Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  Jeez, I thought. It would never have occurred to me that Carla would write to Andy about our meeting. His crazy family always seemed to be a step ahead of me. But for better or worse, it seemed Carla’s story was the truth. “Tell me what you saw,” I asked him.

  He looked around and leaned toward me, his forearms resting on the edge of the table and his hands clasped in front of him. In a quiet, almost monotonous voice, looking sometimes at my face and sometimes at the table in front of him, he began. “I heard noises and I woke up in the middle of the night. I looked over at Emory’s bed and he was gone. So after a while I got up and went out in the hallway and kind of hid and looked around the corner because I knew Mama’d get mad at me if she knew I wasn’t in bed. And—and—I could see my dad in his chair, and Mama and Emory standing by him.” He stopped and looked at me as though waiting for permission to go on.

  “What was happening?” I asked.

  “My dad wasn’t sayin’ nothin or moving, like he was passed out. Carla was just standing there in front of me in the hall, watching. And Mama said, ‘I think that’s done it.’ Then she and Em tried to lift Dad out of the chair, but I guess he was too heavy. So Mama saw that Carla was up and told her to come over there and help. And I ducked back into my room. But I heard them in the kitchen, and they went out the back door.”

  He hesitated again. “What happened after that?” I asked.

  “Em and Mama went away that night—Em told me later they went to get rid of the body—and Carla and I were by ourselves, and I asked her if Mama and Em killed Dad, and she got all upset and cried and said, ‘Andy, you weren’t supposed to know about it.’ And I cried, too. And she told me I shouldn’t ever tell anyone because Mama could go to prison for the rest of her life or maybe even death row.

  “And when Mama and Em got back, Em was all crazy and excited, and was going on about how they went way up in the mountains down these little mountain roads, and the car got stuck on this really lonely road and he didn’t think they were gonna be able to get out. And Mama shushed him, and Carla said, ‘It don’t matter, Mama; Andy saw you.’ And Mama told me they had to do it because my dad was a bad man and she was afraid he was going to kill us, but no one would understand, and they’d put her and Emory in prison, maybe forever. And later when she wasn’t around, Emory told me that if I ever told anyone they’d just say I was crazy and have me locked up in a hospital. So I never told nobody—except now you.”

  As he finished, he was watching me as if waiting to see how I would react.

  I was as speechless as I had been with Carla. “Oh, God, Andy,” I said, finally. “I’m so sorry.”

  “We didn’t want anyone to know about it,” Andy said. “We don’t want Mama to be hurt.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “But then Carla wrote me a letter and said she’d told you about Len—so’s I’d know you knew.”

  “I didn’t know Carla wrote to you.”

  “Yeah. She always sends me a birthday card with a money order, and sometimes a Christmas card. She used to write more letters. This was the first one in a long time. She told me she was in rehab.”

  “She is.”

  “How is she doing?” Andy asked. “Her letter said she’d been sick.”

  “Kind of thin,” I said, “but I think she’s feeling better.”

  “Good.” He noticed the burger in front of him and touched it. “Cold,” he said.

  “Think they’ll let me warm it up for you?”

  “It’s okay.” He picked it up and took a bite, and then another, until it was gone, then wiped his hands and mouth carefully with a paper towel. “That was good,” he said.

  We spent the rest of the visit talking about Len. “Mama hates for me to talk about him,” Andy said. “Carla used to say Mama never wanted to talk about anything bad.”

  Before Len went to prison, he remembered, “We were all afraid of him. He had a really bad temper. He’d hit Mama. Emory used to run at him and yell at him to stop, but he’d just hit him, too. I used to hide in the back of the closet, so’s he wouldn’t see me.”

  While Len was in prison, Andy recalled, things were quieter. “We lived in Spokane for a while, and Pullman. It was good not having to be afraid of my dad. And we used to visit Aunt Margaret and Uncle Ray and Carla, and Carla would come and visit in the summer for a couple weeks. Mama took us to see Len in prison a couple of times a year. We didn’t want to go, but Mama said he was our dad and he had a right. Emory just wouldn’t go after a while. He’d run away.”

