“What did Ian say?”
“He said he was kind of shocked by the whole thing. He wasn’t that close to Todd. They went to school together, and he knew him socially, like they were in a group of guys who sometimes shot baskets together in the park, played computer games at each other’s houses, like that. Todd seemed to have it together; he had a good job and all. Ian thought having a girlfriend who was a minor was a little sketchy, but it wasn’t his business. He met Brittany at the park once or twice; didn’t remember much about her, except that Todd seemed very serious about her. He didn’t remember meeting Braden. He remembered the murder because it was Brittany’s father or stepfather who was killed, so it had a connection to them. He didn’t recall anything about Todd’s reaction. He was really shocked when he heard Todd had died of a drug overdose, because he’d never heard that Todd used drugs. He was also surprised when the police questioned him and everyone else and were saying Todd had killed Brittany’s dad; he didn’t think Todd would ever do something like that. I asked him about Todd’s uncle Steve, and he said Steve hung around them sometimes, but not much because he was older. Steve might have been a user, because he was kind of a lowlife in general; he’d been in and out of jail. But Ian didn’t know that for a fact. He gave us a couple of names of guys in their circle, but they were people we already knew about.”
“What about Kim’s ex?”
“Jason? There’s a police interview of him in the file, too, and I tracked him down to Hood River, Oregon. I’ll probably see him this summer, too.”
After lunch, we hunted down a Starbuck’s, where Natasha used the wireless to do some searches on her notebook. “Got ’im!” she whispered triumphantly, after a few minutes.
“Who?”
“Jeff Brackett. It looks like a good address, right nearby; he shows up as living at it for at least the last five years. Shall we try him and Devin?”
Devin Schneider’s address was down a dirt road behind a row of mailboxes, in a rat’s nest of old bungalows and travel trailers covered in brush and vines. The shades of the houses were drawn, and their yards overgrown with ivy, old roses, and hedges that hadn’t been trimmed in decades. Some of the trailers appeared to be occupied and others abandoned, but it was sometimes hard to tell them apart. As we walked, already sweating only minutes after leaving the car, down beaten dirt paths through the maze, a skinny, grizzled man, smoking a cigarette on the steps of his trailer, called out, “You lookin’ for someone?”
“Devin Schneider?” Natasha asked.
“You’re not from probation, are you?”
“Nuh-uh,” we both said, shaking our heads.
“Church ladies?”
“Not exactly.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. He lives in that blue trailer over there. Not sure if he’s there, but you can try.”
With an uncomfortable sense that people, and not just the skinny man, were watching us, we walked, single file, down a narrow path overgrown on both sides by tangles of grass and weeds. The rotting steps to the trailer’s door creaked and bent alarmingly under my feet as I walked up them and knocked on the door. There was no answer, and no sound from inside. I knocked again, waited, listening, and then descended the steps back to Natasha. “Nothing,” I said.
“He may be asleep,” the smoking man said as we came toward him again. “He sleeps a lot.” Sweat was wetting the roots of my hair and running down the middle of my back; I could only imagine what it must be like inside a metal RV at this time of day.
The man went on. “You may be able to catch him later at the soup kitchen down on Gridley. He goes there a lot for dinner.”
“Where on Gridley?” I asked.
“Church hall over by the food pantry, not far from the old Masonic Hall. Can’t remember what the cross street is.”
“What time do they serve dinner?”
“Five thirty. Need to be there by about quarter after, though, get in line.”
We thanked him and found our way back to the street and the car. As I climbed in, something small and sharp poked at my calf, and I looked down to see what it was. “Shit, my pant legs are covered in foxtails,” I said. We spent a minute or two picking off random bits of traveling seed pods—I from my pants, and Natasha from the hem of her skirt—before we moved on to Jeff Brackett’s place.
