Act of Deceit

Chapter 65

But Albert Hale wasn’t running.

Donnally found him wrapped in a wool blanket, sitting on the veranda of his Hillsborough mansion. He was gazing out at the cloistered garden, the high walls on either side covered by avalanches of vines and the far end cushioned by a private forest of oaks and eucalyptus. The Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on the old man’s face and neck made it seem that AIDS was pummeling him to death, not draining the life out of him.

“How’d you get in?” Hale asked, after turning toward the sound of Donnally’s footsteps behind him.

“Over the river and through the woods,” Donnally said, using a children’s rhyme to take a first jab at Hale. “How else?”

“Ah, yes.” Hale half smiled and then added a line, “Spring over the ground like a hunting hound.”

Donnally settled into a wrought-iron chair next to Hale’s, then studied his withered hands holding a china teacup in his lap, and his eyes that had sunk into their gray sockets. From those alone Donnally understood that there would be no justice for Anna Keenan or Charles Brown, or even Deputy Pipkins, whose body had yet to be found. Hale had chosen a slow suicide years earlier by making his life an experiment in pathology.

Hale gazed at Donnally as if into a mirror.

“As you can see,” Hale said, “you’re too late. The cosmos has exacted its punishment. My HIV finally mutated into forms far outside what the drugs were designed to control.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, then Hale set his cup on the table and reached for a silver bell.

Donnally grabbed his arm. “Don’t even think it.”

Hale laughed. “You need to relax. I merely thought you’d like some tea.”

Donnally released his grip, then pulled aside his jacket, exposing his semiautomatic in a shoulder holster.

“You think I have goons lounging in my billiard room,” Hale said, “waiting for the call to charge out here, guns blazing?”

“Your guns were blazing last week.”

“Sherwyn was behind that. He still had something to fear.”

“What about you?”

“Dead men don’t have that problem.”

Hale reached again for the bell.

This time, Donnally didn’t stop him.

“H ow did you figure out it was me?” Hale asked after the butler had delivered Donnally’s tea.

“The law firm representing Sherwyn inadvertently let on that there was someone behind him. It was in their phrasing. They said that they’d been hired on behalf of Sherwyn, not by Sherwyn himself.”

“And you sensed an invisible hand.”

“It dipped in, just like it did in the Brown case. But I couldn’t figure out why it never seemed to form itself into a fist.”

Hale extended his manicured fingers and examined them like they were instruments that had an additional use he hadn’t considered.

Donnally swung past the unconvincing gesture. “Until Sherwyn told me.”

Hale smirked at Donnally. “That’s something that Sherwyn certainly would not do.”

“The kids at White Sands referred to El Mandamas,” Donnally said, “The Man with the Last Word, and a woman in Cancun talked about a wealthy man behind Sherwyn, and he confirmed it was you.”

“That kind of confirmation is useless. A dead witness is no witness at all.”

“There are witnesses. Some older Mexican boys who’d seen you down there years ago identified your photo, and Melvin Watson recognized this house as the one Sherwyn took him to.”

Hale took a sip of tea. Donnally left his untouched.

“Having parties in my own home was a mistake,” Hale said, “but I realized that too late.”

Hale’s eyes blurred as he gazed out at the garden as if he wasn’t seeing the reality in front of him, but was reliving a distant memory, populated by beautiful boys on summer evenings.

“The men who came here. You would be surprised.” Hale again looked at Donnally. “Maybe not you. I knew even then that it was a risk. Maybe that was part of the thrill. Eventually the balance shifted, and it seemed too dangerous.”

“What changed?”

“One of our members was nominated to a high government position.” Hale smiled as if enjoying a private joke, then said, “One might say that he became one of the knights at the round table. Fortunately the FBI was too busy chasing terrorists to delve too deeply into his past.”

“And that’s why you set up White Sands in Mexico.”

“Of course. The problem is that sometimes the past is like a seeping wound that won’t heal. Like Charles Brown.”

