Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  “Yes.”

  “I just don’t think he did it.”

  “Is that an opinion? Intuition?”

  “If you mean do I know something, the answer is no. Like I say, just a … It’s probably not worth anything.”

  We sit without talking for a few seconds, Klepp looking down at his drink. Then he leans toward me so we don’t have to yell. “Let me ask you a question. You came here tonight to talk to me, didn’t you?” He’s no fool.

  “Yes.”

  “And Herman?”

  “My investigator.”

  “You’re thinking I’m the weak link?” he says.

  “I’m thinking you wanted to say some things that day we met at the conference room.”

  “You picked the wrong person. I can’t help you. I don’t know anything. The fact is I’m outside the loop. If you come back to Isotenics in a month, I probably won’t be there.”

  Havlitz is pushing him out the door.

  “I don’t know how long I’ve got. I’ve been filling out applications, looking for another job,” he says. “I don’t know if Chapman’s death had anything to do with the company. That is what you want to know, isn’t it?”

  I nod.

  I suspect Herman can’t hear a word we’re saying, but from his expression he can tell we’re getting to the nitty-gritty.

  “That day in the office, before Havlitz cut you off, you said Chapman kept personal control over the IFS project?”

  “Right.”

  “She didn’t delegate any of it to anybody else?”

  He shakes his head. “She had programmers working on it, of course, a good-sized team, but she was the one who held all the pieces. She was the one who knew how they fit. The final architecture was hers.”

  “That sounds like a heavy load if she’s running the company,” I say.

  “She had a problem with delegation,” says Klepp. “Whenever there was any problem she grabbed it, tried to fix it herself.”

  “So she still wrote software?”

  “Sometimes. Not often,” he says. “It got worse after Walt Eagan died. My predecessor at R & D. He passed on of cancer last year. Eagan walked on water as far as Chapman was concerned. Part of my problem,” he says. “How do you fill shoes like that?”

  “Did Eagan have any part of IFS?”

  He shakes his head. “They’d been together since the beginning, the days back in Virginia. Walt oversaw all the other government contracts for software, anything that wasn’t defense. We do stuff on education, motor vehicle licensing, elections, mostly special programs for number crunching ordered up by the states or Congress. Walt had been trying to wrap up a package on elections. Some district boundaries for Congress. When he died, there was a lot of chaos. Things started falling through the cracks.

  “Chapman was under a lot of pressure, in part because she wouldn’t let anybody else help. Toward the end, Walt was in a lot of pain. I know he was on a lot of medications. He was trying to work as long as he could. I don’t know why, except that he was devoted to Chapman. But at the end he was making mistakes.

  “When he died, I tried to pick up the slack. I told her some of the stuff he’d done, that the numbers didn’t add up. The software was out of sync with the raw census data. I told her it wasn’t a problem, I’d take care of it. She told me to put the file on her desk, she’d do it. The company was heading downhill because the CEO was getting lost in details. She couldn’t let go. It’s the way she was.”

  “I was told that toward the end she was having a lot of problems with people at the Pentagon over the IFS program,” I say.

  “You mean General Satz?”

  “Yes. Did you ever meet him?”

  He shakes his head. “She wouldn’t let anybody near him. Especially at the end. Like he had the plague. Chapman seemed almost paranoid about it.”

  “Do you have any idea what the problem was between them?”

  He shakes his head, shrugs. The music is getting louder. “Shouting matches over the phone, I know. People in the outer office heard little bits. Chapman had a temper and she could lose it. What I was told, Satz coulda heard her yelling in Washington without picking up the phone. It was the morning after one of the networks did a piece on IFS and the threat to personal privacy. They mentioned Isotenics and used some file footage showing Chapman entering the Pentagon for a meeting with some brass. I guess she felt the Defense Department could handle the heat. Nobody was gonna put the Pentagon out of business.

  “But a private company like Isotenics, that was another matter. Our stock dropped like a rock after the story. She had her secretary place a call to Satz. I was told he avoided her for two days.” He smiles and takes a drink. “She finally ran him down, screaming about how they were making her and her company look like they were doing nothing but making spyware, like she didn’t know how Satz and Company were gonna use her product. Lady was funny,” he says. “She didn’t care what you did so long as the result was good. But if she got caught in the crosshairs, baby, you better look out.”

  “You say there were people in the outer office who overheard—”

  “Harold!”

  The music may be loud, but the tone in the voice causes Herman to jump in his seat. When I turn I see the red hair and the fire in her eyes. Karen Rogan is standing on the level just below us, a few feet away, looking through the railing with an expression that could melt iron.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  “Karen.” Klepp knows he’s in trouble.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she says. “And you …” She looks at me. “You know something? Harold has a family. If Victor finds out he’s sitting here talking to you, he’s going to get fired. And you’re going to be responsible.”

  I can tell by the look on Herman’s face, he’s wondering who opened the door and let the wildcat in.

  “We were just having a drink,” I tell her. “Would you like to join us?”

  She gives me a look to kill.

  “I gotta go,” says Klepp. “Excuse me.” He slides toward Herman, who gets up to let him out.

