Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  Back in my car, I took a swig of the coffee and a bite of the cinnamon sugar cookie. It was a lot like the sugar cookies I’d baked with my son Gavin when he was small, and the taste opened up Proustian memories of rainy Saturdays in the big messy kitchen of our house in Berkeley. The coffee was about what I’d expected, and there wasn’t as much milk in it as I’d have liked. But it would get me through the first leg of the trip home.

  As I headed back down the straight highway toward the freeway, I mused a little about what it might be like growing up in someplace like Sparksville. I’d spent my childhood in the suburbs and a small city—the San Fernando Valley and then Anchorage—and my experiences didn’t give me much of a handle on how it would feel to be a kid in someplace so small and isolated. In the end, I gave up trying and put it on a mental list of questions to ask Sunny when I saw her next.

  9

  I should have felt happier than I did to get home, a week’s worth of groceries jostling with my suitcase in the back of my car, and a whole Sunday ahead of me to wind down from the trip. Instead, I felt exhausted, out of sorts, and old. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d finished with an evidentiary hearing in another case in the Central Valley. The prospect of another year of long drives down the Interstate, gas station coffee, commercial country music, pickup trucks with right-wing slogans on their bumper stickers, and cookie-cutter motels made me weary just thinking about it. Less than a year to file Sunny’s habeas petition, and these first few meetings had told us little we didn’t already know.

  As I lugged my bags and baggage from the car, almost tripping over the cats miaowing and weaving their way down the path in front of me, I could see lights through the woods from Ed’s house. Good, I thought; I can pick up Charlie. In the house, I ignored the message light on my phone and called Ed.

  “You’re back,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said. “Need to ransom a dog.”

  “He’s here; come on over.”

  I picked up a flashlight, put a gallon of milk, a rack of lamb, a dozen eggs, a basket of strawberries, and a pound of coffee into a handle bag, and made my way down the path that wound through the tanoaks and redwoods between my house and his. Ed answered the door as soon as I knocked, and Charlie made a mad scramble from the kitchen and did his best, from corgi height, to knock me over. Pogo, Ed’s big yellow dog, followed him and stopped, panting hopefully, a foot or two away.

  “Down, ankle-biter!” Ed ordered Charlie, to little effect. He took the grocery bag from my hand, so I could stoop and scratch the two dogs’ ears.

  “You’d think you’d been away longer,” Ed said. “He was starting to pine.”

  “I guess I’ve been deserting him a lot these last few months. First the Henley hearing in Wheaton, now this case in Harrison.”

  “Not much difference between them,” Ed said. “Or is that just northern California prejudice?”

  “One’s an oil town, the other’s big agriculture, is about it.”

  “Lucky you,” Ed sympathized. “Would you like a beer? Got a growler of some new brown ale from Vlad’s place down the road. Or we can try the cider we made, see how it’s aging.”

  “Think I’ll go for the ale tonight, have something made by professionals.”

  Ed chuckled, then disappeared into the kitchen and came back with two glasses.

  “You’re watching a show,” I said, noticing the image on his TV, a small cadre of musicians frozen in mid-performance.

  “Yeah, an Alison Krauss concert I recorded a while ago.”

  “I like her; want to turn it back on?”

  “Sure.” Ed picked up a remote from the table next to his favorite chair, and I sank into his sofa—to say it was sagging probably didn’t do justice to its unique texture, a bit like an upholstered marshmallow with a few hidden steel springs. We listened to bluegrass and drank our beers in companionable silence, with the dogs asleep at our feet.

  I finished my beer, and when the show paused for a break, pushed myself up from the sofa and took the glass into the kitchen. “I should let you get on with your evening,” I said. “I’m in your debt again for taking care of Charlie.”

  “It’s never a problem,” Ed said. “You’ll be okay walking back?”

  “Sure—thanks. I have the Hound of the Baskervilles with me.”

  Ed glanced at Charlie and gave a short laugh. “Well, he is tough, I’ll give him that. None of the dogs around here mess with him. You take care.”

