Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  * * *

  Almost before I knew it, it was the end of October, almost eight months into the year we had to file Andy’s petition. I didn’t feel we’d uncovered enough new mitigation evidence to persuade a federal judge that it might have made a difference to a jury trying to decide whether or not to give Andy the death penalty. Jim was never around long enough for a real conversation about where we were with the case. The one or two times I told him I was anxious about how things were going, he brushed my worries aside. “Look,” he said. “If something’s out there, we’ll find it. And Andy’s so clearly retarded anyway, I don’t think anything else is going to matter.”

  At home in Corbin’s Landing, I had more to worry about than Andy. The last rains had been six months ago, and the warm Santa Ana winds were gusting through the Douglas firs and redwoods and pulling the last bit of moisture out of grass and branch and leaf. The air seemed charged with static electricity. The news was so full of wildfires that it seemed half the state must be burning. I was living in a board and batten shack up a dirt road next to a redwood forest, and I wasn’t sleeping well.

  I was working in my office late one evening, pounding out a reply brief and periodically sniffing the air at my open window for smoke, when the phone rang. It was after nine, and I figured the call was probably a wrong number, so I let it go to voicemail. The voice on the line was a woman’s, flat and husky; my first reaction was rural meth user. But a couple of seconds into her message, I grabbed for the receiver.

  “This is Janet Moodie.”

  “Ms. Moodie?” the voice repeated. She started over, a little tentatively, with the message she had been leaving on the voicemail tape. “My name is Carla Burrell.”

  I was still too surprised to answer with anything but a slightly choked “Hello.”

  The timid voice continued, “Andy Hardy’s sister?”

  Still in shock, I said the first thing that came into my head. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear from you!”

  She didn’t seem to react to my gushing. “My dad gave me your number and said I should call you. You’re Andy’s lawyer?” In the timbre of her ruined voice, I thought I heard an ever-so-slight resemblance to Evie’s.

  “Yes,” was all I could think of to say.

  “What do you need from me?”

  I launched into my spiel about how we were trying to find evidence to get Andy a new trial and maybe save his life. She heard me out, and then said, “I didn’t testify at Andy’s trial. Or Emory’s, either.”

  I knew that, but it seemed she wanted to tell me about it, so I asked her why.

  “The investigator for Emory’s lawyer found me and asked me to come testify, but I told him I just couldn’t face it. They served me with a subpoena, but I never went to court. I didn’t hear from them after that. I guess they decided they didn’t want me after all.”

  “What about Andy’s trial?”

  “I didn’t even know about Andy’s trial until it was over.” She was silent for a couple of seconds. “I felt bad afterward. I should have tried to help him. But I had a lot going on in my life.”

  A lot going on in her life—probably shorthand for “I was using a lot of drugs.”

  “Things are different now. I’ve been making some changes, and thinking a lot. I’d like to help him—if I still can.”

  My mind was starting to work again after the shock of hearing from her. “I think you could be really helpful. We’re investigating Andy’s background, and we need as much information now as we can get.”

  “Like what he was like when he was a kid—that’s what Dad said.”

  “Yes, that. And what his life was like, growing up.”

  “You mean whether he was abused and all that?”

  “Among other things, yes,” I answered.

  “Like one of those trials on Court TV.”

  “Yes, like that,” I said, thanking the media, for once, for explaining mitigation to the masses.

  Carla was silent for a moment before going on. “I didn’t grow up with Mama and Len and the boys,” she said, a little hesitantly, “but I was there some of the time.” She stopped again, as though trying to decide what to say next. “I can tell you some things.”

  “Anything might help,” I said. It was my turn to pause before moving ahead. “I’d really like to talk with you in person. Is there someplace we can meet?”

  “I think so.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In Martinez. I’m in rehab. I got busted in Antioch. Judge told me it was this or prison.”

  “Can I visit you there?”

  “I’m allowed to have visitors on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, from two to four.”

