I turned pages, jotting down the names of teachers as I found them. I found both Andy and Emory in the freshman class photo for 1992 and the sophomore class of 1993, but not in any club or team pictures. In 1994, Emory was a junior, but Andy was still in the sophomore picture. Emory’s individual photo appeared in the graduating class of 1995, but Andy’s wasn’t there. That fit with what we had in his school records, that Andy had dropped out of high school in what amounted to his second sophomore year.
I made copies of several pages, brought the book back, and headed over to the local history section. There, I leafed through a different set of annuals, city directories with glazed paper covers and cheap, fibrous pages, looking for neighbors of Evie Hardy twenty-five years ago, people we might interview, if we could find them again, about what they remembered of Evie and the boys.
I took more notes and made more photocopies; and when I was finished, I joined Dave, who was patiently working the finicky dials of the microfilm copier. When he had copied the last of the newspaper articles he’d found about the case, he stood up slowly, blinked his eyes, shrugged and rolled his head back and forth a couple of times to loosen his neck muscles.
“Nothing like obsolete technology,” he said. “I could use some dinner.”
* * *
We ate at a place downtown that served barbecue on wooden trestle tables with paper placemats. Three or four big-screen TVs showed baseball games and car races, and the restaurant was crowded with families looking wilted from the heat of the day.
After we paid the check, Dave said, “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”
We went back to the restaurant where Jim had taken us to lunch, but this time we sat at a table in the bar. Dave had a draft ale, and I had a mojito from the bar’s menu of “specialty cocktails.” Smooth jazz from a speaker system pervaded the air like a faint scent. Beyond the low partition between the bar and the restaurant, I could hear the murmured conversations of a few late diners and the occasional clink of glassware.
“Jim seemed pretty engaged,” I said.
“Yeah, this appeared to keep his attention,” Dave said. “But I’m going to have to come back here or send Brad.”
“Lots of witnesses here,” I said.
Dave was looking at my mojito with some amusement. I gave him a “so what” look in return, and he said, “Pretty festive drink there.”
“Yeah, well. Makes Shasta City seem almost fun.”
“You don’t like this place, do you?”
“No, it makes my spine creep.”
“As bad as the Central Valley or San Bernardino?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Worse, in some ways. More isolated, or something. Lots of cowboys, crazy right-wing politics, meth labs in the hills.”
“Well that’s true in every rural area now. That or marijuana grows run by drug cartels.”
“Yeah.” I decided to change the subject. “So do you have any plans this summer?”
“Bike rides. Couple of bluegrass and old-time music festivals. Maybe a backpacking trip in the Sierras. And you?”
“Nothing much. I’ve become a real stick-in-the-mud. Probably a trip to Alaska in the fall to see my sisters.”
“And what about Australia? That’s where Gavin is, right?”
“Oh, God, I just can’t seem to get up the courage to make that flight. Damn—Gavin will probably be back living in the States again before I make up my mind to go.”
“Well that won’t be good. You really should go.”
The mojito was warming and loosening my tired brain, filling me with some urge to empty out its emotional baggage in a cobwebby heap on the table. “I’m still pretty close to the edge sometimes,” I said. “I need a lot of quiet and routine.”
“So you took another death case.”
“God knows why,” I said, raising my eyes in the general direction of where God was supposed to be.
“I know the feeling,” Dave said. “It’s some sort of weird addiction. I can’t stay away from it. None of us can.”
It was true. Most of the capital attorneys I knew—friends of Terry’s, friends of mine in private practice—had sworn at one time or another they would never take another capital case, only to be drawn in again for reasons none of us could fathom.
“What’s the pull?” I asked.
“The big money, obviously,” Dave said, drily. “And you get to meet celebrities. Famous mass murderers, serial killers.”
“And travel to exotic places,” I added, with an all-encompassing wave that almost toppled my drink.
We went on for a while, getting sillier, until I’d finished my mojito. “It’s getting late,” I said, feeling suddenly tired. “I think they’d like to close the restaurant and get us out of here.”
We got up. I felt a little lightheaded, and I was glad Dave was driving.
Back at the motel, as we said goodbye and moved apart to our rooms, it occurred to me that twenty-five or thirty years ago we might have ended up in bed together. So much was different now. The urge, the need wasn’t there; it was better—clearer, at least—just being good friends. In a way it was a relief, but I also felt an ache of regret for the time when I was young, attractive, and impulsive instead of old, heavy, and cautious.
The bed in my room felt cold. I turned down the air conditioning, put on a pair of socks to warm my feet, and draped my light jacket over my shoulders above my nightshirt. I read half a Nero Wolfe novel before I fell asleep and dreamed of wandering lost in an endless oak forest, trying to find my house.
17
After the Shasta City trip, Jim seemed to lose interest again in Andy’s case. I heard nothing from him as I read through the new discovery. There were a lot of police and laboratory reports, but they didn’t add much to what I already knew.
