Madman Walking

by L. F. Robertson

  When he was arrested for Lindahl’s murder, he was convinced that the murder charges were brought in retaliation for his attempts to re-litigate his personal injury case and that the charges were part of a conspiracy to silence him.

  Oh, what fun, I thought, as I finished reading the last of the briefs. Still not sure whether I wanted to get involved again with Howard, I called Mike Barry and made a date to see him to talk about the case.

  5

  “So Howard’s actually innocent; now what?”

  I felt old and cynical saying it. Not that Mike is that much younger than I am, but he was—he’d always been—enthusiastic about his cases, his clients and his life in general. Walt Klum, who lived in his depression like a tortoise in its shell, couldn’t stand seeing Mike; and while we worked on his case, visiting Walt had defaulted to me, I guess because my energy was low enough to keep him fairly comfortable.

  Mike hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him. His light brown hair was a little more interspersed with gray, but he was still good-looking, and the energy that had been too much for Walt Klum when we were at the state defender’s still showed in his quick smile and his upbeat attitude about Howard’s case.

  “Hey,” Mike said, “we’re getting an evidentiary hearing to prove it.”

  “Not quite,” I told him. The state Supreme Court had issued an order to the referee—the judge who would be appointed to preside over Howard’s hearing—to take evidence and make recommendations on a specific set of questions. One was whether evidence was available at the time of the trial that Lindahl’s killing had been ordered by the Aryan Brotherhood and not Howard, and what that evidence was, and whether a jury might have reached a different verdict had they heard it. The other was whether there was evidence not available at the time of Howard’s trial that warranted setting aside his conviction.

  “If we win, he’ll get another trial, that’s all.”

  “Close enough,” Mike said. “If we win, I don’t think they’ll want to try him again. There’s a lot of evidence out there supporting Scanlon’s story. I’ve hired an investigator, Dan Connelly, and we went to see Scanlon right after the order to show cause came down.”

  “You found Scanlon?” I asked. “Is he still in prison?”

  “In a prison in Utah.”

  That surprised me. “How did that happen?”

  “Kind of a long story. I guess while he was on the run after killing Lindahl he did some robberies in Salt Lake City. A few years ago he was nailed for one of them by a DNA cold hit and extradited to Utah. He pled guilty after California and Utah agreed that he could serve out his sentence in Utah. The move probably saved his life.”

  “How was that?”

  “He was in the AB, but he dropped out after they sent someone after him and almost killed him. He was stabbed pretty badly—almost died from loss of blood. After that he debriefed.”

  “Debriefed?”

  “Means he sat down with some state prison gang investigators and told them everything he knew about the AB. Named names. Wrote an essay for the prison about all of it.”

  “And now he’s permanently on the AB’s hit list,” I said.

  “Definitely.”

  “And that’s how the prison system is protecting him?”

  Mike shrugged. “Yeah. He was lucky, as these things go.”

  “So he’s willing to talk with you? He kind of blew Gordon Marshall off, as I recall.”

  “Yeah. But back then he was still in the AB. Now he doesn’t have much to lose by talking. And he seems to feel genuinely bad that Henley’s facing death because of him. Wants to set things straight.”

  “So what now?”

  “I have Dan Connelly looking for the two guys Scanlon confessed to. There’s Sunderland, the guy Scanlon hid out with, who told his parole officer what Scanlon told him, and another fellow, Niedermeier, the one he talked to in the jail. He’s also trying to locate some of the people from the trailer park named in the police reports.”

  “Has he had any luck tracking down Freddy Gomez? He seems pretty pivotal.”

  “Yeah. Unfortunately, Gomez is dead.”

  “Damn. What happened, an overdose?”

  “No, prison stabbing. He got arrested again not long after Howard’s trial and sent to the joint. I’ll never be able to prove it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the police had a pretty good idea where Gomez was before Howard’s trial but decided it was better if the jury didn’t see and hear him. That said, after he’d snitched on Scanlon the Aryan Brotherhood had him on their list.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Dan’s trying to find out whether he talked to anyone about the case before he was killed. I’m going to see if I can get Scanlon’s debriefing report, and we need to file a discovery motion, to get access to the prosecution’s files and witness interviews. I was hoping you’d do that.”

  “Sure. Was there a previous one?”

  “No. For some reason Marshall never filed one. He sent an informal request to the DA, but she just wrote back she’d see him in court, and he left it there.”

  “Huh.” Not filing a motion was an unusual move; I wondered what Marshall had been thinking.

  Mike looked at a clock half buried under papers on his desk. “You want to grab an early lunch? I have a court appearance at one thirty.”

  “Sure.”

  “Oops, before we go—” Mike rummaged around the surface of his desk and produced an envelope. “My paralegal made this for you—it’s the rest of the files we got from Marshall. I had all the paper materials scanned.”

  I folded the envelope around the thumb drive I could feel inside it, and tucked it into an inner pocket of my jacket.

  6

  We walked through the rain to a Mexican restaurant near Mike’s office. Over burritos and chiles rellenos, we caught up a bit on each other’s lives.

