The Last Plea Bargain

by Randy Singer

  “I need immunity for this,” he said. “Complete immunity. Not that other crap.”

  He was referring to something called “use immunity,” which only guaranteed that we wouldn’t use what he told us to prosecute a crime against him. We could still prosecute if we could prove the crime independently.

  “I’m not promising anything or making any deals until I know what you’re selling.”

  Rafael leaned even closer to the glass, glanced up at LA, and then lowered his voice and called me a name that brought LA flying in over my shoulder.

  “Listen to me, you little punk,” he said. “You’ve got about two seconds to spill your guts, or we’re leaving, and you’re going back to jail to rot for the next fifteen years.”

  I held up a hand and nudged LA back. Rafael shot a taunting grin at LA.

  “We’re done here,” I said. I turned off the tape recorder and picked up the phone to have the deputy come get Rafael. “He’s got nothing,” I told LA.

  Rafael leaned back in his chair and ran his eyes over me from my head to my waist. He rested his elbows on the arms of his chair. “What if I was the one who provided Mr. Tate with the drugs?”

  The door behind Rafael opened, and a deputy stepped into the booth.

  This time I smirked. “That’s it?” I asked. “You wasted my time to tell me that? Why would anybody believe you?”

  The deputy moved in and took his place behind Rivera, but the inmate made no effort to rise. “I’m speaking hypothetically here. But what if I could testify about how much oxycodone and codeine and promethazine—” he rolled the words off his tongue, proud that he knew the types of drugs that had been found in Rikki Tate’s system, facts that the entire public knew as well—“I provided to Mr. Tate?”

  “Anybody can read a newspaper and figure out those were the drugs found in Rikki Tate’s blood. Your testimony would be destroyed on cross-examination.”

  “Let’s go,” the deputy said. “Get up.”

  Rivera still didn’t budge. “What if I knew that he only started getting those drugs six months ago? What if I could provide two other witnesses who knew I was getting drugs for Mr. Tate? Hypothetically speaking, again, what would that be worth?”

  This time, he had my interest. Nobody knew about our working theory that Caleb Tate had started pumping his wife full of the drugs just six months ago. The corroborating witnesses, on the other hand, were probably useless if they hadn’t seen Rivera give Tate the drugs. Their testimony would be struck as hearsay.

  “I sold him more drugs every month,” Rafael said. “I even gave him some morphine one time. Maybe you should test the hair for that.”

  The deputy grabbed the shoulder of Rivera’s jumpsuit and started pulling him up. “Move!”

  “Wait,” I said, raising a hand. LA huddled closer to my shoulder.

  I turned the recorder back on. “Say that again,” I demanded.

  “The part about the morphine?”

  “All of it.”

  He repeated his assertions for the recorder, and my mind raced through the possibilities. You learn early as a prosecutor that you don’t get to prove your case with Boy Scouts and nuns. Yes, convicted felons will say anything to get out of jail, but they also know a lot of things. And right now, Rafael Rivera was providing details he couldn’t possibly have known if they weren’t true.

  When he finished, I shut off the recorder and stared into his bloodshot eyes. I gave him the hardest look I knew how to give and waited a few seconds before speaking. “If one word of this gets back to Caleb Tate, it destroys any possibility of a deal. Got that?”

  “I get that,” he said confidently, as if he had just locked down a deal.

  “These witnesses—did they see you give the drugs to Tate, or did they speak to Tate themselves?”

  “Nah. But I told them about Tate when I bought the drugs.”

  “I want their names. And I’m going to check out every piece of information you tell me. If you’re playing games with me, you’ll regret the day you ever saw my face.”

  “Pretty face like that?” Rivera said arrogantly. “I doubt it.”

  I motioned to the deputy, and he took the scum out of my sight.

  Rivera gave me the creeps, but LA and I both tended to believe him. If Caleb Tate wanted to poison his wife, it would make sense to get the drugs from somebody like Rivera—somebody Tate could easily discredit in court. Nothing had been said in the press about our theory of Tate and the six-month drug window or about the slight trace of morphine in the fingernail samples. How would Rafael Rivera know about any of that?

