Lion Plays Rough (19 page)

Chapter 24

I sat at my desk and turned on my computer with the relief of a drunk in sight of home and free to collapse. This was an illusion, of course. There was still a rogue ex-cop out there who wanted to kill me, and a woman who wanted Teddy, who was dependent on me, to marry her brain-damaged daughter-in-law. My desk was heaped with files, my inbox choked with e-mails, the message indicator on my phone blinking a staccato pulse. Yet here at least a semblance of control was possible: all it took was sitting at my desk until the work was done.

I kept the door closed. I didn't want to be disturbed. I went through the cases one by one, checking the court's orders against my calendar, making sure that all the dates were noted correctly. Then I wrote brief memos to file, summarizing the status of the case, what had been done and what remained, the investigation that needed to be conducted, the names of witnesses, holes that I'd previously spotted in the DA's evidence.

I was tired of criminal law. Lord, was I tired of it. Was it too much to ask to be able to sleep at night, safe in my bed and secure in my conscience?

Before Jeanie left she knocked on my door. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Let's talk. Tomorrow. Tonight I'm too pooped.”

“I'm going to pull a late night, but I should be here by eight thirty, tops.”

She seemed about to give me some warning, then just nodded and went out, pulling the door closed even though I was the last one left in the office.

She was going to get rid of me, I figured. I didn't blame her and I didn't blame myself. I'd done what I'd had to do, what it seemed to me was my duty toward my clients. It was just that death had stayed one step ahead.

~ ~ ~

By midnight I had the cases in a state where another lawyer could easily take them over if Jeanie decided to fire me, if Lucas succeeded in killing me, or if I decided that it was time to walk away and start over, buy a motorcycle and take a trip down through Mexico and South America like I used to fantasize about. Or maybe do it on a bicycle, see how it felt to be in the kind of shape where you can pedal all day and not be tired, eat two dinners, rise in the morning, and do it again.

I'd given up work and was looking on Craigslist for a used motorcycle, plotting the route I would take down through Baja California. I had my feet up on the desk and I was drinking a beer from the office fridge. The ringing of my phone broke a silence that seemed to have gone on longer than I'd lived.

I was surprised to hear Car's voice. “I thought you didn't go into the office anymore,” he said. “I called your place, but Teddy said you were out.”

“You know about motorcycles?”

“You thinking about buying one?”

“Maybe.”

“Funny thing. A man seriously considers buying a bike, then doesn't go through with it, he won't ever again be the man he was before the idea came into his head. It diminishes a person to think about himself on a motorcycle and then say no. Afterward he'll always have that question in the back of his mind, that what if. It's like corrosion on the soul.”

“You got a bike?”

“I don't need to put a thing like that between my legs to prove I'm a man.”

“So it's damned if I do, damned if I don't.”

“I'm just saying, if you don't feel masculine enough, motorcycle's a pretty good purchase.”

“Why you calling me, Car?”

“Little update on what we talked about the other night.”

“Talk to Teddy about Teddy. It's none of my business where he lives.”

“The other thing. Your little problem. I had another talk with my guy in the Oakland PD. He called me, actually. Seems there's an addendum to that dirty laundry he wasn't supposed to be airing. So I twist his arm again, and he tells me that your friend Sgt. Perry hasn't shown up for her shifts the last three days. They sent someone to her house. She wasn't there. Official line is she's taking an unscheduled leave, but if she comes back they're going to fire her ass.”

“
If
she comes back?”

“Let's just say that he expressed a certain skepticism of the official line.”

“Shit.” I remembered the pictures of Nikki Matson. The thought of Lavinia having been dealt with in similar fashion was unbearable.

“You think something happened to her?” Car asked.

“Yeah. Don't you?”

“She was into something, and Campbell was into her. Isn't that what you think? So now she's gone.
Adios
. Down to Mexico.”

“Find her,” I said. “Can't you find her? Can you do that?”

“I don't know if I can. I don't know if I even would want to.”

“You want to,” I told him. “Otherwise you wouldn't have called.”

“I want to get paid, is what I want. How do I get paid on this? There's no case.”

“When I get paid you get paid.”

“You need a case to get paid. There's no case. Where's the client?”

