Night Is the Hunter (11 page)

D
onnally watched Junior drive away, then walked inside the house thinking back over the years, but not so much about him getting shot as about what had gone on before he'd stepped into the cross fire. The killing he was investigating when he got out of his car to walk into the Mission Street taqueria wasn't gang related in any way. It had nothing to do with the Norteños or Sureños. Neither the shooter nor the victim were gangsters. It had just been a stickup robbery in front of the restaurant.

He'd driven there ready to cut a deal with the owner. Donnally would get the D.A. to dismiss an unrelated narcotics case in exchange for information about the identity of the killer. He wasn't even looking for testimony, just for a name, one he could use to obtain a mug shot and put together a photo lineup to show to the witnesses who'd already agreed to testify.

But a gap still existed in his mind between his reason for going to the restaurant and what had happened to him on the street before he could get inside, and he still didn't know whether he'd failed over the years to discover the link that connected them or whether there had never been one. He was certain he understood the mechanics, but wasn't convinced he'd ever understood
the meaning, and Benaga's ordering Junior to set up the attack on Dominguez around the time he'd gotten shot added a new fact, a new event, but nothing more.

As Donnally stood at the kitchen counter making a sandwich, he wondered what else was going on ten years earlier that might have made it urgent for the Norteños to get rid of Dominguez.

Was it really about gang honor, or had that just been the cover for the real reason?

And if doing it was so important, why hadn't they tried again after they'd failed?

Then he wondered whether Benaga later decided that mangling Dominguez's shooting hand was good enough revenge or worked as a living symbol even better than death.

But he didn't think so. Revenge required parity, in this case a matching killing, or it wasn't a promise kept.

Donnally sat down at the table, the first piece of furniture he'd bought on his own after he moved out of his parents' house. Maybe because he'd spent the last few days investigating a homicide, he felt a renewed connection to it, its oak surface and its scrapes and scratches, the wearing of life on wood. It was the same one that was there all the years he was at SFPD, the same table at which he studied for the sergeant's exam, studied for his master's degree in criminal justice at San Francisco State, and where he wrote out search warrant affidavits after he made detective.

It was also the place where he sat reviewing the medical reports and the retirement forms, when he signed his name declining disability benefits, figuring that since he could walk and talk, he could still find some kind of work he wanted to do. He didn't need the taxpayers of San Francisco paying his way. He'd do that himself.

Being conscious of his sitting there also made him notice that it was where he and Janie did most of their arguing.

He remembered Janie wondering one day years ago why they didn't argue in bed like her parents always had. Then Janie saying her folks were always trying to hide their conflicts from the kids . . . then he and Janie both realizing again that despite her being ten years younger than him, they'd met too late to have kids together . . . no way he could see himself as the sixty-year-old father of a teenager . . . and she getting that look on her face that said she was asking herself why didn't she just move on and move out before the clock ticked all the way down and go find somebody else to have children with . . . but instead of talking about that, which would've led to an argument that would've made a real difference in their lives, maybe even led to them breaking up, they argued about why Donnally had forgotten to tell her that her mother had called a day earlier.

Donnally found he was holding his breath and let it out.

In recent years that had changed. Fewer arguments, no forgotten messages, more intimacy, but still there remained Janie's regrets about children. He felt like he'd let her down, that if they hadn't met her life would've been different, there would've been a husband waiting for her at home and kids sitting around a table doing their homework.

The sandwich now didn't look very appetizing, the bread looking drier than he knew it really was and the turkey more bland.

He pulled a Coke out of the refrigerator and took a sip.

Except the decision, or maybe there were lots of decisions, to turn the two of them into an us had been mutual. They both carried a key that would unlock the life into which they'd placed themselves, but neither had ever chosen to use it. And it wasn't
accommodation or settling. Not every relationship needed kids, a dog, and an SUV. And theirs didn't. Love and trust were enough.

The sandwich looked a little better. He grabbed it and headed toward the first-floor bedroom where they had a desk and a laptop.

The walk down the hallway felt like a migration from the known into the unknown. He felt his mind make a jump as he reached around the threshold and turned on the light.

And he was back into the Rojo Sr. murder.

There was too much he didn't know about what had happened in San Francisco since he'd put police work behind him. He'd even stopped reading the newspapers and watching the local news when he came down from Mount Shasta to visit Janie and work on the house. More than anything, it was because he didn't like being reminded of all the dead people he'd known. Every murder reminded him of another he'd investigated, every sidewalk crime scene reminded him of another body that had bled out, every son reminded him of a father who died, every daughter, a mother. Children he'd once interviewed as witnesses were now becoming victims, and killers.

Donnally sat down and ran an Internet news search on “Norteños” and “San Francisco,” and focused on the period between eight and twelve years earlier, the two years on either side of the attempted hit on Dominguez and the Mission Street shoot-out.

