Madman Walking

by L. F. Robertson

  “Mack Gentry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were they at Pelican Bay?”

  “Yes, beginning around 2005, 2006. Some of them were in the SHU.”

  “Gentry was killed, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Laszlo objected that Ida hadn’t shown she was personally aware of Gentry’s death, and the judge sustained it.

  “You were at Pelican Bay at the time of Gentry’s death, weren’t you?” Mike asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you personally aware of his death?”

  “Yes, I was on duty when they found his body and arrested his cellmate. I saw the medics bring his body out of the cell.”

  I glanced at Laszlo. He was glowering, but for once, silent.

  “Did you know Cal McGaw?”

  “No. You mentioned his name to me, but I hadn’t heard of him before that.”

  “You never worked in Folsom, did you?”

  “No. I was at Soledad, then Pelican Bay.”

  “You were acquainted with Steve Scanlon at one point, weren’t you?”

  “Actually, we came into contact at two different institutions, first Soledad and later Pelican Bay.” Ida then explained essentially what she had told Dan and me about her contacts with Scanlon. “Scanlon was young and impressionable and looking for someplace to belong. A kid like that will tend to gravitate toward the gangs. He wasn’t all that bright, and he had a short fuse, so he got into trouble a fair amount. After he angered another inmate, who stabbed him, he threw in his lot with the AB, because he needed the protection of belonging to a gang.”

  Laszlo objected that she was speculating, and the judge told Mike to move on. “You knew he had gotten involved with the AB, though?”

  “Yes. He told me, and I could see he was associating with that group on the yard.”

  “How would you describe Scanlon’s intelligence and sophistication?” Mike asked.

  “He was pretty inept socially. Not too bright, either; I’d put his intelligence somewhere around the low end of normal. But sometimes he has some insights. Once in a while he’s not so clueless. He was kind of a bumbling kid.”

  “Did he eventually get transferred out of Soledad?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you come into contact with him again after that?”

  “Yes, when he came into the SHU in Pelican Bay.”

  “Did you see much of him there?”

  “Not really, until after he was stabbed.”

  Mike asked her to elaborate, and Laszlo objected. The judge overruled him and let her go on.

  “Scanlon tried to escape and assaulted a guard. The incident caused a crackdown on the AB in the prison, and he and a bunch of other AB guys ended up in the SHU. Later, Scanlon was stabbed by another AB associate and nearly died. When he was recovering in the prison hospital he asked to talk to me. I went to see him. He was kind of appalled that the gang had done this to him. He always felt he’d been a good soldier. He said he was ready to debrief from the AB.”

  “And what is debriefing?”

  “It’s a way of dropping out of a prison gang and getting protection from the prison system.”

  “How does it work?”

  “It’s a process. The inmate needs to write an autobiography of his involvement with the gang, you know, everything he’s done with them, who he knows, who he doesn’t know, any current plots to hurt staff, what kinds of things they do to transport weapons and drugs. The inmate has to be very, very candid about his activity with the gang, because the statement then goes to the investigation unit, and the people there are very competent and thorough. They have ways of verifying what you’re talking about to see if you’re lying or not.”

  “Did that happen with Steve Scanlon?” Mike asked.

  Laszlo objected. “If she knows,” the judge said.

  “Yeah, he completed an autobiography and gave it to me. It was pretty thick and rambling. I just kind of browsed through it and sealed it up, taped it, initialed it, and put it in a lockbox to be sent to gang investigations.”

  “Do you know what happened after that?”

  “No, not specifically.”

  “What generally happens?”

  “Inmates requesting debrief go on a waiting list, and the lieutenant and the sergeant and the gang investigation… it’s kind of like first come, first served. I believe Scanlon was allowed to debrief—”

  Laszlo objected, and the judge struck Rader’s last sentence.

  Mike moved on. “But at some point Scanlon was no longer an inmate at Pelican Bay.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Before your testimony today, Ms. Moodie showed you a letter.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  Mike asked that the letter be marked for identification and then handed it to Rader.

