“Was that when he went to Florida?”
“Well, we didn’t know where he was for a long time, except when he called asking me to send him money. He wasn’t speaking to Lyle. Once or twice he called needing bail money because he’d been arrested. Then he disappeared completely for about two years, and we couldn’t find out what happened to him.
“Then one day he just showed up at the house. I hardly recognized him; he looked like he’d been homeless for a long time—dirty, thin as a rail, and some of his teeth missing. He wouldn’t say anything about where he’d been. Lyle gave him the apartment over our garage and walked him through the paperwork to get SSI, so he’d have a little income. We tried to get him to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t. Then one day he had an argument with Lyle over cleaning the apartment and threatened to burn down the garage; and Lyle told him he’d have to get a place somewhere else.
“We found him another apartment and helped with his rent and brought him groceries every now and then. It still wasn’t easy; he’d keep getting evicted for being disruptive and threatening the neighbors, and we’d have to find him someplace else. Once he got arrested for disturbing the peace, and an old warrant came up out of Los Angeles—I guess he must have lived there for a while in his travels—so he was sent down there. It was a drug possession charge; he ended up spending a few months in jail for that and for failing to appear in court.”
“What happened after he was released?” Mike asked.
“We don’t know for sure. We thought he was living somewhere in LA, but we didn’t hear anything from him until they called us from the hospital in Ventura.”
“What happened?”
“He’d been in some kind of accident—hit by a city bus. Nothing too bad, they told us, a broken ankle and some scratches. But he’d gotten some kind of infection that put him in the hospital, which is why they called us; I’m surprised he gave them our names. They were worried about whether he was lucid enough to give consent to be treated. We went down there. He looked awful, and he was fighting them about giving him antibiotics; he’d gotten really paranoid and kept saying the city was trying to kill him so he couldn’t sue them. We convinced him to let them treat him, and when he was recovered enough, we brought him home.”
“Ah,” I said. “He’s talked a lot about that.”
Dot sighed. “I know. Our family lawyer looked into it and filed an injury claim of some sort with the city, and there was a settlement. Nothing very big; Howard wasn’t that badly injured, and the driver claimed Howard was jaywalking. Howard agreed to it, but then he had buyer’s remorse, and he always blamed us for pressuring him into it.”
“What happened to the money?”
“He used most of it to buy a truck and the rest to pay a deposit on that place in the trailer park. I know it was all gone at some point because he was always short of money. We heard from a friend of Kevin’s who’s with the police that the trailer park was full of drug users and dealers, but we couldn’t talk him into moving out of there.”
“Do you think he got involved in drug dealing there?”
“I don’t know. Someone could have talked him into it, I guess. But I know Ms. Blaine said he was this big-time dealer, and that couldn’t have been true.”
“Why?”
“He was always needing money from us. You can’t live on SSI unless you’re really good at making that little bit stretch, and Howard wasn’t capable of that. Not that he didn’t try: he was very frugal. But he’d have to call Lyle just about every month for a little to tide him over. Lyle bought him a cellphone—nothing fancy, no email or Internet—so he could call when he needed to. Not long before the time he was supposed to be hiring this Steve guy to kill that other man, Howard was calling Lyle asking for money for his rent because he’d broken a tooth and had to pay a dentist to have it pulled.”
“Did he ever talk about being robbed by Jared Lindahl?”
“Not specifically. But a little after that time he called Lyle, he called again. I remember because he didn’t usually contact us more than about once a month. He said someone had robbed his cabin and stolen his TV and cellphone. Lyle got another phone from the company store, and took it to him. When he got back he told me Howard looked like he’d gotten the worst of a fight—he had a black eye and bruises. Howard wouldn’t tell him what happened; he just rambled.”
“Was he angry?”
“Lyle didn’t say.” Dot shook her head. “But Howard was always angry about something.”
Something moved in my peripheral vision, and I looked up and saw a suntanned middle-aged man in work clothes standing next to the table. Dot saw him at the same time, and her eyes lit up. “Kevin!” she said.