The coverage centered on gang fights between the Norteños and Sureños in San Quentin, scattered homicides around the Bay Area, mostly unsolved, and three federal racketeering indictments.

He knew little about the gang fights. And the two Norteño-related homicides he'd worked were connected neither with internal prison conflicts nor with the federal cases. They were
straight-up disputes over control over a couple of blocks in the Mission District.

Because he'd never been assigned to the narcotics unit and never needed the overtime, he hadn't worked the wire rooms in the joint SFPD-FBI and SFPD-DEA investigations or performed surveillances of drug transactions.

He also hadn't spent much time with street drug task force officers or narcotics detectives. Some he'd suspected of planting drugs on suspects and of filing false police reports and of lying in search warrant affidavits and in court testimony. Too many were cowboys like Chen or true believers. Just like Junior, both state and federal drug enforcement agents saw themselves as engaged in a war, and all was fair, even if not legal, and they figured that if the guy they grabbed wasn't guilty today, he was guilty yesterday or, if left on the street, would be guilty tomorrow.

And everyone in the department knew it.

Most cops in SFPD refused assignments on the drug task force or in the narcotics division, didn't want to deal with the pressure to make their numbers and to help other officers make theirs. Narcotics officers who didn't deliver enough bodies to the jail soon found themselves with their long hair shorn, their beards shaved, their uniforms back on, and their shoe soles pressing a patrol car accelerator or walking them down a sidewalk beat.

Donnally sat back and drank from his Coke. He realized it bothered him that Junior hadn't attacked him for trying to reopen the factual issues relating to the guilt, or the level of guilt, of Israel Dominguez, only for bothering his grandmother and talking to Oscar Benaga.

He had the feeling that he'd missed something in their conversations, either at the café or in front of the house. Maybe because
he was moved or diverted by Junior's confusion, his disorientation, his disconnectedness, his struggle to find a place for himself in the world.

Twenty-nine years old and Junior still had no clue about who he was, not even a clue about who he didn't want to be.

Even more, Junior was prepared to murder, or at least felt the urge to murder, a homicide detective for failing to disclose in his offense report that it had been Chen who'd called his father just before he walked up to the window where he was shot.

And that only made sense if Junior now feared that some truth, something beyond the mere fact of the call, had also been suppressed.

The logic brought Donnally back to the reason he'd done the Internet search. What was going on ten years ago when he was shot and Israel Dominguez was stabbed in San Quentin and even twenty years earlier when Rojo Sr. was murdered?

And the only way to find out was to enter a corrupt world he'd avoided throughout his career and he thought he'd left behind altogether a decade earlier.

F
ifty-six-year-old Chuck Grassner, working security just inside the entrance to the 44 Double D Club in North Beach, looked to Donnally like a man who'd work for free just to see the shows. Dressed in a stretched-out blue sport coat, unpressed shirt, creaseless pants with shiny knees and steel-toed work shoes, he wore a watery-eyed, flushed-skinned alcoholic's face.

Seeing him stationed by the open door, trading back slaps and hellos and “How many hookers does it take . . .” jokes with entering customers, confirmed for Donnally that Grassner wasn't in it for the money.

Throughout his career at SFPD, from patrol officer, to narcotics detective, to joint designated state and federal agent, and back to patrol as a sergeant, Grassner's mantra had been, “Thirty and out. Thirty and out. Thirty and out.” And at exactly thirty years to the day, including unused vacation and sick leave, he was out. He didn't even hang around long enough for a final end-of-shift drink or return for a retirement party.

He'd hit thirty and he was out.

Standing across Broadway, Donnally didn't know how Grassner now spent his days but knew that he spent his nights in the fifty-two weeks of San Francisco's version of Mardi Gras.

Donnally had decided to seek out Grassner because he was a talker, couldn't help himself, and the edgier the information, the more he thrilled in the telling. In the days before police departments had intelligence units and computer databases, officers like Grassner functioned like archives, some in homicides, some in fraud, some in sex crimes, and some in drugs. And Grassner had been pals with Chen during the height of the crack cocaine years, when careers were made not by how many black street dealers they caught, but how many Mexican suppliers they took down.

And the pair's rules of police practice were based on a narrow-focused street pragmatism unconstrained by courtroom legality. They viewed judicial rulings not as the application of law and precedent, but as mere judicial whim and compared bringing an affidavit to a judge to giving the judge a hand job, always gesturing with their hands in front of their crotches like they had twelve-inch penises.

At times it felt to Donnally that Grassner acted like a guilty adulterer trying to set himself up to get caught. And after Donnally left the department, Grassner did get caught, for what Donnally never learned, except the punishment was that he finished his career in uniform and on patrol.

