Two Lost Boys Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  42

  43

  44

  45

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  47

  48

  49

  50

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  TWO

  LOST

  BOYS

  Also available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

  Madman Walking (May 2018)

  TWO

  LOST

  BOYS

  L.F. ROBERTSON

  TITAN BOOKS

  Two Lost Boys

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785652783

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652813

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2017

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2017 by L.F. Robertson. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To Richard, who made my quixotic career possible,

  and Michael, who helped me write about it.

  1

  California’s death penalty long ago entered the realm of the surreal. The courts keep handing down death sentences at the rate of twenty-five or so a year, but almost no one gets executed. For the most part, condemned men live out their lives on death row, represented by a small army of underpaid but persistent lawyers, while their appeals make some sort of halting progress through the court system.

  I have been a foot soldier in that army for more years than I care to count. A dozen or so of the men on the Row had been clients of mine at one time or another. We have moved from youth to middle age together, and I have watched as their children grew up, their parents died, and they themselves grew ill with the diseases that afflict old men. Now, against my better judgment, I was about to add one more client to my tally.

  2

  San Quentin State Prison sits on a spit of land overlooking San Francisco Bay, at the end of a potholed road lined with million-dollar fishermen’s shacks. In Marin County, real estate with a water view costs a fortune, even at the gates of a prison.

  I reached the visitors’ parking lot with a couple minutes left to rummage in my wallet for dollar bills for the vending machines. Armed with the few items the prison allows visitors to bring—dollar bills and change, a couple of pens, a legal pad, my driver’s license and bar card—I climbed the steep driveway to the long wooden building, something between a shed and a breezeway, where visitors wait to be checked in.

  My new client was a man named, of all things, Andy Hardy. Andy was a nickname, an improvement, I suppose, on his real first name, Marion. Andy and his brother Emory had been convicted, about fifteen years ago, after kidnapping three prostitutes at different times over the course of a year or so. They had killed two, and the last one had escaped after two days of terror. Emory was serving life in prison without possibility of parole. Andy had gotten the death penalty. His conviction had been upheld on appeal, and he was beginning his next round of litigation, petitions for habeas corpus in the state Supreme Court and the federal district court.

  Hardy’s newly appointed post-conviction lawyer, Jim Christie, had called—directed to me by an old colleague who probably didn’t know I’d sworn off death-penalty work—at a moment when I was feeling disenchanted with what I was doing instead. I’d just wasted a half-hour of my precious remaining years reading a Court of Appeal opinion affirming yet another conviction in a case I should have won—would have won, if my client had been a businessman getting sued, instead of a criminal serving life in prison for stealing a bottle of cheap brandy. I was feeling mired in futility and irritated with hack judges and assembly-line law. And I’d gotten a little bored with the lack of stress in my life. I was like a schizophrenic who goes off his meds out of disgust with the dullness of sanity. Listening to Jim tell me about the case, in his personable courtroom-lawyer baritone, I thought about working again where the stakes were high and felt a familiar little prickling of adrenalin. That in itself should have warned me. I asked Jim a few basic questions about time constraints, money arrangements, and whether the client was easy to get along with, and said yes before the end of the call.

  Now, after a restless night and a three-hour drive to San Quentin, it didn’t seem like such a great idea.

  This was one of the visiting days reserved for attorneys and investigators. Jim, who would be flying from Los Angeles and driving from the airport, had made our appointment with Mr. Hardy at eleven o’clock; I had decided to come earlier so that I could visit another inmate, a former client. The door to the room where visitors are—in the argot of the Department of Corrections—“processed” was inside the shed. No one else was waiting, and I rang the bell. A buzzer sounded, and a second later I heard the door lock release. I pushed it open and edged inside.

  There is a different guard at the desk every time I go there. This one, a chunky man with a round pinkish face, short steel-gray hair and silver-rimmed glasses, looked me over indifferently, checking for violations of the endlessly changing rules for what visitors can wear and bring with them. The list of what a lawyer can bring into the prison is short—legal papers, notebook, pens, some money for the vending machines—and I had left my purse and cellphone in my car. I gave him my ID, took off my jacket, glasses, watch and shoes, and walked through the metal detector, while my belongings went through the X-ray machine beside me. Nothing set off any alarms, and the guard stamped my wrist with a smudge of fluorescent ink, returned my ID and a visiting form, and waved me through, saying, “Have a good one.”

  “You too,” I answered, with a sense that we had contracted some sort of truce.

