“What was Braden doing on the ranch, anyway?” I asked. “I’ve asked a couple of people who knew Todd, and they didn’t seem to know.”
John made a face. “Interning, I guess you’d call it. He was having trouble finding work out of college, and Mom and Dad did Pat a favor by offering to let him work in the family business, see if he liked it, or if not, it’d be something he could put on his résumé. He lived in the granny unit and ate with the family. It was a sweet deal for him.”
“Did it work out?”
“Nah. Braden had an allergy to work.”
“Oh, John, isn’t that a little harsh?” Marlene said.
“Mom, you weren’t with him all day. I was supposed to be mentoring him, showing him how the ranch was run, particularly the vineyards. We grow premium wine grapes, and we sell to some of the best winemakers on the Central Coast. It takes skill and good management. I’m proud of what we do. Braden wasn’t interested in any of it; all he talked about was stuff like flipping houses or getting some job in banking or finance that would make him a big killing in five years. And poor Todd started hanging around with him in his off hours. I don’t know what Braden saw in him; maybe he was bored and wanted someone else young to hang out and smoke weed with. And there was Brittany in the middle of it, because Todd would bring her to the ranch to visit.”
“Did you know he was smoking marijuana?” Carey asked.
“Absolutely. I could smell it. And personally I suspected he was using other drugs, too, and getting Todd into them, though I couldn’t prove it.”
“What made you think that?”
“Experience. I had friends when I was young who got into meth or heroin; and we’ve had workers here who were using. I know what it looks like. Todd got flaky, started being late to work, kind of scattered, sometimes hyper and working extra hard, and sometimes just not focused. He wasn’t himself.”
“What about after Greg was killed?”
“It got worse. I was on the point of letting him go when he died. When I heard it was an overdose, I wasn’t surprised— just guilty that I hadn’t confronted him and had it out when I first saw what was happening. Damn, he and Uncle Greg might both still be alive.”
“How is that?” Bob asked.
“Well, assuming he actually was the guy who killed Uncle Greg, I don’t think he’d have done something like that if he hadn’t been under the influence in some way. You knew him, the Todd we knew wouldn’t have hurt a soul.”
“Do you think Brittany was using?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “I didn’t know her well. She didn’t have much to say for herself; she was just kind of around some of the times when Todd and Braden were together.”
“Where did Braden go after Greg was killed?” I asked.
“He stayed a little longer, couple of months, then went back to Fresno, not long after Todd died. Pat wanted him back home after everything that happened; I don’t blame her. He said he was going on a trip to Europe with Pat and her husband and then starting an MBA program somewhere back east, in the fall. I was glad to see him go.”
Smart woman, I thought, getting him out of the way of the investigation. I wondered if Brittany was telling the truth after all.
After lunch, Carey and I helped clear the table, and then thanked the Ferrantes for their hospitality and for taking the time to talk with us. “You know the way down the hill from here?” asked Tony.
“I’ll walk down with you,” John said. “I have some stuff I need to do in the office.”
The puffy white clouds in the morning sky had thickened to billows of light and darker gray. “Looks like it’s about to rain,” John said. I nodded.
As we turned onto the road back to the store, John said, “I tagged along because I wanted to say a couple of things I wasn’t sure I should mention with the rest of the family there.”
“Thanks,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Well,” he said, apparently trying to find words to begin, “this whole thing with Greg shook up the family real bad. I know Aunt Marlene and Aunt Cindy said something about it back there. But it was worse than they let on. That whole crusade of Grandma’s against Sunny almost split up the business. Uncle Tony was so disgusted that he and Aunt Cindy moved away, got a place in town. He almost quit, which would have been awful, because he and his son Ken were the people who really knew about growing wine grapes; they were teaching me. Even so, we lost Ken. He went up to Napa to work at a winery there; he didn’t want anything to do with the atmosphere here.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I hope we haven’t stirred anything up.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not in a bad way. It’s just that we all fell into the habit of not talking about it, even after Grandma died. I’m just now starting to see that we’ve all had our thoughts about the situation over the years. Personally, I don’t know if Sunny was guilty or not, but I sure didn’t think it was right for the prosecutor to push for the death penalty. And listening to my dad and my uncle and aunts, they probably feel more or less the same. But I’m not sure any of us knows each other’s thinking for sure. I hope you can get to the bottom of what happened with Greg’s murder, and I’d like to help you if I can. I’m sure Barbara would agree with me. But I can’t speak for anyone else. I guess the bottom line is, it’s still a sensitive subject, and we’re all kind of tiptoeing around each other right now, because we don’t want another blowup.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m sure this is very difficult for your family,” Carey added. “We’re grateful that you were willing to talk with us.”
“No problem,” John said. “Are you heading back home from here today?”
“Yeah,” we both said.
“How long a drive is it?”
“About three hours for me,” said Carey.
“Closer to seven for me,” I said.
“Whew,” John said. “Hope the weather doesn’t get bad.”
“Thank you,” Carey said. “And thank you all for meeting with us. We really appreciate your hospitality.”
“No problem.”