  “I could drive over this Saturday. Would that be okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you mind if I bring my investigator along?”

  A second’s hesitation. “Yeah. I guess it would be okay.”

  I asked her for the address and phone number where she was staying, and she gave them to me. Afterward, she seemed to linger at the other end of the line, as if she wasn’t finished talking but didn’t know how to say the next thing. I didn’t want to let her go, either. What if she changed her mind before Saturday, and this was the only time I’d have to talk to her? I took a chance. “Is there something you want to talk about now?”

  “No—not now.” She hesitated again. Then, a little abruptly, she said, “I should go now.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to hit the right pitch of gratitude. “Thank you for calling; I’m really glad to hear from you. I’ll see you Saturday, then.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  And whatever ether it is that carried her voice, that single small thread of pulse and signal bridging the air between us, snapped into silence as the phone disconnected.

  27

  I left a voicemail for Dave the next morning, asking if he could come with me to interview Carla. When he called back, he was apologetic. He and his assistant Brad were both going to be in Los Angeles all weekend interviewing witnesses for another case. “I don’t suppose you’d want to put the interview off?” he said.

  I didn’t. I wouldn’t know where to find her if she left the halfway house, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to get cold feet.

  On Saturday I made the drive to Martinez. My car threw back plumes of pale dust as it rolled down the driveway, and the grass at the edges of the road looked brittle and bitten. The early morning air was chilly, and I saw, with relief, that the low sun was lighting a sky half full of rain clouds.

  The air around the city was yellow with smog and smelled like a stale stew of truck exhaust and sulfur fumes from the oil refineries whose low round tanks hunkered along the yellow-brown hillsides. The halfway house was near the old courthouse, in a part of town that had clearly seen better days. The building was a big square Mission Revival house from the 1920s, stucco with a terracotta tile roof and a fake Spanish balcony on the second floor. It was freshly painted in a pinkish beige and landscaped with shredded redwood bark and tough-looking shrubs.

  The front door was slightly open, and I could hear a vacuum cleaner running inside. I walked in and looked around for someone to speak to.

  The house had been a good one, in its day. The foyer was large and ended in a wide staircase to the second-story rooms; a hallway beside it led to the back of the house. The floor was hardwood parquet, recently refinished but already showing signs of wear. Double doorways framed in beveled glass panels led to a room on the left and another on the right. The doorframes were hung with strings of paper jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, and bats. An orange plastic pumpkin bowl full of wrapped candies sat on a small table next to the door.

  The room on the right was clearly an office. In it, I saw a woman at a desk, talking on the phone. The vacuum cleaner noise came from the left, and I followed it into a living room, on the same generous scale as the foyer. One end of the room had been furnished as a children’s play area, with
a couple of small painted tables and kid-sized chairs and some brightly colored toys. The rest of the room was occupied by a couple of well-used sofas, coffee tables, and armchairs.

  The young woman vacuuming saw me after a moment and turned off the machine.

  “Whoa—you surprised me,” she said. “Are you here to see someone? It’s a little early; visiting doesn’t start until two.” She was dressed in tight jeans and a pink spandex tank top that left a bulge of firm flesh and part of a tattoo showing just above the waist of her pants. Her hair, thick and dark brown with a couple of big blond streaks bleached into it, was pulled back into a ponytail, and her eyes were outlined with a sooty ring of dark eyeliner.

  “I’m here to see Carla Burrell,” I explained. “She’s expecting me.”

  “I think she’s upstairs. I’ll see if I can find her.” She turned to go, and then turned back. “You can sit in here; it’ll be okay.”

  She left, and I heard her footsteps on the stairs. A couple of minutes later, she was back. “Carla’ll be down in a minute.” She unplugged the vacuum cleaner, wound up its cord, and wheeled it out.

  Not long after she’d left, another woman came into the room. “Are you Mrs. Moodie?” she asked, a little hesitantly.