  “You seem to have a good office setup,” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered. “It’s a suite with four attorneys. Mary does secretarial work for all of us. Annie, our paralegal, is a freelancer; she’s been working for me and one of the other lawyers. Saves money over having to pay the whole cost of an office and staff.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Sue and I sold our place in Oakland; now we have an acre just outside Petaluma. It’s just us, now that the kids are grown, so it’s pretty quiet. Sue volunteers at the food bank and sings in a community chorus; she’s having a great time being retired. What are you up to these days?”

  “I have a little house in the redwoods off Highway One, above Fort Ross. I do court-appointed appeals, mostly; I work out of my spare bedroom.”

  “Are you in touch with any of the old guard at the state defender?”

  “Not really.”

  “I don’t think it’s changed much since you left. A couple of people retired, a couple of new hires.” Mike paused for a second or two. “You know, I forgot to even ask you if you’ve decided you want to work on Howard’s case.”

  “Will he call me more than once a week?”

  “I’m sure he’ll try. But feel free not to take his calls, if you don’t want to. I think he’s used to it.”

  “I must be crazy.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought when Evelyn called me.”

  “Yet here we are.”

  “Yep.” Mike smiled. He had a great smile. Years ago, when we were both a lot younger and better-looking, I had sometimes found him almost dangerously attractive, to the point that I occasionally wondered what might have happened if we hadn’t both been married to other people. Even now, he still had a good deal of his old charm. “So, I take it you’re in?”

  “Oh, hell, I guess,” I said.

  He exhaled. “Okay, then.” I realized as he did that he’d actually not been sure I’d be interested—but then, neither had I. “Great. I’ll call Evelyn and get the paperwork going to ask for your appointment.”

  After we separated I did some shopping, since I was te
mporarily back in civilization—a hardware store, a plant nursery, the supermarket—before starting for home.

  The drive took me through miles of bright green hills, wet with winter rains and dotted with the long barns and little white houses of old dairy farms, and then up Highway One, with the hills rising steeply to one side and the Pacific Ocean, blue-gray and seemingly infinite, on the other. I navigated the rain-slick road, thankful that there were almost no other cars on it with me. The ghosts of bad memories raised by talking about the past faded with every mile of highway, and I felt tired, but more myself again, as I pulled in to the space near my door.

  7

  “Congratulations,” Mike said, when he called a week later. “You’re now second counsel for Howard Henley.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Too late!” he said brightly. “We should probably go see Howard. When are you free to visit?”

  “Oh, any old time.”

  “Week from Wednesday okay?”

  “You have too much energy. But yes.”

  It takes three hours or more, depending on traffic, to drive from Corbin’s Landing to San Quentin, where the state keeps its death row. On the Wednesday in question I woke up, as I generally do before prison visits, in a state of free-floating anxiety an hour before my alarm went off.

  A March rainstorm swept sheets of mist and rain across the coast highway, and I inched around the tight turns and switchbacks, acutely conscious of the cliffs beside me plunging to the invisible Pacific far below, and the fact that a cup of tar-colored Italian roast hadn’t completely blasted the mists of sleep out of my brain. For that first half-hour, I longed for the second cup of coffee in the cupholder in my car, but didn’t dare take a hand off the steering wheel to grab it or lower my guard away long enough to drink.

  On the freeway in Marin, someone far ahead of me had inconsiderately skidded into the rear of another car, and I inched for half an hour in a stop-and-go backup, cursing the accident, the driver who caused it, the commuters in their cars ahead of me, and my worn windshield wipers, which smeared the glass with streaks of oily water.

  I reached San Quentin a half-hour late to our appointment. Mike wasn’t in the parking lot or the long, drafty shed outside the gatehouse where visitors waited for their turn to be processed—a bureaucratic word that suggested we would emerge from the shed as some sort of lunch meat. I rang the electric bell at the gatehouse door, and the lock clicked open with a buzz, letting me into the relative warmth of the visitor processing area.

  The guard at the desk started to tell me I couldn’t keep my umbrella, but before I started to plead for a dispensation, a second guard at the X-ray machine told him umbrellas were okay. As I put my raincoat back on after walking through the metal detector, I thanked him. “No problem,” he answered. “You look like you haven’t been having a good day.”

  San Quentin State Prison is a bleak sandstone fortress built on a peninsula on the bay north of San Francisco. When the state put its first lockup there, soon after the Gold Rush, the place was a muddy sandbar in the middle of nowhere, with the breadth of San Francisco Bay between it and the relative civilization of the city. Times change, and the prison now looms over water views for which people down the road in Tiburon and Sausalito pay tens of millions of dollars.

  On this unlovely spring morning, the bay was choppy and dirty gray, half obscured by rain and fog. The wind threatened to turn my umbrella inside out, and rain blew in under it. By the time I had made the trek to the visiting building I was cold, damp, and full of self-pity; and my papers and legal pad, wrapped in a plastic supermarket bag because briefcases are prohibited, were starting to go limp.

