“My counselor gave me one,” he said, “a couple of months ago. He said the only deductions were for canteen and routine things like a doctor appointment and eyeglasses. But there was too little money left.”
“You know they charge five dollars for a medical appointment,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Howard said, almost reluctantly.
“And did you actually get new glasses?”
“The doctor told me I needed them for reading. But I don’t believe the glasses cost as much as I was charged. And the canteen I bought, I’m sure it wasn’t as much as they deducted. I think they’re skimming money and sending it to old Lindahl. I want you to investigate it and make them stop.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Mike said, “but it’ll be hard to prove.”
“Huh,” Howard said. “But they need to be stopped. They’re committing a crime.”
“Yeah, but it may be easier if I just send you a bit more when I put money on your books.” The gentle art of bribery, I thought. Sending a client some money they can use at the prison canteen helps smooth the rough places in their lives.
Howard wasn’t satisfied. “That isn’t the point,” he said, tensely. “My mother sends me money, too, and they’re stealing it from her. It’s a crime; you have to take it to the district attorney and get them prosecuted.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
“That’s not good enough,” Howard said. “You have to succeed. Their crimes must be brought to light.”
Mike admitted defeat. “I’ll try,” he said.
Howard then directed his attention to me. “Are you Mr. Barry’s investigator?” he asked.
Mike said, “No, this is the lawyer I was telling you about, the one I’ve brought on as second counsel.”
“Oh. Have you met Steve Scanlon?”
“No, not yet,” I said.
“You should get to know him. He’s got greatness in him. He’s the kind of man who can control his fate.” Thinking of what I knew of Scanlon’s career, I wondered what Howard had in mind.
Howard went on. “I’m here for my beliefs. I didn’t kill anyone. They all know that. But I know God’s plan for sending men like Scanlon to form colonies on the planets of other stars. I’ve been telling the truth to the world, and they knew they had to get rid of me.” He leaned toward us, and his voice rose and took on an evangelical tone. “They knew I was exposing their plans, their corruption, all the evil inside their souls. They accused others, but all the time they were doing the same or worse behind their own doors. When I exposed them, they turned their power on me, to silence me. They’re trying to silence me here, by keeping me from making phone calls. But I will not be silenced. If I am executed I will be a martyr, and my death will bring everything into the light and will destroy them. Their temples will fall around them, and the cities built on their corruption will be crushed.”
Ulp.
“I hope you won’t have to die to accomplish this,” Mike said.
Howard deflated a little. “I would like to think that could be so. I don’t want to die,” he said, his face sad and worn. “Christ didn’t want to die. He asked God to take the cup from his lips.”
“I don’t want you to have to go through that,” Mike said.
Howard looked doubtful. “If you can expose them another way. I don’t know.”
“Showing that you were wrongly convicted would be a start.”
“I guess.” Howard brightened a little, as another thought came into his mind. “Do you read your Bible?” he asked me.
“Not as much as I probably should,” I said evasively.
“You should. Start with the Book of Revelation. It will tell you everything.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
“You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
I nodded.
“The Beast walks among us, even now.”
From the papers in his file, Mike pulled out several authorizations for releasing records. “Howard, we need you to sign these, so that we can investigate your case.”
Howard pulled them across the table and stared at the top sheet for a moment, frowning. “These are the same ones you asked me to sign before,” he said.
“Yes,” Mike agreed.
Howard pushed them back across the table. “I can’t sign these,” he said.
“But we need access to records to investigate your case.”
Howard was firm. “Not these. You don’t need information about me to expose the people who put me here.”
“Okay.” Mike put the papers back on the stack.
A couple of guards were moving down the row of cubicles, giving prisoners and lawyers the five-minute warning of the end of visiting time. As they approached our cell, Howard appeared to remember something and began riffling through the documents he had brought with him. He pulled out a transcript with handwritten notes between the lines and in the margins. He handed it to Mike. “Read this,” he said. “It will tell you what’s going on.”