“Jeremy was gunned down in cold blood to keep him from telling anyone he saw Lucas orchestrating an assault by a bunch of thugs in broad daylight on a drug dealer's house. How's that for a case?”

“What, like a civil case?” The spirit seemed to drain from his voice.

“Sure. Wrongful death. Civil rights.” Why go on defending criminals, I thought, when I could make a contingency fee working for the truth rather than against it. “She's definitely a witness. Call it our precomplaint investigation.”

“You got a client for this complaint you're going to file?”

“I got my dead client's mother. And Jeremy's widow. You find Sgt. Perry, we meet with her, get her to talk to us, convince her to give us a statement.”

“I get paid up front.”

“Then don't take the job. You've got your pick. You don't have to work for me.”

A pause. “I'll put a couple of hours into it. If I don't find her, I don't find her. I'm not going to spend a whole week on this. Someone like her, a cop, she ought to know how to stay hidden. And if she doesn't, well, I'm not going to lie to you. There's probably someone out there who wants to find her more than me.”

“You'll find her.”

Chapter 25

With Jeremy's handwritten statement in hand, I decided that I finally had enough information to merit an approach to Campbell. In the morning I called the police department and left a message on his voice mail, telling him I wanted to speak with him regarding Jeremy Walker. “I'm mystified,” he said when he called me back. “Unless you're calling to talk about Nikki Matson, I don't think we've got any business.”

“Kristofferson showed me the pictures,” I said. “The person who cut Nikki up would have come out of there with so much blood on him you'd have found it behind his ears. He's probably still got it on him.”

“Then I guess we don't have business.”

“Jeremy Walker was my client. I know Chris Lucas killed him, and I think I can help you prove it. Just hear me out; that's all I'm asking.”

Campbell paused so long that I thought he'd hung up. Finally he said, “I'll be at your office in five minutes. We'll drive.”

I was waiting on the curb. Campbell leaned across to open the passenger door but didn't say anything. I had no proof he was an honest cop, as Peabo had said, but I got in beside him. For all I knew, Campbell might have killed Nikki. I'd come to think there must be an innocent explanation for his meetings with Damon, or at least one that didn't involve a conspiracy to frame Jamil and have him murdered in jail. Still, I wouldn't have bet my life on it.

We didn't speak for a minute as he worked his way through traffic. Then Campbell seemed to choose his words carefully. “So do you know something connecting Chris Lucas and Jeremy Walker or is that just a shot in the dark?”

“Not as much as the U.S. attorney knows. What about you?”

“Oh, I know Chris real well.”

“When I was in jail I met a guy who knew you. Guy by the name of Peabo. One of Damon's men. He seemed to think you were just about the last honest cop in Oakland. And that got me thinking maybe we've both been fooled.”

“My wife asked you to take those pictures, didn't she?”

“She told me she was Jamil Robinson's sister, and you and Damon were trying to frame him for murder. Then I got a call from someone pretending to be Jamil. I figure that was Lucas.”

He sighed. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Week and a half ago. I went out and found her during one of her evening shifts with the vice squad. The next day, she came by my place. We drove to the Berkeley Pier, had a chat.”

Campbell was heading up into the hills where he'd met Damon, where I'd taken the pictures. He drove without glancing around and wasn't interested, it seemed, in the proof I'd discovered, supposedly the point of our conversation. If I were wrong about him, if he were dirty, I'd find out soon enough. If that moment came, I needed to be ready.

I didn't actually know that the feds were investigating Lucas, whom I'd never met. Maybe I'd been right the first time, and the meeting I'd photographed was precisely what I and the city's white power structure had assumed, a criminal conspiracy. Maybe Campbell was some rogue cop trying to seize control of the city's drug trade. Every fact I'd discovered certainly fit that conclusion.

If so, the only way to save myself was to dive out of the car, roll, and come up running.

Campbell turned into the lot beneath the trees and parked. There were no other cars. “Let's walk. You go ahead of me. Up the trail. You know the way.”

“What are you going to do? Shoot me in the back?” I tried to make it a joke—but it didn't come out that way.

“I need some air; that's all. Need to exercise my legs. I got to think how to play this, and when I think, I got to move. And until I've thought this through I'm not letting you out of sight.”

