Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  There was always some inner space he kept out of sight, some part of himself he didn’t confide. He was, on the surface, an unemotional man, quiet and even-tempered. He scarcely ever raised his voice in anger. People thought of him as unflappable, methodical. He was brilliant but not showy; he just seemed to know everything, to remember any fact he’d ever read, and to be able to slice effortlessly through obfuscation to the heart of an argument. I used to wonder what he saw in me; I’m not sure I ever really knew.

  As a public defender, he was the legendary Terrence Moran, who tried twenty capital cases without a single death verdict. He spoke at conferences and wrote law review articles on forensics and capital litigation. He was a darling of the death-penalty defense community, though he stayed away from the cliques and hierarchies that sometimes made it seem more like a university department than a group of idealists laboring in a common cause. I lived and worked in his reflected glory, and after he died I understood how many of our colleagues had seen me only as an extension of him, and how many of them felt I was somehow responsible for his suicide.

  But I didn’t see it coming. I never really figured out what, if anything, tipped him into his final depression. He had just driven into Redwood Park on a gray February morning, pulled his car into the parking lot of a deserted trailhead, called his friend and investigator Dave Rothstein on his cellphone with a message where to find his body, and shot himself. He knew where to aim; the bullet severed his brain stem, and he died instantly.

  And here I was.

  After all the time that had passed, on the nights after I had spent the day reading about Andy’s case I sometimes found it hard to get to sleep, and when I did, I had dreams filled with infinite and irresolvable sadness.

  6

  Finally, I finished digesting the materials on the flash drive. Besides my notes and outlines, I had a list of documents that I thought we should have but hadn’t seen in the trial lawyer’s files. I called Jim’s office and got a secretary who told me he was in court and transferred me to their paralegal, Corey.

  Corey’s voice was a lilt that mixed Midwest and Deep South. “Honey, you’ve got everything we got from old Mr. Dobson,” he said. “I went through those files myself.”

  This was bad news and good news—bad, because it meant Jim was going to have to get all this stuff himself, but good, because it meant that Dobson, the trial attorney, probably hadn’t—more support for us to argue that he had been ineffective in representing Andy.

  That afternoon, just before five, the phone in my home office rang. The voice on the other end was a woman’s, unfamiliar. “Mrs. Moodie?” the caller said, a little tentatively.

  “Speaking.”

  “I’m Eva Hardy.” Her sentence ended on an up-note, almost like a question. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you.”

  “Oh, no, of course not,” I said.

  “I got your telephone number from Corey, Mr. Christie’s paralegal? He’s such a nice man. I told him I needed to talk to you.”

  Jim’s warning started ringing in my ears. What does she really want? I asked myself.

  “I have a lot of trouble getting hold of Mr. Christie,” Eva said, almost apologetically. “He’s always so busy. But he does find time to see Andy. I’m glad for that.”

  “That is good,” I agreed.

  “But I do worry,” she said. “Andy doesn’t always understand what his lawyers tell him, and he asks me. But I don’t always know myself. Maybe you can help me.”

  “I hope I can.”

  “Oh, good. I saw Andy last Saturday, and he had some questions he was hoping I could ask someone.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, we’re wondering what’s going to happen in this court. Is it like another appeal?”

  “Not really. It’s called habeas corpus, and it involves presenting evidence to the court that wasn’t introduced by Mr. Dobson at Andy’s trial, in the hope of getting him a new trial.”

  “Oh. What kind of evidence?”

  “Well, right now I’m thinking that there might be a lot more mitigation evidence than Mr. Dobson presented.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Oh, evidence about Andy that might have made him more sympathetic to the jury, and maybe made them think he didn’t deserve the death penalty after all.”

  “Mmm. What would that be?”

  “I’m not really sure yet. Facts about his early life, influences that might have affected his development in childhood and made him less able to control his behavior as an adult. Maybe some mental illness.”

  “My Andy doesn’t have any mental illness,” Eva said flatly.

  Uh-oh. “Of course, probably not,” I answered, in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. “But we do have to investigate it. We’re trying to save his life, and we have to investigate every possibility.”

  “I see.”

  “I’d like to get together with you and talk about Andy’s childhood. Anything we can learn could be helpful.”

  “Okay. I used to have baby books for both the boys, but I gave them to Mr. Dobson, and he never gave them back.”

  Damn, I thought. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. I had photographs, and I put in their weights and heights, and when they first walked. All those memories.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “I’ll think about it and see what I can remember.”

  “That would be great. And if you have any photos of Andy, those would be helpful, too.”

  “I have some.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “I’d really like to see them. Maybe next time you visit Andy we can get together.”

  “That would be good. I visit him every month, on Saturday. I’ll call you and let you know the next time, okay?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Reading the transcript of Andy’s trial, I’d been struck by the fact that she didn’t testify. While I had her on the line, I thought I’d ask her if she knew why she hadn’t been called.

  “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “The district attorney was threatening to have me arrested for helping the boys run from the police. Mr. Dobson said I’d have to plead the Fifth Amendment if I was called as a witness.”