  “Is this a copy of the letter she showed you?”

  Rader looked briefly at each page of the letter. “Yes, that appears to be the one.”

  “Addressed to Steve Scanlon from Cal McGaw, Folsom Prison?”

  “That’s what it said.”

  “Does that letter appear to you to contain any sort of coded message?”

  “I would say, having seen letters between gang members, that there is probably some message encoded in it, but I couldn’t tell you just what it might be.”

  Laszlo objected and asked that her answer be stricken, and the judge sustained the objection.

  “When Scanlon talked to you after he was stabbed, did he mention a contract killing he did in Wheaton?”

  “Yes. He said he’d done a killing for the Aryan Brotherhood in Wheaton, shot a man and went to prison for it. It was one of the reasons he was so shocked by what they did to him.”

  “Did he say he killed the guy for anyone else besides the Aryan Brotherhood?”

  “Not to me, he didn’t.”

  “Do you have an opinion in general based on your interactions with Mr. Scanlon over the years as to his credibility?”

  Rader nodded slightly. “When any inmate comes to us as an informant, whether or not you’ve known them, you have to corroborate their information. But aside from that, I felt Steve was pretty honest with me in general. But, again, I never did an investigation following up on anything he ever said.”

  Willard started his cross-examination after the mid-afternoon break. He began by showing us, and then Ida Rader, a copy of Scanlon’s debriefing statement. “That’s one way to get it out of their grasping claws,” Mike whispered to me.

  After going through the statement with Ida Rader and establishing that it didn’t mention Howard Henley, Laszlo asked, “Isn’t it pretty common for criminals to try to enhance their stature by claiming association with the Aryan Brotherhood?”

  “Not at all,” she said firmly. “It’s a dangerous thing to do; they’ll punish you if they hear of it.”

  “Is it common,” Willard asked, “for someone who has done a killing for the Aryan Brotherhood to tell a lot of other people about it and who was behind it?”

  “Actually, that would be fairly common,” she answered. “The AB doesn’t mind word like that getting around because it enhances their power to have people know they’re capable of killing people who go against them—even more so if it’s someone on the street. It shows their reach.”

  Not getting the answers he wanted, Willard retreated to asking Rader about her direct examination testimony, his questions dripping with sarcasm and incredulity.

  After a brief redirect by Mike, the judge said he had something else he needed to attend to, and adjourned the hearing for the day.

  Dot said hello to us after court. She had come late, but had spent most of the afternoon watching the hearing. She was with another woman, whom she introduced to us as her best friend, Lillian.

  A newspaper reporter, a baby-faced kid who seemed too young to be working at a grown-up job, had been assigned to the hearing. After court ended for the day, he stopped us and introduced himself—“Josh
Schaeffer, for the Taft County News Gazette”—and questioned us about what had just happened and what we had planned for the next day. He didn’t understand the legal maneuvering, but he’d clearly done some homework about Howard’s case, and he seemed interested in what we were doing. The possibility that Howard might be innocent of the murder would make good, if controversial, copy.

  At dinner, after driving Ida Rader to the airport for her flight home, I allowed myself the beer I’d longed for. Afterward, Mike and I worked for a while going over questions for the next day’s witnesses and researching the arcana of hearsay law for arguments against Laszlo’s wall of objections.

  I slept badly, and woke up before dawn the next morning. The blandness of the hotel room—even though it was cleaner and better decorated than any place in my house—made me feel depressed and homesick. I missed my nest of a bed, with its aged down comforter, its nighttime population of cats, and pillows that smelled like me. After a half-minute wallow in self-pity, I shook myself out and showered in the brightly lit, pale tan and white bathroom. Made up and dressed for court, I met Mike in the café off the lobby. Today Mike was questioning Sandra Blaine, and we both fortified ourselves with eggs and bacon. Morituri te salutamus.

