Two Lost Boys E-Book

L. F. Robertson

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Janet Moodie has spent years as a death row appeals attorney. Over-worked, underpaid, and recently widowed, she's had her fill of hopeless cases, and is determined that this will be her last. Her client is Marion 'Andy' Hardy, convicted fifteen years ago along with his brother Emory of kidnapping, rape and murder of two prostitutes, but Janet discovers a series of errors made by his previous lawyers. Andy may well be guilty of something, but what?

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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Author’s Note

About the Author

TWO LOST BOYS

Also available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

Madman Walking (May 2018)

TWO LOST BOYS

L.F. ROBERTSON

TITAN BOOKS

Two Lost Boys Print edition ISBN: 9781785652783 E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652813

Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2017 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2017 by L.F. Robertson. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Richard, who made my quixotic career possible, and Michael, who helped me write about it.

1

California’s death penalty long ago entered the realm of the surreal. The courts keep handing down death sentences at the rate of twenty-five or so a year, but almost no one gets executed. For the most part, condemned men live out their lives on death row, represented by a small army of underpaid but persistent lawyers, while their appeals make some sort of halting progress through the court system.

I have been a foot soldier in that army for more years than I care to count. A dozen or so of the men on the Row had been clients of mine at one time or another. We have moved from youth to middle age together, and I have watched as their children grew up, their parents died, and they themselves grew ill with the diseases that afflict old men. Now, against my better judgment, I was about to add one more client to my tally.

2

San Quentin State Prison sits on a spit of land overlooking San Francisco Bay, at the end of a potholed road lined with million-dollar fishermen’s shacks. In Marin County, real estate with a water view costs a fortune, even at the gates of a prison.

I reached the visitors’ parking lot with a couple minutes left to rummage in my wallet for dollar bills for the vending machines. Armed with the few items the prison allows visitors to bring—dollar bills and change, a couple of pens, a legal pad, my driver’s license and bar card—I climbed the steep driveway to the long wooden building, something between a shed and a breezeway, where visitors wait to be checked in.

My new client was a man named, of all things, Andy Hardy. Andy was a nickname, an improvement, I suppose, on his real first name, Marion. Andy and his brother Emory had been convicted, about fifteen years ago, after kidnapping three prostitutes at different times over the course of a year or so. They had killed two, and the last one had escaped after two days of terror. Emory was serving life in prison without possibility of parole. Andy had gotten the death penalty. His conviction had been upheld on appeal, and he was beginning his next round of litigation, petitions for habeas corpus in the state Supreme Court and the federal district court.

Hardy’s newly appointed post-conviction lawyer, Jim Christie, had called—directed to me by an old colleague who probably didn’t know I’d sworn off death-penalty work—at a moment when I was feeling disenchanted with what I was doing instead. I’d just wasted a half-hour of my precious remaining years reading a Court of Appeal opinion affirming yet another conviction in a case I should have won—would have won, if my client had been a businessman getting sued, instead of a criminal serving life in prison for stealing a bottle of cheap brandy. I was feeling mired in futility and irritated with hack judges and assembly-line law. And I’d gotten a little bored with the lack of stress in my life. I was like a schizophrenic who goes off his meds out of disgust with the dullness of sanity. Listening to Jim tell me about the case, in his personable courtroom-lawyer baritone, I thought about working again where the stakes were high and felt a familiar little prickling of adrenalin. That in itself should have warned me. I asked Jim a few basic questions about time constraints, money arrangements, and whether the client was easy to get along with, and said yes before the end of the call.

Now, after a restless night and a three-hour drive to San Quentin, it didn’t seem like such a great idea.

This was one of the visiting days reserved for attorneys and investigators. Jim, who would be flying from Los Angeles and driving from the airport, had made our appointment with Mr. Hardy at eleven o’clock; I had decided to come earlier so that I could visit another inmate, a former client. The door to the room where visitors are—in the argot of the Department of Corrections—“processed” was inside the shed. No one else was waiting, and I rang the bell. A buzzer sounded, and a second later I heard the door lock release. I pushed it open and edged inside.

