Night Is the Hunter (6 page)

Y
ou're not listening to me.”

Paul Ordloff's voice rose above the wind-driven waves crashing onto the breakwater along Monterey Bay. He and Donnally were standing on the shore trail, a half mile north of the Ocean View Lounge and the conference grounds.

Ten minutes earlier, Ordloff had stood up, pushed off from the bar, and then looked around at the lawyers populating the booths and tables and mumbled that he had to get away.

Donnally hadn't been sure what Ordloff was fleeing from, but he hadn't objected to Donnally following him in his flight.

“He was guilty. He was guilty. He was guilty.” Ordloff's fist beat the air like a pounding gavel. “It was a first-degree, lying-in-wait murder. The Sureños wanted Edgar Rojo Senior dead. Israel Dominguez wanted the Sureño brand and killing Rojo was his ticket. That was the prosecution's theory of the case and that was the testimony they produced. Pretending otherwise would've torpedoed Dominguez for sure.”

Ordloff turned toward Donnally.

“Arguing second-degree murder was our only hope. We had to attack their informants as liars who cut deals to get out of jail or stay out of jail by testifying the crime was a gang execution
and at the same time give the jury something to latch onto, something they could convict Dominguez of that would keep him off death row.”

Ordloff held up his conference binder.

“The first thing they teach you in these seminars, and I've been coming here for decades, is that if you claim innocence in the guilt phase of the trial, the jury will hammer you in the penalty phase. Hammer you. A defendant can't claim he didn't do it, then do a one-eighty and say he committed the crime because of abuse he suffered as a child and express remorse and expect the jury to believe him and show mercy.”

That had been Judge McMullin's argument, but now there seemed something wrong with it. Why couldn't the defendant still claim innocence and ask the jury to let him live so he has a chance to prove it? Jurors knew about convicts who were later freed by DNA evidence and by confessions from the real perpetrators.

Donnally pointed at the binder. “What about what they call lingering doubt? When a jury isn't really positive about guilt and decides it's better to keep the defendant alive just in case.”

“You're still not listening to me. There . . . was . . . no . . . doubt left lingering.”

Ordloff threw up his arms.

“What was I supposed say to the jury? I know you found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but you were wrong, you really had a doubt and you lied to the court in your verdict?”

Ordloff stood there, hands raised like a tent preacher or the crucified Christ, until the absurdity of the gesture was revealed to him in the averted gazes of a young couple walking on the path behind
them. He lowered his arms, looked down at the binder, gripped it like a Frisbee, and tossed it toward the just-risen moon on the horizon. It spun in flight, disklike, then opened and dropped, flailing like a buckshot pheasant into the kelp-carpeted sea.

“That stuff is useless,” Ordloff said, staring at it.

“Then why do you come down here?”

“Why do you think? The bar association makes us take continuing education courses. And this way I can stay drunk for three straight days and still get credit.”

Ordloff pointed back toward the yellow lights of the conference grounds, now muted by a wispy fog skimming the water toward them. The stars above still shined bright and clear.

“The only thing . . . the only thing . . . you learn down here is how to protect yourself from your former clients and from the appeals and habeas corpus lawyers that sniff over the carcass of your work.”

“You make it seem like all that moves these trial lawyers is money and fear.”

“You got that right, pal. The twin sisters of human motivation.”

“What about justice?”

Ordloff paused, staring at Donnally, then snorted. “I don't think you've understood a single thing I've said.” He jabbed a forefinger at Donnally's chest. “You brain dead or something? It's not all that complicated.”

Donnally took in a breath and felt his stomach tense. The flailing lawyer had nailed him in the gut with an inadvertent strike. There were few things Donnally knew about Alzheimer's, but one of them was that it was genetic. In his preoccupation with his father and McMullin, he now realized he might not have heard
the starting pistol shot announcing the beginning of his own descent toward oblivion. For a moment, he felt an irrational sense of urgency. He recognized it and swallowed hard, suppressing it.

He also felt an urge to toss Ordloff into the bay.

“I heard you,” Donnally said, “but I don't see life as that narrow and our motivations as that limited.”

