Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  “Where did you live?”

  “Lots of places. We moved around a lot till my dad went to prison. Then we lived in Leesville for a long time—till after my dad got out.”

  “Do you remember any of the schools you went to?”

  Andy thought for a moment, squinting with the effort of remembering. “I remember a couple,” he said. “McKinley was one. Gardner. Redbud—that was middle school—after we moved to California I was at Shasta City High. I went to some other schools, too, ’cause we were always moving. I don’t remember all their names. Mama knows all that stuff.”

  “How did you like school?” I asked.

  “Mostly not much.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I never did too good. Never that interested in it.”

  “Ever get in trouble?”

  “Little stuff—cutting classes, acting up. Got in a fight once during recess.”

  “What happened?”

  “Couple kids jumped me. Teacher sent us all to the principal’s office. They tried to suspend me, but Mama went and told them off, and they took me back.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nah, that’s about it.”

  “Did you have any friends?”

  He looked up. “Yeah, a couple.”

  “What were their names?”

  “There was a kid named Eddy. Eddy Ford. But he moved away. In grade school he and I and Greg… Greg—I think my mom might remember his last name—we used to hang out together.”

  “What about junior high and high school?”

  “A couple of the girls were okay to me. Althea Soames, Lisa Koslovsky.”

  “Do you remember any of your teachers?”

  “Oh, boy, let me think.” He stopped and looked down for a long moment, frowning with effort. “All’s I can remember in high school, in Shasta City High, are Mr. Muller or maybe Mueller; he taught shop. Mr. Geleitner, or something like that, he was the principal.”

  “What about grade school and middle school?”

  He thought for a moment. “I only remember one nice teacher and one mean one. Miss Brandon was the nice one. Mrs. Cooley, she didn’t like me. She was fourth grade. I had to repeat it, ’cause she wouldn’t pass me. Mama was mad. Went and talked to her about it, but it didn’t do no good.”

  “Do you remember what school Miss Brandon was in?”

  He frowned in concentration again and shook his head. “No, I sure can’t.”

  “What about high school; did you graduate?”

  “No. I got tired of school. I wanted to work, make some money.”

  “How old were you when you left?”

  “Seventeen. Or maybe eighteen. I’m not sure.”

  “What year were you in then?”

  “Tenth grade.”

  We went on like this for the rest of the visit. By the time the guard—a different one this time—came to take Andy back to his cell, I had a half-dozen pages of notes on schools, towns, doctors’ and dentists’ names, friends, relatives, hospitals, and so forth. Andy looked up at the guard and then back to us. “Well, guess I gotta go now. Would you send me some stamps and drawing paper?”

  “Sure,” Jim said. Andy stood up, and when the guard opened the metal port in the cage door, Andy turned and held his hands behind him for the cuffs.

  We followed them out of the passageway and watched as they made their awkward progress toward the painted iron door that led to the cell blocks. Then we waited some more near the row of cages while, somewhere behind the door, Andy was searched to make sure we hadn’t passed him anything illegal during our visit. When the guard behind the window told us we were cleared to leave and flipped the switch that opened the barred gates to the outside, I tried not to look too glad to be out of there.

  3

  The bay seemed even bluer and more sparkling under the noon sun, as Jim and I walked back to the parking lot. A white hydrofoil ferry, toylike in the distance, skimmed over the deep blue water toward the Larkspur Landing, a snowy plume of foam in its wake.

  “Do you want to go somewhere for lunch?” Jim asked. “Talk about Andy and the case?”

  “Sure.”

  The nearest restaurants were in a shopping center a mile or so away. I suggested one and gave Jim directions to it.

  Gaia’s Garden café was earnestly and fashionably green; more important, it was easy to find and quiet.

  Jim had left his jacket and tie in the car; he looked more relaxed in shirtsleeves. He folded his long legs into one of the pale wooden booths, and I sat across from him, my toes just touching the floor. He had the look of a successful litigator—in his mid-forties, I guessed, but trim and athletic-looking, his short brown hair showing glints of gray above a still-handsome face. The lunch crowd of workers, shopping soccer moms, and business people meeting clients was thinning out, and we had enough privacy to talk comfortably.

