A Criminal Defense (10 page)

Chapter 23

D
onnally went alone to try to interview David Burger at the Alameda County jail, a block of brown cement along the freeway near downtown Oakland. He hoped to ascertain whether there was a connection between Hamlin's murder and his visit to the garage crime scene.

On the one hand, he recognized it could be argued that with Hamlin dead, Burger was unrepresented, so there was no bar to law enforcement contacting him.

On the other hand, it was too much of a gray area to risk involving Detective Navarro, and he figured that his going in as a special master might make the contact light enough gray that he wouldn't get too much grief from a judge later.

Burger was already sitting at the table in the interview room by the time Donnally cleared security.

Mid-forties. Mid-height. Mid-weight. Mid-smirk.

Burger folded his tattooed arms across his chest after Donnally sat down, and said, “Special master, huh?” It was as if he'd singsonged the words “birthday boy.” “Make you feel important?”

“It wasn't a job I wanted.”

“What's it got to do with me? I didn't kill him.” He spread his hands to encompass the jail. “I've got the best alibi anybody can have. Nobody's ever escaped from this place. And if I had, I wouldn't have broken back inside. I'd be in the wind.”

“It's not about you, directly. It's about Sanders's people. I was told by an attorney who was close to Hamlin that they were threatening him.”

“They been threatening me, too. Don't mean nothing. They'll get over it.”

“But why Hamlin? They think he tampered with the crime scene?”

Burger forced a smile. “How could he have done that? Far as I know, him and his private investigator didn't get in there until two days after the cops cleared out.”

“Which private investigator?”

“Dan something or Van something. I'm not sure. He's from SF. Has an office downtown.”

“What did Hamlin do in there?”

“Took some photos and measurements, investigation shit like that.”

“No.” Donnally leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “I don't mean then. I mean after you killed Sanders and before you called the police.”

Donnally watched Burger's body tense, but his eyes showed no change.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I saw the surveillance tape from the gas station across the street. Shows everything.”

“Hamlin didn't touch nothing. Sanders was tweaking and came at me with a wrench. One punch, that's all I hit him with. No reason to screw with anything.”

“Then what was Hamlin doing in there?”

“We was talking. I needed to know whether to turn myself in or try to . . . uh . . .”

“Try to pin it on somebody else?”

“No need to go that way,” Burger said. “Hamlin figured I could beat the case. I'd just have to do some pretrial time in here 'cause bail would be set too high for me to make. But not too much time. We figured on not waiving my speedy trial rights. We were gonna just jam the case and get it over in a couple of months.”

“Then why didn't Hamlin wait for the police?”

“He thought it would look bad in the press. Me calling him first, instead of 911.” Burger grinned. “Him and me are notorious guys.”

Donnally decided he'd gotten as much as he was going to get and that he'd keep the door open for a return visit by not challenging Burger with the obvious. Maybe Sanders had still been alive and a quick call to 911 could've saved him. But instead of doing that, Burger had called his lawyer.

Donnally buzzed for the jailer, who escorted him back to the lobby. He called Navarro as he was heading toward the Bay Bridge.

“Stay on that side,” Navarro said. “Meet me out at the Sixty-fifth Avenue Village. I've got a lead on Sanders's wife and brother.”

Donnally made a U-turn through the toll plaza parking lot and headed east, first along the port and then out to the flatland avenues. He parked his truck in the housing project visitors' area and then waited for Navarro, who pulled up ten minutes later. After Donnally got into Navarro's car, they headed farther east.

When they neared the Seventies, Donnally said, “This was Freeman's old turf, wasn't it?”

Donnally could still remember the flash and swagger of the now-deceased Randy Freeman, a legendary East Oakland drug dealer. His name had come up in a homicide Donnally had worked on early in his career, but Freeman was insulated from the heat because the lieutenant who handled the contract had been snuffed out in retaliation a day afterward. Donnally last saw Freeman coming out of Esther's Orbit Room in what was called Harlem West when Basie and Coltrane played there, but became Ghost Town when players like Freeman showed up. He was climbing into a black Range Rover with gold rims and Vogue tires and bulletproof glass, N.W.A.'s “Fuck tha Police” throbbing the sheet metal and blasting louder than the BART train passing on the tracks above. Freeman was later convicted in federal court of racketeering. Eleven months into his fifteen-year sentence, he decided to try to work off some time by rolling on his lawyers.

Donnally remembered all this now because one of those lawyers was Mark Hamlin.

