Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  On the plane trip, I felt lonely and desolate. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking of seeing Charlie and the cats again, and how happy Charlie would be to see me. But my spirits didn’t really lift until I’d left the urban blight of the East Bay and the suburban sprawl of Marin County and was driving once again toward the coast among the tan and dark green of the late-summer hills.

  * * *

  The air in my house felt cold and smelled musty. The cats, fed by Ed while I was gone, came to the door, made a small show of acknowledging me, satisfied themselves that I had no food for them, and retreated to the bedroom. I set my suitcase down, put away the inevitable groceries I’d picked up on the drive home, opened every window I could reach, and, looking disconsolately at the pile of mail Ed had left on my dining table, called to let him know I was back. Then I walked to his house with a slab of smoked salmon and a bottle of birch syrup.

  Ed had made enchiladas for dinner, and his house smelled like green chilies and corn tortillas. Charlie rushed up, vibrating all over, and stopped to sniff my boots and jeans while I scratched his ears. “Have you eaten?” Ed asked. “I’ll fix you a plate.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be hungry until I’d smelled the food. Ed brought me a plate with about twice as much as I could eat. We talked about Alaska—Ed had spent a couple of summers up there working on fishing boats when he was young. By the time I finished eating, I felt almost too tired to talk. I thanked Ed effusively and headed home in the dark with a borrowed flashlight, a dish of enchiladas, and Charlie.

  Besides the mail, there were messages on my answering machine, and I hadn’t bothered to check my email for a couple of days. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d found out what was waiting for me behind that blinking red light and in the heap of envelopes on the table.

  I started with the phone messages—a couple from the prison operator, some solicitations and hang-ups, and then one from Jim. “I have bad news,” he said. “Carla Burrell had a sudden downturn and passed away yesterday. Give me a call when you get back.” There was a message from Charlene, whose voice sounded sad and tired. “Carla passed on yesterday. I told Mr. Christie, but I wanted to tell you myself, too. She always spoke well of you and wanted you to know she was grateful for everything you and Mr. Christie were doing for Andy.”

  Oh, God, I thought. Poor Carla. I felt like crying, and suddenly drained of energy, I walked out of my office and sat down at the table full of mail. I sat for a while with elbows on the table and my head in my hands and let the rush of sadness and pity wash over me. How little life had given her—a mother who deserted her, an autistic child she barely knew, her brothers in prison, her own best years lost to the drug addiction that had finally killed her. After a while, I sat up and, looking for something to keep me busy, began sorting, dully and mechanically, through the week’s accumulation of paper.

  Most of it was junk mail, which I tossed into a bag to recycle or burn. I opened a few of the work-related letters and put the rest and the bills into a pile to open later. About halfway through, I uncovered a worn-looking envelope addressed to the private mailbox at the realtor’s office on the highway that I use for business mail. The handwriting was unfamiliar; the return address, on one of those free address labels charities send by the hundreds, was that of Jimmy and Charlene Kitteridge.

  Without picking up my letter opener, I opened it right away, running my thumb along the inside top of the envelope. The paper shredded along its length, like a jagged wound. I pulled out the paper inside and unfolded it. There was no note and no cover letter; it was simply the declaration I had given Carla in February, the one that told of the murder of Len Hardy. I turned the pages, which were wrinkled and scuffed as though they had been carried around for a while. She had initialed each one at the bottom, and signed and dated it at the end in a shaky hand. I looked at the postmark on the envelope; it had been mailed on the day I left for Alaska.

  “Oh, Christ—oh, Carla,” I murmured. I wished I had someone—Terry, Ed, Gavin, my parents—there just to hold onto—anything but loneliness and night. Instead, I got up and fixed myself a brandy and hot water and drank it, and then another one. Then I put on a CD of Samuel Barber’s violin concerto and lay on my couch in a dark, dull haze of alcohol, sadness and exhaustion until I fell asleep.

