Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  “Okay. Thanks. I won’t call too often, ’cause I know it costs you money.”

  “That’s really thoughtful, Andy.”

  “I better go now. Thanks for taking my call. Bye, Mrs. Moodie.”

  “Bye, Andy. Take care.” The line went silent, leaving me wondering what it was Andy wanted to know.

  Later that day, Dave called. I told him about Andy’s call.

  “Sounds like dysfunctional family follies,” Dave said. “Everyone wondering whether someone else is telling secrets. Speaking of which, should we go see old Emory now? He’s in Folsom.”

  “Guess so.”

  “I’ll set up a visit,” he said. “Any day that’s better for you?”

  “No, they’re all about the same.” May as well get it over with, I thought; the prospect of another prison visit wasn’t exactly a bright spot on my horizon.

  12

  And so it was that on a bright morning in June, Dave and I stood before a chipped Formica counter in the waiting room at Folsom Prison. I’d spent the night in a Travelodge in Sacramento, watching cable movies and rereading Emory’s confession, and falling asleep, finally, to the city sounds of drunken voices, revving cars, sirens and the occasional odd thump from the rooms above and around me. That morning I’d gotten lost a couple of times in the town of Folsom, trying to find the road to the prison. Since the last time I’d been there, the turnoff had almost disappeared behind new subdivisions, and the town, perhaps in shame, marked it only with a small and carefully hidden sign. From there I drove a half-mile through what looked like pastureland until I reached the blacktop parking lot and saw the visitor intake building and behind it the buildings of the prison, surrounded by high chain-link fences topped with coils of barbed wire and overseen by guard towers.

  Prosecutors in death-penalty trials always spend some part of their closing arguments telling the jury about the good life the defendant will live in prison if they sentence him to life without parole instead of death. While his victims lie in their graves, they say, their killer will eat three meals a day; his laundry will be done for him; he’ll be able to lie in bed all day watching television, hang out with his homies, masturbate to skin magazines; and, if he’s inclined to improve himself, get a paying job in some prison industry, take classes, sketch and paint.

  Emory Hardy was living that idyll.

  The cool air of the prison waiting room smelt faintly of dust, old cleaning rags, disinfectant, and children. Outside the scratched glass of the front windows, though, the space above the parking lot seemed to ripple with the heat of the midsummer morning. The heat of summer in the Sacramento Valley was something I could never get used to.

  A few families, mostly women and children, mostly black or Mexican, were waiting in line at the counter or seated in the rows of plastic seats. The children’s voices reverberated from the pale tan walls and the chipped vinyl floor. The older women’s faces were leathery and resigned; the younger women looked hard under the fluorescent lights. Many of them carried the kind of fat people get from too much fast food and not enough exercise. They wore too much makeup or none at all on their tired, heavy faces, and their clothes were cheap: capris or cotton skirts as tight and short as the prison regulations would allow; print blouses; bright-colored flats or running shoes. Several were weighted down with babies and diaper bags.

  The portion of the counter where we were standing was marked with a sign saying LEGAL VISITORS—reserved, in other words, for cops, lawyers and investigators—and we were the only people there. On the other side of it a round-faced young woman in uniform, with a blond ponytail and dark roots, took our ID and looked at it and at the handful of change and car keys and other paraphernalia Dave and I had set on the counter in front of her. “You can’t bring these pens in,” she said, with the finality of someone who knows her word is the last one.

  “Oh no—what’s wrong with them?” I asked, in my most naive tone of voice.

  “We only allow pens with transparent barrels. It’s a change in the rules,” she explained. Relenting, she reached into a drawer. “A lot of people don’t know about it yet. We’ve got some pencils here.” She pulled out a couple and handed them to me. Their points were blunt, but I didn’t feel like spoiling the moment by asking her for a sharpener. “Bring them back here when you leave, so I’ll have them for the next person.”

  We were humble and grateful. “Thanks,” we both said. “We sure will.”

