Madman Walking

by L. F. Robertson

  I got another mocha and hurried back to the cages and stood awkwardly balancing it and my manila folder and clear plastic bag of pens and money while the guard went through the handcuffing ritual. It was a different cage, in the other row; instead of a window it had a blurred view, through scratched Plexiglas, of the vending machines and a mural, painted long ago by another inmate. Walt wasn’t paying any attention to it; his head was bent and his shoulders rounded. He looked worn out.

  “Long time no see,” I said, as soon as he was free of the cuffs. “How have you been?”

  He lifted his head a bit to meet my eyes. “Not so good.” He sounded tired, and his eyes and face were dulled by sadness.

  I set my coffee and paraphernalia on the little table that nearly filled the cage. “Can I give you a hug?” I asked.

  “Sure.” I put my arms around him and hugged him for a second or two; he seemed to relax a little. “Come sit down,” I said. I sat, and he settled, slowly and heavily, into the wooden chair opposite me.

  “I just heard from Ms. Stanhope about Edna.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes closed for a moment, then opened, and there were tears in them. “Yeah; I miss her.”

  “I was really sorry to hear it. I remember her; she was a really lovely person, and she loved you.”

  He nodded. “She was like a mother. She raised me after our mom died.” I remembered that, too; Walt’s mother had died young, of cervical cancer, but really of poverty and ignorance. Edna had told me that by the time her symptoms were bad enough that she couldn’t put off seeing a doctor, the cancer had spread, and it was too late to do anything for her but give her morphine against the pain. Walt cried so much when they visited her in the hospital that they stopped bringing him.

  “Abby Stanhope said you were feeling pretty bad, and she thought it might lift your spirits a little if Mike and I came and said hello.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank her.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you? Put some money on your books, or get you a quarterly package?”

  He shook his head. “There isn’t anything I want.”

  “Are they treating you all right here?”

  “Mostly. Doctors want to change my medications, but I’m not sure. I don’t feel like I can trust them.”

  “Why not?”

  “They experiment.”

  “How?”

  “They give me meds without knowing how they’ll work. Some of them do, some don’t and make me flip out.”

  “But do you feel that what you’re on now is working?”

  “I don’t know, but at least I know how I’m going to feel after taking them.” He stopped and thought for a few seconds. “I don’t trust the guards, either,” he said.

  “Why? Do you think they may be messing with your food again?”

  “That, and they’ve got something up their sleeve. I can hear them late at night, talking about me in the office on the tier. I hear them saying my name and laughing. I’ve been too afraid to sleep at night, so I end up falling asleep during the day. I’m tired all the time.”

  I decided to take the plunge. “Abby Stanhope says you don’t want to go on with your case. Is that why?”

  He shook his head. “Not just that. All of it.”

  “Edna?”

  “Yeah. And everything else.”

  “Like what?”

  He sighed, and his shoulders slumped. “I don’t know, I’m just tired of it all. I—I killed Irene and Tim, people I loved. Even Laura—she pushed me too far, but she didn’t deserve to die for it. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about them. I don’t have any defense for what I did, and they’re going to execute me anyway. And with Edna gone I don’t have anybody anymore. I just don’t want to go on like this.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s really hard sometimes.”

  He nodded. “I really felt it about Edna. I knew she was sick, and I couldn’t even be there to take care of her. I’ve just messed everything up in my life.”

  “I don’t think she thought so,” I said. “She knew you loved her and that you would have been there.”

  “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “The trouble is, I couldn’t.”

  “I know. But she wouldn’t want you to give up now,” I said. “She never did. She kept coming to see you and staying in touch. It really mattered to her for you to stay in her life.”

  “Yeah,” he said again. “But now she’s gone.” He lifted his hands to his face and bent forward, rocking as he cried almost silently, with deep, rough breaths. I remembered those paroxysms, that rending grief, and how they felt. I felt helpless watching him. All I could do was reach a hand across the table and press it on his big shoulder.

  In a minute or so, he stopped, his face wet with tears. He found one of the paper towels I’d brought with my coffee, and wiped his eyes and cheeks with it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It just hits me sometimes.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I often felt that way after my husband died.”

  Walt looked at me. “Did he? I didn’t know.”

  “It was after your appeal was over—a little less than seven years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “It’s okay now. Takes time, but it does get easier after a while.”

  “I don’t see how.” His voice was uncertain, and his hands were shaking. “I think I probably ought to go back to my house,” he said. “Sorry. I just don’t feel too well.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can I come to see you again?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll try to schedule things so that I can get a letter to you ahead of time.”

  He nodded. “It was kind of a surprise to see you,” he said, with a wan smile.

  I got up, walked the two steps to the door of the cage, waited until a guard appeared in the aisle, and waved until I caught his eye. He came over. “We’re ready for Mr. Klum to go back,” I said.

  Walt had composed himself by the time the guard came back with the handcuffs. We both stood, heads down, while he put the cuffs on through the door port. As the door slid loudly open, Walt seemed to wake up.

  “Good to see you again,” he said politely.

  “You, too. Take good care of yourself. See you soon.”

