Night Is the Hunter (8 page)

W
hy open up that can of worms?” retired SFPD lieutenant Jimmie Chen asked Donnally, sitting in the knotty-pine den of his foothills home outside Red Bluff.

Donnally suspected that if he'd done his thirty years in the department as Chen had, he might've made the same career-end migration from the southern suburbs of San Francisco to the narrowing and rising north end of the Central Valley along the Sacramento River.

Donnally wasn't surprised where he found Chen because he and the other cops who preceded him north were at heart West Coast boys. They settled in towns like Paradise, Jackson, and Red Bluff. They wanted warm summers and mild winters and built their retirement houses far below the snow line and usually no higher elevation than Chen's three hundred feet above sea level.

Driving through town and then west on the winding roads climbing out of the valley, Donnally had spotted Bay Area dealership license plate frames on dozens of cars parked in home driveways. Next to them stood trucks with frames from the Chevy, Ford, and GMC dealers in the nearby towns of Redding and Anderson. They were evidence both of the officers' origins and their adaptation to a rural lifestyle that included hauling firewood to
their homes and Jet Skis to Lake Shasta fifty minutes farther up the highway.

Chen had chosen to sit on a couch below plaques and awards that memorialized his career. Narcotics Detective of the Year. Certificates of appreciation from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Centered among them was a framed gavel from his years as president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association.

“There wasn't any informant in the Rojo murder,” Chen said, hiking one cowboy-booted leg over the other.

Donnally noticed that there were no stirrup indentations on the soles. They were boots that had never ridden a horse. Nothing more than a costume or a prop.

“There were just rumors on the street the Sureños wanted to be on the receiving end of the cartel cocaine from Michoacán. And the way to make that happen was to break the supply chain so they could grab onto the near end.”

“Then what made the threat specific to Rojo Senior? He couldn't have been the only one the cartel was shipping to.”

“Somebody overheard a conversation in a taqueria over on Mission Street.”

“Which somebody was that?”

Chen shrugged. “I don't know. I could never trace it down. I just called Senior and told him some kind of hit on him was going down that night.”

Donnally caught that Chen was trying to skip a step and wanted to push past it by prompting Donnally to ask what he meant by “some kind of hit.” Instead, Donnally looped back. “How did the message get from that somebody to you?”

Chen's eyes went dead for a moment, then he smiled. “A patrol cop, Javier Morales. The somebody went looking for him after they overheard what was going down.”

Donnally never considered himself a human lie detector, but he was certain Chen wasn't telling the truth. First the dead eyes, then the smile just before mentioning the name of a young motorcycle cop who'd been executed by a Sureño under an overpass two blocks from the police station four years after Rojo was murdered.

But knowing Chen was lying was different from knowing what he was lying about, and why.

And there was something else, an implication that Senior might have been an informant, or leaning to become one hard enough that Chen would want to reach out to him and warn him and thereby create a debt.

Donnally tilted his chin up toward the certificates on the wall. “Weren't you in narcotics back then?”

Chen nodded, now with the pursed lips of a soldier who'd been to war.

The retired officer had been among the most productive drug cops in the department's history. Part of Chen's success in investigating Hispanic narcotics trafficking derived from his Chinese-Filipino ancestry that made the dealers mistake him for Mexican or Central American. Another part was that he spoke good street Spanish. But most important, in Donnally's mind, was that Chen was a cowboy long before he owned the boots he was now wearing. Whatever block he was on he always acted like he was the new sheriff in a lawless frontier town. He viewed himself not as just a cop, but as The Law, as the western hero, the gunslinger. Even when he covered for Donnally in the homicide unit after he was shot, he still played the part, just in a three-piece suit. It
had only been for a few months, but Chen had gotten a lifetime's worth of war stories out of it.

“And Morales contacted you because he knew you were involved in an investigation of Senior?”

Chen's eyes went dead again. “We were working up toward him. The cartel was driving the dope across the border at Mexicali and Tecate and then up Highway 101 through Salinas. They dropped off the cars at body shops in South City, near the San Francisco Airport, where they'd blowtorch open the secret compartments. They'd distribute the product from there.”

“That means you probably either rolled somebody at one of the body shops or somebody who picked up the drugs and made the deliveries.”