  41

  The next morning, I scanned the declaration and envelope and emailed it to Corey. Later, I called Jimmy and Charlene with my condolences. Charlene was at work, but Jimmy was home and seemed grateful for the chance to talk about Carla. “She had kind of an unexpected downturn at the end,” he said. “She had so much wrong with her; I guess everything just went at once. In a way it was merciful; she didn’t suffer much.”

  I said I was sorry and that I’d hoped to see her again. Jimmy went on, as if he’d hardly heard my response. “It was good to have her here, though. It’s so sad the Lord had to take her just at that time.” He stopped, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “It seems wrong somehow, you know; your children should outlive you.” He paused. “But I should let you go; you have work to do. I’ll let Charlene know you called. And tell Andy I pray for him every day.”

  Jim called me that afternoon. “So—what can we do with this?” he asked.

  I was tired from the trip, hung over, and sad about Carla, and Jim’s all-business insouciance irritated me. “Oh, Christ,” I said, “I don’t know.”

  “It’s going to be a tough one,” Jim said, “but it’ll get the judge’s attention, all right. We don’t have to deal with the issue yet, though, do we? I mean, we can just file it as an exhibit and fight the admissibility thing out if some court orders a hearing.”

  I was worried about what else would happen if we filed the declaration. Would Evie cut off our contact with Andy again, or would she realize that whatever damage it could do had been done by filing it, and there would be no point in keeping Andy from us? Even if she and Andy did cut us off, would we be okay? Dan Moss’s evaluation was finished, and we’d gotten about all we were going to get from Evie. It could be years before any court might order a hearing on Andy’s petition; and a hearing, with its promise of getting Andy off death row, might make him more willing to cooperate in spite of Evie.

  And where did Carla’s statement leave us, anyway? Jim and I couldn’t tell anyone that Andy had once told me her story was true, because of the attorney–client privilege. And as long as Andy, Emory and Evie denied it, it was easily dismissed as a lie told against Evie by her hostile, drug-addicted daughter.

  “Maybe we should look for Len’s body,” Dave replied, with a copy to Jim, when I emailed him the news about Carla’s declaration.

  “And how would we do that?” I wrote back.

  “Unidentified recovered bodies.” Dave had read a newspaper article about a coroner’s office somewhere in Nevada that kept a storeroom full of unidentified skeletal remains found in the desert. “I met an investigator from Washington at a conference last summer,” he went on. “I think we may be able to narrow down the area where Evie and Emory must have dumped Len’s body to a few counties. From what Carla and Andy told us, it has to be in the mountains and within a day’s drive of where they were living. We could hire this guy to check with the local police departments and coroner’s offices.”

  “And what do we do if we find a possible hit?”

  “DNA testing.”

  Jim liked the idea, and he left Dave to arrange things with the investigator in Seattle, Steve Bardelli. I didn’t think much about it; the chance of Len’s remains being found and identified after all this time seemed vanishingly small.

  With a sense of dread, I called San Quentin and asked for visits with Andy and, since I would be there anyway, Arturo Villegas.

  42

  Arturo came through the door with as much of a roll and swagger as a short man in badly fitting prison blues and handcuffs—flanked by guards and hugging a manila folder of papers between his arm and ribcage—could mana
ge. On his way to the visiting cage, he called out, “Hello, bro,” to a couple of buddies.

  Between bites of microwave popcorn, he peppered me with information and questions about his case, and issues he thought I should be arguing in his appeal. The attorney for the codefendant who was tried with him had made a motion for a mistrial during jury selection because the district attorney was selectively challenging Hispanics on the jury panel. The district attorney had gotten an order keeping Arturo’s sister and two cousins out of the courtroom because they were supposedly gang members and their presence might intimidate witnesses. A witness who testified she heard him bragging about the drive-by at a party was the girlfriend of another suspect and had accused Arturo to keep her boyfriend out of jail.