  He turned away with the guard behind him, and I followed and watched as the metal door was opened and they moved into the corridor behind it. A couple of minutes after the door closed, the guard inside the windowed booth called over a loudspeaker. “Klum—cleared.” He handed me my ID, and the sally port opened, letting me out into the gray afternoon.

  32

  On the drive back home, I fretted about Walt. With a statute of limitations running, there could hardly have been a worse time for him to be unsure whether to go on with his case. I wasn’t good at psyching people out or persuading them. Lectures by psychologists at criminal defense seminars had taught me a few techniques for listening to troubled people, but that was all I had—that and what I’d learned about the pain of grief after Terry died. In the hour or so I’d spent with Walt I didn’t think I’d accomplished anything, except to confirm the bad shape he was in. I was grateful that he was at least willing to see me and didn’t feel I’d lost interest in him after my court appointment ended.

  I made a couple of stops on the way home, at a hardware store and a supermarket. I knew I wasn’t going to get home before the end of business hours, so I called Abby from the hardware store parking lot to report on my visit.

  “Poor guy!” she said. “You see what a hard time we’re having.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you be willing to go see him again in a few weeks? We’re trying to keep him communicating with us, especially through the holidays. So we’re visiting him in relays. I have a really good investigator working on his case, a young woman. Walt has taken to her, in a sort of big brotherly way; she’s good at cheering him up.”

  “That’s a real plus,” I said. When the state de
fender’s budget had been more flush we had sometimes worked on habeas corpus cases as well as appeals, and I remembered a few bright and dedicated kids who’d interned with us. Their energy and unspoiled conviction was uplifting to the rest of us dealing with emotional fatigue from repeatedly watching years of hard work burned before our eyes by hostile courts. To clients, they were less intimidating than lawyers, and the men and women on the Row sometimes confided things to them they had never told their attorneys.

  We picked a day for me to visit after I was back from Wheaton, and I said I’d check in beforehand in case there was something she wanted me to focus on when I saw Walt again.

  Then it was Thanksgiving. I had let Harriet strong-arm me again into helping her serve the free dinner put on by her church in Santa Rosa. “I got so bored with making Thanksgiving dinner all those years,” she explained, to justify doing twice as much work an hour away from home. Bill was one of the cooks this year, and he, Harriet, and I bundled into their truck at five in the morning to make the trip, and returned at seven in the evening, footsore and spotted with gravy and whipped cream, and grateful for having homes and friends to go back to after seeing so many people who didn’t.

  Harriet invited me in for a glass of wine before I headed for home, and in her living room the three of us chatted for a while, winding down from the day. Bill gave me some advice on how to fix a slow leak I’d found under my kitchen sink and gave me some plumber’s tape and the loan of a pipe wrench. He offered to fix it for me, but I saw Harriet shake her head and mouth a silent no, so I said I wanted to try handling it myself. Harriet asked me how my hearing was going.

  “Not well,” I said. “It’s tough. Mike feels like it’s his to lose. I mean, the man who did the killing confessed and said our client had nothing to do with it. You’d think that would be the end of it, but somehow no one wants to believe him. The fact that Howard is probably innocent makes it worse.”

  Harriet and Bill both nodded. “I remember a few cases like that,” Harriet said. “Most everyone was guilty of course, but once in a while there’d be someone, you’d listen to the evidence and think, this guy really didn’t do what they said he did. And then he’d be convicted anyway. Couple of times I remember even the judge was kind of upset by the verdicts, but there wasn’t much anyone could do.”

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “This is that Aryan Brotherhood case, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They’re dangerous characters.”

  I shrugged. “Not as much as they used to be, I gather. Our prison gang expert says some big federal racketeering prosecutions took a lot of them off the streets, and a bunch of the old guard have died or dropped out. The guys we’ve been talking to are all dropouts or people who were never that involved in the first place.”

  “That’s good,” Bill said. “I have to admit I’ve been a bit worried for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “This is a really old case, and I don’t think anyone in the AB cares much about it anymore.”

  “Good,” Bill said. “We’ll be keeping an eye out for you anyway.”

  I thanked them. I really didn’t feel any fear of problems with the AB over Howard’s case; Scanlon and the guys Mike and Dan had talked to had been surprisingly willing to try to help set an innocent man free. But living alone in the woods with only a nine millimeter in my night table and a Corgi guarding my door, I felt grateful I had friends looking out for me.

  Bill’s comment came back to me a couple of days later, when I was walking Charlie on the bluffs near Fort Ross. Charlie had run into the woods after a rabbit, and I was looking for him and calling him, to no effect, when I saw a man walking toward me. He was tall, young, and athletic-looking, and despite the chill wind on the bluffs, he was wearing a T-shirt and fleece vest. As he came closer I could see his arms were covered in tattoos. My heart began beating faster, and it was all I could do to tell myself there was no point in trying to run. When he got within talking distance, he asked me, “Are you looking for your dog?”

  “Yes,” I said, faintly.

  “I saw him back there. Can I help you catch him?”