There is a different guard at the desk every time I go there. This one, a chunky man with a round pinkish face, short steel-gray hair and silver-rimmed glasses, looked me over indifferently, checking for violations of the endlessly changing rules for what visitors can wear and bring with them. The list of what a lawyer can bring into the prison is short—legal papers, notebook, pens, some money for the vending machines—and I had left my purse and cellphone in my car. I gave him my ID, took off my jacket, glasses, watch and shoes, and walked through the metal detector, while my belongings went through the X-ray machine beside me. Nothing set off any alarms, and the guard stamped my wrist with a smudge of fluorescent ink, returned my ID and a visiting form, and waved me through, saying, “Have a good one.”

“You too,” I answered, with a sense that we had contracted some sort of truce.

On the long walk to the visiting building, I could see more of the bay, sparkling blue with a few whitecaps, the hills of Marin, dark green after the winter rains, beyond it. At a second open gate I turned left, past the high arched entrance of the old prison and down a service road.

The old prison is a nineteenth-century fantasy of a castle, like something conceived by N.C. Wyeth or Arthur Rackham. The entrance to the main building is a portcullis of stucco shaped and painted to look like sandstone blocks and gated with heavy iron bars. Beside it, a red-brick building resembling a Victorian factory holds two visiting rooms; one for mainline inmates and the other for death row.

I waited on the porch of the visiting building, peering through yet another iron gate, painted gray, with a thick sheet of scratched Plexiglas bolted to its face. Eventually the door slid open with a painful scraping and clanging, and I sidled into a small foyer with another barred gate at its far end. I gave my ID and visitor pass to a guard waiting behind a barred glass screen with a slot at the bottom for passing papers. He glanced at them and pushed a button on a board in front of him. The outer gate closed, and the inner gate screeched and clanged open.

The visiting area was a long, narrow room with a gray vinyl floor, institutional pale beige walls, a couple of vending machines, and two rows of cages to my right. The bars of the cages were coated in chipped white paint and, like the outer gate, sheathed with walls of scratched-up Plexiglas, in a less-than-successful attempt at preventing conversations inside the cages from being overheard. It was a typical prison fix, jerry-built and done on the cheap, and about the best that could be said for it was that you had to keep quiet and listen a bit to hear what your neighbors were saying.

On the opposite wall, straight ahead of me, was a gray metal door. As I watched, the door opened, and with a clamor of voices and clanking keys, two guards emerged with a slightly bewildered-looking prisoner between them. After a brief exchange with another guard, they headed, awkwardly but purposefully, to the aisle between the two rows of cages.

I walked down the aisle after the procession, looking for an old client of mine who I’d arranged to meet, Henry Fontaine. Henry was sitting in one of the cages, and a Latino guard, chunky in a bulletproof vest, his green uniform clanking with chains and keys, was chatting with him through the Plexiglas. So much for the soundproofing. I nodded to the guard, and Henry, catching my eye, called out, “Hey, Miss Janet.”

“You want anything from the machines?” I asked.

“Sweet roll and a Dr. Pepper would be just fine.”

Henry was a former client, but he still wrote me now and again, and I sent him stamps and occasionally put a little money on his books and visited him about once a year to see how he was doing. He was fifty years old when, at the end of a bender, he had stabbed his landlady to death in an argument over his overdue rent. When the police checked out the crime scene, they found her open wallet lying outside her purse on the floor. This was enough for the district attorney to up the charge from second-degree murder to robbery-murder and seek the death penalty—why, I don’t know, since they have enough real capital crimes down in Riverside to keep them busy. Nevertheless, one thing led to another—Henry was black, he was on parole, he’d been in prison most of his adult life and he didn’t have many family members who still knew him well enough to say much of anything good about him—so he ended up on the Row.

