Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  Harry shrugged and shook his head. “She shouldn’t be where she is, that’s for sure.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  He lowered his head in thought for a long moment before answering. “I think several things.” Another, shorter pause. “It was—well, as things go around here—kind of a high-profile case. Family with money, developer with ties to city politicos, Hollywood-style plot. If the same thing had happened with a bunch of lowlifes over in Beanhollow, it would have been no big deal, just all in a day’s work, if you know what I mean. But because it was who it was, the paper and the TV news got hold of it. In the courtroom at every hearing, with cameras. Once that happens, especially in a place like this, you can’t really get a fair jury.

  “That was one thing.” He thought a little more. “Then there was Ferrante’s family—actually, I guess, his mother. She was obsessed with getting ‘justice’ for her boy, and the police and DA convinced her that Sunny was guilty. She stirred things up, gave interviews on the TV news, leaned on the DA.

  “And Joe Hansen, the detective on the case, decided early on Sunny was behind the killing. I don’t think he really thought about whether the snitch—Eason, right?—might be lying, because what he said fit with what Hansen had already figured was the truth. I’ll tell you, I was a detective for a long time, and that happens a lot—someone gets attached to a particular theory about how a crime went down, and then they only pay attention to what supports it and ignore all the loose ends.

  “And then there was Sandy Michaud. She was probably the best lawyer in the DA’s office—sharp, good in court. Ambitious. The office gave her her orders and she carried them out. Not to fault Craig. He did a good job, but she was just that much better. I guess all in all it was kind of a perfect storm. Everything just broke the wrong way for Sunny.”

  “It sure seems that way,” Carey agreed.

  “There was that juror,” I said. “Do you remember him?”

  “The evangelical preacher?”

  “Yep.”

  One of the trial jurors had been the minister of a small church outside of town. After the trial, Harry had spoken with a half-dozen jurors who were willing to talk with the defense. In those interviews, it had emerged that during the penalty deliberations the minister had read passages of the Bible in the jury room. Not only that, he had told the jury that Sunny deserved the death penalty because in killing Greg she had not only flouted the commandment against killing, but worse, had committed an act of rebellion against the Bible’s injunction that a wife must submit to her husband as to the Lord. Two jurors had signed declarations confirming this. Craig had made a motion for a new trial, arguing that a religious injunction was not a proper legal basis for sentencing a defendant to death and that the minister had committed misconduct by telling the jurors they should base their verdict on the Bible rather than the law. The judge had denied the motion on the ground that the jury had been properly instructed to follow only the law in the jury instructions given to them, and no evidence had been presented that they hadn’t done what they were told.

  “I remember those interviews,” Harry said. “A couple of the jurors told me they actually believed the biblical injunctions Reverend—Jeffers, wasn’t it?— had preached, but they wouldn’t sign declarations. Most of them wouldn’t talk to us, including the preacher. Craig said we couldn’t have done anything with the information anyway, and I knew that from other cases. The law says the judge can’t consider jurors’ mental processes. That never made any sense to me.”

  “Not to me, either,” I said. “But we’re stuck with it.”

  “Maybe we can do something about it in the habeas petition,” Carey said.

  “I hope so,” Harry said. “And I hope you can get the court to take another look at Steve Eason. I’m sure that guy was lying. I checked him out, and he was basically a snitch by trade. He had a history—get arrested, find or make up something on another guy he could trade for leniency. He got lucky this time because he was Todd Betts’s uncle or something like that, so he could claim Todd confessed to him and be credible. Craig tried to get the guy’s snitching history into evidence, but the judge excluded it.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “I followed every lead I could find about Todd. People who knew him, his family—everyone who would talk to me—till I think everyone in Beanhollow knew me on sight. People said he was in bad shape before he OD’d, but he didn’t talk about what was bothering him. He was getting high a lot, and his friends didn’t see him with Brittany as much. There was a kid that Joe Hansen dug up, who said Todd told him when he was high that he’d done something he felt horrible about; and I found a couple of others who talked about him crying. His roommate said he was having nightmares. Some people said he suddenly seemed to have a lot of money and drugs around then and talked about buying a truck. My guess is that had to do with the loan from Sunny. But if he did kill Greg Ferrante, he didn’t tell anyone I found. There was a theory floating around among them that Todd’s overdose wasn’t an accident, that he was killed to keep him from talking. But no one could point to anything beyond the timing. Those guys in Beanhollow are a bunch of stoners and tweakers, and it just seemed like the kind of conspiracy theory they’d concoct from any kind of coincidence.”

