Night Is the Hunter (22 page)

Y
our whole life is about to pass before your eyes,” Donnally told Chico in the garage office.

Chico's shirt was wet and splotched with the dead homeless man's blood. He sat in a chair, back against the wall. Donnally was propped against the desk.

Navarro waited near the street to delay the San Jose police detectives in order to give Donnally a shot at Chico unhindered by the need to Mirandize him.

“It's all in your hands how it ends.”

“I didn't kill Heredia, man. I've never killed nobody.”

“That's not what I want to know about.”

“You ain't no cop. You can't do nothing to me.”

“It won't be me.” Donnally pointed at him. “You know what the penalties for perjury are?”

“Who cares. A year, two years. I can do the time.”

“In the Dominguez case it's death.” Donnally glanced at his watch. “The moment he gets the needle, your perjury becomes a capital crime.”

Chico's fists clenched. He leaned forward to rise. Donnally pushed him back.

“I get death row and the prosecutor gets a promotion?”

“That prosecutor has gotten his last promotion, but the worst that happens to him is a little obstruction of justice charge. A hand slap. Maybe not even that. All he has to say is that he believed you when you first claimed it was Dominguez and he didn't believe you when you changed your story.”

Chico looked down. “This is fucked up, man. I didn't ask to get put in the middle of all this. Twenty years ducking and hiding.”

“Tell me the truth about the death of Edgar Rojo Senior.”

Chico's faced turned pained and pleading. “Don't make me do this, man. Ask Chen. He knows everything I do, and a lot more.”

“Chen's dead. Last night. A kind of a suicide.”

“Then Madding, ask Madding.” Chico threw up his hands. “Ask anybody. Everybody knows.”

Donnally recognized that by everybody Chico really meant the limited group relevant to him. Benaga, his father, his uncle—and his mother. Donnally remembered her bringing him a letter when Donnally had surveilled their meeting and had tried to follow them.

“What was in the letter?”

“What letter?”

“The one your mother showed you a couple of days ago.”

“How—”

Donnally waved off the question. “It doesn't make a difference how I know.”

Chico reddened. “I know it don't make no difference. What I want to know is how you're gonna protect us from my uncle Juan?”

Now all the pieces gravitated together in Donnally's mind. The prowling gangsters across the street from Rosa Gallegos's house had been watching and the letter wasn't a message she
was carrying from
La Mesa
to the street, but a warning from her brother-in-law to keep her mouth shut. Maybe they started tailing her to make sure she did, and she led them to her son.

And now Donnally understood for certain what it had all been about.

“You mean the killing of Edgar Rojo was part of a Norteño power struggle between your uncle's faction and Rojo's faction?”

Chico glanced around his office, his business, one that helped support his mother. His eyes focused on a photo on the desk—a woman, two small children, and him—then on another, his mother.

“You didn't answer my question,” Chico said.

“Tell the truth and you'll be protected, and your wife and kids and mother. Lie, and nobody can protect you.”

Chico's eyes moved on, toward a certificate of graduation from an automotive school, his state license, his desk, his file cabinet, a calendar showing a photo of Puerto Vallarta and Banderas Bay, his face taking on an expression of a man leaving his home for the last time or gazing back at a receding shoreline.

“It had nothing to do with the Sureños,” Chico said, still staring at the picture, “and the Sureños had nothing to do with killing Rojo. Not Dominguez.” He shook his head. “Dominguez never shot nobody. They weren't no threat back then. Benaga made up that whole Sureño takeover story and the Sureños played along because it made them look bigger than they were.”

“You tell Madding?”

“Yeah. I told him. Everything. I went to see him the day before he made me testify.” He finally looked up at Donnally. “How you think my uncle made it from a street captain up to
La Mesa
?”

E
dgar Rojo Jr. stood in the doorway glaring into the San Francisco jail interview room. A jailor was standing behind him.

“They said my attorney was here. Not the
chingaso
who got me locked up.”

As Donnally had threatened to do if Junior lost control of himself, he'd called Junior's parole agent after driving him from the hospital to his grandmother's apartment and told him Junior had made a threat to kill a government informant. The parole agent arrested him an hour later.

Donnally rose from the chair. “It was for your own good.”

Junior's arm was still in a sling.

“Who's he?” Junior jutted his head toward Navarro.

“A homicide detective.”

Junior smirked. “How many times you gonna go down that road before you catch on I'm not going along?”