It took five years to find him a lawyer for his appeal, and that turned out to be the state defender’s office I worked for at the time. It was another eight before his appeal was decided. Now, almost nineteen years down the line, he had yet another lawyer and his case was working its way through the federal courts. No one, including Henry, was inclined to hurry it along. Henry had a bathroom-sized cell on death row’s equivalent of the honor block, some buddies to play checkers with, and enough money from me and his federal lawyer for little things like toothpaste and candy bars.

I spent five minutes or so coaxing dollar bills and coins into the vending machines and walked back to the cages with a tray—soda and sweet roll for Henry and a Diet Coke for me. The guard let me into the cage, and Henry and I waited in silence as he locked the gate. Henry backed over to the door, and the guard opened a metal slot in the door, unlocked Henry’s handcuffs, and took them away.

“I always feel guilty getting this stuff for you,” I said after he left, putting the cinnamon roll in its plastic package down on the table.

“No need. I ain’t worried; when the Lord decides it’s time for me to go, I go.” He opened the soda can and took a long drink from it. “Cold soda, that’s so nice. Stuff we get from canteen is room temperature. So, how you been? Working hard?”

“Just the usual. How’ve you been?”

“Just gettin’ grayer and grayer. Doctor put me on some new heart medicine, but the nurse ain’t giving it to me.”

“Damn, not again!” I said. I promised to help his lawyer try to straighten it out, and we spent the rest of our hour and a half chatting about Henry’s ailments, his sister’s latest letter, and the joy he found in the Lord. When the guard came to take him back to his cell, Henry blessed me and said, “Come see me again soon. Maybe next time you can get me one of them ice-cream sandwiches from the machines.”

“It’s a deal,” I said.

A wise criminal defense attorney once warned me, “Never seek validation from your clients.” It’s good advice, because how your clients feel about you has very little to do with how well you represent them. I once won a case on appeal for a man who tried to fire me because I didn’t answer his letters as soon as he liked. It was a complete win—suppression of the drugs he was charged with possessing, and he walked out of prison a free man; I never heard a word from him after I mailed him the Court of Appeal opinion. Henry, on the other hand, liked me even though I hadn’t accomplished a damned thing for him, unless you count an unsuccessful appeal to the California Supreme Court as putting a few bumps on the track of the death train.

While I waited for the guards to fetch Andy Hardy, I made a trip to the restroom down the hall. As I was walking back toward the cages, a tall, light-haired man in a suit caught my eye and flagged me down. “Are you Janet Moodie?”

“Yep,” I said. “You’re Jim, then?”

“I am. Nice to meet you.” He stuck out a hand, and I managed to extricate mine from my notebook and coin purse for a handshake.

There were things I wanted to ask Jim about the case, but we were surrounded by guards moving prisoners in and out of the cages. So we made small talk, or tried to. He said something about baseball, and I said something apologetic about not really following it. Then the metal door to the back opened with a chinking of metal chains, and a sandy-haired man in blue denim limped out, flanked by two guards.

“Here’s our man,” Jim said. “Hey, Andy!”

Andy looked over and flashed a weak smile. “Mr. Christie? Hey, could you get me a coupla cokes and a cheeseburger?”

“Sure.”

“Let me take care of that,” I said. When I came back, my tray laden with a burger hot from the microwave, chips, drinks, ketchup packets and a fistful of the brown paper towels the prison puts out for napkins, the guard was waiting by the cubicle, and Jim and Hardy were already in conversation over some papers.

As the guard let me into the cell, locked it again, and left, Jim introduced me to Andy. Andy looked pleased, in a muted way. I knew he was around forty, but he looked younger. He was pale and clean-shaven, with a long, nondescript face and close-set pale blue eyes. His hair was combed straight back from his forehead. In his loose chambray shirt and prison jeans, he looked rangy, but it was hard to tell. He reached out to shake my hand, and I noticed he had no tattoos on his forearms.

“I’ve just started reading about your case,” I said. “And I’m curious how you got your nickname.”

“It was my mama’s idea. The kids at school kept saying Marion was a girl’s name. So she said I should say my name was Andy. She said it came from some old movie.”

“So naming you Marion wasn’t her idea?”