  I thanked him, and we walked down the trail the way he had come, calling for Charlie together. In a couple of minutes, I saw Charlie crashing his way toward me through the undergrowth. “Rotten dog,” I said to him when he reached me, as I bent down and put on his leash. I turned to the man. “Thank you,” I said. “Are you visiting here?”

  “No, but I haven’t been here long.” He spoke with an accent, maybe German or Dutch. “My name is Carl. I just started working at the brewery.”

  “Oh, you work with Vlad.”

  “Yes.”

  “You all make great beer,” I said lamely.

  “Thank you; that’s good to hear.”

  “Guess I’ll see you there sometimes, then.”

  “Maybe. But I work in the brewery, so I am not in the pub that often.” His light blue eyes took in the view around him. “This is a beautiful place.”

  “I like it a lot.” Charlie was pulling at his leash, anxious to get moving, so I said goodbye and thanked him again.

  “Well, that was stupid of me,” I said to Charlie after he was out of earshot, but even so, I headed back to the car, feeling anxious to be out of there and back in my own house.

  33

  All too soon—it was always too soon—it was time to drive back down to Wheaton: to pack my suitcase, gather my papers, leave food and water for the cats and walk Charlie over to Ed’s. Charlie didn’t seem at all sad to be left with Ed and Pogo, making me wonder what a dreary companion I must be if even my dog was glad to get away from me.

  We were well into the rainy season in California, and the first winter storms had turned the hills along the interstate the velvet green of a pool table. The orchards of almond, walnut and peach trees were leafless, their bare branches dark against the green hills and silvery winter sky.

  The hotel was decorated for Christmas, festooned with plastic spruce garlands and small winking lights; in the middle of the lobby stood a lavishly decorated tree with wrapped presents around it. The clerk at the desk recognized us. “Back again, eh?”

  “Couldn’t stay away,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Glad you like us.”

  After dropping my bag and suit hanger in my room, I met Mike in the lobby, and we went out in search of dinner. We settled on a Japanese restaurant. “I need something light—too much food last weekend,” Mike said.

  Over bento boxes of teriyaki, I asked Mike how his visit with Walt Klum had gone. He sighed. “Not too badly, I guess. I didn’t change his mind, but he seems to be too broken down to remember why he didn’t like me. I kept it low-key—actually, that was pretty easy; by the time I left I felt almost as sad as he was. I’m going to put some money on his books, so he can have a little canteen for the holidays.”

  I said I was planning to do the same. After that we talked about our plans for the hearing.

  “I’ve got Niedermeier under subpoena, and they’re bringing Sunderland from Folsom. George Gettle—the advisory attorney—is going to try to make it tomorrow afternoon; he’s a court commissioner now, and he has a juvenile court calendar in the morning. And Ray Donahue, the lawyer Howard fired, is coming in, too. They’ll both testify that they didn’t get the letter. And Scanlon’s here, too, though they have him at the state prison down the road in Wasco for security reasons. I wasn’t sure he’d make it because of the holiday and the weekend, but I called on Monday, and they’ve got him.”

  “Full plate,” I said.

  “Yeah. I just hope we can get through Scanlon before we have to break.”

  We compared Thanksgivings. “You’re lucky,” Mike said, after hearing about mine. “Sue’s mother still likes to have the family over and cook an enormous meal, even though these days Sue and her sister do a lot of the work. Still, Ruth bakes three or four pies and puts out all kinds of snacks. And you know how family visits are—hours of sitting in so
meone’s living room telling old stories and trying to keep someone’s brother-in-law from getting into politics.”

  “I guess there’s some advantage to being too far away from your family to see them on holidays,” I said, and then remembered, miserably, that Gavin and Rita were even farther away than my family in Alaska.

  After dinner, Mike was anxious to get back to the hotel to prepare for the next day’s witnesses. I offered to help, and he suggested I might do the direct exams of Donahue and Gettle, since they wouldn’t need much preparation. At the hotel, he gave me some notes he’d made from his conversations with them, and we parted to spend the evening with our separate homework assignments.

  We reached the courtroom at a quarter to nine the next morning. The usual audience was sitting on the benches in the hall: the two attorneys general, Dot Henley and Lillian, whose last name I had been told was Carver, and Josh Schaeffer, the young News Gazette reporter. Mike and I had read what he’d written about the first set of hearings; and he seemed bright and unbiased, and even inclined to favor the view that Howard was innocent.

  Josh jumped up and collared Mike to ask him what his plans were for the day. Mike told him who the witnesses were that he hoped to call and left it at that.

  A gray-haired man who had been talking with Dot also came over to us and introduced himself. “Ray Donahue,” he said, shaking our hands in turn, with a firm, businesslike grip. I walked with him a little way down the hall.

  “I’m going to be doing your direct examination this morning,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “How is Howard, anyway?”

  “Quieter these days.”

  “I guess that’s something. He sure wasn’t when I knew him. I felt bad for him,” he added, “especially the way things went at his trial. If he’d only cooperated I could have won that case for him. What will you need from me?”

  I told him we were trying to establish that Sandra Blaine had not given him the letter to Scanlon from McGaw.