  I’d only read about half the trial transcript, but it was pretty obvious that Arturo’s court-appointed lawyer had decided early on that the case was a loser and had pretty much phoned it in at trial. He was Arturo’s third lawyer on the case. A deputy public defender had been the first, but had withdrawn when he found out that the office had represented one of the prosecution witnesses on an unrelated robbery charge. The alternate defender who replaced him dropped out after being appointed to a judgeship. Joe Brasile, the lawyer who finally represented Arturo—if you could call it that—through his trial, was appointed from a panel of attorneys who were willing to try capital cases for the low-ball fee the county was willing to pay. Brasile, it seemed, made up for the low profit margin by dealing in volume. A lot of judges approve of lawyers who move their cases through the system efficiently, and Brasile aimed to please. Six months after his appointment, and two weeks after finishing another capital trial, he announced himself ready for trial in Arturo’s case. A jury was picked in a week, and the whole trial, guilt and penalty phases, took another three. Brasile filed no pretrial motions and, up to the point I’d reached in the transcript, had made only one objection.

  After the trial, Arturo told me, he had gotten some help from another prisoner and filed a motion asking the judge to appoint him a new attorney for a new trial motion. At the hearing he’d presented a list of witnesses whom Brasile had never interviewed or called to the stand. Brasile had explained he didn’t bother with them because they were all gangbangers and the jury wouldn’t believe them, and the judge had denied the motion on the spot, lecturing Arturo for trying to game the system by waiting until after the penalty phase of his trial to bring up the issue of the uncalled witnesses.

  It might be easy to say that it didn’t matter because Arturo was almost certainly guilty of at least aiding a brutal double murder for the stupidest of motives. In spite of his protests, there was plenty of evidence that he was in the car, and some evidence that he was the shooter; and there’s nothing sympathetic about a gang vendetta, particularly when it involves carloads of not very bright young men spraying a neighborhood with automatic gunfire. But paying snitches, hiding evidence, threatening witnesses, and turning a trial against a defendant with one-sided rulings work just as well to convict the innocent as the guilty. And they create distrust, cynicism, and disrespect for the system among everyone involved in it: defendants, cops, lawyers, and judges.

  So we spent an exhausting hour and a half as Arturo, semi-literate jailhouse lawyer, tested my good faith with questions and demands, trying to decide whether he could trust me to know what I was doing and care about his case or whether I was another dumptruck like his trial attorney.

  By the time Arturo was taken back to East Block, after extracting from me a promise to send him another forty dollars for canteen, Andy was waiting beyond the iron door. The guards brought him in a minute later and put him in the visiting cage, and a guard waited outside it while I fumbled with quarters and pushed dollar bills into the food and drink machines.

  Andy had asked for only a candy bar and a Coke. His shoulders were even more slumped than usual, and he looked somber and tired. After the cuffs were taken from his hands, he sat wearily in the plastic chair.

  “Are you doing okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He looked at his Coke as if deciding whether to open it, and then back to me. “I feel really bad about Carla. I keep thinking now I’ll never get to see her.”

  I reached across the table and put a hand on his forearm. “Andy, I’m so sorry,” I said.

  He looked down again, then back at me, and his eyes welled up with tears. He pulled his arm away, bent down, and wiped his eyes with the hem of his shirt. “I’m going to miss her,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “I know. I will, too. I really liked her.”

  Andy looked up and nodded. “She was good to me,” he said. “My neighbor, Lindstrom—they call him Shaky, ’cause his hands shake—his mom died last month. He was pretty broken up about it. We’ve talked some.”

  “Has that helped you?”

  “Yeah, some. That would be the worst,” Andy said, with a deep breath and a sigh, “if it was Mama. I don’t know what I’d do. Shaky hadn’t even seen his mom in years.”

  I’d brought a copy of Carla’s second declaration. That was part of the purpose of the visit, after all, to show it to Andy and let him know our plan. I wished there were a better time to bring it up. Reluctantly, I opened the manila folder I’d brought, pulled out the copy I’d made of Carla’s declaration, and set it in front of Andy.