“Nah. It was my dad’s. It was his grandfather’s name. He was some kind of train robber; I guess they hung ’im back in Idaho. But my dad was real proud of ’im, named me after him. Then he used to say he should have given my name to Emory, ’cause Emory had more of the old man in him.”

“How did you and your dad get along?” I asked.

“Not so good. But we didn’t see too much of him. He was in prison up in Walla Walla for a long time, and then he left town.”

“What’s he do now?”

“Don’t know.”

“Do you ever hear from him?”

Andy looked at me and shifted a little in his chair. “Nope. Never have since he left.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry. That must have been hard on you and your mother.”

“Not really. I didn’t like him. And Mama—she said she never cried over no man—’specially not him.”

Jim looked at the plastic-wrapped burger on the table. “Better eat your sandwich before it gets cold.”

“Oh, yeah.” Andy pulled open the wrapper, peeled back the top half of the bun and smeared ketchup from a plastic packet onto the half-melted cheese and wilted onion that topped the burger patty.

As he ate, Andy complained amiably about the congealed oatmeal and tough pancakes, the gristly stews and watery mashed potatoes that made up his diet between visits. When he had finished, he wiped his mouth with a paper towel and wrapped up the remains of his lunch with surprising tidiness, then tossed them into the scuffed plastic wastebasket next to the table. “Thank you,” he said, leaning back for a moment and patting his stomach a couple of times as if for emphasis. He sat up again, took a drink from his can of soda and looked at Jim and me. “Don’t you want to talk about my case?”

“Well, I do have some questions I’d like to ask,” I said, “to help me get started on it.”

“Okay.” He folded his hands on the table in front of him and waited for the questioning to begin. There was something in the gesture and in the directness with which he answered that reminded me suddenly of my son at about five years old.

I turned to a clean page on my legal pad. “Let’s see. The files say you were born in Washington and lived there until—what, about junior high?”

“No, high school,” Andy said. “We moved down here after my dad left.”

“Where did you live?”

“Lots of places. We moved around a lot till my dad went to prison. Then we lived in Leesville for a long time—till after my dad got out.”

“Do you remember any of the schools you went to?”

Andy thought for a moment, squinting with the effort of remembering. “I remember a couple,” he said. “McKinley was one. Gardner. Redbud—that was middle school—after we moved to California I was at Shasta City High. I went to some other schools, too, ’cause we were always moving. I don’t remember all their names. Mama knows all that stuff.”

“How did you like school?” I asked.

“Mostly not much.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I never did too good. Never that interested in it.”

“Ever get in trouble?”

“Little stuff—cutting classes, acting up. Got in a fight once during recess.”

“What happened?”

“Couple kids jumped me. Teacher sent us all to the principal’s office. They tried to suspend me, but Mama went and told them off, and they took me back.”

“Anything else?”

“Nah, that’s about it.”

“Did you have any friends?”

He looked up. “Yeah, a couple.”

“What were their names?”

“There was a kid named Eddy. Eddy Ford. But he moved away. In grade school he and I and Greg… Greg—I think my mom might remember his last name—we used to hang out together.”

“What about junior high and high school?”

“A couple of the girls were okay to me. Althea Soames, Lisa Koslovsky.”

“Do you remember any of your teachers?”

“Oh, boy, let me think.” He stopped and looked down for a long moment, frowning with effort. “All’s I can remember in high school, in Shasta City High, are Mr. Muller or maybe Mueller; he taught shop. Mr. Geleitner, or something like that, he was the principal.”

“What about grade school and middle school?”

He thought for a moment. “I only remember one nice teacher and one mean one. Miss Brandon was the nice one. Mrs. Cooley, she didn’t like me. She was fourth grade. I had to repeat it, ’cause she wouldn’t pass me. Mama was mad. Went and talked to her about it, but it didn’t do no good.”

“Do you remember what school Miss Brandon was in?”

He frowned in concentration again and shook his head. “No, I sure can’t.”

“What about high school; did you graduate?”

“No. I got tired of school. I wanted to work, make some money.”