  Jim looked around. “Looks like west LA,” he commented as he picked up the menu.

  “You don’t mind vegetarian, do you?”

  “Nah. After that hamburger at the prison, meat’s not looking so good right now.” He ordered a garden burger, and I asked for a grilled veggie salad.

  “So, what did you think of Andy?” Jim asked, as our server, a round-faced twenty-year-old with pink-streaked black hair and silver rings in her nostril and eyebrow, left with our orders and menus.

  “Not your average rapist, is he? Assuming there is such a thing.”

  “No, he seems like a pretty likable guy. Mark Balestri—his appellate lawyer who handled his direct appeal—says he was a real easy client. Didn’t ask for much, didn’t try to control his case. His mother, though—she’s another story.”

  “Uh-oh. What does she do?”

  Our conversation stopped as the pink-haired girl returned with a tray and doled out our food and drinks.

  I took a long, grateful pull at my iced tea. It was lightly flavored with some sort of tropical fruit. Jim gestured toward the mound of skinny French fries that had come with his burger. “Have some,” he said. I took one and ate it slowly, trying to decide whether more of them would be worth exercising for.

  “What about Andy’s mother?” I asked.

  Jim swallowed his bite of sandwich and said, “She’s snoopy. Mark said she’d call every time he filed something in Andy’s appeal, and sometimes in between, to ask what was going on. He said Andy’s very dependent on his mother. Tells her everything, so you can’t say anything to him unless you want her to hear it.”

  “So much for attorney-client privilege.”

  “Yeah. I haven’t met her yet. She’s called a couple of times, but I’ve been out. Corey, my paralegal, has talked to her. She knows I’ve associated you.”

  The conversation more or less died after that, and we ate in silence. After we had pushed aside our plates and ordered coffee, Jim pulled out his notes from the visit. “I’m representing one of the defendants in this huge prison gang case down in LA,” he said. “Twenty-three named defendants, and maybe more to come. I took Hardy’s case because it’s looking like this other one won’t go to trial in any of our lifetimes, but it’s taking up more time than I thought. Discovery wars and a lot of motions work—it’s never-ending. That’s why I asked for money for a second counsel for Hardy. I hope you can help me out.”

  It seemed to me that he should have anticipated all that before taking on a capital case. “Well, I’m here,” I said. “Let me know what I should start with.”

  “It’s hard to say. The trial lawyer—Arnold Dobson—didn’t do much. Balestri got his files while he was still alive, but there isn’t much in them. Dobson didn’t put on any defense at the guilt phase, and he’s dead so we can’t ask him why. At the penalty phase, he only put on two witnesses. So we’re starting almost from square one, in terms of investigating the case. I think Dobson dropped the ball in not challenging the confession as involuntary—it seems pretty clear they got Hardy to confess by threatening to arrest his mother. I’m still look
ing for an investigator, but I think I’ll be able to get Nancy Hollister on board to do the psychosocial history; we’re working together on another case. Do you know her?”

  “I haven’t worked with her, but I’ve heard good things about her,” I said. Most capital defense attorneys retain experts, usually psychologists, whose role is to identify the factors in a defendant’s background that have contributed to making him what he is and explain to juries and judges how the lives that many of our clients have lived—growing up among alcoholics and drug addicts, beaten, molested, neglected or entirely abandoned—can create a mentally and emotionally damaged adult who can’t make the sorts of intelligent decisions day to day that the jurors, and most of the people they know, do by second nature.

  “She’s not sure she can take this case—she’s got a lot of other work. But I’m hoping I can talk her into it.”

  The waitress brought our coffee and the check. Jim paid it with a credit card, then looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. Got a meeting with Nancy at three about the other case. She’s here in Marin; I was hoping she could meet us for lunch, but she wasn’t free. I’ve got something Corey gave me for you, but I left it in the car.”