  27

  The morning started with testimony from Gordon Stans, the parole officer who had faxed the McGaw letter to the Wheaton police. Laszlo began by objecting to Mike’s use of a subpoena instead of a discovery motion for the parole records, but subsided when Mike pointed out that the attorney general had not given us the letter in discovery, even though it was presumably in the files of their own client, the Department of Corrections.

  Stans himself said the letter we’d found in the district attorney’s files was the same as a copy still in the parole file. He had forgotten the case, he said, but after seeing the letter, the fax cover sheet, and a couple of his old reports, he remembered that he had been called in to do a parole search of Scanlon’s car and was present when the letter was found. He recalled that he’d found it in the glove box. He had told the police officers doing the search that the letter was probably relevant to validating Scanlon as a gang member, and they had given it to him. He had sent the original to the Department of Corrections and faxed a copy to Dave Springer, the Wheaton police detective investigating the Lindahl homicide. He didn’t recall the exact date when he’d sent the letter and copy, though he believed it was soon after the search of the car. (Laszlo objected that his belief was speculation; the judge agreed and struck that sentence.)

  On cross-examination, Stans remembered that he had read the letter, and nothing in it had struck him as strange. He knew Scanlon was in with the AB, so he thought McGaw might be an associate; that’s why he’d sent the letter to Corrections, in case they could use it when Scanlon was back in prison.

  Detective Dave Springer was our next witness. He remembered nothing about the letter—not getting it, not sending it over to the DA’s office. “The Lindahl homicide was over fifteen years ago, and I’ve worked on a lot of cases since then,” he said, sounding a little aggrieved. He remembered talking to Freddy Gomez. “Freddy was a lowlife, but he’d given us good information at other times.” The name Indio rang a faint bell. “But I’m a homicide detective. If Freddy gave me information about someone trading in stolen guns, I’d have passed it along to property crimes.” The head of that unit used to be Marvin Ingalls; Ingalls was still around, working for the sheriff now.

  Cross-examined by Willard, Springer expanded on his theories about the murder. He didn’t really believe that Scanlon killed Lindahl for the AB. “Steve Scanlon was just a small-time con who got in over his head. He’d taken out this guy for Henley, and got caught. If he told the truth and named the guy who hired him, he’d be a snitch and probably end up dead in jail or prison, ’cause they don’t like snitches there. So he figured out a good lie, made himself out to be a big shot by making up this story about it all being for the Aryan Brotherhood. Or maybe he really was AB and pulled a scam on Henley—he knew he was going to kill this guy Lindahl for the AB, but he let Henley think he was hiring him, so he’d get paid to do it. What does it matter? They’re both guilty, whichever way you look at it. You know that he testified at his own trial and denied everything—denied the murder and ever having anything to do with those guys.”

  In Springer’s opinion, the police had plenty of evidence that Henley had hired Scanlon. “The word around the trailer park was that Henley wanted Lindahl dead so he hired Scanlon and paid him in drugs. Freddy wasn’t the only person saying that.” Springer was sure the names and statements of other people who had said that were in his reports.

  “I was just surprised Henley didn’t do it himself,” he went on. “Henley was a time bomb, a really dangerous guy.” Mike objected and asked the judge to strike Springer’s opinion and admonish him to stick to the facts, but the judge said, “I believe his opinion as a law enforcement officer is relevant.”

  Springer went on. “He really needed to be put away; the man was out of control and getting more violent over time. It was only a matter of time before he killed someone. We’re just lucky it was Lindahl instead of someone innocent, like a kid.” Mike asked the judge again to strike Springer’s opinion about Howard’s dangerousness; his motion was denied.

  Scanlon had, of course, lied to Sunderland about why he committed the murder. Regarding Christian Niedermeier, the other man to whom Scanlon confessed that the murder was an AB hit, Springer said, “He was in jail with Scanlon, but who knows if he ever actually talked to him. He probably heard some rumor, saw some newspaper story, and put it to good use. Inmates like him make up these confession stories all the time, trying to get plea deals in exchange for providing information.”