  Nice move on the DA’s part, I thought. He’d managed to keep the most sympathetic defense witness off the stand and leave the jury to draw its own conclusions about why the defendant’s own mother wouldn’t testify for him.

  I called Jim again the next day, but he was out of the office for the day, so I told Corey about Eva’s call. “She seems nice enough,” I said.

  “Oh, she always is to me, too,” he said. “Just kind of pushy sometimes. And a little strange.”

  “Strange? How?”

  He paused for a second. “I’m not sure how—just kind of peculiar. Maybe you’ll see it when you talk with her a while.”

  7

  The next morning I woke up to white mist swirling slowly outside my windows. The light in the house looked like winter light reflected from snow.

  The thermometer outside my kitchen window read fifty degrees, and the previous night’s fire was down to a few glowing coals. I nursed it to life with newspapers and more wood, shrugged into jeans and a sweatshirt, and went out for an early morning walk with Charlie, thinking I’d thin the cobwebs in my head by mixing them with the fog outside.

  When we got back to the house, the sun was starting to burn through the mist, and the message light was blinking on my home office telephone. I made myself a cup of coffee before playing the voicemail.

  “Janny, hi,” it said. “It’s Dave Rothstein—a voice from your past. Jim Christie’s hired me to work on the Hardy case. I’d like to touch base, get together to talk about it. Give me a call, okay?” I could hardly wait for the machine to finish before punching in his phone number.

  Dave answered on the second ring. “Janny! It’s been a while. How are you doing?”

&nbs
p; It was a question almost guaranteed to obliterate any memories I might have had about what was going on in my life. But Dave had a way of asking it that made me want to tell him everything—how I was afraid that the fog would mildew my tomato plants, how I worried that the phone would ring and it would be someone telling me that my son Gavin had been killed in a plane crash or mauled by a crocodile, how I couldn’t shake the floating, homeless feeling I’d had since Terry died. It was a gift Dave had; I’d seen witnesses confess their darkest secrets to him as if he were their priest.

  With an effort, I restrained the impulse to confess mine. “Okay—better. And you?”

  He deflected the question. “Good, can’t complain—really, how are you? Liking it up there on the coast?”

  “Oh yes. I have a vegetable garden, and I make bread, and listen to the ocean. I’m good here.”

  “Back to the land, eh? Sounds like a good way to live. And you don’t miss the big city and all your friends?”

  “Not a bit—none of you. You all never come up here to visit me anyway.”

  He chuckled. “You ran away from us. What’s Gavin up to these days?”

  “Oh, God, in Australia, doing a post-doc. I think he went to the ends of the earth to get away from me.”

  “His loss. Australia—wow, I’ve always wanted to go there. Have you been to visit him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Shame on you. You should go before he moves back here.” He changed the subject back to the task at hand. “So—I see you’re still working on death cases.”

  “Only this one. Against my better judgment.”

  “Well, that may be both of us.”

  Dave had worked with Terry on many cases, and they had become close friends. On the morning Terry drove to a park in the Oakland hills and shot himself, it was Dave he rang to tell him where to find his body. Dave had gone with me to the coroner’s office to identify Terry and had generally watched over me in the aftermath of his death, calling often and stopping by to take me to lunch or coffee every week or so. During all the guilt, blame, and weirdness that followed Terry’s suicide, when colleagues I had thought of as friends were accusing me behind my back of negligence and worse in failing to see the warning signs and take some sort of action to save him, Dave had reassured me over and over again that I hadn’t missed any signs, that there wasn’t any way I could have seen Terry’s slide into depression or change his course. “He was hiding it from all of us,” Dave said, “and he did a hell of a job. He was one of my best friends, and I didn’t see it coming, either.”

  He had talked me out of one or two of the crazier ideas that possessed me during that first year of grief, rage, and bewilderment, but not my determination to quit the state defender’s office and go someplace far away from all of it—the grief and betrayal. Later, life and work had taken us in different directions, and we hadn’t seen one another for a couple of years. It was a pleasure to hear his voice again.

  “So you’re working on Andy Hardy’s case now, too?” I asked.

  “Yep. Christie called me last week. Andy Hardy—I can’t say the name without thinking of old Mickey Rooney movies.”

  “Believe it or not, that’s how he got the nickname. His mother gave it to him. But I’m so pleased you’re working on this case. I can never get hold of Jim. I’m starting to feel a little like I’ve been air-dropped onto a desert island with the case files.”

  “Yeah,” Dave said, “I’ve heard that about Christie.”

  “Heard what?”

  “He’s the kind of lawyer who hires good people to do all his work for him. He doesn’t like the dull preparation part—he prefers to shine in the courtroom and talk to the press.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “I wish someone had told me sooner. I’m really not ready for that.”

  “Too late to get out?”

  “I’d feel stupid.”

  “Well, at least we can keep one another company.”

  I didn’t want to think about what I’d gotten myself into, so I changed the subject. “How much do you know about the case?” I asked.

  He told me, and I filled him in on the rest, as far as I had gotten with it. “So you think we’re really going to be left on our own?” I asked again. “There’s so much to do.” I started listing witnesses who needed to be located.