  In the parking lot, he unlocked his rental car, pulled his briefcase from the floor onto the back seat, opened it, and pulled out a small manila envelope. He turned and handed it to me. On it, someone had printed my name and below it MARION HARDY: CASE FILES. I could feel a small object through the thick paper. I opened the metal fastener and turned it over, and a silver flash drive fell into my palm.

  “Dobson’s files, Andy’s prison file, and a few other things—school records, maybe. Happy reading.” Jim closed his briefcase with a bright snap, shoved it back behind the seat and opened the driver’s door. “Call me if you have any questions.”

  4

  Heading north toward home, I stopped at the south end of Sonoma County, in Petaluma, the last real town between San Quentin and my place, and loaded up on groceries. Corbin’s Landing, where I’d settled, is thirty miles from the nearest supermarket, and living there takes some planning.

  The Safeway had BOGOF sales on beef pot roasts and cartons of eggs, so I bought two of each for me and Ed, my neighbor and sometime dogsitter, in addition to the other things on my list. Farther along the road I added asparagus, broccoli, spring onions, and a half-dozen baskets of strawberries from a stand on the Bodega Highway. Local berries were a welcome sign of spring, a treat after a winter of flavorless supermarket fruit.

  The drive up the coast highway, dangerous and dazzling, cleared the sordid memory of the prison from my soul. The afternoon sun was shining blindingly over the ocean, and an almost transparent mist lay on the water’s surface as I turned onto the road up the hillside, with its ragged scatter of houses that made up Corbin’s Landing. The settlement, such as it is, was once a doghole port from which redwood, logged from the hills around, was shipped to San Francisco. It was named for a lumber baron who was forgotten as quickly as the village when the supply of old-growth timber ran out. Some of the logged-over hills were turned into cow pastures by dairy farmers, but in the sheltered valleys and canyons the redwoods grew back, second-growth trees not much more than a hundred years old, but still stately as cathedral spires.

  During Prohibition the cove was a landing point for bootleg liquor from Canada, and later the village became something of an artists’ colony. More recently, the area was discovered as vacation property by rich people from outside who liked its quirkiness and character and the fact that this part of the coast is protected by state law from further subdividing, so the old ranches and long stretches of undisturbed bluffs can’t be covered with beachfront condos. They have built a few Sea Ranch-style houses and execrable stucco mini-mansions here and there, and some of the little board and batten cabins and old white farmhouses have been given Pottery Barn makeovers and turned into vacation rentals, but most are still occupied by old hippies, small ranchers, local workers, artists, and various types of end-of-the-roaders.

  I turned up a side road and then down the long dirt driveway to my house. Bags of groceries in one hand, I unlatched the gate to the yard to let out Charlie, my dog, and backtracked to the door, Charlie prancing and barking ahead of me as I fumbled with the lock. My two cats materialized at the door and crowded into the kitchen with me and the dog. I stopped to feed all of them before heading out to the car for the rest of the groceries.

  I changed out of my black slacks and white shirt—prison-visitor clothes—and into jeans, flannel shirt, and an old down vest and took Ed’s groceries and two baskets of strawberries next door to his place. I could hear bluegrass music inside, and I called out, “Hey, Ed, are you decent?”

  A hoarse voice inside called back, “Come in and find out, if you’re interested.”

  I opened the door. “I don’t know. Should I be?”

  Ed appeared in the doorway of his kitchen, a dishtowel in his hand and another, stained with tomato juice, tucked like an apron into the belt of his jeans. He had grown out of his hard-living youth years ago, before I met him, but his face still had the spare, leathery look of a man who has spent too much time with cigarettes and booze. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair long and tied at the back of his head with an elastic band. “You’re a hard-hearted woman,” he said. “Whaddya have for me? Excuse me, I’m in the middle of putting together a tomato sauce.”

  “Guy food. Meat and potatoes. And eggs, and some strawberries.” I followed him into his kitchen, into a comforting smell of sautéing green peppers and onion. “Shall I put them away?”

  “Sure. No, give me the beef; I think I’ll make a ragu. What do I owe you?”

  “More dog-sitting?” I opened his refrigerator and found a spot for the eggs.

  “No problem—I’m not going anywhere but work.”

