Janet Moodie--Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  A dog barked inside when we rang the doorbell, but I didn’t hear any sounds suggesting anyone else was home. It was another wasted detour.

  * * *

  In my room, after a late dinner of Chinese fast food, I felt troubled by what we’d seen that day. Witness interviews, and particularly those that bring up the painful past for the person I’m talking to, leave me disconcerted and sad. It’s as though the people I meet have made me some sort of offering of their pain, trusted me with it and with their confidences; and that trust is something I need to somehow take care of, but I don’t know how. I can’t help them or make anything better for them; I’m just a passer-by who comes into their lives and shares their memories for an hour or two, and then leaves them alone again with the past wounds I’ve reopened. No matter how often I do it, it leaves me with a slightly bad conscience; and I don’t sleep well afterward.

  I read until late that night, to keep my thoughts at bay.

  15

  Natasha emailed me and Carey the results of the rest of the trip. “Brittany’s friend didn’t remember anything. Aaron was a washout, soulless evangelical, lectured me on why we need the death penalty, no interest in helping Sunny.” She ended with an angry-face emoji.

  As for me, my life settled again into routine: work on my other cases, exercise classes, my struggling garden, walks with Charlie, the occasional shopping trip to Gualala or Santa Rosa, or happy-hour ale at Vlad’s, and the obligatory monthly Skype call from Gavin, my expat son, and his wife Rita, in Melbourne. The big event that summer was the addition of data reception to our little enclave, which meant that I could finally receive text messages from Carey and Natasha. Ed and Harriet took a little while to get on board with it, but within a couple of weeks Ed’s nightly checks on my welfare had evolved from ten-second phone calls to instant messages I could answer with a word or a smiley face.

  Carey and Natasha seemed to have Sunny’s case in hand without much help from me. Carey had retained a psychologist to evaluate Sunny and a mitigation specialist, a combination of investigator and sociologist, to tease out information and patterns in Sunny’s background that Craig Newhouse and Joan Simon might have missed presenting in the penalty phase of her trial. Natasha made more trips to find and interview people, at this point, mostly minor characters, who might have something helpful to say about Sunny, her family, or the case.

  Carey sent me progress reports and copies of witness declarations as they came in, and I blocked out the habeas corpus petition, doing legal research and rough-drafting claims. It was difficult to get very far, though, with the investigation still going on.

  In early September, I made my annual trip to Alaska to visit my sisters, Maggie in Fairbanks and Candace in Anchorage. I was a little afraid to leave my house, even for a week. It was fire season, and the long, rainless summer had been hot, even on the coast. The Santa Ana winds, blowing desert-dry across the mountains, had pulled the last moisture from the ground and the brittle grass and weeds and parched the leaves of the tanoaks in the woods between my house and Ed’s. Along my driveway and away from the drip lines in my orchard, the dry grass crunched under my feet, and every step I took raised puffs of pale dust.

  I spent the week up north picking berries with Maggie and going camping with her and her husband Pete in Denali Park. We walked from the park road over a hill and pitched our tent in a treeless landscape of valley, river, and mountain that was probably unchanged since the Pleistocene. We made a project of heating water for coffee and instant soup on their tiny backpacker’s stove and spent a day walking in the hills and reading in our camp, with a weather eye out for bears foraging for their last bit of fattening before heading to their caves for a winter of sleep. In the evening I dreamily watched planets and stars wink into view in the darkening sky. I didn’t sleep well; I was cold in my sleeping bag and kept thinking I heard animals padding and flitting around outside. But I didn’t care about the lack of sleep; climbing out of the tent in the twilight of a frosty morning and priming and starting the stove with numb fingers were Zen-like experiences on the vast and silent hillside. And as I sat on a rock, drinking sugary tea and gazing down at the river and over at the mountains on the other side, I was filled with gratitude just to be there.

  The next month, it seemed half of California caught fire. Not far from Corbin’s Landing, the Santa Anas drove walls of flame across Napa and Sonoma counties, burning grasslands, vineyards, and whole neighborhoods of houses. Everyone knew someone who had been burned out; we upended our homes for towels, blankets, kitchen equipment we could spare for the fire’s refugees. Harriet and Bill had friends staying at their house. I had no room for another person, but I took in Pogo while Ed, who was part of our local volunteer fire department, went to fight the fires inland, and I played foster mom to a couple of other dogs until their families could find a new home.

  Farther south, more fires scoured the hills and ranches near the coast, burning through parts of Ventura County, where Carey lived. When I called her to ask how she was doing, she told me that her ranch in Ojai had burned. “House, barn, everything. We got the horses and other livestock out,” she said, gamely. “But it was a cliff-hanger for a while; we weren’t sure we were going to be able to trailer them all out in time.”

  That month, I lost a client. Howard Henley, whose case I had been working on, died of a heart attack in prison, a few months after a hard-fought hearing in which the judge had ruled he was entitled to a new trial on the question of whether he was innocent of the murder he was convicted of. The trial would never have taken place, because we had found new evidence that exonerated Howard conclusively. Nevertheless, the prosecution had contested the decision, and Howard stayed on death row while the state Supreme Court considered it. He was in his sixties; he had spent almost eighteen years on death row; he had grown old there. That it had taken so much time, and such a long, uphill battle, to vindicate him was bad enough; that he should die before seeing the freedom he’d finally gained made all our work feel pointless. When Sunny’s case heated up again, I was glad for the distraction.