I went up the trail ahead of him. Despite Jeremy's connection to Campbell's wife, and her connection to Lucas's scheme, Campbell hadn't removed himself from the investigation. Maybe he didn't trust anyone else to care about murdered drug dealers and police corruption, or maybe he wanted to leave a way out for Lavinia and for himself. Again I had the sense of a man pulled in conflicting directions by unwholesome pressures, destined to snap in the direction of whatever force yanked the strongest.

After ten minutes of steady climbing we came out onto the ridge trail. “That view,” Campbell said.

I wasn't interested in the view.

“Now why don't you tell me what you were so eager to tell me,” he proposed.

“It wasn't about money, not at the beginning,” I said, still breathing hard from the climb, sweating in the warm sun, feeling that everything depended on showing him that I understood his intentions. “Not for you. It was about sharing information, letting Damon's crew do what the police couldn't do because of people like me, lawyers looking over your shoulders.”

He stood facing me, a few feet of trail between us, surrounded by the silence of the wind and the birds in the trees. “You're gunning to bring me down.”

I shook my head. “Then someone decided that the cops who tipped off Damon's crew should share the take. Lucas was probably the one who came up with the idea of putting the drugs back on the street. By then you were out. And ever since then you've been trying to stop them.”

“You seem to have all the answers. Doesn't sound like you've got proof.”

“I've got this statement Jeremy Walker wrote.” I took out a photocopy of what I'd found. After reading it he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket.

“I suppose you told someone you were meeting me.”

I felt another wave of fear so palpable that he must have seen it. “You're no killer.”

His nostril twitched. “People surprise themselves. And others.”

“I know that you're not completely clean in all this, but I also know you got out before it became mercenary.”

“You said you last saw my wife a week and a half ago. That's a lie. I'm not a violent man but I swear by god I'm not a cop right now.” He enunciated each word separately. “Tell me where she is.”

“If I knew I would tell you.”

He studied me. “No, I don't think you would. But I could make you tell me. I know the ways, Leo. I could leave you without a scratch on you, not a bruise. Or if it went too far, I could make sure they never find you. I could put you in a place you'd never get out of. Last weekend was just a taste.”

Fear clawed at me. My collar was damp, my eyes misted. I knew by the look in his eyes that he was right, that he could make me tell anything, make me say anything. “She used me, but that doesn't mean she trusted me. She could be running. Either with Lucas, or from him. Or from the police.”

“Do you even know that she's alive?”

“My investigator's looking for her.”

“And what then, if he finds her?”

“I want to try to bring her in, sit her down, get a statement. Lucas ought to pay for Jeremy's murder. The city ought to pay. But even if I didn't represent the family, I've got to find this guy. Because sooner or later he's going to come after me.”

“That's right,” Campbell said. “You're the man who knew too much.”

He stood poised for—something. I could almost believe that he might have murdered Nikki and tried to kill me, except I couldn't imagine him using a knife.

Then his limbs loosened, and the crisis passed, and he moved to a bench beside the trail and sat down on it. He looked exhausted, as if he'd aged thirty years since I'd last seen him here. “They found her car a block and a half from her condo, not in a place where she'd ever park it. Like someone left it there.”

“Which one, the Bronco?”

“She's only got the one car.” He looked up at me.

“When I met her she was driving a blue Pontiac convertible.” I explained how she'd knocked me off the road—deliberately, it seemed.

“Where did she get the money for a car like that?”

I didn't say anything. The answer was obvious: she'd gotten it from Lucas, and Damon, and the scores they made.

Campbell rose without another word and started back down the trail almost at a run. I hesitated, remembering my fear of him a moment before. Now he seemed to have forgotten me, but I followed him. When I arrived breathless at the base of the trail he was already in his car. I got in on the passenger side. He flicked the computer screen. “There we go. Blue Pontiac, impounded three days ago in San Francisco.”

He snapped the laptop shut. The tires spat gravel as he cranked the wheel and pressed the gas. “Three days,” he said, keeping up a hard beat on the wheel with the side of his fist. “Three goddamn days.”

His skill on the downhills made me think that he couldn't have been the driver who followed me the night of Nikki's death. He treated the freeway like a private course, curving around other cars as if they were motionless, breezing through the express lane onto the Bay Bridge, the city seeming to rise to meet us. The impound lot was down under the 101 next to the Hall of Justice, where Teddy had won verdict after verdict in his prime.