For all its apparent magnitude—three separate sets of crimes, two bodies—the case really wasn’t that complex. The forensic evidence was unusual, because the bodies had been in the ground so long. But it had all been presented at trial. The identities of the two victims were established by dental records, comparing their DNA to that of living relatives, and the identification of other physical evidence: Brandy Ontiveros’s purse, with her driver’s license and the photo of her baby, found in the barn; the red sandal, like the pair which another hooker recalled Lisa Greenman wearing around the time she was last seen in Shasta City. The condition of the remains was consistent with the time when each of the victims had last been seen alive.
The additional police reports contained more about the investigation into their disappearance. Both women were drug addicts and prostitutes, and no one on the street, it seemed, paid much attention to where they went. Brandy Ontiveros’s real first name was Socorro. Her parents had died when she was a child, and she had been raised by her grandmother, who was also taking care of the baby Brandy had given birth to when she was sixteen. Her grandmother had gone to the police after Brandy failed to show up for a couple of months to visit her baby girl. She spoke little English, and from the police report, it seemed that she had assumed Brandy had died of something drug-related and was just trying to find out if she was right.
Lisa Greenman had simply stopped being seen on the streets of Shasta City, and no one, not even her family, missed her. Her father lived in Indiana and hadn’t had any contact with her for five or six years. Her mother, who lived in a trailer park in Reno, didn’t see her much, either. Lisa wasn’t particularly welcome because she and a boyfriend had stolen her mother’s TV and some of her jewelry and sold them to buy drugs. Lisa’s mother had testified at the two trials about her grief over her daughter’s murder, but even there she had admitted that she hadn’t heard from Lisa for over a year before the police called her. “She was going to come see me for my birthday, but she didn’t show up. She called a couple of days later, with some excuse. I don’t even remember what it was.” Even on the page, her words sighed hollowly with echoes of lost patience and resigned irritation—the too-typical w
ords of a mother of a down-and-out drug addict, exhausted by her daughter’s problems and her own. She had said almost the same thing to the policeman who called her; the report said nothing about her reaction to hearing that her daughter had been murdered.
People on the street had remembered the women only vaguely through the drugged haze of their own lives. They were just two more of the dozens of girls who claimed small territories on the sidewalks in front of the bars and liquor stores around First and Elm, Shasta City’s red-light district, waiting to be picked up by the men who cruised slowly down the yellow-lit street, and having sex in the back of parking lots in their customers’ cars. When they stopped showing up, no one paid much attention. If people thought about it at all, they assumed the girls were in jail or had left town.
Weeks went by, and I was starting to feel pressured by how slowly the investigation was going. It was nearly August; the year we had to file the habeas petition was almost half gone. Dave had made another trip to Shasta City, where he’d looked for court records on Evie, the judge, the district attorney who’d tried the case, and the jurors, and talked to more of Andy’s teachers and the few former neighbors who could still be found.
For several years, before they moved to the ranch, Evie and the boys had lived in a bungalow on a leafy street in the older part of town, not far from the old courthouse. Before driving home from Shasta City, I’d driven out to take a look at it. The neighborhood had been—was still—working class, a grid of flat streets and back alleys, big shady trees, and rows of little houses set back from the street behind grassy front lawns. It had grown rundown as the people who owned the little houses grew old and died, and younger people preferred bigger homes in new subdivisions or Craftsman houses in gentrifying neighborhoods with more character. Many of the little houses were rentals now, cheaply painted and minimally landscaped, their lawns dried out and mottled with patches of bare ground and a shrub or two straggling next to the house.
On his other trips to Shasta City that summer, Dave had found that Evie’s landlord was dead, and the house had been sold long ago. Dave had interviewed the former landlord’s son, who lived in one of the new subdivisions outside Shasta City, but he had no recollection of the tenants twenty-five years ago, except that his father had once said one of them had turned out to be some sort of serial killer. Most of Evie’s neighbors, themselves renters, had died or moved away long since. The ones Dave could locate remembered Evie, but not too well. “Nice lady,” one couple said; “a little strange,” said another woman, but couldn’t articulate why she thought so. The boys didn’t leave much of an impression on them, either. “She kept them on a pretty tight leash,” one former neighbor said. “My boys didn’t like them much,” another recalled. She remembered that “they moved away after some trouble with the younger one, I think.”
Several of the teachers were away on vacation, but the two Dave found at home both remembered Andy, or rather, Evie. “He was failing everything,” one of his English teachers said. “We offered to test him for special ed, but she wouldn’t even consider it.” The school psychologist, retired now, said the same thing, and added, “I never saw a woman in such denial. You’d try to tell her he was intellectually disabled, and she just wouldn’t go there. I can still remember her telling me, ‘There is nothing wrong with Andy. He just needs someone to pay more attention to him.’ Pity the law in this state doesn’t allow us to do IQ testing on kids. I’m sure he’d have scored pretty low. But then Mrs. Hardy would probably have found some reason not to believe it.”