In the locker room a couple of years before he left the department, Donnally overheard Grassner explaining to a young vice officer how he'd obtained evidence to convince a judge to issue a wiretap order by illegally listening in on the target's conversations. He used the information to identify members of the gang and to figure out when they made their runs and where they stored their drugs. He'd seize drugs during pretext traffic stops or by towing and searching cars he'd claim had been parked too long on the street, then roll the underlings on his original target
and incorporate that illegally derived evidence into the affidavit in support of the wiretap application.

Other times officers like Grassner took information obtained from illegal wiretaps and used it in affidavits to obtain search warrants, just pretending that the source was an informant or an anonymous caller, and then walked over to the courthouse to find a judge who needed a metaphorical hand job.

Grassner thought, and proclaimed to everyone at every opportunity, “It was a hoot.”

That was the other phrase he used as often as “Thirty and out.”

“It was a hoot.”

Sometime, probably early in his career, and somewhere, probably with his knee on a suspect's back or his boot exploding a door, Grassner had bartered his integrity for an adrenaline rush.

Looking at Grassner now, joking and laughing at the titillating center of San Francisco, Donnally wondered whether it had ever been about integrity. Grassner seemed to just like the adventure. He didn't care as much about stopping crime as about having a good time. And the more reckless he became, the greater the thrill, and like a junkie it took more and more to thrill him.

Donnally had never met a street narcotics officer who believed the drug war could be won. They were merely addicted to the job and Grassner had the worst addiction he'd ever seen.

When Donnally confronted him about what he'd overheard in the locker room, Grassner's story had been that it was just a hypothetical he was using for training purposes, explaining what an officer should never do.

Donnally didn't believe him and Grassner knew it.

Donnally failed in his attempts to identify the case. There
were too many wiretaps in those years, too many dealers, and too many drug seizures.

He hadn't spoken to Grassner for five years. He'd last seen him in a roofing supply store where Donnally had stopped in to pick up some shingles. Since Donnally hadn't heard from Grassner after he was shot, it was like encountering an old friend who'd failed to send condolences after a parent died, and it framed an obligation Donnally thought he might now be able to exploit.

Donnally worked his way up the crowded North Beach sidewalk past a frat boy vomiting in the gutter, a middle-aged, midwestern couple giggling at vibrators in a sex shop window, finally passing a group of men in starched shirts and loose collars ducking into a club.

Grassner reached out his hand as Donnally approached, ready to greet another customer, then looked up, faked a double take, and rubbed his eyes.

“Well, come at me with a gold-plated dildo,” Grassner said. “Look who's here. Never thought I'd see the day when Harlan Donnally would show up in perv country.”

Grassner glanced behind him at the bank of photos of naked women above the ticket counter, then pointed at the poster in the center announcing it was lesbian shower night.

“That the kind of thing you're into now?”

Donnally forced a smile and shook his head. “Word around the Hall of Justice is that you'd gone from being part of the solution to part of the problem. I had to see it for myself.”

Grassner grinned back. “Just part of a different solution. I'm part of a secret crime suppression unit. Guys with boners don't be out doing stickups.”

Donnally emitted the obligatory laugh, then asked, “You got a break coming up?”

Grassner nodded toward the entrance to the showroom.

“Wait in there until I can find somebody to handle the door.”

Donnally could see the bar facing just inside, most of the stools occupied by men staring toward the stage.

Grassner waved at the ticket taker behind the counter, then pointed at Donnally, indicating that he should be allowed into the show without paying.

Donnally walked in and slid onto a stool and ordered a beer. He put down enough money to cover the cost and a tip. He didn't want to put into his pocket whatever residue his change might have scraped up.

The sign had been accurate. It really was lesbian shower night. Two women, who may or may not have been lesbians, were soaping and fondling each other within a three-sided glass enclosure set up the middle of a fake locker room. The fourth side, at the back, was formed out of gym lockers. Cheerleading outfits and pom-poms lay on wooden benches just out of splash range. The music was heavy on bass, but not so loud that the audience wouldn't be able to hear the women's practiced moans.

Donnally glanced around, classifying the men watching as tourists, after-work financial district partiers, and loners. He then divided them further into the cheerers, the starers, and the fantasizers who revealed themselves by their open mouths and wet lips. He was working on further subdivisions when Grassner walked up.

The bartender delivered a shot of bourbon to Grassner as he
sat down on the stool next to Donnally. The move was as smooth and practiced as an NBA outlet pass. Donnally guessed Grassner spent his breaks each night on one of these stools.

“So, what's on your mind?”

“Memory lane.”

“Yours?”

“Yours.”

Grassner raised his finger into the air, indicating that Donnally should wait, downed the shot, and then signaled the bartender for another. He smacked his lips and nodded at Donnally to continue.