  Carey called one morning a couple of weeks after the fires. “I’m a little overwhelmed here, with dealing with the ranch,” she said. “Can you do some more on Sunny’s case?”

  “Sure, whatever you need,” I said.

  “I haven’t been asking you for a lot lately because the judge has gotten kind of stingy with funding. I can cover your expenses, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay you for all your time.”

  It was the old story. Prosecutors are on salary and work in offices with generous budgets, but criminal defense attorneys, even in death penalty cases, are expected to essentially donate a lot of our time. We receive a small fraction of the rate paid to lawyers in civil law firms, and even that is often cut and whittled down. “No worries,” I said bravely.

  She thanked me. “I’ve been going nuts here,” she went on. “Not just with the fires, but our psychologist—Marilyn Cannon.”

  “What’s up?”

  “She can’t find anything wrong with Sunny. She says Sunny is basically a normal, well-adjusted woman for her age and where she is. She does think Sunny was clinically depressed in the period before Greg Ferrante’s death. Marilyn didn’t have much good to say about Greg and how he treated Sunny. It’s her opinion that he broke down Sunny’s self-esteem by constantly criticizing and downgrading her. Between that and his unfaithfulness, she says Sunny was psychologically crushed to the point where she doesn’t think Sunny could have organized anything like having him murdered. It’s what people who study abused women call ‘learned helplessness.’ Sunny felt that Greg was all-powerful, and believing that left her feeling there wasn’t anything she could do to get out of the situation.”

  “That doesn’t seem bad as mitigation,” I ventured.

  “No, as far as it goes, but so far it’s all based on what Sunny told her. I’ll get a report from Marilyn about that, at least; it’ll help with arguing lingering doubt
that she’s guilty. I wish it were more, though. And that we had more in general at this point.”

  “Everything does seem kind of inconclusive,” I agreed.

  “I know. But there’s something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “Marilyn thinks Sunny is covering for Brittany in some way. I guess Sunny told her she felt bad because she couldn’t protect Brittany from Greg’s meanness and said some things about Brittany and her relationship with Greg that made Marilyn wonder if Brittany wasn’t involved in his murder.”

  “I’ve wondered about that for a long time,” I said. “So did Craig Newhouse, if you remember.”

  “Yeah. Me too. But Marilyn thinks Sunny thinks so, too.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  Oh, boy, indeed. If it was true, then I understood why Sunny had been willing to be convicted of murder rather than put on a defense that might point to Brittany.

  “That’s the problem Craig Newhouse had to deal with,” Carey continued, “threading that needle, trying to convince the jury Sunny was innocent without laying the crime on her daughter. And we’re in the same position. I can’t imagine Sunny changing her mind.

  “It’s a mess. Everything that points away from Sunny points toward Brittany or Braden—or both of them. I don’t know how to write this petition. We need to talk to Sunny again soon, but I have to think a little about how. I’ve been waiting to talk to Braden and Brittany until we’d talked to some more of the other witnesses, but it’s time. I think it’s time to talk to the Ferrantes, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was hoping you could go with Natasha to see Braden and Brittany. And then come with me to visit the Ferrante family. We should probably both go, as Sunny’s attorneys.”

  I was good with that. “I’ll get in touch with Natasha. Let me know when you have time to go see the family.”

  “Thank you so much. Everything is so crazy right now. I’m still in shock over the ranch, and we have to deal with cleaning up and rebuilding and the poor horses. I keep reminding myself that it was just our vacation place; I can only imagine what people are going through who’ve lost their homes. What a strange case this is. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

  * * *

  When I called Natasha to discuss planning visits to Braden and Brittany, she said, “I’ve finally located Steve Eason.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “Inmate locator website. I’ve been checking it from time to time since I’ve been working on this case. This is the first time his name came up.”

  “Where do you suppose he was before?”

  “Don’t know—jail, out on the streets. He doesn’t seem to have had a permanent address in a while.”

  “What prison is he in now?”

  “Salinas Valley.”

  “We should go see him together.”

  “I’m for that.”

  An informant like Eason was likely to say one thing to an interviewer and something else on the witness stand. Having a pair of people speak with him made it harder for him to successfully claim that the interviewer had misheard or lied about what he said.

  “They’ll want to do a background check before we go in,” I said. “It’s going to take a couple of weeks.”

  “Let’s get started right away. You know, Braden’s at the Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo. Maybe we can see them both in one trip.”

  “How wonderful—the prison tour of coastal California.”

  16

  The parking lot of Salinas Valley State Prison was windy and cold. The prison itself was modern and devoid of landscaping, a treeless sprawl of gray cellblocks and gun towers, fenced with razor wire and spread over some of what had once been the delta of an ice-age river. More recently, it had probably been fields of lettuce, spinach or cauliflower, like the ones that still surrounded it. As I surveyed it from the parking lot I felt a vague moral discomfort that productive earth had been buried under something like this.

