“Yep,” Mike said. “And maybe you can help us understand where the hidden message is in it.”
“Okay.” Scanlon read slowly through the letter, occasionally shaking his head. When he had finished, he said to Mike, “That’s it, all right. Kind of hard to read. McGaw’s handwriting wasn’t the best. But I can’t say I’m good at decoding what he was saying. I didn’t really try at the time. I just considered the source and took it as a reminder of what I was supposed to be doing. The stuff about stool pigeons I figure was some kind of reminder to stay loyal. The homies probably meant Lindahl. And I remember I took the Christmas thing as a way of saying they knew what I’d been up to, and the ‘are you still working’ and delayed letters as his way of saying, ‘Why are you screwing around out there?’ ’Cause I’d been out on parole for a while at that point. The martial arts part probably just meant what it said; I’d been practicing in prison, and he thought I was getting pretty good. How’d you find it, anyway?”
“It was in the district attorney’s files of your case,” Mike said.
“Son of a bitch,” Scanlon said. “They never told us they had it.”
“Did you tell the Corrections Department about it when you debriefed from the gang?”
“Definitely. I told them I had the proof if they could find it.”
“We’ve been trying to get your debriefing paper—the one you wrote—from the Corrections Department,” Mike said, “and the attorney general has been stonewalling us. I’m afraid they’re trying to keep it from us until the last minute and then use it to impeach you when you testify, try to show you’re a liar.”
“Sounds about right,” Scanlon said.
“We’re going to have to ask you to tell us everything you remember writing in it, everything about your criminal history, so we aren’t blindsided.”
“You have my C-file, don’t you?” Scanlon asked.
Mike nodded. “Yes, and a bunch of court records. But that’s just the stuff you were convicted of, and the disciplinaries you picked up. We need to know what else you told Mrs. Rader.”
“Hoo, boy,” Scanlon said.
Mike’s paralegal had made a timeline of Scanlon’s brushes with the law, and Mike started going through that with him.
“How old were you when you were first sent to prison?”
“Eighteen. I’d been in the Youth Authority before that, but they let me go.”
“How long were you in for that time?”
Scanlon thought for a moment, counting the years on his hands. “Six years. Right up until I paroled and then popped Lindahl. It wasn’t supposed to be that long, but I lost good time because I kept getting in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Bunch of stuff, mostly getting involved in other people’s fights and mouthing off at the guards.”
“Where were you during that time?”
“The first place they sent me was the fire camp at Owens Valley. I guess I flunked out of that, so they sent me to DVI, then to Soledad, and from there to Folsom.”
“Where did you first run into guys from the Aryan Brotherhood?”
“Probably Soledad, really. There were some at DVI, but I wasn’t there that long. There were definitely AB at Soledad. Lotta guys with the shamrock tattoos. They were pretty much in charge of all the white guys there.”
“How did that work?” Mike asked. “Did you have to join them in some way?”
“Actually, no,” Scanlon said. “They didn’t want just anyone. Basically, you could mind your own business and be left alone, as long as you didn’t screw up or mess with them. If someone from one of the other races messed with you, they’d have your back because they took care of the whites.”
“So did you voluntarily seek them out, then, to get involved?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I was pretty immature, and wanting something bigger than me to get involved in, you see. You might say I was seeking a cause. And these guys, they were like, you know, real men. They had a code and rules for how to behave, and it all made sense to me then. And then, if you were a young white guy and they thought you might have promise, they’d kind of take you under their wing and teach you how to survive. Mack Gentry did that for me—taught me how to make knives, handcuff keys, whatever. I looked up to him; he was like the perfect white man.”
“Do you know where Gentry is now?”
“Yeah, he’s dead.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. He was killed in the Pelican Bay SHU. Some kind of fight among the higher-ups. I was debriefing when it happened. It made me feel I’d done the right thing to get out.”
“Did you meet McGaw at Soledad?”