  On the long walk to the visiting building, I could see more of the bay, sparkling blue with a few whitecaps, the hills of Marin, dark green after the winter rains, beyond it. At a second open gate I turned left, past the high arched entrance of the old prison and down a service road.

  The old prison is a nineteenth-century fantasy of a c
astle, like something conceived by N.C. Wyeth or Arthur Rackham. The entrance to the main building is a portcullis of stucco shaped and painted to look like sandstone blocks and gated with heavy iron bars. Beside it, a red-brick building resembling a Victorian factory holds two visiting rooms; one for mainline inmates and the other for death row.

  I waited on the porch of the visiting building, peering through yet another iron gate, painted gray, with a thick sheet of scratched Plexiglas bolted to its face. Eventually the door slid open with a painful scraping and clanging, and I sidled into a small foyer with another barred gate at its far end. I gave my ID and visitor pass to a guard waiting behind a barred glass screen with a slot at the bottom for passing papers. He glanced at them and pushed a button on a board in front of him. The outer gate closed, and the inner gate screeched and clanged open.

  The visiting area was a long, narrow room with a gray vinyl floor, institutional pale beige walls, a couple of vending machines, and two rows of cages to my right. The bars of the cages were coated in chipped white paint and, like the outer gate, sheathed with walls of scratched-up Plexiglas, in a less-than-successful attempt at preventing conversations inside the cages from being overheard. It was a typical prison fix, jerry-built and done on the cheap, and about the best that could be said for it was that you had to keep quiet and listen a bit to hear what your neighbors were saying.

  On the opposite wall, straight ahead of me, was a gray metal door. As I watched, the door opened, and with a clamor of voices and clanking keys, two guards emerged with a slightly bewildered-looking prisoner between them. After a brief exchange with another guard, they headed, awkwardly but purposefully, to the aisle between the two rows of cages.

  I walked down the aisle after the procession, looking for an old client of mine who I’d arranged to meet, Henry Fontaine. Henry was sitting in one of the cages, and a Latino guard, chunky in a bulletproof vest, his green uniform clanking with chains and keys, was chatting with him through the Plexiglas. So much for the soundproofing. I nodded to the guard, and Henry, catching my eye, called out, “Hey, Miss Janet.”

  “You want anything from the machines?” I asked.

  “Sweet roll and a Dr. Pepper would be just fine.”

  Henry was a former client, but he still wrote me now and again, and I sent him stamps and occasionally put a little money on his books and visited him about once a year to see how he was doing. He was fifty years old when, at the end of a bender, he had stabbed his landlady to death in an argument over his overdue rent. When the police checked out the crime scene, they found her open wallet lying outside her purse on the floor. This was enough for the district attorney to up the charge from second-degree murder to robbery-murder and seek the death penalty—why, I don’t know, since they have enough real capital crimes down in Riverside to keep them busy. Nevertheless, one thing led to another—Henry was black, he was on parole, he’d been in prison most of his adult life and he didn’t have many family members who still knew him well enough to say much of anything good about him—so he ended up on the Row.

  It took five years to find him a lawyer for his appeal, and that turned out to be the state defender’s office I worked for at the time. It was another eight before his appeal was decided. Now, almost nineteen years down the line, he had yet another lawyer and his case was working its way through the federal courts. No one, including Henry, was inclined to hurry it along. Henry had a bathroom-sized cell on death row’s equivalent of the honor block, some buddies to play checkers with, and enough money from me and his federal lawyer for little things like toothpaste and candy bars.

  I spent five minutes or so coaxing dollar bills and coins into the vending machines and walked back to the cages with a tray—soda and sweet roll for Henry and a Diet Coke for me. The guard let me into the cage, and Henry and I waited in silence as he locked the gate. Henry backed over to the door, and the guard opened a metal slot in the door, unlocked Henry’s handcuffs, and took them away.

  “I always feel guilty getting this stuff for you,” I said after he left, putting the cinnamon roll in its plastic package down on the table.

  “No need. I ain’t worried; when the Lord decides it’s time for me to go, I go.” He opened the soda can and took a long drink from it. “Cold soda, that’s so nice. Stuff we get from canteen is room temperature. So, how you been? Working hard?”

  “Just the usual. How’ve you been?”

  “Just gettin’ grayer and grayer. Doctor put me on some new heart medicine, but the nurse ain’t giving it to me.”

