“What do you remember about your father?” Dave asked.
“That he was a sonofabitch.” Emory looked hard at Dave, and something like a shiver hunched his shoulders under his loose shirt. “But you know, he was in prison most of the time. And he run out on us after he got out. Mama probably told you that.”
“What was he like? Did he drink? Do drugs?”
“He drank, mostly. Did meth, too, after he got out of prison—that’s what Mama and Carla said.”
“Did he hit you?”
“Yeah, when we were little. After he got out of prison, we were too big and fast for him. Mostly he just sat around all day and drank.”
“What about your mom? Did he hit her?”
“Yeah.”
“How bad?”
He shifted in his chair and looked down at his hands and then at the table in front of him. I could see his jaw tighten. “Look, I hated him, okay?” he said in a low voice. “He was always pissed off about something. If we got too close, we’d get backhanded or kicked—like a couple of dogs. He’d get into it with Mama—he’d come home drunk in the middle of the night, and if she said anything he’d start yelling and throwing her around. Just stupid stuff.”
“Why did your mom stay with him?”
“I don’t know—maybe she was afraid to leave him. We were all afraid of him. He was a pretty big guy, and real strong, at least when he was younger. I thought she divorced him after they put him in prison. But for some reason, when he got out, he was just there. Showed up one day and then just sat around the living room, drinking and ordering us all around.”
“Did he work?”
“Before prison he worked in construction, building houses. And I think he worked as a bouncer in a bar sometimes, too. That’s where he killed a guy—in some cowboy bar.”
“What about after he got out? Did he work then?”
“Not if he could help it. I think he did odd jobs sometimes, maybe delivered newspapers now and then, stuff like that. Mostly he just drank his cheap bourbon and coke and felt sorry for himself.”
“But then he left.”
“Yeah.”
“Any idea where he went?”
“No, none at all.”
“Have you ever heard from him?”
“Not a word.”
“How did you feel about that?”
Emory looked sharply at Dave. “About what?”
“About your father leaving you like that, and never getting back in touch.”
Emory’s hands clenched into fists on the table in front of him, and I could see his right knee shaking up and down in a nervous rhythm. He opened his mouth as if to say something, stopped, and then started again. “How was I supposed to feel?” he asked angrily. “How—” He backed his chair away from the table. “This is bullshit. I don’t know why you’re asking me this stuff. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to go back to my house.” He stood up and pressed the red button near the light switch.
I sat, frozen and unnerved. Dave stood up.
Emory turned back around, and something in our expressions must have impressed him, because he calmed down—not completely, but enough that he looked a little embarrassed about his reaction. “Look, this isn’t a good time,” he said, shaking his head. “I just need to go back.”
“It’s okay, man,” Dave said. “We can talk another time if you’d like.”
“Yeah—yeah. Whatever.”
Emory sat down sideways in his chair, not looking at us, and we waited in awkward silence until, with a distant clink of keys, the guard finally showed up at the door. “Thanks for the chips and soda,” Emory said flatly, with a quick look back at us as he walked out of the room.
Dave and I cleaned up the table, picked up our papers, and headed for the guard’s booth near the exit.
“Sorry,” Dave said.
“What for?” I asked. “Who could have known he’d go off like that?”
We were both quiet on the bus and while we signed out and returned our laminated badges to the guard in the reception area. Outside, as we walked to our cars, the air felt like a hot washcloth. Dave said, “Let’s get lunch. I saw a Mexican place on the way in that looked okay.”
* * *
Over plates of soft tacos and glasses of iced tea, we talked about the visit and gradually began feeling a little better about it. Emory had signed releases and given us some helpful information and had, at the end, at least left the door open for us to come back. Neither Dave nor I felt very chatty, though. I was feeling the way I often do at the end of a witness interview: as though a truckload of words, gestures, facial expressions and body movements had just been dumped in a heap into my brain. I needed time to sift through what I remembered and to try to figure out how any of it might connect to anything else I knew about the case.
