Madman Walking

by L. F. Robertson

  For Mike, the challenge would be proving that Scanlon was telling the truth. Sandra Blaine, the prosecutor in both Howard’s and Scanlon’s trials, had argued, in her successful bid to keep Sunderland off the witness stand, that Scanlon’s claim was an empty boast, an attempt to boost his stature among his acquaintances by claiming that his murder of Lindahl was something more exciting than a revenge killing done for whatever Howard could pay him in money and drugs. Freddy Gomez had claimed Scanlon told him he’d received five thousand dollars and eight ounces of meth from Howard—a claim even Blaine argued was probably an exaggeration after Howard’s father had testified that he had given Howard money for his rent that month because Howard had been forced to spend part of his disability check to have a tooth pulled.

  Eventually the content of the Internet articles started to repeat itself, and I figured I’d had enough of the wrinkles and skin pores of old gangsters.

  After lunch and an hour digging planting holes for the last of the trees I’d grafted the year before, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the video of a client confessing to drowning her two small children in the bathtub of their apartment. The videotape of the confession and the interrogation that led to it had been played at her trial, after a motion to suppress it had been denied; and the question whether the confession was legally obtained was an issue in the appeal. My client was a very young, developmentally disabled woman, a child herself, really, who had had two babies before she turned sixteen. She had drowned them and tried to kill herself with an overdose of pills after the babies’ father acquired another girlfriend. Her case didn’t involve the death penalty because she was a minor, seventeen years old, when she committed the crimes. She had been sentenced to life in prison. I could see there would be a lot to argue about in the way the police had cajoled and pressured her into confessing, but watching it all happen was hard, and the girl’s confession itself, full of long hesitations, bouts of uncontrollable weeping, and apologies, with the homicide detectives feigning sympathy to keep her talking and suggesting incriminating details when her memory wavered, was painful to sit through.

  I was relieved when I looked at the clock and realized it was time to meet my friend Harriet for the exercise class she had talked me into. I changed into a T-shirt and my stretched-out yoga pants, threw a raincoat on over them, called her to tell her I was on my way, and headed out the door. For once, I was actually looking forward to it.

  * * *

  Harriet was one of the first friends I made after retreating to Corbin’s Landing. We had met one another at a garden club lecture at the Santa Rosa public library, after I asked a question about growing tomatoes over on the coast. She came up to me after the talk, a fairly tall, angular woman with short gray hair and a matter-of-fact manner, and we compared notes on where we lived and found we were nearly neighbors; her house was on the ridge, about a mile from mine. Since then, she had become not only my garden mentor but a substantial part of my social life, bringing me to garden club events and signing me up, along with her partner, Bill, for volunteer work for the community center and her church. She didn’t mind that I wasn’t religious, and I liked the feeling of helping people in a solid, tangible way, by things like serving food and giving away canned goods and school supplies.

  Harriet and I had another bit of common ground: her first husband and their eight-year-old son had been killed many years ago, when the pickup they were in had been hit by a tractor-trailer. Her attitude, a quiet way of looking the worst that can happen to you in the face, lifting up your chin and moving ahead with the work of life, made me examine, finally, the way I’d let pain and self-pity control me in the years after Terry’s suicide.

  We traded driving to exercise class, and usually Harriet’s friend Molly met us at Harriet’s house, but today Molly was away babysitting a grandchild. I was glad, because I wanted Harriet to myself this time.

  Harriet had been a court reporter, which gave us each a better understanding than most people of the other’s work experiences. My work involved reading what reporters like her wrote down as they heard it in court.

  The transcript of a criminal trial is seldom elevating reading, and I’ve seen my share of ugly facts and painful testimony. But before meeting Harriet I hadn’t thought about the fact that the staff in the courtroom had to hear it all every day. The transcripts of the cases I handled were a tiny fraction of the hearings she had covered in her career. And I was reading words on a page while she had to watch and listen to the actual actors in the courtroom. “I heard a lot,” she said to me once, “some really bad stuff—murders, rapes, robberies, child abuse. And you’re not supposed to react to any of it in court. Believe me, sometimes that can be really hard to do. I had nightmares after some of those trials.”

