Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  After adjourning the hearing, the two prosecutors left, and we met the judge in his chambers to discuss the request Carey had submitted for funding for the case. Our fees and expenses were paid by the state, but we had to get the judge’s approval to spend money on investigators and experts. The discussion of money went as smoothly as the discovery hearing. Carey presented him with our claim for the work we had done so far, and a request that he authorize five thousand dollars more for future work for Natasha. “We’re on a tight timeline,” she explained, “and I think she’ll be working almost full time on this case for a while.”

  Judge Garcia nodded. “You’re probably right,” he said. He read through the claim and request and then signed both. “Is that it?” he said, as he handed it back to Carey.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  He stood, and we did, too, and we said our goodbyes.

  The morning brought home to me how much time had passed since Sunny’s trial, fourteen years ago. Between then and now, the entire cast of characters had moved on: transferred, promoted, or retired. The same would be true of witnesses; in a case this cold, too many would be dead or impossible to find or, when we found them, would remember all too few of the vital details we needed. And we had only months to try to talk to them all and put our case together. Carey was right to be anxious.

  6

  There must be a competition among courts to see how thoroughly they can hide their exhibits clerks. Some offices are in basements, others on the top floor, and they always seem to be at the end of a labyrinth of corridors. Hartwell County’s was on the third floor of the courthouse, behind an unmarked door in a row of similar doors, at the far end of one wing. As we finally opened the right door, we were bewildered and surprised to have found the place at all. Our question whether this was the exhibit room was answered with a nod and a “Yep,” by a round-faced young woman at a metal desk. She stood up, and it was clear from the bulge under the high waist of her short summer dress that she was pregnant.

  “Oh, don’t get up,” Carey said quickly. “We’re here to see Mary Jesperson and review the exhibits in People v. Ferrante. We’re Mrs. Ferrante’s lawyers, Carey Bergmann and Janet Moodie. Ms. Jesperson is expecting us.”

  “Oh, right!” The young woman sprang up again. Even heavily pregnant, her movements were almost effortless. Ah, youth! I thought. “I have those over here. Mary’s at a meeting this morning. Just come in through that gate at the end of the counter. I’m Corliss, by the way—Corliss Howard.”

  “That’s an unusual name,” I said.

  “It’s a family name. I’m named for my great-grandmother.”

  “When are you due?” Carey asked.

  “Two months. I can’t wait.” She smiled, looking down at her belly. “This gets really old after a while.”

  “Do you know if it’s a boy or girl?”

  “Boy. It’s our second; our first baby was a girl. So we’ll have one of each.” Another smile.

  The boxes, what there were of them, were on an otherwise unoccupied desk in a corner of the outer office. Natasha came in the door as I was plugging in my computer and attaching the cords to the scanner. “Sorry I’m late,” she apologized. “I had a hard time finding this place.”

  “Oh, everyone does,” Corliss answered. “We hear that all the time.”

  After more introductions, we began the work of looking at the exhibits, checking them off on our copy of the clerk’s list from the trial, and photographing or scanning those that appeared to be worth preserving. The review was more for Carey’s benefit; I’d seen them here once before, when I was Sunny’s attorney in her appeal, and I didn’t expect to get any new insights from viewing them again.

  There wasn’t much, for a capital trial: photos of the murder scene, of Greg’s body lying on the concrete pool deck; autopsy photos showing the small bullet hole in the back of his head, the hair shaved to make the wound visible. The slug removed from his brain was in a small plastic bag inside a manila evidence envelope; it seemed a ridiculously small thing to have killed a man. There were also photos of Todd Betts’s body slumped in an armchair, the tourniquet and syringe he had used on a table beside him. There were autopsy reports for both men, bank records and a copy of the check Sunny had written to Todd, and also some copies of criminal records of Steve Eason, the informant who had claimed Todd had told him he’d been hired by Sunny to do the murder.

  Photocopies of the prosecutor’s PowerPoint slides from her opening statements and closing arguments at the guilt and penalty trials had been made exhibits by the judge. More poignantly, there were photographs of Greg Ferrante, from childhood through middle age, that had gone with the testimony of his parents, to show the impact of his death on those close to him. I remembered there was also a video, made by the family, that had been shown at trial, with more photos and some home movie footage.

  Sunny had also had her day, and the defense exhibits included school records, photos of her as a child; in junior high in her 4-H uniform, holding a brown and white rabbit and a red prize ribbon; as Homecoming Queen in the pink dress bought for her by Linda; as a new bride outside the Methodist church; more photos of her with Brittany, with Greg, with her mother and grandmother.

  I was feeling the uncomfortable sleepiness of caffeine deprivation as we closed up the last box and thanked Corliss for her help. Despite myself, I was a bit disappointed to find that there was nothing new to be discovered here—all was largely as I remembered, and nothing inspired me or suggested any new approach to the case. We would have to rely on Natasha’s research and the long, uncertain process of interviewing witnesses, to perhaps throw up some new leads.

  “Best wishes to you and the baby,” Carey said, as we left. “Take good care of yourself.”