  “You too.”

  The combination of beer, music, and undemanding friendship worked some magical transformation on my state of mind, and the night breeze, with its slap of chill fog, lifted some of the weight of exhaustion from my head and shoulders. Back home, I fed the cats, made myself a cup of instant cocoa, and settled comfortably into my own bed, the cats at my feet and Charlie on the rug beside me. Everything could be dealt with later. “Yep, Scarlett,” I thought before I fell asleep, “tomorrow really is another day.”

  Sunday I started a pasta sauce and meatballs in my slow cooker with frozen tomatoes from last year’s surplus, did laundry and overdue vacuuming and dusting around the house, and thought for the thousandth time about retiring and spending my days like an old cat, sleeping late and napping in the afternoons. Instead, I went outside to look at my garden and thin the fruit on my apple trees.

  Something—birds or rabbits—had found a way under the row cover in my lettuce bed, and most of the greens I had been so proud of a few days ago were eaten down to green nubs. I’m not inclined to be philosophical, and I spent a few minutes swearing and lecturing Charlie on the need, from now on, to kill any wildlife he found in the yard. I pulled a few weeds from around the peas, which seemed to have escaped the raids, watered the tomato plants starting to sprawl in their pots in my popup greenhouse, turned the raised bed in which I’d decided to plant them, and moved on into the orchard.

  My trees were still young, but several of them had clusters of nickel-sized green apples. Older hands with apple trees had told me that I needed to cull most of them so that the rest would grow to normal size. But I felt like apologizing to each one as I faced one branch after another, clippers in hand, and decided, godlike in arbitrariness and finality, which fruit would live and which would end up in the compost.

  After that, feeling a little bored with my own company, I drove down to the cliffs above the ocean to take a walk with Charlie and stop at Vlad’s for a growler of the ale I’d had at Ed’s. Tomorrow might be another day, but it was coming all the same, with more days like it; and it would be nice to have something in the fridge to take the edge off the evenings.

  Warm smells of tomato sauce and beef greeted me as I returned home, reminding me I was getting hungry. After a break for lunch, I decided to follow up on Harry Wardman’s remark about Braden Ferrante’s arrest. Braden Ferrante was an unusual enough name that a simple search online immediately brought up links to newspaper articles about his case. He’d been charged in Fresno, his hometown, with soliciting the murder of his business partner. Braden and the intended victim had invested in a winery, but couldn’t agree on how to run it. Unable to buy his partner out, Braden had tried to have him murdered. He had been caught by a sting, in that the man he’d tried to hire for the crime had been an undercover police officer. The similarity in modus operandi to Greg’s murder, if you assume, as Craig said, that Todd Betts had probably done the killing for someone else, was just enough to make me wonder. Later articles said Braden pled guilty to some of the charges, and others were dropped, and that he had been sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison. Eventually we’d have to interview him; that much was clear. But at least he wasn’t going anywhere.

  For the hell of it, I decided to do another search, this one about the Reverend Robert E. Lee Jeffers, the Bible-thumping juror at Sunny’s trial. It seemed that a few years after the trial he had found his moment of fame: several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, ran stories about threats from the Internal Revenue
Service to revoke the nonprofit status of the little church he had founded, because he had spent the 2008 presidential election season sermonizing against the idea of women holding public office. An archive search found a video loop of Jeffers in full cry at the podium, his shirt limp with sweat and his white hair a short spiky halo around his head, fulminating about the evil of a world where women flout the Bible’s command of subservience to their men. It was more or less his last hurrah, since he had died less than a year later. Given that and the timing of the IRS suit, I didn’t think it would add much to the investigation, but I emailed the links to Carey and Natasha, along with those to the articles about Braden.

  I spent Monday catching up on work: writing part of an opening brief in one case and a request for an extension of time to file the reply brief in another. In the middle of the day, after taking my outgoing mail to the private mail service at the real estate office on the highway, I spent an hour planting out the tomatoes from my little greenhouse, mostly because I knew that if I didn’t, Harriet, who had given me the plants back in March after growing them from seeds, would ask if I had them in the ground yet. And if I didn’t she’d be disappointed in me. Not that she’d say much—she never did; she’d just give me a “you really ought to get it together” look and say, “Okay.” And I’d be crushed. For a lawyer, I thought, I crush pretty easily.

