Power Blind (18 page)

Chapter 48

G
age wasn't surprised he didn't recognize the deputy on the other side of the bulletproof window on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice. It had been over twenty years since Gage had been a regular visitor booking murderers into the jail. And like a snake that sheds its skin, it was almost a new sheriff's department. Only a few from Gage's generation were left, now in the upper ranks.

The deputy accepted Gage's PI license as a ticket inside, then activated the locks on the barred gate and the sliding metal door.

Gage stepped into the hallway and signed in on the visitor's log. He heard a baritone voice call out his name from behind the booking counter to his left. He looked over to find its source: a sixty-year-old freckled face below a bald head. It was a sergeant from the old days, now wearing a captain's insignias.

Gage walked over and stuck out his hand.

“I used to know a guy who sort of looked like you,” Gage said. “We called him Red, but I don't see the red anymore.”

Red shook his hand and smiled. “Your day will come. You ain't gonna keep all that hair forever.”

Red glanced at the sign-in sheet across the hallway, and asked, “Who you here to see?”

“John Porzolkiewski.”

“The poison guy?”

Gage nodded.

“Weird dude.”

“Weird dude?” Gage laughed. “Haven't you been out of this place in the last thirty years? No one says ‘weird dude' anymore. That went out with ‘put a cap in his ass' and ‘what's up bro.' ”

“Okay, forget the dude part. He's still weird. He didn't say peep other than ‘I want my phone call' after Spike hooked him up at his market. He never even invoked. Spike says he read him his rights and the guy just stared back like a beached whale.”

Gage looked down the hallway through a gate separating the visiting rooms from the rows of cells facing each other fifty feet away. He could see hands and forearms extending from the cells, some resting on flat cross pieces, others gesturing. Mostly brown and black. A staccato of hard voices, knife-sharp cackles, and assaulting laughs reverberated against the concrete and steel.

“He's not in main line.” Red jerked his thumb toward the other end of the hallway. “We put him on suicide watch last night.”

“You have a shrink talk to him?”

Red shook his head. “No point if he's not gonna talk back.”

“I
didn't do it,” Porzolkiewski said, just as Gage crossed the threshold into the interview room.

“Then what were you doing with a pound of sodium monofluoroacetate in your storeroom?” Gage pulled back a plastic chair and sat down across the table from him. “That's enough to kill everyone who works at TIMCO.”

“I never saw it before.”

“It was on a shelf. Eye level.”

“In a bag of flour. I don't open every bag of flour to see what's inside. Those cops planted it. Brandon Meyer and Marc Anston must've paid them off.”

“Spike Pacheco isn't buyable.”

“Then it was the hazmat woman.” Porzolkiewski folded his arms over the front of his orange jumpsuit. “You going to vouch for her, too?”

Gage shook his head. “I don't need to.”

He pulled out the timeline Porzolkiewski faxed over to attempt to prove his innocence after the newspaper reported the discovery of Karopian's body.

“I went out to talk to the woman you visited in the Delta. You told me
she
called you. She told me
you
called her. You put yourself within ten miles of Karopian on the day he was murdered, then lied to me about why you were there.”

Porzolkiewski stared at the page, face rigid.

“I also talked with Karopian's wife,” Gage said. “She hasn't touched the boat since he died. SFPD and Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies are dusting the cabin for prints right now.”

Gage dropped the chronology on the table. “What do you think they're going to find?”

Porzolkiewski looked up. “So I went to see him.” He smirked at Gage. “It didn't take a genius to put two and two together. I figured out what else was on the recording you played for me. No one would've believed Hawkins unless Karopian had backed him up with the OSHA report. He had to be in on it. I wanted to see the look on his face.”

“No, you wanted to see the
last
look on his face.”

Porzolkiewski gripped the edge of the gray metal table.

“I . . . didn't . . . kill . . . the guy.”

“I know. That was the poison's job. Just like with Charlie Palmer. You're lucky it's too late to recover fingerprints from his house. I'm sure his wife has cleaned up the bedroom, but then again . . . maybe not.”

