Janet Moodie--Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  “She spoiled him something awful,” Tony said. “I don’t know about you,” he said to Bob, “but there were times when I really hated him, growing up.”

  “Yeah, he was kind of a pill,” Bob said, with a smile. “He got away with everything.”

  “Kind of explains how he turned out,” Tony said.

  “What was he like?” I asked.

  “As a kid?” Tony responded, and went on. “He knew he could get away with almost anything with my mom, and he took advantage of that. He’d steal stuff—toys, bats, baseball mitts, swimming equipment—from me and Bob, use them and break them, and then deny it. And Mama would believe him, or if it was clear he was lying, she’d forgive him because he was so much younger than us. He learned he could play Mama and get away with all kinds of sh—, sorry, bad behavior. It got to be kind of a habit with him, cheating, seeing what he could get away with.”

  “Yeah,” Bob agreed. “Greg was kind of a master manipulator.”

  “Sounds like he stayed that way as an adult, too,” I hazarded.

  “Yep,” Tony said. “Always trying to get something for nothing, put one over on you.”

  “Come on,” said Bob. “You’re still pissed about the timeshare deal he got you into. I don’t think he knew it would go south.”

  “Maybe not,” Tony said. “But he made his money on it before it did, and left me high and dry. And he kept badgering us to sell part of the ranch land for a housing subdivision, said we’d all get rich off it. Almost convinced Dad to do it. I know who’d have gotten rich, and it wasn’t us.”

  Bob sighed. “Well, he’s long gone now. Anyhow, that’s why Mama was so bent on getting Sunny convicted. Greg was almost everything to her; it made her crazy when he was killed. And she felt betrayed by Sunny, just flabbergasted— she treated Sunny like a daughter, and the idea she’d do this to her own husband and his family just outraged her.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “You couldn’t talk to her about it. It was like if anyone said anything to contradict her, you were the enemy. Her best friends were the district attorney and that detective, Hansen. She’d say they were the only people who really supported her through the trial. It tore the family apart, is what it did.”

  “So you didn’t always agree with her?”

  “I thought it was ridiculous to give Sunny the death penalty,” John said.

  “I could never believe in my heart that Sunny did it,” Tony said, “even after that guy said Todd confessed. But I stopped saying anything around Mama because she’d go ballistic.”

  “Did you have a theory about who might have?”

  “No—that was the trouble. I mean, I imagine Greg made some enemies over the course of his life, given how he treated people. But if it really was Todd who killed him, then it seemed like it had to be someone in the family who put him up to it.”

  “He wouldn’t have done it on his own?”

  “Todd? I can’t imagine why. Like Bob said, he was no killer. He was just a happy-go-lucky kid. He was like a puppy, liked everyone, liked working here.”

  “No reason why he’d personally resent Greg?”

  “None that I ever saw. I don’t think they knew one another that well. I never saw them exchange a word when they were both here.”

  “What was Brittany like?” I asked.

  The three of them thought for a moment. John spoke first. “As far as I could tell, a typical high school kid. A little rebellious, but not beyond normal, that I saw. Greg treated her as bad as he did Sunny. That probably didn’t help with her behavior. She and Todd seemed to be really tight; she was out here at the ranch a lot after school and on weekends. I wondered how her parents felt about her dating Todd. I mean, he was a nice enough kid and all that, but he was twenty or so, and probably wasn’t going to amount to a lot.”

  “When Braden was here,” Bob said, “the three of them spent a lot of time together.”

  “That was probably because they were about the same age,” Tony said. “They didn’t have much in common with the rest of us in the older generation.”

  “I always wondered if Braden didn’t have something to do with it,” John said.

  “You’ve said that before,” Bob said, “but I don’t know what reason he’d have to kill his father, and besides, wasn’t he out of town that weekend?”

  “That wouldn’t matter if he hired Todd,” John said. “He’d probably want to arrange it that way, to make sure he had an alibi.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bob said.