“Cheer up, kid,” Dave said, reaching across to give my forearm a squeeze. Dave’s hand was warm and tanned, with thick fingernails and a sprinkling of rough black and gray hairs on its back—reassuringly male, I thought, a little surprised at how comforting it felt.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m okay—just kind of tired.”
He squeezed my arm again and pulled his hand back. “Good food,” he said, picking up a forkful of rice and black beans.
We made some small talk about news and politics—things that were seeming more abstract to me, the longer I lived in Corbin’s Landing. And Dave commented that I looked calmer than I had when I lived in Berkeley. “I feel better,” I agreed.
“You should try cycling,” he said. “Works the mental stress right out of you. Are you going to eat that last taco?”
“No,” I said, pushing my plate toward him. “Maybe I could if I took up biking.” I watched wistfully as he ate it in three or four bites.
When I reached home that night, thoroughly road-weary, the smack of cold sea fog on my face was like heaven. Charlie was beside himself with joy, bouncing and barking as he rushed out the gate of Ed’s yard. “Did you miss me?” I cooed in my dumbest “good-dog” voice, and he ran back and forth between me and the car until I opened it and hefted him into the back. I marveled again at the goodness of dogs; if my significant other was always running off and leaving me with neighbors for days at a time, I’d be barking a much different tune.
13
Somehow Jim found the time, between court appearances, to call and tell me he’d retained Nancy Hollister, the psychologist he had mentioned at our first meeting, to prepare a psychosocial history on Andy and his family. He suggested that since she lived in Marin County, “up your way,” I should meet with her to brief her about the case. I didn’t bother to tell him it was a good three-hour drive from my place.
After a round or two of phone tag, Dr. Hollister and I agreed to meet at her home in the early afternoon the following Wednesday. To make the trip worthwhile, I set up a visit at San Quentin that morning with Andy.
Andy seemed mildly pleased when I told him about the new person who would be working on his case, but what he really wanted to talk about was a new prison program that let inmates special-order pizza from Costco every few months. “It’s next week. Mama put money on my books to buy one. I ordered Italian sausage and pepperoni. Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve had pizza.” He sighed in happy anticipation.
After a lunch of vending-machine burritos and a Diet Pepsi, I left Andy to his pizza dreams and set out to find Nancy Hollister’s house in a woodsy neighborhood of older houses and winding streets that looked as if it was being slowly absorbed into the oak forest around it. The roads twisted and turned back on themselves among gnarled trunks and grasping branches until I began to wonder whether I should have brought a ball of twine to mark my path. Even with my GPS tracker, I made a couple of wrong turns before finding the house, almost invisible behind an overgrown hedge.
In the hills, away from the bay, the afternoon was warm. Dr. Hollister, slender and elegantly casual in a long linen dress, offered me iced tea and put a plate of mad
eleines and a bowl of hulled strawberries on the dining-room table. The room was quiet and uncluttered, and French doors looked out onto a wide deck shaded by an oak tree, and a lawn fringed with beds of flowers, rosebushes, and flowering vines.
“This is lovely,” I said, lamely.
“Thank you,” she answered. “I like working here. I only go to my office to see patients these days.”
I handed her the binders of case materials I’d made, and she thanked me. “I know Corey likes the high-tech stuff,” she said, a little apologetically, “but I’m still a paper person. I like to mark things up and put sticky notes on them.”
When I called her “Dr. Hollister,” she said, “Please, call me Nancy.” We sat at the table and drank our iced tea and ate strawberries and a madeleine apiece. She said Jim had talked with her and given her some basic information about the case. I filled that in with more detail and told her what Dave and I had learned from our interviews with Andy, Emory, and Evie.
“That’s about as far as we’ve gotten at this point,” I said, “and Jim—well, I guess he’s been too busy to really give us much in the way of direction.”
Nancy nodded. “I know Jim. I’ve been working with him on another case, and I almost didn’t take this one because of it. It hasn’t always been a comfortable working relationship; it’s so hard to get him to engage. He’s a nice guy, though, and a good courtroom lawyer, I’m told.”