He leaned down to kiss her cheek and give her a squeeze on the shoulder. “Hi, Mom,” he said.
Dot introduced us. “These are Howard’s lawyers, Mike and—” She paused.
“Janet,” I said, with my best forthright smile.
“We were talking about Howard,” Dot said to Kevin. “Can you stay a bit?”
“Yeah, for a little. We’re waiting on a plumber who’s running behind schedule.”
Dot scooted over in the booth, and Kevin sat down next to her.
“Do you really think you can help Howard?” he asked us. “I mean he’s crazy and all, but we really don’t think he did this.”
“We’re doing our best,” Mike said. “It’s hopeful that we got an order to show cause; it suggests that the California Supreme Court, at least, has some question about whether he’s guilty.”
“That’s good news, right?” Kevin asked.
“It is,” Mike said.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Kevin said. “I’m no lawyer, and Howard’s case has had so many twists and turns it lost me a long time ago.”
Mike did his best to explain the process of appeals and habeas corpus proceedings in death-penalty cases, pointing out that of all the habeas petitions filed by death-sentenced prisoners in the state Supreme Court, in only a small fraction does the court see enough of a possibility of serious error to order the trial court to show cause why the defendant shouldn’t get a new trial. At the end of it, Kevin seemed just as baffled, but too polite to say so.
“I guess all we can do is hope for the best,” he said. “To be honest, though—sorry, Mom—I’m not sure he should be allowed to go free. He really ought to be locked up someplace, for his own good. And ours,” he added. “We’ve all had to block him from calling us. Howard and his problems have really torn our family apart.”
Dot gave him a sideways look, but she didn’t disagree.
Kevin continued. “Bob really can’t stand him. Some of it’s understandable. Back when they were young, Howard gave Bob’s name a couple of time when he got arrested—I guess maybe to keep the police from finding out about warrants against him, or maybe just because he was crazy, I don’t know. But it caused Bob a lot of trouble to clear his name. Once he even got picked up on a warrant against Howard and spent a few hours in jail. It was an even bigger deal to him because he’s all about being some kind of big shot here in town—Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, all that. Howard’s troubles have been a huge embarrassment to him. Bottom line, he’s not anxious to help Howard. He doesn’t want him to be executed, but I don’t think he wants him coming back here, either.”
Dot nodded. “It’s been hard for him. Corinne felt it, too. I believe that had a lot to do with why she moved away.”
A cellphone ringtone sounded from somewhere nearby, and even though it wasn’t mine, I instinctively turned toward my purse. Kevin pulled his phone from his pocket, listened for a few seconds, then said a word or two. “Gotta go,” he said. “Plumber finally showed up.” He turned to Dot. “See you Friday?” he asked.
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Great. We’ll be by around seven.” He bent down and kissed her again, and then walked quickly toward the door.
Dot watched after him for a few seconds, and then turned back
to us. “I’ll have to leave in a few minutes. I’m taking a quilting class at the Adult School.”
We walked out together. At the door, we thanked her, and Mike said, “Thanks for seeing us; and it was good meeting Kevin.”
Dot smiled. “He’s a good person.”
“I can see that.”
“The hearing is, when, October 16th?”
“Yes,” Mike said.
“Good. I’ll write that down. I’d like to go, hear what they have to say.” She turned to me. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Moodie.”
“It was great meeting you, too; please, call me Janet.”
“Janet, then. I hope everything goes well with Howard’s hearing. Will you be seeing him any time soon?”
“I’m planning to visit him next month,” I said.
“Please say hello to him, and send him our love,” she said, “and would you ask him if he got the quarterly package I sent him?”
“Sure will,” I said.
* * *
“They seem like a nice family,” I said to Mike as we walked to his car. “Not like the ones you usually find in mitigation investigations.”
“Yeah. Makes our lives a little easier.”