  “Well now he’s in prison for, what, trying to have some guy killed he was in business with? I didn’t trust him when he was here, you know that.”

  The bell on the shop door began a steady ringing, and we heard voices and footsteps. “Sounds like Alison’s back,” Bob said.

  “Would you all like to come to the house?” said Bob. “It’s just up the hill; we can walk from here. We can talk more without being so crowded.”

  Bob pulled his phone out of a jeans pocket and made a call. “Alison? How’d it go? Great! Do you think you’ll be all right there by yourself? We have some company, and I’d like to go up to the house. Thanks, hon. Good luck!” He then made a second call. “Honey? I have those lawyers here I told you about; can we all come up to the house to talk? Okay. See you in a few.

  “We’re all set,” he said. “We can go out the back.” We stood, and Carey and I walked with them toward the back of the store. We passed through a long room, almost like a wide corridor, with windows along the sides. I recognized it as something common to many early ranch houses, the big dining room which separated the front of the house from the kitchen, where the family and the hands had all eaten meals together at one long table. Now it seemed to be a file room and storage area. Behind that was the old kitchen, converted into a mail room, with a copier and printer, stacks of packaging materials, a work table, and a couple of desks. Two women were working at the table; they looked up and smiled as we passed and exchanged hellos with the Ferrantes. “We do a pretty good business with online sales, particularly during the holidays,” John remarked to us, as he stood aside for Carey and me at the back door.

  Robert Ferrante’s house was along the right fork of the private road, the farthest of three houses in a semicircle behind a vineyard. “The big house is my son Rob’s now,” Bob told us. “Marlene and I moved to the little house here a few years ago.” As we walked down the road, Carey and Bob talked livestock. “Charolais cattle,” he was saying. “Excellent beef cattle. We sell to restaurants in LA and the Bay Area. My granddaughter, Melissa, has some Jerseys here, too; she’s started making cheese, gouda and lately cheddar. It’s good, too; we’ve got some for sale in the store.”

  The house that was now Rob’s was the central one of the three. It was fairly large, but not ostentatious, a comfortable split level that reclined gracefully across the top of a small rise. Shade trees around it, now bare of their summer leaves, probably kept it somewhat cool in the heat of summer. The front lawn between it and the vineyard had recently, it appeared, been conscientiously converted to a low-water landscape, with lavender and succulents and a winding dry creek of rounded rocks.

  “Marlene and I built that house in 1974, 1975,” Bob said, as we walked past it. “Tony’s place is the first one that we passed. Tony and Greg and I were raised in the old house— the one that’s now the store and offices. That’s the third house our family built on the ranch, in 1890. The first one was just a shack, an adobe my great-great-grandfather built and lived in while he got the ranch going. He was Swiss-Italian, came here from Europe. Went by ship to Panama, crossed the isthmus, and then sailed up to San Francisco; ended up out here. Worked for a rancher, then bought this ranch right after the big drought, when the land was cheap. Once he got established he went back home and married a girl from the old country, my great-great-grandmother Giovanna, brought her back here. They built a real house in the 1870s. My great-grandfather built the next one. Our dad said the adobe and the first house
were still standing when he was a kid. The old house burned in the thirties, and the adobe was pulled down to build the current hay barn. There’s an old photo of the two of them on the wall of the store.” He talked casually, but with a certain proprietary pride, about the history of his family on the ranch. I wondered how it must feel to have such ties to a place.

  After passing Rob’s house, we turned up a gravel driveway and walked around the side of the third house. It was a one-story post-war ranch-type house, flanked, like the bigger house, with old shade trees, and with a deck around its front and sides. “This is where Marlene and I started out,” Bob said, “and we’re back here now. It’s a good size for the two of us, less work for her.”