Brackett lived in a little stucco house on a paved street full of cracks and potholes. It was one of the nicer streets; the houses on it were all well cared for, and some had big shade trees in their yards. His house and yard were carefully maintained. The little front lawn was green and mowed, and the borders neatly edged. An ornate mailbox on its post stood at the head of the driveway, and the flowering bushes under the front windows were neatly trimmed. The garage door and window trim had been recently painted. Weekend warrior, I thought. Over the garage door I spotted a basketball hoop. With a family, I added.
There was no car in the driveway, a bad sign, but we walked down it and along the swept concrete path to the doorstep, and rang the bell. I wasn’t surprised when no one answered.
“Well, we’ve really washed out today,” I said to Natasha. “What now, do you think?”
“Let’s try the school, and see if he’s at work.”
“Sure.” Natasha appeared less concerned about our lack of luck than I was. Maybe it was that she, unlike me, was an actual investigator and had acquired a certain patience with days like this. To me, investigation was frustratingly random and inefficient: no matter how well you thought you’d planned, you could get into the field and have no luck getting anyone to talk to you. It didn’t sit well with me. And now I was hot and already tired, even though it was barely the middle of the afternoon.
The Sierra Vista School, which educated the children of Beanhollow, was a single-story maze of offices and classrooms connected by roofed outdoor corridors. It was as downtrodden as the neighborhood around it. The stucco walls were faded and chipped, the wooden door and window frames were covered in multiple layers of paint. The concrete of the roofed walkways between the buildings was cracking. It occurred to me suddenly that the school might be on summer vacation, but it was apparently still in session, though barely. A big sign, the kind with removable block letters, at the front of the driveway, said, with a notable lack of visible emotion, “LAST DAY OF SCHOOL JUNE 9.” We found the front office, and I asked the plump, middle-aged woman at the desk if we could speak with Mr. Brackett.
“I’ll call him,” she said. She picked up the receiver. “Would you go get Jeff? There are a couple of people here to see him.”
Jeff Brackett walked into the office a few minutes later. He was tall and a little stooped, dark-haired, with a thin, serious face, a long jaw, and what was probably a perpetual five o’clock shadow on the lower half of his face. Even in his brown janitor’s uniform, he looked lean, like a Dorothea Lange photo of a Depression-era farmer. Flaco, his nickname, means “skinny” in Spanish; I could see how his high-school friends would have tagged him with it. He stood, hesitating, for a few seconds before asking, “Can I help you?”
I realized I hadn’t prepared what to say next, so I introduced myself and Natasha and then said, conscious of the presence of the woman at the desk, “We were wondering if we could talk with you a bit about Todd Betts.”
His face registered mild surprise. “Oh, wow. Maybe we can talk outside. I’m on a break, though, so I don’t have much time.”
We filed out the office door, and Jeff led us to a bench. Once we’d all sat, he said, a bit doubtfully, “Todd passed a long time ago.”
“I know,” I answered. “We’re part of a legal team defending Sunny Ferrante, the woman who was accused of hiring Todd to kill her husband.”
“Oh, wow,” he said again. “That. I remember that case. Police came and talked to some of the guys about Todd. That lady was convicted, though, right?”
“Right,” I said. “We’re trying to get her a new trial, because we think she didn’t actually do it. We’d like to ask
you some things about Todd, anything he might have said, other people he was close to and might have talked to—that sort of thing.”
“I don’t have time now,” Jeff said, “but can you meet me after work? I get off at four. I can meet you here at this bench, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thank you.”
He stood up. “See you then. Don’t know how much I can help.”
* * *
We managed to kill an hour by driving to the apartment building, a bleak cube of cream-colored stucco and aluminum-framed windows half-filled with air conditioners, where Todd and Devin had been living at the time of the crime. We knocked on doors and talked to a neighbor or two who happened to be home, but none of them had been living there fifteen years ago, nor did they know of any other tenants who might have been there that long.
At four, we were back at the school, sitting side by side on the bench and gratefully drinking from bottles of cold water we’d bought along the way. A little later Jeff approached down a corridor, and we moved over to make a place for him next to Natasha. I’d bought a bottle of water for him, at Natasha’s suggestion, and I offered it to him. He took it and thanked us, opened it and drank about a third of it down in one gulp. “Hot day,” he said. “Starting early, this year.”