  We took off our shoes and walked through the metal detector next to the counter, while she ran our file folders and shoes through the X-ray machine. Then she pushed the rest of our belongings, except for the offending pens, along the counter to us and handed us a pair of laminated tags with something printed on them. “Clip these to your shirts,” she said. “Bus stops outside that door.” She turned and pointed toward a door straight ahead of us. “You’ll be in Section Three.”

  The lock in the gray metal door clicked open as we approached. We waited in a vestibule while that door closed and a door ahead of us opened. When we emerged, we were outdoors, under a concrete awning. Five or six women were waiting there, day visitors like us. In the shade, the air felt warm and sleepy and smelled like watered soil and roses. Across a service road, in neat, weedless beds, were the inevitable prison rose bushes, pruned by inmate gardeners into tight little spheres and spangled with old-fashioned, heavily scented flowers.

  A woman next to me looked at us and asked, “Legal visitors?” She was middle-aged, heavy-set and bottle blond. She had tattoos on her upper arms, and in the V-neck of her red shirt I could see the top of another one in the leathery skin of her chest. Her voice was a whiskey-and-tobacco scarred baritone.

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  “You just missed the last bus,” she growled. “So’d I. ’Nother one should be along any minute. Goin’ to see my ol’ man; he’s gonna be pissed that I’m late.” She rolled her eyes heavenward and sighed. “God, I could use a cigarette. They don’t let anyone smoke now. It’s gonna be a long morning.”

  Dave and I murmured in sympathy, and we all stood in a sort of awkward, companionable silence for a minute, until the next bus pulled up. We climbed into it in an orderly line. The bus was small, old and battered, with gray, unpadded seats. We all sat silent as it threaded its way through a maze of service roads, past low gray barracks and more metal mesh fences topped with concertina wire. The area was empty of people, and despite the sun and cloudless sky above, it seemed dim, almost dark. Anxiety closed around my stomach like an invisible small hand. If anything were to happen here, I was far from the outside world, with no idea how to get out. Dave caught my eye and raised his eyebrows in sympathy. “Kafka, anyone?” he whispered. I nodded, mute.

  The bus slowed down. “Section One,” the driver said, as he stopped in front of a concrete portico with a double door at the back of it. “Anyone for Section One.” Two of the women got up from their seats and sidled down the aisle and out into the shaded porch. The bus started again and meandered for another few minutes until it reached Section Two and let off the tattooed woman.

  The bus stop at Section Three looked just like the ones at Sections One and Two. Dave left the bus, with a nod and a “Thank you, sir” to the driver, and I followed behind him, with a wan smile. I found myself thinking that there were times—and this was definitely one of them—when it felt awfully good to have a man around. It didn’t even matter that it was Dave—stringy, bike-riding, nerdy, middle-aged Dave. What mattered was that this was a sinister metallic place full of armed men guarding other men, and Dave, whatever his physical appearance, was clearly one of them, while I just as clearly wasn’t. He was more at ease here than I could ever be, and his relative comfort reassured me in some primitive way.

  Someone inside was watching the gray-painted metal door; as soon as we reached it, the lock clicked open with an electric buzz. Dave pulled it wide, and we slipped through and found ourselves in another vestibule, facing another gate. The door closed behin
d us, and, a second later, the gate unlocked with a loud metallic click, and slid, or rather lurched aside, screeching and clanking. The bare gray foyer on the other side felt anticlimactic. A guard behind a window checked our IDs and buzzed us through yet another metal door into the visiting room.

  The room looked like a school cafeteria, only darker, with pale gray walls, a floor of dark green vinyl tiles, and a scattering of plastic tables and chairs. Only two of the tables were occupied. As we stood just inside the door, looking around, a guard in green prison uniform walked out of a door and toward us, a fist-sized knot of keys chinking on his thick leather belt.

  “You’re here to see Hardy?”

  “Yes,” we both answered.

  “Legal visit, right?”

  We nodded.

  “Attorney rooms are over here.” He gestured to two doors to our left.

  We followed him meekly and waited while he unlocked one of the doors and flipped the light switch. The room was fairly small, windowless, and bare, except for a worn and scratched wooden table and three scuffed chairs, and a cheap veneer bookcase holding several Bibles and a couple of Scrabble games.