“How old were you when you left?”

“Seventeen. Or maybe eighteen. I’m not sure.”

“What year were you in then?”

“Tenth grade.”

We went on like this for the rest of the visit. By the time the guard—a different one this time—came to take Andy back to his cell, I had a half-dozen pages of notes on schools, towns, doctors’ and dentists’ names, friends, relatives, hospitals, and so forth. Andy looked up at the guard and then back to us. “Well, guess I gotta go now. Would you send me some stamps and drawing paper?”

“Sure,” Jim said. Andy stood up, and when the guard opened the metal port in the cage door, Andy turned and held his hands behind him for the cuffs.

We followed them out of the passageway and watched as they made their awkward progress toward the painted iron door that led to the cell blocks. Then we waited some more near the row of cages while, somewhere behind the door, Andy was searched to make sure we hadn’t passed him anything illegal during our visit. When the guard behind the window told us we were cleared to leave and flipped the switch that opened the barred gates to the outside, I tried not to look too glad to be out of there.

3

The bay seemed even bluer and more sparkling under the noon sun, as Jim and I walked back to the parking lot. A white hydrofoil ferry, toylike in the distance, skimmed over the deep blue water toward the Larkspur Landing, a snowy plume of foam in its wake.

“Do you want to go somewhere for lunch?” Jim asked. “Talk about Andy and the case?”

“Sure.”

The nearest restaurants were in a shopping center a mile or so away. I suggested one and gave Jim directions to it.

Gaia’s Garden café was earnestly and fashionably green; more important, it was easy to find and quiet.

Jim had left his jacket and tie in the car; he looked more relaxed in shirtsleeves. He folded his long legs into one of the pale wooden booths, and I sat across from him, my toes just touching the floor. He had the look of a successful litigator—in his mid-forties, I guessed, but trim and athletic-looking, his short brown hair showing glints of gray above a still-handsome face. The lunch crowd of workers, shopping soccer moms, and business people meeting clients was thinning out, and we had enough privacy to talk comfortably.

Jim looked around. “Looks like west LA,” he commented as he picked up the menu.

“You don’t mind vegetarian, do you?”

“Nah. After that hamburger at the prison, meat’s not looking so good right now.” He ordered a garden burger, and I asked for a grilled veggie salad.

“So, what did you think of Andy?” Jim asked, as our server, a round-faced twenty-year-old with pink-streaked black hair and silver rings in her nostril and eyebrow, left with our orders and menus.

“Not your average rapist, is he? Assuming there is such a thing.”

“No, he seems like a pretty likable guy. Mark Balestri—his appellate lawyer who handled his direct appeal—says he was a real easy client. Didn’t ask for much, didn’t try to control his case. His mother, though—she’s another story.”

“Uh-oh. What does she do?”

Our conversation stopped as the pink-haired girl returned with a tray and doled out our food and drinks.

I took a long, grateful pull at my iced tea. It was lightly flavored with some sort of tropical fruit. Jim gestured toward the mound of skinny French fries that had come with his burger. “Have some,” he said. I took one and ate it slowly, trying to decide whether more of them would be worth exercising for.

“What about Andy’s mother?” I asked.

Jim swallowed his bite of sandwich and said, “She’s snoopy. Mark said she’d call every time he filed something in Andy’s appeal, and sometimes in between, to ask what was going on. He said Andy’s very dependent on his mother. Tells her everything, so you can’t say anything to him unless you want her to hear it.”

“So much for attorney-client privilege.”

“Yeah. I haven’t met her yet. She’s called a couple of times, but I’ve been out. Corey, my paralegal, has talked to her. She knows I’ve associated you.”

The conversation more or less died after that, and we ate in silence. After we had pushed aside our plates and ordered coffee, Jim pulled out his notes from the visit. “I’m representing one of the defendants in this huge prison gang case down in LA,” he said. “Twenty-three named defendants, and maybe more to come. I took Hardy’s case because it’s looking like this other one won’t go to trial in any of our lifetimes, but it’s taking up more time than I thought. Discovery wars and a lot of motions work—it’s never-ending. That’s why I asked for money for a second counsel for Hardy. I hope you can help me out.”

