Steven Gore: A Criminal Defense

Donnally and Navarro shrugged. They’d seen both.

“We’ll have to wait to hear what the medical examiner says,” Navarro said, “but unless there’s Viagra or something like it in his blood, I’m not sure the ME will know for certain.”

Goldhagen turned toward Donnally.

“I spoke to Hamlin’s assistant as I was driving over. She’s saying a week ago he told her to call you if anything happened to him. You know why?”

“Why me? Or why did he make the comment then?”

“Both.”

Donnally spread his hands. “I don’t know the answer to either.”

And Donnally didn’t, at least in any way he could yet articulate. He’d spoken to the man only once since his forced retirement from the department and his moving north to Mount Shasta ten years earlier.

“I heard you helped out a client of his a while back,” Goldhagen said.

“Inadvertently. I needed to find out something that his client knew. Hamlin hired me-”

Goldhagen’s brows furrowed. Hamlin was as warped as Donnally was straight, and he knew she couldn’t imagine him making the kind of moral compromise required for him to work for Hamlin.

And he hadn’t.

“It was only in order to keep what his client told me privileged. The information got me where I needed to go, and also led me down a trail leading to evidence that cleared his client of participating in a murder conspiracy.”

Goldhagen squinted at Donnally, facing him head to head, matching him at five-eleven. He could see the buoy and beacon lights flash in her dark eyes and tint her graying hair red.

“That mean you’re a private investigator now?”

“No. I was just helping out a friend.”

She turned her gaze back toward Hamlin. “You take any money from him?”

“A dollar I later dropped into the employee tip jar at my cafe.”

“And you haven’t spoken to him since?”

“No reason to. I’m just a guy who flips burgers these days. I was only in town to do some work on my house. My girlfriend still lives there.”

Goldhagen fell silent, her questions answered, her cross-examination ended.

A maverick wave broke hard on the rocks below. Shrieking gulls rose from the top of the lighthouse, then wheeled and fled inland.

“Damn,” Goldhagen finally said, watching a TV satellite truck joining the others parked along Marine Drive. “This is going to be a mess.”

Donnally understood she was speaking past him and to Navarro. None of them needed to say aloud why Hamlin was so hated by law enforcement and why both the public and the legal community would distrust an investigation into his death by SFPD or the DA’s office. Hamlin didn’t win cases so much as sabotage them, all the while accusing the district attorney of judicial fascism and the police of blue-on-black terrorism.

A week earlier Donnally had seen on the news that Hamlin had lined a courtroom hallway with gang members, forcing a rape victim to walk a tattooed gauntlet on her way into court to testify against their leader. Despite her having identified the defendant in both photo and standup lineups during the previous weeks, when the moment came to point him out in court, her hands remained clenched in her lap.

“SFPD starts going through his files,” Goldhagen said, “not only the criminal defense bar, but the state bar, will go haywire.” She pointed at Hamlin. “And not because they had any respect for that asshole.”

Navarro took in a long breath and exhaled. “Give me just ten minutes in his office. . just ten stinking minutes.”

“You know that’s not going to happen,” Goldhagen said, “as much as I’d like to be in there with you.”

“Then what is gonna happen?” Navarro asked.

“You’ll know as soon as I do,” Goldhagen said, then pulled out her cell phone and walked a few yards away.

The forensic team came striding across the rooftop carrying screens to surround Hamlin’s body. They photographed the scene, collected cigarette butts and food wrappers damp-stuck on the surface around the base of the lighthouse, and then began fixing the barriers in place.

As they worked, Donnally could feel the weight of the city behind him, not just the bluff onto which the bridge was anchored, but the neighborhoods into which Hamlin’s professional roots reached: the politically powerful Castro, the drug and prostitution ground zero of the Tenderloin, the gang-ridden Bayview-Hunters Point, and even downtown into the financial district and out to City Hall and deep into the yuppified Noe Valley and high into the mansions of Nob Hill.

As a cop, Donnally had borne that burden, had never struggled against it, had even sought it, but standing there in the muted dawn, he found he didn’t miss it. Sure there were things he still needed in life and things he was still puzzling out, but he’d learned in the last decade that he didn’t require the gun and the badge to get at them. Even more, the city that had once struck him as a maze or a labyrinth spread over its seven hills now seemed like a web.

Goldhagen returned as Donnally and Navarro were about to step inside the enclosure to examine Hamlin’s body.

“I talked to the presiding judge,” Goldhagen said to Donnally. “He’s appointing you special master. You’ll station yourself in Hamlin’s office and figure out how to pursue leads without jeopardizing attorney-client privilege and you’ll be the public face of the investigation.”

Donnally shook his head. He was still embarrassed to have taken Hamlin’s dollar, viewing it at the time as an evil necessity made for the sake of a greater good. And he wasn’t about to have it made public, an inevitable consequence of his accepting the role as special master. The press would demand to know why he’d been chosen, what his relationship with Hamlin had been, and what motivated Hamlin to ask for his help in death.

Even more, Donnally knew he’d be compromised from the start. Reporters would focus not on the facts relating to why Hamlin had been murdered, but on what it was that Donnally knew-or the press suspected he must know-that intersected with what Hamlin feared in the days before his murder.

Donnally himself didn’t know. And the fact that he didn’t worried him.

“The judge and I will both give you cover,” Goldhagen said.

“I don’t see how that’s possible. You’ll be too busy trying to give yourself cover. I’ll look tainted from the get-go and it’ll slop back on you and the investigation.”

Goldhagen gestured toward the enclosure. “Without you jumping in now, we may not be able to get to the heart of this investigation for days and days.” She glanced at Navarro as if anticipating his disagreement with what she would say next. “I don’t believe in the so-called forty-eight-hour rule. I think it’s bullshit. Especially in this case, with Hamlin’s history and the number of enemies he’s made over the years. But I do believe it’s foolish to give a killer time to wipe away his tracks.”

“Nice try,” Donnally said, “but you’ll have to find someone else. Ask the attorney general to send somebody from Sacramento. I’m not indispensable.”

“No, you’re not,” Goldhagen said. “You’re convenient. His assistant said he left a letter in his desk drawer authorizing you to look at his files. And the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It would be idiotic to go the long way.”

“Look, man,” Navarro said, turning to face Donnally. “The one thing we know is that Hamlin brought this on himself.”

“That’s a helluva leap,” Donnally said.

Navarro ignored him. “And evidence about how he did it is probably in his office.”

“Probably,” Goldhagen said. “That’s the operative word. And ‘probably’ is not probable cause, and without probable cause there’s material relating to his death in there, we don’t have the basis for a search warrant. Sounds to me like Hamlin trusted you to develop that basis in a way that protects his clients.”