  “Andy,” I said. “Before she died, Carla sent us this.”

  He read it through, slowly, silently, turning the pages, his lips moving now and then to form a word. I felt as though I were inside a bell, the sounds of the prison reverberating from its sides: individual words of conversations or a laugh from the cells around us, the occasional shouted command from a guard, thumps of doors closing, the harsh jingling of keys and handcuff chains. Eventually, Andy reached the end of the declaration and looked up at me. His face was tense with misery and confusion.

  “Why did she write this?” he asked.

  “To try to save your life, Andy,” I said. “Because she loved you. She didn’t want to, you know. She didn’t want to hurt your mother, either. But in the end, you won out with her. She signed this just a few days before she died.”

  “Did you show it to the judge?”

  “Not yet, but Jim is going to.”

  The angry protest I expected from Andy didn’t happen. Instead, he looked at me almost pleadingly and asked, “What’s going to happen?”

  “Probably nothing, at least not for a long time,” I said.

  Andy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mama said if we ever told about it she’d have to go to prison forever.”

  “That was almost thirty years ago,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “Nothing’s going to happen to Evie now. I don’t think she would go to prison anyway; she was trying to save your lives.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “it was just like Carla said. But what if you’re wrong, and they put Mama in prison? Why do you have to tell about it?”

  I struggled for an explanation. “Well,” I said, “it’s part of the mitigation evidence in your case. It’s an awful thing that happened to you and your family; if the jury had known about it they might have felt more sympathetic toward you, and maybe not have given you the death penalty.” The more I tried to explain it, I thought, the lamer it sounded.

  Andy didn’t seem to notice. “What’s going to happen to Mama when the judge sees this?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Really. They don’t have any other proof that Len is even dead.”

  “But what if they find his body?”

  “After all these years,” I said, “the chances are slim to none. And I really think anyone reading what Carla says will see that Evie did it to keep Len from hurting all of you.” I felt hardly more confident about that than I did about the mitigating effect of Carla’s revelation.

  There was one more thing I had to find out, though, that had weighed on my mind since our meeting with Nicole. “Andy,” I asked, “do you remember the night you let that girl go?”


  “Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

  “Do you remember bringing her a cup of juice that had something funny about it?”

  He looked at me and nodded. “Yeah—how did you know about that?”

  “We interviewed her back in the spring, remember? And she remembered it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did someone give it to you to give to her?”

  “Yeah, Emory.”

  “How did that happen?”

  Andy thought for a moment. “It was when I came back from seeing her—the girl. It was in the evening, and I brought her something to eat. And I came back with the dishes. I walked into the kitchen, and he and Mama were both there. And Mama asked, ‘Where are you coming from with those dishes?’ And I didn’t know what to say, and she looked at me and Emory. And she was really angry.”

  “About what?”

  “She figured out about the girl.”

  “You mean she knew you had her there?”

  “No—I guess she figured it out just then.”

  “How do you know?”

  He paused, thinking. “She told me to go into the living room and watch TV, and I did, and she told Emory to wait and went upstairs and came down again. I wondered what was happening, so I went over near the kitchen door to hear, and she was reading Emory out, calling him stupid, telling him she’d told him never to do that again. I think she gave him something, ’cause she said, ‘You give her this and make her drink it.’ Then I went back into the living room and sat down again so they wouldn’t know I heard. And then Emory came in and said to me, ‘You moron; you’ve messed everything up.’”

  “So did he give her whatever it was your mom had mixed up?”

  “No—he made me do it.”

  “What was it he made you do?”

  “He said to take the glass of juice out to the barn and tell her to drink it.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “I went out to the barn, and she tasted the juice and wouldn’t drink it. That’s when I decided we needed to get out of there. I went back to the house and got the truck keys and then put her in the truck and left.”