“Good to hear that,” I said.
“I think he’s overextended,” she went on. “Just one of those people who can’t say no to a case. One of the things he said to talk me into taking this one was that this time he had second counsel who’d be available to work with me. He was very complimentary about you.”
She smiled, I thought hopefully, and I tried not to look as uncomfortable as I felt. I could use another madeleine, I thought, and then decided it would just make me feel worse.
We talked a little more about the case and agreed to meet again in a couple of weeks, after Nancy had had a chance to digest the material I’d given her and to present Jim and me (or, as it was starting to seem, me) with some observations and impressions about Andy’s psychological makeup and possible risk factors and stressors in his background. As we said our goodbyes at her front door, I silently damned Jim and kicked myself for being so easily manipulated.
* * *
A week later, Corey called me, as I was reading transcripts from a murder appeal I’d agreed to take on before taking Andy’s case. “How are you?” he asked.
“So-so,” I said.
“Just that? Well, if it will make you feel better, I have actual progress to report. Jim asked me to call you. He’s been talking with the district attorney in Shasta City about discovery. The DA has scanned a lot of files, and Jim wants to go up there next week to meet him and look at the trial exhibits and drive out to the ranch where the crimes happened while he’s there. He wants to know if you can go next Tuesday or Wednesday.”
I looked at my calendar; both days were blank. “Either day is fine,” I said.
“Great. I’ll let him know. I think he wants Dave Rothstein, too, so I’ll have to call him and get back to you. Oh, and we got Mr. Hardy’s high-school transcript and the court file of his father’s manslaughter case.”
“Great!” I said.
“All in a day’s work,” Corey said modestly. “Mr. Hardy is, shall we say, not a candidate for the academic decathlon.”
“Really! I can’t say I’m surprised after what Emory said about him.”
“I guess. I’ll scan and email them.” He rang off and called me again an hour later to confirm that Dave was available and that the meeting was set for the following Tuesday.
I called Ed and left him a voicemail about dog-sitting again. “I’m going to owe you more dinners than I will ever be able to afford,” I said. “You’ve got to get another dog, so I can start paying you in kind.”
14
I’d been to Shasta City before, but not in a long while. The last time was to talk to the family and friends of Clay Van Arsdale, a Vietnam veteran who’d killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend in a meth-fueled rage. Neither a psychologist’s testimony that Clay was suffering from severe PTSD nor wrenching descriptions from army buddies about the bloody jungle warfare he’d lived through managed to move a Pomo County jury to give him life without parole, and it didn’t seem to matter much to the people he’d grown up with, either.
One of Clay’s uncles had informed me, from the porch of his bungalow, that Vietnam PTSD was just a bunch of bull. “Boy was just weak,” he said, “wanted to live that life, do drugs, and now he’s trying to make excuses for what he did.” His wife, a mousy woman with frizz-permed hair and an American Gothic face, had stood behind him and added, “It just killed his poor mother, what he did.”
“Go back inside, Etta,” her husband had ordered without turning to look at her, and she had disappeared in silence from the doorway.
That was pretty much how everyone we talked to had been, including the jurors. Pomo County was a place where the myth of the frontier endured, where men hunted and women home-schooled, where messing up your life was your own damned fault, and where the current district attorney had sought the death penalty in eleven cases in the past eight years and had gotten it in all eleven. Given this background, I was surprised that Jim had gotten any cooperation from the district attorney’s office. But they had agreed to give him discovery of their files of both Andy and Emory’s cases.
Shasta City was nearly a day’s drive from my place, so I drove up there the afternoon before. Corey had reserved rooms for all of us at the same motel, and we met for breakfast the next morning at a Denny’s, to plan the day’s activities. We had an appointment in the morning to look at the exhibits from the trial and another after lunch with the deputy district attorney. While Jim and I were at the DA’s office, Dave would stop at the jail, police station, and medical examiner’s office in a search for records and reports. Time permitting, we would also drive out to the old ranch where the murders had happened.
