Blaine laughed. “Fun, isn’t it? It must remind you of what you left behind when you got out of police work. This is like one of those noir movies from the forties, hard to tell who the good guys are.”
“Maybe I should go all the way and sign on as a defense witness. I’m sure Margaret Perkins would be glad to have me on her team.”
“You missed your chance, pal. We cut a deal late last night.”
Donnally’s body stiffened and he caught his breath.
“You what?”
“Brown pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter and gets credit for the time he served in the loony bin.”
Donnally’s hand clenched the telephone receiver. “And that means he gets out…”
“The end of next month.”
Donnally pushed himself to his feet, as if the force of his body in motion would deflect the course of the case.
“Is that what a life is worth down there?”
“It’s the best we could do,” Blaine said. “The judge didn’t want to take the political heat for dismissing a murder on speedy trial grounds. The defense gets to wash its hands of the case. And I get a conviction. It works for everybody.”
“It sure as hell doesn’t work for Anna Keenan.”
Blaine snorted. “Well, she’s never gonna find out, is she?”
Chapter 22
F or the first time in his life, Harlan Donnally felt like he’d become a hick. Sitting on a leather couch in the lobby of Schubert, Smith, and Barton, looking out at the San Francisco financial district, wearing jeans and a Levi’s jacket, with his gray Stetson lying on the coffee table.
He could’ve worn a suit. He had one left over from his detective days that still fit.
But when he was getting dressed to drive down from Mount Shasta, he felt like he needed to let Margaret Perkins know that there remained a real flesh-and-blood working world where people still cared about the truth and tried to do the right thing.
But now he wasn’t so sure.
After all, what was the real difference between the Blaines and the Nanstons, and the Pipkinses and the Mauricios?
Sitting there, watching the starched shirts and silk ties and eight-hundred-dollar shoes walk from the elevators into the glass-walled conference room bordering the lobby, he concluded that the only difference was the area code.
Donnally rose when Perkins came out from the hallway to the left of the receptionist. He was surprised not just by her genuine smile, but by her pink tennis shoes.
Perkins stuck out her hand as she approached and said, “Maybe we should get out of here and take a walk. There’s never been a conversation inside here like the one I think we’re about to have.”
Donnally nodded, then picked up his hat.
“D o I think he did it?” Perkins said as they walked up Stockton Street toward Chinatown. “I assume so, but I’m too scared of him to give you a rational answer.” She reached over and took Donnally’s hand for support as the hill steepened, then pointed at her hip. “Brand-new. I’m still getting used to it.”
Donnally wondered if she’d done some research on him, learned about him being retired out on disability after the ambush, and was trying to position herself on common ground.
“Then why plead him out?” Donnally asked. His voice was more accusatory than he wanted it to be. “If you believe he’s incompetent-”
“No, we argued that he was incompetent-”
“Then how can it be ethical to go through with it?”
“Because it’s the best disposition for him and I’m obligated to do what’s in the interest of my client. And it’s not like a felony conviction will change his life. I don’t see him applying for a job requiring a top-secret clearance.”
Donnally wasn’t sure what he’d had in mind as he’d driven down through the Central Valley toward San Francisco, but he’d expected that it would look a lot more like an argument than the conversation it was turning into. He’d even fantasized that Perkins would come into the reception area gloating like all the rest of the imbeciles in the defense bar who celebrated every murderer going free and couldn’t grasp that it was a tragedy, not a victory, when the criminal justice system failed.
In thinking back to the smile with which she greeted him, it now seemed like the kind that fellow sufferers offer each other in doctors’ offices.
He now wondered whether she’d been swept along by events just as he had been.
“The Albert Hale Foundation mustn’t be too thrilled with their poster boy pleading guilty,” Donnally said. “Makes Brown look a whole lot less of a victim. In fact, it shows he worked the system better than the folks who run it.”
Perkins stopped to take a breath next to one of two potted orange trees bracketing the entrance to a Chinese restaurant.
“The word from on high is that Hale is fine with it,” Perkins said. “And his underlings are finally acknowledging what we told them at the start. It was a mistake to jump into the case without looking into it a little deeper. Charles Brown was the wrong guy to build a cause around.”
Donnally looked at his watch. It was almost 12:45.
“You hungry?” he asked.
Perkins nodded.
He pointed at the framed menu hanging on the green stucco wall next to the front door.
“How adventurous are you?”
Perkins grinned. “I think we’re about to find out.”
“W hat do you call this, again?” Perkins pointed at her almost finished bowl of hand-rolled wheat noodles, beef, pork, scallops, shrimp, mussels, and onions in a spicy red sauce. Her face was pink and sweating.
Donnally smiled at her.
“In Chinese it’s called ma mien. Horse noodles. The Koreans call it jambong. The name of this restaurant is Yantai. It’s a city in China right across the Yellow Sea from Seoul.”
“And you know that because…”
“I had a fascination with maps as a kid.”
She set down her chopsticks and spoon and wiped her lips with her napkin.
“Why was that?”
Donnally felt himself stiffen. He hadn’t come down to San Francisco to talk about himself, but to find a way to torpedo Brown’s deal.
Perkins must have seen something in his eyes. “Come on,” she said, “spill it.”
He pushed his bowl forward, then folded his arms on the edge of the table. While some of his childhood memories came back to him like half-remembered episodes from the storybooks his mother had read to him, this wasn’t one of them. This was real and he knew it was the incident that started his downhill slide from the innocence of childhood.
“I was in the third grade,” Donnally finally said. “It was after my brother was killed in Vietnam. I went outside into our backyard, up in the Hollywood Hills-”
Perkins stopped him with furrowed brows.
“My father is in the entertainment business.”
Donnally pushed on before she could begin the line of who-what-where questions everyone asked.
“Up there, above the city lights, before I could identify constellations, it just looked like a chaos of stars. And that night they all seemed to be moving together, like you could actually see the universe expanding. Looking back, I suspect that it was a thin layer of clouds passing by that made the stars look like they were moving the opposite way.” He paused for a moment, then shook the image from his mind. “In any case, it was unnerving. Ever since that moment I’ve needed to know where I stand.”
“So you’re always triangulating your position.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“And now Charles Brown has been sprung free from the place he was supposed to hold.”
“And where he was supposed to spend the rest of his life.” Donnally paused as a wave of sadness passed through him, followed by anguish and then anger. “Brown tried to rape Anna Keenan and she resisted. That’s not manslaughter. It’s capital murder.”