“You find out anything about whether there was any kind of problem between Hamlin and Sheldon Galen?”
“Not between them. Only between Galen and an old client that threatened to sue him. But it settled before the papers got filed, so I couldn’t find out the details. His client was charged with beating up a security guard who wouldn’t let him take his dog into a bank. Galen lost the trial. Maybe the guy wanted his money back. His name was Fisher except with a C, Tink Fischer. I’ll text you an address when I come up with one.”
Donnally heard the sound of papers rustling through the fine static on the line.
“We got a few more latents off the money,” Navarro said. “I’ll have the results later this morning. But no guarantee that we’ll be able to ID them.”
Donnally then told Navarro about the note telling him to follow the money and the slashed tire warning him to leave.
Navarro laughed. “Maybe somebody’s telling you to follow the money all the way out of town.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Donnally said. “You were always good at putting one and one together.”
“I’ll make sure it’s not two and two. I’ll have the beat cops do drive-bys for the next few days, see if they can snag whoever he is, or at least scare him away.”
Chapter 16
Old-people smell. That’s what it was called. Donnally recognized it at first breath when he entered Warren Bohr’s reception area. It was the background odor of nearly every elderly suicide he’d ever investigated.
It wasn’t just the dust on the desk and in the built-in bookcases, or the grime worn into the marble floor, or the months of legal newspapers stacked on the low table in front of the leather couch.
It was something else.
It was what it meant: the kind of cognitive impairment that always seemed to go with it. That had been the first sign that his grandmother was heading toward Alzheimer’s, what the doctors called impaired odor recognition.
Bohr must have heard the door open, for he appeared at his inner office door.
“Can I help you?” Bohr asked, looking up from under eyebrows lowered by his hunched back.
Donnally recognized the middle-aged lawyer under the smudge and tarnish of old age. His wool suit draped his thinned body, his once angular nose had softened, his ears drooped like overgrown botanical specimens, and his once black hair had turned fungus yellow-gray.
“I hope so.” Donnally crossed the room and shook his hand, saying, “I’m Harlan Donnally; Judge McMullin appointed me special master in the Hamlin case.”
“I didn’t expect someone would be coming by so soon.”
“So soon?”
“You couldn’t have run out of leads this fast, that you needed to start shaking the bushes to see what falls out.”
Donnally pointed through the door and toward Bohr’s desk. “Can we?”
Bohr nodded and led him inside his wood-paneled office. Donnally waited until Bohr shuffled his way around to his high-back chair, then sat down facing him. Hanging on the wall behind the lawyer were photos of him with former mayors George Moscone and Willie Brown, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, Carol Doda, and Eldridge Cleaver.
“I can save you some time and trouble,” Bohr said. “I hadn’t spoken to Mark in a year.”
Donnally raised up his hands in a football timeout motion, then realized that it might have been preemptive.
The old-people smell. Maybe Bohr didn’t remember.
“I understood you spoke to him within the last few months.”
Bohr glanced over at his wall calendar. It hadn’t been turned in half a year. He sighed. “That keeps happening.” He looked back at Donnally. “Refresh me.”
“I was told that you participated in a conference call about money. Somebody needing money real bad and real quick.”
Bohr nodded. “I remember. Sheldon Galen.” He pretended to spit. “That putz. The idiot borrowed from a client, then couldn’t pay it back. Could’ve lost his bar card for doing it.”
“Why’d you help him out?”
“I didn’t. Mark stepped in right away and paid the client to keep him from suing Galen. The rest of The Crew then put in money so Mark wouldn’t be out on a limb alone.” Bohr glanced at the calendar again. “I think Mark was supposed to pay me back by now.”
“You may want to put in a claim with the probate court.”
Bohr paused, thinking, then blinked. “It may be better to write it off. I’m not sure I want to be the one who explains to the court why Mark wanted the money.”
No, Donnally thought, you don’t want to explain to the court why Galen needed the money.
Donnally felt his phone vibrate once in his pocket. He pulled it out. It was the text message from Navarro with Tink Fischer’s address.
“Can you think of anyone who might want to kill Mark?” Donnally asked.
“By anyone, you mean Galen?”
“Not just Galen.”
“A thousand people.”
“I think you’ll need to narrow it down some.”
“Mark was an aggressive lawyer. And aggressive lawyers make enemies.” Bohr spread his hands. “How’d you like to be the father of a kid who was murdered by one of Mark’s clients? Mark dummies up some reasonable doubt-which doesn’t take much around here-and the killer walks.”
“The odds of that being the reason are pretty slim. A winning lawyer has never been murdered before, at least in San Francisco.”
Bohr paused and inspected Donnally’s face. “What did you do before you started this special master business?”
Bohr said the words “special master business” like Donnally was in the same class as the court-appointed lawyers in the building.
“I was a homicide detective,” Donnally said. “And it’s not a business. It’s a onetime thing.”
“How many unsolved homicides have there been in San Francisco. Hundreds? Thousands?”
Donnally nodded. He knew where Bohr was going, but didn’t get in his way.
“Then I guess you can’t say whether it hasn’t happened before.” Bohr gestured toward the window. “Lot of the people getting killed out there are old clients of Mark’s. Most of those murders don’t get solved. People assume it’s gang on gang. Maybe not.”
The old man had gone off course. They hadn’t been talking about clients being murdered, but their lawyers. He should’ve been arguing that some lawyers had been murdered over the years and not all of those murders had been solved. Donnally wondered whether there was some thought or memory inside Bohr’s brain that was pushing him that way.
“That just means killers get killed,” Donnally said. “It doesn’t mean their lawyers get killed for getting them off. I don’t recall any of those, even when there were serious criminal organizations involved.”
Bohr leaned forward in his chair. “But if it was going to happen to one of them, my candidate would’ve been Mark.” He leaned back again and squinted up toward the ceiling. “Where did we start with this? Oh yes. Sheldon Galen.” He looked again at Donnally. “You’re thinking that Hamlin’s murder is a lawyer-on-lawyer crime. Galen kills Mark so he doesn’t have to pay back the money?”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
Bohr smiled. “But if you were about to think something, I’d make it that.”
Chapter 17
Loan? It wasn’t no loan. That asshole Galen stole my money. Stole. . it. A hundred thousand dollars.”
The man standing behind the chain-link fence next to a fight-scarred pit bull didn’t look to Donnally like a guy who’d ever seen a hundred thousand dollars in any form. Cash, check, or money order.
Having emitted a rapid first blast, Tink Fischer fell silent and then looked Donnally up and down as if only now having the thought he’d should’ve had when Donnally first walked up and set the dog to barking. What’s a white guy doing out here without a badge and a backup?
“Where’d you park your car?”