  “I will,” Corliss said. “I have three months off, starting next month.”

  “That’s good,” Carey said. “Not a lot of time, is it, though?”

  Corliss nodded. “Yeah, it’s tough, having to go back to work so soon. But we need the money.”

  “You and that clerk really bonded over her baby,” Natasha said to Carey as we walked down the hall.

  I didn’t see Carey react, but a beat passed before she answered. “My daughter’s first baby was born this February.”

  * * *

  After lunch at a sandwich shop near the courthouse, Natasha went her own way, to research high-school yearbooks and old city directories at the library, for names of neighbors in Harrison and Sparksville who might have known Sunny and her family, or Todd, or anyone else important to the case. She also had plans to interview a few people she had already found, including some of Sunny’s and Brittany’s teachers.

  Carey and I had some time to kill after lunch before our appointment with Craig Newhouse. We walked over to Old Town, which wasn’t far from the courthouse, and spent a quiet half-hour strolling the old main street and window shopping. It was still spring; the leaves of the trees and shrubs that lined the street and shaded the sides and back yards of the old buildings were fresh and bright green, and the air under the shade trees was warm, but not yet hot.

  “So you have a grandbaby,” I said, regarding her with new eyes. Carey had seemed to me so professional and driven that I’d never seen her as particularly maternal, let alone grandmotherly.

  Her eyes brightened. “Yes, indeed.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl. They named her Rachel, after my mother.”

  “That’s a nice gesture.”

  Getting back to business, Carey said, “I’ve got a few thoughts for questions for Craig Newhouse, but not many.”

  I agreed. “I’ve been going through his files again, and he did a decent job investigating the case and presenting mitigation. The woman he hired as his mitigation specialist knew what she was doing, too.”

  “Joan Simon. I know her—another one of Marianne Southern’s alumnae. She is good.”

  “I could see that. She interviewed a lot of people—even got Sunny�
�s father’s family to talk to her—and compiled a history of Sunny’s ancestors going back to the Civil War, with records and everything. It was impressive.”

  Carey nodded. “It sure was. But no smoking guns. It must have been really hard for Craig. It’s always a balancing act, trying to present background evidence that might make your client appear less blameworthy, when your whole case is that she didn’t do the crime at all. And Sunny’s past looks uneventful compared to most clients. She lost a father she never knew, and her mother skipped out on her, but her grandparents seem to have been good to her, and she seems very normal, as a kid and adult—no history of childhood abuse that we know of, no drinking, no drugs, no especially risky behavior, no signs of mental illness. Greg was a womanizer and emotionally abusive, but Sunny was no Betty Mateski.”

  “No.”

  “It’s a tough case.”

  Craig Newhouse’s office was near the courthouse complex, an easy walk back from Old Town, and we got there a few minutes early. He was a partner in a law firm that apparently occupied an entire building, with its own parking lot. The building, in Mission Revival style, was finished in cream-colored stucco with accents of oak and terrazzo tile. The sign above the massive oak double doors read “Eldridge, Saperstein, Newhouse, and Walti, Attorneys at Law.”

  The theme of the building’s façade was continued inside it. The waiting area was decorated with polished terrazzo floors, blocky wood and leather chairs and magazine tables, and a wagon-wheel chandelier. Filtered light came in from a couple of tall windows framed in dark wood. An attractive young receptionist behind the counter took our names and said, “Mr. Newhouse is on the phone right now. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Carey and I sat in side-by-side blocky chairs and reflexively checked our phones for messages. I picked up a copy of a month-old People magazine from a side table and leafed through it, and Carey pulled a notepad from her briefcase and studied something written on it.

  Lawyers and clients came and went through the lobby and into and out of the offices behind a doorway to the left of the receptionist’s counter. After ten minutes or so, a man opened the door and walked a ways into the lobby, scanning it for someone. He was a little taller than average, and middle-aged, with salt-and-pepper hair cut short. He had probably been strikingly handsome when he was young; even now he was good-looking, with a suntanned face, a clean, square jaw, and the posture and easy movement of an older man who has kept in shape. Seeing us, he brightened. “Ms. Bergmann and Ms. Moodie,” he said, striding toward us. “I’m Craig Newhouse. Sorry to keep you waiting; I had a phone call that took a while.”

  We stood and shook hands. “Which of you is Ms. Moodie?” he asked.

  “Me,” I said.

  “Ah—we talked on the phone a few years ago. Nice to meet you in person.”

  “Nice to meet you, too,” I said lamely.

  “My office is back here.” Craig gave a nod toward the door by the receptionist.

  As he led us down a corridor lined with offices, he asked over his shoulder, “Does your being here for the habeas case mean Sunny’s appeal is over?”

  “No,” I answered. “It’s still pending. All the briefs have been filed, and they’re waiting for it to be set for oral argument.”

  “That long,” he said, bemused. “Here we are.”

  Craig’s office was nice, but not luxurious: a large desk of polished dark wood at the left, a window at the right with a view onto leafy landscaping, a leather sofa under the window, dark wood bookshelves on the far and near walls. The furniture was plain and not brand-new, but good-quality and well-kept. It was a look that told clients the firm gave value for their fees.