Freeman contacted the U.S. Attorney who had prosecuted him and told him that despite a court order freezing all his assets, he'd paid Hamlin's fee in the form of a 1956 Mercedes Gullwing. Freeman later testified that a week after the order was issued, his father-in-law had taken Hamlin to where the car was hidden in the Central Valley and gave him the keys. The U.S. Attorney produced a catalog displaying the car up for auction at the Dubai Classic Car Show three years after Freeman's conviction, its sales history made untraceable by a series of offshore transactions.

The case became a credibility contest, and the weight of Freeman and his father-in-law's felony histories tipped the scale in Hamlin's favor. No one in the legal community knew whether Hamlin did it, but most agreed it was the kind of thing he would do if he had the chance. In the end, and as always, the hearings were less about facts of what happened and more about evidence and the rules of evidence, and about what would stand up on appeal.

Freeman was murdered six months after he finished his federal prison sentence and returned to Oakland. He fell to the sidewalk below the bulletproof driver's side window of his Range Rover that had been hidden in storage while he served his sentence. For a couple of years afterward, any dope dealer shot down because he'd left himself vulnerable on the street was referred to as being on the wrong side of the glass.

Navarro pointed toward Discount Liquors as they passed Seventy-ninth Avenue.

“He got it right there,” Navarro said. “Turns out the drug dealers running East Oakland when he got out of the joint hadn't learned to respect their elders. The turf was theirs and they weren't about to give it back to an old man.”

Drug dealers aged like professional athletes. Forty-five years old was ancient.

Navarro turned off International Boulevard onto the rutted Eighty-third Avenue, more of an alley than a street, then drove past ratty-clapboard and cracked-stucco houses for two blocks before pulling to a stop over an oil-slicked patch of pavement.

A generic, tattooed biker type was reclining in a ripped Barcalounger and drinking a beer on the porch of the gray bungalow where the murdered Ed Sanders had lived. An early 1970s Ford truck sat on blocks in the driveway next to a 1990s Chevy Camaro. A black Harley-Davidson stood on the hard-packed dirt yard.

The biker watched Donnally and Navarro walking across the street toward the house, and then reached back and rapped on the window. A woman appeared in the doorway as they climbed the steps.

Donnally expected her to be a biker chick with a meth-lined face, scraggly hair, skinny as an axel. Instead, she looked like a Home Depot checker, wearing jeans and a Pendleton work shirt.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Navarro displayed his badge. “I'm trying to get in contact with Gloria Sanders.”

“That's me, but why SFPD?”

“Can we talk inside?” Donnally said.

She glanced at the man on the porch, then said, “Okay.”

The biker followed them in, but remained standing just inside the front door as they sat down, Donnally and Gloria on the couch, Navarro in a chair. Donnally had the feeling that while they'd be directing questions to her, they'd be getting answers, if any were forthcoming, from him.

“That's my brother,” Gloria said, pointing at him. “People call him Tub, for Tubby.” She smiled. “He used to be fat.”

From the looks of his loose skin, Donnally figured he'd gone on a crystal meth diet and had shed the pounds fast. One of the risks of the drug trade was using your own product. The other one had been exemplified by the bullet-ridden body of Randy Freeman that had lain on a sidewalk a few blocks away.

“We're looking into some threats that were made against Mark Hamlin,” Navarro said. “The attorney who was representing David Burger.”

Gloria winced at the name as though Donnally had poked at a fresh wound, then said, “I didn't threaten anybody.”

“Somebody did.”

Gloria's eyes darted toward Tub, then back.

“Maybe because they think he tampered with the crime scene to make it look like self-defense,” Donnally said.

Her eyes darted again.

Tub spoke. “We know Hamlin was in there. Knew it from day one. Couple of people we know in the East Bay Devils Motorcycle Club rode by and saw him going in a while before Burger called the cops.”

“Who were they?” Donnally asked.

Tub shrugged. “It don't make no difference. They saw what they saw.”

Donnally recognized he'd never get the names, at least from Tub, so he moved on.

“You threaten Hamlin?” Donnally asked.

Tub thought for a moment. “If I deny it and you can prove it, it'll look like I killed him. And I didn't.” He looked down at his sister. “And nobody connected with us did him in either. If we had, you'd of never found his body. We just made some calls to him.”

“Calls about what?”

“What Hamlin was doing in there. We wanted it back.”

“Meth? He took meth out of the place before the cops showed up?”

“No, man.” Tub looked back and forth between Donnally and Navarro like they were passengers who'd somehow gotten onto the wrong plane. “My brother-in-law's share of the forty grand him and Burger got for the meth they sold to the Norteños the day before.”

Chapter 24

T
he son of a bitch went in there to collect his fee before they called the police.”

Donnally had left it up to Navarro to tell the tale to District Attorney Hannah Goldhagen the next morning in her Hall of Justice office. His face was twisted with anger by the time he'd reached the punch line.

