Steven Gore - A Criminal Defense

“Why didn’t you just come up to my window and ask to talk to me?”

Donnally thought of her screaming at Navarro.

“And what would you have done?”

“Found a way to run your ass over.”

“What’s your beef with me?”

“My beef with you is that you’re trying to drag a mentally ill young woman into something she’s not a part of. She didn’t hang Mark Hamlin out there. She weighs all of a hundred pounds.”

“I know she didn’t.”

“Then why are you hounding her?” Mother Two pulled on her arm. “Let me go.”

“You swing at me again and you’re going to jail.”

Mother Two breathed in and out again, forcing the air like she wanted it to be heard. Finally, she said, “Okay. I won’t hit you.”

Donnally released her wrist.

She reached over, jerked on the handcuffs, and looked out at Navarro. “What about these?”

“They stay where they are.”

“Have it your way.” She lowered her free hand to her side.

A horn honked behind them. Navarro held up his badge. An engine whined as a car accelerated around them.

“Tell me about Ryvver and Frank Lange,” Donnally said.

“What’s there to say?”

Donnally noticed a calmness in her voice. He wondered whether his saying he knew Ryvver hadn’t strung up Hamlin had led her to conclude her daughter wasn’t a suspect in anything. He guessed she was about to head down the patricide trail Mother One had already blazed.

“What’s there to say is why you lied to Ryvver all those years about who her father was.”

Mother Two’s head pivoted toward him. “Say what?”

“You heard me, and she knows already.”

Her eyes widened and her face paled. She started to speak, more of a gasp, the words trapped in her throat.

“How. . how?”

“It’s not important. But she believes Mark Hamlin was her father.”

“Mark wouldn’t have told her.”

“Let’s say he was desperate.”

Mother Two snorted. “If he was desperate, he would’ve said anything. That’s the kind of guy he was.”

“The medical examiner has tissue samples. We can still do a paternity test.”

She raised her fist, held it in front of her face, looking at it like it had somehow let her down, like it was a weapon she had failed to fire in combat. Her head fell forward and she dropped her hand to her thigh.

“My partner hated Hamlin, saw through him from day one, that’s how I ended up with the fat pig Frank on top of me day after day. I only found out after Ryvver was born that Frank was shooting blanks. Got hurt as a kid. On his bike or playing football or something.”

She looked over at Donnally.

“He just got off on the idea of screwing a lesbian, so he lied to us. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I wasn’t getting pregnant and wanted the whole thing over with, so I let Mark fuck me a couple of times. And that was it. We got Ryvver.”

“And you never told your partner?”

“No. I was afraid she’d always look at Ryvver as a kind of Rosemary’s Baby.”

“How did you find out Frank was impotent?”

Mother Two looked at Navarro. “Do I have to answer that?”

Navarro nodded.

“The asshole blackmailed sex out of me after she was born. Mark told him about me and him, and Frank used it to make me put out or he’d tell my partner. I told him to wear a condom so I wouldn’t get pregnant again, and he laughed and told me. I should’ve killed the bastard right then.”

Donnally didn’t follow that with “Instead of later?” for fear of giving her the idea of trying to protect her daughter by taking the fall.

Navarro cut in. “Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you would lead me to her and I could. .”

“Help her get away?” Navarro said.

“Maybe. Frank deserved it.”

“What about Mark?” Donnally asked.

Her head snapped toward Donnally. “You said. .”

“No. She killed him all right. Someone else moved the body out there and hung him up.”

“You son of a bitch.”

She raised her elbow to strike him.

Donnally pointed at her. “Don’t do it.” She lowered it.

“I had no choice,” Donnally said. “I needed to know the truth.”

“Now you know. And now it’s over.”

“It’s not. Reggie Hancock is missing. She was supposed to meet him in LA yesterday. Nobody has seen him since.”

Donnally described the rolling scheme, its connection to Little Bud and his suicide, and the call from Hancock to his secretary. He didn’t see any risk in telling her. If Mother Two refused to cooperate with them in finding Ryvver and getting her to surrender, Navarro would lock her up for assault so she couldn’t do anything to help her daughter.

“She never went to LA. I know. She lives on SSI and her credit card is in my name. If she’d flown or driven down there, I’d know about it. I’ve been checking her credit card and bank account online. She’d need a plane ticket or gas for the car. Like always, there’s hardly any money in there and she hasn’t taken cash out for a couple of weeks.”

“Maybe Reggie figured out he’d be next,” Donnally said, “and came up here to try to grab her on his own terms.”

“Where would she try to meet him?” Navarro asked. “Maybe someplace where Hancock wouldn’t think there was any risk.”

Mother Two closed her eyes. Donnally watched her thumbs working against her fingertips. Finally, she opened them.

“The place she knew best in San Francisco was Golden Gate Park. The California Academy of Sciences and all that. She spent a summer working as a volunteer at the Steinhart Aquarium. She even had her own key. She liked to hang out there late at night. Just her and the animals.”

Donnally imagined Ryvver tying up Hancock and feeding him to the alligators.

“She still knows lots of folks who work there. They’re very fond of her and let her do work around the place when she’s in town.”

What will happen to her?” Mother Two asked.

Donnally, Navarro, and Mother Two were sitting in a surveillance van outside the California Academy of Sciences. Undercover officers dressed as homeless people were hiding in the bushes watching the front and service entrances. Two others were already inside, dressed as janitors. All had been given DMV photos of Ryvver and Reggie Hancock and descriptions of her hairstyle and likely clothing.

“That’s hard to say,” Donnally answered.

But it wasn’t.

If the mothers were willing to mortgage their house and business to hire the kind of lawyer Hamlin had been and the kind of investigator Frank Lange had been, the worst she would get was a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict.

“It depends on what the psychiatrists say,” Donnally said.

“She has a history of violence as a child. We tried everything.”

Donnally squinted at her. “Violence? Your partner told me as a kid she wouldn’t pick flowers for fear of hurting the plants.”

Mother Two took in a long breath and exhaled. “The lies we tell ourselves.” She looked at Donnally. “If she was a little boy, nobody would have said anything. Catching and torturing lizards and frogs is what they do. Catch them. Lead them down the sidewalk on strings. Swing them around. Dissect them. She was just a little aggressive on the dissecting side.”

“And she was a girl.”

“And the child of lesbians. Don’t think that didn’t play a role in the school psychologist’s theories about why she was that way. This was more than twenty years ago.”

Navarro’s radio clicked, followed by a voice.

“Black male and white female walking close together south along Music Concourse Drive, near the fountain between the palm trees.”