Porzolkiewski rubbed his hands together on top of the table. Lips compressed. Eyebrows narrowed. A bouncing left leg caused his body to vibrate. He scratched his head, then rubbed his nose. Gage sensed him trying to dam something inside himself, hold it back.

Then the floodgates broke open.

“I didn't go to Palmer's the day he died. It was three days earlier, and I didn't go there to kill him. I went there because I felt bad about . . . about . . .”

“Shooting him in the first place?”

Porzolkiewski's voice hardened. “I'm not going to talk about that or somebody'll plant a gun in my house. Look. I . . . didn't . . . kill the guy. Somebody's setting me up.”

“How come everything you say to defend yourself sounds like a confession?”

Porzolkiewski rose and glared down at Gage.

“What a waste of time.”

He took a step toward the visiting room door, looked out through the wire mesh window for a passing deputy, and began pounding.

W
hile walking down the front steps of the Hall of Justice, Gage realized he had the answer he came for: Handing Porzolkiewski the truth was just like putting a gun in his hand.

It was a good thing Porzolkiewski didn't know where Wilbert Hawkins was living.

Gage heard something grate in the back of his mind like misaligned gears: Boots.

Was there a connection between Porzolkiewski and Boots Marnin? How did Porzolkiewski know to send Boots to India to find Hawkins, and how did he get hooked up with Boots in the first place?

But what if there wasn't a connection between Porzolkiewski and Boots?

Then what?

Chapter 49

G
age called Spike at SFPD Homicide after an hour working through Charlie's records with Alex Z. He knew he wasn't seeing something in the mass of data lying before them, but he didn't yet have the means to recognize it.

“What happened at Porzolkiewski's arraignment?” Gage asked.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing?”

“He wouldn't say a word. Refused to enter a plea. Refused to talk to the public defender. The judge sent him off to the funny farm. Smart move on Porzolkiewski's part. He's just delaying the inevitable, but smart move anyway.”

“Are you going to ship him off for trial first in Contra Costa?”

“We were until he admitted to you he went to Charlie's. Now the case here is as strong as the one there. Might as well do this one.” Spike chuckled. “You ought to keep visiting the guy. Every time he opens his mouth he digs himself in a little deeper. What do you think he's doing?”

“He's just like all the shrewd crooks,” Gage said. “Build your defense around what you can't deny and what's sure to be found out anyway.”

“Well, I've got something else he won't be able to deny.” Gage heard Spike shuffle papers on his desk. “I just received Porzolkiewski's cell phone records. It has calls to the Mariner Hotel where Viz had followed Boots Marnin. Four calls during the week after Charlie got shot. We can't trace them to his exact room, but the jury won't care. If Marnin had worked a little smarter in India, there could've been a third body.”

The gears caught again. Porzolkiewski had claimed he sold the wallet for ten thousand dollars to two men claiming to represent Meyer. Maybe the calls to Boots were the negotiations, and maybe there was evidence to confirm it.

“Have you gone over everything seized from Porzolkiewski's house?”

“Not yet. The prize was the sodium monofluoroacetate from the store. In fact—more shuffling—“the evidence sheet shows the officers only took flour containers from the house and cleaning powders from the garage.” Spike paused. More shuffling. “Beyond that, only some indicia to prove in court he had control of the house: telephone and electric bills, and his wallet.”

“Porzolkiewski's wallet? That doesn't sound right. He would've had it with him at the store.”

More shuffling. “There's a wallet listed on his jail property sheet, too. Let me call you back.”

S
pike called back fifteen minutes later.

“You may want to drop by. I've got two wallets sitting on my desk and one of them doesn't belong to Porzolkiewski . . . and there's some really strange stuff in it.”

Chapter 50

L
unge and parry. Lunge and parry.

Landon Meyer felt a yawn rising, and forced it down. To the millions of viewers watching the confirmation hearing of Judge Phillip Sanford, Landon knew he appeared serious and senatorial, even presidential.