“The question,” Donnally said, “is whether Galen knew about it and went after money that no one would miss or that no one could ever talk about. Burger couldn't complain without having to explain where the money came from. And Takiyah Jackson said she didn't know about it. She didn't even know Hamlin had a stash at home.”

“Do you believe her?” Goldhagen asked.

Donnally nodded. “She's the one that sort of put us on this trail.”

“And Sanders's wife and brother, are they still suspects?”

“Barely,” Navarro said. “Killing Hamlin was the one sure way they'd never get the money back.”

“Unless the homicide was just an interrogation gone wrong,” Goldhagen said.

“Except that the autopsy doesn't support that,” Navarro said. “No injuries consistent with having been hit or beaten. I looked at Tub's rap sheet. He's the kind of guy who'd have done lots of bone breaking if he was trying to get something. Why take the risk of strangling Hamlin to death when a couple of broken fingers or a slice across the chest would've gotten him the information he wanted?”

Goldhagen smirked. “Or maybe shocked him with a Harley-Davidson battery to get it?”

“Or shocked him with any kind of battery. He's the kind of guy who'd want to see blood.”

She paused and tapped the desk, and then looked at Donnally.

“Then your recommendation is we draft some kind of cooperation agreement with Galen.”

“ ‘Some kind' are the operative words since the information he provides will be filtered through a third party, which is me. So the execution of the agreement wouldn't be directly between him and your office.”

“And the next step would be that you start going through Hamlin's case files with Galen and see what he has to say about them.”

“And with Jackson.”

“Do we need a cooperation agreement with her?”

“That would only scare her off. She'd never want to see herself as a snitch.”

Goldhagen smiled again. “And Galen would?”

“He'll find a way to justify it,” Donnally said. “After all, he was the extortion victim, right?”

“But only because he chose to become an embezzler.”

“And an embezzler only because he got caught. Bottom line is he's a snake. I called the court on the way over here. Galen notified the clerk's office within five hours after Hamlin's body was discovered that he was substituting in on the Burger case.”

Goldhagen smirked. “That ain't gonna happen.”

“Maybe it has to. Things have got to seem normal while he cooperates, otherwise people will start asking questions.”

Goldhagen sighed and dropped her head.

“How will that look when the truth comes out? The DA's office has a hammer over the defense attorney and the defendant doesn't know it.” She looked up. “How many constitutional violations is that? Let me count the ways.” She paused and bit her lip. “Can't do it. You'll be heading back up to pine tree country when this is over to flip flapjacks and I'll be up for reelection. I can't win with the California Supreme Court tap-dancing on my head.”

Donnally couldn't argue against her. She was right. It was only because of Galen they'd discovered facts about the case that could provide a motive for the homicide. The theory would be that Burger killed Sanders not in self-defense, or even in a heat of passion, but because he wanted both shares of the dope money. A self-defense, or at worst a manslaughter, would turn into a capital murder—just . . . like . . . that.

Navarro stirred in his chair.

Goldhagen cast Navarro a hard look. “Don't even think it. No cluing in Oakland homicide or the Alameda County DA's office about Hamlin going in there or about the money. Short-term, it would help their case, but long-term, whatever conviction comes out of it would be overturned.”

“That's only if the defense ever finds out how we got the information,” Navarro said. “OPD has got an anonymous tip line and there are a few pay phones still around.”

“I'm not going to be blackmailed by Galen for the rest of my career. He'll be able to figure out what happened.”

Navarro shrugged his consent to remain silent.

“I'll draft the cooperation agreement,” Goldhagen said, “and run it by Judge McMullin. In the meantime, you two need to divide up the labor”—she nodded toward Navarro—“so Ramon doesn't end up in the middle of attorney-client issues again.”

“I'll be working on Hamlin's cell phone records,” Navarro said, “and trying to re-create his movements during the days before he was killed. I'll pass on what I find.”

“And the gun?”

“That, too. I'm sure it wasn't there for self-defense. Otherwise it would've been within easy reach like the 9mm he was supposed to have had in his nightstand, instead of hidden under a floorboard.”

None of them said the words, but all were wondering whether the gun, like the forty thousand dollars, had also been removed from a crime scene, not for direct profit, but to conceal evidence in order to help a client beat a case.

“Maybe you better let Harlan do that,” Goldhagen said. “Or at least bail out if it starts heading in a hinky direction.”

She looked at Donnally.

“I'll start going through his client files,” Donnally said. “I can justify doing it now. With the Burger case and what Galen knows, it won't look like a fishing expedition when the defense bar finds out about it later.”