“No, Folsom. But he helped me, too. Taught me to get a little more control over myself.”
“Can you remember what you told them in your debriefing statement about who you knew and what you were involved in there?”
Scanlon closed his eyes and lowered his head for a moment, thinking, before turning back to Mike. “I was trying to see the pages in my head, to remember what all I wrote. Let’s see, there were an awful lot of stabbings there. It was a violent place. Kites went around all the time saying that this or that guy was in the hat or ought to be taught a lesson or just gotten rid of. I didn’t get to see most of them because I wasn’t a member or really high up, so I wasn’t in on the business of making the lists. I’d just hear that we didn’t like so-and-so, and that was a signal that he should be taken out.”
“Were you ordered to stab anyone?”
“Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t like a direct order, but you knew you were expected to carry them out. There are no ‘maybes’ about it. They don’t tell you, ‘Do this.’ It’s just if I say I was AB, and you were an associate, and I told you, ‘If you ever see John, we don’t like him,’ you’d pretty much know what you have to do.”
“Did you follow those orders?”
“Oh, yeah, you don’t have any choice.”
“So you stabbed people in the prison?”
“Oh, yes. I did a few. I wrote up the ones I remembered. Guy named John, who was supposedly a child molester, and some guy whose name I can’t remember, who disrespected Corker. I threw him over the tier rail. He survived, but he never said who did it to him. Claimed he didn’t remember. Smart, actually. There were a couple of others, stabbings in the yard; I don’t even remember their names anymore.
“Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t always just following orders. Sometimes I volunteered when I heard about someone on the list.”
“Why did you do that?”
“At first more or less just for the excitement, because it was new, to see what it was like. What kind of shocked me was that I didn’t feel nothing inside after the first or second time. I remember thinking, man, shouldn’t I feel sorry or feel bad? I guess I decided the way to deal with it is I just see it as a game of Monopoly. He didn’t pass go, he didn’t get his two hundred bucks. He knew the rules just like I did, so that’s his fault. I don’t know if that’s a good way to look at it, but it helped me.
“And also at the time I had ambitions. I wanted to rise up in the ranks, maybe get to be a member. So I put the word out I was up for whatever.”
“And at some point you were told in some way to kill Lindahl?”
“Yeah. All without just coming out and saying it, of course. I heard he was on his way out because he’d stolen drugs or something like that—maybe been given some product to sell and put it up his own nose. I don’t know. But he wasn’t paying the tax. He paroled before they managed to act, and then I guess McGaw knew I was from the same town as Lindahl and I’d be paroling, too, in a few months. So arrangements were made, you might say.”
“So McGaw wasn’t the one who ordered the hit, just the one who arranged it with you.”
“Right. The order came from higher up the chain somewhere, maybe Corker Bensinger, who was a major player in Folsom, maybe someone higher than him.”
“And then you paroled, and what happened?”<
br />
“Well, it was kind of late in the year, close to Thanksgiving, and what with that and Christmas and all, I was spending some time getting to know my family again. I even worked for a few weeks. Thought I might try to stay out of trouble. Kept putting off this thing with Lindahl till tomorrow, next week, whatever. It was kind of a jolt, actually, getting that letter from Cal. I guess, realistically I was on my way back to prison by then; I’d started doing burglaries and small-time robberies—for entertainment as much as the money. I was getting bored living a respectable life. Anyhow, I’d been told before I paroled where Lindahl was staying. I knew the trailer park because I’d grown up around there, and a cousin of mine that I was always pretty close to was living there—I’d crashed at her place a couple of times when I was a kid, and while I was out I stopped by once in a while to see how she was doing. Kind of a welfare check, if you know what I mean; she had her problems.”
“Is she still around?”
“No. She died maybe five years ago. My sister wrote to tell me. She had cancer, I think, but it took her pretty quick.”
“What did the letter from Cal mean to you?” Mike asked.