“Yeah . . . something like that. We knew the whole operation was managed from Mexico, but ICE and the DEA weren't getting anywhere on that end. We figured once we got a case on Senior, we'd lean on him to get his connection to come up here and introduce us. That way we could get an agent buying directly.”

“Was he big enough to do that?”

“When he died, he was a Norteño captain with a big future. We were told he was originally recruited right from the top, by the key generals in
La Mesa
in the Special Housing Unit at Pelican Bay. But that's not how he got hooked up with the cartel. We think that was orchestrated from Mexico. It was drug money he kicked up to the Norteño leadership that moved him up in rank. And he was making a huge amount. The street dealers were all lining up at his door.”

If Junior was right that his father accepted orders from the cartel in Mexico at least partly to protect his family at the ranch, there's no way he would've have cooperated with law enforcement.
It would've been a death sentence for his relatives back home. Even if Chen had been able to make a case, Senior would have kept his mouth shut and done his time.

“We were even ready to pitch a deal to the feds to get Rojo's wife out of prison if he agreed to work with us.”

Donnally didn't believe Chen was “ready to pitch a deal,” for he couldn't imagine Senior changing trajectories, swerving from Norteño captain to government informant. If his wife ever did walk out of prison, it would be into crosshairs.

Now Donnally wondered whether the warning was for another reason, a purely self-serving one. Maybe it was simply that Senior was a known link in a drug distribution chain and losing him would mean starting over, delaying Chen's ascent from officer to sergeant to lieutenant.

But Donnally didn't offer his speculations. It struck him that whatever Chen was hiding would more likely be revealed by the contradictions in his story than by arguments with him.

“How certain were you that he'd cooperate?”

“Completely. Would've been a slam dunk. Federal mandatory minimum sentencing had been instituted a couple of years earlier.”

The change in the law meant that drug dealers who would've done three or four years under the old law were being sentenced to twenty and thirty under the new one, and they'd have to serve at least eighty-five percent of their time before they could get released.

“If we were able to make the case we wanted,” Chen said, “Senior would've faced life plus. He'd never get out.” Chen grinned. “All these guys took one look at spending their whole lives behind the razor-wire fence of a maximum-security federal pen and cooperated.”

That wasn't true. The drug world in those days had a term for those who didn't cooperate. They were known as stand-up guys, and the geriatric units in the federal prison system were now crammed with them.

The words
some kind of hit
came back to Donnally.

“Any idea why Senior walked over to the front window?”

“I wanted him to check the area, but stay away from his door because I figured the shooter would be kicking it in and I didn't want him to show himself in the windows on either side of it. That would be like setting himself up.”

“Was he still on the phone when he was shot?”

“Nope. He said something about going to the front window and hung up.”

Donnally glanced around the den as he tried to span the twenty-year, 250-mile gap between Senior's murder in San Francisco and Chen's retirement in the foothills. He spotted a Smith and Wesson .357 sitting alone in a glass-fronted and locked display box. It was one of the service revolvers some officers still carried in the 1980s, before the department as whole switched to semiautomatics.

Its polymer grip was shattered.

Chen had framed the evidence of the only shooting he'd been in like it was a certificate of courage—except Donnally's recollection was that Chen had never gotten the gun out of its holster.

It had saved Chen's life by deflecting a slug, not by firing one.

Nonetheless, Chen had somehow worked it around in his mind so that it was a sign of his heroism, even though it was just something that happened to him that he had no control over.

Donnally scanned the certificates. His eyes settled on one
from the U.S. Attorney's Office and then realized Chen had referred to federal sentencing guidelines, not state.

“Was it some kind of joint investigation?”

Chen looked away, then back. “Everything we were doing in those days was coordinated in some way, you know that.”

“I mean formally. Did the investigation have a code name, did you have meetings, did you share informants with the DEA or ICE or the FBI?”

Chen stiffened. Donnally recognized his voice had taken on the tone and force of a cross-examination. He backed off with a shrug and let his voice trail off into, “That kind of thing.”

Chen stared at him for a moment, then relaxed. “It was heading that way. We were talking mostly with ICE because we were trying to work toward the border and the source in Mexico.”

“And what happened?”

“We pulled the plug after Senior was murdered.”

