Act of Deceit

Chapter 6

The dull glaze of the owner’s eyes didn’t sharpen after Donnally spoke the name: Charles Brown.

Lumps of skin oozed from the sleeves of the flowered shift encasing her body. The smell of coffee and urine wafted past her from inside the East Oakland group home and swirled around the porch. Cigarette butts littered the concrete landing of the three-story converted house. Two vacant-eyed men with nicotine-stained fingers sat in white plastic chairs and stared at the street, oblivious to the tension building in the doorway.

Elsa Coady squinted toward the setting sun, then repeated: “Charles Brown… Charles Brown…”

“The Fresno Developmental Center sent him here six years ago.”

Her difficulty in placing the name assured Donnally that the prosecutor, busy putting together a task force to identify and hunt down all the lost defendants, hadn’t yet sent out a posse to round up Brown.

And that was fine with Donnally. He didn’t want to give Blaine a chance to screw it up again.

She shrugged her shoulders. “He’s not here. He walked away.” She glanced at the two men as if they were living repositories of the history of the house. “About five years ago.”

“Didn’t you notify anyone?”

“Who’s there to notify? If he’s the one I’m thinking of, there wasn’t nobody. He wasn’t on no probation or parole.”

“Didn’t you know he still had a homicide case pending?”

Elsa’s blotchy face darkened.

“This isn’t a jail and I’m not a jailer.” Her voice hardened as she spoke. “A roof over their heads, three meals, and their meds. That’s all we do. People want to walk away, they can walk away.”

The two sentences had a practiced feel, sounding to Donnally like she’d given that same answer many times before.

“You still have his file?”

“Sure. We have to keep that stuff. But I can’t show it to you.” A smirk emerged on her thin lips. “Confidentiality and all that.”

Donnally folded his arms across his chest, then lowered his head and looked hard into her eyes.

“Let me tell you what my concern is,” Donnally said. “In a couple of days, the press will be looking for someone to blame for Brown slipping away. It can be the court system, some weak-kneed judge, the county, the California mental health system, the Fresno Developmental Center, or it can be Elsa’s Home for Men.”

He made a show of inspecting the weathered wooden windows, the cracked and faded pink stucco, and the two men wearing grimy surplus overcoats that looked like they hadn’t been washed since summer.

“Who do you think all these folks are going to gang up on? You’re damn lucky I got here first.”

Elsa bit her cheek for a moment, and then said, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”