The Hunt Club (6 page)

I kept the camera on him. I believe I may have been smiling. He half-turned, holding the tire, stepping toward the back of the car. Seeing me, he came to a shocked and abrupt stop.

“Yo, Wilson,” I said. “How's the back?”

His eyes grew large and frightened as I lowered the camera and, pointing a finger gun at him, pulled the trigger. “Gotcha,” I said.

That brought the bonus. Mayhew whirled halfway around, dropped the tire, and reached down for the tire iron that he'd used to lever up the jack. With an animal cry, he lunged at me as I danced away, capturing the Kodak moments as he continued to advance, swinging the iron as he came at me. If his back was hurting him, he didn't show much sign of it. But he was getting close now as I ducked and swirled away from another swing.

And then from behind me, Juhle's welcome voice: “Hold it right there! Police! Drop the weapon!”

The cavalry pulled up on foot and kept coming. Now nearly frothing at the mouth, Mayhew whirled on Juhle and Manning as they got him by the arms and tried to restrain him. He continued to resist them. The tire iron clanged to the street.

I caught it all on videotape. The steps, the golf clubs, pumping the jack, lifting the tire up, swinging at me with the tire iron, and—my personal favorite—the resisting of his arrest. This last guaranteed that the fraudulent back claim would now go all the way to the DA. Without resisting arrest, the DA might otherwise find himself tempted, coerced, or outright bought into forgetting about the fraud. With the assault on working homicide inspectors, he would then have to charge it all. Even Mayhew's connections would not be able to put a lid on the story once it came out that he had attacked two cops who just happened to be passing by and, witnessing an attack with a deadly weapon in progress, had charged in to restore order.

“Dismas Hardy,”
Amy said, “this is Wyatt Hunt.”

We shook hands. Hardy was probably in his mid-fifties. He certainly looked good for the role of managing partner of one of the city's top law firms. He wore a gray suit with the thinnest of maroon pinstripes. Maroon silk tie, monogrammed silk shirt. High-end all the way, but he came across as one of the good guys. Plus, he'd had the good sense to hire Amy.

“Ms. Wu tells me you've made the firm some money this morning. We appreciate it.”

“It was my pleasure. In fact, I can't remember when I've had more fun.”

Amy spoke up. “As I mentioned to you when I first brought it up, Diz, Wyatt had a bit of history with Mr. Mayhew. I thought he'd be motivated.”

“Still,” Hardy said, “one day. That's impressive. Nobody does this stuff in one day.” He nodded appreciatively. “I'm glad Amy thought of you.”

“Me, too.”

Hardy rested a haunch on the corner of his large cherry desk. “So now the question, Wyatt,” he said, “is what can we do for you?”

I'd of course considered the payment issue, but it didn't rule my thoughts. Now I found myself saying, “Maybe this is one of those times when the work is its own reward.”

Hardy grinned over at Amy. “This guy's too much,” he said. Then, back to me, “Are you for real?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes it's not the money.”

“In my experience, that's not as often as you'd think. Can I ask you a personal question? How long have you been out of a job?”

I shot a quick glance at Amy. She'd obviously had a somewhat substantive talk with Hardy before she'd invited me to look at Mayhew's case. “A few months, but I saved while I worked, and money's not a huge issue for me right now. I've kind of been trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.”

“Well, if I'd just done what you did this morning, I'd be tempted to take it as some kind of sign. You ever think about becoming a private investigator?”

I laughed. “Not even once.”

“Okay, but you deliver results like today, and within six months, you wouldn't be able to keep up with the work from this firm alone. I promise you.”

Shaking my head, I still found the idea mostly amusing. “I don't have any idea how I'd even go about it.”

“What's to know? You get a license, hang up a shingle, open your doors for business.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

U.S. Federal Judge George Palmer
met Staci Rosalier when she took his drink order one day at MoMo's, a San Francisco restaurant across the street from SBC Park, where the Giants play baseball. It was a warm September lunchtime, and Judge Palmer, known on sight to half the clientele and most of the regular staff, was sitting alone outside, awaiting the arrival of his appointment.

Staci was in her first week there at the waitress job. When she took the great man's order—Hendrick's gin on the rocks—they exchanged the usual lighthearted, mildly flirtatious banter. In spite of the age difference, it struck neither of them as incongruous. Staci was an experienced and sophisticated waitress, used to dealing with the well-heeled and successful.

And for a man at any age, Palmer's physique was admirable, his face captivating, his smile genuine. He was also personable, witty, confident, well dressed. He exuded the power of his position. The job God wants, so the saying goes, is U.S. federal judge.

