“Actually, I’ve decided on a new career.”
Donnally extended his hands before him, mimicking Hale’s earlier examination of his manicured nails.
“I think I’ve flipped enough burgers for a while,” Donnally said. “I’m looking for something that would be more satisfying, something that will allow me to make a more substantial contribution to the world.”
Hale swallowed and licked his dry lips. “And that would be?”
Donnally reached into his jacket and pulled out a power of attorney and held it up so Hale could read the title.
“I’ve decided to become the head of what used to be called the Albert Hale Foundation.”
Hale shuddered as the implication of Donnally’s demand blasted through the brick and mortar of his psychological defenses.
“Don’t worry,” Donnally said, handing him the two-page document and a pen. “I won’t let you starve. I may even let you stay here.”
Hale accepted it. His body hunched as though he thought the mansion was about to collapse over him. His hands vibrated too hard for him to focus on the words.
“I’ll… I’ll need to have my lawyer look at this.”
“There are two problems with that,” Donnally said. “First, your lawyer is the one that drafted it. And second, if you hire another one, you better make it a specialist in criminal defense.”
Donnally pulled out his cell phone. He punched in a number, waited a few moments, then said, “This is Harlan Donnally, let me speak to Lieutenant Navarro.”
“Give me a minute,” Hale said, his face reddening around the crimson splotches of his disease. “You can’t expect…”
Donnally reached for the recorder and held it up to the phone.
Hale threw up his palm. “Stop.” He signed on the last page.
Donnally disconnected and took the pages back.
“You’ll never get away with this,” Hale said, intending the words to sound like a threat, but they came out like a whimper.
Donnally rose to his feet without answering, but before he could take a step, Hale reached out into the emptiness around him and asked, “What did you mean, ‘used to be called the Albert Hale Foundation’?”
Donnally displayed the power of attorney toward Hale.
“Read the fine print.”
Hale grabbed for it, but Donnally pulled it away. Hale bit on his knuckle as he skimmed down the text, then squinted at the last paragraph.
Donnally let him finish reading it, then turned toward the side gate leading to the driveway.
“Wait,” Hale said. “I still don’t understand. Who is Mauricio Quintero?”
Donnally stopped. Images of Mauricio clicked through his mind like falling dominoes, ending with the little man’s lifeless body in the Mount Shasta hospital, his sad brown face framed by the starched pillow, his handwritten confession lying in a drawer next to him.
Who Mauricio Quintero had been was the question that started Donnally on the trail that had brought him to this spot. And in understanding Anna’s life and death he’d found an answer, but it wasn’t one Hale had the right to hear, much less one he’d understand.
Donnally started walking toward the street and the declining sun that would soon abandon Hale to an empty twilight, and then said over his shoulder:
“Let’s just say he was a friend who asked me to deliver a letter.”
Note to the Reader
The idea for the story told in Act of Deceit arose out of a number of events.
In 1986 an individual I will identify as X walked into a furniture store in California and stabbed a clerk. He fled, leaving the broken blade in her body. X was arrested, charged with attempted murder, and sent for psychiatric treatment. After X completed counseling, the district attorney moved the Superior Court to dismiss the charges, which it did.
A year later he slashed his next-door neighbor to death.
On the motion of the public defender, X was sent under 1368 of the California Penal Code for an evaluation of his competence to stand trial for the homicide. He was found to be both mentally ill and developmentally disabled. He was returned to court a year later and was again found to be incompetent.
Since that time, no court has made a determination on whether X has recovered his competence to stand trial. Indeed, for more than a decade the Superior Court had not received a report of his mental condition. The most recent report I found in his court file concerned another defendant altogether.
This all came to light a couple of years ago when a friend of mine, who had spent his career working in the mental health field, reminded me of the concerns he had back in 1988 that X was pretending to be mentally ill, malingering, in order to avoid trial for the homicide. Indeed, the head psychiatrist at the out-patient facility that X was attending at the time of the crime had warned the staff prior to the murder that X was not mentally ill, but was a sociopath who was a danger to others at the facility.
My friend’s more general complaint was that since so many sociopaths claim mental illness to excuse their crimes, the public has come to believe that the mentally ill are more dangerous than everyone else. And this is not, in fact, the case.
After this conversation with my friend, I decided to find out what happened to X.
Because of medical and psychiatric confidentiality rules, this was not an easy task. The details of my investigation are unimportant, but in the end, I discovered that X was housed in a developmental center in a county far from the one in which he was arrested and being detained solely under a California civil code that allows developmentally disabled violent individuals to be held until a civil court determines that they no longer represent a danger to the community.
Based on information from those I interviewed in the course of looking for X, it seemed unlikely that X was developmentally disabled, since the symptoms first appeared, not when he was a child, but when he was in his twenties. And based on the fact of his transfer from a psychiatric to a developmental center, it was clear that state psychiatrists had already determined that the mental problems that had otherwise justified his detention had been resolved.
I interviewed X, who acknowledged to me that he had killed his neighbor. Although he referred to the crime as a “murder,” he offered a manslaughter defense: that he hadn’t taken his medications, that he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that he had “blacked out.”
More likely than not, he went to his neighbor’s house to rob her of money to buy drugs. A felony murder and a capital crime.
X also told me that he had been advised by his attorney on the morning of our conversation that there was a good chance that the civil court judge hearing his case on the following day would grant her motion to set a date for his release.
I made sure that didn’t happen.
At X’s next hearing, I understand, the positions taken by the state and by his attorney reversed: the state arguing for his release from the center and his return to the county of his arrest for trial, and his attorney arguing for his continued detention.
As of this writing, no court has yet been asked to rule on whether X is currently competent to stand trial. I don’t know whether he is or he isn’t, but the integrity of the justice system requires an answer.
It then crossed my mind: What if one of the many criminal defendants in civil detention around the country was, unlike X, factually innocent of the crime with which he or she was charged?
As always, when the innocent have been wrongly prosecuted, the guilty escape punishment.
This suggested the idea of using the civil commitment of a mentally ill but innocent person as part of a cover-up.
At the same time as I had these thoughts, my wife was engaged in one of her numerous investigations on behalf of victims of Catholic-priest child molestations. Many of her investigations required her to locate witnesses and documents relating to incidents that happened as long as forty years ago. In the course of her work, and with the help of Catholics disturbed by the church’s defensive and immoral response to the allegations, she was able to develop contemporaneous evidence of the crimes.