Donnally didn't believe him, but he did believe that talking to him longer wasn't going to get him anywhere. He'd done enough interviews and interrogations in his career to recognize when the lines of information, straight or meandering, had run out and only circles were left. He declined the offer of a beer and the inevitable trading of war stories that would be expected, and after a little small talk about Chen's ex-wife marrying another officer and his now-grown kids moving out of state, he left.

During the drive out of the foothills toward Highway 5, as he thought about Chen's cold eyes and averted gaze and his dude ranch cowboy boots, Donnally got feeling he was missing something.

Even worse, he felt like he wasn't getting any closer to the problems that were burdening Judge McMullin.

He'd planned to head north to Mount Shasta to check in at the café as a way of letting his mind sort things out in the background, but when he hit the interstate, he found himself taking the on-ramp south toward San Francisco.

And the reason came to him only after he'd made the long loop and accelerated into traffic. It was time to sit down with Israel Dominguez.

W
hat do you think you're doing, talking to people about me behind my back?”

The voice on the other end of Donnally's cell phone was his father's. That fact that it was already a couple hours past midnight meant nothing special. His father had always been impulsive and inconsiderate.

Donnally wasn't prepared for the challenge and didn't know how to answer.

“You think I'm some kind of criminal you need to sneak up on?”

“Hold on. Janie's asleep.”

The words silenced his father, but Donnally could feel the pressure of the unanswered questions as he swung his legs to the floor and walked into the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen.

“I was trying to avoid the conversation we're about to have,” Donnally said, “until I figured out whether we needed to have it at all. And if we had to have it, I wanted to do it in person.”

“I'm not a child.”

Donnally sat down at the table. He noticed that Janie had printed out some scholarly articles about Alzheimer's for him to read. She'd highlighted a few sentences on the one on top of the
stack. His eyes settled on the title. “Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer Type.”

“If you're not a child, then stop acting like one.”

“You're right. It's acting.”

Donnally felt his hand tighten around the phone, a mixture of incomprehension and annoyance.

“It's what?”

“Just acting. You know me. You know my stunts. I was trying to get into the experience, get into the role and see how people reacted to me, and then make the actors respond the same way. And I'm trying to create a buzz in the industry to set up the movie.”

Donnally took in a long breath and exhaled. “How could displaying the symptoms of”—he didn't trust that his father was telling the truth so he didn't want to use the word
Alzheimer's
yet—“of cognitive impairment or clinical depression help sell a movie?”

His father laughed, a schoolboy, snickering laugh. “That's why it's so great. It's counterintuitive. Nothing anybody would've thought of.”

“You lost me.”

“The film is about Ronald Reagan and his suffering from Alzheimer's during his second term.”

Typical Don Harlan.

“So you're thinking you'd make it seem like the movie was made by a director suffering—”

“Who might be suffering—”

“From Alzheimer's who then makes a heroic effort to explore his disease in film?”

“Something like that.” His father laughed. “And Buddy and all
the rest of them have already got the buzz going. There was an article in
Variety
today.”

In his burning face, Donnally could feel a familiar fury; his father was once again sacrificing fact for the sake of fiction and employing a cheap manipulation of emotion instead of facing a tragedy head-on.

Just like he did with
Shooting the Dawn
and almost all his other films, telling the big lie in the service of what he considered to be the greater truth.

Except it was clear to Donnally this wasn't a greater truth, any more than
Shooting the Dawn
was; it was just a deeper lie, first about his older brother and now about himself.

But this time his father had made himself not just the director, but part of the show itself.

It wasn't Alzheimer's; it was insanity, or selfish childishness.

“Isn't this unfair to the people who really have Alzheimer's? Creating expectations that despite the disease, they should be able to carry on as if they didn't have it?”

His father didn't answer.

“Making them feel guilty as though their loss of ability was a personal failure instead of the result of a disease?”

Finally, his father responded. “Hell, if they really have Alzheimer's, they'll forget about it soon enough.” Then he disconnected.

Donnally stared at the phone as the screen went dark. He heard Janie's approaching footsteps. She stopped next to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Was that your father?”

Donnally nodded.

“What did he say?”

“He denied it. He said it was all an act.”

She sat down in the chair to his right. “You really didn't expect him to admit it, did you?”

Donnally pulled back and looked at her. “What?”

“At the beginning, they almost never do.”