Jeff Sherratt - Detour to Murder

1974

The California Institution for Menat Chino was forty miles from my office in Downey, almost an hour away. But today, a fenderbender on the Pomona Freeway had traffic snarled, causing me to be late. Southern California was in the midst of one of the periodic droughts that plagued the basin since the beginning of time. Less than normal winter snowfall in the High Sierras to the north meant for a parched summer and autumn in the south. Couple that with a hot Santa Ana wind that blew in from the desert and about ten million normally compliant people turned into mad demons who drove their cars on the battlefield of L.A.’s freeways like raging predators seeking to devour their prey.

On days like today, dire conservation warnings flooded the airways, restaurants quit serving a glass of water with your meal, and you could be arrested for watering your lawn. Don’t even think about washing your car, you’d be shot on sight.

I arrived ten minutes past my scheduled appointment. Damn. I glanced at my watch; should’ve left earlier. Why hadn’t Mabel, my office manager, given me the high sign while I was on the phone haggling with my car insurance guy? No use thinking about that now. And anyway my client, Alexander Roberts, wasn’t going anywhere. He’d been convicted of homicide in 1945 and had been in prison for twenty-nine years now. What the hell, he’s been rotting in his cell at Chino all that time and I was fairly certain my tardiness was the least of his worries. Still, I hated being late all the time. Someone said that being late is sloppy; shows one had sloppy habits, could be true.

Maybe I should’ve shined my shoes this morning.

Back in ’45 Roberts had been sentenced to life with a minimum eligibility for parole set at thirty years. Inmates serving life automatically become eligible for parole hearings one year before their MEP date, and now Roberts counted on me to get him a fair shake at his hearing.

Because of the perennial manpower shortage in the Public Defender’s office, I’d been assigned by the Board of Parole Hearings-recommended by a friendly judge-to represent him before the panel. It wasn’t my legal brilliance and razor-sharp mind that got me the job, I must admit. I heard later Judge Balford said to a board member, “Jimmy O’Brien is a lawyer of hopeless causes and he works cheap.” It pays to be noticed.

It’s true, state-appointed cases like this didn’t pay well, but they added a steady stream of revenue to the uneven flow generated by my regular work: defending poor saps unlucky enough to be caught up in the criminal justice system. With no discovery requests, interrogatories, and countless forms and red tape, parole hearings didn’t tie up a lot of my time. Scan the report, interview the prisoner, be on time at the hearing, and do my best for the convict-that was about it. Then I’d head back to the office to sit and stare at the walls until the next call came.

This morning, before I left Downey to drive to Chino, Rita Flores, my associate, and I had shared coffee and a couple of glazed. She’d brought the donuts to the office, placed the bag of sugary delights on my desk, and sat and crossed her legs, exposing a bit of thigh. My mind drifted from the legal matters at hand and focused on her. How could she remain so lissome and appealing when she had donuts with me here in the office almost every morning? Amazing.

Rita had been with me in our two-lawyer firm for almost two years now. She’d started as my secretary at the same time that I’d opened the office. Back then, she’d just graduated from law school, waiting for her bar results when she happened to walk by my storefront as I was hanging out my shingle. I took one look at the raven-haired Latina and hired her on the spot. When her bar results came in, I’d elevated her to associate status and prayed-with her new salary-that we’d have sufficient cash flow to stay in business.

But just because Rita was single, attractive, and smart, and I’d been divorced for years, didn’t mean there was any kind of office hanky-panky going on. She was young, twenty-seven, and at thirty-five I felt I was way too old for her. And anyway, she looked up to me as sort of a mentor; I guess you could call it that. How would it look, a mentor romancing his associate? But, I didn’t dwell on that thought, either. We had business to take care of.

We had spent almost an hour going over the Roberts case. According to the report supplied by the BPH, Al Roberts had been arrested and charged with Section 187, murder in the first. It seems that, back in 1945, he’d brutally strangled a woman. Her semi-nude body was found in a two-bit Hollywood motel room draped across a bed with a telephone cord twisted tightly around her neck. Her trachea had been crushed, her eyes bulged, and her face was frozen in a grimace of horror. There were traces of semen in her vagina, but there was no sign of rape, no bruising of the genital area. The physical evidence gathered at the scene was overwhelming. And it all pointed to the man who committed the crime: Al Roberts. But the jury never saw the mountain of evidence. There was no trial. He had confessed.

More bad news: the report also stated that he killed a man in cold blood a few days before he murdered the girl. The authorities surmised that the victim gave Roberts a lift when he’d been hitchhiking across the country en route from New York to Los Angeles. The man’s body was found off the side of a road somewhere on the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona. There was a deep gash on the side of the victim’s forehead, indicating foul play. The man had been dead for a few days when an Arizona Highway patrolman spotted the partially decomposed corpse lying behind a small outcropping of brush.

A warrant for Roberts’ arrest had been issued in 1945 by a Yuma County judge, but the Los Angeles DA charged him with the woman’s murder before he could be extradited to stand trial for the murder of the man who gave him a lift.

“Look at this, Jimmy.” Rita pointed to a notation in the report. “The police found the dead man’s Lincoln convertible parked in the lot at the same motel where the woman had been strangled.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And later, when they picked Roberts up on a vagrancy charge, he had on the dead man’s clothes. Christ, he even had Haskell’s wallet in his pocket.”

“A parole wouldn’t do him any good,” Rita said. “There must be an outstanding warrant in Arizona for murdering the guy who owned the car. If California turns him loose, they’ll snatch him and try him for first degree murder down there.”

“No statute of limitations on murder.”

“I know that.” Rita stood and turned and gave me a wink over her shoulder. “I’m a woman and maybe I’m not the hotshot Jimmy O’Brien, but I’m a lawyer too, you know.” She moved smoothly to the door.

Rita adjourned to her office to meet with a client, a drunk named Geoff with a deuce hanging over his head, and I set the report aside.

No use digging further into the technical details described in the appendix, I figured. The report supported their conclusions. I couldn’t use anything in it to mitigate his crimes. The guy killed two people in cold blood, and after spending almost thirty years locked up in a cage, it appeared that Roberts would still spend the rest of his days as a guest of the State. With what I had just read, the parole board would never cut him loose. Still, I was being paid to plead his case and I’d do the best I could for him.

I arrived at 14901 Central Avenue, a mile or so south of Chino’s downtown district, and turned onto a side road leading to the main gate. The penitentiary was huge, a few thousand acres surrounded by a double chain-link fence with three feet of coiled razor wire topping it. Through the fence, I could see row after row of buildings. Looking deeper into the complex, I saw a smokestack spewing a steady stream of white vapor. Probably steam coming from the massive boilers that would be needed to keep this small city functioning.