Donnally looked over at Navarro and smiled. “Usually he just says, ‘I ain't no snitch.' He's especially talkative today.”

Donnally tilted his head toward the empty chair. “Have a seat. You've got a decision to make.”

“The only decision I got to make is whether to kick your ass once I get out of here.”

Donnally pointed at Junior's shoulder and smiled. “I guess you really will have to kick me since you can't do any punching.”

“Yeah. I owe you for that too.”

Navarro signaled for the jailor to close the door. They all recognized that if Junior had intended to walk out, he would've done it already.

There was too much Junior wanted to learn beyond what had been reported in the press about Judge McMullin's hand-delivered letter to the governor and the stay of execution that followed and the truth about the deaths of Chen and Benaga and of the murder of his father by Chico's uncle, Juan Gallegos.

Junior sat down, then pointed back toward the housing unit. “I saw it on the news. Is Juan Gallegos gonna get charged with killing my dad?”

Donnally shook his head. “The slug matched the gun Gallegos used in the murder six months later that put him in prison for the rest of his life, but we can't prove he pulled the trigger the night your father was killed. We've got no witnesses. Chico says he was the only person right in front of the apartment, but the shot came from behind him, from the roof of the church across the street. It was too dark for him to see who was up there.”

“I thought the angle—”

“No. The theory was that your father was looking down and the shot came up. The truth is probably that he saw some motion across the street and was looking right at Juan when he fired. The trajectory would have been the same and the slug shattered the glass so there was no way to determine the direction.”

Donnally knew it would've hurt Junior so he didn't describe that trajectory. An inch below his father's hairline in the front
and then a horizontal path until the slug ricocheted off the back of his skull.

“Israel Dominguez was in the area,” Donnally said. “He lied about that, but he couldn't have fired the shot. Chico puts him on the street half a block away with no line of sight to the apartment window.”

“What about the shell casing in the driveway?”

“It was New Year's Eve and there were lots of gunshots that night,” Navarro said.

“You mean Dominguez lying about not being there don't mean nothing?”

“It mostly means that his attempt to lie himself out of a frame just tied him in deeper. It made him look even guiltier of lying in wait, the special circumstance that made it a capital case.”

Junior sat there, shaking his head.

“I didn't think you cared that much about lying,” Donnally said, “or truth telling for that matter.”

“Why you saying that?”

“Because the first words out of your mouth are always the same.”

“Who you asking me to snitch on?”

“It's not about that.”

“Then what's it about?”

“You already know. It's about a decision you've got to make right now about what you've done and who you've been and who you're going to be for the rest of your life.”

Donnally thought of Judge McMullin. Who he would be in a few months or years was out of his control. It was a matter of physiology, not choice, and soon enough he'd be nobody, for who he had been would fade until he was just a body without a mind,
without memories, without a past or a future, and then that body would fail too.

And he thought of Israel Dominguez, who grew up wanting to be nobody, a fairy-tale character who tried to disappear into the earth, and who was now condemned to bear forever the scars on his hand like a gang tattoo that couldn't be burned off.

Junior had a choice, but Donnally didn't know whether he had the courage to make it.

“How much time can I get?” Junior asked.

“Does it make a difference?”

The question answered itself in the silence that followed.

Donnally looked at Junior and realized that a junior he really was, a nine-year-old boy in a twenty-nine-year-old man's body.

“This gang outreach is just a lie, isn't it? You're deceiving the kids and you're deceiving yourself.”

Junior's face flushed, but he didn't answer.

“You're not doing anything to get them out of that world. They acted it out on the street. No snitching and no witnessing. That's why they jumped in to help you.”

Junior still didn't say anything.

Donnally slid a sheet of paper and a pen across the table. “It's up to you.”

Junior stared at it, seeing words that weren't yet there.

Fifteen minutes later, Donnally and Navarro walked out.

Two hours later, Donnally handed Israel Dominguez Junior's confession to ordering the hit on him. They sat at the same table on death row. A stay of execution was only a stay. He'd have to remain among the condemned until the attorney general's investigation was complete and the governor's pardon came through.

Israel read it over.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“That's up to you.” Donnally was aware that the words echoed what he'd said to Junior just before he wrote it. “It hasn't gone to the D.A. for charging yet.”

“Is Junior locked up already?”

Donnally shook his head. “He was, on a parole violation, but I asked his parole agent to lift the hold and let him go. He won't be running anywhere. He's ready for whatever the court hands him.”