  “Kind of a dead end, then?” I asked.

  “Yeah, unfortunately. Craig and I started thinking about following the money, asking who besides Sunny would benefit from Ferrante’s death. Brittany, maybe, because her mother would get an inheritance instead of whatever she’d get in the prenup if Ferrante divorced her. And of course, Todd was her boyfriend. Then there were Greg Ferrante’s other kids. But we understood that Ferrante’s first wife had money of her own, and the kids were well off through her, so I couldn’t see why they’d risk killing him.” He stopped talking. A breath of morning air, with a hint of the day’s coming warmth, floated in from the open window, bringing with it the faint, ordinary sounds from the streets—passing cars, the growl of a lawnmower.

  I was impressed by his memory of the case, and I told him so.

  “I have three kids of my own,” he said. “I remember how it felt to be considering the possibility that one of Greg’s own kids, or his teenage stepdaughter, would have killed him for his money. It wasn’t something you like to think about.”

  We both made some sympathetic murmur.

  “But it may not have been that far-fetched, after all,” he added. “You may have already heard, but Ferrante’s son is doing life in prison, for soliciting a murder.”

  That was news to me. “We didn’t know that,” I said, surprised. “Do you know any of the details?”

  “It’s a while since I read about it, but it was in the Fresno paper that he tried to have his business partner murdered.”

  I think Carey and I both gulped. “Really! We’ll have to follow up on that,” Carey said.

  “Hope it helps,” Harry said.

  It felt as though the interview was winding down. Carey asked Harry if there was anything else he could think of that might help us. He thought, brows knitted, for a few seconds before answering. “Nothing I can think of. But I’ll let you know if I do. And feel free to come see me again if you have any more questions.”

  We all stood, and Harry walked ahead of us to open the door. “Give Sunny my best when you see her,” he said, as we turned toward the stairs.

  8

  Carey said she’d stay and touch base with Natasha, so I could head for home. Feeling the first stirrings of optimism after the bombshell Harry had dropped about Braden Ferrante’s attempted murder conviction, I decided, instead of heading directly home, to take a detour to Sparksville.

  The town is twelve miles outside Harrison, down a two-lane highway through orchards and gently rolling rangeland. The business district was a reduced speed zone on the highway itself, a scatter of worn commercial buildings and small houses, with a few streets extending out on either side. I passed a lumber yard, construction
and plumbing companies, a well-digger, the auto body shop where Sunny had worked after high school, an American Legion post, a small Mexican supermercado, a bar, a fire station, a motel, and at the end, in the middle of a parking lot of bare earth, a Kingdom Hall. Beyond that, before the highway went on through more farmland, I could see the playing fields and low buildings of what I guessed was the high school. The place was apparently too small for chain restaurants, but it had a taqueria and a diner with signs in its picture windows saying “Breakfast Served All Day,” and “Two Eggs, Toast and Hash Browns, $3.95.” The parking lot of the supermarket was about half full, and there were several cars parked on the street outside the coffee shop.

  I turned down a side street, and then another. The streets ran about three or four blocks before ending at culverts or fences with orchards or pasture beyond. They had no curbs or sidewalks, just dirt shoulders with parked cars and pickup trucks, and beyond them well-trodden dirt walking paths bordered in rank weeds. They were lined with little houses of painted wood or stucco. Most of them were one story, though a two-story Victorian house towered over one corner lot.