  Yet the thought of putting Rivera on the stand as one of my witnesses made me sick. Even worse was the thought of rewarding him with a plea bargain for it.

  When I crawled into bed that night, I kept seeing the sneering face of Rivera leaning toward me, his vulgar comments running through my mind. I thought about the witnesses, themselves gang members, who had been slated to testify against him in a prior murder case. They had disappeared, and their bodies had never been found.

  How could I turn a man like that loose just to fulfill my personal vendetta against Caleb Tate?

  29

  Getting a meeting with Bill Masterson the next day was like trying to schedule an audience with the pope. He had some radio interviews and meetings with campaign advisers in the morning, then was heading south to Macon to speak at a luncheon for a local bar association. That evening he had to be in Savannah for a fund-raiser at the home of a wealthy socialite. “Can’t this be done by phone?” he had asked.

  “I really need to talk to you in person,” I replied.

  He gave me eighty-three miles—the distance from Atlanta to Macon on I-75. We were riding in the back of his RV, sitting at a small kitchen table, while a young intern from his campaign drove. The kid had country music playing in the cab, and that, along with the drone of the engine, gave me and the boss plenty of privacy.

  I had an outline I was following and got about five minutes into it when Masterson’s phone rang. He handled some campaign business and apologized. I picked up where I left off and a few minutes later was interrupted by another call. This time, when he finished, he put his BlackBerry on vibrate and holstered it.

  “I’m all yours. But I don’t need to hear about every piece of evidence. Just give me the punch line.”

  I launched into a quick summary of my conversation with Rafael Rivera, which finally seemed to grab his attention. When I explained that Rivera claimed he had started providing Tate with oxycodone and codeine just six months ago and also had provided him with morphine once, Masterson really perked up.

  After I finished, Masterson chewed on it for a minute, blew his nose, and wolfed down a few fish crackers straight from the cardboard box. “What’s your gut telling you?” he asked.

  “That Rivera is the kind of scum who would rat out his own lawyer.”

  Masterson nodded. Carrie Underwood was playing in the background. This was not the way I had pictured it in law school. Making strategic decisions about murder cases in the back of an RV heading south for a Macon barbecue.

  “You want to cut Rivera a deal?” Masterson asked.

  “Not really. I think he’s more dangerous than Tate.”

  Masterson grunted. “Maybe. But Rivera will screw up again. If we let him loose tomorrow, we’ll nail him again in six months. Plus, the media is not howling about Rivera.”

  I wasn’t so sure the boss was right about nailing Rivera. I thought about the undercover narcotics officer who had risked his life to put this man behind bars. And I also didn’t think the press should be a factor in determining which of these two men—Rivera or Caleb Tate—should go free. In fact, this whole conversation made me uncomfortable.

  “I’ve never cut a deal with someone like Rivera, and I’m not sure I could live with myself if I did.”

  Masterson lowered his eyebrows. More fish crackers, this time chased by a swig of Red Bull. “And you could live with you
rself if you don’t get enough to indict Caleb Tate?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Masterson rubbed his face and scratched the back of his head. He was used to these kinds of decisions, but that didn’t make them any easier.

  “Think you could get Rivera to serve two years and still testify?”

  “I doubt it. He thinks he’s got us. He’ll want to walk on this one.”

  “Sure would be nice to nail Tate, wouldn’t it?”

  “The thought has crossed my mind.”

  “Want some fish crackers?”

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  Masterson stood and stretched, bracing himself as the RV sped down the road. He sat back down. “This is why I get paid the big bucks.”

  He took out a Dictaphone and dictated a memo to his executive assistant while I listened. The memo reassigned the Rafael Rivera case from me to him. He copied Regina Granger, who oversaw the allocation of case files. He put down his Dictaphone.

