Madman Walking Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  MADMAN

  WALKING

  Also available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

  Two Lost Boys

  MADMAN

  WALKING

  L.F. ROBERTSON

  TITAN BOOKS

  Madman Walking

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785652837

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652844

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2018

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  “Futility” by Wilfred Owen is from Wilfred Owen: The War Poems

  (Chatto & Windus, 1994), ed. Jon Stallworthy

  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 © 2018 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 Robertson

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Truth really is stranger than fiction. The story that follows is inspired by something that happened, in California, late in the twentieth century. The characters and a lot of the details of the story are invented, but the basic premise—that a man with serious mental illness was charged with murder, allowed to represent himself at his trial, and ended up on death row, even though everyone involved knew that the actual killer had confessed to the crime and exonerated him—is fact.

  For a DREAM is a good thing from GOD.

  For there is a dream from the adversary which is terror.

  For the phenomenon of dreaming is not of one solution, but many.

  For Eternity is like a grain of mustard as a growing body and improving spirit.

  For the malignancy of fire is oweing to the Devil’s hiding of light, till it became visible darkness.

  For the Circle may be SQUARED by swelling and flattening.

  For the Life of God is in the body of man and his spirit in the Soul.

  For there was no rain in Paradise because of the delicate construction of the spiritual herbs and flowers.

  For the Planet Mercury is the WORD DISCERNMENT.

  For the Scotchman seeks for truth at the bottom of a well, the Englishman in the Heaven of Heavens.

  CHRISTOPHER SMART (1722–71), Jubilate Agno

  (WRITTEN IN ST. LUKE’S HOSPITAL FOR LUNATICS, BETHNAL GREEN, LONDON)

  Still I sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys,

  Bedlam boys are bonnie

  For they all go bare and they live by the air,

  And they want no drink nor money.

  TOM OF BEDLAM (ENGLISH FOLK SONG)

  1

  “You have to help me.”

  The man’s voice on the phone both pleaded and commanded. “You have to help me, Ms. Moodie, as an officer of the court. A terrible fraud has been committed against me by the court and the police. I’m the victim of an unconstitutional conspiracy by the district attorney of Taft County and the court and the County of Ventura. Sandra Blaine and Judge Redd must be exposed. God will judge them, the betrayers, he will judge them on the final day—” The voice was rising now, the tone more urgent, the words clattering out in a jumble of legal language and fragments of biblical-sounding passages.

  “Dammit, Ms. Moodie, they framed me because they knew they cheated me in my legal settlement,” he went on. “They knew I was in jail when the man was killed. I have the proof, all the paperwork. You have to write to the director of the FBI. No, you have to go see him in his office, tell him to come talk to me, they have trampled on my constitutional rights, Ms. Moodie, they have my blood on their hands. And every day you let this happen, you are as guilty as they are. Call my lawyer, Brian Morris, tell him to come see me right away, tell him he needs to petition the Supreme Court to hear my case now—”

  He continued talking, stopping only for breath, for the entire fifteen minutes before the prison phone system automatically cuts off inmate calls. Once in a while I managed to utter a syllable or two when it seemed I should respond to something, but I don’t think I’d managed ten words by the time the phone went dead in the middle of one of his sentences.

  I shook my head a couple of times to clear the clattering from my ears and looked up Brian Morris’s phone number on the State Bar’s website. He answered on the second ring.

  “Mr. Morris,” I said, “this is Janet Moodie from the state defender. I just had a call from a client of yours, Howard Henley?”

  “Oh, yes, Howard.” I could hear a sigh in his voice.

  “He seemed pretty agitated,” I said. “He wanted me to call you.” I left out the part about petitioning the Supreme Court.

  “Did he want you to call the heads of the FBI and the CIA and both senators and representatives from his district, and—oh, God, I can’t remember all the people he’s told me to contact,” Morris said, with weary humor.

  “Most of them. He wants you to come see him, too,” I said. “He seemed pretty delusional, but really desperate. Is he all right?”

  “It depends on what you mean by all right,” Morris said. “He’s always delusional and desperate; that never changes. I’ve had his case for two years, and I don’t know how many lawyers he’s called, not to mention judges, the governor’s office—anyone who happens to take his calls. Did he talk about the colonies on Mars?”

  “No, not that.”

  “Poor guy, he’s his own worst enemy.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thanks for letting me know he called. You may hear from him again, now that he has your phone number.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry.”

