Home for the Haunting(75)

“And you weren’t seeing Linda Lawrence?”

“She was fourteen. I was almost twenty.”

“I saw photos of her—she looked older than she was. Very pretty.”

“Real cute. And I already told you, I liked and respected her, and her family, too much to even think about that sort of thing. She might have . . . She had a little crush on me, and one time she came inside, and I gave her a soda, and she asked for some rum in it. I almost did it, almost gave in to the demons that told me to destroy her innocence, to take away her family’s happiness. But I didn’t. Even then I wasn’t that lost. I told her to get going and not to come back. She was crying when she left. I felt bad, but I would have felt a damned sight worse if I’d given in to my base temptations.”

I didn’t know what else to ask. I wasn’t even sure why I was here, in this grim place of desperation, other than the need to understand what could have happened, the strange neighborhood dynamics that seemed to exist back then and might have somehow contributed to what happened.

“I have nightmares sometimes,” Dave continued, his voice quiet. “It’s a pair of shoes, just the athletic shoes by themselves running down an alley, running away. No body, just the shoes.”

I waited, not sure what to say.

“It’s . . . I think it’s because, you know when people get shot, and the police are taking them away, they cover them with a blanket. But the shoes stick out the end. All’s you can see of them are these white athletic shoes. Gets so the mothers in the neighborhood, they recognize their kids’ shoes; that’s how they know their babies are dead.”

There were tears in his eyes. Either this guy was a truly great actor, or Etta was right: He had a good heart. He had made some terrible choices, but if he’d had a different start to life? He could have been so much more.

“Anyway, whenever I feel like, whatever, I’ll just give in and try to screw everybody over like everyone else in here, then I think about those shoes. If I can do any good from inside, I will.”





Chapter Nineteen




Zach and I walked silently side by side out of the meeting room, down the various corridors, and through the several lockdown doorways. When we were finally outside, the breeze was blowing in off the bay and the day was sunny and in the low sixties, one of those late winter days in the Bay Area that remind residents why they pay such a high price for the privilege of living here.

The snug little town of San Quentin seemed ludicrously charming after the grim reality of life inside the walls.

“Surreal,” said Zach, giving voice to my thoughts.

“You can say that again,” I said. Our boots crunched on the broken blacktop and gravel cul-de-sac, the dead end that was the prison, as we walked toward my car parked on the main street. “Do you believe him?”

“I’m no expert in this sort of thing,” he said. “But he came off as pretty believable. And perhaps more important, I can’t think why he would lie about it at this point.”

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“True, but he’s already a lifer. He had a criminal history and special circumstances of drugs and guns . . . life without the possibility of parole already. I suppose he might not want to be nailed for a triple murder. . . . But, I don’t know; I guess I believed him. He admits to everything else so readily. And besides, didn’t Linda Lawrence tell the police her father killed her mother? Why would she lie about something like that?”

“I was thinking that maybe he and Linda were seeing each other, and she didn’t want to finger him for the crime. Or maybe she saw him that night but was so scared she didn’t say.”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Possible, but it’s a stretch. Why would she blame it on her father, of all people? If she was lying to cover up the fact that she saw Dave, wouldn’t she make up some other intruder or, at the very least, say she didn’t see who did it? To finger your own father—that seems pretty extreme.”

“It was worth following up on the idea, though, junior detective. And I’ve never been to San Quentin. One more destination to cross off my list of places to see in the Bay Area.”

I smiled. “Also, you’re now on a first-name basis with Duct-Tape Dave. That’s got to be good for bragging rights at least, right?”

He grinned.

I clicked the remote to open the car doors but stood for a moment, just to savor the day. The bright sunshine warmed my back, seagulls called, and I basked in the knowledge that I was free to climb in the car and drive out of town, leaving the denizens of San Quentin in our dust—and relegated to the very back of our minds. Freedom felt like a sweet dream in comparison to the life that Dave—and all those other men condemned to San Quentin—were living.