“How much more does your brother need?”
“For his campaign or the Supreme Court nominees?”
“One thing at a time. The nominees.”
“I don’t know for sure. We got pledges of about five in Silicon Valley during his last visit. It really depends on how big Landon’s promises have to be to get his colleagues’ confirmation votes once he gets the nominations out of the Judiciary Committee.”
Anston fixed his eyes on Brandon’s. His voice was low and hard.
“He’s going to have to do whatever it takes. If Reagan had the guts to put up a fight in 1987, we’d have gotten Robert Bork instead of that wimp Anthony Kennedy. That lunatic cited European law more often than the U.S. Constitution. And I don’t want to wait another twenty-five years for those idiots in Washington to get it right.”
Anston stiffened as a two-term member of the city council passed by their table, a transsexual with the body of a linebacker, encased in a short-cut pant suit.
Anston shook his head as he stared after her.
“I hate this fucking town.”
Chapter 45
"This really is like a ball of snakes,” Alex Z said to Gage in his loft overlooking the tourist shops and seafood restaurants on the Oakland waterfront. “There’s no way we’d have seen it if we hadn’t been looking for it.”
They stood facing a six-foot-by-eight-foot sheet of posterboard displaying a flowchart and chronology of the TIMCO and Moki Amaro cases.
“Walk me through how they did it,” Gage said.
Alex Z picked up a yellow fluorescent marker from the worktable behind him and started at the left side of the chart.
“A million dollars showed up in the Pegasus Limited account after Meyer’s firm got hired by TIMCO. It was later wired out to Hawkins. Then after the superior court ruled it was just a workers’ comp case, TIMCO transferred another two million into Pegasus-”
“The fee for Anston and Meyer making the case go away.”
“But I don’t see anything that could have been a payoff to the judge who dismissed it,” Alex Z said.
“I don’t think there was one,” Gage said. “If he’d been paid off, his decision would have been a lot more definitive than it was. He had to dismiss the case on legal grounds because the plaintiffs couldn’t shake Hawkins or Karopian.”
Gage scanned the complex chart. “Is that it for TIMCO?”
“It pops up again after Meyer was appointed to the bench. A TIMCO subsidiary got cited for toxic dumping into San Pablo Bay. The general manager was charged in federal court.”
“Meyer’s court?”
“Bingo. According to Skeeter Hall’s research, Meyer forced the U.S. Attorney to knock it down to failure to report a spill, rather than an intentional release. No jail time. Just a fine.”
“And the payoff?”
“A TIMCO subsidiary wired two hundred thousand into Pegasus a week before sentencing, and another two hundred a week after.” Alex Z shook his head. “No one seemed to have noticed that TIMCO was a client of Meyer’s old firm.”
“Wouldn’t make a difference,” Gage said. “Meyer wasn’t the attorney of record in the explosion case. That’s all that counts in conflict of interest rules for judges.”
“Makes you wonder whether Meyer is paying off clerks to direct the cases he wants into his court,” Alex Z said.
“Possible,” Gage said, “but untraceable. The payoffs would have been small and paid in cash, not hundreds of thousands of dollars wire transferred into offshore bank accounts.” He pointed at the chart. “What about Moki?”
“That’s even easier.” Alex Z highlighted a series of lines. “Charlie’s spreadsheets show four separate two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar payments into Pegasus.”
“One transfer from the parents of each of the kids?”
“That’s what it looks like. And a day later, four hundred thousand gets wired to the witness in Cabo San Lucas.”
“So Charlie got rid of witnesses in the cases Meyer handled when he was a lawyer,” Gage said, “and Judge Meyer got rid of cases that landed in his court.”
Gage sat down and picked up the Pegasus spreadsheet.
“The problem,” Gage said as he examined it, “is we have no way to connect Meyer directly to Pegasus.”
Gage skimmed down to the bottom.
Alex Z pointed at the last line. “There was about nine million dollars in the account before Charlie closed it a week before he died. But I can’t figure out where it was transferred.”
Gage leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I know where. Socorro showed me a Pegasus insurance policy. Two million dollars for each of their children. And another seven million went into an annuity for Socorro.”
“You mean he stole it?”
“Either that or it was his cut for a career of criminality.”
“Is that why they broke into his house? Trying to find where the money went?”
“At this point there’s no way of knowing.” Then a question came to Gage in an image of a writhing Charlie Palmer during his final moments. “It makes me wonder whether Charlie’s death really was from natural causes.”
Chapter 46
Gage kept Lieutenant Spike Pacheco company on a wooden bench outside San Francisco Superior Court Department 23 while he waited to be called in to rebut defense claims at the tail end of a homicide trial. Gage surveyed the long marble-floored hallway, normally packed with defendants, attorneys, and the relatives of the in-custodies, but not at four o’clock on a Friday. It satisfied him there was no one close enough to overhear their conversation.
“Somebody who was trying to trace the money wouldn’t have murdered Charlie,” Gage said. “That would guarantee they’d never get it back.”
Spike jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the courtroom.
“You know what that scumbag in there told me after he murdered his wife and tossed her off Devil’s Slide into the Pacific Ocean? ‘I just wanted her back, I just wanted her back.’ What did you beat into my brain when I got promoted into homicide? Don’t look for reasons, look for motives, for what really drives people, because the reasons killers give can be nonsensical.”
“And that’s what’s been nagging at me. Porzolkiewski. He’s got the motive, triggered by bumping into Brandon Meyer on the street. Maybe it pushed him over the edge. First he shot Charlie when he came to retrieve the wallet and later got inside his house to finish him off. Then he figured from what I told him that Karopian was in on it and had been paid off to submit the false OSHA report on the cause of the explosion, so he went after him.”
“Somehow.”
“That’s the problem. We’ve got a truck load of motive, but no suspicious cause of death. Porzolkiewski wasn’t even on Bethel Island when Karopian died, and he sure was in a hurry to tell me he wasn’t.”
“Did you check?”
“He admitted to being about ten miles away from Karopian’s house earlier in the day, but claimed he was at the Ground Up Coffee Shop on Geary at about the time of death. I talked to a couple of employees. He was there all right. He’s known to most of the people who work there.”
“What about the day Charlie died?”
“No idea. I made a deal with him. In exchange for copies of what was in Meyer’s wallet he got to listen to part of my tape of Hawkins’s confession. I didn’t ask him anything about Charlie, not even about the shooting. I’m still not sure I know enough to ask him anything in a way that’ll get an answer that would make a difference.”
The courtroom door swung open next to them. The DA stepped out. “The judge needs a five-minute break,” she said, “then you’re on.”
Spike nodded and she walked back inside.
“How about taking a long shot with a little of the county’s money?” Gage asked.
“For what?”
“Another toxicology analysis. The only way Porzolkiewski could have killed Karopian is by remote control.”