They turned down Larkin Street and could see the grassy east end of Civic Center Plaza and the west end of the farmers’ market.
“Give me an example,” Donnally said.
“Calls with Reggie Hancock.”
Donnally’s stomach tensed and his fist clenched, even though he wasn’t surprised there might have been phone traffic between Hamlin and Hancock. It was the mere thought of Hancock.
Reginald Leotis Hancock had started out as LA’s Mark Hamlin in the seventies, drifted into handling big drug cases in the eighties, and then into high-profile homicide cases at the end of the nineties. Some of those he was hired on to from the start. Others he injected himself into. Countless times he’d worked his way from the sidewalk where he commented on cases for cable news networks to a spot behind the defense table. His audience, when he was speaking into the mikes, wasn’t the long distance voyeurs sitting in their living rooms, but defendants sitting in their nearby cells, desperate for a defense strategy that might win for them.
“Calls between guys like that wouldn’t be unexpected,” Donnally said. “I’m sure they worked together on north-south cases. And I’m not sure the fact of the calls themselves can tell you what the content was.”
“It’s the surrounding calls,” Navarro said, holding up the accordion folder like he was showing off evidence. “Hamlin calls Hancock, then calls the DEA, then calls the U.S. Attorney, then calls a cell number belonging to an old-time drug trafficker named Hector Camacho, and then calls Hancock back.”
Donnally stopped and turned toward Navarro. “How’d you know it was Camacho? Those guys don’t have phones in their own names.”
Navarro swallowed before answering. “I. . uh. . checked with our intelligence unit.”
The move reminded Donnally of Navarro’s preemptive search of Hamlin’s apartment.
Donnally let it go. Jamming him wouldn’t change what he’d done, and his face showed he knew he’d done wrong.
“You think Hamlin was planning on surrendering Camacho on a still secret indictment?”
“I don’t think that’s it. More likely Camacho is trying to cut a deal to roll on somebody. That had to have been the reason the DEA was in the loop. Hancock represented Camacho in the late 1980s in LA. He pled out and did seventeen years in the federal pen.”
“That was a big sentence back then.”
“And he was a big guy, and tough, too. He left a few murders in his wake the local DA couldn’t prove, so the U.S. Attorney hit him as hard as he could. And my guess is that Camacho is not up for doing another seventeen.”
“How old is Camacho?”
“Early sixties. Given life expectancy in the joint, another seventeen years would be a death sentence.”
“He’s back in the trade?”
“Intelligence says he’s moving a hundred kilos of cocaine a month. That puts him at the top of the federal sentencing guidelines.”
Donnally pointed ahead to indicate he still needed to get to City Hall, and they walked on.
“I think there are two ways to look at it,” Donnally said. “It isn’t all that privileged if the DEA and the U.S. Attorney are in on it. And if the telephone company can look at the phone records, they’re not all that confidential.” He looked over at Navarro. “Except they wouldn’t know that Camacho was using that particular phone.”
Navarro cleared his throat. “Sorry about that one. My finger is always close to the trigger.”
Donnally reached out his hand for the file. “How about I take it from here?”
Navarro passed it over.
“I’ll call this one a no harm, no foul,” Donnally said. “I don’t think it will go anywhere. If somebody was going to get hit, it would’ve been Camacho, not Hamlin. He’s the snitch, he did the damage, or is going to, so he’s the dangerous one.”
Chapter 40
He didn’t ask me if I wanted to inherit his duplex,” Lemmie Hamlin told Donnally, sitting across the table in her kitchen an hour and a half later. “He just did it.”
Lemmie pointed through her atrium window toward Golden Gate Park and beyond it at the sun flaming out in the Pacific Ocean. It was what the real estate brokers called a million-dollar view, but this one was out of a multimillion-dollar town house.
“It’s not like I need the money.”
“Wanting and needing are different things.”
Her brows furrowed. “Did you ever read any of my books?”
Donnally smiled. “You mean, all the way through?”
Lemmie nodded.
He shook his head.
“Then you’ll have to trust me on this one. I know the difference.” Lemmie’s face seemed to wince, then she said, “I guess you could say that I’m compelled to write, not to hunt and gather and acquire money. And I can write what I want, because people buy whatever I put on the page. I don’t have to write for the market, or try to time it.”
“No compromises.”
Lemmie nodded again. “I know it’s a luxury others don’t have.”
Donnally took a sip of the coffee Lemmie had poured for him.
“Then why did he impose his duplex on you?”
“Maybe guilt. Maybe to make me a coconspirator in his compromises.”
“I’m starting to think his problem was far worse than mere compromising.”
“You’re probably right. I’m not even sure he could’ve articulated what position he was compromising from. And I’m not sure any of the people he worked with, and who acted like he acted, could either.”
“Like Reggie Hancock?”
Lemmie drew back. “Why do you mention Reggie?”
Donnally was surprised by her reaction. “Why, why?”
“Mark once set us up on a date. Reggie made my skin crawl. He’s beyond arrogant. He has no values at all, believes in nothing. He bragged about things other people would be embarrassed even to admit.”
Lemmie glanced toward her laptop on a table in the corner, overlooking her garden. Her writing desk.
“He’s a character in my new book, except I made him a medical researcher who falsifies his clinical trial test results instead of a lawyer and I made him East Indian instead of black. He figures that since thirty percent of people have a placebo effect anyway, he can claim a thirty percent success rate. For some drugs on the market that’s not so bad. Where he goes wrong-where he deceives himself-is that it’s a cancer drug he’s developing. There is no placebo effect on cancer, and people will die.”
“Did Reggie ask you out again?”
“Yeah, when he came into town to meet with Mark or appear in court up here. And I went. For research.”
Lemmie leaned back in her chair. She closed her eyes and took in a long breath and then exhaled as though steeling herself for an assault of memory.
“Reggie was a petri dish of corruption.” She opened her eyes again. “I watched it grow over the years like a virus that escapes from the lab and infects others.”
“Like Mark?”
“Like Mark. He turned my brother’s rebellion against my father from a fight for justice into a kind of nihilism. Into a justification for substituting his own judgment for the law’s. It’s like. . like. .” She winced again. “Shoot. I can’t think of the word. It’s when a jury sets aside the law.”
“Nullification.”
“That’s it. Nullification. The jury finds someone not guilty who everybody knows is guilty because they think the law is bad or the defendant’s motives were good, or at least not evil. The problem was that for Reggie his aim became nullification in every case and by any means necessary.”
“Except it wasn’t in the interest of some notion of justice.”
“At the beginning, it may have been. At the end, no. I think Reggie was opposed to drug laws on principle. He felt virtuous fighting those kinds of cases, and he was good at it, and got rich doing them.”
Donnally watched the sides of her mouth turn up as a thought came to her.
“I guess you could say virtue is easy when there’s money to be made, then it somehow transforms into the virtue of easy money.”