The Hunt Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

told him whom I’d assigned, and said that I thought that this was a case he might want to keep an eye on over the weekend, to follow its disposition.
    He thanked me for my responsibility in bringing this serious case to his attention and said that’s just what he’d do.

    Ms. Nunoz took Miguel home on Friday night. On that Sunday, he was again brought to the hospital, but this time with a concussion from which he did not recover. At the inquest, Dr. Turner testified that he had spoken to me and that I’d assured him that CPS would have someone out to the hospital within an hour, two at the most, but that no one from the department had arrived.
    In both of their individual testimonies, Cardoza and Freed admitted that I had given them the case, but that I’d put no particular emphasis on it. Certainly, I had put nothing in writing (and in my haste to get them moving, this at least was true). They’d even gone on another call first—they had the address and case number to prove it—and had arrived at the hospital long after Ms. Nunoz had gone home with her son. Believing that Dr. Turner would never have released the boy if he’d believed there to be danger, they had gone to their next call and left a follow-up note on the Nunozes for Monday morning.
    Wilson Mayhew, while I was sitting in front of him in the same small room at the disciplinary hearing, calmly and emphatically denied that I’d ever mentioned the case to him in any context whatsoever.

4 /(2001)
    When all the administrative hearings and appeals ended, the bottom line was that I could stay with the CPS if I accepted a formal letter of reprimand they wanted to include in my personnel file. There was nothing else even remotely negative in that file, and I’d done nothing wrong in the Nunoz case. No power on earth was going to get me to take any part of the hit for Mayhew’s betrayal and the incompetence and dishonesty of his protégés. I realized that the price for my refusal to accept the reprimand letter was my career at CPS.
    So be it.

    For ten years I’ve lived in a rent-controlled, barn-size warehouse south of Market, essentially in the shadow of the 101 Freeway. When I’d first moved in, it was empty space with a twenty-five-foot ceiling. I’d drywalled off and enclosed a little over a third of the three thousand square feet, and within that area, I’d put down industrial carpet and further subdivided it into three discrete units—a living room/kitchen, my bedroom, and the bathroom.
    Five months after I quit, I was on my futon reading the final pages of The Last Lion , the great second volume of Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill. When I finished, I put the book down and sat for a while, contemplating the life of the man about whom I’d just been reading. Brilliant military leader, mesmerizing public speaker, superb watercolorist, Nobel Prize–winning author, prime minister of England and—oh, yeah—savior of the Western world. His personal trials between the two world wars, when he was discredited and vilified by enemies and friends alike, put my setback with Mayhew and the CPS into some sort of perspective.
    Which isn’t to say I didn’t have some issues with rage. Mostly I’d been working those issues off by windsurfing for a couple of hours nearly every day down at Coyote Point. I was also in two men’s basketball leagues where elbows got thrown. I jogged the Embarcadero a lot. Plugged in my Strat and nearly blew the windows out of the warehouse. With Devin Juhle, several times a month, I’d stop by Jackson’s Arms in South City and shoot a few hundred 9 mm rounds at what I imagined to be Wilson Mayhew’s head. Amy Wu, a sympatico lawyer in town I’d met through CPS, was a good platonic drinking buddy with a light-handed knack for keeping in check my temper, always hair-trigger and worse since I’d quit work.
    But as I