Alison came to the counter as we entered the store. “It’s just us,” John said. “I’ll go on back now.” He turned to Carey and me. “Nice to meet you. Have a safe trip home. Wait just a second.” He walked over to one of the shelves and took down a couple of bottles. “Our premium olive oil,” he said. “Arbequiña, this year’s pressing. We’ve won medals with it in a bunch of competitions.”
We both thanked him. “I hope you like it,” he said, and he shook hands with each of us and disappeared into the back.
As we walked to our cars, Carey said, “That thing about Braden being hauled off to Europe and then sent to school back east.”
“Yeah?”
“That sounds like his family suspected something and wanted to get him out of the way.”
“It sure does,” I said. “It also makes Brittany’s story about being afraid of him even more sketchy.”
“It does, doesn’t it? He couldn’t be all that much of a threat if he was three thousand miles away. But then I guess she could say she knew he’d be back. God, what a mess. I don’t see any way around using her declaration. She may be telling the truth; I don’t feel in a position to judge.”
“We need to talk to Sunny first,” I said.
“You’re probably right. I’m so busy right now; do you think you can do it?”
I certainly had time, and I said so.
“Thanks. I’ll go back to town and check in with Natasha, see how she’s doing with the jurors. I imagine you want to get on the road as soon as possible. I can fill you in on what she says.”
I thanked her. I was looking forward to hearing what Natasha found out from the trial jurors, but not enough to stay an extra day in Harrison.
20
Back home, I continued writing Sunny’s habeas petition, sending draft arguments to Carey and revising as she edited them. It was the last big rush; in a couple o
f months we’d have to file the petition with whatever we’d been able to find to help Sunny’s case. We were both tense about the deadline and worried that we didn’t have more—more documents, more witness declarations—to convince the judge that Sunny should get a new trial. The way the law works, we were required to proffer all our evidence and arguments in that one petition; if you find something new later, it’s damned near impossible to get a do-over. I was anticipating that I’d spend the rest of the holiday season working on it, when I got a phone call from Toni Jackson, the state defender lawyer who had taken over Sunny’s appeal when I’d left the office.
“Sunny Ferrante’s appeal has been set for oral argument on January 8th,” she said, after a minimum of initial formalities. Although I had a lot of respect for Toni and was pleased that she’d been picked to take over Sunny’s case, she and I had never gotten to know one another well at the state defender. We’d moved in different circles: she was ambitious to advance in the office, while I just wanted to do my work and be left alone.
“Interesting timing,” I said. “Her habeas petition is due at the end of February.”
“Probably just coincidence,” she said. “Anyhow, I’m wondering if you have time to come down and help with a moot court. You know the case better than anyone else I can think of.”
I said I’d be happy to.
“We’re thinking of the Thursday or Friday before. Would either of those work?”
Both days were clear on my calendar. “Could you make it in the late morning or early afternoon, though?” I asked. “It’s kind of a long drive down there.”
“No problem. I’ll get back to you when I find a day that works for all the volunteers. How are you, by the way?”
“Fine. Busy getting Sunny’s petition together.”
“How’s that going? Any breakthroughs since Eason recanted?”
I felt uncomfortable telling her about Brittany’s story until I was less doubtful of it myself.
“Not much. Our investigator talked to eight of the jurors, and four or five remembered the evangelical guy and confirmed that he’d quoted Scripture and argued that Sunny should get death basically for insubordination. The rest didn’t remember.”
“Petty treason, isn’t that what they used to call it?”
“The crime of a wife killing her husband. Yep. Guess the guy wanted his patriarchy back.”
She gave a short laugh. “And the trial judge refused to hold a hearing.”
“I know. The jurors she interviewed wouldn’t go so far as to say it affected how they voted. One of them said she thought he was a nut.”
“Only one?”
“Well, it’s Harrison. Some of them probably agreed with him, but were too embarrassed to say so. Anyhow, the man himself died ten years ago.”
“Pity; that’s the trouble with cold cases. It might have been interesting to hear what he had to say for himself. You’re going to argue the misconduct in your habeas petition, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Anything else happening?”
“Carey and I had a very interesting meeting earlier this month with a bunch of Greg’s relatives. They were amazingly friendly. At least some of them have doubts about whether Sunny is guilty.”
“Huh. Let’s see where that goes. Well, good luck. Have a good holiday, see you next month.”
A moot court is basically a practice oral argument, where the lawyer makes the presentation she has planned for the court in front of a group of other lawyers and receives feedback and critiques. Toni emailed me the briefs in the case and the list of topics she hoped to cover in the forty-five minutes the state Supreme Court gave her to make her legal arguments before them. I decided to wait to see Sunny until after the argument, so I could tell her any news there might be about how it went. In the meantime, I kept working.
A lot of businesses not directly involved in selling holiday merchandise seem to go on something like hiatus as Christmas approaches; little work gets done from about the third week in December until after New Year’s Day. The courts are an exception; they operate like clockwork, winter and summer. Filing deadlines don’t change, and trials continue to be held; I’ve worked on two appeals, one of them a capital murder, where the trial jury handed in its verdict on Christmas Eve.