“Why didn’t you cauterize it and get rid of him?” Donnally asked. “Put an end to this when he was released from the Fresno Developmental Center?”

“You seem to think we are cold-blooded murderers. We’re not.”

“What could be more cold-blooded than the murder of Anna Keenan?”

“That was an act of desperation.” Hale smiled. “I think Sherwyn surprised himself.” He took another sip of tea. “You showing up threw a monkey wrench into things, but then we figured that we couldn’t lose whether he got convicted or the case got thrown out on a technicality. Either way, the world would be convinced he killed her. The important thing was to make sure that the case never went to trial.”

“And that’s why the Albert Hale Foundation interceded and bought him the best defense money could buy.”

“Exactly.” Hale then dismissed the entire issue with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, that’s all behind us now. The statute of limitations has run on everything I did and there’s no way to connect me to the murder.”

“What about public exposure?”

Hale snorted. “How terribly provincial. The hundred-million-dollar endowment of the Albert Hale Foundation will mitigate the minor inconvenience of some temporary bad press.”

He turned toward Donnally. “Did you see The Pianist? I’m sure it must have played even in your little Mount Shasta.”

Donnally pulled back. “You’re not deluded enough to compare yourself to a Holocaust victim?”

“Not to the Jew, but to the director. Roman Polanski. He plea-bargained away charges that he drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl, and then escaped to France before sentencing. A few years later he received a standing ovation from the Hollywood crowd, probably including your father, when he was awarded the Oscar for Best Director. You see, the world is forgiving of those with enormous amounts of talent or money, and I neither drugged nor raped anyone. At worst I will be viewed as flawed, perhaps even weak, but not evil. And I can live with that.”

“You mean die with that.”

“That’s implied, but until that happens I have time to spread my largesse around.”

Donnally thought of the criminals who’d redeemed themselves in the public mind through power or artistic brilliance or payoffs to charity.

Hale paused in thought for a few moments, then asked, “Do you know the Goya etchings from the eighteenth century? I’m thinking of the one in which a woman averts her eyes in shame as she reaches to yank out the teeth of a hanged man because of their supposed magical power.”

Donnally nodded.

“Expose me, if you will,” Hale said, “but charities will soon become the alchemists of my rehabilitation. My penance will be their profit, and they’ll find some way to justify it.”

Hale gazed toward the rear of the property, his eyes pausing in the direction of his Labrador lying under a tree, now illuminated by the setting sun. The dog opened its eyes for a moment, blinked into the light, and then closed them again.

“And remember,” Hale finally said. “Exposure goes two ways. You think little Melvin and the boys want to have their secrets displayed to the world? Can you imagine the looks he’ll get from the parents of the kids at the college? They’ll all wonder why the church assigned Brother Fox to the student chicken coop. I’m not sure he wants to live with that kind of humiliation. And even if he was willing, the church wouldn’t let him.”

Hale rested his cup and saucer on his lap.

“In the end, it’s all about money, of which I have an enormous amount.” Hale spread his arms to encompass the gardens and mansion behind him. “The only heaven is on earth, at least for those that can afford it. And my money is untouchable, should the boys sue me. Not only is it all under the control of the foundation, but the foundation itself is housed offshore. That way I can still control it. In this castle I’m immune, and from my throne I can distribute alms to those I choose, for the purposes I choose.”

“But you won’t be finishing out your days here, but in a hell on earth. A prison cell.”

“Are you intellectually deaf or just not listening?”

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Hale snorted again. “Anyone who could tie me to any of the murders is dead. At most you have a circumstantial case. I may be the man with the last word, but there’s no one alive who heard me speak it. The dead, my friend, are both deaf and mute. The most you could possibly have is hearsay.”

Donnally extracted his tape recorder from his jacket pocket and set it on the table between them. He left his gun exposed.

“A confession?” Hale smiled. “You expect me to confess? You’re insane.” Hale reached for the bell. “I think I’ve had enough of this.”