As the crowd began to arrive, Staci fell into a rhythm with the work, and Palmer pretty much left her consciousness. She was after all serving half of the sixteen tables on one side of the outer patio, waiting on, among others, one superior court judge, the mayor's chief assistant, a gaggle of high-powered attorneys, a table of four of the 49ers, a city supervisor.

MoMo's was a happening place and had what they called a big yoo-hoo factor.

Over the next month or so, Judge Palmer came in nearly every workday, always choosing a table in Staci's section, arriving early enough, often enough that they got time to extend their repartee. His tips began at a generous twenty percent and grew to reflect the pleasure he took in her company. He learned that she was single, without a steady boyfriend, that she lived alone in a rented studio apartment just north of Market above Castro. She went to school part-time at SFCC and hoped to finish at junior college and go to Berkeley in the next couple of years, but the mission now was simply to make a living, which wasn't that easy on tips, in spite of the judge's largesse—not everyone was as generous as he was. She confided to him that she was thinking about taking another waitress job at another place on her days off here. But then she might have to quit school altogether and didn't want to do that. You didn't have a future if you didn't finish school.

She in turn found out, not only from him, that the judge had been married to Jeannette for nearly forty years. He lived in a big house in Pacific Heights on Clay Street. He had three grown children. He worked at the federal courthouse and worked on appeals to the Ninth Circuit. “Fun stuff,” he told her. He also was an avid fly fisherman and something of a wine nut, as she'd already guessed from what he usually ordered to drink after his gin on the rocks for lunch.

After a while, they began to see each other outside of MoMo's, at quiet places down the coast where the judge would not be recognized. One day, he had come in much later than usual, close to one thirty, timing it so he was getting up to leave at around three, as she was finishing her shift. They walked together down the Embarcadero for a hundred yards or so, making easy conversation as they usually did at the restaurant. He asked her if she'd like to go over and walk by the water, where it was more private. He told her he had a present for her, which he so hoped she'd accept.

It was a solitaire one-carat diamond necklace on a platinum-and-gold braided chain.

Although he was now considered
an official hero, Inspector Devin Juhle was coming off a very bad time. Six months ago, he and his partner Shane Manning were on their way to talk to a witness in one of their investigations at two in the afternoon, when they'd picked up an emergency call from dispatch—a report that somebody was shooting up a homeless encampment under the Cesar Chavez Street freeway overpass. As it happened, they were six blocks away and were the first cops on the scene.

Manning was driving, and no sooner than he had pulled their unmarked city-issue Plymouth into the no-man's-land beneath the overpass, a man stepped out from behind a concrete pillar about sixty feet away and leveled a shotgun at the car.

“Down! Down!” Juhle had screamed as Manning was jamming into park, slamming on the brakes. One hand was unsnapping his holster and the other already on the door's handle, and Juhle ducked and hurled his body against the door, swinging it open and getting below the dash just as he heard the blast of the scattergun and the simultaneous explosion of the windshield above him, which covered him with pebbles of safety glass. Another shotgun blast, and then Juhle was out of the car on the asphalt, rolling, trying to get behind a tire for shelter.

“Shane!” he yelled for his partner. “Shane!”

Nothing.

Peering under the car's chassis—he remembered all of it as one picture, though the images were in different directions, so it couldn't have been—he saw two bodies down on the ground by a cardboard structure and behind them a half dozen or so people crouched in the lee of one of the concrete buttresses that supported the overpass, penned in so they couldn't escape. At the same time, the man with the gun had retreated behind the pillar again. To the extent that Juhle was thinking at all and not just reacting, he thought the killer was reloading. But it was his only chance to get an angle and save himself and maybe these other people as well.

He bolted for the low stump of a tree that sat in the middle of the asphalt. It shouldn't have been there—Caltrans should have uprooted the thing before they poured, but they hadn't. Now there it was and he'd reach it if he could. Running low, then diving and rolling, he got to it in two or three seconds, enough time for the shooter, who had come out in the open again to fire his next round, which pocked into the stump in front of him and sprayed him with wood chips and pulp.

Juhle, on his stomach and with the side of his face and body pressed flat to the ground, knew that the stump didn't give him six inches of clearance and that the man was advancing now, sensing his advantage. He was still probably sixty or seventy feet away—and coming on fast. Once he got to forty feet or so, the shooter's height would give him the angle he needed. The next shotgun blast and Juhle would be history.

