The Daughters Of Alta Mira (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 4)

by Michael Wallace

  “Oh, how nice. I just saw someone I have to say hello to. Catch you later.” And she was off.

  The people he was supposed to meet apparently hadn’t arrived yet, and he decided to step outside for a breath of fresh air. Fresh was probably not an accurate description. The heat seemed to trap the vehicle exhaust between the buildings, and cooking odors from a Thai restaurant three doors down somehow made their way into the street. Next to the gallery was a small men’s clothing store, with a window display of stunningly patterned ties and made-to-order shirts. He thought that with his long arms (he’d been a very good college basketball player) it might make sense to custom-order some shirts. He made a note to himself to come back next week.

  “You already have enough clothes, Gordon,” Elizabeth said, slipping up behind him. “They’re both here now. Let me introduce you so I can get back to meeting with the guests.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Wonderfully. They’ve sold three paintings in the first hour.”

  “Then you should probably raise the prices.”

  “Several people wanted to know if the two paintings on loan from the Quill Gordon collection were for sale.”

  “I hope you told them not at any price.”

  “I did. Come on, let’s go.”

  She led him back into the gallery and through a door at the rear, into a narrow hallway. On the right was a unisex bathroom, and on the left was a closed door. Elizabeth rapped on it twice and was told to come in.

  “Take it from here,” she said. “I need to get back.”

  Gordon opened the door. It led into a cramped office, 8-by-8 feet, partially bisected by a four-foot desk. Behind the desk sat the redhead in the emerald dress and a stocky man in his early fifties with thick black hair, flecked with gray. They both rose.

  “Melissa McConnell,” the woman said, extending her hand. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself earlier.”

  “And I’m Clarence Jefferson,” the man said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. We’ve heard a lot about you.”

  They sat down again, and Gordon sat in the room’s remaining chair.

  “I don’t know how much Elizabeth has told you,” Melissa said.

  “A little,” Gordon replied. “Why don’t you just start at the beginning.”

  Melissa looked at Clarence, and he proceeded.

  “Several years ago, I got involved with an organization called NGNC. That stands for Not Guilty Northern California. I teach sociology at City College, and I’ve always been interested in the way our criminal justice system works – or doesn’t. NGNC looks into cases when the question of a wrongful conviction has been raised and all the ordinary appeals have failed. All the major law schools in the Bay Area have faculty who volunteer their services, and when it appears there’s been a conviction of someone who is actually innocent, they petition for a writ of habeas corpus to overturn the conviction. It’s a good cause, and I’ve enlisted several students and faculty members at the college to volunteer. One of them was Melissa.” He looked at her. “Why don’t you take it from here.”

  She nodded. “I went through the NGNC training program to learn how to conduct interviews and gather information. They get a lot of requests from people wanting their case looked into, and each one gets assigned to a volunteer for an initial investigation to determine if it’s worth pursuing. At the end of last month, I got my first case, a man named Gary Baxter, who was convicted of killing his wife, Connie, two years ago in a place called Dutchtown. Have you ever been there?”

  “Not really,” Gordon said. “I drove by it or through it on the way back from a fishing trip a few years ago. About all I can remember is that it’s pretty small and isolated – even for a town in the mountains.”

  “It was one of the original Gold Rush boomtowns, hard as it is to believe today. Anyway, Gary grew up there, graduated from high school, kicked around for a couple of years, then joined the Army. He served in Desert Storm, came back, married a woman he met at a community college, and kicked around some more at various jobs. The marriage was tempestuous, and his drinking was getting worse.

  “Early in the morning on September 14, 1996, 911 got a call from him. He was barely coherent and kept babbling about Connie. A sheriff’s deputy went over and found her lying in a pool of blood on the living room floor. There was a bloody hammer next to her, and her face and head had been smashed in pretty good. Gary reeked of piss and alcohol and said he’d just woken up from a bender with a fierce hangover when he saw her body lying on the floor.”

  “On the floor?” Gordon asked.

  “He apparently passed out on the couch. Anyway, they took him down for questioning and started leaning on him about what he’d done. After a couple of hours, he finally broke down and said, ‘I guess I must have done it.’ That sealed his fate. The sheriff’s department started putting together the case against him.”

  “But why did he confess if he didn’t do it?” Gordon asked.