Israel read it over again, then folded it over once, then a second time, and tore it up.

“That's good enough for me,” Israel finally said. “He had to grow up his way and I had to grow up mine.”

P
eople versus Harvey Madding.”

The clerk announced the arraignment without looking up from her desk as though trying to shield herself from the focused lenses of the news cameras and the peering eyes of the reporters in the courtroom.

The disproportionality of everything struck Donnally as never before, even when he was telling Chico Gallegos that his penalty if Israel Dominguez had been executed would have been death.

Judge Madding stood accused of a mere misdemeanor obstruction of justice, barely more than an infraction, but one that could have cost the life of an innocent man for a murder he hadn't committed.

All this time Donnally had thought he was investigating the worst of crimes, a capital murder, while it turned out to be the most minor of misdemeanors. But it was like a fulcrum set so light a mere touch would move a boulder.

He wondered whether Judge McMullin felt the same imbalance or even could have imagined it just two weeks earlier.

Donnally gazed up at McMullin, but his mind saw not the man sitting there before him on the bench, but the judge first standing in the Smith River, a swirl of snow in the air, and then sitting
and gazing down at the translucent orange flame of a rock-ringed fire. The judge's mind struggling with his memories and working his way toward talking about the Dominguez case, starting with the law.

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.

The judge had stared across the river, as though a generation of faces and cases had been flowing through his mind.

Then McMullin had moved on to the standard of proof to support first- and second-degree murder convictions, but Donnally didn't yet know which face and which case had come to preoccupy him, and feared that it was the judge himself.

Malice may be express or implied. It is express when there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature.

Malice aforethought, premeditation, and intent. Those elements had been the source of the judge's doubt over all those years.

And he was right to doubt them, but for the wrong reasons.

Judge Harvey Madding and his attorney, Robert Callahan, rose from behind the defense table.

Donnally recognized the lawyer when he entered the courtroom. He specialized in representing cops and prosecutors and was an expert at smothering the flames of public outrage. He was the master of the two-minute court appearance, never giving reporters anything new to write about.

Callahan spoke first. “We waive reading of the complaint.”

McMullin looked up from the file in front of him, his face flushed as though he'd been caught daydreaming.

“Excuse me?”

Uneasiness vibrated through Donnally, fear that McMullin's mind wasn't lucid enough for the task before him, that the intermittent confusion displayed during that last meeting had returned. Surely, he must have heard and understood Callahan's words, which were as standard as entering a plea and setting a next hearing date.

“I said we'll waive reading of the complaint.”

McMullin glared down at Callahan and his voice took on an edge.

“Did I ask you a question, Counsel?”

Donnally felt his fear sigh out of him. McMullin was in control of himself and of his courtroom.

Callahan drew back, surprised and embarrassed, then glanced over at the district attorney, who stared ahead.

Donnally wasn't sure whether the prosecutor was reacting to the judge's tone or ducking through silence from the obvious conflict of interest involved in the D.A.'s office prosecuting one of its former members.

“No, Your Honor. You didn't ask a question.”

“Clerk, will you please read the complaint.”

“On or about March 24—”

Janie sat down next to Donnally in the seat he had saved for her.

“Why go through the motions?” she whispered. “No California D.A. or ex-D.A. has ever been convicted of obstruction of justice for hiding evidence. I checked on the Internet before I drove over here.”

“That doesn't mean there can't be a first. And maybe this will be it.”

The clerk again, “The said defendant, Harvey Madding, in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, did willfully, unlawfully, and with malice aforethought—”

Madding collapsed into his chair. Callahan's arms flew up. The gallery gasped as one person, smothering the clerk's words. She raised her voice against the rising disbelief. Bailiffs stepped between Madding and the gallery.

Donnally leaned forward, only catching fragments: “conspire,” “Chen,” “Benaga,” “suborn,” “perjury,” “reckless disregard,” and finally, “attempt to murder a human being, Israel Dominguez.”

McMullin hammered his gavel, all the while looking Donnally in the eye, and both of them thinking of that day on the river.

Malice is implied when the circumstances show an abandoned and malignant heart.

Donnally felt Janie's hand grip his forearm as reporters ran past them toward the hallway. She was squinting up at him when he looked over. He answered her question before she asked it.

“Attempted second-degree murder.”

No other mental state need be shown.