  He didn’t know why Evie had let Len come back after he was paroled. “He just sat around the house drinking and calling everyone names. He called me stupid and Em a mama’s boy and Carla a slut. And then he and Mama got into that big fight about something he did to Carla, and we was all afraid he was going to kill us. That’s when they killed him.”

  Only then did it occur to me to ask, “Andy, did anyone ever tell you how your dad died?”

  He looked at me, puzzled. “I told you, they killed him.”

  “Sorry—I mean, did anyone say how they killed him?”

  He thought for a second or two. “No—I don’t think they did.”

  “Not even Emory?”

  “No. He didn’t talk about that part.”

  “So you don’t know how he died?”

  “No. I think maybe Emory hit him on the head or something.”

  I had come to talk to Andy about Dr. Moss and his appointment for the neuropsychological evaluation, and I still needed to deal with that. After Andy’s revelation, though, it seemed oddly anticlimactic.

  Andy had been seen before his trial by a psychologist hired by Dobson. The psychologist was a local hack who picked up extra money doing one-hour examinations of defendants whose lawyers had questioned their sanity at the time of the crime or their mental competence to stand trial, or who, like Dobson, knew that a lawyer representing a capital client should have him evaluated by a mental-health expert and wanted to be able to check that off their list of things to do.

  The examination had been a drive-by: an interview lasting about an hour and a couple of almost valueless personality tests. One of them was a written, multiple-choice test that required the subject to be able to read at an eighth-grade level. The psychologist didn’t check Andy’s reading ability and decided that the strange answers he gave to some of the test questions were an attempt to fake symptoms of mental illness. In the end, he told Dobson that there was nothing wrong with Andy.

  Dr. Moss’s tests, I told Andy, would be different. For one thing, they’d go on a lot longer: two six-hour sessions. For another, a lot of neuropsychological testing isn’t just pencil-and-paper stuff, but more like puzzles. Dr. Moss would interview Andy, more or less as Dr. Hollister had done. But he would also play sounds to find out how well Andy could listen, give him wooden puzzles with pieces to insert while blindfolded, connect-the-dots games to play, sequences of numbers to remember, and cards to read. I told him I’d be coming to the prison that morning with Dr. Moss and would stay long enough to introduce him.

  When I asked Andy if he had any questions, he told me about the football pool that some of the inmates had organized, entirely against the rules, using stamps for money. “I won it last week,” he said proudly. “Seventy bucks in stamps.”

  30

  Dr. Moss’s visit was scheduled for the week after Thanksgiving. While I waited for it, I began rough-drafting the parts of the habeas corpus petitions that I could put together without his conclusions. The weather didn’t leave much else to do: rain, on and off, obscured the view toward the ocean, and morning frosts withered the tomato plants in my garden.

  Thanksgiving came, and Gavin sent funny emails from Sydney about how strange it felt to remember it in a country where it wasn’t a holiday. He sent photos of their dinner; his girlfriend, Rita, had risen to the occasion by roasting a turkey with a bread and chestnut stuffing and baking a lemon pie, which they both preferred to pumpkin.
r />   Harriet, my garden mentor, invited me to join her and her partner Bill, serving dinners to the poor at a church in Santa Rosa. We spent the morning laying turkey-patterned paper tablecloths and centerpieces of artificial autumn leaves and flowers on long tables in the basement meeting room and the afternoon filling plates with slices of steamy turkey, scoops of mashed potatoes and yams, green bean casserole, and salad, and then handing out slices of sticky pumpkin pie with dollops of sweet whipped cream, to what seemed like a never-ending line of old people, homeless men, and poor families. We bantered with the people we were serving, or just smiled at the shy ones, and I found myself wondering if this would be me someday, old and lonely, trying to make a holiday of steam table food and a smile from a stranger.

  And I kept writing. Legal boilerplate for the introduction; claim after claim based on the ineffectiveness of Dobson’s performance as Andy’s lawyer; declarations for the signatures of teachers and old acquaintances whom Dave was visiting one more time.