  He walked us around to the back, where we entered through a mudroom into a big, bright kitchen. Three women, two with gray hair and one with honey blond highlights, were cutting vegetables for a salad at the counters; they turned to meet us as we came in. Bob made introductions: “My wife, Marlene, my sister-in-law Cindy, and my daughter-in-law Barbara. These are the attorneys come to see us about Greg’s case—” He stopped, unsure of our names, and we introduced ourselves, to nods and smiles from the women. All of them were wearing blue or black jeans and sweaters of different colors—Marlene, tall and slender like Bob, in ice blue, Cindy, stocky and solid, in bright green with an applique of poinsettias on the front, and Barbara, middle-aged and fit, in off-white, with a silver and turquoise necklace and earrings.

  “I’ll get everyone settled inside,” Bob said, “and come back, okay?”

  “Why don’t you all sit at the table?” Marlene said. “We’re fixing lunch right now.”

  The dining room was just past the kitchen. There were enough seats for all of us around the long table. Through a wide archway I could see into the living room, where a generously decorated Christmas tree stood silhouetted in front of a picture window, partly obscuring a view across the valley.

  Carey and I glanced at one another, thinking, I suspected, the same thing. This was not how I’d expected the family of the man our client supposedly murdered to respond to us.

  We sat together near the far end of the table, and Tony sat across from us. John and Bob returned to the kitchen. “Cindy says I get in the way in the kitchen,” Tony said. “She’d just chase me out, so I’ll stay here and keep you girls company. Where did you come here from?”

  We told him. “I don’t know the north part of the state too well,” he said. “Been to San Francisco and the wine country, made a road trip in the motor home once to see the redwoods, but that’s about it. But I know the area around Ventura, Santa Barbara. Dad and Mama used to take us camping by the beaches around there in the summer. We’d take this little old travel trailer we had, pitch a tent, and stay for a week or so. When Cindy and I had kids, we used to do the same thing every summer. We loved it—still do.”

  Bob came back in with place mats, plates, and silverware, and we helped distribute them around the table. A moment later, John showed up with glasses and a pitcher of ice water; and the women followed him with a bowl of salad, plates of sliced bread, cheese and cold cuts, and jars of mustard and ketchup. “We’re doing kind of a deli thing,” Marlene said. “Everyone making their own sandwiches.” We nodded and set to work. When we all had sandwiches and salad, Marlene said to us, “So I understand you’re here for Sunny.”

  Carey nodded. “We’re her lawyers for her habeas corpus case. We’re reinvestigating it and filing a petition arguing for her release.”

  “Hmm,” Marlene said. “I’m not sure what to say. We all liked Sunny, but if she did what they say, she deserves to be in prison. It was horrible, we were all in shock. You don’t expect murder to touch your family.”

  “I’m not so sure about the death penalty, though,” Cindy said. “I mean, I believe in it, even though I’m Catholic, but for people a lot worse than her. I just wish I knew what happened. We all loved her, she was such a sweet little thing. It was like a double loss, losing Greg and then poor Todd. And then finding out that someone you’d loved like your own family had committed such a horrible crime… It was a terrible time. We didn’t know what to think.”

  “Except Mama,” Marlene said. “She was convinced Sunny killed Greg. She completely turned on her. You could not say a word around her in Sunny’s defense. We all stopped talking about it while she was alive, to keep peace in the family.”

  “Yeah, even with each other,” John said. “It became, like, this awful family secret.”

  There was a murmur of yeahs and uh-huhs around the table.

  “So have you found anything?” Barbara asked.

  I didn’t want to talk about Brittany, so I said, “The man who claimed that Todd confessed to him has just signed a sworn declaration saying he lied about it all.”

  Everyone’s eyes were on us. “No way!” a couple of people said.

  “You mean he said Sunny never hired Todd to kill Greg?” Tony asked.

  “He said he didn’t know; he just made it up.”

  “Jesus—why?” Bob asked.

  “He was in legal trouble himself. He was Todd’s uncle, so he knew about Todd’s connection to your family, and he knew the police were investigating Sunny. He figured he could get leniency in his own case by concocting a story about Todd confessing.”