As for me, as I grow older and more ambivalent about the holidays, my preparations for Christmas have become minimal. I’d sent presents to Gavin and Rita in October to save the expense of airmail postage to Australia. Aside from them there were very few people in my life any more to whom I gave gifts: Ed, Harriet, and Bill, a jar of jam to Zoe, my aerobics teacher—that was about it. We all had enough stuff anyway, and they weren’t that interested in acquiring another white elephant in the form of a present; they wanted things they’d consume, like food and candles. I’d bought an artificial tree small enough to sit on my coffee table without obstructing my view of the TV, and trimmed it with miniature ornaments, a chain of popcorn, and a couple of strings of tiny lights. I strung some multicolored lights over the living room windows and along the roof line outside and called it good.
In the middle of the month I made the trek to San Quentin, on a foggy morning, for holiday visits to my client Arturo and some other inmates I still kept in touch with. We spent the time in small talk about Christmases past and how our families were doing, reminiscing about our favorite holiday meals. I left with promises to send quarterly food packages and books of stamps and a sense of duty done for another few months.
My few friends left town for Christmas—Harriet and Bill took the train to Reno to spend Christmas with Bill’s son and his family, and Ed ran off to meet his son for a week of fishing in Baja California. Gavin and Rita skyped me from Australia on Christmas Eve, panning their laptop around their apartment to show the tree and window decorations, and told me it was eighty degrees and sunny there, and they were on their way to a barbecue at Rita’s parents’ house. I spent Christmas Day at home, eating cookies and drinking home-made eggnog and binge-watching The Lord of the Rings.
On Boxing Day, I settled back into working on my cases. In addition to Sunny’s petition, I was writing an opening brief in another murder case, fortunately one not involving the death penalty, that had to be filed in mid-January. With Ed, Harriet, and Bill gone, New Year’s was as quiet as Christmas. Vlad’s had a party going, but I wasn’t interested in sitting around drinking and waiting for midnight among a bunch of strangers, so I stayed home and went to bed early.
A few days before the moot court, I settled down to rereading the briefs in Sunny’s appeal, admiring the job I’d done on the opening brief—had I really ever been that smart?—and making notes of questions I’d ask Toni if I were a particularly hostile and devious judge, in the hope it would help prepare her for any question, however strange, that might be lobbed to her from the bench.
Naturally, it was raining when I had to make the drive to the state defender’s office in San Francisco. After feeling my way gingerly along the curves of Highway One and meeting the inevitable traffic jam, courtesy of a car that managed to slide onto the rear bumper of another on the freeway, I left my car in the parking garage I remembered as the least outrageously expensive of a bad lot and trekked damply into the lobby and onto the elevator to the suite of offices that housed my old employer.
Everything was the same, except the young African-American woman at the reception desk, who was new to me. The metal and plastic upholstered chairs in the waiting area, the magazines on the side tables (surely they were different, though I couldn’t tell), the track lighting, off-white walls, and business-blue carpet. The place even smelled as I remembered it, like a forest of copy paper and toner, with just a whiff of coffee. I had expected something like a rush of painful sense memory from the worst few months of my life, but I didn’t feel anything except mild relief that I didn’t work here anymore.
The receptionist was on the phone; from her end of the conversation, I could tell she was speaking with a pri
soner unhappy that the lawyer he wanted to speak to was out of the office. When she hung up the phone and turned to me, her expression was one of not-quite-exhausted patience. “I’m sorry,” she said; it seemed to be more of a general observation about the state of the universe than an apology meant for me. “Can I help you?”
I smiled. “Rough morning?” I asked, and by way of explanation, added, “I used to work here, years ago.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just can’t seem to get off the phone today.” As if to confirm what she’d said, it started ringing again. She picked it up and asked the person on the other end to hold. “I’m here for the Ferrante moot court,” I said, to spare her having to ask. “Janet Moodie.”
“Oh. I’ll get Ms. Jackson.” She made a call, said, “Toni, Janet Moodie’s here for the moot court,” hung up, and returned to the call on hold. I moved away from the desk toward the chairs and leafed through a magazine—a fairly new issue of the State Bar monthly journal—while I waited.
Toni came through the door to the offices. Tall and dark-skinned, she had always had a lot of presence; now, a little heavier in the face and body, she also had that regal bearing that some African-American women seem to acquire with middle age. The long red shirt of heavy silk she wore over dark slacks enhanced the impression. She smiled and shook my hand. “I’m so glad you could help. How was the drive here?”
I gave her a bowdlerized version, and she commiserated. “Traffic just gets worse and worse.”
She walked ahead of me to the conference room, where two other former colleagues, Joe Scott and Marty Silverman, stood and greeted me, Marty with a hug. “Congratulations on the Henley decision,” Marty said.
I thanked him. “I wish he’d lived to see it.”
“A real shame,” he said, soberly. “I heard you did great work on the hearing.”
“We had good luck,” I demurred. “Most of the credit should go to Mike Barry. But it’s always a crapshoot. When I think of all the cases we’ve all deserved to win and didn’t—”
Next of Kin Page 20