  Ed is a carpenter, and his kitchen, like the rest of his small house, has been a work-in-progress ever since I’ve known him, cluttered with projects that he attacks between jobs. For the past week or so, pieces of a salvaged cabinet meant for the wall above the refrigerator had been propped against his kitchen table, and the table was littered with a jigsaw, drill, hammers and screwdrivers, and assorted small hardware. A thin film of sawdust coated everything but the counter where he was cutting vegetables.

  “Cup of coffee?” Ed invited. “It’s a fresh pot. Sorry about the mess. No time to finish putting those guys up yet. We’re getting into the busy season.”

  Ed liked his coffee strong. I poured myself a cup, added milk from the fridge, and sat down at the table, pushing aside a couple of screwdrivers and a pair of wire cutters. I watched him work as I sipped my coffee.

  “So how was your prison visit?” Ed asked. “Everyone still there?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Was this the day you were meeting that guy and his lawyer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how’d it go? You taking his case?”

  “I guess—I took the file home.”

  “Well, I don’t know why you want to, but good luck. Want to come over for dinner later?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll probably be asleep by the time it’s cooked. Long day, driving there and back.” I stood up. “Thanks for the coffee. I need to get back home and start reading.”

  “Well, if you’re still awake at seven or so, come on over.”

  Feeling a little livelier from the coffee, I picked my way back through Ed’s front room, a clutter of books, CDs, boxes of paper recycling, and the detritus of more remodeling projects. It still smelled faintly of old dog, even though Panama, Ed’s ancient labrador, had died last winter.

  Back at my house, Charlie greeted me as though it were some sort of miracle that I had reappeared, and then bustled out past me and sat on the porch, to remind me that I owed him a walk. “A short one, Charlie; I’m really tired.”

  Braced against the stiff afternoon breeze, we walked up the hill to the end of the road. I stopped now and then to drink in views o
f the rocky coast and the sunset while Charlie lifted his leg against the fence of one or another of the Pottery Barn bungalows.

  5

  For the next couple of weeks I read what Corey had given me about Andy Hardy’s case. A post-conviction case comes with a history ready-made, in the form of police and forensic lab reports, transcripts, pleadings, and court orders, from the first dispatch call to the crime scene through trial and sentencing. The theories and strategies of the police, prosecutor and defense counsel were laid out like the plot of an exceptionally bad play, with the witnesses as characters. My work was to read all of it and start asking questions. What are the holes in the stories? What was done by the police, the prosecutor, the defense attorney—and what wasn’t? What documents, reports, evidence are missing?

  From morning till night I read and organized facts. On my computer I typed summaries of testimony, notes, timelines, charts, lists of witnesses, potential issues, and things to be done. I let the answering machine pick up my phone calls and returned calls during breaks in my reading. When I needed to clear my head, I took walks with Charlie, cleaned house, or tied tomato, bean, and pea stems to trellises. I made strawberry jam and took a jar to Ed. I made salads and stir-fries, to use up the fresh produce I’d bought and the lettuce from my garden that needed to be eaten before it grew too bitter and tough. Ed stopped by once or twice, and my gardening mentor Harriet brought over some fava beans and wrote out a fertilizer formula for my tomato plants, but for the most part I was alone in the quiet house, working. I liked it that way.

  Appellate law, which is most of what I do, is solitary work; a lot of research, analysis, and writing, and not much human contact except by email. Appeals are like a debate carried out in writing—opening brief, responsive brief, reply, rounded out with a fairly brief court hearing where the parties’ attorneys present a summary of their arguments, and the panel of judges who will decide the case questions them to refine and clarify the issues involved. It suits me. I don’t like being around people much; dealing with them takes too much time and attention for what you generally get out of the process, and it leaves me tired and on edge. Terry, my—I never know what to call him; “former husband” sounds as though we divorced, but “late husband” casts a pall over casual conversations—was pretty much the same way, really, though not many people figured this out because he was a great trial lawyer and seemed thoroughly at ease in a courtroom. But Terry kept a lot of secrets, even from me.