The Painted Gun by Bradley Spinelli

Author:Bradley Spinelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2017-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

19

I woke up around noon, feeling more hungover than if I’d actually been hungover. I made some coffee, casually pacing the kitchen as I waited for it to brew, not quite awake and only gently, almost blithely aware that I was being watched. How banal, how boring. How many such empty, everyday moments had been recorded—just me, alone in my house; my quiet, uncompelling life. I stirred sugar into my coffee and was irritated by a bit of crust in the corner of my eye. High drama in the Crane household. I went into the bathroom and threw some water on my face, and it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks.

My alibi.

I ran down to the Schoolhouse Deli and called the Chronicle.

“Give me Thomas Grange.” Horrible hold muzak, an anxious pause.

“Tom Grange.”

“Tom, you on deadline? It’s David Crane.”

“Itchy, wow, this is a blast from the past. I got a minute. How are you?”

“I’ve been better. Listen, I need a favor.”

“Big or small?”

“Just some info.”

“Shoot.”

“I need you to check the archives for any unsolved homicides close to these dates . . . you ready?”

“Go.”

“January 1, 1996, November 15, 1996, and August 18, 1997.” The dates from the three paintings.

“Anything in particular I should be looking for?”

“Nope. Yes or no: were there any homicides in the Bay Area on these dates.”

“Easy. Give me ten.”

Tom was a good guy, honest, and not a drunk. One of the few people I knew from the paper who wasn’t a complete scumbag. Gay, basically married, two dogs. I paced and smoked a couple and called him back.

“Yeah, David, you’re right on the money. Let’s see, New Year’s Day, ’96 . . . looks like just before two a.m. Alberto Martiartu, fifty-two, became the first murder victim of 1996. He was shot in the head in the hallway of the Dudley Apartments at 172 6th Street . . . Says he was a Cuban immigrant with twenty-one aliases. Still unsolved. And just this past August . . . Lucius Rodgers, twenty-four, was shot at 8:55 a.m. in the driveway of his home . . . as he sat in his parked pickup in East Oakland listening to music, police said. No suspects, no motive. And this other one you have to remember: November 15, 1996. A BMW hit a hydrant at Steiner and Post streets. The driver was dead with a bullet in his back.”

I felt a cold shiver. “Really.”

“Yeah. Defense attorney Dennis Natali. Remember? They found all these connections between him and—what was the guy’s name? Here it is, Vietnamese gang boss Cuong Tran.”

I did remember. Natali was good friends with the DA, Terence Hallinan, and divided his time between attending high-class political fundraisers and defending alleged gangsters. Tran was big-time in the Tenderloin.

“That was a strange situation,” Tom said. “They were killed within minutes of each other. Says here cops found a phone number on Natali’s pager that led them to suspects in the Tran killing. And Natali had represented one of Tran’s codefendants in an earlier beef.

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