  “That’s awful,” Cindy said. “So Sunny may have been innocent this whole time?”

  “Yes,” Carey said, “but we still have to look at the whole case.”

  “Okay,” a couple of them said—a little unsure, I guessed, at why.

  “What can you tell us about Greg and Sunny’s relationship?” Carey asked.

  “Whew,” Cindy said. “Where to begin? Well, you know that before Greg married Sunny he was married to Pat for— what, twelve years?”

  Marlene nodded.

  “She left him when she found out he was seeing Sunny,” Cindy said. “I don’t think it was the first time he’d fooled around on her, but it was kind of the last straw. We liked Pat. It took a while for the family to warm up to Sunny.”

  “We saw her as a trophy wife,” Marlene said, “and of course we blamed her for breaking up Greg and Pat’s marriage. She really was beautiful, but young, just a kid, and not too bright. Pat is sharp and funny. She and I were good friends; Bob and I are her daughter Emily’s godparents. We’re still close, in spite of the divorce. But Sunny—I mean, she was young enough to be my daughter.”

  “Greg treated her like a trophy wife, too,” Cindy said.

  “How was that?” Carey asked.

  “Like a possession,” Cindy said. “Like something he’d brought along to show off to his friends. He never really seemed to treat her like a person. They’d come here, and he’d ignore her most of the time, except when he wanted to sort of flash her like a fancy piece of jewelry he’d bought.”

  Barbara nodded agreement. “I was just appalled sometimes at how he talked to her. He’d just order her around—tell her to go fix her hair or makeup or get him a drink. And he’d criticize her in front of everyone. I remember once when he told her a top she was wearing made her look like trailer trash. I saw her sometimes go into a corner somewhere and cry after he embarrassed her in public like that.”

  “We felt sorry for her over time, in spite of everything,” Marlene said. “She obviously didn’t marry into any bed of roses with Greg.”

  “She was really sweet and helpful and good with the little children,” Cindy said. “And you could see she loved Brittany.”

  “She never had an unkind word to say about anyone,” Marlene said. “Even Greg.”

  “Did she ever confide in you about her life?”

  Cindy shook her head, and Barbara said, “No. She kept it to herself, never complained. She always tried to put the best face on it, stay upbeat about everything. She’d talk about trips they’d taken, things like that, always the good things.”

  Marlene added, “We were Greg’s family, after all. I don’t think she wanted to say anything ba
d about him to us.”

  “Did anything seem different just before Greg was killed?”

  The women shook their heads; then Bob said, “He was a little troubled the last time or two I saw him. Asked me if I could loan him some money—a bridge loan till he could find permanent financing on some property of his. It didn’t seem like a big deal, just a liquidity issue.”

  “Did you loan him the money?”

  “I was going to, but he died before we finalized it. I hate to say this, but I was probably lucky. My accountant knew his, and he advised me against making the loan; told me in confidence that Greg was on the verge of bankruptcy. He was right: I was Greg’s executor, and his estate was used up paying off creditors. Sunny got nothing from the sale of any of the properties. My guess is he overextended himself and got caught short by the recession that year.”

  “He never said anything to me,” Tony said.

  “He was probably too proud,” Bob said.

  “Or too devious.”

  “Did Braden and Brittany get anything out of the estate?” I asked.

  “Let me think,” Bob said. “Not much, because there was really nothing left after all the creditors were paid. Greg had life insurance policies that paid something to Braden and Emily, maybe fifty thousand dollars each, and about the same to Brittany. But that was it, as far as I can remember.”

  “Did you notice anything going on with Todd around the time Greg was killed? Or Braden?” I asked.

  There was a momentary silence as the women shook their heads, and the men seemed to be trying to recall what they might have seen. “I liked Todd,” John said, finally. “He was a good worker. Handy, willing. Dad was training him to work with the cattle. But then he got all caught up with Braden and his little schemes.”