  “Prison furniture,” I said to Dave, when the guard had left us. “Where do they find this stuff?”

  “I’d like to know who plays Scrabble during legal visits,” Dave said.

  We’d talked ahead of time about the interview with Emory. Dave was going to do most of the talking. Our major goals for this visit were to put Emory at ease by asking for some of the same information we’d gotten from Evie and Andy, and to get him to sign an authorization for us to get his records—school, medical, prison, jail, whatever. It wasn’t likely that he would tell us everything we wanted to know this time—no one ever does—so we hoped to leave him willing to see us again.

  A lanky, dark-haired man in the prison uniform of blue jeans and blue chambray shirt appeared at the door, followed by a stocky uniformed guard. Dave and I stood up, and Dave extended a hand. I realized, a little surprised, that Emory was not handcuffed. “Mr. Hardy?” Dave asked.

  Emory Hardy lifted his right hand to shake Dave’s. The motion was a little awkward, that of a man no longer accustomed to handshakes. “Yes, sir.”

  Somehow, without touching him, the guard moved Emory farther into the room and over to a chair. Before leaving, he said from the doorway, “When the door is closed, it locks from the outside. When you’re ready to go, or if you need anything, push that button there.” He nodded toward a red plastic button on a switch plate on the wall near the door.

  “Hey, can I get something to drink?” Emory asked.

  “May I?” I said, with an inquiring look toward the guard, who stepped aside obligingly.

  “Couple of sodas, Coke or Pepsi, if you can. And maybe a bag of chips?”

  I’d spotted the food and drink machines on one wall of the big visiting room. I walked across the echoing space, my footsteps tapping on the hard floor, feeling every second, every foot of distance as if it were doubled. As quickly as I could, I shoved dollar bills and coins into one machine after another, until I had drinks for all of us and a bag of potato chips for Emory. Back in the legal visiting room, I dumped them on the table as the guard pulled the door shut behind me.

  Emory opened one of the sodas, took a long swig from it, and set it down with a grunt of satisfaction. “Hot day,” he said. “I guess you’re Mrs. Moodie. Mama said you’d be coming to see me.” He looked around at Dave and me. “So—what can I do for you?”

  Emory was darker than Andy and better looking, almost handsome. His face was thin, with high cheekbones and a light tan. He had dark brown hair, combed, like Andy’s, straight back from his forehead, blue eyes almost the color of Evie’s, and a neatly trimmed mustache starting to show a bit of gray. He was a bit over forty, but he looked younger, his face still smooth except for tiny lines at the edges of his eyes and mouth. I could still see the boyish young man who had moved the hearts of a jury fourteen years ago. Now, though, he had the watchful, not-quite-direct look and the carefully casual movements of someone who’d been in prison a while, who had learned to get along by not standing out, making no moves that could be misinterpreted, inviting no one to move into his space. His arms, in his short-sleeved blue shirt, were a frieze of blue prison tattoos. I saw the word “Mom,” but couldn’t make out any of the other patterns.

  “I guess you know I’m one of the lawyers for your brother Andy,” I said, “and Dave Rothstein here is our investigator.”

  He looked from Dave to me and nodded once, his face unreadable. “Yeah, I know. Mama told me.”

  Dave picked up the ball. “Being Andy’s brother, you could be an important witness about a lot of things.”

  Emory leaned back a little in his chair and looked from me to Dave. “I told the police everything I knew at the time. I told Mama, I got nothin’ more to say about the case.”

  Dave shrugged. “Actually, that’s okay. We’re really looking more for background at this point.”

  “Like what?” With careful casualness, Emory hinged himself forward and picked up his soda without looking away from Dave.

  “His life. Your life. What Andy was like as a kid, what things were like for both of you growing up. You know, the sort of things your lawyer put on in your penalty phase.”

  Emory’s shoulders relaxed a little. He made an expression of distaste. “Okay. I don’t see why I should do him any favors. But sure. I promised Mama I’d try and help. Didn’t his lawyer put on all that stuff at his trial?”