  She was glad to retire, but she didn’t have any problem with occasionally talking shop. When you’re writing a legal brief, it’s a real help to be able to run your ideas past some non-lawyer friends. Harriet was willing to hear me out, and she’d seen enough courtroom action to have a good sense of what works with jurors and judges.

  “How are your tomato starts going?” Harriet asked, as we drove the short distance to the church hall.

  “Not half bad,” I said proudly. “They’re getting nice and big.”

  “They’re probably ready to put into four-inch pots,” she said.

  I sighed. “Yeah, more work.”

  She wasn’t sympathetic. “You have to treat them right, or you’ll lose them.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling guilty about my plants, which were crowding each other out of their little six-packs. So I changed the subject. “I have a question for you: did you ever report on any cases involving the Aryan Brotherhood?”

  Harriet considered. “I know we had some trials involving men in gangs like that. They tended to have funny names—Nazi Low Riders, and would you believe Peckerwoods? Skinhead gangs, kids with shaved heads and tattoos.”

  We were pulling into the church parking lot. “Let me think about it some more,” she said.

  The class was led by a young woman who seemed to love nothing more than to get us all dancing enthusiastically to pop tunes from the seventies and eighties. There were usually about twenty people there: women getting a little aerobic exercise on their way home from work, stay-at-home wives and mothers, and retirees trying to stay healthy. Once in a while a man came to the class, but they didn’t tend to last long.

  There was always a little chatter before the class, as people who knew one another caught up on each other’s recent lives. One woman who raised chickens had brought eggs, and Harriet and I each bought a dozen.

  There was no chance to talk during the dance routines, so it was only when Harriet and I were in her truck heading home that she said, “There was one case, a long time ago, back when I was working in Sacramento. Three guys charged with murdering someone from one of the big Mexican gangs, some kind of turf war. The DA said the defendants were with the Aryan Brotherhood. I’d never seen such a collection of scary-looking people. Real lowlifes. And half the witnesses were scared to death. Some of them just refused to testify, even when the judge said he’d put them in jail for contempt. They put extra security in the courtroom. Everyone was on edge. I’ve been trying to forget it; it’s one of the cases that kept me awake at night.”

  In Harriet’s driveway, as I was climbing down from the passenger seat, she asked, “You don’t have a case with those guys, do you? The Aryan Brotherhood, I mean.”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Sort of?”

  “It’s a really old case.”

  “Huh. Well, be careful.”

  11

  After I’d finished reading the material Mike had given me about Howard’s case, I wrote a draft of a discovery motion and emailed it to Mike.

  The motion was a pretty standard piece of legal writing, a request to be given copies of relevant material in the possession or control of all agencies involved in investigating and prose
cuting the case against your client. The request is always to some extent blind, because while you know the general types of information a criminal investigation usually comes up with, you don’t know what specific material the district attorney might have or know about that he or she isn’t giving you. There’s an art to writing a motion that claims your opponent has relevant material you’re entitled to, when you don’t know if they do or not. Fortunately, that technical problem has been solved by other, better lawyers than me, and I was able to get several good sample motions from an online criminal defense forum and crib shamelessly from them for my own.

  One type of material prosecutors are required to turn over with or without a defense request is exculpatory evidence, that is, evidence found in the course of investigating the case that might suggest the defendant isn’t guilty after all. A more enlightened Supreme Court held decades ago that prosecutors, as government officials, have a duty that goes beyond winning the cases they bring; they have to try to make sure that the result of the prosecution is just and fair to all sides. Part of this duty says that police and prosecutors aren’t allowed to bury evidence that doesn’t help their case; they have to make it available to defendants and their lawyers.

