A Criminal Defense

Chapter 44

Donnally left the city just before noon by way of the Golden Gate Bridge, heading north through Marin County on the Redwood Highway toward the Russian River. With “Proud Mary” playing in his head, he realized that what Lemmie had seen as merely juvenile-Hamlin and Hancock getting stoned and singing and pounding the table-was worse, it was corrupt and cynical. In their minds, “rolling” referred not only to smoking pot, but to snitching one client on another. It was nothing less than a celebration of betrayal.

He knew he’d be going back to Mission Street. He knew that soon enough he’d pull up in front of Camacho’s taqueria, get out of his car, look up and down the sidewalk, and head toward the entrance-

Just. . not. . yet.

The Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit to coastal Highway 1 rose up like a suppressed temptation, and not just because a longer trip up along the ocean to the mouth of the river then inland to Guerneville would delay his return to Mission Street. But because he hated the outlet malls and car dealerships that were filling in the land between San Rafael and Novato, and between Novato and Petaluma, and between Petaluma and Rohnert Park, and between Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa. Driving past them was like walking down the aisle of an Eddie Bauer outlet store filled with people buying clothes they didn’t need and pretending to themselves they’d go places where they’d never go. Or maybe it was like a dollar store, the oppression of too much stuff overwhelming the necessities of life.

A minute later, the urge to cut off the highway had faded and he was shooting north past where redwoods used to be. And a few minutes after that, the Marin County Civic Center appeared on his right. He remembered driving there soon after he completed the police academy to pick up a suspect, wondering where else but in Marin did people hire an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright to design a jail. But then San Francisco built one that looked like a European art museum, undulating like a wave that seemed to wash the jail out of jailed.

An hour later, Donnally slipped off the freeway onto the Old Redwood Highway, turned west on River Road, and headed toward the bookstore owned by Ryvver’s mothers.

Donnally felt a tingle in his fingers and a bump up in his heart rate when he got his first glimpse of the Russian River, wide like a lake and blue like a lagoon except where sunlight painted yellow and gold on the moving surface. He knew that people fishing for steelhead were working the riffles and holes downriver, maybe one now stood waist-deep in waders near the sand and gravel spit where he’d caught his first one, each turn and run by the fish, each pump of the rod shooting adrenaline through his body. It was that moment, more than any other, that fated him to someday move north to Mount Shasta where redwoods still grew and close to where steelhead and salmon still ran. That someday had come a lot sooner than he’d expected, but he’d made it nonetheless.

River Road turned into Guerneville’s Main Street, a few mostly one-story commercial blocks north of the river that was just inside the far border of quaint and that had become too gay even for Ramon Navarro. He’d once told Donnally that anyplace referred to as a playground wasn’t for him.

As Donnally stepped down from his truck in front of Mothers’ Books amp; Cafe, a blue-facade Tudor storefront, he wished he wasn’t wearing cowboy boots. He should’ve checked with Navarro about local politics, whether the leather-soles-in-cow-shit locals from the dairy farms in the foothills were still at war with the Vibram-never-leave-the-sidewalk outsiders.

At least in Guerneville, unlike San Francisco’s Mission District, he didn’t have to worry about finding himself in anything worse than a verbal crossfire as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

A tinkling bell announced his arrival as he pushed open the door.

He’d checked the bookstore Web site before he left Hamlin’s office, so he recognized Scoville Mother Number One behind the drinks counter in the cafe half of the store. She was a little shorter and a little wider than her picture, but was wearing the same wire-rimmed glasses and a similar tan work shirt with the business name stenciled in brown on the front. He walked up, ordered a decaf coffee, and asked if he could talk to her.

“About what?”

Only loud enough for her to hear, Donnally said, “Ryvver,” and then tilted his head toward the end of the counter, ten feet beyond the tattooed teenage boy working the espresso machine.

Mother One bit her lip, anxious and uncertain, then came around and walked with him to a corner table at the back of the cafe. She folded up a local newspaper and slid it aside as they sat down.

“Aren’t you supposed to show me a badge or something,” Mother One said, then flicked her thumb toward the entrance. “And aren’t there supposed to be two of you?”