In fact, he was bored.

“May I have another five minutes, Mr. Chairman?”

Landon looked down the curving dais at Democratic senator Andrea Quick and nodded.

“With no objection.”

The seventy-year-old Quick fixed her eyes on Judge Sanford. Her coiffed hair was as frozen in place as her belittling stare.

“Let me understand where your argument takes you, Judge.”

Sanford gazed up at Quick; his elegant features and earnest expression had been a form of armor no other Democrat had been able to penetrate.

Landon smiled to himself. Jimmy Stewart couldn't have appeared more wholesome and invincible; then his internal smile faded as he wondered why there were no actors like that anymore, nor even an America like the one Stewart lived in. But then he felt a wave of uncertainty, wondering whether that old America could be restored by someone as young as Sanford, experienced in law, but not in life.

“Doesn't your free speech argument lead us down a road toward the eventual overturn of entirety of McCain-Feingold and every other piece of legislation restricting corporate contributions directly to political candidates and—”

“Madam Senator—”

Quick wagged a finger at Sanford. “Don't interrupt me, young man.”

Sanford's face reddened, then he grinned like a schoolboy trying to deflect a teacher's discipline.

“I was about to say . . .” Quick reddened, too, then stiffened.

Landon watched the slow recognition sweep across the room that Sanford had derailed her train of thought.

Quick scanned the notes her staff had prepared.

Lunge and parry
, Landon said to himself.
Lunge and parry.

“With all due respect, Madam Senator, I'm not sure it's appropriate for me to comment on a matter that may come before the Court.”

Sanford had rescued her from the embarrassing moment by suffocating the issue, and everyone in the audience and watching on television or online had recognized it also.

By Landon's count, it had been the twenty-third time he'd executed that question-strangling ma-neuver.

Landon understood the confirmation hearing wasn't about Sanford alone. It was also about how effectively the Democrats could take shots at President Duncan. For them, Sanford was both a nominee to be defeated and a surrogate to be whipped, but so far the rawhide had been missing its target and snapping back into the Democrats' faces.

But, in a way, Landon felt as though the whip's popper was just missing him or maybe just pricking him, for it reminded him of an internal tension that had vibrated within him since college. Was the conservatism he believed in composed of tradition or of ideology? Was he an Edmund Burke defending what the country had been and therefore what must be, or a Thomas Hobbes creating a Leviathan out of the chaos of competing wills and constraining everyone for their own safety? Was he a man who believed that the American was at heart a yeoman farmer who should be left to plow his fields as he pleased, or was he a man who believed Americans were merely impulse-driven juveniles whose lives—from their bedrooms to their doctors' offices—must be monitored and managed?

Landon knew who Brandon wanted to be, but in the twinges of conscience he sometimes felt, he wondered about himself.

He thought of the summer intern who'd misunderstood his biblical reference to the Leviathan, and now wondered whether he'd somehow misunderstood it, too.

Quick looked up from her notes.

“Is there anything that might
not
come before the Court, anything you feel you
are
free to comment on?”

Sanford displayed a bland smile and shook his head.

“I'm sorry to say, Senator, we live in a litigious society.”

W
here do we stand?” Brandon Meyer asked his brother as they sat in Landon's office in the Dirksen Building.

The Senate Judiciary Committee had just completed a party-line vote to send Sanford and Heller's nominations to the full Senate.

Brandon had flown to Washington to meet with members of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“About seven Democrats are only pretending to be undecided,” Landon said. “And we have two of ours who are truly sitting on the fence. They're not sure whether they can buy their way back from an affirmative vote.”

“So they've got fifty against and we've got forty-eight in favor. If we can swing our two, then we're at fifty-fifty and the vice president breaks the tie.”

“It won't be pretty,” Landon said, “but it'll be done.”

Brandon examined his tally sheet lying on the edge of Landon's desk, then asked, “How much more will it take to bring over those last two?”

“There's a prior question,” Landon said. “How do we get it to them?”

“You just tell me what they need. I'll figure out the rest.”