“Well, I saw it as kind of a reprimand. It came out of nowhere. I hadn’t heard zilch from those guys since paroling, and then here’s this letter. Made me think I’d better get going, because if I didn’t finish the job before getting sent back to the joint, there would be problems for me there.
“Anyhow, I set things up with Freddy Gomez, first to help me buy a gun for the hit—I’d been doing robberies with one I found in a drawer in my parents’ house, and I wasn’t about to use it in a murder—and then to introduce me to Lindahl. Freddy was kind of an AB wannabe, but he was too into drugs to ever go anywhere. I didn’t tell him anything about my plans, told him I was looking for a partner for some robberies. So he gave me a cellphone number for this guy Indio, and I got in touch with him and bought a good gun, a Smith & Wesson .38, ’cause I didn’t want anything to go wrong. Then Freddy brought me up to Lindahl’s cabin one afternoon. And I got to know Lindahl, did a robbery with him the next day. The day after that I went to his place with Freddy and some beers, and we hung out for a while, drank beer, smoked weed, talked guns. Then I suggested we go to the clearing and do some target shooting. I sent Freddy out for more beer, so it was just Lindahl and me. We went out back and shot a few rounds, and then I waited until he wasn’t looking and just popped him in the back of the head, like that.” Scanlon mimed shooting a handgun two-handed. “He just dropped, without a sound. I figured he was dead, but I shot him another couple times anyway, just to make sure. Then—God knows why, I guess I was kinda ripped—I took his watch and a police scanner he’d had with him.”
“Then Lindahl had his gun on him when you killed him?”
“Yeah. I heard they didn’t find no gun out there. Little son of a bitch Gomez probably came back and took it. I didn’t take it, ’cause I didn’t know where he got it or what it might have been used for.”
“Freddy’s the one who turned you on to Indio, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve been trying to find Indio. Can you tell us any more about him?”
He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them. “I’m trying to remember. All Freddy gave me was the name Indio and the phone number. I remember being surprised when I met him, because I figured with a name like Indio he’d be, like Mexican or Indian, you know? But he was this kind of heavy-set Anglo guy, light hair, not too old, maybe early thirties. Freddy said he worked in the oil fields with his brother.”
“Do you know anything more about him?”
“Nothing, really. My guess is that he must have been kind of affiliated with the AB, but not an associate—just, like a sympathizer. Freddy was sort of an AB hanger-on, and he said the guy was safe to deal with.”
“How much did you pay for the gun?”
“Three hundred. I had some money just then, wanted a good gun.”
“Where did you get the money?”
“I had some from a couple of store robberies.”
“So Howard didn’t give it to you?”
“Hell, no. No drugs, either. Howard didn’t even know this was happening. Nah, I was broke when I heard the cops were after me and I was gonna have to take off. I’m not a planner; spent my last money partying. I was afraid to even try a robbery until I was out of the area. That’s why I called Indio and sold the gun back to him instead of getting rid of it somewhere. Got a little cash and a cheap .22. Stupid move, but I was desperate.”
“Do you know what he might have done with the gun?”
“Not for sure. We talked a little when I gave it back to him. He was some sort of amateur gunsmith; said he could switch out the barrel and the firing pin of a gun so it couldn’t be identified.”
“I guess that means it’s probably gone for good,” Mike said.
Scanlon shrugged. “Probably.”
“Anything else you recall about Indio?”
“I heard Freddy Gomez gave him up when he ratted on me, and he was busted not long after that. He was in the jail while I was there, though I didn’t see him. I heard they’d set up some kind of sting to get him.”
“I take it you told Corrections all this in your debriefing.”
“Not about Indio. I don’t think I said anything about where I got the gun, and they never asked. They were interested in AB, and Indio wasn’t, that I know of.”
