Everything went smoothly this time, and after recovering my papers, shoes, and jacket at the far side of the X-ray machine, I headed out the door and down the long path to the actual prison, feeling unburdened and even a bit lighthearted.
Passing through the pair of metal gates to the prison visiting area, I knew without looking that the wind from the bay had uncombed my hair into strange spikes and curls and reddened my nose. A trip to the restroom confirmed it; I combed my hair with my fingers to push it into some kind of order, but the nose was, sadly, beyond hope.
The men I was seeing today were all, at this point in their lives, lonely. Arturo Villegas, once a gangbanger from Los Angeles, missed his family, who couldn’t visit him because his parents were Mexican and undocumented and fearful of being arrested and deported. Walter Klum, a former client, had killed his wife, and the rest of his family wanted nothing to do with him. A motorcycle accident a few months before the murder had left him with permanent brain damage. I visited him from time to time—his current attorney had asked me to because Walt, in his isolation, tended to brood and become depressed and suicidal.
For the hour and a half allowed by the prison for visits, we made awkward conversation about whatever was on their minds. My first visit was to Arturo, whose case was still relatively early in its long progress through the system. He wanted to know how it was going—how long before the Attorney General would file their brief, how long before the case would come up for argument. He was also anxious for his parents, his sister in college, and his little brother, who he feared would turn to the gang life and end up dead or in prison like Arturo.
Walt, when I saw him this time, fell into reminiscing about his childhood on a farm in Minnesota, a hardscrabble life that he remembered as if it were some Eden from which he had been expelled into the harsh mundanity of adult life and work.
As we talked I felt in each of their voices their pleasure in getting a visit from outside, a continual, pleading undertone: please don’t let go, don’t desert me, don’t leave me here with no one. I knew too well how little I could do to solve the great problem before them, that they had committed the worst of crimes, and society was collecting the rest of their lives as repayment. But I could, at least, do that one thing, and I promised to be there when needed, to send Walt some stamps, put a little money on Arturo’s books and call his sister to find out how his family were doing.
It wasn’t much, and I managed to get it done in the turnaround time before leaving home again and heading back down the road to Harrison.
11
“So you and Carey got to meet Linda,” I said, as Natasha and I waited for our dinners at the diner by the motel in Harrison. “What was she like?”
Natasha tilted her head back to one side and made a moue with her lips as she considered where to begin.
“She was a trip.”
“How?”
She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Oh, my God, she was so LA. She and Pete live in this tiny little cottage in Silver Lake. It’s really sweet, with a little deck and back yard and a view, and full of, like, artifacts. Just this little hippie place, with lots of tchotchkes, plants in macrame hangers, bright colors everywhere. I have pictures on my phone. I guess she and Pete have lived there, like, forever.”
“Sorry I missed it,” I said. “What is Linda like?”
“Let’s see—she’s, what, about seventy now? But she looks amazing. I’ll show you the pictures—here.” She opened the camera app on her phone and handed it to me. “There are five or six, of her and her house. Pete was away playing a gig in San Diego so we didn’t get to meet him.”
I scrolled through the photos. From the outside, Linda’s home was an unassuming cottage, pale green with white window frames, and a tiny front yard that seemed to be full of succulents. Inside, it fit Natasha’s description, a prettily cluttered, comfortable space, with light-colored walls covered in paintings, framed photos, and woven art pieces and plants in pots and hangers near the windows. “She has a hummingbird feeder on her deck,” Natasha said a little wistfully.
Natasha had also photographed Linda herself, alone and with Carey. Linda was slender, wearing a long skirt in a batik print and a white Mexican blouse with embroidery around the neckline. She had masses of dark red hair, like Sunny’s had been, though it was all but certain that Linda’s hair, upswept with attractive carelessness and held with some sort of clasp at the back of her head, was dyed. I couldn’t help thinking that I had never been able to do anything like that with my hair before I gave up and cut it short.
“God, you’re right,” I said. “She does look amazing.”
Natasha nodded. “She says she’s never had any work done, just eats carefully and does a lot of yoga.”
“That, lots of sunscreen, and good genes,” I said. I couldn’t resist adding, “And not worrying about pesky things like raising your children.”
“Yeah,” Natasha said. “She was so self-centered—it was all about herself, and sometimes Pete. She asked how Sunny was doing and said she’s been to see her a couple of times because Pete said she really should, but she can’t do it often because going to the prison is just too painful.”
“Aargh.”
“Yeah. She did say how grateful she was to her mom for taking such good care of Sunny. She said she tried her best, sent money and all when Sunny was a kid. Apparently she had a reasonably successful career in acting; at least she was able to make a living at it. And Pete was a soundman or something, though she says he’s retired now and ‘pursuing his passion’—her words. He plays guitar and mandolin in a group that does old-time and some bluegrass. I guess they’re pretty good; they play gigs around the LA area and go on tour up the west coast to Oregon and Washington a couple times a year. She told some funny stories about her career. She said when she first got to Hollywood she took acting classes, but had trouble finding work because she actually looked too much like Sharon Tate. Then Sharon Tate was killed by the Manson family, and after a while people kind of forgot about the resemblance. She had small parts in a couple of movies, but she did mostly television work and some commercials. She said she kind of specialized in being murdered.”