“I’m an ex-cop, so my badge wouldn’t mean anything,” Donnally said. “And I was never very good at pairing up.”

She glanced at his left hand. “No ring.”

Donnally got the feeling that she was in no hurry to talk about her daughter.

“Never married.”

She smiled. “I never would’ve guessed.”

Donnally smiled back. “You?”

“That’s kind of hard to say at the moment.” Her smile faded. “I’ve got a ring and a certificate, but there’s three levels of appeals courts between us and the promised land. Once they tell me what the law is, I’ll know whether I’m married or-”

“Or just civilly united?”

Mother One shrugged. “I guess you could say it’s mostly civil.”

Donnally saw an inadvertent opening.

“Does the uncivil part have anything to do with Ryvver?”

Her eyes widened as she saw herself being pushed into the gap.

“How come you want to know?”

“I was appointed special master in the murder of a lawyer in San Francisco.”

“Mark Hamlin. I read about it.”

Donnally nodded. “I’ve been trying to get in contact with people-”

“Suspects?”

“Ryvver isn’t a suspect,” Donnally said, and finished the sentence in his mind: At least in the murder of Mark Hamlin.

“Then why. .”

“She had an argument with Frank Lange the night before he died and I think Hamlin and Lange were in the middle of something together.”

“They were in the middle of something together for decades. They shared what they called the Lost Years.” Mother One paused, then the tinkling bell drew her attention to the door. She watched an old couple walk hand-in-hand up to the counter. He thought he saw envy in her fixed gaze. She blinked and looked back at Donnally, then leaned forward and folded her arms on the table.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Mother One said. “Ryvver didn’t kill Frank Lange.”

“I didn’t accuse her of-”

“Close enough. It would be called patricide.”

Donnally drew back. “Lange was her father?”

Mother One nodded. “From the days before artificial insemination, or at least before lesbians got access to it.”

She gave a shudder from which Donnally understood that he was supposed to assume her act of intercourse with Frank Lange in order to conceive Ryvver was the most distasteful thing she’d ever done.

Donnally decided to display that he did, and said, “I hope she appreciated your sacrifice.”

Mother One took in a long breath, then exhaled, “Not always. But it wasn’t exactly my sacrifice, it was my partner’s.”

Donnally understood that Mother One’s sacrifice was pacing a living room floor while Mother Two had sex with Lange. He wondered how they decided who’d be the one to spread her legs under him. Maybe they picked straws or maybe they just measured their levels of revulsion on some kind of scale, like a noise meter. Or maybe they just got high and flipped a coin, each praying to the Her Who Art in Heaven as it spun in the air.

Donnally also wondered how Ryvver’s life could ever have seemed normal when it began with what the mothers considered to have been an original sin against their nature.

“How’d you pick Frank?” Donnally asked.

“He was the best of a narrow range of options and he wasn’t yet the fat asshole he turned into.”

Mother One sighed as though saying, If I only knew then what I know now.

“Do you know why Ryvver was upset with Frank?”

“In general or in particular?”

“Start with the particular.”

“There are too many possibilities. Mostly father-daughter possibilities, or maybe I should say the sort-of-father-sort-of-daughter possibilities.”

“Then how about start with the general, non-sort-of-father-daughter type.”

Mother One gazed around the restaurant with a how-did-I-get-here expression, then said, “She didn’t have a whole lot of contact with Frank growing up. Just a week or two during the summers. That changed after college, what she did of it. It was only after she started working for him that she got a good look, and she didn’t like what she saw.”

“What had she expected to find?”

“You ever see Frank on television or read in the newspaper the kinds of things he said?”

“I don’t remember seeing him at all or reading any quotes from him.”

“You’d think he was the guarantor of the U.S. Constitution, sounding like Earl Warren. Equal justice and all that shit.” A bitter laugh burst from her mouth. “He used to call himself The Equalizer. Almost sued the production company when that TV show came on in the late 1980s using that same name. But the fact was he was a louse. A fucking louse. He was a dirty-dealing, money grubbing Un-Equalizer. We kept our mouths shut and never poisoned her thinking about him, but that’s what he turned into.”

