He pointed down at Galen. “If you want to tell me something, just call. Don’t slash my tire and leave a note on my windshield.”

Chapter 23

Donnally went alone to try to interview David Burger at the Alameda County jail, a block of brown cement along the freeway near downtown Oakland. He hoped to ascertain whether there was a connection between Hamlin’s murder and his visit to the garage crime scene.

On the one hand, he recognized it could be argued that with Hamlin dead, Burger was unrepresented, so there was no bar to law enforcement contacting him.

On the other hand, it was too much of a gray area to risk involving Detective Navarro, and he figured that his going in as a special master might make the contact light enough gray that he wouldn’t get too much grief from a judge later.

Burger was already sitting at the table in the interview room by the time Donnally cleared security.

Mid-forties. Mid-height. Mid-weight. Mid-smirk.

Burger folded his tattooed arms across his chest after Donnally sat down, and said, “Special master, huh?” It was as if he’d singsonged the words “birthday boy.” “Make you feel important?”

“It wasn’t a job I wanted.”

“What’s it got to do with me? I didn’t kill him.” He spread his hands to encompass the jail. “I’ve got the best alibi anybody can have. Nobody’s ever escaped from this place. And if I had, I wouldn’t have broken back inside. I’d be in the wind.”

“It’s not about you, directly. It’s about Sanders’s people. I was told by an attorney who was close to Hamlin that they were threatening him.”

“They been threatening me, too. Don’t mean nothing. They’ll get over it.”

“But why Hamlin? They think he tampered with the crime scene?”

Burger forced a smile. “How could he have done that? Far as I know, him and his private investigator didn’t get in there until two days after the cops cleared out.”

“Which private investigator?”

“Dan something or Van something. I’m not sure. He’s from SF. Has an office downtown.”

“What did Hamlin do in there?”

“Took some photos and measurements, investigation shit like that.”

“No.” Donnally leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “I don’t mean then. I mean after you killed Sanders and before you called the police.”

Donnally watched Burger’s body tense, but his eyes showed no change.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw the surveillance tape from the gas station across the street. Shows everything.”

“Hamlin didn’t touch nothing. Sanders was tweaking and came at me with a wrench. One punch, that’s all I hit him with. No reason to screw with anything.”

“Then what was Hamlin doing in there?”

“We was talking. I needed to know whether to turn myself in or try to . . . uh . . .”

“Try to pin it on somebody else?”

“No need to go that way,” Burger said. “Hamlin figured I could beat the case. I’d just have to do some pretrial time in here ’cause bail would be set too high for me to make. But not too much time. We figured on not waiving my speedy trial rights. We were gonna just jam the case and get it over in a couple of months.”

“Then why didn’t Hamlin wait for the police?”

“He thought it would look bad in the press. Me calling him first, instead of 911.” Burger grinned. “Him and me are notorious guys.”

Donnally decided he’d gotten as much as he was going to get and that he’d keep the door open for a return visit by not challenging Burger with the obvious. Maybe Sanders had still been alive and a quick call to 911 could’ve saved him. But instead of doing that, Burger had called his lawyer.

Donnally buzzed for the jailer, who escorted him back to the lobby. He called Navarro as he was heading toward the Bay Bridge.

“Stay on that side,” Navarro said. “Meet me out at the Sixty-fifth Avenue Village. I’ve got a lead on Sanders’s wife and brother.”

Donnally made a U-turn through the toll plaza parking lot and headed east, first along the port and then out to the flatland avenues. He parked his truck in the housing project visitors’ area and then waited for Navarro, who pulled up ten minutes later. After Donnally got into Navarro’s car, they headed farther east.

When they neared the Seventies, Donnally said, “This was Freeman’s old turf, wasn’t it?”

Donnally could still remember the flash and swagger of the now-deceased Randy Freeman, a legendary East Oakland drug dealer. His name had come up in a homicide Donnally had worked on early in his career, but Freeman was insulated from the heat because the lieutenant who handled the contract had been snuffed out in retaliation a day afterward. Donnally last saw Freeman coming out of Esther’s Orbit Room in what was called Harlem West when Basie and Coltrane played there, but became Ghost Town when players like Freeman showed up. He was climbing into a black Range Rover with gold rims and Vogue tires and bulletproof glass, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” throbbing the sheet metal and blasting louder than the BART train passing on the tracks above. Freeman was later convicted in federal court of racketeering. Eleven months into his fifteen-year sentence, he decided to try to work off some time by rolling on his lawyers.

Donnally remembered all this now because one of those lawyers was Mark Hamlin.

Freeman contacted the U.S. Attorney who had prosecuted him and told him that despite a court order freezing all his assets, he’d paid Hamlin’s fee in the form of a 1956 Mercedes Gullwing. Freeman later testified that a week after the order was issued, his father-in-law had taken Hamlin to where the car was hidden in the Central Valley and gave him the keys. The U.S. Attorney produced a catalog displaying the car up for auction at the Dubai Classic Car Show three years after Freeman’s conviction, its sales history made untraceable by a series of offshore transactions.

The case became a credibility contest, and the weight of Freeman and his father-in-law’s felony histories tipped the scale in Hamlin’s favor. No one in the legal community knew whether Hamlin did it, but most agreed it was the kind of thing he would do if he had the chance. In the end, and as always, the hearings were less about facts of what happened and more about evidence and the rules of evidence, and about what would stand up on appeal.

Freeman was murdered six months after he finished his federal prison sentence and returned to Oakland. He fell to the sidewalk below the bulletproof driver’s side window of his Range Rover that had been hidden in storage while he served his sentence. For a couple of years afterward, any dope dealer shot down because he’d left himself vulnerable on the street was referred to as being on the wrong side of the glass.

Navarro pointed toward Discount Liquors as they passed Seventy-ninth Avenue.

“He got it right there,” Navarro said. “Turns out the drug dealers running East Oakland when he got out of the joint hadn’t learned to respect their elders. The turf was theirs and they weren’t about to give it back to an old man.”

Drug dealers aged like professional athletes. Forty-five years old was ancient.

Navarro turned off International Boulevard onto the rutted Eighty-third Avenue, more of an alley than a street, then drove past ratty-clapboard and cracked-stucco houses for two blocks before pulling to a stop over an oil-slicked patch of pavement.

A generic, tattooed biker type was reclining in a ripped Barcalounger and drinking a beer on the porch of the gray bungalow where the murdered Ed Sanders had lived. An early 1970s Ford truck sat on blocks in the driveway next to a 1990s Chevy Camaro. A black Harley-Davidson stood on the hard-packed dirt yard.