I had to laugh. “Really?”
“Yep. She said cop shows liked to cast her as the cute girl at the beginning who has a fight over the phone with her boyfriend or leaves to go to her car after a party, and turns up dead the next morning. When she got too old for that, she sometimes played witnesses, grieving mothers, that sort of thing. She seemed very proud of one Law and Order episode where she was the villain, a nurse who was having an affair with a doctor and framed him for stealing drugs from the hospital where they worked, or something like that. Anyhow, she says she’s mostly retired, but she still has an agent and gets a part now and then. Now she’s into aromatherapy and sells oils and lotions at a couple of farmers’ markets. Her house smells incredible, like roses and lavender and cocoa butter. It was kind of a high just being there.”
“I’m sorry I missed it. Did she have anything to say about the case?”
“When we finally managed to talk about it with her, not too much. She talked about Sunny, said she was the sweetest little girl and she loved it when she visited, that she was never any trouble to anyone. She was delighted when Sunny married Greg, because he had money and she thought he was very in love with Sunny. Sunny never talked to her about any troubles with Greg. But then I’m not sure she would have. Linda seemed really smitten by him. Apparently he was always charming and funny around her and Pete, and he was generous with money, which Linda clearly liked. He negotiated a great deal for them on their house, found them a mortgage broker who got them a mortgage they could afford, and even loaned them money for work on the place, said they could pay it back whenever they could. She said they still owed some when he was killed. She didn’t believe Sunny had anything to do with his murder. She didn’t know of any problems with their marriage, and she didn’t see Sunny as someone who would ever be capable of
such a thing. That was about it.”
“That’s more or less what she said at Sunny’s trial, too.”
“That’s what I remembered. Carey and I tried, but we didn’t get more out of her than that.”
Our food came, two giant bowls of salad that appeared to contain half the lettuce harvest of the Salinas Valley. We stopped talking while we tunneled through our respective mountains of greens, chicken, cheese, avocado, sliced supermarket cucumbers, and rubbery cherry tomatoes. “You know,” Natasha said eventually, tilting her head again, “Greg was really manipulative—putting on a charm offensive with Sunny’s family, to keep them on his side. So when he hurt her, she couldn’t go to them because they’d be all, ‘oh, but he’s such a nice guy.’”
I was starting to like Natasha a lot. I could see why Carey thought she’d be good for Sunny’s case.
“That makes sense. Sunny talked about all the things Greg did for Linda and Pete, and her grandparents. It could all have been a strategy.”
As we sat convivially finishing our dinners, I wanted to ask Natasha something about her life outside this case, to get to know her better. Most people, I thought, would have known how to turn the conversation seamlessly into a casual chat about personal lives. But moving a relationship between levels, from business colleague to acquaintance, from acquaintance to friend, was a skill I’d never seemed able to develop; and fear—of taking a chance, smothering a possible friendship with the wrong question, or inviting assumptions of closeness I couldn’t control—choked me up when I wanted to speak and move forward. So instead of inviting Natasha to say something about herself, I asked, “So how is the investigation business going?”
“Good. We’re actually having to refer some things out. John—my business partner—is thinking about hiring another person, maybe someone good with cyber investigations. If you know anyone good who’d like to live in LA, let us know.”
“Sure.”
“What do you do up on the coast?” she asked. “You’re like way out in the woods or something, aren’t you?”
“Sort of; that’s why I moved there.”
“Where were you before?”
She’s a lot better at this than I am, I thought. “We lived in Berkeley, but then my husband died, and I didn’t want to be there anymore.”
“Huh. I’m sorry.” A man or woman my age would probably have asked more about my husband’s death, but for someone as young as Natasha, that was a bit of a conversation stopper. “Do you have any kids?”
“Yes, one. He’s close to your age, I think. He’s a professor, ecology and wildlife biology. Lives in Australia now, in Melbourne. He married an Australian woman, and I guess they plan to stay there. No grandkids yet.”
“It’s funny, that grandparent thing,” Natasha said. “My father keeps hinting about them. I used to just tell him, ‘Dad, I’m gay, all right?’ but now Mari and I are actually thinking about getting married and having kids. It’s all so complicated, though, finding a donor and all that. We haven’t really worked it out yet.”
“That is a tough one. But someone I worked with had a baby and raised him with her partner, and they were very happy. Don’t be discouraged.”
“Thanks.”
I felt like some kind of indulgent aunt. But it was a feeling I didn’t mind having.
“What’s our plan of attack for tomorrow?” I asked.
“I’ve got addresses for Todd’s mother and sister and one of his friends the police interviewed—there were four altogether, but one moved away, one died, and one I couldn’t find a current address for. Also a girl one of Brittany’s teachers said she used to hang out with a lot. I thought maybe I could try her place this evening.”
