Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html)

San Quentin Prison stands on a windswept headland on San Francisco
Bay. At first sight it does not look like such a bad place: its
sandstone-colored walls and red roof are architecturally imposing. The
cypress-fringed hill that abuts them and the row of sturdy palms along
the shoreline lend the natural setting a certain charm. The waters of
the bay are azure or green or steel gray, depending on the weather,
dotted with sailboats and the sleek ferries that ply their way from
Marin County's Larkspur Landing to San Francisco. Not such a bad place
at all.

But as you approach the prison's iron gates down a narrow lane lined
mostly with ramshackle houses, you hear the rumble of loudspeakers in
the yard and the monotonous hum of the generators that keep the huge
physical plant functioning. You see the guard tower and floodlights and
warning signs, and the weary hopelessness in the eyes of the people who
trickle through the visitors' entrance. The wind feels colder; it
carries the stench of stagnant water and an indefinable decay.

Then you notice that elsewhere on the promontory no healthy
vegetation grows, as if even trees and shrubs are wary of venturing too
near the grim edifice. You realize how far removed Point San Quentin is
from the posh newness of Larkspur Landing, the million-dollar homes of
nearby Tiburon and Belvedere, the majesty of the redwoods and Mount
Tamalpais. In spirit, this place shares more with Richmond, the city
that lies across a graceless span of bridge to the northeast—a troubled
community blighted by slums, populated largely by struggling blacks
from whose ranks many of those housed behind the prison walls have come.

And on a darkly overcast winter morning, such as the one in late
December when I first visited there, you are almost certain to remind
yourself that this is a place of misery, where human beings are often
sent to die.

I'd left the city early that Thursday morning, hoping to be at the
prison at eight-thirty, but traffic was slowed by an accident in one of
the northbound lanes on the Golden Gate Bridge, and it was nine-fifteen
when I presented my identification and signed the east gate log. I
passed through the metal detector at the security checkpoint, where an
officer inspected the contents of my briefcase and shoulder bag. Then I
sat down as directed on a bench in the visiting area.

It was early enough that there were few people in the area; most of
them I judged to be either attorneys or investigators like myself,
there to confer with inmates in private. I waited for close to an hour
before approval came down, even though my name had supposedly been
added to the list of visitors authorized by the prisoner's attorney.
The desk officer entered my tape recorder in his log of recording and
photographic equipment, and then I was led to one of the segregated
visiting rooms for inmates of the adjustment center and death row.

After the guard locked me in, I looked around the room for a moment.
It was institutional tan, divided down the center by a
wall-to-wall table. A heavy grille extended from the table to the
ceiling. Had I possessed tendencies to claustrophobia, my surroundings
would probably have prompted me to pound on the door and demand to be
let out. As it was, I felt curiously suspended, as if time had stopped
and wasn't going to start up again until some distant and unknown power
said it could. Finally I crossed to the table, set my briefcase on it,
and sat in one of three wooden chairs.

It was another ten minutes before the door on the other side of the
grille opened and a young black man in blue prison work clothes was
admitted. He was slender, of medium height, with a complexion the shade
of cinnamon. In spite of his age, which I knew to be twenty, his
hairline was receding; the short black curls formed an M on his high
forehead. Beneath it, his eyes were heavy lidded and unreadable, his
nose long and broad, his mouth set tight. When the door locked behind
him, he glanced back at it and balled his fists reflexively.

I'd viewed a videotape of his confession the night before, but in
person he looked different. Smaller and more vulnerable. And somehow
incapable of perpetrating the vicious crime he'd admitted to on the
tape.

As I studied him, I thought—not for the first time—that it was
possible he'd been railroaded by a criminal justice system that is not
exactly blind when a poorly educated young black with a juvenile record
is brought to trial on sensational charges. A victim of that system, or
a coldblooded killer? For the moment I preferred to reserve judgment.