Mike took it and added it to his materials. “Thanks,” he said.
The guard, a young Hispanic woman, came to our door. “Five minutes,” she said, and we nodded. Howard glanced up at her and then began putting his papers into a large manila envelope. We sat, mostly in awkward silence, until she returned to take Howard back to the cell block.
“If you need anything,” Mike said to Howard, “let me know.” Howard nodded, then stood with his back to the cage door as the guard removed the metal cover from a smallish slot in the gate and reached through it to lock a set of handcuffs onto his wrists. That finished, he moved away from the door, and she locked the metal cover and then unlocked the door.
Howard’s envelope was still on the table. He nodded toward it. “Would you slip that under my arm?” he asked Mike. He lifted his left arm as far as the cuffs would let him, and Mike slid the envelope between his upper arm and his body.
We followed them out and turned left toward the visitors’ entrance, as the shuffling procession of Howard and the prison guard turned right, and the painted metal door to the interior of the prison opened and closed again behind them.
“Okay, that was intense,” I said. “So Scanlon’s an interplanetary colonizer, huh?”
“Yes, and the Beast of Revelations walks among us. And two courts found him competent to represent himself,” Mike said, shaking his head.
8
Back home again, I let myself, my dog Charlie, and the two cats, Effie and Nameless, into the kitchen, and put groceries away, then checked my phone for messages; I’ve kept a landline in my house because cellphone service is nonexistent where I live. There were no voicemails. Then I called my neighbor, Ed Harrison.
Ed and I have a sort of buddy system that has grown tacitly over a half-dozen years in Corbin’s Landing. Ed is a carpenter, cabinetmaker, and handyman, and I hire him now and again to build or repair things around my place. We both live alone, and after dark we can see the lights of one another’s houses through the trees. We take care of each other’s dogs; we buy groceries for each other when we go into town; and over time, we’ve taken to calling one another every day or so, on one excuse or another, but really as a sort of welfare check.
Ed answered at the same time as his machine picked up the call. “Sorry,” he said, “I was on a ladder.”
“No problem. I just called because I have groceries for you.”
“Fine—bring ’em over. Want some coffee? I do, so I guess I’ll start boiling water.”
I changed quickly into rain boots, and bag over my shoulder, flashlight in hand, and with Charlie running back and forth in front of me on his short Corgi legs, started across my back yard and down the path through the woods between our houses. The path had been there when I moved in, but so overgrown it was barely visible. Ed and I had found it, and walking back and forth on errands had opened it up a bit, although it was still a narrow track snaking around tree trunks and rocks and, on a day like today, dripp
ing with moisture from the oaks and redwoods overhead. It gave me a feeling that we were connecting with the history of our remote little settlement. I had found different things—an old glass marble, a fragment of patterned china, a Liberty head penny—on the path, and wondered who had dropped them there.
Once, in a maudlin moment, I had speculated that at some time in the past before either Ed or I lived in Corbin’s, the inhabitants of the two houses had also been friends. “Could be,” he had answered, “but it was probably made by rum runners or smugglers.” The north coast had a checkered history: it was isolated, and a fishing boat could easily sail down from Canada, pull into one of the little dog-hole harbors and unload a cargo of cases of liquor or any other portable contraband, to be hidden in the barns and sheds of householders and moved in farmers’ wagons down the old stage roads to Santa Rosa and points south.
Ed’s door was ajar, the opening radiating warmth and light and a faint smell of wood smoke and wet dog. His dog Pogo, after a perfunctory bark, trotted out to touch noses with Charlie and get a pat on his big yellow head. Leading the small pack of dogs, I walked through Ed’s crowded living room and into his kitchen, which smelled like coffee and cooking. Ed was at the counter, pouring hot water into his coffee press. Pogo assessed the proceedings and wandered off to a dog bed near the back door, where he sighed and flopped heavily down. Charlie examined Pogo’s kibble dish and then lay down under the kitchen table.