  That was the first Howard call, something over ten years ago. He did call again; in fact he called me a half-dozen times before apparently gi
ving up and moving on to someone else. By the last call, I flinched when the receptionist said his name. But for some reason I couldn’t refuse him. It seemed important, somehow, to hear him out and let him run headlong through his pleas, his patchwork of Old Testament fulminations, and his speculations on outer space.

  After me, Howard called almost all the other attorneys in the office. Eventually his name became a rueful joke, a trigger for rolled eyes and guilty laughter among those of us who had been treated to his breathless monologues. And when one of us complained about a difficult client, someone would inevitably say, “Hey, at least you don’t have Howard Henley.”

  * * *

  And then one late-winter morning a few years later, my husband drove to a lonely park road in the Oakland hills and shot himself.

  Terry’s death shattered my little family, sending me and our son, Gavin, reeling apart like fragments from an explosion. But it wasn’t just a private family tragedy. Terry Moran was famous in the small community of attorneys who defend capital cases—a trial lawyer with a string of miraculous wins; an expert at identifying and litigating the legal and factual issues that can save a client from the death penalty; a speaker at criminal law conferences all over the United States. I was also in that community, but much lower in the pecking order. Along with the genuine sympathy I received from people who stayed close to me in the dark, numb months after Terry died, I learned some uncomfortable lessons about who had befriended me only because of him. And I felt, from some colleagues, particularly those who had been close to Terry, but not me, a hurtful undercurrent of judgment, a conviction that I was somehow negligent in not preventing Terry’s death, that I Should Have Seen It Coming.

  The next year, I left the state defender’s office, everyone I knew, and all of it—the damned sympathy, unspoken blame, and unanswered questions—and moved with my shock, anger, and miscellaneous emotional baggage to an old cabin up the California coast, in a scatter of old farmhouses and vacation cabins called Corbin’s Landing. I made a cottage industry of doing what I knew and worked on court-appointed appeals out of my spare bedroom. For a long time I stopped having anything to do with death-penalty cases, except to take phone calls from, and write holiday and birthday cards to, former clients in San Quentin, some of whom had become like extended family over the years in which I’d worked on their cases. I didn’t hear from Howard Henley, and I almost forgot about him.

  Once, when I was at San Quentin paying a birthday visit to a former client, I heard Howard Henley’s voice again, raised in a harangue hardly different from the one he had repeated in each of his phone calls to me. From my spot in one of the facing rows of attorney visiting-cages, I looked around for the source of the voice. It was projecting from one of the cages directly across the passageway. Howard, in his prison blues, was leaning forward, almost rising from his chair, his hands clutching the edges of the small table, his body trembling with tension. He was thin, almost ascetic, with a high forehead, eyes set deep in their sockets, and uncombed salt-and-pepper hair. Across from him, his visitor was sitting back in his chair as if pushed there by the force of Howard’s tirade, his eyes on the notepad in front of him and his shoulders hunched as if trying to ward off blows. I felt sorry for him.

  2

  When Mike Barry called me, I was temporarily incommunicado—out in my yard on a not-too-cold February day, cleft-grafting a dozen apple, pear, and plum saplings at my picnic table. Grafting involves whittling twigs with a very sharp knife, and I’m no expert at it, so I was doing my best to work in undisturbed concentration. I was oh-so-carefully slicing into a rootstock when the knife slipped and sliced into the base of my thumb instead. Blood welled up from the cut, dripping onto the table and the pot with the baby apple tree. Cursing, I joined the twigs together and wrapped up the graft, leaving red smears on the tape, and stormed into the bathroom, holding a paper towel around my thumb to keep from dripping more blood onto my shirt and the floor. The phone in my office rang, and I threw a tube of toothpaste in its general direction as I rummaged through the medicine cabinet in search of bandages.

  I was still cursing as, my hand swathed in gauze, I stomped across the room and punched the button to listen to the voicemail. “This is Mike Barry calling for Janet Moodie. Would you please give me a call at—” and a number—not that of the state defender, where he and I had worked together. I called him back, furiously punching keys on his answering-machine menu, until his line rang.

  “Michael Barry,” Mike’s voice said on the other end of the line.

  “Walt Klum,” I said.

  “Janny! Thanks for calling back so fast. No, Walt’s fine.”