  Some blocks were better than others. On the worst of them, the paint on the houses was worn and the trim pitted with dry rot; the front yards were bare, compacted earth littered with faded plastic kids’ toys or old furniture, and the sides of the houses piled with old junk: pallets, more furniture, bits of pipe and lumber. On the better streets, the houses were tidily kept, with small front lawns and wisteria or bougainvillea climbing beside their doors and in front of their windows.

  The house where Sunny had grown up was on one of the nicer streets, dominated by a Methodist church at its far end, a plain building with an unassuming steeple, a blacktop parking lot on its right, and on its left a neat house that I guessed was the rectory. Sunny’s grandparents’ house, in the middle of the block, appeared fortuitously to be vacant and had a “For Sale” sign in front of it. I got out of the car and walked around it.

  It was a bungalow, possibly a hundred years old, one that could have been built from a Sears kit, or at least modeled on one. The wooden building, painted white, sat on a raised foundation. A set of worn wooden steps led to a roofed front porch as wide as the front of the house. There was a door in the center and windows on either side. The windows were dark, but there were no blinds or curtains inside them.

  I took a couple of photos with my phone, then walked down the little driveway to the left of the house, opened a gate in the low picket fence and followed a narrow concrete path to the front steps. The front yard had been covered in a cosmetic layer of dyed bark. Brick-edged flower beds, untended, bordered the fence, with red geraniums and honeysuckle spreading along the ground inside them. A flourishing pink jasmine vine climbed the post at the right corner of the porch.

  I walked up the porch steps and crossed the porch to the windows, noting that the flooring had at some point been replaced with durable artificial wood. Inside, the rooms were bare of furniture. I pictured them as they might have been when occupied, in a sort of perpetual gloom from the shade of the porch. The room on the right would have been the living room; it had a fireplace on the right wall, with a small window high on the wall on either side of it. At the end of the room a wide opening led into the dining room. Through it I could dimly see the built-in hutch that filled the far wall. The front room on the left would probably have been a bedroom.

  I walked back down the path to the driveway and turned right toward the back of the house, passing the little detached garage. The back yard was bigger than I thought it would be, extending some distance behind the house. On the left, behind the garage, I saw the remains of a big brick barbecue. It didn’t seem to have been used in a long time; a couple of loose bricks had tumbled from it, and it was half overgrown with vines. An orange tree was dropping the last of its winter fruit, split and dried out, onto the ground; and a dying peach tree had thrown out a leafy branch or two from its skeletal scaffold. At the back of the yard, there had clearly once been a garden, with neat raised rows, now growing weeds, and a small shed in the right corner.

  Some owner had built a raised deck outside the back door of the house; a white plastic chair sat to one side, as if waiting for someone to come out and sit for a few minutes between chores. There were windows, unshaded, at each side of the door. I climbed onto the deck and peered through one into an enclosed sun porch, walled with shelves and with a hot water heater and hookups for a washer and dryer. Inside, another closed door probably led into the kitchen.

  It was a house in which I could easily imagine Sunny growing up.

  As I stood on the deck, a dog in the house next door gave a desultory bark and then stopped. No one came out to ask me what I was doing; the neighborhood seemed to nap under the warm sun of a spring day. I took a few more photos of the sides and back of the house, and left, and then walked up to the end of the street to photograph the Methodist church.

  On impulse I decided to ring the doorbell of the house that appeared to be the rectory. After a moment, the door was opened by a gray-haired man in old khakis and a green short-sleeved sweatshirt.

  “May I help you?” he asked. There was no challenge in the question, and his face and voice were mild. He was thin and a little round-shouldered, with the slightly underfed appearance of a man who has lived a long time on a small and carefully budgeted income.

  “I’m not sure where to begin,” I said, truthfully; I hadn’t really thought this through. “I’m one of the lawyers for a woman in prison who grew up in that house over there, with her grandparents. I’m hoping to find some people who may have known them.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Why don’t you come in? I’m David Jessup—the minister of the church here.”

  “Janet Moodie.”

