for the rest. Donnally had heard him praised by prosecutors as a clown with great client control, and they were willing to put up with his clowning because he never failed to find a way to make his client cave.
There were exceptions, good defense lawyers who were bad at self-marketing or who were committed to defending the poor, but most of the appointed lawyers were less advocates than fixers.
The whole game of deal cutting had pissed off Donnally and the other cops in the department, at least with respect to the cases they cared about, because some victims needed their day in court, needed to have their suffering seen, not reduced to a penal code section entered on a form and passed from judge to clerk to file and then consigned into the dark eternity of a storage room.
Donnally suspected that were it not for Hamlin lifting him up, if only to use him as a tool, Sheldon Galen would have spent his career as one of those Frederickson Building lawyers. And Galen had to know and dread that Hamlin might someday decide he was done with him and drop him back onto the pile.
As Donnally approached the edge of the financial district, he wondered why Bohr still had his office in there. Bohr had to feel like the odd man out since he couldn’t have much in common with the hand-to-mouth lawyers that worked out of the place. He wondered whether Bohr stayed there because he liked knowing he was the guy all the others wanted to be when they were young, and maybe having him around made them feel like they had made it. Maybe he was an artifact, or a totem, from a time when law was a mission in San Francisco, instead of the chiseling it too often revealed itself to be.
On the other hand, maybe he was still there only because he had always been there, like a backyard tree stump that was just too much trouble to haul away.
Donnally paused at the bottom of the front steps and called Navarro.