  Natasha was wearing a bulky black cardigan over her white shirt and long black skirt. She shivered and pulled it closed around her as we stood in the prison parking lot.

  “Hardly looks like East of Eden, does it?” I said.

  She gave me a questioning glance.

  “John Steinbeck. This—well, not this, but the whole area—is what he wrote about.”

  “Oh, right. I’ve never read it. We read Grapes of Wrath in high school. I always thought all his books were about the Central Valley.”

  “No, he lived here—Salinas and Monterey. He was writing about what he saw.”

  “Oh, right. Makes sense now I think about it. There’s all that Steinbeck stuff around Monterey, Cannery Row…”

  We went through the routine for legal visitors without incident and were given our badges. A civilian employee, a brown-haired baby-faced man who was probably about the same age as Natasha, was assigned to be our Virgil through this particular purgatory.

  He led us down a wide concrete sidewalk edged with beds of gravel in which not even a weed was visible and stopped at a heavy double door with a window of glass reinforced with wire mesh. He unlocked the door with a key from a large bunch at his belt. “There’s a conference room in here you can use,” he said.

  Inside the building, everything seemed to be white and gray—polished gray floors, white walls with a scuff mark here and there, gray-painted doors. Our guide opened a door. “This is where you’ll be.” He held it as Natasha and I walked through. “They’ll be bringing your guy here. Probably take a few minutes.”

  “Thank you,” we said.

  “No problem.” The door closed, and he was gone.

  The white and gray theme repeated itself in the conference room. The long table was some sort of brushed metal; the steel chairs were upholstered with gray plastic. A counter at one end held an empty drip coffee pot. Above it, white shelves held the only touch of color in the room, a few binders of what appeared to be official reports. Two closed windows of mesh-reinforced glass let in light and a blurred view of the outside, and overhead fluorescents lit the room with a shadowless impersonality. The room felt a little warmer than the outdoors, but not much.

  “I hope this isn’t an exercise in futility,” I said, without much hope. Natasha nodded in agreement, and we sat for a while in the echoing silence. I found myself thinking that it was November already, well over halfway through the one year we had to finish and file Sunny’s habeas petition, and we had precious little to show for all our work.

  I heard a door open and shut and voices in the hallway. “Sounds like they’re here,” Natasha said.

  They were. We stood and watched as the door to our room opened, and a uniformed guard, his leather belt clanking with keys, handcuffs, and other apparatus, appeared in the doorway next to another, shorter man dressed in the prison inmate’s uniform of jeans and a loose blue shirt.

  “This is Eason,” the guard said. “He your visit?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  From the police reports, I knew Steve Eason had been twenty-eight years old when he made his statement accusing Sunny. He would now be in his early forties. His face was broad, with close-set eyes and a day’s growth of pale stubble on his cheeks and chin. His sand-colored hair, shaved in a buzz cut that was starting to grow out, was receding from his forehead back along the top of his head. Under his loose blue prison-issue shirt I could see the neck and long sleeves of a white thermal undershirt, dingy with age. If he had any prison tattoos, they were invisible under its long sleeves.

  He assessed me suspiciously from under sand-colored eyebrows.

  The guard herded Eason to a spot near one of the chairs at the table. “I’ll be out in the hall,” he said. “Just let me know when you’re finished.”

  I thanked him, and he left, closing the door behind him.

  Eason looked from me to Natasha, obviously trying to figure out who we were and why we’d come to see him. I introduced us with as much formality as the occasion allowed.
>
  “I’m Janet Moodie, and this is Natasha Levin. I’m one of the attorneys for Sunny Ferrante, and Natasha is an investigator.” I reached a hand across the table to shake his; he hesitated a second or two and then raised his and took mine. His palm was warm and moist.

  “Sunny Ferrante,” he said, as if retrieving the name from the depths of his memory, before releasing my hand.

  He was wearing prison-issue shoes of cheap canvas with thin rubber soles, and the cuffs of his undershirt, I noticed, were starting to fray. Thermal underwear is not issued by the prisons; inmates usually get that and other comforts, such as decent-quality tennis shoes, ramen, cookies, and candy, from their families, in the care packages they’re allowed once a quarter. Judging from the state of his thermals, Eason had probably gotten them used from another inmate—I guessed he wasn’t getting much family support.

  “Why don’t we sit down?” I said, and we did. “Unusual place for a visit,” I went on, with a glance around the room. “If there were any vending machines, I’d buy you something to eat or drink.”

  Something like a slight smile creased the muscles of his face. “That would have been good,” he said. “Better than the food here.” His smile faded, and he looked from one of us to the other. “Sunny Ferrante,” he repeated. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re working on her habeas corpus case.”

  “Um,” he said. “She got sent to death row.”

  “She did.”

  He shook his head, almost sadly. “Man, no one saw that coming.”

  That surprised me. “Really?” I asked. “Why?”

  “It just didn’t seem like that kind of case. Husbands kill their wives; bitches kill their old men. It’s like crimes of passion, you know. I mean, I didn’t know her, but it’s not like she was a serial killer.”