Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  We had almost reached the car before I heard the door close behind us.

  34

  Carla sat silent for a couple of minutes as we drove back downtown, looking ahead into the bright halo the headlights made in the darkness. Just after we turned onto the little main street, she said, “She’s always had those little glass animals and things. I remember some of them from when I was a kid. I just loved to look at them, the way they sparkled like ice or diamonds. Some of them were presents I gave her. Charlene used to help me pick them out.” She stopped for a moment, as if uncertain what to say next, and then asked, “Do you really think Mama might have helped kill those girls?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t thought much about my suspicion, because it seemed so unlikely that Jim and I would ever be able to find out the truth from the only three people who would know. I was shaken by the confrontation with Evie, and I felt guilty that I’d brought the subject up at all. I had all but accused Evie of two more murders in front of her own daughter. And I’d just been an accomplice in something uncomfortably close to extortion, a crime that could get a lawyer disbarred. Unless you’re a prosecutor, it’s a serious breach of legal ethics to use a threat to report a crime as a bargaining tool. Not that Evie was likely to complain to anyone, but that didn’t stop me from feeling unnerved at what I’d done, at how easy it had been to cross the line when the opening came.

  “Andy confessed to the police and said he strangled them,” I said.

  “But you said they could have been killed the way Len was.”

  I backtracked. “I was guessing,” I said. “But the bodies really didn’t show any signs they’d been strangled. No signs of violence at all, in fact.”

  “But Mama knew,” Carla said. “I could see it.” She went silent, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her bend her head forward and press a closed hand to her mouth.

  We arrived at the motel, and I pulled into the parking lot and stopped the car. I put a hand tentatively on her shoulder in an inept attempt to comfort her. She didn’t seem to notice, but after a few seconds she relaxed a little and wiped her eyes and cheeks on the sleeves of her jacket. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m just tired.”

  “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have said what I did.” At a loss for words, I added, “Would you like to go inside and rest, or have some dinner?”

  “Let’s go someplace,” she said. “I don’t want to just sit in a room right now.”

  The café we’d been to that afternoon was still open, but in the dark the bare-bones decor and fluorescent lights were a little too Edward Hopper for my present mood. I opted for an Italian restaurant farther down the street that had an encouraging number of cars parked in its lot. It was dimly lit inside, but warm and cheerful, with wood-paneled walls, hokey fifties pop music on the sound system, and a little group of regulars laughing and telling stories at the bar. We both ate, bread with olive oil and big plates of pasta, as though we’d been starved all day, as if food would fill some hollow, trembling place inside us and make us solid and strong again.

  As we drove back to the motel, Carla returned to the subject of Evie. “If she did it, I guess it was because she was desperate,” she said thoughtfully, her profile a silhouette against the points of multicolored light moving past beyond the window. “Those boys were all she had. And if you’ve done it twice already, the idea of killing someone else isn’t as hard.”

  “It makes sense,” I said.

  “Yeah—but it’s still crazy.” She shook her head. “There really is something wrong with her. She’s—I don’t know. I guess you don’t see these things in your parents when you’re young.”

  I agreed. “You don’t have a frame of reference when you’re a kid to know what’s normal and what isn’t.”

  “But with what happened to her family—and having to shoot her own father—I guess that would leave just about anyone a little bent.”

  “We don’t know if she had anything to do with those women; it still could have been Emory.”

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head again, slowly, as if emphasizing the point. “Emory doesn’t think. He wouldn’t plan something like that. God—my own mother. It makes you wonder about yourself.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry.”

  “No. I’m more like my dad. Just spent my life letting people walk all over me.” She laughed, a one-syllable grunt of air. “Do you think she’ll leave Andy alone now?”

  “I don’t know; I don’t know her that well. But I think she was afraid of you.”

  “I hope so.”

  35

  When I saw Carla the next morning, she looked ill, her face sallow, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. “Are you okay?” I asked, alarmed.

  She shrugged. “I’ve been worse. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  She spent most of the drive back to Sacramento leaning back against the headrest, her eyes closed. “Do you need me to stay a while?” I asked her as I carried her little overnight bag up the walk to the house. “Take you to the doctor?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m having a bad day, that’s all.”

  When I got home that evening, after picking Charlie up from Ed’s, I called Carla’s cellphone, but she didn’t answer. I left a message on her voicemail, saying I’d just called to make sure she was all right and asking her to call if she needed anything.

  * * *

  The next morning I called Jim and left a message with Corey that Evie had promised to tell Andy to go ahead with the examination. I faxed a request to the prison for a visit with Andy the next week, and when the confirmation came, I wrote him a longer-than-usual letter, explaining that Carla and I had met with Evie and that she had agreed with us that he should be tested after all.

  Carla didn’t return my call, and Andy didn’t call me, either; I wondered whether Evie would find some way to derail the testing again. But when I made the long dark drive to the prison the week after our visit to Evie, Andy came down to see me.

