Night Is the Hunter (16 page)

Donnally wasn't certain time would tell. Although testing was getting more proficient and proteins had been discovered that cause Alzheimer's, there was no final and definitive diagnosis except by autopsy after death. But given that his mother's failing medications put her own death on the visible horizon, Donnally didn't say that aloud. In any case, it didn't reflect where his thoughts were headed.

“Or maybe,” Donnally said, “he just needs to grow up.”

D
onnally's cell phone rang as he drove up Mulholland Drive toward the Hollywood Freeway. He didn't recognize the number displayed on the screen or the man's voice or name, Alfredo Marin.

“I'm the assistant director on your father's film.”

“Sorry we didn't have a chance to talk. I need to get back north.”

“Do you have a couple of minutes to meet? I'd like to talk to you about your father.”

“Can't we do it on the—”

“I think it would be better in person.”

“Where are you now?”

“I live in the valley. I was heading home, and it wasn't until I was almost there that I gathered up the courage to call you.”

Knowing how his father reacted when he'd learned that people had discussed his condition without consulting him, Donnally was certain it had taken courage on Marin's part to call.

Marin's filmmaking career might end when Don Harlan found out about it.

“Meet me at the Burbank airport,” Donnally said. “I'll be in front of Terminal B.”

Donnally disconnected and a half hour later he saw Marin approaching him, walking fast, his face intent, like a man late for a flight.

Marin took Donnally's extended hand and shook it, then they walked down the sidewalk toward the rental car return and stopped next to some shrubs, out of the pedestrian traffic.

“This is a little awkward,” Marin said.

“Don't worry about it. I'm glad you decided to call me.”

“And I don't want you to think I'm trying to take credit for your father's work.”

Donnally guessed that Marin had been thinking so hard about what he wanted to say that he jumped ahead, anticipating Donnally's response to a story he'd not yet told.

“You'll need to back up a little.”

Marin reddened. “Sorry. It's just that your father is—”

Donnally smiled. “I know, immortal.”

Marin rocked his head side to side as if to say,
Not quite
.

“I studied him more than anyone else in film school,” Marin said, “and his coming to see my work at Sundance and then calling me to help him on this project were the most astounding things that ever happened to me.”

“But . . .”

“But it was the worst experience of my life. Bad enough for me to quit filmmaking altogether.” Marin looked down and away, toward the shadows cast by the shrubs. “It was a dream turned to a nightmare.” Then back at Donnally. “The thing was a constantly moving target. Plot, characters, story line. And what he wanted was not an assistant director, but a substitute memory, and sometimes a substitute conscience.”

For a moment, Donnally felt like Marin was an actor playing
him in a movie and McMullin was playing the part of his father. He had just begun to think that memory and conscience were what McMullin wanted out of him, too.

“Meaning he was counting on you to hold the thing together and be his memory if it failed, and his artistic conscience, too.”

Marin nodded.

“Except that he fought you all the way.”

Marin nodded again. “Especially during editing. We'd agree on something. I'd think it was done, then he'd go back to it a few days later as though he hadn't agreed on anything. I finally had to have him sign off on each thing and keep kind of a log posted on the wall.”

No wonder the film was coherent in the end,
Donnally thought. It wasn't entirely his father's anymore.

“Why did he trust you?”

Marin flushed again, this time in embarrassment. “He heard good things about me in the industry.”

“You mean brilliant things.”

Marin reddened further.

Donnally smiled, then reached out and gripped the young man's shoulder for a moment. “You'll have to take that ego of yours down to Gold's Gym and pump it up a little if you're going to make it in the movies.”

“So I've been told.”

“Did you draw any conclusions about his mental state?”

“Not that so much as . . . as . . .”

“Go ahead, you can say it.”

“Whatever it is, he covers it up with lies. To me, to everybody.” Marin spread his hands. “And it wasn't just that he was offering rationalizations. For a while I thought it was. But he knows
he's in trouble and knows he's deceiving people to conceal it, and he's worried. He kept asking, all through the filming and editing, what it must've been like for Reagan when he realized what was happening to him, the sheer terror of it.”

Marin fell silent for a few seconds. “And there was something else. Even after the tens of millions that had been committed to the film and all the work he and the actors and the crew put into it, he would wonder aloud what difference it made what anyone believed about what had occurred. That what happened, happened. Nothing would change that. He once asked, since it wouldn't bring the dead back to life, what was the good of it in the end?”

It was a kind of fatalism that Donnally hadn't expected from his father, a man who he'd long been accustomed to viewing as a child in the body of an adult, that he wasn't sure what to make of it.