Ordloff stared out toward where his binder had fallen into the water. Finally, he said, “You know, Judge McMullin could've saved the kid if he wanted to. There were ways.”

“You mean by not following the jury's recommendation?”

Ordloff shook his head. “No judge will ever do that. They'd get recalled in a heartbeat and the cable news channels would crucify them. But there are other methods judges use all the time.”

“Like?”

“Like letting the D.A. use illegally obtained evidence so the conviction, or at least the penalty, gets reversed on appeal. Or make some bad rulings on motions. Judges who oppose the death penalty do it all the time. They know the defendant is going down anyway; they just want him to get a second chance to stay alive somewhere down the road.”

“And you figure McMullin had those chances and didn't take them.”

“He was new, but he'd been around long enough to figure out how the game was played.” Ordloff squinted at Donnally as if trying to assess his reactions. “I know you've watched judges make bizarre rulings in these cases and never understood why. Well, I'm telling you now.” He looked back the way they'd come. “There's a federal judge down in Texas that has been sitting on a habeas corpus case for over ten years, keeping the defendant alive by delaying his appointment of an attorney to represent him.”

“Don't the relatives of the victim—”

“Nope. There aren't any left to complain. The defendant killed them all. That's what he was convicted of.”

Donnally thought back on the trials he'd been involved with. It was the attorneys, far more than judges, who engaged in bizarre maneuvers, seeming to plant errors.

“Do attorneys sometimes do that, too? Not make the objections they're supposed to, don't seem to prepare the way they're supposed to?”

“All the time. Sometimes the appeals courts even catch them at it—or at least accuse them of intentionally sabotaging hopeless cases—and refuse to overturn convictions they should.”

“Did you do that in the Dominguez case?”

Ordloff displayed a twisted grin. “Even if I did, I wouldn't admit it. I'd get disbarred.” His grin faded and his mouth turned down. “But I didn't. Anyway, if I did try to build in some error, it didn't work. The U.S. Supreme Court is about to flush him down the judicial toilet.”

Donnally watched Ordloff stare off toward the moon hanging above the horizon. The tide had gone slack and the fog separated and a shaft of moonlight shot toward them across the water. It lit up the dark patches that had formed under Ordloff's eyes. He looked to Donnally like he wanted to dive in and swim to where the light died and the night sky dissolved into the sea.

“You know the weirdest thing about American law, what makes it arbitrary, is that in a state like Texas we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Defendants convicted even of just second-degree murder are put to death all the time and governors down there make sure it happens. They'd get impeached if they didn't.”

“This isn't Texas.”

“Don't I know it.”

“Then tell me something.”

“If it'll keep Dominguez alive.” Ordloff blinked against the moon's reflection and looked over. “I'll tell you anything. I'll sign anything. I'll testify to anything.”

“I went to speak to Edgar Rojo's mother and to look over the scene. She lives in the same place.”

“She talked to you?”

Donnally nodded.

“She sure as hell wouldn't talk to us.”

There was an angry edge in Ordloff's voice, like the victim's family owed him something, not as an officer of the court with duties to his client to discharge, but to him personally. He stood there like a mirror image of the kind of cop Donnally had hated working with, the kind who wore his uniform not as a second skin, but all the way through to the bone.

“The wound was way too fresh,” Donnally said, though he knew that fact couldn't have been news to Ordloff. “And I didn't approach it head-on.”

“What did she say?”

“The important thing at the moment is that her son had received a call from an unknown person that caused him to walk behind the couch and look out the front window.” Donnally angled his arm upward. “Unless Rojo was right up close to the glass, a guy as short as Dominguez couldn't have hit him. Even then it would've taken a sharpshooter.”

Ordloff watched Donnally lower his arm, then said, “I knew about the call and about the police's inability to trace it. It was a dead end. And I'm not even sure it meant that much. Not on New
Year's Eve with lots of people on the street, coming and going. Lots of people looking to meet up and party.”

“But you didn't think so at the time.”

“No. Not at the time. It walked like a setup and talked like a setup, but we couldn't prove that's what it was or discover whether Dominguez had anything to do with it. And neither could the D.A. That's why McMullin limited the testimony about it. To keep the jury from speculating too much.”