It seemed to me that he should have anticipated all that before taking on a capital case. “Well, I’m here,” I said. “Let me know what I should start with.”

“It’s hard to say. The trial lawyer—Arnold Dobson—didn’t do much. Balestri got his files while he was still alive, but there isn’t much in them. Dobson didn’t put on any defense at the guilt phase, and he’s dead so we can’t ask him why. At the penalty phase, he only put on two witnesses. So we’re starting almost from square one, in terms of investigating the case. I think Dobson dropped the ball in not challenging the confession as involuntary—it seems pretty clear they got Hardy to confess by threatening to arrest his mother. I’m still looking for an investigator, but I think I’ll be able to get Nancy Hollister on board to do the psychosocial history; we’re working together on another case. Do you know her?”

“I haven’t worked with her, but I’ve heard good things about her,” I said. Most capital defense attorneys retain experts, usually psychologists, whose role is to identify the factors in a defendant’s background that have contributed to making him what he is and explain to juries and judges how the lives that many of our clients have lived—growing up among alcoholics and drug addicts, beaten, molested, neglected or entirely abandoned—can create a mentally and emotionally damaged adult who can’t make the sorts of intelligent decisions day to day that the jurors, and most of the people they know, do by second nature.

“She’s not sure she can take this case—she’s got a lot of other work. But I’m hoping I can talk her into it.”

The waitress brought our coffee and the check. Jim paid it with a credit card, then looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. Got a meeting with Nancy at three about the other case. She’s here in Marin; I was hoping she could meet us for lunch, but she wasn’t free. I’ve got something Corey gave me for you, but I left it in the car.”

In the parking lot, he unlocked his rental car, pulled his briefcase from the floor onto the back seat, opened it, and pulled out a small manila envelope. He turned and handed it to me. On it, someone had printed my name and below it MARION HARDY: CASE FILES. I could feel a small object through the thick paper. I opened the metal fastener and turned it over, and a silver flash drive fell into my palm.

“Dobson’s files, Andy’s prison file, and a few other things—school records, maybe. Happy reading.” Jim closed his briefcase with a bright snap, shoved it back behind the seat and opened the driver’s door. “Call me if you have any questions.”

4

Heading north toward home, I stopped at the south end of Sonoma County, in Petaluma, the last real town between San Quentin and my place, and loaded up on groceries. Corbin’s Landing, where I’d settled, is thirty miles from the nearest supermarket, and living there takes some planning.

The Safeway had BOGOF sales on beef pot roasts and cartons of eggs, so I bought two of each for me and Ed, my neighbor and sometime dogsitter, in addition to the other things on my list. Farther along the road I added asparagus, broccoli, spring onions, and a half-dozen baskets of strawberries from a stand on the Bodega Highway. Local berries were a welcome sign of spring, a treat after a winter of flavorless supermarket fruit.

The drive up the coast highway, dangerous and dazzling, cleared the sordid memory of the prison from my soul. The afternoon sun was shining blindingly over the ocean, and an almost transparent mist lay on the water’s surface as I turned onto the road up the hillside, with its ragged scatter of houses that made up Corbin’s Landing. The settlement, such as it is, was once a doghole port from which redwood, logged from the hills around, was shipped to San Francisco. It was named for a lumber baron who was forgotten as quickly as the village when the supply of old-growth timber ran out. Some of the logged-over hills were turned into cow pastures by dairy farmers, but in the sheltered valleys and canyons the redwoods grew back, second-growth trees not much more than a hundred years old, but still stately as cathedral spires.