Donnally didn’t interfere. Instead he turned on the recorder. The voice was a whisper:

This is the dying declaration of William Sherwyn.

Hale’s eyes widened for just a second, then he looked at Donnally. “It doesn’t make any difference what he said. It’s all hearsay.”

“You should’ve studied up for a day like this,” Donnally said. “A dying declaration is the exception to the hearsay rule.”

El Mandamas is Albert Hale. He established White Sands.

Hale glanced over his shoulder at the sound of the door opening behind him. He grabbed the recorder and fumbled with it, jabbing at buttons.

I was present in Hale’s house when he gave Gregorio Cruz ten thousand dollars in cash and ordered him to kill Harlan Donnally.

Hale wrapped his hands around the device, muffling the sound, then thrust it toward Donnally.

“Turn this damn thing off.”

Donnally took it from him.

When Anna Keenan threatened to expose us, I had no choice but to-

Donnally pressed the “off” button.

The butler came to a stop next to Hale, who looked up and waved him away.

Hale waited until the butler was out of hearing range. His face was flushed and sweating.

“What do you want? A payoff? Is that what this is, extortion?”

“It would more properly be called blackmail,” Donnally said, smiling. “Extortion relies on a threat of violence. Blackmail on a threat of exposure or, in this case, of dying an excruciating death in a prison hospital.” Donnally paused for a moment. “It’s interesting. Sherwyn didn’t make that mistake. He called it by its correct name when I offered him what he thought was a chance to buy his way out.”

“So this was about money all along.” Hale forced a smirk, attempting to conceal his vulnerability behind a wall of sarcasm. “So that maybe you can buy a new stove for your little cafe? Perhaps add some outdoor seating? Maybe a mosquito zapper?”

“Actually, I’ve decided on a new career.”

Donnally extended his hands before him, mimicking Hale’s earlier examination of his manicured nails.

“I think I’ve flipped enough burgers for a while,” Donnally said. “I’m looking for something that would be more satisfying, something that will allow me to make a more substantial contribution to the world.”

Hale swallowed and licked his dry lips. “And that would be?”

Donnally reached into his jacket and pulled out a power of attorney and held it up so Hale could read the title.

“I’ve decided to become the head of what used to be called the Albert Hale Foundation.”

Hale shuddered as the implication of Donnally’s demand blasted through the brick and mortar of his psychological defenses.

“Don’t worry,” Donnally said, handing him the two-page document and a pen. “I won’t let you starve. I may even let you stay here.”

Hale accepted it. His body hunched as though he thought the mansion was about to collapse over him. His hands vibrated too hard for him to focus on the words.

“I’ll… I’ll need to have my lawyer look at this.”

“There are two problems with that,” Donnally said. “First, your lawyer is the one that drafted it. And second, if you hire another one, you better make it a specialist in criminal defense.”

Donnally pulled out his cell phone. He punched in a number, waited a few moments, then said, “This is Harlan Donnally, let me speak to Lieutenant Navarro.”

“Give me a minute,” Hale said, his face reddening around the crimson splotches of his disease. “You can’t expect…”

Donnally reached for the recorder and held it up to the phone.

Hale threw up his palm. “Stop.” He signed on the last page.

Donnally disconnected and took the pages back.

“You’ll never get away with this,” Hale said, intending the words to sound like a threat, but they came out like a whimper.

Donnally rose to his feet without answering, but before he could take a step, Hale reached out into the emptiness around him and asked, “What did you mean, ‘used to be called the Albert Hale Foundation’?”

Donnally displayed the power of attorney toward Hale.

“Read the fine print.”

Hale grabbed for it, but Donnally pulled it away. Hale bit on his knuckle as he skimmed down the text, then squinted at the last paragraph.

Donnally let him finish reading it, then turned toward the side gate leading to the driveway.

“Wait,” Hale said. “I still don’t understand. Who is Mauricio Quintero?”