“What about the shooting itself? Dominguez have any experience firing a handgun?”

“What difference would it have made?” Ordloff smirked. “Was I supposed to argue to the jury that Dominguez was too unlucky a guy to have gotten off a lucky shot?”

Donnally shook his head. “That's not telling me anything.”

“You've been to police seminars.” Ordloff nodded toward the distant conference center as though law enforcement also used it. “You know as well as I do how those Sureños train their people. They're practically paramilitary. They have their own camps, just like terrorists.”

He formed his hand into that shape of a gun. “When they decide to take somebody out, they take that somebody out. That's who they are and what they do.”

Then he tilted his finger upward and pulled the trigger.

D
onnally noticed the tail as he drove from his house far out in the avenues, a few blocks from Ocean Beach, that he'd bought when he was with the department and now shared with Janie. He was on his way to Fort Miley Veterans Medical Center to pick her up at the end of her shift. The trailing Chevy Impala focused his mind that had been divided all day as he sat in front of a computer at the court of appeals reading through the briefs in the Dominguez file. He hadn't anticipated that the consequence of his conversation with Ordloff was that he'd spend the next twenty-four hours feeling the Alzheimer's barrel pressed against his temple.

The car followed him as he made the three turns to get onto the commercial Clement Street and heading west toward the sunset. Donnally couldn't make out the face of the single occupant, but the front license plate was missing its frame, suggesting it might be a rental.

The problem for an ex-cop who laid his head in the town where he'd spent his career was that the past was never past. Chance sightings of the officers who'd sent them away remind crooks of wasted years, of dead time spent caged inside steel bars, pacing concrete. Animosities grind, sharpening thoughts of revenge,
and then prison sentences end and the crooks return to the wide open streets with a narrowed sense of relevance. For them, there are cops and there are cons and nothing in between.

Donnally slowed, letting the driver catch up so he could get a glimpse through the windshield. Maybe the face would draw out a memory. But the more the gap narrowed, the more the descending sun's refection masked the glass. The driver seemed to catch on to what Donnally was doing and backed off again.

Veterans Drive into Fort Miley came up on his right, the broad entrance onto the grounds now seeming like an opening into a trap. There was no reason to let the guy—if it was a guy, for revenge knows no gender—start guessing at the connection between him and the hospital if he didn't know it already. Instead of turning into the property, Donnally cut left into a street of bungalows.

Donnally pulled to the curb midway down the block. He hoped the man following him would either park along the street behind him so he could catch a look at his face, no longer masked by the sun, or at least get the plate and call it into Ramon Navarro.

But the driver did neither. He pulled into the shadow extending across the pavement from the row houses lining the west side.

That the man had failed to disguise his surveillance, his incompetence at the craft, puzzled and annoyed Donnally rather than making him worried or fearful. He thought about walking up on him, but dismissed the idea for he'd likely spin a U-turn and flee before Donnally could close in.

Better to try to lead him into a trap.

Donnally scanned the street ahead to make sure he hadn't fallen into one himself, then popped his hood. He put a perplexed expression on his face as he climbed out of his truck, suggesting
he'd noticed a troubling noise. A double, maybe even a triple, pretense. Donnally was pretending he wasn't under surveillance and the surveiller was pretending he wasn't surveilling, and neither's act was convincing the other.

As Donnally probed the engine compartment, jiggling wires and tugging at hoses, he called Janie, asking her to catch a cab home. He then drove to an auto supply shop and killed enough time inside for the sun to finish setting and for the distant clouds over the Pacific to smother the remaining daylight.

Donnally headed back toward Fort Miley through the gray evening, then wound his way between the wooded Lincoln and Sutro Heights parks to the coast. He pulled into a parallel parking space along the curving road north of the Cliff House, a two-story, modern museum-like restaurant overlooking the ocean.

The Chevy slowed, but there were no more spaces on Donnally's side and the hill across the road descended to the edge of the traffic lane. The car passed him. Donnally got enough of a glimpse of the turned-away head to confirm it was a man, but nothing more. He pulled into a spot in front of a low wall thirty yards south of the restaurant, facing the water. Its lights died, but the driver didn't get out.