“It is that,” I answered. “Are you looking forward to summer vacation?”
“Yeah. Actually, we don’t really get the whole summer off, though. Part of it we spend cleaning out lockers, doing maintenance, deep cleaning, other stuff you can’t do with kids all over the place.”
“All that work in the background we don’t think about,” Natasha said.
“Yeah,” he said again, with a nod, a hint of pride in his face. “Would you excuse me please? I need to make a phone call.” He pulled out his phone and hit a couple of keys. “Hi, Ruthie? It’s Dad. I’ve got something at the school after work, so I won’t be home right away. Yeah, no problem. Make sure Noah gets started on his homework— thanks. I should be there by the time your mom gets home, but if not, tell her I won’t be long. Thanks, kiddo. Call me if you need anything. Bye.
“My kids,” he explained. “I’m free to talk now. What is it you wanted to ask?”
“I guess, to start with,” Natasha said, “we’re trying to get a new trial for Mrs. Ferrante. She was convicted of hiring Todd to kill her husband, but we’re trying to establish that she didn’t do it. I don’t know if you followed the trial, but a man named Steve Eason testified that Todd confessed to him, told him he’d killed Gregory Ferrante and Mrs. Ferrante hired him to do it.”
Jeff was shaking his head. “I heard about that,” he said. “We were all saying, ‘Todd? No way.’ We were like, ‘Nuh-uh.’ Some of the guys said police told them he confessed everything to his uncle Steve, and I said, ‘I wouldn’t believe that guy if I were you.’ Steve was a scammer and a dope fiend.”
“So the police didn’t interview you?”
“Nah. I was up in the Napa Valley that summer and fall, working in a vineyard. My uncle was managing a big one, and they were shorthanded, needed good workers. Guess the police didn’t know where to find me. Heard about it all when I got back.”
“And Todd never told you or anyone else you know that he was involved in the murder?”
“Not me, and no one else I know of. But I started to wonder. Not to speak ill of the dead, you know. But there were some things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, he was thick with that girl Brittany, the guy’s stepdaughter, and this other guy—can’t remember his name, but he was the guy’s son. Todd used to talk about him a lot; he really admired him. One time he said to me they both hated their dad, and he could relate to that. Todd told me a couple of times about this stepfather he’d had who was really harsh, hitting him and putting him down all the time.”
“You didn’t know Todd, then, when his mother was married to Ron?”
“Nah. I guess Todd lived here all his life, but I didn’t really get to know him till we were in high school. We were on the baseball team together.”
“About this guy Todd liked. Was his name Braden?”
Jeff thought for a second or two. “Could have been, I’m not sure.”
“Sounds like you didn’t care for him.”
He nodded. “No, I didn’t. He came around with Todd a few times. I thought he was kind of a smartass, a scammer like Todd’s uncle. All big plans, no follow-through. And he always had drugs. He brought weed, meth; he said he could get heroin, too. I didn’t like any of it. My guess is he was selling them to Todd.”
“How did you know?”
“Well, I didn’t, really; he never said anything. But he started to change, you know, like talk a little faster. He’d be a bit jittery sometimes. I’ve known tweakers, and he wasn’t that bad. But I was worried. I thought he was heading down a bad road.”
“Did you say anything?”
“I tried to, but he wasn’t interested. He said he had everything under control, and I didn’t need to worry.”
“How long was this before Greg Ferrante was killed?”
Jeff thought some more and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “I don’t know, a month, maybe? Not long.”
“Did you see any change in him after the murder?”
“Yeah. But I wasn’t spending as much time around him then. I had a job for a while before I left for Napa, working swing shift at a cannery. Didn’t see anyone that much because I was at work when everyone was off. I saw him on weekends sometimes, but I was a little weirded out by then, by the people he was hanging with and the drugs. I kind of went my own way. But when I heard he’d overdosed, I guess I wasn’t as surprised as some people.”