  “It was hardly a full confession. He’d been saying all along that he didn’t remember anything, but he finally broke down under pressure.”

  Clarence coughed. “Actually,” he said, “there have been several cases of people who confessed to a crime and were later exonerated by DNA evidence. Generally, they were poor, had been in trouble with the law before, and didn’t expect to get a fair break.”

  “Which is not a bad description of Gary Baxter,” Melissa said. “Three DUIs and a number of visits from sheriff’s deputies when he and his wife got into arguments. He was made to order as a fall guy.”

  “Maybe so,” Gordon said, “but it sounds as if the case against him was pretty strong.”

  “The jury surely thought so,” Clarence said. “They were out less than 45 minutes before finding him guilty of second-degree murder. It probably took them longer to pick a foreman than to reach a verdict.”

  “So why do you think he may not be guilty?”

  “Three weeks ago,” Melissa said, “I talked to him at Folsom Prison. He’s starting to wonder if he really did it, but he can’t remember a thing that happened after 11 o’clock the night she was killed. In prison he’s gotten into Alcoholics Anonymous and developed a deep Christian faith. And when I talked to him – you’ll probably laugh at this – I just couldn’t believe he’d kill a defenseless person, let alone a woman.”

  Gordon said nothing for a moment. His father, a judge, had told him stories about women who had been emotionally seduced by prisoners, men who, when they wanted to be, could be charming and plausible.

  “So you judged him by the look in his eye and trusted your instincts?” Gordon said.

  “That makes it sound superficial,” Melissa said. “But it’s not far off the mark. There are a couple of other things, though. From his description of the trial, it sounds like some of the evidence might have been inconsistent.”

  “Do you have a transcript?”

  “No, but his attorney would, and Gary can ask him to share it with you. Still, it comes down to two things that seem right in terms of his story.”

  Gordon spread his hands slightly, as if to say, “Go on.”

  “The first is that he’s not swearing up and down that he’s innocent. He honestly doesn’t know.”

  “That was what impressed me,” Clarence interjected. “I’ve dealt with a lot of ex-cons, and the ones who are still conning you are absolutely sure of themselves.”

  “And the second reason?” Gordon asked.

  “Gary and Connie had a tempestuous marriage. They argued a lot, and the sheriff’s deputies were called more than once. But Gary says he loved her, and that even though they had huge arguments, even though they shouted and threw things, he never laid a hand on her in anger. That’s why he thinks he can’t have done it.”

  “On the other hand, to play the devil’s advocate, maybe he finally boiled over.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  After a silence, Gordon spoke again.
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  “Something else I don’t understand about this,” he said. “I’d assume NGNC has its own people to look into cases, so why are you asking me to do it?”

  “Good question. When I went back to the lead attorney to report on my interview, she shook her head at the end and said they couldn’t take the case because Gary didn’t insist on his innocence. With all the appeals coming into NGNC, they have to make decisions on which cases they take, and it’s a hard and fast rule that they won’t investigate the case of a prisoner who doesn’t affirm his innocence.”

  “I can see you’re puzzled,” Clarence interjected. “We – Melissa and I – read his behavior as psychologically true. But NGNC doesn’t want to represent someone unless he’s all in. It makes sense from their perspective. They don’t want to invest hundreds, thousands of hours on a case, and have the client suddenly back out.”

  “Makes sense, I suppose,” Gordon said. “But if he’s not sure he’s innocent, why did he contact NGNC in the first place?”

  “He didn’t,” Melissa said. “The request to look into his case came from a woman named Nell Quinn. She lives in a town about 12 miles up the road, and she’s known Gary since they were both little kids. She doesn’t believe he did it . . .”

  “And she’s in love with him,” Gordon said.

  “I didn’t ask, but that was the impression I got, and it would have to be taken into consideration, certainly. I’m sure she’d be willing to talk to you.”

  “I’m sure she would, “ Gordon said, “but let’s cut to the chase. What, exactly, would you be asking me to do?”

  “If NGNC could be presented with new evidence indicating innocence, they could still take up the case. If I had the time, I’d go up to Dutchtown for a couple of weeks and nose around, but classes are starting and I can’t go at Christmas break because I have to be back east with my family. The earliest I could get there would be spring break, and only if nothing else came up. Time is of the essence; with each passing day, it gets tougher to compile accurate information. Elizabeth said you were planning a fishing trip in the next few weeks . . .”