But of one thing Donnally was certain. At the heart of Don Harlan's thinking when he talked of bringing the dead back to life weren't the victims of Reagan's foreign policy, but his oldest son.

I
nstead of heading back to San Francisco, Donnally flew into San Jose and at 9:00
A.M.
he was stationed along Senter Road in Little Saigon. He'd parked his rental car facing north, centered as much as he could among the stores he found listed on Rosa Gallegos's credit card statement. He hoped to spot her as she traveled from one to the other.

Donnally was certain Rosa didn't drive the sixty miles up from Salinas just to go shopping. Everything she might have wanted to buy could be found fifteen miles away in the malls of Seaside and Monterey. She had to be on a mission.

The fact that her activity was centered in a non-Hispanic district made whatever she was doing seem more deceptive and sophisticated than he'd expected.

But she hadn't impressed him as shrewd. Instead, Donnally imagined her brother-in-law directing her from where he sat in his cell up in Pelican Bay in picking up or dropping off money or delivering messages to soldiers on the street.

And then another thought. Maybe Rosa was not only making pickups and deliveries in San Jose; she could also be receiving and handing off instructions as she refilled food warmers with fried chicken or cleared the tables in the Uptown Buffet in Salinas.

While she would be the means, the methods would have been created by others. The Norteños were ingenious at communicating with their outside members using code words formed from the ancient Aztec language, Nahuatl, and using microscopic lettering written in urine, the jailhouse version of invisible ink.

An odd thought came to him, an analogy with what he was doing. He was trying to find a way to apply heat to make the invisible, visible, and to do so without burning McMullin.

From where Donnally sat, it was hard to concentrate on the six lanes of traffic at once. Not just the relative motion of the cars passing one another, but the fact that they accordioned as the distant stoplights changed and that they all moved against a disorienting background of Vietnamese strip malls, a racket of oranges, greens, and reds, of fast-food restaurants and discount outlets and vegetable markets.

Donnally had learned from Navarro that Rosa owned an old Ford Taurus, but DMV records don't indicate colors and, beyond the difficulty of spotting the license plate in moving traffic, there was no guarantee she'd even be driving it.

An hour in and he was already suffering from the surveillance officer's delusion. If you're looking for a Taurus, half the cars that pass you seem to be Tauruses, even the Camrys and Accords. And if you're looking for a Camry, at times all the passing cars look like Camrys. And if you're looking for an Accord, they all look like Accords.

The shapes seemed to merge into a generic four-door, just as Rosa became a generic Hispanic female out shopping.

Donnally watched cars pull into the driveway of Flaco Ortega Auto Repair. The drivers waited in their cars until a mechanic
with a clipboard approached, then they got out gesturing toward the tires or the engine compartment or imitating a sound as the mechanic took notes. The drivers signed the estimates and then either got into the cars of those who'd come with them to give them rides back home or to work, or walked away.

At 10:15, after the morning rush was over, Rosa Gallegos appeared next to the driver's door of a blue Chevy Malibu as a tattooed, midforties Hispanic male in a mechanic's uniform walked up. Donnally snapped a photo with his cell phone and zoomed in on the picture to read his name tag. He was the owner, Flaco. His bald head rotated left, and then right as he looked up and down the road, then got into the driver's seat. Rosa walked around to the passenger side and got in.

Donnally watched Ortega open an envelope, pull out a page, and hold it against the steering wheel as he read. Rosa stared forward as though not wanting to be seen as paying attention to the contents.

Or maybe she already knew them, either had heated the page to make the writing appear or had translated the coded message into English or Spanish.

Donnally was now certain his theory was correct. She was able to live beyond the means of an Uptown Buffet waitress because she also worked as a messenger for the Norteños.

And he knew she wasn't alone in doing so. Countless women were serving time in federal penitentiaries around the country for having done the same thing, for delivering orders to move money, or execute rivals or snitches, or take over new territory. Each woman pretending she had no more moral responsibility than a cell site moving signals from one block to another, one city to another. And always the same justification. If she didn't do it,
someone else would, so why not make a little money, or in Rosa's case, a lot.

Ortega swung the car around to the exit from the garage property and drove out onto Senter.

Donnally eased into traffic behind them.

They'd only traveled a half mile before Ortega pulled into the parking lot of a market advertising Mexican and Asian foods.

Donnally spotted what appeared to be the motion of Rosa handing Ortega something, then he got out of the car, leaving her where she sat. He made a pretense of wiping a smudge from the roof as he scanned the street and the parking lot, and then walked inside. He returned ten minutes later carrying a small paper bag and drove back out onto Senter.