  Karen moves toward the steps and waits for him to come down, then turns to give me one more death stare over her shoulder as they walk away.

  “Give me a second.” I leave Herman at the table and head after them. I catch Karen Rogan by the arm as she’s sliding through the crowd. She turns toward me, then jerks her arm out of my hand. Klepp doesn’t seem to notice. He keeps moving toward the door.

  She stands on the dance floor looking at me with an expression that says she’d like to hit me.

  “Klepp had no idea I was going to be here,” I tell her. “I was just getting deep background.”

  “Good for you. You know, Havlitz comes in here all the time. Harold’s career is hanging by a thread. If Victor sees him talking with you, he’s finished. Harold is a nice guy. I don’t want to see him lose his job and, worse, get blackballed in the industry. It’s a very small world,” she says. “Tell me you’re not going to call him as a witness!”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, my client’s life is dangling by a thread. I’m afraid I can’t make promises I might not be able to keep.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  She doesn’t believe me.

  “He’s having trouble filling Eagan’s shoes. Chapman wouldn’t let him take over and do the work when his boss died. She was a control freak. I don’t think any of this is classified information.” I don’t mention the shouting match between Chapman and Satz over the phone. My guess is that Karen Rogan, being Chapman’s gatekeeper, probably already knows about it. This may have been where Klepp got the information in the first place. “I’ll tell you what I will do. I won’t say anything to anyone about my conversation with him, and if I can avoid it—if I can find the information I’m looking for elsewhere—I won’t call him as a witness.”

  She softens just a little around the eyes. “You’ll leave him alone?” />
  “If I can. Is there any chance that we could have a drink sometime, perhaps over dinner? Somewhere private, out of the way?”

  “If you’re thinking I can tell you anything, you’re wrong,” she says.

  “You can’t blame me for trying to eat my way up the evidentiary food chain.”

  She smiles a kind of bewitching and bemused grin. “If you can spare Harold, I’m sure his family would appreciate it. And so would I.” Then she turns and walks away.

  Herman comes up behind me. He has already settled up with the waitress, signed the tab. “I suppose that means our basketball date with Harold is off?” he says.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  By all accounts, General Gerald Satz is an intensely private man, so much so that three efforts to find him in order to serve process, a summons to compel his attendance to testify at Ruiz’s trial, have failed. Harry has called the process servers in Washington and told them to try again.

  This morning I am on my way to a meeting I have been dreading for two days, putting it off, hoping that we would come up with something hard by way of evidence.

  Two weeks have passed since the light show at the bar, my meeting with Harold Klepp, and I have nothing to show but rumors and innuendo that Chapman was having serious disagreements with the Pentagon. A couple of newspaper articles: and wire service stories out of D.C. are nibbling around the edges as if they can smell a scandal in the dark holes of the military-government complex like sulfur from fumaroles, but so far there is no fire, nothing but hot gas.

  Everything at Isotenics has been closed to us, battened down tight since my meeting with Klepp. We have tried to find home phone numbers for several of the key employees at the company to see if they might be able to shed light on what Klepp told me about Chapman’s battles with Gerald Satz. All of them were unlisted, including Karen Rogan. Herman tried to find a home address for Rogan and came up dry. Ordinarily he could do a skip trace and find an address in a heartbeat. According to Herman, he has seen this only once before. His guess is that Rogan, Klepp, and the others probably have high-level security clearances from the government. This is no doubt required of most of the software wizards and executives at Isotenics, anybody who might touch documents or see information dealing with IFS.

  This morning, alone, in a rare drizzle that fits my mood, I trudge from the parking lot to the jail. Fortunately it is early. There is only one television crew out in front of the entrance. My guess is they have probably been tipped off by one of the guards that I would be coming by to see Ruiz.

  As I approach the steps, the camera lights snap on. The reporter sticks a microphone in my face. “Is it true that there is a deal in the works, that you’re trying to negotiate a plea bargain to save Emiliano Ruiz’s life?”

  I say nothing. Instead I brush past him and into the public area of the jail on the first floor. Here several other reporters are waiting with notepads. The same question. Harry had already heard rumors that Templeton has been leaking information. Now we have the confirmation.

  I put my briefcase and overcoat on the conveyer to be X-rayed and searched, then pass into the air lock. A guard sitting at the imaging machine inside the bulletproof booth can see everything on a cathode-ray screen, including my private parts. The electric bolt on the door behind me locks. For a couple of seconds I am trapped inside the small chamber with its inch-deep acrylic windows and doors all set in stainless-steel frames, metal sufficiently thick to outfit the bridge of a battleship. The lock on the door in front of me snaps open and I enter the inner sanctum.

  I grab my briefcase and coat and follow one of the guards, who escorts me to the elevator and rides with me to the upper floor, where I am handed off to another uniformed guard.

  When I get to the concrete conference room, Emiliano is already waiting for me, sitting at the table inside, looking at me through the window in the door. The waist chain and leg restraints have been removed, but his hands are cuffed as usual.

  This morning I have brought cigarettes for him, though I don’t smoke. I show the pack and the book of matches to the guard outside the door. He checks the matches, then feels the package of cigarettes, squeezing it in his hand.