Donnally walked into the street-level bar overlooking the downstairs dining room. He positioned himself by a window facing the street to make sure he could be observed, then ordered a beer. He drank half of it in the next five minutes, then made a show of getting the waitress's attention, pointing at the glass, and at the hallway toward the restroom to indicate that he'd be back and not to clear the table.

The route he chose kept him in view of the front of the building
until just before he reached the turn toward the men's room. He broke off and cut down the steps to the dining room, then through swinging doors and past the kitchen to a back exit.

Rather than trying to sneak his way along the lighted parking area, Donnally lowered himself over the concrete retaining wall and climbed along the breakwater rocks. He reached a spot just below where the man had parked and peeked over the wall. He spotted a thirty-year-old Hispanic. Tall, thin, and pacing like a caged panther next to his car, his eyes fixed on the restaurant entrance. His oversized gangster-style sweatshirt hung loose on his body. The hood was lying back, revealing a narrow face and short hair under an Oakland Raiders knit cap.

Donnally watched him finger-flick his cigarette, shooting it down to the blacktop, the tobacco ember fragmenting and exploding upward, then walk around his car and open the trunk. The inside light glowed against an unfamiliar face. It revealed two prison tattoos, a heart pierced by a sword on one side of his neck and a spider web on the other. He ducked down for a moment, straightened up, looked around, then closed the lid and slipped something into his back pocket.

As Donnally reached for the semiautomatic in his shoulder holster, he recognized that a 911 call wouldn't help. The man knew where he lived and next time he'd lie in wait, not follow him. And if the man made a move and Donnally caught him and got him locked up, he could still reach out from jail to his crime partners on the street. Even worse, Donnally couldn't take a chance that, unable to get to him, the man would go after Janie as his proxy.

Whatever was going to happen between them had to happen now and be over with.

Donnally lowered himself and waited for a wave to crash onto
the rocks behind him to cover the sound of ripping Velcro, then pulled back on the retention strap and drew his gun.

From the shadow cast by a lamppost, Donnally watched him light another cigarette, then walk to the wall and stare out at Seal Rock. Only then did Donnally notice the squawking and yelping seals and sea lions behind him and feel the chill wind against his neck.

The gangster looked again toward the restaurant entrance, then leaned back against the wall.

Donnally remained in his crouch until another wave crashed, then stood and pressed the barrel against the man's back.

The man's body stiffened.

“Stay cool,” Donnally told him, locking his left hand on top of the man's shoulder to keep him from turning. “Move a fraction and I'll pull the trigger. I've got nothing to lose. You set it up this way by coming to where I lay my head.”

The gangster dropped his cigarette and raised his hands head high.

“It ain't about that.”

“Turn around, place your hands on the top of the wall, and spread your legs.”

He complied.

Donnally spotted letters N O R T E Ñ O tattooed across his fingers on his splayed hands, just below his knuckles.

Donnally climbed over and patted him down.

A Mercedes roadster pulled into a space fifteen feet away. Two women got out. They paused by their doors after they spotted Donnally. He pulled out his retirement badge, flashed it toward them, then nodded toward the Norteño and uttered the word, “Fugitive.”

The women squinted toward the tattooed man, then nodded at Donnally and walked toward the restaurant.

Donnally continued searching and removed a wallet and a pint bottle of brandy from the gangster's back pockets.

No gun. No weapon at all.

Donnally set them both on the top of the wall.

“If ‘it ain't about that,' whatever ‘that' is,” Donnally said, “what's it about?”

“It's about why you bothered my grandmother.”

Donnally reached over and flipped open the wallet. The driver's license bore the name Edgar Rojo Jr.

He knew only two things about Junior. At age nine he'd watched his father bleed out on the night he was murdered, and ten years later he beat a victim so badly that the man lost body parts.

Junior now seemed to him to be less like a panther, and more like a pit bull.

“Why'd you follow me?”

Junior shrugged. “I don't know. I went by your house and saw you driving away. I slid in behind, then didn't know what to do when I caught up with you.”