"Mr. Foster," I said, "I'm Sharon McCone from All Souls Legal
Cooperative. Jack Stuart told you I'd be visiting."

Bobby Foster nodded but didn't move.

"It would be better if you sat down." I gestured at the single chair
on his side of the grille. "We have a lot to go over."

This time he made no response of any kind. I waited.

Finally he said, "Don't know what you think you can do for me." His
voice was deep—a large man's voice trapped in a smallish man's body.

"I'm not sure if there is anything I can do. That's what I'm here to
find out."

My admission of uncertainty seemed to relax him; perhaps he liked
the fact that I didn't pretend to have all the answers. He moved to the
chair and perched on its edge.

"What did Jack Stuart tell you about me, Bobby? It is okay to call
you Bobby?"

He shrugged.

"And please call me Sharon."

He regarded me from under those heavy eyelids for a moment, then
said, "Stuart, all he tell me is you a private eye for that law firm of
his. He say maybe there's something you can do to get me out of this
mess."

"You don't seem to believe that."

Another shrug. "Don't see what nobody can do. They try me, send me
up here. One of these days they gonna kill me."

"But you claim you didn't do the murder."

"Now you the one look like you don't believe me."

"I'm not sure what I think yet. A lot of guilty people claim they're
innocent. But I haven't heard your side of the story. And Jack Stuart
believes you."

He shifted position, leaning back in the chair. "That Stuart, he
okay. Better than the PD I had for my trial, maybe."

Bobby's first attorney had been a public defender; after the
conviction his mother had raised the money to retain All Souls for the
appeals process. "Jack's a good criminal lawyer," I said. "If there's a
procedural basis for overturning your conviction, he'll find it. But
the PD you had wasn't bad, either. What it boiled down to is that there
was a strong case
against you."

His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward, arms on the table. "You
call that a case? They never even find her body. How the hell you gas a
man when you ain't even got a body?"

I knew that both the public defender and Jack had explained to him
the legal basis for conviction in a "no-body" case. I also knew that he
stubbornly refused to accept the explanation and argued vehemently with
them every time the subject came up. What I suspected was that—lacking
anything else—he had seized upon the issue as a last hope and wasn't
about to turn loose of it. Determined not to let him get off on that
overworked tangent, I asked, "What do you think happened to her?"

He shook his head.

"Tracy Kostakos was a friend of yours. You must have some idea about
her disappearance."

"If I did, would I be here?"

"Some people think she's still alive. Her own mother, for instance.
Laura Kostakos thinks her daughter disappeared of her own free will."

His gaze moved away from mine, to a point beyond my left shoulder.
Immediately I felt a prickling at the base of my spine—the kind I often
get when I sense someone is withholding something important from me.

I said, "Bobby? What do you think happened to Tracy?"

"Don't know," he replied, still avoiding my eyes. "But she ain't
alive. If she was, she'd of heard about me and come back and put things
right." He was silent for a moment, then added softly, "Tracy, she dead
all right. But I didn't do it to her."

"Why did you confess, then?"

"I took that back later. That just a story."

"A story, Bobby?"

"Yeah."

"It fit the facts pretty closely."

"Facts? Ain't no facts. Ain't even a body!"

"Why did you confess?"

He clenched his fists, then tipped his head back so he was looking
at the ceiling. The cords in his neck grew taut as he struggled for
control.

Bobby Foster had a history of losing his temper—and a juvenile
record to go with it. But while in the custody of the California Youth
Authority, he'd apparently learned to cope with the impulse to
violence. Life had been looking up for him—until Tracy Kostakos had
disappeared one rainy night nearly two years ago.

After a bit he unclenched his fists and lowered his head. His eyes
were intense but free of anger. "You ever really been scared, lady?
Scared shitless?"

I had, on numerous occasions, but I sensed he was talking about a
different kind of fear. I shook my head.

