“Is that why he went to the old guys in The Crew to cover what he loaned you?”
Galen nodded, chewing on his lower lip. Finally, he said, “I know about Mark taking the money out of Burger’s garage and the perjury in the Thule case-”
“And snitching off the judge and extorting money out of that homicide victim’s husband, Rudy-”
“Rusch. I know. All of that and more. But he wasn’t a complete scumbag. He did some good in the world.”
It was news to Donnally and it also seemed like a non sequitur, unless Galen knew something about the reason Hamlin had collected all the cash.
Or maybe Galen had already arrived at the point in the program when he started lying.
If Hamlin wasn’t so bad, after all, maybe he wasn’t either.
“Like what?”
“The kids. The gymnasts.”
“The what?”
The puzzlement Donnally felt must have shown on his face.
“You know, in Southeast Asia. I don’t know the details, but I know a lot of money went that direction.”
Chapter 36
Here’s an overview of Mark’s calendar for the last six months,” Jackson said, as she walked into his office. She laid it on the blotter in front of Donnally, then leaned over, turned the pages, and ran her finger down each one. “You can see by the blank weeks when he was in Asia.”
Galen had left to meet with a longtime client in the jail to help him choose a new lawyer. He and Donnally had decided Galen’s cover story for resigning would be that he had a life-threatening medical problem that he had disclosed in private to Presiding Judge Ray McMullin. Donnally had called Goldhagen and gotten her consent, and then McMullin agreed to ask the judges hearing Galen’s cases to allow a new lawyer to substitute in. Donnally had no doubt that Galen’s pale face and uncharacteristic agitation would convince everyone in the court system the illness was real.
“Mark never talked about it,” Jackson said. “But I checked once or twice, and his trips coincided with gymnastic competitions in Thailand and Vietnam. They’re kind of a big deal over there. National pride involved. Got a lot of press coverage because the program was a ticket out of poverty for lots of village kids. There are even some videos on the Internet.”
“How come he was so secretive?” Donnally asked.
Donnally felt Jackson’s breast rub against his shoulder. He leaned to his right to break the contact. She bent down a little further and made contact again.
“I have no idea.”
He thought back to what Navarro had told him about her background and her sexually abusive father and the kinds of things Janie had told him over the years about the abused women she’d treated. He suspected fear and panic about what he might discover about Hamlin and her had led her to revert to the use of a teenage weapon of self-defense: Buy off Daddy with sex. He also wondered whether she’d run that routine on Hamlin and whether he’d exploited it. He imagined her standing in Hamlin’s shower on a morning after, cursing herself for sleeping with him and bewildered about why she’d done it.
But this wasn’t the time to confront her about the facts of her current behavior or to try to test his speculations about her relationship with Hamlin.
Donnally rolled back his chair and stood. Jackson straightened up and put on her most suggestive Tina Turner face. He could feel the sexual tension coming from her and sensed her filtering everything he was saying and doing, and measuring it against her subconscious intent. And the fact that her eyes displayed a certain kind of vacancy, a vacuum of unthinking, told him it was motivated in a way she didn’t herself understand.
But it was real. Blood-and-flesh real.
“How about gathering together all you can on what Mark was doing over there.”
He suspected she already had some of the answers he was looking for, but he needed to use his question as a way to force them both beyond what could’ve become an impasse.
Jackson nodded and her shoulders settled. He felt the connection break and her emotionally backing away.
She licked her lips and her brows furrowed as though she’d just become aware of her desire and was wondering why it arose just then.
He decided to push her past the awkwardness of the moment.
“See if you can find out who else was involved,” Donnally said. “Where they’re located over there. How he paid for it. Anything else on the Internet.”
She nodded again, then turned and headed to her desk. He watched her and recognized by the slight wobble in her step that she knew he was watching her. It was like she was aware that she was being captured on film for the first time and felt her everyday gestures turn into self-conscious performances.
Donnally waited until she passed out of his view, then sat down and scanned the calendar. Even if Hamlin’s work in Asia was a kind of charity, that didn’t mean the money funding it was clean. Using dirty money to do good and to buy legitimacy was the San Francisco way. All the tong and triad leaders made a show of contributing to the benevolent societies and funding the Chinese New Year parade, the Italian gangsters shoveled money to the churches, even the Hell’s Angels bought turkeys for the poor at Thanksgiving and ran toy drives for Christmas.
Thinking of the cash in the safe and in Hamlin’s bedroom hiding place, Donnally wondered whether Hamlin was engaged in transferring the money to someone in the old country on behalf of the man with the Vietnamese accent who’d held a gun at Donnally’s back.
Donnally resisted the temptation to reduce the coincidence of the Vietnamese gunman’s intervention and Galen’s disclosure of Hamlin’s Southeast Asian charity into effect and cause or even into links in a chain.
He also realized he had another temptation to resist.
No one had mentioned women in Hamlin’s life. No wife or ex-wife. No girlfriend or ex-girlfriend. No boyfriend or ex-boyfriend.
Maybe the charity was a pretext for sex tourism, for hitting the brothels of Bangkok and Hanoi. Maybe Hamlin had a girlfriend over there. Maybe-he felt a shudder of disgust pass through him-maybe the half-naked kids who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of his charity were actually his targets.
Chapter 37
Money.
More and more Donnally was convinced the route to whoever killed Mark Hamlin would follow a money trail-
And he hated money trail cases.
As a cop, he hadn’t lied to himself. He knew he didn’t have the talent, he didn’t have the mind for it. He couldn’t see patterns in numbers and abstract the character of human actions from deposits and withdrawals and balance sheets.
He had a hard time just keeping track of the pluses and minuses of his cafe’s money flow.
And now he found himself sitting at Hamlin’s conference table surveying stacks of bank statements. Eight bank accounts, personal and business. All with connected ATM or credit cards.
Donnally felt straitjacketed. Paralyzed. Hamlin could’ve laundered money just by moving it among these accounts and Donnally knew he wouldn’t be able to figure it out.
Sensing motion in the doorway, he looked up to see Jackson walking in. She’d undone the top two buttons of her blouse. He felt a surge of annoyance. He wasn’t in the mood for the manipulation. He was interested in the truth she was in a position to expose, not the cleavage she was intending to reveal.
Jackson stopped at the opposite side of the table, leaned over at the waist, and tapped one of the piles of bank statements with her fingernail. “There’s an easier way to get the answers you’re looking for.”
Donnally fixed his eyes on hers, resisting the temptation to let his gaze fall where she wanted it to. Her maneuver made him recall a female suspect who’d cozied up next to him in the bar where he’d sought her out, and had asked, “Is there any physical way we can resolve this?”