  On redirect, Mike asked Springer if he’d have said the same thing if Niedermeier had claimed Howard confessed the crime to him. Laszlo objected to the question as argumentative, and the objection was sustained.

  “But you used Niedermeier as a witness at Scanlon’s trial,” Mike asked, “even though you found him unbelievable?”

  “That was the prosecutor’s decision,” Springer said.

  “Did you tell her you didn’t think Niedermeier was a credible witness?”

  “All this happened years ago,” Springer said, defensively. “I don’t remember if I did or not.”

  “But surely you’d have said something to prevent an injustice.”

  “I probably would have, if I thought there was one.”

  “Did you tell Mr. Scanlon’s attorneys that you didn’t believe Niedermeier was credible?”

  “I don’t think that’s my job,” he said testily.

  “Whose job is it?”

  “The prosecutor’s, I’d think.”

  As we left the courthouse for lunch, Mike asked me, “Can you wait for lunch for a bit?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I want to go to the sheriff’s office and try to find Marv Ingalls.”

  The sheriff’s office was in a different building in the civic center complex, and it took us ten minutes and a few wrong turns to find it. Mike asked the uniformed man at the counter whether Marvin Ingalls worked there. “Sure does,” the man said. “He’s a lieutenant over at the jail.”

  “Do you have a phone number for him there?”

  “Yes, we do.” He walked a couple of feet along the counter and ran a finger down a list taped to the vinyl surface. “Here it is. I’ll call down there and see if he’s in. Can I tell him what this is about?”

  Mike handed him a business card. “I’d like to talk with him about a case he worked on.” The man read Mike’s card, nodded, and picked up a phone near the list. He dialed and waited, the phone to his ear. After a moment, he said, “Marv? This is Gonzalez at the desk. There’s an attorney here wants to talk to you about an old case. He left me his number.” He recited Mike’s cellphone number from his card, then hung up the phone and turned to us. “He’s probably at lunch; I left him a voicemail.” We
thanked Deputy Gonzalez and left.

  “I saw a Panda Express across the street about a block from here; not as good as the buffet, but closer. Work for you?” Mike asked.

  “Sure,” I said. Visions of orange chicken danced in my head. I was feeling suddenly deflated and very hungry. “They have coffee?”

  “Don’t know, but I’m sure we can get some around there. Let’s go eat and talk about what Sandra Blaine may try to do to us this afternoon.” Mike strode off, and I followed, yawning, in his wake.

  28

  Sandra Blaine was all business as the clerk read her the oath. As she agreed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she even managed to look a bit humbled by the solemnity of the ritual. I was impressed.

  Mike questioned her about her decision to prosecute Howard.

  “There were strong grounds,” she explained. “People in the trailer park told the police that Henley was dealing drugs and that Lindahl had beaten Henley and stolen his money and drugs. There were people who said they saw him after the robbery with a black eye and swollen face. Henley had a motive to kill Lindahl, and people said he had been threatening to kill him and asking where he could buy a gun.”

  Blaine admitted that the district attorney had had to dismiss the first prosecution against Howard when records showed that Howard had been in the local lockup when Lindahl was killed. And a search of Howard’s trailer had found no gun and no ammunition—and no drugs, for that matter, except a couple grams of marijuana.

  “So the first time you ended up dismissing the complaint against him except for the misdemeanor marijuana charge?” Mike asked. Blaine agreed.

  “So why did you charge him a second time?”

  Laszlo’s relevancy objection was sustained, but Blaine went ahead and answered the question on her own.

  “Freddy Gomez came forward,” she said, “and told Detective Springer that Mr. Henley had asked him where he could get a gun and someone to kill Lindahl. Mr. Gomez said he gave Henley contact information for another man who sold guns, and suggested to him that Steve Scanlon might be up for a paid killing because he was in the Aryan Brotherhood, so he was probably a killer. Gomez said he was at Howard’s cabin a couple days later when Scanlon showed up. He saw them talk and Henley hand Scanlon a revolver.”