  He led me down a hall and into a room toward the back of the house, obviously his study, a room long lived-in, with stacks of papers, magazines, and books on the desk and shelves. A door in one wall led to the outside, in the direction of the church.

  There were two armchairs in front of the desk. “Have a seat,” he said. “Can I get you something? Iced tea or water?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine.” I sat in one of the chairs, and he took the other.

  “Who were you looking for?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know. My client’s grandparents lived on this street, but they’ve passed away. Their names were Al and Marie Sizemore.”

  “Marie Sizemore,” Reverend Jessup said, thoughtfully, calling up her memory. “I remember Marie. She was a member of my congregation. Her husband passed before I came here, in 1998.”

  “Did you ever meet her granddaughter? Her name was Sunny.”

  He gazed past me, his brow slightly knitted. “I did, a couple of times, now that I think of it. She used to come visit Marie.” He hesitated for a second, and then asked, “Was she the woman who went to prison for murdering her husband?”

  I nodded. “She grew up here. She and her first husband were married in your church. Back around 1985,” I added, so he wouldn’t have to wonder if he had married them.

  “Oh,” he said, his expression a study in warring emotions. “Marie came and talked to me a few times about what had happened with her granddaughter, and I counseled her. It was very difficult for her. You know, for people in her generation, it brings real shame on them to have a family member convicted of a serious crime. She felt she couldn’t hold her head up in the congregation. And she loved her granddaughter—if I remember correctly, Marie and her husband raised the child after her mother moved away. Marie wondered whether she was somehow to blame for what happened. Of course she wasn’t. From what she told me they had brought the girl up with good principles and a lot of love.”

  “That’s the impression I have,” I said.

  “And, you know,” he went on, with a shake of his head, “she wasn’t the only person in the congregation with a loved one in prison. These days, with all the drugs around, and, if you
don’t mind my saying so, the lack of solid morality to guide them, too many young people end up in trouble.”

  “Do you remember a teenaged girl who lived with Marie?”

  He paused and thought for a few seconds, then nodded. “There was a girl,” he said, “who lived there for a while. Her granddaughter’s child, Marie said. About high-school age. She moved in with Marie and took care of her until Marie had a stroke and had to move to assisted living. Nice girl, quiet, a little sad, but no wonder. She used to come to church every Sunday with Marie. My wife has a Bible study group for young people, and she was in that, too. You could tell she loved her great-grandmother—unusual in a child her age. I don’t know what happened to her after they moved. I heard Marie passed away.”

  I nodded. “Brittany’s doing well,” I said. “She’s married now and has a couple of children of her own.”

  Reverend Jessup smiled. “That’s always good to hear.” He pondered for a few seconds, and then said, “I’m not sure there’s anything more I can remember about the family. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Not that I can think of, but thank you; you helped me understand some things.” I rummaged in my purse, found a business card, and gave it to him, and we both stood.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Jessup said, shaking hands. “Please let me know if I can help in any way.”

  Before starting for home, I drove further down the highway, past the high school, and stopped to take a few pictures. It was small, but typical: a parking lot with shade awnings topped with solar panels; a single-story main building with a flat roof and a tan stucco façade; and two or three prefab buildings of the same tan color along one edge of the parking lot. Behind them I could glimpse the flat, fenced expanses of the baseball and football fields. Practice of some sort was happening on the track, and a faint shout or two reached me from a small group of kids in shorts and T-shirts clustered there.

  Back in the business district, I stopped at the diner for a cup of coffee to go, with milk. The place had clearly been around for a long time, but it was clean and well kept. A radio played country oldies in the background. A couple of men in jeans and plaid shirts sat at the counter and chatted with the middle-aged waitress. About half the booths were occupied, the customers in them gray-haired—couples or groups of three or four. The server who brought me the cardboard cup of coffee handed it to me with a, “Here you go.” In a glass case near the cash register I’d noticed a couple of trays of homemade cookies, cinnamon sugar and chocolate chip. I bought one of each.