I felt almost guilty for agreeing. Most of our clients’ families were, to put it kindly, troubled; and though I generally felt sympathy for their hardships, it was mingled with judgment for the fact that the parents, at least, bore a lot of the blame for how their child had turned out. Howard’s kin were more relatable, a middle-class family on which the misfortune of Howard’s mental illness had been visited through no fault of theirs.
“Gives you kind of a ‘there, but for the grace of God’ feeling, doesn’t it?” I said, lamely.
15
After leaving Mrs. Henley, we drove out to the crime scene.
“Dan tells me they’ve spruced the place up a bit,” Mike said. But even with some new paint on the common buildings and oiled roads between the trailers, the place still looked blighted. The trailers were old, their aluminum paint oxidized and the wooden latticework around their bases rotting and broken in places. A few were shabbily well kept, as though their owners had made some effort at maintaining or improving them, planting flowers and shrubs in the narrow strips of dirt at their fronts and sides. One had a minuscule patio next to it, with a plastic table and a pair of chairs on a bit of artificial turf. But many were surrounded by trash half buried in rank green weeds, and behind their windows I saw torn curtains and broken blinds. There were few people outside—a middle-aged man sitting on a folding lawn chair, beer in hand, and a woman taking a bag of trash to one of the dumpsters at the front of the park.
We had a copy of a map of the park from a police report, with Howard’s trailer marked on it. We drove there first and knocked on the door. No one answered. The woman we had seen earlier was walking by, and called to us, “The man who lives there is at work.” We thanked her, and when she was out of sight I took a few pictures of the trailer. I’d seen photos of it in the trial exhibit, and it was still run-down all these years later, but not as ragged as some: the blinds in the windows were in good repair, the planting strip was weeded, and there was a small vinyl storage shed at one side.
After that we drove to Lindahl’s cabin. The place where he’d once lived was outside the bounds of the trailer park, but connected to it by a dirt track. His was at one end of a line of three or four such cabins scattered in the woods behind the park, along the bank of a creek. When the police had asked people in the trailer park whether they’d heard the gunshots that killed Lindahl, a couple said that people sometimes used a clearing in the area behind the cabins as an informal target range, going out there to shoot at cans and bottles. Besides, it wasn’t a place you’d rush out to check if you heard a shot; as one park denizen put it, “You don’t go near the folks out there; they’re crazy.”
Lindahl’s cabin looked as if no one had lived there in a while. The parking strip in front of it was green with small weeds, with no sign of tire tracks. The windows were filthy, and the wooden stoop in front of the door was rotted through. The door was locked. We walked around the cabin seeking signs of life and saw none. Lindahl’s body had been found in the clearing behind the cabins; the police surmised he might have been target shooting when he was shot, though they hadn’t found a gun at the scene.
As we were walking back to the car, we saw a man walking toward us from the direction of the other cabins. “Can I help you?” he asked.
It wasn’t a friendly question; it was clear that he wanted to know what we were doing snooping around. He was wearing old jeans and a faded black T-shirt with the name and logo of what I guessed was a heavy-metal band. He was perhaps forty and in pretty good shape, someone who probably did physical labor for a living. Given that he was living in a place like this, I guessed he was an ex-convict or a drinker; he didn’t have the vague, half-starved look of a drug user.
Mike answered him. “We’re lawyers,” he said, “working on an old murder case that happened here.”
The man stopped, outside of handshaking distance, but close enough to talk. “I heard about something like that happening,” he said. “When was it?”
“1999,” Mike said.
“Huh. Yeah, I wasn’t around here then. Only been here about a year.” He glanced over at Lindahl’s cabin. “It’s been vacant since I’ve been here. Someone was killed there, huh?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “You wouldn’t happen to know who owns it, would you?”
“No. I pay my rent to Kelly Properties over on Main Street. Maybe someone there knows.”
Mike thanked him.
“Have a good one,” the man said, and we wished him the same. He walked back in the direction he came from, glancing back once at us, as we got into Mike’s car and drove off.
Although it didn’t really seem to matter, we decided to stop at Kelly Properties just because we had the name and we were in town. An agent there knew about the area behind the trailer park. They managed it for the owner. His lot had three cabins on it; the lot on the end that held Lindahl’s wasn’t his. “You’d probably have to go to the county recorder and find the deed,” she said.