  “Probably the second half of October,” Gordon said. “I’m still talking to my friend about times, but he’s really slammed at work.”

  “That’s a lot sooner than I could get there,” Melissa said, “and a fishing trip would be a perfect cover for you to be in town while you’re nosing around and asking questions.”

  And if you’re not going for almost two months,” Clarence added, “it would give us some time to have Gary contact people and ask them to talk to you.”

  “What, exactly, would I be looking for?”

  “Perhaps I can answer that,” Clarence said. “In examining these cases over a period of years, NGNC and other innocence advocacy groups have found a number of common factors in wrongful convictions. There’s bad faith and fraud by police and prosecutors, to be sure, but that’s a small part of it. Most of the time, there’s just a jumping to conclusions. The police see a couple of things early that point in one direction, it makes sense to them, so they start focusing on that and downplaying or ignoring the facts that don’t fit their theory.”

  “Isn’t the defense attorney supposed to challenge that?”

  “Ideally, yes. In practice, it doesn’t always work out that way. Incompetent defense counsel is also a major factor in wrongful convictions, and, in fact, one of the things we’d be asking you to do is look for that in the trial transcript.”

  “But I’m not an attorney.”

  “Granted. But you could be a juror. Look at the transcript and see if there’s anything that you, as a juror, would have liked to have seen some elaboration on. Something where you didn’t think the defense pressed hard enough.”

  “What else would I be looking for?”

  “Some of the more common problems in these cases are bad eyewitness testimony, bad expert testimony, witnesses who weren’t called when they should have been, questions that should have been asked but weren’t.”

  Gordon exhaled with a whistle.

  “That’s an awful lot to turn up in a week or so,” he said. “Especially if I want to get some fishing in, too.”

  “Look,” Melissa said, “we’re not asking you to be Perry Mason and produce a confession on the witness stand. Just nose around and tell us if you think there’s enough there to justify further investigation. Right now, you’re our best option. The question is, will you do it?”

  Gordon said nothing for several seconds, trying to convey the impression that he was thinking about it. In reality, the matter had been settled when Elizabeth had first asked him to have this meeting. Unpromising as the case appeared, he felt he owed it to her to help her friends.

  “All right,” he finally said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  “There’s just one thing,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “What if I do my nosing around, as you call it, and everything I turn up points to Gary Baxter being guilty as charged?”

  “I hope that doesn’t happen,” Melissa said. “But if it does, and we agree with you, we drop the case. And maybe Gary finally has closure.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  REX STOUT, American, 1886-1975, was the widely honored creator of the Nero Wolfe detective series, also a lifelong activist in civil liberties and peace issues. The Wolfe novels, set in New York City, were narrated by Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin, who took a somewhat less than exalted view of his boss. Some critics, in fact, consider Archie, rather than Wolfe, to be Stout’s great creation. In bringing Gordon’s sidekick Sam Akers back after a two-book hiatus, I decided to enlarge Sam’s role by having him play Archie to Gordon’s Wolfe, hence the dedication at the beginning.

  Gerald Nachman, used fictitiously in this book, is a real person, who graciously consented to his fictionalization. At the time the book takes place, 1997, Nachman was in fact working on a book that was published the following year with the title Raised on Radio. It is an absolutely delightful work, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has the slightest interest in radio or American cultural history.

  Finally, some advance readers have questioned whether someone convicted of statutory rape in California could avoid having to register as a sex offender. Such registration would be mandatory today, but at the time the book takes place, it was not, so the handling of that issue is entirely plausible as a reflection of the time in which the story occurred.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to all who helped in the research and production of the book. This would include Gil Courtney and David Robles, who got me into the press box for a high school football game; former Chief of Police Terry Medina, who answered questions I didn’t want on my internet search history; the U.S. Marine Corps Santa Cruz Recruiting Office for visual assistance with the book cover; Lauren Wilkins, my editor; Deborah Karas, the cover designer; and Melody Sharp, who keeps the website quillgordonmystery.com current each time a new book is published.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MICHAEL WALLACE is a native Californian, former editor of a daily newspaper, and longtime consultant in public relations and publications. He is a fly fisherman, a Rotarian, and an avid reader of mystery novels and stories. He currently lives along California’s central coast and can be contacted via email at quillgordon@calcentral.com