  As I came out of the rain into a small vestibule and waited for a barred gate behind me to close and another gate into the visiting area to open, I saw Mike and Howard in one of the cages that pass there as attorney-client meeting rooms. Howard was talking, pointing, and gesturing, a stack of papers and envelopes on the table in front of him. Mike was writing something down on a legal pad. As the inner gate rolled back, he looked up, saw me, and rolled his eyes. Howard went on talking.

  Inside the visiting area, I left my ID with a guard seated behind a window in the small foyer and put my umbrella in a wastebasket with a sign taped on it that said, “Visitors Leave Umbrellas Here.” I walked over to the little cage containing Howard and Mike. Howard fell silent and turned, unsmiling, toward the door and me.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said. Another guard appeared nearby, waiting to let me into the cage, and I felt introductions could wait. “Can I get you anything from the machines?” I asked.

  “No,” Howard said, as though I’d proposed bringing pizza to a church service. Mike shook his head. “Nothing to eat for me,” he said. “Maybe a coffee, sugar, no cream.”

  The guard moved aside as I turned, with an apologetic smile, to walk toward the vending machines. When I reappeared at the cage, with two coffees and a package of cookies on a plastic tray, she let me into the cell and locked it behind me with a clash of keys and metal bars.

  It has puzzled me, over the years, why schizophrenia seems to bring out the worst detritus from the sufferers’ subconscious minds. The negativity and nastiness that sane people brick up inside walls of denial seem, much too often, to spew like venom from people whose inhibitions have been freed by psychosis. Howard wasn’t walking down the middle of some city sidewalk shouting Bible verses and calling the women he passed whores, but it appeared to me, from the dark expression on his face, that anger and hostility were percolating inside his splintered mind.

  He had aged, but he was recognizably the man I’d seen briefly all those years ago. His hair, now receding and completely gray, was brushed back from his forehead, which seemed even higher, his sunken eyes larger. He was gaunt; his prison blue shirt hung in folds from his shoulders. The cuffs of a worn thermal undershirt, more yellow than white, showed beyond the ends of his shirtsleeves. He was holding a pair of dark-framed prison-issue eyeglasses in one hand and tapping them, lightly but impatiently, on the table in front of him.

  I smiled a greeting, moved the coffees and cookies from the tray to the small table and stood the tray on the floor against the bars of the cell. “I’m Janet Moodie,” I said then, holding out a hand. I wondered if Howard would remember me from the phone calls when I was at the state defender, but he didn’t seem to recognize my name. Reflexively, his hand came up from the table, clasped mine for a fraction of a second, and then returned to where it had been, next to his stack of papers. Mike, I noticed, had a similar pile about half as high next to his legal pad. I moved past Mike to the only remaining chair at the small table and sat down, setting my folder on the table in front of me.

  “Howard and I were talking about the issues for the evidentiary hearing,” Mike said.

  “There’s only one issue,” Howard broke in, impatiently. “The conspiracy between Sandra Blaine, Judge Redd, and Ventura County to frame me for this man’s murder. Expose that conspiracy, that’s what you need to do, and they will have to let me go.”

  “Howard tells me,” Mike said, and I could tell he was choosing his words carefully, “that Lindahl was killed as part of a conspiracy to get Howard convicted of capital murder so that the county could stop him from reopening his accident case.”

  “But didn’t Steve Scanlon confess that he’d killed him for the Aryan Brotherhood?” I asked.

  “No, no, no,” Howard broke in, shaking his head emphatically. “Steve was tricked into killing Lindahl. Freddy Gomez told him that Lindahl had drugs and money and the AB wanted him dead. Freddy was part of the conspiracy. He was supposed to find someone to kill Lindahl and then pin the crime on me, so he tricked Steve into doing it. I wanted Steve to testify at my trial and tell the truth about what happened, but they wouldn’t let him. He took the Fifth.”

  “But that was because he was charged, too,” I said. “He wouldn’t want to confess to the crime with his own trial coming up, would he?”r />
  Howard looked at me as though I’d just said something truly idiotic. “He didn’t need to take the Fifth. It was too late; he’d already confessed. And the man he confessed to, Sunderland, he was afraid of them, too. I had to subpoena him, and he tried to avoid my investigator. Sandra Blaine threatened to have his parole revoked if he testified. The judge covered up for her by refusing to let him testify.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Lindahl’s father wanted him dead. He was a bigwig in the Taft County Transportation Department; Lindahl’s mother is his ex-wife. He wanted to get his son out of the way because he was an embarrassment to him. And if he could get me convicted for the crime, he’d get the restitution money, too.”

  “What restitution money?” Mike asked. Restitution is money the court can order a convicted criminal to pay his victims for economic losses resulting from the crime. “The court didn’t order you to pay any restitution.”

  Howard looked intently into Mike’s eyes. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “But money is being taken from my books.”

  “That’s not good,” Mike said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Howard announced in a tone that suggested Mike was a bit slow not to have grasped the seriousness of the situation.

  “Do you have proof?” Mike asked. “A statement of your trust account?”