The Pomo County courthouse was a handsome old stone building in what had once been Shasta City’s business district, before it had been abandoned for the outlying rings of newer suburbs and shopping malls. At some point the courthouse had been expanded with an ugly institutional annex, and several blocks around it had been turned into a civic center of four-square buildings of gray concrete, some topped with bristling fields of antennae, and all landscaped with durable, rubbery hedges, spongy green lawns, and spindly shade trees.
Around the civic center, rehabbed Victorian buildings with antiques stores and restaurants on their retail floors and law offices upstairs shared city blocks with mid-twentieth-century cinderblock bunkers housing bail bondsmen, taquerias, thrift stores, and storefront churches.
The sun was already hot on our shoulders and pulling humid, earthy air from the overwatered lawns as we walked from the visitors’ parking lot to the courthouse. At the main door, a sheriff’s deputy at the metal detector looked out at us and asked, “Attorneys?” When we nodded, he motioned us into a separate lane, letting us bypass the line of tattooed bikers, massive women in flip-flops and spandex tank tops, and sallow-faced tweakers filing through the general public metal detector.
Mr. Ferris, the clerk in charge of storing trial exhibits, had his own office on a side hallway in the old part of the courthouse, behind a varnished oak door with a frosted glass panel. He had pulled the boxes of exhibits from Andy’s trial, seven of them, and he pointed to them where they stood in two stacks pushed against one wall of the L-shaped office he shared with another clerk, a spare desk, and a copy machine. Apparently the county’s budget didn’t allow for enough storage boxes; these were a random collection of cheap banker’s boxes and copy-paper boxes. After almost fifteen years, they looked frayed and softened.
Mr. Ferris greeted Jim, Dave and me like the curator of an obscure and neglected museum, showing the collections he had painstakingl
y stored for those rare occasions when someone actually wanted to see them. He and his deputy, a plump young woman who had decorated the wall beside her desk with a collage of snapshots of children and cats, occasionally looked over with mild curiosity at the objects we pulled from the crumbling boxes: folded paper diagrams, 8 by 10 enlargements of crime-scene photos, fingerprint cards, evidence envelopes, papers, and a few seemingly random objects in frayed brown paper bags—a black fake leather purse with rusting chrome grommets; a woman’s red high-heeled sandal, its straps brittle with age; a thin wallet of shiny blue plastic.
We went through one box at a time, setting it on the empty desk, unfolding drawings on butcher paper, peering at clear plastic bags and vials, and handing each other photos. Dave photographed exhibits with his phone, and Jim and I checked each one off against the list of trial exhibits from the court file. There were two numbers on most of them, one from Andy’s trial and another from Emory’s. The manila envelopes containing photographs and small objects were fragile and beginning to tear along the seams, and everything smelled a little musty. After about an hour, my fingers were gray with old dust, and I felt as if a thin coating of it was lining my throat and sinuses and stiffening my hair.
Some of the exhibits made my heart sink: a portrait photo of a smiling round-faced, dark-haired girl in a V-neck sweater, the sort of picture that high-school yearbook photographers take, but fading with age and dog-eared on its edges; a green plastic barrette; a Disneyland keychain; a worn and faded color snapshot of a smiling baby girl. I remembered from the transcript of Andy’s trial that one of the victims, Brandy Ontiveros, had a daughter and that Brandy’s grandmother had brought a photo with her to the trial. The toddler in the picture would be about seventeen by now. I wondered what her life had been like and whether she looked like the girl in the yearbook photo.
Given the nature of the crimes, the crime-scene and autopsy photos were pretty bland: the judges in both trials had sustained defense objections against showing the jurors full views of the women’s decomposing bodies in the ground or on the autopsy table. There were photos showing the ranch where the bodies were found and the graves themselves, and lab photos showing the victims’ clothing and other things—a bracelet, an artificial fingernail—recovered from around the bodies. The pathologist hadn’t found any obvious injuries to either of the victims; Andy and Emory’s confessions were the only evidence of how the women had died.
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