“Turned into from what?”

She thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. We might’ve been wrong about him right from the beginning, and just didn’t see it.”

“And do you think there’s a connection between the general and the particular that got her fighting with him?”

“All I know is that a friend of hers committed suicide in prison. She went racing down to see Frank right after she found out about it. I got the feeling she’d tried to get Frank to help him just after he got arrested and while she was working for Frank, but he refused.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“We called him Little Bud.” She waved her hand in a high arc behind her, as though beyond the confines of the cafe. “He had a marijuana grow up in the hills. For decades. Lived like a sharecropper in a shack above it. Helluva view of the river from up there. No electricity. No television. No radio. Just a wood stove for cooking and a gas lamp for reading. Ryvver used to spend hours up there with him.”

She paused and her eyes and face took on a kind of longing.

“Little Bud was like an older brother to her and she loved him in that way. I mean really loved him. He did for her what the meds could never do, what we could never do. Calm the racing thoughts and anchor her back into the world-then he got busted. Thirty fucking years in prison.”

She glanced toward the book section of the store, and a hard edge entered her voice. “From Call of the Wild to The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“He must’ve had a hillside of plants to get that much time.”

Mother One spread her hands like she was making a plea at a sentencing. “It was just pot, and he gave almost all of it away to medical marijuana clubs he thought were legit. And him being five-two and a hundred and twenty pounds and stuck in the federal pen with real crooks and heavy-duty gangsters. .” Her voice trailed off.

“And he couldn’t take looking at the rest of his life caged up.”

“Hung himself after two months.”

“Why didn’t he cooperate? Give them someone else. Isn’t that how the game is played in federal court?”

“Somebody had to be the last domino, and he decided it would be him. The DEA wanted everyone he sold to or gave away stuff to and everyone he knew who had grows going and everything about what they did with their money. Especially that.” She looked through the front window. Donnally followed her eyes toward a real estate office across the street. “They really, really wanted the real estate brokers who structured deals so the growers could turn their cash into land and houses. But he refused to do it.”

“I’m not sure what Frank could’ve done to help him,” Donnally said. “Some cases can’t be beat. And if Little Bud was living right on the property he grew the pot on, I don’t see what kind of defense he could’ve cooked up.”

Donnally then had a thought. Maybe Mother One was looking at this thing backward. Maybe Ryvver was angry because Lange hadn’t been willing to play the Un-Equalizer and play dirty on Little Bud’s behalf. Maybe pull a John Gordon routine on whoever the government’s witness was or maybe find somebody to take the fall in exchange for money like the formerly brain-tumored Bennie Madison had claimed. A guy like Lange could come up with lots of angles.

But Donnally didn’t transform that thought into speech. Instead, he asked, “And you think she blamed Frank?”

“I don’t know. This is all theory, anyway. She hasn’t been back up here to tell us about it.”

“You have any idea where she went?”

“Nope. And she hasn’t been answering her cell phone since two days before Frank died.” She shuddered again. “I can imagine what she’s going through. She was devastated by Little Bud’s death, and she was a fragile person to begin with.” She half smiled. “How two dykes like us ended up with a daughter who wouldn’t pick flowers as a kid for fear of causing the plant pain, I’ll never know.”

Donnally reached into his pants pocket for a pen and tore off a piece of paper from his notepad. He wrote down his cell number and handed it to her.

The bell tinkled again. Mother One looked over. “Shit.”

Mother Two moved like a subatomic particle. One instant she was standing at the door, the next she was leaning over the table.

“I can tell a fucking cop when I see one.”

Her face burned with outrage and her fists were hard by her sides.

Mother Two glared down at Mother One. “Why are you talking to this guy?”

It wasn’t a question.

Then to Donnally, “What do you want from us?”

This one was a question, and he answered it.

“I’m trying to get in contact with Ryvver.”

Mother Two’s palm shot out toward him in a straight arm that stopped inches from his face.

“Not through us, you won’t.”