Plans made, we paid our checks and walked back to the hotel.
In the lobby, Natasha asked, “How old was your son when your husband died?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Oh. My mom died when I was fifteen. She got some really fast-moving form of lymphoma; she died, like, three months after being diagnosed. I think I can relate to how Brittany must have felt, going through so much loss in such a short time. My dad was devastated; it was like he was in a daze for a couple of years. I felt like I’d lost both my parents. I was really angry for a long time, raged at everything, mad at my dad for not being there for me. After a year or so, Dad got me to agree to see a counselor, just to have someone to talk it out with. She was great; she helped me understand how I was feeling about my mom and my dad and sort it all out. He and I are really close now.”
“Terry’s death was rough on my son Gavin, even though he was in his twenties,” I said. I hadn’t been there for him, either, like Natasha’s father; the shock wave of grief moves in more directions than we think about.
“I believe it,” she said. “People focus on how losing a parent will affect young kids, and they don’t understand how bad it is even when you’re older.”
“You’re right,” I said. “And it can be hard to see your kids’ grief through your own. Gavin still has a hard time with that.”
Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote of his own family, “The children of lovers are orphans.” The passage, when I found it late in life, made me think of Gavin. Terry and I hadn’t been so much doting lovers as close partners, absorbed in our profession and our shared ideals. And Gavin had been a quiet, self-contained child, who didn’t demand much of our attention. He had made it through adolescence with a minimum of angst, had done well in school, and when he chose his career, had shown no interest in following us into law. He loved Terry, whose charisma drew him in, as it had me, and when Terry died, I had been utterly inadequate to support him in his shock and grief. I had fled to Corbin’s Landing, and he to graduate school in Australia. We had mourned separately and largely alone.
In the lobby I wished her good luck in her evening interview and proposed meeting in the breakfast room the next morning at around eight thirty and heading out for our day together from there.
“I have the same address for Todd’s mother and sister,” Natasha said. “So we may get to meet them both. They live in Beanhollow.”
“Oh, right.” I remembered the name from when Carey and I had interviewed Harry Wardman. Full of stoners and meth heads, or something like that. I could see Carey’s point in sending us out together. Not only was there safety in numbers, but the people we’d be seeing lived in a world where the truth was, one might say, malleable. If they said anything useful, it was good to have a witness.
12
Beanhollow was literally on the wrong side of the tracks, on the far side of a grade crossing at the south end of Harrison.
It was obviously older than the rest of the town. The few commercial buildings in its small business district, near the railroad tracks, were two-story wooden blocks with peeling paint and storefronts with blankly reflecting picture windows. Streets, paved and unpaved, stretched from the far side of the main road, and on them the oldest houses on their quarter-acre lots—the little square wood-sided bungalows, with their generous windows and front porches, old swamp-coolers perched on their roofs—were losing their battle with history. They were too small for modern tastes, with dark kitchens and tiny bedrooms, and their thin walls made them expensive to heat in winter and impossible to keep cool in the baking Central Valley summers. As we passed them I mused that the people who had lived in those houses when they were new—the men who worked the fields in broiling heat, the women who canned vegetables in those kitchens in hundred-degree weather—were a hardier race, along with the children they had raised. Or, more likely, they just sickened and died younger under the stresses of weather and poverty.
Some of the little bungalows, damaged beyond repair by termites and dry rot, had been torn down and replaced with newer, slightly larger houses with stucco siding and slab foundations, or with tinny double-wides. A few of the houses had lovingly maintained front yards, with drought landscapes of dyed wood chips and white or gray rock, borders of creeping rosemary and Mexican sa
ge, and an olive or fig tree in the center. Occasionally an old house sat abandoned, broken windows gaping under sagging roof, on a lot overgrown with weeds and the feral descendants of landscape plants popular a hundred years ago. Of those that were still being lived in, some were owned by men and women who had grown old in them and who lived behind drawn blinds while the neighborhood disintegrated around them, the houses they could no longer afford to maintain or leave falling gradually into disrepair and their yards, unwatered, growing tangled gardens of dry grass stalks and rank weeds. Many of the rest were rental properties, minimally upgraded and maintained, and occupied by Mexican workers’ families and poor people like Todd Betts’s family and his friends.
Natasha and I walked slowly along the edge of an unpaved street, from my parked car to the old house, painted light green with white trim, that supposedly belonged to Todd’s mother and sister. Natasha was wearing a summery blue skirt and print blouse in a style that recalled the 1950s. I had on a white short-sleeved knit top and dark blue pants of some synthetic fabric, in which I was already feeling sticky in the mid-morning heat. Coming here, we’d passed fences and abandoned houses sprayed with extravagant graffiti, some of it in Spanish slang; junk cars half dismantled in their parking places; and old pickup trucks with bumper stickers for Republican candidates and the National Rifle Association and Confederate flag decals on their rear windows. It didn’t seem to be a friendly environment for an aging defense attorney and a lesbian investigator.
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