By prearrangement with Mike, I had been writing down a declaration for Scanlon, in the event that he didn’t manage to stay alive until the hearing. It wasn’t long, just a statement that he had been an associate of the Aryan Brotherhood; that he had been told before he paroled to kill Lindahl when Lindahl got out of prison; that the letter we showed him from McGaw was the one he had received reminding him of the order. It also said he had gotten the murder weapon from Indio and sold it back to him afterward. And it said Howard Henley had nothing to do with killing Lindahl, didn’t know Scanlon was going to kill him, and never gave Scanlon anything to kill him with. It contained a sentence saying it was signed under penalty of perjury—which, it occurred to me, would be a moot point if we actually had to use it.
Eventually we ran out of things to ask, and Scanlon was becoming a little restless. I gave him the declaration, and he read it intently, initialing each page, signed it at the end, and pushed it back to me. Mike pressed the button that signaled the guard, and while we waited we said our goodbyes and told Scanlon as much as we knew about when he might be transported to California to testify.
“I don’t know if they told you,” Scanlon said, “but some deputy attorney general and an investigator came to see me, I guess a month or so ago. Asked some questions about who in the AB told me to kill Lindahl, if it wasn’t Howard. I got the feeling they were trying to trip me up or something. I told them I wasn’t giving up any names to them. The AG wasn’t too bad, but the investigator was another story altogether.”
“How?” Mike asked.
“Well, as they were getting ready to leave, and the AG was at the door waiting for the guard, the investigator started threatening me.”
“How?” Mike asked.
“He leaned over toward me and whispered that if I didn’t work with them they’d bring me back to California and arrange for me to be put in general population.”
“Damn!” Mike and I both said.
“Yeah,” Scanlon agreed. “I told him I was telling the truth, and I wasn’t afraid of dying. Told him he could put his threats where the sun don’t shine.”
“That was a hell of a thing for him to say,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Scanlon said. “But they pull that kind of shit all the time.”
“I believe it,” Mike said. “I heard of cases where they threatened a witness with a perjury charge for saying he’d been pressured to lie at trial.”
Scanlon nodded knowingly. “Then they count on no one believing you when you say what they did.”
The guard s
howed up and we went our separate ways, Scanlon back to the cells, and us past the usual succession of guard posts and sally ports to the brightness of the outside world.
Mike and I didn’t say much as we walked back to the car. A dry wind blew grit at us from the bare ground that surrounded the parking lot. I felt cold, from more than just my headache and the thin air. Listening to Scanlon had felt like hearing a voice from beyond the grave. I don’t think I’d ever met someone with so few illusions left about his life.
As we drove out, I looked back at the prison, sprawled across a desiccated primordial plain, snow-dusted mountaintops visible in the distance.
Yeah, I’d think twice about escaping into that.
24
I came home wishing for more time to get my affairs in order before the hearing. I had to help Mike prepare for it, mostly by writing more discovery requests for prison records and a motion to open up the hearing to take evidence on a claim that Sandra Blaine had suppressed exculpatory evidence at Howard’s trial. I also had to prepare and submit some bills to the courts for work I’d been doing on other cases: I needed the money to get my driveway graded and some patching done on my roof before the winter rains, and to get myself through the winter. Howard’s case was not shaping up to be particularly lucrative. And my son Gavin and his fiancée, Rita, were getting married in Melbourne, and I was taking a week off in December to fly to Australia for their wedding.
Howard, who’d been let out of the Adjustment Center, called several times. Because I thought he might be anxious about the upcoming hearing, I didn’t want to limit him to the usual once every two weeks, so twice a week or so, I spent the fifteen minutes the prison system allows for inmates’ phone calls listening to him rant about the conspiracies that had landed him in prison, until he was mercifully cut off, usually mid-sentence.
Harriet talked me out of skipping our exercise classes, and I had to admit she was right. Dancing and sweating to old ABBA songs and cooling down to Carole King ballads made me feel less jangled after Howard’s calls and nostalgic about my youth, before law school and grown-up life and Terry, and now Howard.
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