“How did he seem changed when you saw him during that time?”
“He seemed to be high a lot.”
“Did he ever mention getting a check from Mrs. Ferrante?”
“Not to me.”
“Can you remember who else was close to Todd at that time?”
“Hmm. Ian Nestor; he moved away, though. So did Bob Spitz. Rory’s dead—that was Rory Ebersole. You know who’d probably know more than anyone? Devin Schneider. He and Todd were renting an apartment together; the two of them were around each other the whole time. Devin still lives here in Beanhollow—another Beanhollow boy, I guess.”
“We were trying to find him today, but he wasn’t home.”
“Home?” Jeff rolled his eyes. “You mean that crazy old trailer?”
“Yeah.”
“You went back there? I admire you. That’s one weird place.”
“You know it, then?”
“Yeah. Couple of us kind of watch over Devin. He went into the Army, got sent to Iraq, and got a head injury, and he’s never been right since. Come back here, lived with his mom, but after she died he was homeless for a while. Julie, my wife, and I busted our asses—pardon my language— to get him help from the Veterans Administration. Julie’s a nurse, an LVN, so she knows something about the system. He lives in that old travel trailer—I don’t think it’s even got water or sewer hookups—because the guy who owns it lets him stay there for next to nothing, lets him run a power cord to it from his house, use a restroom in his garage. If you want to talk to Devin, I can try to get him for you. We bought him a cellphone, so we could stay in touch with him and he could get hold of us if he ran into trouble.”
“That would be terrific—thank you,” Natasha said.
“I’ll give it a try. Half the time he forgets to put it on the charger and walks around with a dead phone. But we’re working on him,” he said with a laugh. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and hit a number. After a few rings, I heard it pick up, and a faint voice say, “Hello?”
“Hey, Red, it’s Flaco. How you doing?” The other voice went on for half a minute before Jeff could speak again. “Wow, man, sorry to hear it. You should go back to your doctor and tell him. Did you call him? Yeah. Call him tomorrow, tell him what’s the matter. Or I can giv
e him a call and have him call you. Hey, man, I have two ladies here who want to talk to you. No, they aren’t. No, it’s okay. They’re lawyers working on that case where Todd’s girlfriend’s mother was accused of having her husband killed. Yeah, that one. Where’s a good place to meet you? Around six? Okay, man, I’ll send them over. Yeah, I can give them directions, so they can find the place. Okay. And I’ll call Doctor Carrillo in the morning. Don’t forget to charge your phone tonight, huh? So I can call you and tell you what he says. You take care of yourself. Have a good dinner. Bye.
“He says he’ll meet you around six outside the Daily Bread. That’s the soup kitchen in the church downtown, on Gridley Avenue, Gridley and Orange Street. Good luck. He can be hard to talk to; his mind doesn’t track so well.”
We thanked him.
“No problem,” he said. “Is there anything more you need?”
“Just one thing—do you have any idea where Steve Eason might be now?”
“Gee, no. I heard a few years ago that he was in prison again, but nothing recent. I don’t think he’s lived around here for a long time. Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Natasha said. “You’ve been really helpful. You wouldn’t mind us getting in touch if we needed to talk with you again, would you?”
“No, that would be fine.” He stood up, and we followed. “Gotta get home and start dinner.” We shook hands. “Good luck to you,” he said. He walked away toward the section of the parking lot reserved for staff.
Natasha yawned and rolled her head and neck, working out the stiffness, then massaged the back of her neck with her hand. I sighed and made a little moue of exasperation. We’d landed ourselves yet another hour to kill. “Nice guy,” Natasha said. I agreed.
“I hope Devin will help us. He was uncooperative with the detective who went to see him. I don’t think the defense got to talk to him because he’d been sent to Iraq by that time.”
“Lucky guy. What’s that old blues song? ‘If it weren’t for bad luck, wouldn’t have no luck at all’?”
Next of Kin Page 12