  * * *

  On the day of Dr. Moss’s appointment with Andy, I hauled myself out of bed in the small hours after a night of fitful sleep, and left home in darkness that didn’t lift until I was nearly at the prison.

  Dr. Moss was waiting for me with his laptop and a box of cards and board puzzle tests, all of which were opened and peered at by a pair of guards at the gate. They looked at his credentials with suspicion before we were allowed to pass through.

  “Is it always like this?” he asked, as we walked down the long sidewalk toward the prison buildings.

  “Or worse,” I said.

  Inside, we waited as lawyers and investigators emerged, shaking off the rain, through the sally port from outside, and guards brought inmates one at a time, in their denims and handcuffs, through the metal door from the back. After about ten minutes, the guard in the glassed-in office motioned to us, and I went to the window. “Your client refused the visit,” he said.

  I went numb. “Did he say why?” I asked.

  “They didn’t say. I’ll call up and ask,” the guard said.

  “What’s happening?” Dr. Moss asked me.

  “Andy is refusing to come down to see us,” I answered. “I’m trying to find out what’s up.” Embarrassed, I nattered on, feeling more foolish with every word. “I don’t know what the problem is. He knows what this is for, and he seemed to be looking forward to it.”

  The guard waved at me to get my attention and called through the window, “He said he didn’t want to see the doctor.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said lamely, as the outer gate of the visiting area slid shut, and we started back to the parking lot under a wet and lowering sky. “A couple of weeks ago he was really enthusiastic about seeing you.”

  Dr. Moss seemed remarkably patient under the circumstances. “He could have gotten cold feet, I guess,” he said. “Does this happen often?”

  “Not that much,” I said. “Some guys are apprehensive about psych testing of any kind. But Andy wasn’t. I really don’t know what’s up with him. Can you make time to come back when we can get another appointment? Assuming I can get Andy back on track, of course.”

  “In another couple of months? I imagine so. It’s a shame this happened; if I remember, you said you were working to a deadline.”

  I nodded; the thought made me feel like crying on the spot.

  In the parking lot, I kept apologizing, effusively, compulsively, until Dr. Moss was practically in his car. Even the thought that he would be paid for his trip down here didn’t keep me from feeling as though I were personally responsible for failing to make it work.

  I dreaded calling Jim, so I called him right away on my cellphone, to get it over with. I needn’t have worried; he was in court, and I broke the news to Corey, who was sympathetic.

  “I’ll call Moss,” he said, “and find out when he’s available and reserve the psych interview room again. I sent you some more vital records,” he added. “Interesting stuff.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m going to call Evie tonight. She’ll know what’s going on with Andy if anyone does.”

  * * *

  My car bounced up the potholed road to my house, reminding me that the driveway needed grading and a new coat of gravel. “God damn it,” I said out loud. I felt defeated and in no mood to deal with anything else going wrong.

  In the house, I turned on my computer and wrote and printed a letter to Andy, asking, as kindly as I could, what the hell he thought he was doing. I signed it and stuck it into an envelope, on which I printed CONFIDENTIAL: ATTORNEY–CLIENT MAIL. I saw Corey’s email, but didn’t open the attachments; Andy’s case was not high on the list of things I wanted to think about. I made a pot of coffee and thought about making some bread, to take out some of my frustration on something that would actually benefit from being repeatedly punched.

  My second cup of coffee was three-quarters empty when I finally opened the files Corey had sent. There were some court records of cases involving some of the witnesses and jurors—a divorce, a civil suit over a car accident, nothing particularly useful. Then there were some death certificates. The first was for Robert Bowden, Jr., born February 23 1954, showing he had died of pneumonia in 1994, in the Iowa State Hospital in Davenport. Evie’s brother, I figured. The next was for Marilyn Bowden. It took me a second to recognize the name as Evie’s mother’s. The information on the certificate was sparse and to the point. She was born in Jefferson City, Missouri in September 1927 and had died on February 12 1965, in Corydon, Iowa, aged thirty-eight. At the time of her death she was married, her occupation “homemaker.” The cause of death was given as evulsion of the brain from a gunshot wound. The manner of death was listed as homicide. She was buried in the Millbrook Presbyterian Cemetery, Corydon, Iowa. The informant listed in the certificate was someone whose name I didn’t recognize.