Campbell badged the overweight cop at the gate and gave him the description of the car. After searching through a printout he pointed Campbell toward the far end of the lot.

When we got out I found the scratch my bike pedal had made on the side of the Pontiac's hood. Campbell peered through the windows, but there was nothing to see, the interior shaded by the freeway above us. He went to the trunk and pulled out a flashlight and a slim-jim, took a quick look around, then slipped the tool between the window and the doorframe and popped the lock.

I'd noticed the odor when we first got out of the car. I'd written it off to the location under the freeway or the usual city smells of sewers and garbage cans, but it wasn't that. When the door opened, the foul air, a sickening sweet stink of rotting food with an overtone of rust, made me take a step back.

“Blood,” Campbell said, shining a light on the driver's seat, which was covered with darkish stains. He wiped the seat with a tissue. It came away dry. But these stains were not the source of the smell. Campbell reached down and popped the trunk.

I remembered a story about a body going undiscovered in a van in this same impound lot for months. The stink wafted forward to meet us as we went back on either side of the car. I felt a retch bubbling up, and hysteria mixed with the deepest dread. Not another one, I thought. Not Lavinia. It took me a second to see that the trunk was empty.

The absence of a body hardly mattered. The contents were there. Black blood was congealed on the carpet, coating the underside of the lid as if sprayed there, gumming up the lock, giving off a stink like rotten meat.

Campbell stepped back. “Oh my lord,” he said. “Oh, baby.” He looked away, then raised the flashlight and clicked it on. The beam picked out an object in the mess. I recognized the little nickel-plated revolver. He went back to his car for rubber gloves and fished it out. “It's been fired,” he said. “Only once.”

I caught the implication. No little twenty-two had made a mess like this. Whatever'd been done to the person whose blood was in that trunk, it'd been done with a knife.

Campbell started to tuck the gun away into an evidence bag, then stopped himself and tossed it back into the ghastly recesses, slammed the trunk, and wadded the evidence bag and the rubber gloves away.

We got back in his car, Campbell breathing erratically. “We don't know that's her blood,” I began, but he cut me off.

“Don't fuck with me. Same person who did Nikki did that.”

I hesitated. “I hear Lucas used to carry a knife.”

He drove back to the gate and rolled down his window. “You got an inventory form on that car?” he asked the cop at the shack. “Doors are locked.”

“Doesn't look like they've searched it,” the man told him after consulting his paperwork.

“Well, don't bother. There's nothing in it. It's been picked clean. It's not the car I was looking for. Thanks anyway.”

He turned onto Bryant, driving without urgency and seemingly without destination. He turned, then turned again, stopped. “I've got to get out of this car,” he wheezed. “Need to breathe.”

He left the car double-parked.

Again, after a hesitation, I followed him. He stalked up South Park Street, a tree-lined enclave in that postindustrial neighborhood. Stopping at a bench, he grabbed the back of it and bent like a jogger stretching, spat on the ground between his feet, then retched. Nothing came. He spat again, the sweat glistening on his face.

“I knew it was going to happen,” he said, breathing like he'd just sprinted here from the impound yard. “It had to end this way.”

I just stood there beside him, able to offer nothing, feeling responsible, wanting to be away from him, to be home, to put it all behind me—except I couldn't. Lucas was still out there, and I might be next on his list.

“It's my fault,” he finally said, looking up at me with haunted eyes. “It was my idea, using Damon and his business. I used to call him up and say, we got so-and-so at this location, but he ain't breaking no laws that
we
can see. Drug dealers. I'd make a call like that, and he'd go in all military and take what there was to be took.”

He paused, spat again, still breathing hard, like an engine racing after an accident.

“I'm the one who brought Lucas in. Score had to keep getting bigger every time. Got so Lucas would have Damon hit the dealers rather than make the arrest, even when he could make a righteous bust. And if Lucas thought any of Damon's crew was holding out, well, he could always arrange a month or two in Santa Rita.”

“And by then Lavinia had left you for him.”

He spat on the ground between his feet again. I came around to stand on the other side of the bench.

“You have to promise me that you'll call me first if you find him,” he said, looking up, his gaze made of clear, hard anger. “You don't call the police. You call me. I want to be the one who brings him in.”