  “Damn, not again!” I said. I promised to help his lawyer try to straighten it out, and we spent the rest of our hour and a half chatting about Henry’s ailments, his sister’s latest letter, and the joy he found in the Lord. When the guard came to take him back to his cell, Henry blessed me and said, “Come see me again soon. Maybe next time you can get me one of them ice-cream sandwiches from the machines.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  A wise criminal defense attorney once warned me, “Never seek validation from your clients.” It’s good advice, because how your clients feel about you has very little to do with how well you represent them. I once won a case on appeal for a man who tried to fire me because I didn’t answer his letters as soon as he liked. It was a complete win—suppression of the drugs he was charged with possessing, and he walked out of prison a free man; I never heard a word from him after I mailed him the Court of Appeal opinion. Henry, on the other hand, liked me even though I hadn’t accomplished a damned thing for him, unless you count an unsuccessful appeal to the California Supreme Court as putting a few bumps on the track of the death train.

  While I waited for the guards to fetch Andy Hardy, I made a trip to the restroom down the hall. As I was walking back toward the cages, a tall, light-haired man in a suit caught my eye and flagged me down. “Are you Janet Moodie?”

  “Yep,” I said. “You’re Jim, then?”

  “I am. Nice to meet you.” He stuck out a hand, and I managed to extricate mine from my notebook and coin purse for a handshake.

  There were things I wanted to ask Jim about the case, but we were surrounded by guards moving prisoners in and out of the cages. So we made small talk, or tried to. He said something about baseball, and I said something apologetic about not really following it. Then the metal door to the back opened with a chinking of metal chains, and a sandy-haired man in blue denim limped out, flanked by two guards.

  “Here’s our man,” Jim said. “Hey, Andy!”

  Andy looked over and flashed a weak smile. “Mr. Christie? Hey, could you get me a coupla cokes and a cheeseburger?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me take care of that,” I said. When I came back, my tray laden with a burger hot from the microwave, chips, drinks, ketchup packets and a fistful of the brown paper towels the prison puts out for napkins, the guard was waiting by the cubicle, and Jim and Hardy were already in conversation over some papers.

  As the guard let me into the cell, locked it again, and left, Jim introduced me to Andy. Andy looked pleased, in a muted way. I knew he was around forty, but he looked younger. He was pale and clean-shaven, with a long, nondescript face and close-set pale blue eyes. His hair was combed straight back from his forehead. In his loose chambray shirt and prison jeans, he looked rangy, but it was hard to tell. He reached out to shake my hand, and I noticed he had no tattoos on his forearms.

  “I’ve just started reading about your case,” I said. “And I’m curious how you got your nickname.”

  “It was my mama’s idea. The kids at school kept saying Marion was a girl’s name. So she said I should say my name was Andy. She said it came from some old movie.”

  “So naming you Marion wasn’t her idea?”

  “Nah. It was my dad’s. It was his grandfather’s name. He was some kind of train robber; I guess they hung ’im back in Idaho. But my dad was real proud of ’im, named me after him. Then he used to say he should have given my name to Emory, �
��cause Emory had more of the old man in him.”

  “How did you and your dad get along?” I asked.

  “Not so good. But we didn’t see too much of him. He was in prison up in Walla Walla for a long time, and then he left town.”

  “What’s he do now?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Do you ever hear from him?”

  Andy looked at me and shifted a little in his chair. “Nope. Never have since he left.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry. That must have been hard on you and your mother.”

  “Not really. I didn’t like him. And Mama—she said she never cried over no man—’specially not him.”

  Jim looked at the plastic-wrapped burger on the table. “Better eat your sandwich before it gets cold.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Andy pulled open the wrapper, peeled back the top half of the bun and smeared ketchup from a plastic packet onto the half-melted cheese and wilted onion that topped the burger patty.

  As he ate, Andy complained amiably about the congealed oatmeal and tough pancakes, the gristly stews and watery mashed potatoes that made up his diet between visits. When he had finished, he wiped his mouth with a paper towel and wrapped up the remains of his lunch with surprising tidiness, then tossed them into the scuffed plastic wastebasket next to the table. “Thank you,” he said, leaning back for a moment and patting his stomach a couple of times as if for emphasis. He sat up again, took a drink from his can of soda and looked at Jim and me. “Don’t you want to talk about my case?”

  “Well, I do have some questions I’d like to ask,” I said, “to help me get started on it.”

  “Okay.” He folded his hands on the table in front of him and waited for the questioning to begin. There was something in the gesture and in the directness with which he answered that reminded me suddenly of my son at about five years old.

  I turned to a clean page on my legal pad. “Let’s see. The files say you were born in Washington and lived there until—what, about junior high?”

  “No, high school,” Andy said. “We moved down here after my dad left.”