Donnally stayed four cars back as they traveled. Ortega slowed as he approached a yellow traffic light and the cars behind him bunched up—

Then he accelerated a second before it turned red.

Donnally felt his body go rigid, straitjacketed by what he was seeing and what he knew would come next.

Ortega cut into the parking lot of a city-block-sized mall.

There was no point in trying to follow them. Donnally had no doubt but that they'd be out the other side before the light changed to green again.

When it did, he drove on, eyes forward. For all he knew there was someone watching him from behind, trying to ascertain whether anyone was tailing Ortega and his messenger.

Donnally assumed Ortega would've made a move like that whether he'd spotted someone watching him or not, for all his moves were practiced, perfected, and disciplined by the suspicion that he was always under surveillance.

While Donnally didn't know yet whether he'd been spotted, he was pretty sure when he'd find out.

Just after he was blindsided.

There were twenty thousand Norteños in California with something to keep buried in the past, and only one person, an ex-cop with a bad hip and an onrushing execution date, trying to find out what that was.

P
aul Ordloff was standing behind his desk when Donnally walked into his third-floor office. His arrival had been announced by the receptionist just inside the entrance of the restored Victorian a few blocks from San Francisco City Hall.

The Frederickson Building was known in the legal community as housing indigent defense lawyers. Nearly every cop who'd worked in San Francisco knew the place since they'd all received subpoenas from one or more of the twenty who worked in the building.

“Have you found a sword I can fall on?” Ordloff said, as Donnally shook his hand.

Ordloff wasn't smiling. His eyes were bloodshot and the flesh around them dark.

Donnally pointed at the file box on his desk. “Maybe it's in there.”

“That's a different sword.”

At first, Donnally thought Ordloff was hungover, having extended his binge past the three days of what he'd termed the Death Festival and late into the week, but on second look, he just seemed weary.

Donnally had called from the Burbank airport and asked Ordloff
to contact the federal practitioners in his building and obtain copies of the discovery materials they'd received over the years in connection with Hispanic gang cases.

The affidavits he'd read had been too cryptic, concealing and disguising specific facts that might reveal the sources of the information used to obtain the wiretaps. Donnally hoped the underlying reports, however much redacted, even with sentences and possibly whole paragraphs blacked out by the prosecutor, might disclose more.

“All these 302s and 6s came with protective orders,” Ordloff said, staring down at the box.

The numbers were shorthand for the report forms used by federal law enforcement. The FBI 302 and the DEA 6.

“My friends could get disbarred for giving them to me and I could get disbarred for giving them to you.”

Donnally was grateful for Ordloff's help even though he didn't trust the lawyer's motives. He knew they were focused less on resolving the issues troubling Judge McMullin than on his continuing terror of living the remainder of his life with the knowledge that one of his clients had been executed.

“I'll be careful. Did you have a chance to read through it all?”

“Not really. I figured my time was better spent organizing it for you. You're in a better position to make sense of it, and you sounded on the telephone like you knew what you were looking for.”

Donnally shrugged. “I may have sounded more sure than I was,” and then he described following Rosa Gallegos on the previous day and what she had told him at her house.

“An internal Norteño power struggle and not a Sureño takeover attempt?” The shock seemed to weaken Ordloff. He reached
for the chair armrest behind him and sat down. “Nothing like that was even hinted at during the trial. Nothing.”

“But it's probably not true. It seems like misdirection. Her playing messenger for the Norteños casts doubt on everything she told me. It would be pretty close to snitching, and she doesn't want to end up buried in an artichoke field.”

As he said the words, Donnally felt his stomach tense. He remembered a line in the letter Israel Dominguez had written to Judge McMullin. It was something like, “the D.A.'s theory was wrong.” He now wondered whether that was the most important sentence in the entire thing, and he'd missed it.

But if it was, why hadn't Dominguez laid it out to him during his visit to San Quentin?

The investigation into the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. might have all been about the ID of the killer, but underlying the prosecution was the question of motive, a theory of the case.

Ordloff pointed at the box. “There's also some DVDs in there. Not for all the cases, just some. Years ago, the defense started making motions in these high-volume paper cases to get as much as they could scanned and get the wiretap data downloaded into spreadsheets. Makes it easier to search, though I suspect most of what you want, the older stuff, is probably only in hard copy.”

Donnally reached down to pick it up.

“Careful. It weighs a ton. There's about five thousand pages in there.”

“Five thousand?”

“You wanted everything. I got you everything.”