Glee Club. The idea of a high-level conspiracy going back decades was fascinating but far-fetched. It was a stretch to think that there was a connection between Israel's death and Dupre's case.
The elevator doors opened. Amanda paused in the lobby. Connections--conspiracies were, by definition, acts of people working in concert. Sammy Cortez had told the police that the conspiracy between Pedro Aragon and the others went way back. Was there some connection between Aragon and Hayes that started before Hayes became a lawyer? Amanda walked outside and found herself in the shadow of the Multnomah County Public Library. An idea occurred to her. She crossed the street.
The library, which took up a city block, was Georgian in style, with a ground floor fronted by cool gray limestone, and upper stories of red brick. Amanda climbed the broad granite steps that led to the public entrance and went directly to the History Department on the third floor where she found the library index; row after row of low-tech, wooden drawers stuffed with musty index cards arranged by name, which gave citations to newspaper articles in which the individual on the card was mentioned. Amanda pulled out the drawer marked animals treatment and flipped through the cards until she found several for Pedro Aragon. She listed every newspaper-story reference on her yellow, lined legal pad, then did the same for Wendell Hayes. When she was finished, Amanda made a separate list of all of the stories that mentioned both men.
Periodicals were on the second floor. Amanda decided to work from the oldest stories forward, and the oldest reference was an Oregonian article from 1971. The newspaper stories from that far back were only on microfilm. Amanda found the appropriate roll. She fitted it on a spindle attached to a gray metal scanner and turned the dial. The microfilm raced across the screen fast enough to give her a headache, so she slowed it down. Eventually she reached the Metro section for January 17, 1971. At the bottom of a column was an update of a story about the investigation into a massacre that took place in December of 1970 in North Portland, in which Pedro Aragon was a suspect. The January story concerned the discovery of three handguns in a landfill on the outskirts of Portland. They had been positively identified as weapons used in the December shootout. The handguns had been traced to the home of Milton Hayes, a wealthy Portland lawyer and gun collector, who had reported the weapons stolen in a burglary that had been committed on the evening of the shootings. Buried in the story was an explanation of how the burglars had gained entry to Hayes's house. His son, Wendell, who was home from Georgetown University for the holidays, had forgotten to set the alarm when he left the house with several of his friends to attend a Christmas party.
Amanda found the microfilm spool for December 1970 and located the story about the drug-house massacre. Dead bodies had been found scattered around the first floor of an abandoned house. Most of the victims had been shot to death, but a man in the front hall had had his throat slashed. Traces of heroin had been discovered in several rooms. The police had been able to identify several of the victims as members of a black gang with Los Angeles connections, and the others as Latinos associated with Jesus Delgado, who was suspected of working for a Mexican drug cartel. One of the dead men, Clyde Hopkins, had ties to an organized crime family in Las Vegas. Pedro Aragon, a known associate of Delgado, had been arrested the day after the murders but had been released when the police could not break his alibi.
Could Hayes and Aragon have been involved in the drug-house massacre? Amanda had a hard time picturing a West Hills preppie wiping out armed druggies in a shootout in one of Portland's worst neighborhoods, but Hayes might have been at the house buying drugs, or he could have stolen his father's guns to trade for dope.
Amanda wondered who Hayes's buddies were in December of 1970. They were probably the friends he was with on the night his father's guns were stolen. It would be interesting to get the police reports and find out the names of the boys who were with Hayes when the B-and-E occurred.
Amanda took a break from viewing microfilm and found Wendell Hayes's obituary. Hayes had graduated from Portland Catholic in June of 1970, the same year as the drug-house massacre. He had attended college and law school at Georgetown University. Amanda asked the reference librarian where she could find the yearbook for Portland Catholic. She took it to a table and started leafing through the book.
Hayes had been the senior class vice president, and the president had been Harvey Grant. As she thumbed through the yearbook, Amanda found more familiar names. Burton Rommel and William Kerrigan, Tim's father, were teammates of Hayes on the football and wrestling teams. Amanda remembered that Grant was also a graduate of the law school at Georgetown, and she was pretty certain that he'd received his undergraduate degree from the school.
Amanda checked out the backgrounds of Burton Rommel and William Kerrigan. Neither had gone to Georgetown. Rommel had a BA from Notre Dame and Kerrigan had received degrees from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Amanda returned to the microfilm projector and threaded in another spool, which contained an early reference to Pedro Aragon. She was curious to learn how someone who started out running a drug house in Portland got to be the head of a cartel in Mexico. An hour later, Amanda had learned that Aragon's rapid rise had been made possible by a series of murders, which had started in 1972 with the assassination of Jesus Delgado, Pedro's immediate superior, in the parking lot of a Portland 7-Eleven.
Amanda spent more time going through stories that mentioned Pedro Aragon and Wendell Hayes, but the majority were accounts of cases in which Hayes had represented a client with connections to Aragon. She returned the microfilm and headed back to her office. Amanda had not really believed Sammy Cortez's story about The Vaughn Street Glee Club when she walked into the library, but one piece of information in the newspaper stories had really gotten her thinking: The drug house where the massacre took place was on Vaughn Street.
Chapter Thirty-Three.
Tim Kerrigan and Maria Lopez had been discussing trial strategy for an hour, and it was getting close to five o'clock. Kerrigan had his jacket off and his tie at half-mast. Lopez had slung her jacket over the back of a chair, and her hair was a mess because she kept running her hands through it.
'Jaffe filed a motion to keep evidence of the Travis murder out of the Hayes case,' Tim said. 'What do you think? Can we get evidence about Travis's murder in when we try Dupre for killing Hayes?'
'I'd concede the point,' Maria answered. 'Why risk a reversal? Hayes is an easy win. The trial should take less than a week, if you don't count jury selection. Our case will take a day, two at the most. If Jaffe defends with this self-defense bullshit, she could turn the trial into a circus, call all the reporters, do a demonstration with the metal detector at the desk in reception. But I still see it as a slam dunk. Once we have a conviction we can introduce it for impeachment if Dupre takes the stand when we try him for killing the senator.'
'Good thinking. But . . .'
The phone rang. Tim looked annoyed as he picked up the receiver. 'I'm in conference, Lucy. I don't want to be interrupted.'