"Then you don't know. They hammer at me for hours, tell me what I
did. They say I flunked the lie detector test I took before. Later my
lawyer, he found out that wasn't true; it say I lied about some things
but not about killing her. But then I believe them, and it scare me
even more. I get tired, mixed up. After a while I start believing
everything they tell me. The way it work, it's like you remembering
some dream you had. What they tell you, you start seeing it, only you
can't really 'cause it just a dream."

"And then?"

"It start getting real. You see it better. But it still be like the
picture of an old TV that don't work right. You stop being scared
'cause you so tired. They hammer at you some more and you think maybe
if you tell them the dream they go away. Doesn't matter, it just a
dream—right? So you tell them. Then you find out it ain't no dream—it's
a fucking nightmare. "

I leaned back in my chair, trying to imagine what he'd told me. I
could, and yet I couldn't. But it fit with certain
inconsistencies I'd noticed in the trial transcript and the videotape
of his confession. Police interrogation methods these days are more
civilized than the old back-room tactics, but still capable of
producing false admissions of guilt.

After a moment I said, "Tell me about yourself, Bobby."

His face, which had become animated while he was talking about the
confession, went blank. "Why?"

"If I'm to try to help you, I need to know something about you."

"What you want to know?"

"Anything you'd care to tell me."

"Ain't nothing to tell."

"You grew up in San Francisco, right?"

"Potrero Hill. The projects."

"Went to school there?"

"For a while."

"To what grade?"

"Seventh."

"And then you were in and out of the CYA?"

He nodded.

Even though I already knew, I asked, "What did you do to end up
there?"

Silence.

"Bobby?"

"Look, Stuart know all that stuff. Why don't you ask him?"

"I'd rather hear it from you."

He hesitated, regarding me with a mixture of suspicion and hope.
"You really think you can help me?"

"I'm going to try."

"How?"

"By turning up new evidence. By finding out if Tracy Kostakos is
still alive. And if she's not, I'll try to find out what really
happened to her."

"Why you have to know all this stuff about me, then?"

"In my business, I never know what information is going to be
important. I want to hear about your life, right up to the minute you
walked into this room this morning."

That seemed to satisfy him. He nodded, took a deep breath, and said,
"Okay. Where you want me to start?"

"At the point where you quit school and started getting in trouble.
But first let me set up my tape recorder." I took it out of my
briefcase and placed it on the table. Bobby looked dubiously at it but
didn't protest. After I'd tested it, I started the tape and leaned back
in my chair.

"All right," I said, "just talk. Don't hurry or leave anything
out—I'll come back next week if I have to. You and I have a lot of work
to do."

As Bobby began talking, I looked down at my hands. They lay in my
lap, palms turned upward, fingers curled. Cupped, as if I were about to
hold his life in them.

My visit to Bobby Foster was the result of an impromptu picnic I'd
gone on with Jack Stuart, our criminal law specialist at All Souls.
He'd turned up on my doorstep the previous noon—Wednesday of that last,
afterthought week of the year, which serves no earthly purpose except
to frustrate those of us who have had enough of the holidays and are
anxious to get our lives back to normal.

I'd taken the dead time off in order to launch my campaign (I
refused to call it a New Year's resolution) to once and for all have
the construction finished on the back porch of my house. I'd begun
enclosing it to make a second bedroom the previous summer but had run
out of money halfway through. In October I'd refinanced my mortgage and
received funds to complete the job, as well as to make a number of
other necessary and essentially uninteresting repairs. Then I'd gotten
caught up in Christmas shopping and holiday festivities. This week had
been reasonably productive, but now I found myself infected with the
general lassitude that was going around, and none of the contractors
whom I'd had in to give estimates had gotten back to me. When Jack rang
the bell, I was
wandering around the backyard harboring halfhearted notions of
murdering some of the blackberry vines that had taken hold there. If he
hadn't shown up, I'd have been wringing my hands in boredom inside of
fifteen minutes.