  I stood up. “Yes. Mrs. Burrell?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Please, call me Carla.”

  “Okay. And I’m Janet.”

  “Okay.”

  Carla looked like she’d lived hard. She was thin, almost spare, and the skin on her arms and the half circle of chest that showed above her scoop-necked T-shirt was freckled and brown. She was taller than me, maybe five foot five, and her long, straight hair, light brown mixed with gray, was held away from her face with a couple of barrettes. She had three or four stud earrings in each earlobe. Her eyes were like Evie’s, but paler, and the small features of her thin face recalled Jimmy’s.

  She looked around the room. “This isn’t a good place to talk. There’s visiting today. Always a bunch of aunties and kids. Mrs. Evans gave me a pass to go to the park by the church. Would you mind that?”

  I shook my head. “No, that seems fine.”

  “Good. Wait, and I’ll tell her I’m going.”

  She turned away quickly, and I watched as she walked into the office across the hall. A woman at a desk gave me a quick, appraising look and said something to Carla. Carla nodded, turned, and came back to meet me in the foyer. We walked out to the street, Carla leading the way.

  “The park is just down the street and across,” she said. She walked with a little swing to her hips that made me wonder if she had waited tables. Her jeans were loose around her thighs, and her shirt hung straight from her shoulders.

  There wasn’t much to the park: a play structure with a couple of slides, some swings, and a sand box, and next to them a small lawn with garden beds, graveled paths and metal mesh benches. It was bounded on one side by the wall of the church and surrounded on the others by a heavy wire fence with signs prohibiting pets and drugs and proclaiming that the park closed at 6 p.m.

  A half-dozen small children, one or two in parts of Hallowe’en costumes, were sitting on the swings or climbing on the structure, and a couple of women—mothers or grandmothers—sat nearby watching them. In the garden, an old Asian man and a younger woman who looked as if she might be his daughter were sitting on one of the benches. Carla walked ahead of me to another bench farther in, and we sat down. We were in the shade of the church wall, and the air, which had been sultry in the sunlight, felt cooler and smelled faintly of damp earth.

  “Mind if I smoke?” Carla said. I shook my head, and she pulled a pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter from a small black nylon shoulder bag and lit up. She took a drag on her cigarette, holding it in her thumb and forefinger, exhaled tendrils of grayish white smoke into the barely moving air, and shook her head as if shaking something out of her hair. She seemed to be, at the same time, tired and full of nervous movement. In the daylight, the skin on her face and hands looked thin and papery.

  “It’s okay here,” she said, looking around at the garden and the playground. “I get a little crazy in that house—all the noise and shit that goes on there.”

  “How is it going?” I asked. “The rehab.”

  “Okay.” She shrugged. “I’m really trying to clean up this time. I’m hoping to get a job or get on disability, move someplace away from where I was. You get too old for all that drinking and doping shit after a while—’scuse my language.”

  “No problem.”

  She began to speak again, looking at a place on the ground a couple of yards from her feet. “I’ve made a real mess of my life. I’m hoping to do better with what’s left of it. I don’t know how much that’s gonna be—I have hepatitis C and lupus. My teeth are all gone to hell. They sent me to a dentist here; he filled some, pulled some, but he says I’m really gonna need dentures. I have no idea how I’d pay for them.” She shook her head, with a brief throaty chuckle that turned into a cough, and then fell silent, looking out at nothing in particular and rocking slightly back and forth on the bench. She took another pull at her cigarette, looked at it in her hand, dropped it and ground it out under her shoe. Then she looked up at me, her face serious. “How is Andy?”

  How is your son, nephew, cousin, brother, on death row? It was one of those questions I never had a good answer for.

  “He’s holding up,” I said. It was a meaningless phrase, but it seemed to satisfy most people.

  “I always meant to visit him,” she said, “but I just couldn’t handle it, and now I’ve got this drug conviction, so I guess I can’t anyway. How is his case going?”