There wasn't any time for thought. Juhle rolled a full rotation, extended his gun gripped in both hands out in front of him, drew a bead, and squeezed off two shots. The man stumbled, crumbled, dropped like a bag of cement, and did not move.

Juhle called out for his partner again and again got no reply. Still in a daze, his adrenaline surging, he eventually got to his feet, his gun never leaving the downed man. In half steps, he warily crab-walked sideways toward him, with his gun extended across his body in a two-handed stance. When he got to his target, he saw that he had made the luckiest shot of his life. One bullet had hit the man between the eyes.

Which should have been the end of it. After all, Juhle had six witnesses to everything. Manning was dead, killed by the first blast. The car was a shot-up mess. It was clearly self-defense at the very least and heroism by any standard.

But not necessarily.

Not in San Francisco, where every police shooting is suspect. One of the homeless in the encampment, a highly intoxicated diagnosed schizophrenic, insisted that police had run up to the deceased and executed him for no reason. The fact that he claimed there had been five such officers and that he maintained that the man had not had a shotgun—in spite of Manning's death by shotgun blast—didn't even slow down the right-minded public nuisances of the antipolice crowd.

Beyond that, Juhle's shot was so perfect that it led Byron Diehl, one of the city's supervisors, to opine that perhaps the killing had, in fact, been an overreaction by an overzealous and enraged cop. Perhaps it had, in point of fact, been an execution. Nobody could hit a moving man with a pistol between the eyes at fifty or sixty feet. That just wasn't a possible shot. The man with the gun might have already surrendered, laid his gun down, and Juhle—out of control because of the murder of his partner—had walked up and shot him point-blank.

The other witnesses? Please. Most of them wanted the shooter dead, anyway. Plus, they were naturally afraid of the police. If Juhle told them they'd better back up his story or else, they'd say anything he wanted. They were simply unreliable and their testimonies worthless. Except for the schizophrenic, of course, who was struggling with his substance abuse issues. The idiocy was so palpable that it may have been fun to watch but not to be part of.

So Juhle spent the next three months on administrative leave, under the shadow of a murder charge. He testified four times before different city and police commissions, not including a formal session defending his actions and confronting Diehl in the chamber of the board of supervisors. He was asked to demonstrate his prowess with a handgun on various police ranges in San Francisco, Alameda, and San Mateo counties, where they had pop-up targets that demanded speed as well as accuracy.

Finally, a couple of months ago, he'd been cleared of any wrongdoing. Returning to his place in homicide, though—Manning was of course gone forever—he found himself newly partnered with an obviously political hire, Gumqui Shiu, whose ten-year career didn't seem to have included much real police work. He'd been an instructor at the Academy, worked in the photo lab, and been assigned to various other details, where his progress had been rapid but unmarked by any real accomplishment. He clearly had juice somewhere, but nobody seemed to know where it came from.

This morning,
Juhle was at his desk. Insult to injury, he still had his right arm in the sling from arthroscopic rotator cuff surgery—three little holes. His doctor had told him it was an in-and-out-in-the-same-day procedure, little more than an office visit. He'd be pitching Little League practice again in no time.

Not.

Like he ever wanted to do that again, anyway. Little League was pretty much the reason he'd thrown out the damn arm in the first place, letting his macho devils con him into a little
mano a mano
with Doug Malinoff—perfect baseball name—the manager of Devin's son Eric's team, the Hornets. Doug was a good guy, really, if maybe slightly more competitive than your typical major-leaguer during the playoffs, talking Assistant Coach Devin into playing a game of “burnout” for the enjoyment of the kids. Give them a taste of what it's like to
really
want to win.

Burnout's a simple game for simple adults and preadolescent boys: You throw a baseball as hard as you can starting from, say, sixty feet. You use regular gloves, no extra-padded catcher's mitts allowed, and you move a step closer after each round. First one to give up loses. Devin was no slouch as an athlete, having played baseball through college. He still had a pretty good gun of an arm. Nevertheless, he gave up, conceding defeat, after seven rounds, his opponent nearly knocking him down on his last throw from thirty-five feet. Malinoff had played shortstop in minor-league ball, made it to double-A. He could throw a baseball through a plywood fence.

Juhle caught the sixth toss not in the webbing but in the palm of the mitt. He never mentioned to a living soul and never would that on top of ruining his shoulder through his own stupidity on that cold and misty March day, he also allowed Malinoff's major-league fastball to break two bones in his
catching hand
.

Since then, Juhle had been having confidence issues. He found it hard to convince himself that he was among the most brilliant homicide inspectors on the planet when at the same time he considered himself a certified idiot for going at it with Malinoff.