  Behind Marilyn’s death certificate was that of Robert Bowden, aged forty. Robert had died on the same date of multiple gunshot wounds to the heart and lungs. His death was also described as a homicide. The same informant was listed on his death certificate as on Marilyn’s, and he was buried in the same cemetery.

  And behind Robert Bowden’s was another: Susan Bowden. Dead the same day of loss of blood from a gunshot wound that severed her carotid artery. Age: fifteen years.

  The rumors Jimmy had heard were true: Evie’s family had been murdered.

  31

  I called Dave.

  “Christ, what a morning!” I said, when he answered. “Andy refused Dr. Moss’s visit.”

  “Oh, shit. Do you know why?”

  “No. I’m going to call Evie this evening, to see if she knows anything about it.”

  Dave commiserated as I agonized over how we were going to meet our deadline for filing the petition or, worse, how we were going to make a case to get Andy off death row if he wouldn’t cooperate with our experts.

  “But wait,” I added. “It gets stranger.”

  “How?”

  “Remember what Jimmy and Charlene said about ‘some big secret,’ about the death of Evie’s family?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, the rumors were true.”

  “Really!”

  “Evie’s parents and her older sister were murdered—shot—all on the same date.”

  “Damn!” Dave said. Then silence on his end of the line.

  “Dave?”

  “Nothing—I’m thinking. Didn’t she have a brother?”

  “Yeah, she did. Corey got his death certificate, too. He died in a state mental hospital.”

  “We need to plan a trip to Iowa,” Dave said.

  “Speak for yourself,” I said. “I have to get Andy off whatever limb he’s put himself out on and get him to see Dr. Moss.”

  Dave snorted. “You just want the glamorous assignments.”

  “That’s me. Oh, to be in Quentin, now that April’s here.”

  “Christmas in Iowa—I got you beat.”

  I told
him I’d send him the death certificates, and let him go to look into plane reservations.

  * * *

  In the early evening, I called Evie. “I need your help,” I said. “Dr. Moss, the neuropsychologist, came to see him today, and he refused to meet with him.”

  She was silent for a moment, like a child confronted with some bad behavior, before answering, in a tight little voice, “Maybe he didn’t want to.”

  Oh, bullshit, I thought. “Evie, Andy wanted to see Dr. Moss. Something changed in the past two weeks. Have you seen him recently? Do you have any idea what’s on his mind?”

  Again, she hesitated before answering. “He doesn’t want to see any psychologists. He’s not crazy.”

  “Evie, did you talk to him about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell him not to see Dr. Moss?”

  She paused again, and when she spoke, her voice had an edge. “Nobody’s going to say my boy is wrong in the head. There’s nothing wrong with Andy.”

  “Evie, that isn’t what Dr. Moss’s evaluation was about.”

  “He’s not retarded, either, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Evie,” I went on, trying to keep my voice calm, “we’re trying to save his life.”

  “By lying about him, that’s what you’re doing. Like they did with Emory. He isn’t crazy, either. They just tried to pretend he was and the jury didn’t buy any of it.”

  “They didn’t give him the death penalty, did they?”

  “That didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I struggled to think of something I could say that would persuade her. “Evie, don’t you want to save Andy’s life?”

  “Not by letting them lie that he’s wrong in the head. You have other things you can do.”

  “This is important. This is probably the only thing that will save him.”

  Again, she was silent for a moment, before speaking. “There’s nothing wrong with my boy, and I told him so. Now, goodbye.”

  The line went dead.

  Jim called her the next evening, but he had no better luck than I did. I called again, too, and asked her to meet me the next time she was at San Quentin.