  A smartly dressed young woman stood up from the farthest of the chairs in front of the desk and reached out a hand. “Hi, I’m Alison,” she said.

  “Alison’s our paralegal,” Craig said. “She’s working with me on Sunny’s case.” We exchanged more handshakes.

  I doubted Craig needed a paralegal for whatever he was still doing on the case. My guess was that she had been asked to sit in as a witness when the conversation moved to Craig’s representation of Sunny. However friendly we seemed, in any discussion between trial and postconviction defense attorneys, the possible claim of ineffective assistance of counsel was the elephant in the room.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Craig asked. “Coffee or tea? Water?”

  Carey said water sounded good, and I opted for coffee.

  “I’ll get them,” Alison said, smiling.

  The surface of Craig’s desk was uncluttered: a couple of photos, presumably of family members, an inbox with a few pieces of mail, a few manila files stacked to one side, a yellow pad in the center, a notebook computer on an L to Craig’s left. Next to the computer stood a sleek metal water bottle. Above the credenza behind the desk, and below his framed college and law school diplomas and certificates of admission to the state bar, was a shelf of trophies and medals. “What are the trophies?” I asked, curious.

  “Competitive swimming.” He seemed both proud and a bit shy about it. “I just won best in my age class in two categories in the state competition.”

  Alison reappeared with a bottle of water, a mug, and a couple of small creamers and set them down in front of us. I carefully opened the creamers, trying not to spritz any drops from them onto Craig’s shining desktop, and poured their contents into my coffee.

  “Here, let me get those.” Alison swept up the empty containers and dropped them in a wastebasket.

  I took a sip of the coffee, which wasn’t bad.

  “So,” Craig said. “Where would you like to start?”

  “Well—” Carey inspected her notebook “—I can see you put a lot of work into Sunny’s case.”

  Craig nodded. “We did our best. We were all shocked by the verdict; we were surprised enough when they found her guilty of murder, but none of us really believed the jury would find for death.” He shook his head. “It should never have been a death case, but Mrs. Ferrante—Greg’s mother— pushed really hard for it and got some victims’ rights groups on board. She raised the profile of the case, made it hard for the DA politically.”

  “Had you done other capital cases?”

  “Yes.” He glanced at me; we’d gone over this ground before, years ago. “Before coming to Eldridge Saperstein I was a solo practitioner, working on criminal cases here in Harrison and in Tulare County. I did three capital trials there; none of them ended in a death verdict. Sunny’s was the last case I thought we’d ever lose. I felt so bad that I pretty much gave up criminal practice after that. Now I do mostly personal injury and some criminal work now and then for clients of the firm—mostly DUIs and white-collar crimes, juvie cases when their kids get in trouble, things like that.” He shrugged, and Carey and I nodded sympathetically.

  “You were appointed by the court on Sunny’s case,” Carey said. “How did that happen?”

  “Well I wasn’t at first. She retained me, but then she ran out of money. Greg Ferrante didn’t leave as much of an estate as everyone thought, and his relatives contested his will; and the life insurance company sued for return of the payout. So I ended up asking the court to appoint me. The judge wanted to appoint the public defender, but they declared a conflict; they’d represented Steve Eason, the informer, in an old misdemeanor.

  “It was such a crazy case,” he mused, with another shake of his head. “There was almost no evidence connecting Sunny to the murder except that check to Todd Betts and Eason’s testimony. Sandy—the DA—had this cockamamie theory about motive, like something out of a soap opera: greedy wife kills her rich husband because he’s about to leave her for another woman. Hokey as hell, but it works on Hartwell County jurors. She knew her audience. The smartest thing Sandy did was to attack Sunny as a mother. She made a huge deal about how Sunny used her own daughter’s boyfriend to do the killing. And she brought in the witnesses who testified about Todd Betts’s admissions and what a good, ha
rdworking kid he was and how he was wracked with guilt about it afterward. She ended up turning Todd and Brittany into victims along with Ferrante.”

  I nodded agreement. The strategy had been clever, and obviously successful. The prosecutor had called a couple of Todd’s friends to testify that he had changed after the murder; he seemed shaken and frightened, and before his death he had started using a lot more drugs, “like he just wanted to stay high all the time.” One said Todd, while high, had mumbled something about having done “something horrible.” Brittany had been called to testify that she had seen the change in him. The district attorney told the jury, in her closing argument, that Sunny had used Todd and destroyed him, and that she was responsible for his overdose death, saying, “She may as well have put that needle in his arm herself.”

  “We tried to discredit the informant, Eason,” Craig went on, “the guy who told the police that Todd said Sunny had hired him. We investigated him and found he was pretty much a professional snitch. Harry Markman, my investigator, turned up several other cases in which Eason informed for money or leniency, including a couple where he claimed the defendant confessed to him. But the judge kept all that out. Said it wasn’t relevant unless he’d lied in his other cases, and when we said we could show that he had been lying in some of them, he said he didn’t want to hold a series of mini-trials about a bunch of unrelated crimes. But you know all that.”