  This ideal has one big weakness: that it’s the police and the prosecutor—the players who are trying to get the defendant convicted—who decide initially whether a piece of information should be disclosed. Police officers and prosecutors don’t usually know much about how to defend a criminal case; and it’s easy for even a conscientious detective or district attorney to take an unduly narrow view of what evidence might benefit the defense. And some prosecutors and police officers see exculpatory evidence as an obstacle, adding confusion to a case whose outcome, in their minds, should be clear; some of them make the decision to pretend it doesn’t exist, especially if the risk that the defense will find out about it is small. Even when a defendant is lucky enough to learn about the evidence after he is convicted, there are few consequences. A judge may grant him a new trial, but prosecutors and police officers are almost never punished for hiding evidence that might have kept a defendant out of prison in the first place.

  Discovery motions are a standard part of most criminal cases, but Howard had fired his trial attorney before he could file one, and it had undoubtedly never occurred to Howard to prepare one of his own. Howard’s first habeas attorney could have made a motion for discovery, but, for unknown reasons, hadn’t. He had written a letter to Sandra Blaine, the district attorney who tried Howard’s case, asking to see her files, and she had written him a curt response saying, in essence, “See you in court.”

  Mike sent an appreciative email after getting my draft, and then another with a copy of the motion after he’d made some edits and filed it; and for another couple of weeks, all was silent on the Henley front. Even Howard stopped calling; the silence from him seemed almost eerie.

  I worked on a couple of the other cases I’d taken appointments on, went on hikes with Charlie, weeded my raised beds, planted beets and more lettuce, repotted my tomatoes, made yoghurt and bread, and generally enjoyed living like the backwoods foodie I had become. One day, after a late rainstorm, I went out with Ed and a couple of his friends to hunt mushrooms: the last boletes of the season, chanterelles, and morels.

  I was about to call Mike, reluctantly, to find out whether something had happened to Howard, when he called me.

  “Both the attorney general and the district attorney filed responses to our discovery motion,” he said, “and the AG filed a motion for discovery from us. No surprises in them, but it looks as though Sandra Blaine’s office is taking a personal interest in the case. I’ll email them to you.”

  “That’s not good.” Blaine had been the prosecutor at both Howard’s and Scanlon’s trials. Now she was the elected district attorney of Taft County. “By the way,” I added, “is something up with Howard? I haven’t had any calls from him in a while.”

  “Yeah. He got rolled up and sent to the Adjustment Center.”

  “Shit. What for?”

  “I’m not sure—apparently a combination of having too much paperwork in his cell and mouthing off to the guards who told him to get rid of it. He sent me a letter ranting about it. He thinks he’ll be back on Grade A in thirty days.”

  “Could be worse, then.”

  “Yeah. It happens periodically. It’s Howard; he can’t shut up, ends up on someone’s bad side, and they send him down there to let him know who’s boss. But I have a favor to ask you.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m supposed to go with Dan Connelly—the investigator I’m working with—to see a witness up in Crescent City on Monday, but I have a preliminary hearing that day I can’t get out of. Can you go there and meet Dan?”

  I didn’t have anything scheduled on Monday except my exercise class. “I can do it,” I said.

  “It’s a long drive, so you’ll probably have to go up the day before. Dan’s going to fly to Eureka and drive from there. He lives in Oakland, so it’s easier for him to get to the airport.”

  I checked my calendar, just to be sure. Nothing going Sunday, either. Nice to be so in demand, I thought.

  “Not a problem. Tell me about the witness.” I hoped it wasn’t some AB guy. I was starting to internalize Ed and Harriet’s concerns.

  “Her name is Ida Rader. She’s a retired prison lieutenant. Used to be one of the Department of Corrections gang specialists. She knew Scanlon; he says he debriefed to her after dropping out of the AB.”

  “So what do we want from Mrs. Rader?”

