A Criminal Defense by Steven Gore

you than the way your father thinks about the world.”
    Donnally felt himself tense. Every time Janie started down this kind of analytic road, his past washed over him like a flash flood, the storm triggered by the mention of his father. It made him feel like he’d spent too many years circling in an eddy.
    He’d become a cop as a form of rebellion, and he recognized it at the time. It had been against his filmmaker father, a man who treated fiction as more real than fact because it made possible the evasion from responsibility he’d sought for most of his life. For his father, justice had been no more than a kind of fictive irony, a subversion of cause and consequence, of effect and responsibility, because real-world justice would’ve meant facing up to what he’d done to his older son. Donnally’s older brother had believed the propaganda his father had created as a press officer in Saigon during the Vietnam War. His father had falsely claimed that North Vietnamese regulars had massacred a group of Buddhist monks near the DMZ, and the lie not only provoked worldwide outrage, but persuaded his brother to enlist. He learned the truth—that the killers had been Korean mercenaries working for the U.S.—just days before he was killed in an ambush.
    Years later, his father became a movie director, playing out his evasions on film, and liked to say that Hollywood wasn’t a place, but an idea, while Donnally had always thought of it as no more than a patch of concrete and viewed the motives of those who worked there as more base than artistic—and his father was proof of that. After all, what was post-Vietnam Hollywood, the years in which his father first achieved fame, but an escape from reality into drugs, sex, and money.
    Donnally pushed aside the memory and worked his way back to where their conversation had started, with Jackson and what had connected her to Mark Hamlin, where it began, how it grew, its character just before his death and whether it might have transformed afterward.
    â€œWhat you’re saying,” Donnally said, “is that I need to understand Jackson’s transition from victim of a police crime into . . .” He spread open his hands on the table. “Into what?”
    â€œSomeone whose identity was somehow tied to Hamlin’s ends-justifies-the-means mentality.”
    Donnally had the feeling Janie was right. That could be the reason why Jackson could be terrified of being prosecuted for the illegal means Hamlin had chosen, but could still be loyal to him.
    â€œEven though,” Donnally said, “whatever ends were hers over the twenty years she was with him may not have been his anymore when he died.”
    â€œBut I suspect that she doesn’t quite see it yet. And if you push her too hard, she’ll never let herself see it. It would be just too terrifying.”

Chapter 14
    T he note on Donnally’s windshield had read:
    We decided to flatten only one tire so you could use your spare to get yourself out of town. Next time . . .
    Donnally hadn’t noticed the listing right rear end of his truck when he walked out of the house and into the predawn shadows at 7 A.M. He felt a surge of anger as he examined the tire under the streetlight and realized that he’d overlooked a ground rule when he met with Judge McMullin. Who was going to pay for the damage.
    The note was still pinned under his wiper blade. Four thoughts came to him as he retrieved it.
    The first was that whoever left it probably wrote for a living. They didn’t split the infinitive and they knew how to use an ellipsis.
    The second was that he wished Hamlin’s friends and enemies would stop leaving notes.
    The third was that the absent words “Fuck you, asshole” meant that the author probably hadn’t been one of Hamlin’s clients.
    The fourth was that the “we” was really an “I.”
    Twenty minutes later,