Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

Perkins stood and looked up at Judge Nanston.

“We have reached a disposition, Your Honor. Mr. Brown will plead no contest to the count of manslaughter.”

Donnally pushed himself to his feet. Everyone in the courtroom turned toward him, except Blaine.

“No contest?” Donnally said, eyes fixed on Blaine’s back. “No contest? Like it was a crime that nobody committed?”

Both bailiffs rose, hands on their guns.

Donnally saw the clerk reach under her desk, finger poised to press the alarm that would flood the courtroom with sheriff’s deputies.

Perkins faced toward him, her hands extended as though pleading for forgiveness for an act her duty required.

Judge Nanston glared at Blaine like a neighbor demanding that he control his off-leash dog.

Blaine turned and took the few steps toward the low barrier behind which Donnally stood.

“Take it easy, man,” Blaine said, reaching for Donnally’s shoulder. “This isn’t the time-”

Donnally pushed away his hand.

“I know this isn’t the time, it’s the last time anybody will have a chance to stop this. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“The best that I can, under the circumstances.”

“Then change the circumstances. Nothing says you have to take this deal. Make him go to trial.”

“For what? Given a choice between letting him walk on reasonable doubt and a first-degree murder conviction, the jury would’ve compromised on manslaughter anyway.”

“I’ll tell you for what,” Donnally said, jabbing a forefinger against Blaine’s chest, ignoring the approaching bailiffs. “So Anna Keenan, wherever she is, can hear the word ‘guilty.’”

D onnally thought he’d probably looked like a lunatic as he pushed past the television cameras and reporters outside the courthouse on his way to the parking garage.

Watching the eleven o’clock news in Janie’s living room confirmed it, for him and for her.

But at least Blaine hadn’t blamed him for the outcome of the case during the press conference afterward.

Donnally leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes as he listened to Blaine uttering hateful platitudes about justice and closure, spoken with prosecutorial authority, calculated to make the obscene disposition palatable to the public.

For a moment, the target of Donnally’s fury oscillated between Blaine and his audience, both now willing to put someone else’s past behind them.

Then another wave of embarrassment.

Donnally cringed as he thought back on his final words to Blaine. He didn’t believe in an afterlife, and he sure didn’t believe that dead souls wandered among the living, waiting for human justice to release them from the mundane world of their battered flesh.

He knew that it wasn’t Anna who needed to hear Brown say the word “guilty.”

It wasn’t even Mauricio who needed to hear it.

It was himself: a short-order cook in a two-bit town dwarfed into insignificance by its namesake lump of dirt and rock towering above it.

Janie reached over and touched his arm as a reporter quoted Donnally’s final words in court.

He looked again at the screen. The woman stood with the lake behind her, face framed by auburn hair, the microphone held high. She said again, now whispering, “So Anna Keenan, wherever she is, can hear the word ‘guilty.’ ” She lowered the mike as her eyes welled up and the camera panned past her toward the shimmering water.

Donnally then knew why he chose those words. He was yelling fire in a complacent world’s theater, only to have it transformed into melodrama for the eleven o’clock news.

He also knew that his father would be so very, very proud.

Donnally rose from the couch and walked upstairs to the bedroom. He closed his eyes after he lay down, wondering if that melodrama had been his plan all along, wondering if he’d once again let himself be seduced by his father’s magic in turning life into fiction.

He thought back to his father entering his ICU room at SF Medical where he lay after he had been shot. Even in the gray haze of morphine, he’d seen his father hesitate in the doorway as though framing the scene, choosing the camera angle, the point of view, the distance.

In that moment, Donnally had felt himself break in two, as though his mind had risen above his body, suspended like a lens, watching, recording, as if what happened to him had actually happened to someone else, to a character in a movie.

OPENING SCENE: Squad Room. Undercover operation run-through. Homicide Detective Harlan Donnally will park his car next to Morelia Taqueria and walk past the Norteno bodyguards and into the restaurant. He’ll slide into a bench seat across from Alberto Villarreal and make the trade: a get-out-of-jail-free card for a name.

CUT TO: Shootout. Donnally firing at Norteno Gangster Number One and Sureno Gangster Number Three, both too preoccupied with shooting at each other to notice the detective with the double-handed grip leaning over the hood of his car.

JUMP CUT/HIGH ANGLE: A top-down view of Donnally sprawled on the Mission Street sidewalk next to the wheel well of his bullet-ridden undercover Chevy. Unmoving legs. Back riveted to the pavement. His Levi’s and leather jacket soaking up splotches of Coke and salsa.

TRAVELING SHOT: The whoop-whoop of patrol cars bursting through the South of Market intersections from the police station a half mile away.

PAN SHOT: Following behind the siren blasts reverberating against the storefronts lining the street: Carniceria Michoacan, Tortilleria Juarez, Tacos Guadalajara.

FREEZE FRAME AND CLOSE-UP: A bra and panty-clad manikin in a store window. A bullet hole in her throat.

POV: Donnally’s vertigo as the paramedic flops him away from the curb and toward the shattered plate-glass shop windows. Then a view past the black boots of the EMT squatting near his head and toward the Starbucks fifteen yards away.

“Cut!” his father yells.

Donnally watches director Donald Harlan point his finger at the couple slumped over the wrought-iron table in front of the coffee shop, their fake blood dripping through the latticed top onto the sidewalk.

“Don’t just slump,” his father says, throwing up his arms. “Audiences don’t want slumping. They want wrenching, spasmodic writhing. And knock over the goddamn coffee cups. Nobody’s going to believe you’ve been killed unless you knock over the goddamn coffee cups.”

VOICE-OVER:

Officer caught in a crossfire.

CRANE SHOT: Dead Mexican gangsters lying in the street, all but their snakeskin boots covered by the medical examiner’s plastic sheets.

JUMP CUT: The shooting review board.

VOICE-OVER:

Let’s hear your version, Detective. Tell us what led up to the ambush.

“Ambush,” Donnally mumbled.

“What?” Janie leaned up on an elbow. It was still dark out. “What did you say?”

Donnally rubbed his eyes. “Nothing.”

“It sounded like you said ‘ambush.’ ”

“I must’ve been dreaming.”

“About the shooting?”

“No, not now. It was last night as I was falling asleep.”

Janie reached over and ran her hands through his hair. “Are you fighting a battle in there, or planning one?”

Donnally stared up at the invisible ceiling.

“I don’t know what I was doing.”

“I can’t let this go until I hear him say it,” Donnally said to Janie, as they walked along the fog-curtained Ocean Beach after breakfast. Far ahead of them in the semidarkness stood a shivering crowd drawn to the shoreline by a rough tide’s exposure of the wreckage of the King Phillip, a clipper ship that went aground in the nineteenth century.