“Got rained out of work today,” Ed said, “so I made some chili. Recipe made a lot; would you like some to take home?”
“Sure,” I said. “Save me cooking dinner—it’s been a long day.”
I sat down at the table, and he came over and began emptying the bag I’d brought. “Ah, Scotty’s coffee—good stuff.” He put away the rest—avocados, strawberries, butter, yoghurt, milk. “What do I owe you?”
“Twenty will do it.”
He retreated to the back of the house and returned with a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me. “Coffee should be ready,” he said, and turned to the counter. He slowly pushed down the plunger in the press, while I got two cups from a cabinet above the sink and a gallon of milk from the fridge. Carrying our cups, we sat down opposite one another at the table. Ed knew me well enough to have left a lot of room in my cup for milk, and I filled it, watching the coffee turn the color of ice cream, then gratefully took a drink.
“So, did you take the case?” Ed said.
“Yeah.”
“The crazy guy, right?”
I hung my head in mock shame. “Yeah, I guess.”
Ed gave a laugh. “I could see you were going to.” He paused for a second, and his face became more serious. “This is the one where the guy was supposedly killed by the Aryan Brotherhood?”
“The very one,” I said.
“Jeez,” Ed said. “You be careful. When I was living in Oregon I knew a guy who had some dealings with them. It didn’t end well.”
“Not what I need to hear,” I said.
“It was a lot different from what you’re doing. Guy was a meth cook down in the desert in San Berdoo, and the local bigwig thought he made them a bad batch. So they kept him prisoner in a house for a week, made him make them another one. He said the whole time they kept talking about whether to let him go after he finished or just kill him. In the end, I guess, cooler heads prevailed, and they took him home. He said he packed up and left that night for Oregon. When I knew him, he was a born-again Christian, said he never wanted to have anything to do with drugs ever again.”
He was lucky, I thought. I’d known of cases—Howard’s included, it appeared—where people were killed for less than that.
“Really,” I said. “You didn’t have to tell me that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that I guess we’re old friends at this point, and I don’t want to see you put yourself in danger.”
I reached across the table and took hold of his forearm. “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be, but I feel better.”
“Hey, we take care of each other,” Ed said. “Watch out for your cup.”
I sat back quickly and steadied it.
After I finished my coffee, Ed ladled about a quart of chili into a jar for me. By the time I got home, I’d decided that what it really needed to go with it was some corn bread. I called Ed and told him I was going to make a batch, and when it was done, I took half of it over to him, then walked back to eat my solitary, comfortable dinner in my own kitchen. I’d had enough of socializing; I was ready to be alone for a while.
9
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
I was pacing back and forth in my living room, holding both hands over my ears.
“Shit,” I said again, more out of habit, at this point, than anything else.
I walked into the kitchen, still holding my head, gripping fistfuls of hair, then finally let go to retrieve a box of oyster crackers from the pantry, pull out a handful, and pop them into my mouth one and two at a time until I felt a little calmer. A call from Howard will do that to you.
It had been fifteen minutes cycling through a shorter version of the same rant as the prison visit, with a few more twists: we weren’t helping him; he didn’t kill anyone; he was in jail when it happened; this was all a conspiracy by the prosecutor, the judge, and the mayor of Wheaton to have him executed; Mike and I weren’t taking his case seriously; he suspected we were in on the conspiracy; he would report us to the State Bar and sue us for malpractice; I had to come see him and bring an investigator and an FBI agent, or else. And on, and on, until the fifteen minutes the prison allowed for his call were up, and the line went dead in mid-sentence.
Howard made me wonder how many people were on death row because they were just pains in the ass.
