The case became a credibility contest, and the weight of Freeman and his father-in-law’s felony histories tipped the scale in Hamlin’s favor. No one in the legal community knew whether Hamlin did it, but most agreed it was the kind of thing he would do if he had the chance. In the end, and as always, the hearings were less about facts of what happened and more about evidence and the rules of evidence, and about what would stand up on appeal.
Freeman was murdered six months after he finished his federal prison sentence and returned to Oakland. He fell to the sidewalk below the bulletproof driver’s side window of his Range Rover that had been hidden in storage while he served his sentence. For a couple of years afterward, any dope dealer shot down because he’d left himself vulnerable on the street was referred to as being on the wrong side of the glass.
Navarro pointed toward Discount Liquors as they passed Seventy-ninth Avenue.
“He got it right there,” Navarro said. “Turns out the drug dealers running East Oakland when he got out of the joint hadn’t learned to respect their elders. The turf was theirs and they weren’t about to give it back to an old man.”
Drug dealers aged like professional athletes. Forty-five years old was ancient.
Navarro turned off International Boulevard onto the rutted Eighty-third Avenue, more of an alley than a street, then drove past ratty-clapboard and cracked-stucco houses for two blocks before pulling to a stop over an oil-slicked patch of pavement.
A generic, tattooed biker type was reclining in a ripped Barcalounger and drinking a beer on the porch of the gray bungalow where the murdered Ed Sanders had lived. An early 1970s Ford truck sat on blocks in the driveway next to a 1990s Chevy Camaro. A black Harley-Davidson stood on the hard-packed dirt yard.
The biker watched Donnally and Navarro walking across the street toward the house, and then reached back and rapped on the window. A woman appeared in the doorway as they climbed the steps.
Donnally expected her to be a biker chick with a meth-lined face, scraggly hair, skinny as an axel. Instead, she looked like a Home Depot checker, wearing jeans and a Pendleton work shirt.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Navarro displayed his badge. “I’m trying to get in contact with Gloria Sanders.”
“That’s me, but why SFPD?”
“Can we talk inside?” Donnally said.
She glanced at the man on the porch, then said, “Okay.”
The biker followed them in, but remained standing just inside the front door as they sat down, Donnally and Gloria on the couch, Navarro in a chair. Donnally had the feeling that while they’d be directing questions to her, they’d be getting answers, if any were forthcoming, from him.
“That’s my brother,” Gloria said, pointing at him. “People call him Tub, for Tubby.” She smiled. “He used to be fat.”
From the looks of his loose skin, Donnally figured he’d gone on a crystal meth diet and had shed the pounds fast. One of the risks of the drug trade was using your own product. The other one had been exemplified by the bullet-ridden body of Randy Freeman that had lain on a sidewalk a few blocks away.
“We’re looking into some threats that were made against Mark Hamlin,” Navarro said. “The attorney who was representing David Burger.”
Gloria winced at the name as though Donnally had poked at a fresh wound, then said, “I didn’t threaten anybody.”
“Somebody did.”
Gloria’s eyes darted toward Tub, then back.
“Maybe because they think he tampered with the crime scene to make it look like self-defense,” Donnally said.
Her eyes darted again.
Tub spoke. “We know Hamlin was in there. Knew it from day one. Couple of people we know in the East Bay Devils Motorcycle Club rode by and saw him going in a while before Burger called the cops.”
“Who were they?” Donnally asked.
Tub shrugged. “It don’t make no difference. They saw what they saw.”
Donnally recognized he’d never get the names, at least from Tub, so he moved on.
“You threaten Hamlin?” Donnally asked.
Tub thought for a moment. “If I deny it and you can prove it, it’ll look like I killed him. And I didn’t.” He looked down at his sister. “And nobody connected with us did him in either. If we had, you’d of never found his body. We just made some calls to him.”
“Calls about what?”
“What Hamlin was doing in there. We wanted it back.”
“Meth? He took meth out of the place before the cops showed up?”
“No, man.” Tub looked back and forth between Donnally and Navarro like they were passengers who’d somehow gotten onto the wrong plane. “My brother-in-law’s share of the forty grand him and Burger got for the meth they sold to the Nortenos the day before.”
Chapter 24
The son of a bitch went in there to collect his fee before they called the police.”
Donnally had left it up to Navarro to tell the tale to District Attorney Hannah Goldhagen the next morning in her Hall of Justice office. His face was twisted with anger by the time he’d reached the punch line.
“The question,” Donnally said, “is whether Galen knew about it and went after money that no one would miss or that no one could ever talk about. Burger couldn’t complain without having to explain where the money came from. And Takiyah Jackson said she didn’t know about it. She didn’t even know Hamlin had a stash at home.”
“Do you believe her?” Goldhagen asked.
Donnally nodded. “She’s the one that sort of put us on this trail.”
“And Sanders’s wife and brother, are they still suspects?”
“Barely,” Navarro said. “Killing Hamlin was the one sure way they’d never get the money back.”
“Unless the homicide was just an interrogation gone wrong,” Goldhagen said.
“Except that the autopsy doesn’t support that,” Navarro said. “No injuries consistent with having been hit or beaten. I looked at Tub’s rap sheet. He’s the kind of guy who’d have done lots of bone breaking if he was trying to get something. Why take the risk of strangling Hamlin to death when a couple of broken fingers or a slice across the chest would’ve gotten him the information he wanted?”
Goldhagen smirked. “Or maybe shocked him with a Harley-Davidson battery to get it?”
“Or shocked him with any kind of battery. He’s the kind of guy who’d want to see blood.”
She paused and tapped the desk, and then looked at Donnally.
“Then your recommendation is we draft some kind of cooperation agreement with Galen.”
“ ‘Some kind’ are the operative words since the information he provides will be filtered through a third party, which is me. So the execution of the agreement wouldn’t be directly between him and your office.”
“And the next step would be that you start going through Hamlin’s case files with Galen and see what he has to say about them.”
“And with Jackson.”
“Do we need a cooperation agreement with her?”
“That would only scare her off. She’d never want to see herself as a snitch.”
Goldhagen smiled again. “And Galen would?”
“He’ll find a way to justify it,” Donnally said. “After all, he was the extortion victim, right?”
“But only because he chose to become an embezzler.”
“And an embezzler only because he got caught. Bottom line is he’s a snake. I called the court on the way over here. Galen notified the clerk’s office within five hours after Hamlin’s body was discovered that he was substituting in on the Burger case.”