  “He can smoke inside the room, but take them with you when you go. We’ll search him before we take him back. I don’t want to find the matches,” he says.

  Matches and cheap butane lighters, once common in jails, have been banned. A small plastic lighter in a breast pocket can become a lethal explosive if somebody figures a way to ignite the tiny fuel tank. Ignition sources for cigarettes are now confined to the dayroom of the jail and carefully monitored by staff. They favor small battery-powered electric lighters. In some counties smoking is not allowed anywhere inside the jail.

  The guard opens the door and I step inside. I flip the cigarettes and the matches to Ruiz, who catches them on the fly even with his hands cuffed.

  “Thanks.” He smiles.

  Emiliano seems to have warmed to us in the months since our first meeting. “You called the meeting. I hope you have some good news. Any word on when I can see my kids again?”

  “Probably next week.”

  “Good. I’ve been missing them—a lot,” he says. “It’s funny.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When you’re locked up, you have time to think. All the regrets in life seem to pile up. At the top of the list are my kids. Time was, I was overseas, posted in another state, I didn’t see them for months. Guess I was so busy I didn’t notice. You could say I’m a lousy father,” he says.

  “That’s not true. I’ve seen you with your son.”

  “Richie. Yeah.” He smiles as if he were dreaming, transporting himself to a happier time and place. “He’s a good kid. Good baseball player. We used to do a lot of that”—his expression returns to the present—“when he was little.”

  I have seen him with his son. The boy is twelve going on thirteen. Dark hair and large brown eyes, a face that has seen too much personal pain for his tender years. And yet, when they are together, his son’s face lights up like a lantern. You can see it in his eyes. The last time they visited, after the boy left, Ruiz, a man who has been shot at least four times, judging from wounds that I can see and count—a man who no doubt has seen friends killed in combat—began to cry. Tears ran down his cheeks until he saw me. Then he turned and rubbed his face with his manacled forearms. When he turned to look at me again, he had the same untouched and dead eyes that I remembered from our first visit.

  “Tracy won’t come in to see me. Can’t say I blame her,” he says. “But she does brings the kids. Tell her I do appreciate it. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “You won’t forget?”

  “No.”

  Tracy is Emiliano’s former wife. They have been divorced nearly six years. She has remarried and lives in L.A. County to the north with her new husband. She called the office two weeks ago to ask how the case was going. I told her I couldn’t discuss it. Then she got to the point. She wanted to know, in the event that Emiliano is convicted, if her new husband can adopt the two children. I told her she would have to talk to another lawyer, that I had a conflict of interest. Since that phone call I haven’t had the heart to tell Emiliano.

  I sit down at the table across from him. “We have to talk.”

  He is all eyes, looking at me as he lights up.

  “The prosecutor has made an offer.”

  “A deal?” He holds the match an extra beat, burning the end of the cigarette, then shakes the match until it goes out. The cigarette dangles between his lips.

  “If you’re willing to plead guilty to one count of first-degree murder, they will drop the special circumstances.”

  He looks at me, a question mark, a little shake of the head, and takes the lit cigarette from his lips. “I don’t understand.”

  “What they’re offering is life without possibility of parole. What’s known in the trade as an L-WOP. They would drop the capital cha
rges. You would avoid the death penalty.”

  He looks at me, thinks about this for a moment, then takes a drag on the cigarette.

  “Sooo, how much time would I have to do?”

  “You don’t understand. It means what it says. You would stay behind bars for life. There would be no parole. No release date. You would be there until you die.”

  This seems to settle on him like a boulder. Ruiz has always seen his fate in terms of black and white, darkness and light. He would either be convicted and executed, or acquitted and set free. He has been left to contemplate death for months now, a slow, choreographed execution, strapped to a gurney, a machine pumping lethal fluids into a vein in his arm while witnesses look on from behind a glass partition. This thought has not seemed to move him. But the concept of life without the possibility of parole is an entirely new matter.

  “Why would they do this if they thought I killed her?” he says.

  “Because it’s a certain result. The state avoids the cost and time it takes for a trial and all of the appeals that would follow if they get a capital conviction. And politically, for them, the stakes are high. If they shoot and miss—if you walk with all of the publicity surrounding the trial—it’s the kind of case that’s likely to be remembered come election time.”

  There are no doubt other reasons for the offer but I don’t go into all of them. I don’t want to sugarcoat it. They are all long shots. There is the chance that, given Ruiz’s background, we will be able to show the defendant in a positive light: his years of military service, injuries and wounds that he suffered—some of them perhaps psychological—what the man has endured while defending his country. These are things that could make the defendant more sympathetic in the eyes of the jury. Beyond this is the fact that the victim was a wealthy woman with all the toys that money could buy. The DA knows we will have no choice but to put the dead on trial, and in Chapman’s case there is a universe of unknowns behind that door. Anything and everything that Chapman did over the last ten years, if we can drag it into the ring of relevance, is going to come out. If there is any doubt in the minds of jurors as to whether Emiliano did the crime, juror attitudes toward the victim could steer the state’s case into a ditch—could being the operative word.