Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

“We were going to handle it ourselves. It was insane, man, a crazy fantasy. People who’d never touched a gun were buying them on the street, ready to posse up like it was some Western movie.”

Sonny paused, his eyes went vacant for a moment, then he continued.

“Some already had them. The guys that had gone into the drug trade. They’re the ones who figured out that Artie was in Berkeley the day Anna was killed, that he needed money and was trying to find Trudy. He was broke and homeless. Everybody knew it.”

“And he figured Trudy was making a lot of money from marijuana?”

“That wasn’t it. They’d loaned Trudy most of the cash from the armored car robbery to buy her house. If they hadn’t done something like that, it would’ve rotted where it was buried. Artie came back to collect what she owed him, and he was desperate, desperate enough to show his face in Berkeley.”

“What happened?”

“You can guess.”

“Tell me.”

“What’s the point?”

“You want the dollar back and I’ll go find out myself?”

Sonny smiled, then winced and touched his busted lip.

“All I can say is that some people… some people… tracked Artie down. He blamed Robert and led the folks to where he was hiding. Things went sideways and it got kind of bloody.”

“Does Trudy know what happened to Artie and Robert?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“She can’t keep her mouth shut. She admitted buying the guns they had used to kill Tsukamata the first time the cops leaned on her. The last thing anybody wants is for the police to start testing DNA from every unsolved double murder in those years to see if it matches any ex-members of New Sky.”

“So all this time she’s been hiding from dead people and she doesn’t know it?”

Sonny shrugged. “I guess you can say that.”

Donnally walked over to the kitchen counter and refilled their coffee cups. He turned back toward Sonny.

“And for over thirty years you’ve been fending off the cops for her?”

“It wasn’t just for her.” Sonny touched his swollen eyes. “I had no choice.” He tried to smile. “But like the paranoid, at least I was never lonely.”

Donnally returned to the table and set down the cups. He remained standing, arms folded over his chest.

“And that means that you folks were willing to let Charles Brown take the fall for a murder he didn’t do?”

“We knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

“You knew that because…” The last piece fell into place in Donnally’s mind before Sonny could answer. “Because of Sherwyn. It was Sherwyn’s job to make sure Rover never went to trial.”

Sonny nodded. “He was the only one in a position to do it and we had leverage to make sure he did. And things went along fine for decades. Until you showed up. Trudy collapsed into a pile of symptoms because she was terrified, afraid that Rover, as nuts as he is, would go to prison for the rest of his life for a murder that R2T2 did. Everybody knows what happens to mentally ill people in the joint. But then he pled no contest and she thought it was finally over.”

“Then why’d she see me? And why was she so sick-looking if she really believed it was over with? I would’ve thought she’d be dancing among the pine trees.”

“I guess she needed to feel like the book is finally closed on the past.”

“But it isn’t.”

Sonny shook his head. “No matter how hard she tries to slam it shut.”

“Y ou mean it was true?” Janie said, as she moved a stack of books from a shelf to a box in her bedroom.

It was 8 A.M., an hour after Donnally had left Sonny’s house.

“Don’t change the subject,” Donnally said, standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry about what I said. You don’t need to move out.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. You did me a favor by knocking me out of orbit. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”

Donnally shrugged. “Have it your way.”

“You may want to try it, too.”

“So this is for my benefit?”

She stared at him for a moment. “Your orbit was never around me.”

But it was once.

He knew it and she knew it, from the moment he’d entered her office, sent by SFPD under the assumption that he needed to get his head straight after being shot and killing the two gangsters. He had taken a look at her, underwent what felt like the Big Bang, then asked, “Can a patient date his shrink?” She smiled and told him no. He then turned around and walked back out the door. Thirty seconds later, her phone rang, she said yes to a new question, and he hadn’t asked another woman out since.

Standing there looking at her now, he realized the problem was not that there wasn’t an orbit, but that there was.

For too many years, they had been like bodies in motion, pulled together by attraction and pulled apart by inertia, and it was momentary acceleration in one direction or another that had replaced the exhilaration that had swept them along for the first few years. In the end, there hadn’t even been enough passion to carry them through with their plan for her to join him in Mount Shasta and work in the nearby VA clinic.

Donnally walked out of her room, already imagining the house empty. Then he noticed a worn spot on the hallway carpet and scuff marks on the wall and a chip out of the paint on the corner near the top of the stairs.

All of that had been invisible just two minutes earlier.

He couldn’t decide whether he was already starting to think like a landlord or it was just guilt about how he had let the house deteriorate.

By the time he arrived at the bottom of the stairs he’d almost worked himself around to the sort of place he always did: It didn’t make any difference which it was or how he felt about it.

Things just are the way they are.

He’d fix the place up, rent it out, and head back up to Mount Shasta.

Except there was a new void in his life. An emptiness. And not just because Janie was leaving, but because the trail from Mauricio’s deathbed to Anna’s killers had ended almost a generation earlier, in a history he wasn’t part of and that didn’t feel real to him.

Donnally walked into Janie’s office and used her computer to run a news archive search for articles about Artie and Robert Trueblood, but he couldn’t find any murder victims with those names. He discovered that the true names of the suspects in the New Jersey armored car case were Willie Carley and Julius Moran, but those didn’t show up in local homicide reports either. Finally he searched for double murders during the weeks after Anna was killed, and there it was.

Thomas Peele

Chronicle Staff Writer Two unidentified men were found bludgeoned to death in an abandoned Hunters Point warehouse on Sunday night. The bodies were discovered by a homeless man looking for a place to sleep. Police reported that it appears the men were beaten to death after being tortured, and they suspect the homicides were the result of a drug deal gone bad. Sergeant Pete Peterson said the hands of both men had been cut off, most likely in an attempt to prevent their identification by fingerprints.

“What’s this?” Janie said, her soft footsteps coming to a stop on the carpet behind him.

“I’m just tying up some loose ends that Sonny left me with. It doesn’t all seem quite real yet.”

“That’s the problem with history.”

“The tragedy is real,” Donnally said, staring at the monitor, “it’s just not anchored to anything.” He thought for a moment. “If Mauricio was still alive, it would be different.”

“I know,” she said, squeezing his shoulder, “and he would’ve been proud of her. Charles told me that Anna helped out lots of people. Food, medicine, advice. Some would come right to her door once a week, like clockwork. She’d give them boxed lunches or, for the ones she trusted, money to buy things for themselves.”