  Some time after four o’clock, I tore myself away from the computer screen, changed into a T-shirt and yoga pants and dug through the clean laundry heaped on my bed for a newly washed sports bra. Onward! I thought, as I gave Charlie a pat on the head and marched out to my car.

  Harriet, slim and strong at seventy-five, was waiting at her door when I pulled up. “So, did you plant the tomatoes?” she asked, and gave a nod when I said I had. “Good,” she said. “What about fertilizer?”

  Fertilizer. Of course. “Oh, shit,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Not a problem. Just give them some fish emulsion tomorrow to get them off to a good start, and then follow it next week with tomato fertilizer. I guess you’ve been busy,” she said, a little tartly. “You haven’t been around much lately. Are you still working on that case with the Aryan Brotherhood?”

  “No, that’s wound down; we’re just waiting for the judge’s findings. I have a new one, over in Harrison.”

  “That’s a long way, too. Why can’t you get a case someplace closer?”

  I laughed. “I ask myself that at least once a week.”

  “Zoe asked after you at the exercise class.”

  “That’s nice of her.” I was surprised it mattered to the instructor that I wasn’t there. But that was the kind of place Corbin’s Landing was, sometimes. We lived scattered through the woods, but somehow we were in each other’s business like a family.

  “She’s a sweet girl.”

  Molly Cordero met us at the bottom of the potholed private road that led to her house. I’d offered several times to pick her up at her front door, but she always said she didn’t want people driving up there. “It’s a mess,” she’d apologized. “None of the neighbors will chip in to have it graded, and we can’t afford to do it ourselves. Someday someone’s gonna break an axle; maybe then they’ll do something.”

  As we waited for Zoe to set up her CD player, the talk among the women and the couple of stray older men in the class was mostly about a sighting of a mountain lion up on the ridge the previous morning. “It walked across the ridge road right in front of some bicyclists,” one of the women said. “My husband heard them talking about it at Vlad’s.”

  “Better keep your cats inside at night.”

  “I do anyway; the coyotes will eat them otherwise.”

  “They don’t eat chickens, do they?”

  “Coyotes? Absolutely.”

  “No, I knew that. I meant mountain lions.”

  “Haven’t heard of it happening. I don’t think they like to come close to buildings.”

  It was what passed for news in our neck of the woods.

  After an hour of stretching and sweating, Molly, Harriet, and I drove home in exhausted silence. “I can’t believe I still have to cook dinner,” Molly said.

  “Doesn’t Bob cook?” Harriet asked.

  “Sometimes, but he was out in the field today and didn’t think he’d be back before seven.”

  “I made a pan of cornbread and a salad before I left, and Bill is supposed to be heating up some chili, if he remembers,” Harriet said.

  “I’m not that much of a planner,” Molly said, a little ruefully.

  “I’m not, either, but it’s easier now I’m retired.”

  Their small talk was comforting; and the thought made me aware of how often I felt alone, watching other people’s lives from somewhere outside. After dropping them off, I’d drive back to my own little house and a dinner of leftovers, with a glass of Vlad’s ale or red wine to put a little glow on the day’s end. Then I’d get a fire going in my wood stove and finish my drink in the living room, cats on the sofa and Charlie at my feet, watching satellite television or reading a book. There was a time when that was just about all I wanted. But now it was feeling a little lonely being me. A thought rose in the back of my mind—and when it did I shook my head in disbelief—that a trip to Harrison or Sparksville now and then wasn’t such a bad thing.

  10

  I am not careful enough what I wish for.

  The next day—literally—Carey Bergmann called me.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Natasha’s going to Harrison to try to talk to people who knew Todd Betts. I’m wondering if you could help, kind of divide the work, go with her as needed. Some of these folks live in sketchy places.”