  “You’re working too hard anyway. Decided you might have one case too many.”

  I wasn’t sure where he was headed, so I didn’t know whether to thank him or protest. But I could tell from the look on his face that he’d made up his mind. I had always admired that about my boss. I would agonize over things, analyzing first one side, then the other. Masterson would hear two or three minutes of explanation, cut to the chase, and make a call.

  “Just so you know, I’m gonna deal with Rivera. I need you to get a videotaped statement of his proffered testimony and double-check to make sure there hasn’t been a leak about the morphine. Our next grand jury starts Monday. I’ve got a campaign to run and an office in controlled chaos. Think you could get the grand jury to indict Tate?”

  I sat up straighter in my seat. We both knew that you could get a Milton County grand jury to indict Santa Claus for trespassing. Defense attorneys weren’t even allowed in the grand jury room. In fact, we probably could have indicted Tate even without Rivera’s testimony. But you don’t go to the grand jury unless you’re ready to go all the way.

  Despite my enthusiasm for indicting Tate, a small voice was telling me to protest. If I put up a big-enough fuss, Masterson would probably rethink dealing with Rivera. What if Rivera killed somebody when he should have been behind bars?

  But I kept my mouth shut. I wanted Caleb Tate so bad I could taste it. And I told myself that I wasn’t the one who would be cutting the deal with Rivera. My boss had taken it out of my hands.

  “Thought you’d never ask,” I said.

  “Good. We’ll hold a press conference once we get the indictment and bench warrant. Get your friend LA to stage a perp walk. Make sure every station in Atlanta covers it.”

  I could tell Masterson was having fun. He would make a good attorney general. There was nothing he liked better than a big fight with someone he considered truly evil.

  “I wish your dad could have seen this,” he said.

  He must have been reading my thoughts. And that’s the other thing I appreciated about Masterson. He came across as big and gruff and uncaring. But comments like that one displayed his true nature. And in that way, he reminded me of my dad.

  “Me too,” I said.

  30

  I had five days to get ready for the grand jury. I needed to push aside the emotions from my father’s death and pour myself into the Tate prosecution. During the day, I prepared my witnesses. I spent evenings in my war room at home, where the documents and exhibits mushroomed, overflowing to the kitchen and eventually the family room. Justice would beg to go out and play Frisbee, but I just turned him loose in the fenced-in backyard without me. I skipped my morning workouts. I stayed awake until two or three in the morning, drinking caffeine and preparing my case.

  At the most inopportune moments, I would break down and cry, loneliness ripping at my heart. I couldn’t plan for those moments, and they would always sneak up on me, unexpected, triggered by something small that reminded me of my dad.

  On Friday night, a thunderstorm swept through. The wind howled, bending the big pine trees in the backyard, causing them to sway back and forth. As a little girl, I was always afraid that the trees would snap and fall on our house, but my father had used it as a teaching point. “Those trees know how to bend with the wind, Jamie. You don’t have to worry about them. It’s the oak trees that don’t know how to bend—they’re the ones to worry about.”

  Now the pines were dancing in the storm, casting long shadows into the family room through the large picture window. I could almost hear my dad’s voice in the howl of the wind.

  On the day of the grand jury hearing, I drove my father’s 300M to court. Nobody had driven it since my dad passed away, but it seemed like a good way to honor him. I also carried his worn-out brown leather briefcase. He had carried the thing around for at least fifteen years, and the leather was dark on the handles from the residue of sweaty hands. There was stuff in the bottom—curled-up yellow stickies, some dead batteries, an old highlighter, pills that had escaped from a bottle. Who knew how long that junk had been in there?

  I took the briefcase into the grand jury room with me and vowed that it would stay with me every step of Caleb Tate’s trial.

  31

  At Southeastern Law School, Professor Mace James paced back and forth at the front of the large lecture hall, waxing eloquent about the cruel-and-unusual-punishment element of the death-penalty debate. One of Southeastern’s other law professors gave James this forum a few times every spring in a second-year constitutional law class. Mace usually taught only clinics and didn’t typically get a chance to impose his views on such a big class of students, so he always jumped at the opportunity. His friend on the faculty liked having the morning off.

