Donnally cast her a puzzled look.

“Federal Criminal Justice Act. Indigent defense. Sheldon never had a paying client until he came out here.”

“What kind of weaseling led him to need eighty thousand dollars all of a sudden?”

Jackson shrugged. “I told you. I ain’t a snitch.”

Donnally anticipated the dodge and had his answer prepared. As he readied himself to give it, he wondered whether it had been Jackson who’d left the “Follow the Money” note in the envelope under his doormat, a way of snitching without being seen to snitch.

Donnally backed off the idea of pressuring her; instead he said, “Then point me in the right direction so I can find out myself.”

She paused, then aimed her finger down the street in the direction from which they’d come.

“Go see Warren Bohr. His office is in the Frederickson Building. He put some money in, so he must know why.”

Donnally recognized the name. Bohr had been a defense lawyer who represented Black Panthers and other radical political groups in the sixties, then criminal defendants in big drug and racketeering cases in the seventies and eighties, and finally migrated into public interest law after he grew wealthy enough that he didn’t need the money. The last time Donnally had heard his name was before he’d left San Francisco, when Bohr had filed a suit to stop the federal government from leasing part of Alcatraz Island to the Marriott corporation to build a hotel. But that was fifteen years ago.

Donnally glanced at his watch. It was 8:25.

“What time does he get in?”

“You know how these old guys are. In at 7 A.M., and tell everyone they meet that they’ve never missed a day of work in the gazillion years they’ve been practicing.” She gestured with her cup toward Bohr’s office. “He’ll be there.”

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.”

Chapter 16

Old-people smell. That’s what it was called. Donnally recognized it at first breath when he entered Warren Bohr’s reception area. It was the background odor of nearly every elderly suicide he’d ever investigated.

It wasn’t just the dust on the desk and in the built-in bookcases, or the grime worn into the marble floor, or the months of legal newspapers stacked on the low table in front of the leather couch.

It was something else.

It was what it meant: the kind of cognitive impairment that always seemed to go with it. That had been the first sign that his grandmother was heading toward Alzheimer’s, what the doctors called impaired odor recognition.

Bohr must have heard the door open, for he appeared at his inner office door.

“Can I help you?” Bohr asked, looking up from under eyebrows lowered by his hunched back.

Donnally recognized the middle-aged lawyer under the smudge and tarnish of old age. His wool suit draped his thinned body, his once angular nose had softened, his ears drooped like overgrown botanical specimens, and his once black hair had turned fungus yellow-gray.

“I hope so.” Donnally crossed the room and shook his hand, saying, “I’m Harlan Donnally; Judge McMullin appointed me special master in the Hamlin case.”

“I didn’t expect someone would be coming by so soon.”

“So soon?”

“You couldn’t have run out of leads this fast, that you needed to start shaking the bushes to see what falls out.”

Donnally pointed through the door and toward Bohr’s desk. “Can we?”

Bohr nodded and led him inside his wood-paneled office. Donnally waited until Bohr shuffled his way around to his high-back chair, then sat down facing him. Hanging on the wall behind the lawyer were photos of him with former mayors George Moscone and Willie Brown, Harvey Milk, César Chávez, Carol Doda, and Eldridge Cleaver.