The psychologist was, in his words, “astounded” about the murders. “He’s just about the last kid I’d think would do such a thing. His brother was a bit of a troublemaker, but Andy—no. He was slow, but not like that.” None of which left us with much that we didn’t already know.
Learning problems in a child can be the result of brain damage. The birth complication Evie had described, when Andy had been born with the umbilical cord around his neck, could have accounted for Andy’s difficulties. Or they could have resulted from heredity, some toxin or virus Evie was exposed to when she was pregnant, or maybe a beating by Len. Brain damage can cause a lot of bad behavior, from lousy choices to explosive rages to hallucinations and full-on psychosis. I’d been calling Jim for weeks about retaining a neuropsychologist to test Andy’s brain function. I even got a few recommendations from Dr. Nancy Hollister and a colleague or two from my past. But Jim was always somewhere else and didn’t return my calls and emails. “He’s in a big trial,” Corey told me in his wry, so-here-we-are-again voice. “He’s just not thinking about anything else right now.”
Without Jim’s go-ahead, I couldn’t commit to anything that required spending serious money, like retaining an expert; and Dave and I were running out of things we could do ourselves. Then the Washington school records came.
I read through them, jumped up with a whoop, ran to my phone, and called Dave’s cell, and was a little deflated to get his voicemail. Then it occurred to me to call Corey and ask him whether Jim knew about the IQ score. “I don’t think he’s looked at the records yet,” Corey said. “What was it?”
“Sixty-five,” I said. “In fourth grade. Mentally retarded.”
“Doesn’t that mean they can’t execute him?”
“Hopefully,” I said. I was backtracking, after my initial enthusiasm, considering the reality of litigating mental retardation in a death-penalty case. The Supreme Court has said it’s unconstitutional to execute a mentally retarded defendant—that it’s inhumane to hold them as responsible for their crimes as fully functioning adults. But instead of emptying death row of the mentally retarded, the decision created an angry and determined backlash from prosecutors who just couldn’t stand the idea that a murderer might escape lethal injection—might, God forbid, merely spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison—just because the Supreme Court has said he was too stupid. Prosecutors, abetted by psychologists with old-fashioned beliefs in the workings of the criminal mind, fight to convince the courts that the defendant is more capable than his IQ scores reflect, or just faking retardation. And all too often, standing before a judge looking ahead to the next election, they’ll win.
When Dave called back an hour later, I was out in my garden picking some lettuce and cherry tomatoes for a salad. I dropped my scissors and dove for the cordless phone I’d left on the deck.
“So, what’s up?” he asked. “Your message sounded like it was something pretty big.”
“It is. We got some of Andy’s grade-school transcripts. His IQ in fourth grade was sixty-five.”
“No way—that’s great!” He gave a short laugh. “What a profession we’re in. Where else would hearing that your client is retarded be good news?”
Now that I had Dave’s ear to bend, I couldn’t help burbling on about Andy’s grade-school records. “He was kept back—we already knew that. But there are also achievement tests that show him reading and doing math at second-grade level in the sixth grade. He was thirteen—thirteen—at that point. Dobson never got these records. I’ll bet he never knew.”
Dave was suitably impressed. “Fits with what the teacher and the school psychologist told us, doesn’t it? And his mother never said anything to you about it?”
“Not a word.”
“I’m not surprised,” Dave said. “I bet she was mighty pissed about it. Well, what do we do now?”
“I called Corey again and told him to give Jim the news. Maybe this will get him to call me back.”
“Good luck. You know, this might be a good excuse to sit down with Jim and talk to him about what he’s supposed to be doing on the case. I’m with you; I’d like to hear something when I call his office besides a secretary telling me he’s in trial.”
I felt a sick little shiver of anxiety. I hate confrontations; it’s one of the reasons I live in a cabin in the redwoods writing appeals. But when we’d hung up, I rode the wavelet of resolution raised by Dave’s support and dialed Ji
m’s number again. I left a message with his secretary; we needed a strategy meeting about the IQ score, I said, and soon.
Jim’s secretary called the next morning. His trial had ended in a hung jury; he could fly up to San Francisco the following week and meet us Friday at the federal public defender’s office there. I was surprised that he’d gotten back to me so soon, and I felt a little silly for having asked.
18
I made the long drive into San Francisco on Thursday. Life in the country was putting a lot of wear on my poor car—but not, fortunately, on my friendship with Ed. He was as willing as ever to keep Charlie for a couple of days, even though he had his hands pretty full with a new dog. It was some sort of yellow-lab mix puppy, already half-grown, all bounding energy and big feet waiting for his body to grow into them. Ed had named him Pogo.
Pogo, seeing Charlie for the first time, had given a bark and skidded across Ed’s kitchen floor. Charlie had looked at Pogo, planted his feet, and answered with a long, low growl that crescendoed into a single sharp bark that stopped the puppy two feet from him, where poor Pogo crouched, caught between curiosity and fear and whimpering hopefully.
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