  Dave stopped me. “Why don’t you email me the names, and let’s make a time to get together.”

  “Your place or mine?” I asked.

  “I can drive up there,” Dave said. “There are great bike roads up where you are.”

  8

  By the day of Dave’s visit I’d found the answers to a few more of my questions in the transcripts of Emory’s trial. Emory had been tried after Andy. His case had been tried in Fresno, because Emory’s attorney had moved for a change of venue on the grounds that the Pomo County jury pool had been irreparably tainted by the publicity surrounding Andy’s trial. And Emory’s court-appointed lawyer, Mark Levenson, had done a better job than Dobson.

  Like the prosecutor, Levenson had played on the fact that Andy was older to make a case that Andy was the instigator and leader in the crimes and the actual killer of the women. He portrayed Emory as the impressionable younger brother following his older brother’s lead. He wasn’t able to keep Emory from being convicted of the two murders, but at the penalty phase of the trial, he put on witnesses—teachers and friends of the family, a psychologist who specialized in investigating and explaining the effects of background on behavior—to talk about Emory’s impoverished life, the abuse he, Eva, and Andy had suffered at the hands of a violent, alcoholic father, and why his behavior grew worse after his father abandoned the family.

  The psychologist had gone over Emory’s school records and the criminal history of his father, Len Hardy, and had interviewed Eva’s aunt Margaret and her husband Ray, who were too old and infirm to come to court, and Eva herself. Her testimony synthesized the information she’d obtained into a portrait of Emory as a boy who got into trouble because of the traumatic effects of his early life and because he followed his older brother. She even said that Emory was afraid of Andy.

  It was a doubly clever move: although the prosecutor had kept Eva herself off the witness stand by threatening to prosecute her, the psychologist, in the course of explaining the formative influences on Emory’s life, was able to testify about Eva’s love for her boys and her helplessness in the face of their father’s drinking and his unpredictable rages.

  Levenson had also committed one of those acts of civil disobedience that make lawyers on television glamorous and real-life defense attorneys unpopular. He asked the psychologist whether Eva had told her why she could not come to court to testify for her son. Before she could answer, the prosecutor objected, and the objection was sustained. But the question had been asked, and the jury knew who didn’t want it answered and knew, also, that Eva had wanted to testify, and that the prosecutor had something to do with why she hadn’t. Levenson’s move ensured that the unspoken question Andy’s jury must have had about why Eva didn’t take the stand was answered, more or less, in Emory’s trial.

  The day before Dave’s visit, I puttered fretfully around the house, washing windows and walls, running the vacuum cleaner behind the furniture and in corners where I seldom looked, tossing out old papers, and putting things away. I obsessed over menus for the next day’s lunch, before settling on a potato frittata with sugar snap peas and a salad from my garden and an apricot tarte Tatin for dessert. Except for my son Gavin, none of the people I knew from outside had made the trip to Corbin’s Landing to visit me in the five years since I’d moved here. Having someone from my past show up at my retreat filled me with performance anxiety.

  * * *

  Just before noon on Friday, Dave’s little SUV rolled up the driveway. His bike, on its carrier, was just visible through his back window. Charlie ran ahead of me out the kitchen door, barking fiercely. I walked out to meet Dave, and he gave me a hug, and then ben
t down to pat Charlie, whose reserve lasted all of two seconds before his tail began to wag. “Good boy,” Dave said, scratching behind his ears. “A corgi, right?” Dave stood up and took in the little house and the land around it, and the view down the hill to the distant ocean, and then turned to me. “Nice place. You’re looking good, too. Life in the country seems to agree with you.”

  Dave didn’t look much different from when I’d known him in the public defender’s office. He was a bicyclist and had that spare, sinewy build that goes with it. His jeans were loose on his skinny legs, and the sleeves of his faded sweatshirt were pushed up, showing tanned forearms with thready muscles under freckled skin. He had always made me feel fat, but then just about everyone makes me feel fat.

  I showed him around the place—the sprawling old fig tree and the old apples and pears, planted by some previous owner; the new trees I’d added; the garden inside the deer fence, the lemon and lime shrubs in their tubs on the wide deck Ed had put in for me. The sun on the deck was warm enough that we ate lunch outside. Dave duly admired my cooking and the home-grown peas, though I suspected he would have been almost as happy with a bowl of granola and a protein shake.

  Over food, we caught up on each other’s lives. Dave filled me in on what was happening among the little community of death-penalty lawyers—who was up now and who was down in the ongoing dominance struggles. “You know,” I said, “for a bunch of outcast idealists, I could never figure out how they could be so competitive.”

  “It’s the small club thing,” Dave said, between bites of frittata. “The infighting is so bad because there’s so little status to fight over.”

  “Well,” I said, “they’re not my problem any more.” It brought up painful memories, and I changed the subject and asked Dave what was new with him.

  Dave had broken up with the girlfriend he’d been with the last time we’d seen each other, but had met someone else. “Does she bike, too?” I asked.