During Prohibition the cove was a landing point for bootleg liquor from Canada, and later the village became something of an artists’ colony. More recently, the area was discovered as vacation property by rich people from outside who liked its quirkiness and character and the fact that this part of the coast is protected by state law from further subdividing, so the old ranches and long stretches of undisturbed bluffs can’t be covered with beachfront condos. They have built a few Sea Ranch-style houses and execrable stucco mini-mansions here and there, and some of the little board and batten cabins and old white farmhouses have been given Pottery Barn makeovers and turned into vacation rentals, but most are still occupied by old hippies, small ranchers, local workers, artists, and various types of end-of-the-roaders.

I turned up a side road and then down the long dirt driveway to my house. Bags of groceries in one hand, I unlatched the gate to the yard to let out Charlie, my dog, and backtracked to the door, Charlie prancing and barking ahead of me as I fumbled with the lock. My two cats materialized at the door and crowded into the kitchen with me and the dog. I stopped to feed all of them before heading out to the car for the rest of the groceries.

I changed out of my black slacks and white shirt—prison-visitor clothes—and into jeans, flannel shirt, and an old down vest and took Ed’s groceries and two baskets of strawberries next door to his place. I could hear bluegrass music inside, and I called out, “Hey, Ed, are you decent?”

A hoarse voice inside called back, “Come in and find out, if you’re interested.”

I opened the door. “I don’t know. Should I be?”

Ed appeared in the doorway of his kitchen, a dishtowel in his hand and another, stained with tomato juice, tucked like an apron into the belt of his jeans. He had grown out of his hard-living youth years ago, before I met him, but his face still had the spare, leathery look of a man who has spent too much time with cigarettes and booze. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair long and tied at the back of his head with an elastic band. “You’re a hard-hearted woman,” he said. “Whaddya have for me? Excuse me, I’m in the middle of putting together a tomato sauce.”

“Guy food. Meat and potatoes. And eggs, and some strawberries.” I followed him into his kitchen, into a comforting smell of sautéing green peppers and onion. “Shall I put them away?”

“Sure. No, give me the beef; I think I’ll make a ragu. What do I owe you?”

“More dog-sitting?” I opened his refrigerator and found a spot for the eggs.

“No problem—I’m not going anywhere but work.”

Ed is a carpenter, and his kitchen, like the rest of his small house, has been a work-in-progress ever since I’ve known him, cluttered with projects that he attacks between jobs. For the past week or so, pieces of a salvaged cabinet meant for the wall above the refrigerator had been propped against his kitchen table, and the table was littered with a jigsaw, drill, hammers and screwdrivers, and assorted small hardware. A thin film of sawdust coated everything but the counter where he was cutting vegetables.

“Cup of coffee?” Ed invited. “It’s a fresh pot. Sorry about the mess. No time to finish putting those guys up yet. We’re getting into the busy season.”

Ed liked his coffee strong. I poured myself a cup, added milk from the fridge, and sat down at the table, pushing aside a couple of screwdrivers and a pair of wire cutters. I watched him work as I sipped my coffee.

“So how was your prison visit?” Ed asked. “Everyone still there?”

“Oh yes.”

“Was this the day you were meeting that guy and his lawyer?”

“Yeah.”

“So how’d it go? You taking his case?”

“I guess—I took the file home.”

“Well, I don’t know why you want to, but good luck. Want to come over for dinner later?”

“Thanks, but I’ll probably be asleep by the time it’s cooked. Long day, driving there and back.” I stood up. “Thanks for the coffee. I need to get back home and start reading.”

“Well, if you’re still awake at seven or so, come on over.”

Feeling a little livelier from the coffee, I picked my way back through Ed’s front room, a clutter of books, CDs, boxes of paper recycling, and the detritus of more remodeling projects. It still smelled faintly of old dog, even though Panama, Ed’s ancient labrador, had died last winter.

Back at my house, Charlie greeted me as though it were some sort of miracle that I had reappeared, and then bustled out past me and sat on the porch, to remind me that I owed him a walk. “A short one, Charlie; I’m really tired.”

Braced against the stiff afternoon breeze, we walked up the hill to the end of the road. I stopped now and then to drink in views of the rocky coast and the sunset while Charlie lifted his leg against the fence of one or another of the Pottery Barn bungalows.