  “I got a letter from Mama,” he said, when the guard had locked the visiting cage and left. “She says it’s okay for me to see that doctor.” He seemed baffled but also relieved—I supposed because he was no longer between his mother’s intentions and mine. “Will you be there?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay.” He hesitated, as if he were trying to remember something he’d meant to say. “Oh, yeah, I’ve been making bead necklaces. Can I make one for you? I made one for Mama for Christmas, but I don’t know if she got it.”

  I said I’d ask her about it when I next talked to her, and that I’d really appreciate getting one from him. He smiled. “Good. I’ll start working on it right away.”

  36

  During our trip to Redbud, I’d told Carla about Nancy Hollister, the psychologist working with us, and had asked if she would be willing to meet with her. Carla had agreed, and I’d given her phone number to Nancy.

  A week or so after my visit to Andy, Nancy called.

  “Well,” she said, “I drove up to Sacramento yesterday and saw Carla for about three hours. Poor woman; I really felt for her. Did you know that she has liver cancer?”

  “Oh, God, really?” I said, shocked. “No, the last thing she told me about it was that there’d been a cancer scare but it turned out to be a false alarm.”

  “Not so false, I guess. I think she found out after you and she went to see Eva. She says they’ve told her there isn’t much they can do—chemotherapy may give her a few more months, but there aren’t many options, apparently, given her other medical problems.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Nancy agreed. “She also told me about Leonard. But she’s still worried about protecting Andy and Eva. She wants to talk to you.”

  I called Carla the next day and left a voicemail; she called me back within the hour. “Dr. Hollister told me about your diagnosis,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah—it was kind of a shock,
” she said, with a short, nervous laugh. “You think your life is finally starting to come together, and then…” She sighed, and gave another weak laugh. “Oh, well. I haven’t started smoking again, though.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess. Especially since I don’t have to worry about it killing me any more, do I?” She paused for a moment, then went on. “I need to figure out what I can do to help Andy, you know, because of what’s happening. I know you all want me to sign a deposition of some sort.”

  “Yes, we need a declaration from you for the habeas petition.”

  “And you’ll send that to the other side and the judge?”

  “I think we’ll have to, yes.”

  “And Dr. Hollister said I might have to testify at a hearing.”

  “Maybe.” Given the glacial slowness of capital cases, an evidentiary hearing on Andy’s petition, if there even was one, wouldn’t happen for years. It seemed unlikely Carla would live that long.

  “That’s the problem. I know I told you about Mama and Emory and Len. But I just don’t see how all that coming out is going to help Andy. I mean, it was all so long ago, and it didn’t have nothin’ to do with what him and Emory did.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “It helps explain Andy, to some degree. It’s the kind of thing that might have made a jury more sympathetic to him—to know that he’d gone through something so terrible.”

  Carla wasn’t convinced. “I don’t see how it has anything to do with what he’s in jail for,” she said. Her voice became more tentative, as if she was thinking something through as she spoke. “I’m worried about what’ll happen to him if Mama goes to jail.”

  “I don’t think she’s in any legal trouble over this,” I said, trying to reassure her. “I believe what you’ve told me, but there’s not nearly enough evidence to prosecute her—no body, nothing at all to even say there was a murder except what you’ve told me.” And in a reasonable world, I thought, Evie’s act would be seen as defending herself and her children from a man who’d been holding them hostage at gunpoint. But I knew of too many women doing long prison terms for killing abusive husbands out of fear for their own lives to trust that the justice system would take the reasonable view.

  “Yeah,” Carla answered, hesitantly. “But what if they look for Len’s body? And what if they put two and two together, like you did, and start to think she had something to do with killing those girls?”

  So this was the unintended consequence of confronting Evie with my speculations. “I really don’t think they’ll do that,” I said. “And it’s the same problem—no evidence. And they have a confession from Andy. The prosecution’s got their man; the last thing they want to do is reopen the guilt part of the case—especially since it would mean admitting that Andy’s confession wasn’t true.”

  “But what if Mama gets scared and moves away? She’s all Andy has in the world. I don’t want to take her from him.”

  I had to admit I didn’t know what Evie might do if she felt threatened. I made the only suggestion I could think of. “Why don’t I write up a declaration of everything you told me except the part about Len’s death? Then we’d have that much, at least, and you’d have time to think about the rest.”

  She thought the idea over for a moment and then said, “Yes—I think I could do that.”

  * * *

  A couple of days later I made the drive to Sacramento. Hoping Carla might relent, I’d written two declarations. One recounted what Carla had told me and Nancy Hollister about her life with Evie, her grandparents, Jimmy, Charlene, and Len, her son Austin, and her observations about Andy’s slowness. The other, a supplemental declaration, told about the murder of Leonard Hardy.