I ate another couple of oyster crackers. At least I wouldn’t have to talk to Howard for another two weeks. That was the deal Mike and I had made with him, that we’d each take one call from him a week. We lived up to our end of the bargain. Howard, on the other hand, called every couple of days. But since he had to call collect, I could refuse his calls. I’d even gotten to the point where I could do it without much guilt.
And then there were the letters. He sent Mike and me each about one a week—handwritten, the lines of oddly regular, rounded letters crowded together, on both sides of each page. He also wrote around the margins, top, bottom, and sides of every page, filling them with notes, quotes from statutes and cases, biblical passages—afterthoughts, perhaps, or meant to illustrate points in the letters; it was hard to tell.
I’d been working on Howard’s case for less than a month, and already it had come to this.
“Crazy,” I muttered to myself as I put away the cracker box and walked outside my kitchen door to breathe some fresh air and try to shake Howard out of my ears and brain. “I have clearly gone completely nuts.”
10
The Brand. That’s what the Aryan Brotherhood calls itself. White supremacists seem to love a certain off hand self-aggrandizement.
Not long after meeting with Mike I spent a morning reading Internet articles on the AB, my reactions alternating between irritated and queasy. The stories I read had a certain similitude, because they all seemed to be based on revelations by the same gang dropouts. Convicts and gang members like bullshitting their interviewers, and I took some of their accounts with a grain of salt, but they contained enough of what a scientist might call convergent data to give a lot of them a ring of truth. The photos showed a few of the most infamous of the AB shot-callers, old but scary-looking guys in prison grays, the blue-black tattoos on their necks and arms especially creepy against the pallor of wan, sagging skin.
At the state defender I’d handled a number of capital appeals involving defendants in street gangs. Gangs in general seem like violent boys’ clubs for undersocialized adolescents. They have rites and insignia and signs, and rules and understandings that amount to the same thing: so
lidarity, loyalty, respect, and knowing your place in the hierarchy, never leaving, and never snitching. Street gangs are violent and dangerous, but mostly only in their own neighborhoods because they tend to occupy small territories and fight their turf wars with equally small rival gangs nearby. But prison gangs are another story.
Prison gangs are better organized, probably because they’re run by men who are nominally grown-up. The structure still seems geared to men operating at the social level of teenagers, but the people controlling them are older and more savvy, and worse, into money and power. The major gangs—whites, Hispanics, and African Americans all have their clubs—are much bigger than the average street gang, with a wider reach and the ability to run ongoing criminal operations for profit. And through their families, former inmates, and supporters outside and on the prison staff, they recruit and operate both in and out of the prisons.
Judging from some of the crime stories related in the Internet pieces I was reading, the Aryan Brotherhood appeared to be pretty fond of gratuitous bloodshed. On the absolute loyalty vector, the Aryan Brotherhood claims to have a doctrine of “blood in, blood out,” meaning that you have to do a killing for the Brand to graduate from being an “associate,” a loyal foot soldier for the gang, to a full member, and that once you join, if you later try to leave the gang, you will be killed—presumably by some other wannabe hoping to “make his bones,” another fine macho phrase for killing someone to qualify for a place in the club. That struck me as possibly unrealistic, if only because it would lead to an awful lot of carnage, but I found myself thinking it was probably better for the average person’s health and wellbeing to stay out of the way of the AB and aspiring associates.
Where my reading started to connect to Howard’s case was when the articles talked about people who get marked for death by the gang. Mostly they’re snitches, suspected child molesters, or gang associates who have committed some infraction, like stealing drugs or money from the gang or failing to carry out an assignment from a member. In the colorful vocabulary of gangs, such traitors are “greenlighted,” or in the Aryan Brotherhood’s own term, “in the hat.” What this means is that any gang member or associate, or someone with aspirations to rise in the gang, is allowed, even required, to kill them if they have an opportunity. Scanlon had told his buddy Sunderland that Lindahl had sold drugs for the AB in prison and had embezzled money from them, that he was in the hat, and that Scanlon had been given orders to better himself by doing him in.
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