  Mace was being his provocative self, telling stories about innocent death-row inmates who had been exonerated by DNA tests and arguing that the death penalty disproportionately impacted low-income black males.

  “We use the same method of execution that we use on the family dog when Fido gets old or bites one too many neighbors,” Mace said. “How many of you have actually witnessed an execution?”

  Nobody raised a hand.

  “Then let me describe it to you.”

  As he did, the back door to the lecture room opened, and Caleb Tate slipped into one of the seats. Mace gave him a surprised look but continued speaking. When he had finished speaking, Mace debated a few of the conservative students for five or ten minutes before calling it quits. A line of students came down front for a little post-class discussion, but Mace shut them down and excused himself.

  He walked up the steps to the back of the room and greeted Caleb. The two men couldn’t have been more different. Tate was wearing one of his finer charcoal-gray suits and a white monogrammed shirt. Not a hair on his head was out of place.

  Mace wore his favorite pair of jeans, with a hole in one knee that grew each time they were washed. Since it was April, he had on the flip-flops he would wear through the entire summer. He told people he had grown accustomed to them in prison and could never kick the habit. A backward baseball cap covered his bald pate.

  Tate surveyed the classroom, probably taking in the sight of the female law students. “How do I get a job like this?”

  “Get convicted of a felony and become a poster boy for rehab. Then the liberals will love you.”

  As soon as the words were out, Mace thought about Rikki Tate’s death. Caleb probably didn’t appreciate the felony wisecrack.

  “Actually, that’s why I’m here,” Tate said. “Can we go someplace and talk?”

  They made their way upstairs to Mace’s office, and Mace moved a pile of papers from one of the guest chairs. He sat behind his desk, moving to the side so his view of Caleb Tate wasn’t blocked by his large monitor.

  Caleb glanced at the dry-erase board on the wall with a series of numbers crossed out, announcing that only 106 days were left until Antoine’s execution. Appellate briefs and cases littered the fl
oor.

  The two men had established a decent rapport, considering the circumstances. Antoine Marshall had spent what little money he had on Caleb Tate’s services as trial counsel. Tate’s real motivation for taking the case was probably the enormous amount of publicity the case had generated. Then, once the verdict was in, the money was gone, and the case was old news, Tate had passed Antoine off to Mace’s free legal clinic and the pro bono program at Knight and Joyner.

  Often, appellate lawyers like Mace would base an appeal on the allegation that the defendant had received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial. Mace hadn’t made such a claim; Caleb Tate had been anything but ineffective. And Tate had seemed to appreciate the way Mace handled his former client.

  “You cut it a little close last time,” Tate said.

  “We aren’t out of the woods yet.”

  “He’s lucky to have you.” Tate crossed his legs and tried to get comfortable. “But that’s not why I’m here. It’s about Rikki.”

  Mace nodded. “I’m sorry about your loss,” he said.

  Caleb blew out a deep breath, but it didn’t seem to Mace like there was any sorrow attached to it. “You know they’re after me,” Caleb said. “I’ve had a running feud with Bill Masterson and Jamie Brock, and they think they can nail me on this. They’re presenting the case to the grand jury right now. They’ll have their indictment by tomorrow at the latest.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mace said, though he wasn’t sure what this had to do with him.

  “Yeah, not as sorry as me.” Caleb inhaled another deep breath and then said the last words Mace had expected. “I’d like to hire you as my lawyer.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to represent me. I like the way you’ve been bird-dogging Antoine’s case.”

  Mace had never lacked self-confidence, but he was realistic enough to know there had to be more to the story. Mace was an appellate lawyer who filed long-shot motions on behalf of death-row inmates. There were a hundred lawyers in Atlanta who could do a better job at the trial-court level than he could.