Donnally had interpreted Junior's pacing as anticipation, like a lion getting ready to pounce. He now wondered whether it was indecision or anxiety.

“Turn around and sit back against the wall.”

He slipped the gun into his jacket pocket so it wouldn't draw any more attention from restaurant patrons, but he kept it aimed at Junior.

Junior's eyes flicked back and forth as he turned around, looking for the gun. They fixed on Donnally's hidden hand and then he reached back and lowered himself to the wall.

Donnally tossed him his wallet. “You're still not telling me anything.”

“I need you to leave my grandmother alone. You hear what I'm saying? She ain't part of nothing. She's suffered enough losing my father. No reason for you to bring it all back up again.”

“You're a step ahead of me. I don't know whether I'll bring it all up again. I haven't discovered anything to prove it wasn't Israel Dominguez who killed your father or that the evidence didn't support the sentence he got.”

Junior stared at Donnally as though they'd started the conversation a question too late.

“What's it to you, anyway?”

“It's coming up on his execution and somebody wanted to make sure the court got it right.”

“That's them. Not you.”

Donnally shook his head. “I've got no stake in this.”

Junior flashed a grim smile. “Yeah, you do. You were ready to shoot me over it.”

“And you were ready to do what?”

“If it was ten years ago”—Junior gestured with his thumb toward the ocean—“I'd have torn you into bite-sized chunks and fed you to the sharks.”

“And now?”

Junior looked away, then back. “I don't know.”

In Junior's manner and words, Donnally sensed doubts about things much older than what he intended to do to Donnally.

“Were you sure Dominguez killed your father?”

“I never heard nothing saying it wasn't him. But it was a war
and in a war it don't make no difference who gets taken prisoner. You see what I'm saying?”

“You mean it didn't make a difference to you whether they got the right guy? The one who really pulled the trigger?”

“Course it did. But I was a kid. All I knew was what the police said and what my father's crime partners told me.”

The approaching flash of strobing patrol car overheads drew their attention toward the restaurant. The unit rolled to a stop behind Junior's Chevy, against the traffic. The passenger officer looked back and forth between Donnally and Junior as he and the driver got out. He pointed toward the Cliff House.

“We got an officer needs assistance call from a woman in the restaurant, but I don't see an officer.”

“There must have been some misunderstanding,” Donnally said, then displayed his empty hands.

“Who are you?”

“Retired SFPD.” Donnally pointed down with his forefinger. “I'm going reach into my back pocket and show you my retirement badge and ID.”

The officer rested his hand on his gun and nodded. “But slowly.”

Donnally eased his badge case out of his back pocket and flipped it open as the officer approached.

The officer took it from his hand.

“Donnally . . . Harlan Donnally.” He glanced at his partner standing by his door, still using his car as cover. “This is the detective who got shot out there on Mission Street years ago.” He looked back at Donnally. “That's you, right?”

Donnally nodded.

“They still teach what you did in the academy firearms training
class. Got a little reenactment video and everything showing you in the cross fire.” The officer emitted a breathy whistle. “Scary as hell.”

Donnally didn't respond.

The officer focused on Junior but continued speaking to Donnally.

“Who's the gangbanger?”

Junior answered. “My name's Edgar Rojo and I ain't no gangbanger no more.”

“Then why you wearing the tattooed advertisements all over your face? Looks to me like you're banging hard-core.”

Donnally felt a flush of annoyance at the cop's descent into crook slang. By accommodating himself to the lawlessness it implied, it legitimized the criminal way of life. It made it seem that the criminal world was the entire world, not just the badlands, and that the police weren't representatives of law, but only of power. Using the language of the gangsters made the police department into just another gang.

The officer didn't wait for a response. He walked Junior to the back of the patrol car and spread-eagled him over the trunk. He then told his partner to run a warrant check and read Junior's name and date of birth off his driver's license. The partner eased back into his seat and reached over toward the computer monitor attached to the dashboard and ran the check.

A few seconds later, he climbed out again, “He's clear, but on parole for mayhem.”

“How long you been out?” the nearer officer asked Junior.

“Almost three years. My parole ends in a couple of months.”