  “In part, to establish that Scanlon did write a debriefing document and that it was given to the Department of Corrections. And, anything else they might have from him. Whatever she remembers about Scanlon’s history in the prison system. Her impressions of him. Whether she feels he was really connected to the Aryan Brotherhood and might have committed a killing for them.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve briefed Dan on what I want to ask her. But I wanted to come along because I’ll probably subpoena her for the hearing, and I wanted to get a feel for how to approach her on direct examination. I’m hoping you can help me there.”

  “You mean, is she unfriendly to the defense? Will she be honest? Evasive? Like that?”

  “Exactly. Dan goes up to Crescent City from time to time; he’s been working on a case with some witnesses up there in Pelican Bay. I’ll ask him to get in touch with you. Place is kind of a depressed area; he can probably tell you the name of a decent motel.”

  12

  Crescent City is at the far north end of California, almost at the Oregon border. From where I live, it was a long day’s drive, up the coast and inland, then north through the redwood forests. The forest scenery is punctuated by cabin resorts and old-fashioned tourist attractions: drive-through trees, a cabin built of a single redwood log. I’d made a couple of trips to the Eureka area years ago on another case, and the names of the old lumber towns and ports along the way—Fortuna, Trinidad, Scotia, Samoa—recalled drives down steep and potholed streets and witness interviews in rundown bungalows and convalescent homes. A lot of the highway was two-lane road, or sometimes a single lane where construction crews were repairing the damage from the winter’s inevitable rock slides. But the weather was clear, and the redwoods in Humboldt County made the second-growth trees around my little acre seem pretty ordinary.

  Near the end of the drive, the highway skirted the Pacific, with forested hills and green valleys to the east and the rocky coast to the west. I had expected Crescent City to look like someplace in the Pacific Northwest, but it turned out to be more of a seacoast town, a collection of weathered buildings surrounding the bay, under a wide open sky. My motel was part of a row of similar ones that bordered the water’s edge, near a sizeable marina. After checking in and dropping my overnight bag in my room, I went out and treated myself to halibut tacos at a restaurant a little down the highway, then read in my room until I fell asleep.

/>   I’d meant to sleep in, enjoying the luxury of not being awakened by Charlie and the cats, but I woke up at six anyway, so I took a walk around the marina. Gulls keened overhead, and the morning was sunny but chilly, with a sharp breeze that made my eyes water. The marina was half full of a mix of well-worn fishing and pleasure boats with names like Skipjack, Moray, Katherine, and Chelsea. At that hour, there were few other people around. A young man with a heavy dark beard was hosing down the steel cleaning tables and concrete floor of a fish cleaning station, amid the strong metallic smell of fish scales and blood. At the edge of a parking lot a woman in a fleece jacket and scarf was walking a big, placid yellow dog; I thought of Charlie and wished he were here with me.

  After returning to the motel I ate a leisurely waffle in the breakfast room, then went through my notes for the interview. I showered and changed into the outfit I’d brought for the interview: dark gray slacks, a light sea-green pullover, and a black cardigan. I was trying to strike the right tone: professional, but casual and unintimidating—or so I hoped. I almost never wore work clothes anymore, and even the people at Corbin’s Landing who did were hardly slaves of fashion. I fretted in front of the mirror, wondering if I’d lost track of how women were supposed to dress. But I’d gotten my hair cut the week before, and I felt appropriate, at least from the neck up, in my neat salt-and-pepper bob.

  Even after all that, I had a couple of hours to kill before meeting Dan and Ida Rader, so I checked out of the room and went for a drive through the town. It wasn’t a pretty place. There was a park of sorts along the shore of the bay, and along the edge of it a business district, such as it was, a utilitarian mix of one- and two-story stucco buildings housing car parts stores, a Grocery Outlet, repair shops, building supply stores, and so forth, all in some shade of beige or off-white and in need of repainting. Behind it were two-story apartment buildings, little offices housing bookkeepers, tax preparers, and insurance agents, and blocks of weatherworn houses, paint chipping on door and window frames. It all had an air of windswept near-poverty that reminded me of some towns in Alaska.