  Over lunch at a deli, we talked more about her living situation. Her landlords were a retired couple whose son was a friend of Carla’s probation officer. “They’ve been okay,” she said. “I have this little granny unit in the back of their house. Doreen brings me cookies and stuff. They belong to some little church, and they keep trying to get me to go with them. Maybe I will some time. I may be moving up to Washington, though.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Dad and Charlene want me to come up there where they can look after me. Charlene can’t stand the idea of me being so far away and sick. It’s crazy, after all those years when I never said boo to them, didn’t help them with Austin, anything.”

  After we’d eaten, I gave her the two declarations. “I wrote them both up,” I said. “You can sign both or just the one and maybe keep the other in case you feel differently about signing it in the future. At least you’ll know what it would say.”

  She read the longer one, frowning in concentration, corrected an incorrect place name and a spelling mistake, filled in the date at the end, and signed it decisively, pushing it back to me across the table. Then she studied the second one for a minute or two, her face unreadable, before folding it in thirds and putting it into her purse. She looked up at me. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  I hated to go into particulars about her illness, but we needed to know whether she was likely to live to testify at a hearing. “Is your doctor saying there’s no possibility of recovery, then?” I asked.

  “That’s about it.”

  “No possibility of a transplant.”

  “No—I’ve got too many other things wrong with me.”

  “Are they going to try any therapies—chemo, radiation?”

  “He said there are some things they can do to kill some of the tumors and slow the rest down—but he said they’re risky. I’ll probably try anyway, though. Not much point in just sitting around waiting to die.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “You’re too young for that anyway.”

  She made a face and shrugged. “Not really. I’ve lived a lot. Not much to live for when I think about it.” Her gaze shifted to a spot in the middle of the table between us. “It’s funny,” she said thoughtfully. “I thought I’d be really afraid of dying, but I’m not.”

  I wished I could say the same. “Some people say that’s a sign of wisdom.”

  “First one ever,” she said, with a rueful smile.

  After I’d paid for our lunches, she asked if I’d mind driving her to Wal-Mart, so she could pick up some prescriptions and groceries. She bought only a few things: a quart of milk, some cans of soup, peanut butter, cookies, crackers, a loaf of bread and some butter. At the pharmacy counter, she wrote a check and then turned to me, holding her small paper bag of prescription jars and bottles. “Damn—that about cleaned me out until the end of the month.”

  “Do you need some cash to tide you over?” I asked her. “I can help you.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’ll be all right.”

  On the short ride home, she said almost nothing. Her face looked tired and strained, as if by pain. Back at her place, I offered to carry her groceries in, but she said, “No, I’ll be okay. Think I’ll take a nap, though.”

  “Stay in touch with me, will you?” I asked her. “Let me know if you move, so we can reach you if anything develops in Andy’s case.”

  I waited while she walked up the little path, carrying her plastic grocery bags, and unlocked the door. Before going inside, she turned and waved to me, and I waved back.

  37

  Dan Moss liked Andy. “He was pretty low key,” he said, between bites of a wedge of quesadilla. The wind outside had pushed up a couple of tufts of brown-gray hair near the crown of his head, and he looked tired. “Not what I expected. The other case I worked on—Mr. Chu’s—the client was more in line with my preconceptions—streetwise kid, into being a gangbanger. Andy just seems like—well, kind of a schlemiel.” He picked up another piece. “I’m really hungry,” he said almost apologetically. “We were there from eight to two with only one bathroom break.”

  It was well after two in the afternoon, a late lunch for both of us. Dan had finished his evaluation of Andy, two six-hour days at the prison.
I’d spent part of the first day with him and Andy, making introductions and sitting quietly in a corner of the interview room for the first couple of hours, just to be there in case Andy got stressed by the clinical interview and the testing. The second day, to stay nearby, I made visits to a couple of former clients.

  Our marathons finished, Dan and I had headed off to lunch at a brewpub. It was late enough that we were able to get one of the booths along a wall, apart from the echoing center of the room, where we could talk with some quiet and privacy.

  “Not the best conditions for testing, that’s for sure,” Dan went on, after swallowing another bite. “He held up well, though. I was impressed.”

  “It’s standard operating procedure at the prison,” I said. “No one’s been able to get them to change it. It took ten years of arguing with the warden’s office to get a psych testing room at all.”

  Dan shook his head in disbelief. “What a system.”

  He took a drink of his Diet Pepsi. “You know,” he said, shaking his head, “obviously I haven’t met anyone else on death row, but Andy doesn’t seem capable of the crimes he’s accused of. Unless he’s just showing me a front.”

  “Personally, I think his brother Emory was the heavy,” I said, “and Andy was just following along.”

  “And his brother isn’t on death row. Why is that?”

  “They weren’t tried together. Different lawyers, different juries. Emory got life without parole.”

  Our server appeared and set our main courses down. Dan took a bite of his sandwich and looked over at me again. “I imagine you’d like to hear some more about how the evaluation went?”

  I nodded, and he went on. “Well, you were there for the clinical interview. He was very cooperative, generally. But you saw how he reacted when I asked him about his father. I let it go, because it seemed to be making him upset.”