  Dave glanced at me, passing the conversational ball. “Not like your lawyer,” I said. “He didn’t put on much at all, just your great-aunt and a jail guard.”

  “Shit.” Emory shook his head in disbelief. “That’s Andy. Weren’t for bad luck, like they say, he wouldn’t have no luck at all. So he didn’t even get a decent lawyer.”

  “Your mom said you’d be okay with signing some authorizations so we could get records,” Dave said. Somehow, without my seeing, the records releases and a pencil had materialized in front of him.

  “Oh, right. Lemme see ’em.” Dave pushed the papers and pencil across the table. Emory made a show of running his eyes over the top sheet and then signed each one slowly, pressing the pencil hard on the page. Then he sat back again in his chair.

  “So. What do you want to know about my asshole brother?”

  “Don’t like him much, eh?” Dave asked.

  “Shit, no. He’s the reason why I’m here. If it wasn’t that Mama asked me, I wouldn’t do shit for him.”

  Dave saw the opening and went for it. Almost offhandedly, he asked, “Don’t you think you’d have ended up in prison anyway? I mean you were both involved in kidnapping those girls.”

  Emory pushed himself back from the table, a look of irritation on his face. “Well, that’s what she said, didn’t she. The one ol’ Andy let go.”

  “Yeah, I know. I wondered why he did that.”

  Emory shook his head. “Shit, I don’t know. He’s just fucking feebleminded.”

  Dave hesitated slightly, then said, as if bemused, “Maybe. That’s what’s so crazy about this case. He kills the other two girls, but then just decides to let this one go.”

  Emory shook his head in a gesture of disgust. “I really don’t know why he did it.” He opened the bag of chips and poured a small pile onto a paper towel, then looked back at Dave. “Shit, I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. I told you I wasn’t gonna talk about the case.”

  “Sorry,” Dave said.

  “Okay.” Emory gestured toward the chips. “Have some if you want ’em.”

  Dave let Emory eat a couple of chips and take a drink of his soda before asking his next questions. He started with easy ones like where Emory was born, where he grew up, what schools he went to, that sort of thing. By the time he got to the more personal stuff, Emory was in the rhythm of being interviewed, relaxed, even smiling and occasionally volunteering information.

  “S
o what was Andy like when you were kids?” Dave asked.

  “Stupid,” Emory said. “Dumb.”

  “In what way?”

  “He just never got it, whatever it was. I mean, I had friends who had big brothers and they looked up to them. Andy was my big brother, but he was more like a little brother. He was an embarrassment. Mama would slap me when I said it, but she knew, too.”

  “Knew what?”

  Emory sat back, with a scornful chuckle. “That he was kind of a retard.” He seemed surprised that anyone could have missed it.

  “She wouldn’t admit it?”

  “Yeah. She was always fighting with the school people and moving Andy from this school to that one because they’d want to put him in special ed and stuff. It was like everybody knew but her.”

  “So what was Andy like?”

  Slowly, a story at a time, Dave pulled from Emory a description of Andy from his point of view. Andy losing Emory’s bike because he borrowed it and then left it in a park. Forgetting to change his clothes unless someone laid new ones out for him. Getting in trouble when he was with a group of kids shoplifting at a department store—everyone but Andy managed to ditch their stuff when they saw the mall guard looking at them. “God, he was so dumb,” Emory said, shaking his head and chuckling. “We could get him to do just about anything. We used to break into places at night—stores, the high school, vacant houses. Andy always wanted to come along on anything I did. So we’d send him in first. We’d tell him, ‘You’re the advance guard, Andy; you get to tell us if it’s safe.’ And then when Carla came to live with us, and he wanted to be her boyfriend—God, that was funny! Carla explaining to him that they can’t be boyfriend and girlfriend because she’s his sister, and he got so embarrassed, he didn’t say nothing, just turned bright red and hung his head like a dog.” Emory laughed. “I can’t believe you got me remembering all this stuff. Just don’t tell Mama. She’d be real upset.”

  Dave and I promised that we wouldn’t.