A Criminal Defense

Chapter 15

Donnally headed back up the sidewalk toward the Frederickson Building. Every cop in town knew the place, a three-story Victorian composed of tiny offices filled with aging sole practitioners. Most were so lousy at law that their mortgage payments depended on indigent defense cases, state and federal court appointments, for clients either without the money, or without the sense to borrow the money, to hire someone competent.

Donnally hated their pretense. The court-appointed attorneys swaggered around the courthouses like they had real paying customers. In the end, nearly all their clients pled out. The defendants were unwilling to risk trials with appointed help, and the DAs and federal prosecutors were willing to cut deals just to clear the calendar. The attorney who managed the Frederickson Building set the tone for the rest. Donnally had heard him praised by prosecutors as a clown with great client control, and they were willing to put up with his clowning because he never failed to find a way to make his client cave.

There were exceptions, good defense lawyers who were bad at self-marketing or who were committed to defending the poor, but most of the appointed lawyers were less advocates than fixers.

The whole game of deal cutting had pissed off Donnally and the other cops in the department, at least with respect to the cases they cared about, because some victims needed their day in court, needed to have their suffering seen, not reduced to a penal code section entered on a form and passed from judge to clerk to file and then consigned into the dark eternity of a storage room.

Donnally suspected that were it not for Hamlin lifting him up, if only to use him as a tool, Sheldon Galen would have spent his career as one of those Frederickson Building lawyers. And Galen had to know and dread that Hamlin might someday decide he was done with him and drop him back onto the pile.

As Donnally approached the edge of the financial district, he wondered why Bohr still had his office in there. Bohr had to feel like the odd man out since he couldn’t have much in common with the hand-to-mouth lawyers that worked out of the place. He wondered whether Bohr stayed there because he liked knowing he was the guy all the others wanted to be when they were young, and maybe having him around made them feel like they had made it. Maybe he was an artifact, or a totem, from a time when law was a mission in San Francisco, instead of the chiseling it too often revealed itself to be.

On the other hand, maybe he was still there only because he had always been there, like a backyard tree stump that was just too much trouble to haul away.

Donnally paused at the bottom of the front steps and called Navarro.

“You find out anything about whether there was any kind of problem between Hamlin and Sheldon Galen?”

“Not between them. Only between Galen and an old client that threatened to sue him. But it settled before the papers got filed, so I couldn’t find out the details. His client was charged with beating up a security guard who wouldn’t let him take his dog into a bank. Galen lost the trial. Maybe the guy wanted his money back. His name was Fisher except with a C, Tink Fischer. I’ll text you an address when I come up with one.”

Donnally heard the sound of papers rustling through the fine static on the line.

“We got a few more latents off the money,” Navarro said. “I’ll have the results later this morning. But no guarantee that we’ll be able to ID them.”

Donnally then told Navarro about the note telling him to follow the money and the slashed tire warning him to leave.

Navarro laughed. “Maybe somebody’s telling you to follow the money all the way out of town.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Donnally said. “You were always good at putting one and one together.”

“I’ll make sure it’s not two and two. I’ll have the beat cops do drive-bys for the next few days, see if they can snag whoever he is, or at least scare him away.”