  In the state defender’s office, Mike and I had been Walter Klum’s attorneys for his appeal. Walt had shot his ex-wife, her sister, and her parents, and then tried to kill himself, but the bullet circled inside his skull around his brain, and he had survived, only to be tried for three murders (his wife’s sister had survived to testify against him) and sentenced to death. Mike and I had then spent five years putting together what we thought was a compelling case, in a four-hundred-page appellate brief, that Walt wasn’t competent to stand trial or fully responsible for his actions at the time of the crimes. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury caused by a truck accident two years before the murders. Medical records presented at Walt’s trial showed that he had been in a coma for two months after the accident and that about an eighth of his brain was simply missing, atrophied as the result of trauma and loss of blood supply. His family and friends said his personality had changed after the truck accident. He had gone from being a quiet, easygoing guy to a man who was gloomy, unpredictable, depressed, and prone to sudden attacks of anger and paranoia. In the county jail, tormented by hallucinations and flashbacks and remorse at what he had done, he tried again to commit suicide; and he spent his trial half-asleep from sedatives and psychotropic medications.

  The state Supreme Court had given short shrift to our arguments, affirming Walt’s conviction and death sentence in a unanimous opinion.

  About a year later, the court had appointed Walt a new lawyer to investigate and file a habeas corpus petition, a separate proceeding to present additional evidence that hadn’t come out, for whatever reason, in Walt’s trial. Mike and I did what we could to help Walt’s new attorney, but by the time the habeas petition was filed I’d left the office. Unlike some of my former clients, Walt wasn’t inclined to write or call anyone; except for the brief thank-you notes he sometimes sent in response to the Christmas and birthday cards I sent him, I hadn’t heard about him in years.

  Walt really didn’t care much if he lived or died, and he suffered from bouts of black depression and terror, becoming convinced from time to time that his food was being poisoned or that guards were planning to plant some contraband item in his cell as an excuse to search it and then kill him. No regimen of medications tried by the prison doctors seemed to keep him stable for very long. That’s why my first thought on hearing Mike’s voice after such a long time was that something terrible had finally happened to Walt.

  “No, Walt’s as well as he ever was, as far as I know. How are you these days?”

  It occurred to me that how I was at the moment would probably not interest most of the people I knew from my previous lives, Mike included. So I refrained from mentioning that I was no longer bleeding out from a grafting wound, and said, “Pretty good. How are you?”

  “Okay. Enjoying private practice. And you?”

  “Same, I guess. How long have you been out of the state defender?”

  “Four years—a little less than you. Sue retired from the school district, and we moved north to Sonoma County. We have two grandkids nearby we get to spend more time with; Hannah just had her second. And Adam graduates from law school this year. And my commute is now fifteen minutes, instead of an hour.”

  “God, how time flies,” I said. “You’re ahead of me. No grandkids yet. Gavin’s in Australia doing a post-doc, and he has a girlfriend,
but he isn’t married yet. Got you beat about the commute, though. Mine is about thirty seconds.”

  After a little more small talk, Mike got down to business. “Are you busy at the moment?” he asked.

  “I’m just finishing up a habeas petition, but I’ll be free in a few weeks.”

  “Are you interested in another capital case?”

  Oh, shit, I thought, but then my curiosity got ahead of my better judgment. “Maybe,” I said, doubtfully. “Tell me about it.”

  “Do you remember Howard Henley?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Not Henley. No way.”

  “Really?” Mike sounded a little downcast. “I took his case, and I could use someone to work with me on it.”

  “Henley? Really? What were you thinking?”

  “Oh, God,” Mike sighed. “I let myself be sweet-talked into it by Evelyn Turner at the court.”

  I chuckled. Evelyn Turner, the state Supreme Court’s appointments attorney, had a reputation for being, one might say, persuasive. Her magic was mysterious, but faced with her blandishments, otherwise rational attorneys accepted impossible cases at the court’s miserly pay rate, and ended up thanking her for thinking of them.

  “You pushover,” I said.

  Mike laughed. “Yeah. But seriously—would you work with me?”

  “Why me?”

  “I thought of you because of Walt Klum, actually. And another case or three—you were kind of known in the state defender for your crazy clients.”

  That was actually news to me; I’d never felt particularly known there for anything except being a constant minor irritant to the little clique of bureaucrats who ran the office.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Just because it’s you and you’re flattering me. But… Howard? Is he any better than he was?”

  “Not better, no. But he’s calmed down some. He’s been on medication for a while. He’s still crazy, but actually bearable.”

  “Lovely. So tell me about the case.”

  “Howard has a habeas corpus petition pending. His lawyer on it was Gordon Marshall.”