Donnally stopped. Images of Mauricio clicked through his mind like falling dominoes, ending with the little man’s lifeless body in the Mount Shasta hospital, his sad brown face framed by the starched pillow, his handwritten confession lying in a drawer next to him.

Who Mauricio Quintero had been was the question that started Donnally on the trail that had brought him to this spot. And in understanding Anna’s life and death he’d found an answer, but it wasn’t one Hale had the right to hear, much less one he’d understand.

Donnally started walking toward the street and the declining sun that would soon abandon Hale to an empty twilight, and then said over his shoulder:

“Let’s just say he was a friend who asked me to deliver a letter.”

Note to the Reader

The idea for the story told in Act of Deceit arose out of a number of events.

In 1986 an individual I will identify as X walked into a furniture store in California and stabbed a clerk. He fled, leaving the broken blade in her body. X was arrested, charged with attempted murder, and sent for psychiatric treatment. After X completed counseling, the district attorney moved the Superior Court to dismiss the charges, which it did.

A year later he slashed his next-door neighbor to death.

On the motion of the public defender, X was sent under 1368 of the California Penal Code for an evaluation of his competence to stand trial for the homicide. He was found to be both mentally ill and developmentally disabled. He was returned to court a year later and was again found to be incompetent.

Since that time, no court has made a determination on whether X has recovered his competence to stand trial. Indeed, for more than a decade the Superior Court had not received a report of his mental condition. The most recent report I found in his court file concerned another defendant altogether.

This all came to light a couple of years ago when a friend of mine, who had spent his career working in the mental health field, reminded me of the concerns he had back in 1988 that X was pretending to be mentally ill, malingering, in order to avoid trial for the homicide. Indeed, the head psychiatrist at the out-patient facility that X was attending at the time of the crime had warned the staff prior to the murder that X was not mentally ill, but was a sociopath who was a danger to others at the facility.

My friend’s more general complaint was that since so many sociopaths claim mental illness to excuse their crimes, the public has come to believe that the mentally ill are more dangerous than everyone else. And this is not, in fact, the case.

After this conversation with my friend, I decided to find out what happened to X.

Because of medical and psychiatric confidentiality rules, this was not an easy task. The details of my investigation are unimportant, but in the end, I discovered that X was housed in a developmental center in a county far from the one in which he was arrested and being detained solely under a California civil code that allows developmentally disabled violent individuals to be held until a civil court determines that they no longer represent a danger to the community.

Based on information from those I interviewed in the course of looking for X, it seemed unlikely that X was developmentally disabled, since the symptoms first appeared, not when he was a child, but when he was in his twenties. And based on the fact of his transfer from a psychiatric to a developmental center, it was clear that state psychiatrists had already determined that the mental problems that had otherwise justified his detention had been resolved.

I interviewed X, who acknowledged to me that he had killed his neighbor. Although he referred to the crime as a “murder,” he offered a manslaughter defense: that he hadn’t taken his medications, that he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that he had “blacked out.”

More likely than not, he went to his neighbor’s house to rob her of money to buy drugs. A felony murder and a capital crime.

X also told me that he had been advised by his attorney on the morning of our conversation that there was a good chance that the civil court judge hearing his case on the following day would grant her motion to set a date for his release.

I made sure that didn’t happen.

At X’s next hearing, I understand, the positions taken by the state and by his attorney reversed: the state arguing for his release from the center and his return to the county of his arrest for trial, and his attorney arguing for his continued detention.

As of this writing, no court has yet been asked to rule on whether X is currently competent to stand trial. I don’t know whether he is or he isn’t, but the integrity of the justice system requires an answer.

It then crossed my mind: What if one of the many criminal defendants in civil detention around the country was, unlike X, factually innocent of the crime with which he or she was charged?

As always, when the innocent have been wrongly prosecuted, the guilty escape punishment.

This suggested the idea of using the civil commitment of a mentally ill but innocent person as part of a cover-up.