We decided to forego the pleasures of the recorder’s office; it was getting late, and we had a long drive back. “Well, home we go,” Mike said cheerily, as we settled ourselves in his car. “I’ll have to ask Dan to canvass the trailer park and see if there’s anyone there who was around when Howard lived there.”
By the time I reached home it was well after midnight. After coffee and the drive through the dark along the cliffs of Highway One, I was too wired to sleep. Ed had left me a voicemail, checking on whether I’d gotten back safely, but it was too late to answer. I racketed around the kitchen for a while, wiping cabinets and counters and mopping the floor. When that failed to work off the caffeine and adrenalin, I brought down my precious bottle of Grand Marnier from its cabinet over the sink. A small glass and a Nero Wolfe novel picked randomly from the shelf of paperbacks in my living room did the trick, and after a half-hour I was finally out for what remained of the night.
16
It felt as though I was barely home from Wheaton when Sandra Blaine’s motion showed up in the mail. She had decided that Judge Brackett had a conflict of interest because he had defended Steve Scanlon in a couple of cases in juvenile court. I thought she was being a whiner and said so, in measured legal language, in the response I sent to Mike for filing. But Judge Brackett took the path of least resistance and issued an order two weeks later recusing himself from the case. The order also vacated the dates for the habeas hearing and status conference.
While we waited for a new judge, Mike and Dan went on a tour of prisons, visiting a few Aryan Brotherhood dropouts who Scanlon had told them might have some background on the hit on Lindahl. I worked on the rest of my cases and made a couple of long drives of my own to the Central Valley, to visit my client in the women’s prison and interview witnesses in her hometown. Then, with a
sigh of relief at not having to endure the oven-like heat of inland California for a while, I drove to San Quentin for a day of visits to clients.
It was summer, and I’d worn a white oxford cloth shirt under my black jacket. When I took off my jacket and put it on the belt of the X-ray machine, the guard there appraised my ensemble and said, “That shirt is a little too light. You can see the outline of your bra through it.” I stopped taking off my watch. Don’t fuck with me, I thought. I didn’t get myself out of bed at dawn and drive three hours to get here to be told my clothes are too sexy for a prison visit. What I said, though, was, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
The desk guard who had processed my paperwork came to my rescue. “She’s okay,” he called from behind me. “Let her through.” I gave both guards a look that I hoped expressed only gratitude. The guard at the X-ray machine turned her attention to the TV screen that showed the inward secrets of my jacket, shoes, plastic case of money and pens, and file folder. I cleared the metal detector without further incident, put on my jacket, watch, and shoes, slid out the door into the prison grounds, and walked the couple hundred yards of sidewalk to the main prison gate, paying little attention to the view of the dark blue bay and the misty hills beyond it. Oh, fuck you, fuck you—just fuck you all, ran the resentful mantra in my mind. A visit to Howard was enough without some minor bureaucrat worrying about whether some inmate might glimpse the shadow of my utilitarian sports bra underneath my mannish blazer.
Howard wasn’t the only client I was visiting that day. First I stopped to talk to Arturo Villegas, whose appeal I had taken the previous year. He was worried for his family. His parents were undocumented and in fear of being found and deported. Immigration agents seemed to be everywhere in Los Angeles arresting people. His family hadn’t visited him for his birthday because they were afraid to apply for a visit and travel from Los Angeles. His younger sister—the pride of his family—was enrolled in Cal State and living at home, and his younger brother had just started high school; they were US-born, at least, but he didn’t know what they would do if his parents were taken away. His parents couldn’t afford to hire an immigration lawyer, and they didn’t know if one could even help them. Lately, they had been afraid to talk about the issue over the prison phones, so all Arturo could do was call them every week or so to see if they were all right. The price Arturo was paying for his crime included one that people on the outside didn’t generally see: the pain of being unable to help when those you loved were in trouble.
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