5

For the next couple of weeks I read what Corey had given me about Andy Hardy’s case. A post-conviction case comes with a history ready-made, in the form of police and forensic lab reports, transcripts, pleadings, and court orders, from the first dispatch call to the crime scene through trial and sentencing. The theories and strategies of the police, prosecutor and defense counsel were laid out like the plot of an exceptionally bad play, with the witnesses as characters. My work was to read all of it and start asking questions. What are the holes in the stories? What was done by the police, the prosecutor, the defense attorney—and what wasn’t? What documents, reports, evidence are missing?

From morning till night I read and organized facts. On my computer I typed summaries of testimony, notes, timelines, charts, lists of witnesses, potential issues, and things to be done. I let the answering machine pick up my phone calls and returned calls during breaks in my reading. When I needed to clear my head, I took walks with Charlie, cleaned house, or tied tomato, bean, and pea stems to trellises. I made strawberry jam and took a jar to Ed. I made salads and stir-fries, to use up the fresh produce I’d bought and the lettuce from my garden that needed to be eaten before it grew too bitter and tough. Ed stopped by once or twice, and my gardening mentor Harriet brought over some fava beans and wrote out a fertilizer formula for my tomato plants, but for the most part I was alone in the quiet house, working. I liked it that way.

Appellate law, which is most of what I do, is solitary work; a lot of research, analysis, and writing, and not much human contact except by email. Appeals are like a debate carried out in writing—opening brief, responsive brief, reply, rounded out with a fairly brief court hearing where the parties’ attorneys present a summary of their arguments, and the panel of judges who will decide the case questions them to refine and clarify the issues involved. It suits me. I don’t like being around people much; dealing with them takes too much time and attention for what you generally get out of the process, and it leaves me tired and on edge. Terry, my—I never know what to call him; “former husband” sounds as though we divorced, but “late husband” casts a pall over casual conversations—was pretty much the same way, really, though not many people figured this out because he was a great trial lawyer and seemed thoroughly at ease in a courtroom. But Terry kept a lot of secrets, even from me.

For the most part, the police reports and transcripts in Andy’s case expanded on the depressing story I’d heard from Jim. Andy and his brother Emory had been arrested after a runaway teenager from Sacramento, Nicole Shumate, was picked up by a rancher on a country highway twenty miles from Shasta City. Nicole said she’d been kidnapped while hitchhiking near Shasta City, taken to a ranch somewhere outside of town, and raped by two men, after which one of them had driven with her out onto the highway late at night in his pickup truck. She had jumped from the man’s truck and hidden in the woods until after daybreak. The rancher drove her to the main police station in Shasta City, where she reported the crime. As the truck drove away, she said, she read and memorized its license-plate number. The plate came back to Emory Hardy.

The police put Emory’s driver’s license photo into a photo lineup and showed it to Nicole. She picked him out without hesitation as one of the kidnappers.

Emory’s address, which appeared to be where Nicole had been taken, was outside the Shasta City limits, and the job of making arrests and investigating the crimes was assigned to the Pomo County Sheriff’s Department. Several deputies were waiting at the house when Eva Hardy, Emory’s mother, came home from work that night, but neither Emory nor his brother Marion showed up. Eva said she had no idea where they were.

It didn’t take long to find them. They were arrested at a motel in the mountains near the Oregon state line, after the manager recognized the truck and license plate from the TV news and called 911.

After a night in jail and a long, mostly silent ride to the sheriff’s station at Shasta City, Emory was ready to talk. He gave a statement saying Andy was the instigator of the whole sorry escapade, and he went along with it because Andy made him. They talked to Andy, too, and he said it was his brother’s idea and he went along with it because, well, she was a hooker and she would have given it to them for money anyway. Reading their statements, I felt a little sick. It’s hard to sympathize with someone like that, even if he’s your client. But interrogating cops are trained not to show their real feelings when they’re trying to get information, so the questions in the transcript were pure Joe Friday, neutral and bland, designed to get as much out of Andy as possible and keep him from lawyering up.