  I decided not to sugarcoat it for her. It might motivate her to be a little more helpful if she thought there wasn’t much standing between Andy and lethal injection.

  “Not as well as we’d like,” I said.

  She looked at me, worried. “What’s the matter?”

  I tried to read her expression, not sure what she was waiting to hear. “Trouble is, we’re not having much luck finding evidence that might have made a jury see him more sympathetically.”

  “Andy?” she said, surprised. “God, who wouldn’t feel sorry for him?” She pulled her pack of cigarettes out of her purse and lit another one, leaning back on the bench as she exhaled a plume of blue-white smoke. “You know, I never understood why Andy got the death penalty and not Emory. Emory—he’s the mean one. But not Andy. I never believed he killed them girls.”

  I debated how much to tell her. “The police seemed to think right from the beginning that it was Andy,” I said. “I think Emory told them a better story, and they believed it.”

  “Damn,” she said. “That’s Andy’s luck. No one ever cut him a break.” She looked up and paused for a moment as if deciding whether to say something. “I’ll bet it was Mama.”

  “What was?” I asked, nonplussed.

  “She and Emory, they were close. They had an understanding. I think she’d have told the police Andy did it, to save Emory.”

  This was new to me. Evie’s devotion to Andy had seemed almost obsessive; certainly, I’d never felt she loved him any less than his brother.

  “An understanding?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  Carla looked at me as though debating what to say next. “About Len,” she said. A second or two passed, and probably seeing my blank look, she said, with a short, humorless laugh, “You don’t know about our little secret, then.” Another pause, and she continued quietly, almost as if thinking aloud. “I guess you wouldn’t if Andy didn’t tell you.”

  “I don’t know that much about Len,” I said, baffled. “I know he went to prison. And that he lived with Evie and the boys for a while and then disappeared.” I didn’t mention what we’d heard about his molesting Carla; it seemed too early in the conversation to get into that. “We haven’t been able to find him. I was going to ask you if you knew anything about where he might be.”

  “Oh, he’s dead,” she said.<
br />
  “Really? Do you know for sure?” I asked.

  Carla looked away. She took another drag on her cigarette and dropped it on the gravel next to the first one, then pulled the pack from her nylon bag and tapped another cigarette from it. She seemed unnerved and shaky; it took her several tries to flick a small flame from her lighter, and when she looked at me again from behind a barely visible veil of smoke, her face looked tense. Oh, damn, I thought, she’s going to blow up and leave.

  Instead, she took a deep pull on her cigarette and turned away to exhale the smoke. When she turned back toward me, the strain in her face was gone, and she looked worn and sad. “So Andy really didn’t say anything, then.”

  I shook my head, hoping she would believe that I really didn’t know what she meant.

  “I guess he wouldn’t.” She looked around the park, and seeing no one in earshot, leaned toward me. “Mama and Emory killed him.”

  I felt my stomach jump into my chest, as though I’d just stepped off a cliff. In the next second I decided she really hadn’t meant it quite that way, that she was exaggerating and that there had been some accident that the family had, for some reason, not wanted to talk about.

  “Killed him?” I asked. “What happened?”

  She sat straight again, took another puff of her cigarette, and turned aside to exhale the smoke. When she turned back, her eyes seemed a little red, whether from smoke or held-back tears I couldn’t tell. “I guess Andy didn’t tell you because he’s afraid for Mama. I guess we all are. But—well, I’ve said it now. I don’t know, maybe it’ll help Andy in some way for you to know. He was there when they did it—we both were.” She spoke the words quietly, looking past my shoulder into some middle distance of memory.

  For a moment I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just nodded. The sounds around us—the little children’s voices and the squeaking of the swings on the playground, the hum and rush of cars on the street—seemed far away and unreal. I felt a faint cool breeze and noticed for the first time that the sky was mottled with darker gray clouds. “What happened?” I asked again.