At the same time as I had these thoughts, my wife was engaged in one of her numerous investigations on behalf of victims of Catholic-priest child molestations. Many of her investigations required her to locate witnesses and documents relating to incidents that happened as long as forty years ago. In the course of her work, and with the help of Catholics disturbed by the church’s defensive and immoral response to the allegations, she was able to develop contemporaneous evidence of the crimes.

In a separate context, and unrelated to the molestation cases, I was asked to investigate whether, and to what extent, there existed corporate and financial links between the Vatican and the church’s operations in various countries. I learned that the Vatican had structured itself in a manner to insulate it from liability for acts committed in the church’s name and had employed banks and private bankers in the main money laundering and tax evasion centers around the world in an attempt to do so.

In a very few instances, the church has accepted responsibility for not turning the guilty over to the criminal courts for prosecution and for reassigning molesters from one parish to another.

In many cases, however, representatives of the church destroyed personnel records containing complaints of abuse and the names of the victims and witnesses; spent tens of millions of dollars on teams of lawyers (it once sent five law firms up against a single plaintiff’s lawyer, and still could not prevent an adverse judgment); attempted to mislead judges, juries, and the public about the facts of the cases; and while building in Northern California the most expensive cathedral in the nation at a cost of nearly two hundred million dollars, complained that the plaintiffs were financially ruining the church.

There were, of course, many more victims of abuse than have come forward. Some declined out of embarrassment, some because they didn’t want to have their suffering reduced to a matter of cash value, and some because they didn’t want their lives flayed open by church lawyers.

And until the church begins to treat the abuse of parishioners as a matter of moral inclusion, rather than of legal combat, and fulfills the duty of confession that it imposes on its members, the number of victims will never be counted and justice will never be done, either in the United States or abroad.

At the same time, the church has no monopoly on the abuse of children. In the course of my work, which took me to many parts of the world, I interviewed victims of sex trafficking-Thai, Chinese, Indian, Mexican-and met those who were complicit in their abuse-business leaders, parents, smugglers, government officials, police officers-and I wanted to display the roles of at least some of these coconspirators in this story.

In particular, I made Sherwyn a medical professional not only because I knew of a molested child who was again molested by the psychiatrist to whom he was sent for treatment, but also because, like doctors who keep prisoners healthy enough to be tortured, there are doctors, particularly in the Third World, who assist sex traffickers by keeping children healthy enough to be abused.

Acknowledgments

An investigator’s task ends when the facts have been discovered. A writer, on the other hand, can’t leave well enough alone. It was during my migration from one to the other that I conceived this novel.

Helping me in doing so were: fishing and environmental writer Seth Norman, a master of character and meander. Rick Monge, a master investigator and barbecuer. Bruce Kaplan, whose “What about…” has made me a better writer. David Agretelis, whose keen hands are as deft with an editorial pen as they are on the keys of a saxophone and the grapes on the vine. Denise Fleming, who understands that the first fifty pages are a lifetime. Melissa Buron, European Art Curatorial Assistant at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, for help in locating the particulars of Goya’s “Hunting for Teeth” in the Los Caprichos etching series.

Special thanks to my editor, Gabe Robinson, whose insights helped me weave together the sometimes disconnected threads of my story; to Pamela Spengler-Jaffe and Wendy Ho, who have done such a magnificent job of introducing my books to readers; to Eileen DeWald, who guides their production; and to Eleanor Mikucki, whose last, careful reading of the manuscripts has been invaluable.

Thanks also to those whose good selves, great work, and useful lives have brought light first to an investigator’s life, then to a writer’s, spent too long in the shadow of evil: Gail Monge, Margie Schmidt, Judy Barley, Gary Cox, Jean Rogers, Julie Quater, John Beuttler, Barbara Marinoff, and Kristi Bradford.

I borrowed from my mother-in-law, Alice Litov, her use of spreadsheets to keep track of elderly or homebound members of her church for whom she organizes visits.

As always, I borrowed from my wife, Liz, her good judgment.