“I'm trying to figure out what happened in a twenty-year-old murder case. Edgar Rojo Senior out in Hunters Point. He was shot when he was standing in his mother's living room.”

Grassner stared toward the stage. The women were rinsing each other off, running and giggling. “Rojo . . . Rojo . . .” He finally blinked and looked back. “A Norteño guy?”

Donnally nodded.

“Yeah. I remember him, Rojo Loco.”

Donnally shook his head. “That's the son. He's still alive.”

Grassner scrunched up his face for a moment. “Now I remember. Blasted right through the front window. A big-time hit.”

“By a kid named Israel Dominguez. He's been on death row since then.”

Grassner pulled back like someone had pushed a rotten fish up to his nose. “You haven't gone private and become one of them bleeding hearts like those Innocence Project assholes.”

“I haven't signed up with anybody. A friend of mine is puzzled about the trial and wanted me to look into it.”

Grassner shrugged. “I don't know much about what took place either at the time of the homicide or the trial. All that happened when I was still on patrol. I heard a lot about it though after I started working with the feds. When they wrote out their affidavits to wiretap the Norteños, they'd do, like, a history of the organization. Who killed who, when, and why. Who had the drug connections in Mexico, how it got handed off over the years as people got taken out or sent to prison.”

The bartender slid another drink in front of Grassner.

“What was important about Senior?”

“Since he was the link between the cartel in Mexico and street corners up here, he was the guy all the black Hunters Point dealers dreamed of hooking up with. You make a connection with him or somebody like him and a month later you're riding in an Escalade. Without him, it's ratty old hoopties until you die.” Grassner rotated his stool toward Donnally. “You didn't hear about him back in the day?”

Donnally shook his head. “I never worked out of any of the southern substations.”

Grassner took a sip of the second bourbon, making this one last. Donnally wondered whether Grassner had limited himself to two drinks during his break, or management had.

“Senior wasn't in place long enough to spread north into the Fillmore or the Tenderloin,” Grassner said, “maybe four or five months altogether. Then bam.”

“What about Israel Dominguez? The shooter. You ever hear about him?”

“Sure. A Sureño. El Búho. They all had nicknames like that. I remember him as a teenager when I worked the Mission but didn't have much contact with him because he spent a lot of time
in juvenile hall for assaults. He was just the kind of sneaky backstabber the Sureños always had a use for.”

“What about Oscar Benaga?”

“El Lobo.”

“So it says on his neck.”

“He ain't no wolf, he's a snake.” Grassner made a weaving motion with his hand. “Slithered out of one case after another.” Then a chop. “I really wanted to lop his head off.”

“What made it so hard?”

“Shrewd guy. We thought we had him once, got him indicted in a federal racketeering case. Not at the top with the other heavies, but down on the bottom. He was a big guy in the business, but the whole case against him rested on one call.”

Grassner fell silent, then a half smile came to his face.

“Benaga and his guys were distributing cocaine out of a meat market a couple of blocks from where his shop is. Listening in on their calls over the months, we figured out their operation, from sources to code words. Finally we got a call with Benaga ordering a goat and saying where he wanted it delivered. Goat was always a code word for a kilo. Always. The DEA and FBI guys and us were doing high fives all around the wire room.”

Grassner blew out a breath, like an expression of relief. It felt to Donnally like a setup for dramatic effect.

“All we needed was one overt act on his part to make him part of the conspiracy and make him liable with everyone else for the whole thing. He'd be 10-7 for twenty years.”

That had been another of Grassner's expressions. He took the code meaning “out of service” from the police world and applied it to crooks as if both sides were somehow equal and opposite, somehow morally equivalent. Donnally wondered whether he'd
applied it not only to Donnally, but also to the gangsters who shot him, both 10-7. Donnally out of the department and the gangsters dead.

Grassner laughed. “What did we find out in the end? The only time we intercepted him in half a year of wiretapping, the asshole was really ordering a goat. A real goat to roast at a real party.” He shook his head. “You should've seen the look on Jimmie Chen's face when Harvey Madding—you know him, he was the prosecutor in the case—called us into his office.”

Donnally felt a vibration pass through him. Madding was the D.A. who'd prosecuted Israel Dominguez.

“Why Madding?” Donnally asked. “He was never a U.S. attorney.”

“On special assignment. They were thinking they would charge some of the gang-related homicides in federal court and they needed someone with both narcotics and death penalty experience. He was there to supervise some wiretaps and train the AUSA's in capital trial tactics.”

“For how long?”

“A year, more or less. Anyway, Madding showed us all the photos taken at the party the defense attorney had brought him. A dozen pictures of the goat roasting over a big, backyard fire ring and Benaga standing there next to it drinking a Coors and turning the spit. And Madding was pissed, starting to wonder whether his fifty-page indictment was just the world's longest menu.”