It was Tuesday morning, May 31, nine fifteen. June, just a day away, is synonymous with fog in San Francisco, and today Juhle couldn't see the elevated freeway sixty yards to his left out the window. Awaiting the arrival of his partner, he was at his desk in the crowded, cramped, and yet wide-open room without interior walls that was the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco's Hall of Justice. He was sipping his third cup of coffee this morning, his right arm and still untreated opposite hand—damned if he was going to let anybody know—both throbbing in spite of six hundred milligrams of Motrin every four hours for the past ten days. He turned to the second page of the transcription of a witness's testimony in one of his cases that he was checking against the tape and suddenly took off his headphones, stood up, made his way past the shoulder-high, battered green-and-gray metal files that served as room dividers, and stopped at the door of his lieutenant, Marcel Lanier, who looked up from his own paperwork.

“What's up, Dev?”

“We gotta do something about the quality of people they hire, Marcel.”

Lanier, only fifty-some and yet still a hundred years with the department, scratched around his mouth. “That's a song I've been singing for years. What kind of people this time?”

For an answer, Juhle handed him the printout he'd been reading. “You'll see it,” he said.

Five seconds into his reading, Lanier barked out a one-note toneless laugh, then read aloud. “‘And what is your relationship with Ms. Dorset?'”

Juhle nodded. “That's it. You don't see a relationship like that every day.”

“He was her power mower?”

“Must have been, since it's right there in black and white.”

“Her power mower?”

“Yeah, except maybe instead of
power mower
, what he actually said was that he was her ‘paramour.'” Juhle leaned against the doorpost. “And this is, like, mistake ten on one page, Marcel, not counting the big chunks that she has marked ‘unintelligible' on the transcript, but that
I
can hear perfectly on the tape. Do they give an IQ test before we start paying these people? Of course, I've got to correct the transcript, anyway, but now it's going to take me two days instead of an hour. It'd be quicker to write the whole goddamn thing out in longhand.”

Shiu floated up behind Juhle into the space left in the doorway. “What's going to take two days?”

Lanier ignored both the arrival and the question. His phone rang and he picked it up. “Homicide, Lanier.” Frowning, suddenly all serious, he pulled over his yellow pad and started jotting. “Okay, got it. We're moving.” Looking up at his two inspectors, he said into the phone, “Juhle and Shiu.” When he hung up, there was no sign that he'd ever laughed or thought anything in the world had been funny ever. “Either of you already signed out on a car?”

The inspectors shared a glance. “No, sir. Paperwork day,” Juhle said.

“Not anymore it isn't. Grab a ride in a black and white downstairs,” he said, “and have 'em light it up out to Clay at”—he shot a quick look at his notes—“Lyon. Don't pass go, guys. I'll get word to the techs. I want a presence there yesterday. Somebody just killed a federal judge.”

Jeannette Palmer had made
the call to 911 at precisely a quarter to nine, her voice high-pitched and panicked, saying that her husband was dead, that somebody had shot him. Since Pacific Heights is a high-income neighborhood, emergency response tends to be prompt. In this case, a patrol car had been cruising within a couple of blocks down in Cow Hollow and was at the scene within two minutes. An ambulance arrived one minute later.

Jeannette was standing in the door—dressed, wringing her hands, crying—to meet the cops and guide them to the judge's office, a large room in the left-hand front of the house, with bay windows and thousands of books. This was where Jeannette had found her husband and a young woman she'd never seen before, both of them on the floor behind his desk, and where the responding officers then directed the med techs in the ambulance, who took one quick look and then left the bodies undisturbed. Both had been cold to the touch.

Juhle and Shiu, as ordered, got to the scene in fifteen minutes in a patrol car with lights and sirens clearing the traffic for them. Even so, a news van from Channel 4 had obviously picked up the dispatch and was already parked in the street out front, a harbinger of what was sure to be the full-scale media circus to follow. A knot of people—neighbors, probably—stood over by the van, chatting away with backstory. The good news was that there were already three other patrol cars at the premises, the officers out of the cars in uniform, securing the scene, denying access.

Juhle wasn't a native San Franciscan, but he'd moved up from the Peninsula for college at San Francisco State and had stayed. He had always loved Clay Street, especially this stretch of it. The gas lamp–style antique streetlights. The elegant gingerbread houses were set back a civilized distance from the sidewalk, usually with a low wall or discreet fence marking the property boundary. And then the landscaping, each house as though it were watching over its own small private park—no bigger than an average front lawn in suburbia—making a totally different statement about taste, urban life, civility.