  “Sure.” I thought she was being a bit overprotective of Natasha, but I’d felt the same way sometimes when I’d worked with young investigators, an almost maternal need to see them warm and fed and safe.

  “Thanks for the material about Braden, by the way. And old Reverend Robert E. Lee Jeffers was a stitch—or he would be if there weren’t people out there who believe that stuff. I think we should include some of that in the petition, as evidence that the trial jurors were right about the things he was saying in the jury room.”

  As soon as Carey and I had said our goodbyes, I called Natasha.

  She picked up on the third ring. “Hi, Janet, what’s up?”

  “Carey called. She wants us both to go to Harrison. She says you have some interviews planned there.”

  “Sure—okay.” I could hear the question in her voice.

  “She figures we can get more done in Harrison if we split up the work. And,” I figured I might as well be honest, “I’m guessing that she’s worried about some of the people we’ll be seeing there and thought it would be good if there were two of us on some of the interviews.”

  Natasha laughed. “She’s cute,” she said. “Such a tough woman herself, but she acts like a mom.”

  “It’s a good thing to take care of your team.”

  “Yeah,” Natasha conceded.

  “When are you free to go?” I asked. “I need to make some overdue visits to San Quentin, but other than that my schedule is clear.”

  We settled on a date to meet.

  With an inward sigh, I sent an email to the clerk in charge of visiting at San Quentin, asking to see three inmates. Two were currently clients, and one had been years ago. They were each struggling with mental illness, which wasn’t helped by the limbo of death row and ongoing appeals, and it wasn’t easy to spend time with them, but I was in some ways their only hope of another chance. It often seemed a heavy burden.

  I’ve never been someone who confides easily in other people. I don’t tend to pick up the phone and call a friend when something is bothering me, and as a result I don’t know anyone I can regularly unburden my troubles to. Feeling a little sorry for myself, I packed Charlie into the car and drove to the county park, where we took a walk along the bluffs above the ocean. A half-hour of hiking with the damp wind snapping
at my face and hair didn’t do my mood much good, but it made Charlie happy and made me appreciate the comforts of my home when I got back. That evening I picked enough peas from the garden for dinner for one, poured myself a glass of brown ale, and sat for a while shelling peas and listening to quiet jazz before moving on to the kitchen to make a lazy woman’s dinner: the peas, an omelet, and a half-batch of baking powder biscuits. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll make a loaf of bread and share it with Ed.

  * * *

  After a drive that began at dawn and seemed to go on forever in a purgatory of stop-and-go freeway traffic, I finally made it down the potholed road to the San Quentin parking lot. I sat for a minute in my car, drinking the last of my coffee and staring out at the breakwater beyond the lot, the teal blue of the bay beyond that, and then the hills, half hidden by streaks of morning fog, and the sky the color of a bluebird’s egg. Visits to San Quentin were indelibly linked in some corner of my memory to the aftertaste of tepid coffee and the sour buzz inside my head from sleep deprivation. But the sight of the bay, rippling with small whitecaps in the morning sunlight, revived me, and I gathered my files and plastic purse of cash, squared my shoulders, and marched bravely to the visiting office.

  Generally, over the years, I’ve managed to remember all the arcane details about what I’m allowed to wear and carry into San Quentin on a legal visit, and my mishaps have been minor, such as accidentally having a five-dollar bill in my stack of singles (fixed by changing it for a fistful of quarters in the lobby change machine). But on the criminal defense attorney forums I read, I see occasional posts from people turned back because the color of their slacks was too much like the denim worn by the inmates or a jacket too close to the color of the guards’ uniform. Once, at San Quentin, a woman guard at visiting decided that the outline of my brassiere could be seen through my shirt. I was saved from rejection by another guard who waved me through, as I wondered what disruption could possibly be caused to inmates’ psyches by the hint of a utilitarian sports bra under the clothing of a woman manifestly on the far side of middle age. The upshot is that the visitor center at San Quentin always makes me a little apprehensive.