Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

“Because of how you think you looked on television?”

“No,” Donnally said. “This isn’t about me.”

They stopped and watched the fog reach inland, over the surf and sand, insulating them, isolating them, the gulls wheeling away, their calls and shrieks fading like distant echoes.

Donnally took in a long breath and exhaled, then looked over at Janie.

“Tell me,” Donnally said. “Which is worse? Them failing to get Brown convicted over all those years or letting him plead no contest and drift away like he did nothing at all?”

Janie didn’t answer right away, her eyes moving, seeming to search the gray around them for something solid to attach her thoughts to.

Finally she said, “I’m not sure there is a worse.” She looked up at him. “Or even that they’re all that different. It seems to me they did the same thing twice.”

Donnally nodded. “And I’m not going to let it end this way.”

T he burglar wasn’t after money.

Donnally recognized that the moment he stepped into Mauricio’s office. The petty cash tin lay open with the same fifty dollars inside that had been there since Mauricio checked himself into the hospital. Someone was either looking for something more valuable or trying to send a message, or both.

The voice on the blinking answering machine gave Donnally the answer.

“Interesting thing, Harlan,” Deputy Pipkins said on the recording. “I checked DMV and birth records and the only Mauricio Aguilera born in California on January 14, 1956, died on January 15, 1956. What do you make of that, Detective?” Pipkins chuckled. “Oh, yeah, there’s one other thing. Strictly speaking, can you call them wetbacks if they snuck in across the desert?”

The next voice he heard was Will’s, but coming from within his own head:

Deputy Asshole.

Donnally extracted the tape and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He didn’t put in a new one. Mauricio was done receiving messages.

While he straightened the papers on the desk, Donnally wondered what difference it made whether Pipkins found out the truth about Mauricio. Maybe he’d been resisting not because the truth would hurt anybody, but simply because Pipkins was Pipkins, or maybe because Pipkins was his father’s son.

By the time he’d stepped back and uprighted a chair, he realized that it made a difference for the same reason that promises made to the dying did.

And it sure as hell wasn’t because the dead cared afterward.

It was because the living had to live with themselves.

Donnally checked the rear door and each of the rooms until he found where Deputy Pipkins had broken in. Scuff marks showed that he had climbed through a bedroom window that was concealed from the cafe parking lot by an overgrown pyracantha.

After retrieving a flashlight from the kitchen, Donnally leaned over the sill and shined the beam toward the ground and among the intertwined and leaf-cluttered branches.

A glint of silver flashed back.

He swept the beam past the same spot a second time.

Another flash.

He locked on it and squinted until he could make out the outline of a basket-woven rectangular square of leather with a chrome clasp: Deputy Asshole’s ticket book.

A metallic pop and a “Jesus fucking Christ!” startled Donnally awake as he lay in Mauricio’s bed at 2 A.M.

Branches thrashed against the glass and the wood siding as Pipkins flailed, each yank on the badger trap onto which Donnally had tied the ticket book driving the jaws deeper into the deputy’s wrist.

Donnally grabbed his shotgun and racked it.

He heard an “Oh shit,” then the crunching of Pipkins fighting his way toward the ground, deeper among the thorns and out of the line of fire.

“Don’t shoot, you son of a bitch,” Pipkins yelled.

“Give me a good reason.”

Pipkins didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t embarrass him in front of his department or make him appear even more pitiful than he already was, and they both knew it.

Donnally reached for his cell phone, located a number, and pressed “send.”

“This is Donnally. I’m at Mauricio’s. Come get your idiot kid.”

R ain thudded against his truck’s windshield and hammered the pavement as Donnally sat in the parking lot of the Santa Rita jail, spread out in a central Alameda County valley.

He looked at his watch. It was nearly 3 P.M., kick-out time for Charles Brown and the rest of the prisoners who had completed their sentences.

Donnally wondered how much the place had changed since the few trips he’d made out to the campuslike facility more than a decade earlier. The long, wide hallways and the bare interview rooms, with their unscuffed paint and inmate-waxed linoleum, were then as sterile as hospital floors and lacked the grime of despair and hopelessness that sometimes made the guilty want to purge themselves. As he watched the entrance at the end of the rising, grass-bordered walkway, Donnally wondered whether the place had now deteriorated enough to make detective work possible.

The slow clunk-swish of his wipers provided more rhythm than clarity as he waited for Brown to emerge. A couple of defense attorneys ran from their cars toward the entrance, attache cases gripped with one hand, legal newspapers held above their heads for shelter with the other.

He recognized one of them: Mark Hamlin, Sonny Goldstine’s lawyer, and wondered whether Sonny had finally been arrested for the gun he wasn’t supposed to own, and whether Hamlin had come to represent him, or maybe just to shut him up in order to protect others connected to the Tsukamata murder all those years earlier.

In any case, Sonny would surely have to wonder where Hamlin’s loyalties lay: with him or with former clients among the remnants of the sixties and seventies radicals whose secrets Sonny might want to trade to buy his way out of a third-strike life sentence.

For a moment, Donnally enjoyed thinking through the trajectories and anticipating the collisions, for time and distance and weariness had broken the gravitational pull of caring about Sonny’s future.

But then he remembered the dollar that tied him and Sonny together and that was still in the pocket of his Levi’s jacket. It made him feel queasy, doubting whether he should’ve accepted the money. Not only had he gotten nothing for it, but it felt like a leash around his throat.

A few minutes later, inmates began filing out through the front door and into the rain. They looked to Donnally like refugees who were still dressed in the clothes they were wearing when the bombs fell or the earthquake struck and destroyed their homes. He turned his wipers on high and peered out through the windshield, inspecting the men first for race, then size, then features.

The men streamed out one-by-one, then collected at the bus stop at the foot of the walkway. The weak stood in the rain and the strong under the surrounding trees.

But no Charles Brown.

Maybe he’d been moved to the county hospital psych ward, Donnally wondered.

Maybe he got released earlier.

Maybe-

The door opened again. It was Hamlin. Walking backward. His arms spread wide like he was trying to herd an escaped goat back into a pen.

Then Brown walked out, shaking his head and holding his hands out in front of him as though he was blocking an assault.

It wasn’t Sonny after all who had brought Hamlin to Santa Rita.

Hamlin backed down the walkway another twenty feet, moving side to side as Brown tried to slip around him with his eyes lowered and his body hunched. Hamlin reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. Brown pushed it aside, then cut across the grass, angling west away from the bus stop and toward the two-lane road leading to the freeway.