The Last Plea Bargain

by Randy Singer

  “I can’t believe they’re doing this for us,” I said.

  “Pretty cool,” Chris agreed.

  We had cleared the traffic on the loop and were heading south on I-75, riding in the back of the state police car, when the next call from Bill Masterson came. As always, the boss was blunt, but I could hear concern in his voice.

  “Jamie, I just got a call from the AG’s office. The Georgia Supreme Court granted a stay of execution until August 7. They want time to reevaluate the case in light of the Cooper affidavit. They’ve sent out a briefing schedule and a date for oral arguments.” He paused as I took the news in. “I’m sorry.”

  I stared straight ahead, feeling numb. I had thought I was ready for everything. I’d reminded myself a thousand times that this could happen. But the reality of it hit harder than I had imagined. I had marked this day months ago as a day when I would finally achieve closure. But here I was, getting abused by the system all over again.

  “You okay?” Masterson asked.

  “I don’t believe it” was all I could manage.

  “I know you’re disappointed,” Masterson said. “But I wouldn’t read too much into this. They just want time to consider it. That affidavit won’t invalidate your dad’s testimony.”

  It helped to hear Masterson sounding so confident. But the gut punch had left me nearly breathless. I knew I had to get off the phone before I started crying.

  “Okay. Thanks for letting me know.”

  Masterson apologized again before he hung up. Chris looked at me, and I could tell the blood had drained from my face. He slid next to me and put an arm around my shoulder. He had heard enough of the phone call to know.

  “Officer Hartley, I hate to ask you to do this, but could you take us back to our car?” I asked. My voice held up, though I could feel my throat clenching, the tears starting. “The Georgia Supreme Court just granted a stay.”

  I leaned into my older brother, and the tears started pouring down my face. Before I could stop, I was sobbing, even though I tried to be quiet and stoic.

  “I’m sorry,” Officer Hartley said from the front seat.

  At that moment I couldn’t even respond. Instead, I lowered my head onto Chris’s shoulder and allowed myself to cry.

  One of the prison guards found Mace talking on his cell phone in a conference room and handed him a single sheet of paper. Mace ended the call and quickly scanned the page.

  “He’s been a good prisoner,” the guard said, his voice low. “He prob’ly deserves this.”

  “Can I be the one to break the news to Antoine?” Mace asked.

  “Of course.”

  They met in the same room where Antoine had shown Mace his final statement just an hour or so earlier.

  “Troy Davis still has the record,” Mace said. “His stay came two hours before his scheduled execution.” Mace looked at his watch, then back at Antoine. “Yours came with a generous three hours and three minutes to go.”

  Antoine stared like a man who had seen a ghost. Perhaps his own? “What are you saying?”

  “The Georgia Supreme Court granted our stay. They’re taking four months to reconsider the case.”

  For the longest second, a stunned Antoine Marshall just stared at his lawyer, absorbing the news. His lips started trembling, and his eyes brimmed with tears. “Glory to God,” he said. Then he buried his face in his hands and started crying.

  12

  My father was the one who taught me how to be tough. When I was in elementary school, some of the boys called my father names because he was defending a man accused of killing his wife and children. My father argued the insanity plea—his client believed that the gods required a blood sacrifice—and my mother provided the psychiatric testimony. I got in a fight at school, and my parents found out about it.

  That night, my mother lectured me on why violence was never the answer. She grounded me and sent me to my room while my father stood by silently. Later, as I was stewing about being punished for defending my parents, my dad came in and sat down on my bed.

  “Did you win?” he asked, his voice a conspiratorial whisper.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Tell me about it.”

  After I got done describing the fight and getting some pointers about the next one, he kissed me on the forehead and got up to leave. “For the record,” he said, “I’m opposed to fighting too. But I do know this—if you’re going to fight, you’d better get in the first blow, and you’d better make it a good one. And, Jamie . . .”

  He waited, commanding my full attention.

  “If you get the other guy down, don’t let him up.”

  Maybe that’s why it was so hard to take my father off life support. He was a fighter. I just knew I would come to the hospital and there would be a twitch in the arms, a blinking of the eyes, my father slowly but surely getting up off the canvas one last time. You could never count him out.

  But after Antoine Marshall received his stay, I realized it was time to let Chris pull the plug. Even before Friday’s disappointment, I had worked through the phase of grief that denies reality. I wasn’t yet ready for my dad to die, but I knew I never would be. I had finally accepted the fact that he was never coming back.

  By the time I got to the hospital on Saturday morning, I had cried so much that I felt like I didn’t have any tears left. I was already weak from the grief of knowing what we had to do, as if somebody had squeezed all the energy and joy out of my heart. I met Chris and Amanda in the lobby, and we made our way to Dad’s room, where we met with Dr. Guptara and a few nurses. We asked for some time alone.

  I entered the room without using the hand sanitizer and stood on one side of the hospital bed while Chris and Amanda stood on the other. Holding Amanda’s hand, Chris told my father how much he loved him.

  “I’ll miss just picking up the phone and hearing his voice,” Chris said to Amanda and me. “I’ll miss watching him get down on the floor to play with the girls.”

  He wiped his eyes and placed a hand on Dad’s forehead. Tears rolled down his cheek as he closed his eyes and thanked God for giving us such a wonderful father. “I don’t know what I did to deserve a father like you,” he said to Dad after finishing the prayer. “And you deserve better than this.” He paused and swallowed hard. “Give Mom a hug for me when you see her.”

  All day long, I had been thinking about what I might say to my dad during these last few moments with him. But now it all seemed so pointless. The tears had welled up in my eyes as I listened to Chris, and now sorrow choked my words.

  I knew that the last words my dad had truly heard me say were the ones I’d said on the way out the door the morning of his second stroke. Because his first stroke had impacted his short-term memory, I had made a habit of writing things down so he could remember them. On the morning of his second stroke, I had reminded him to bring the trash can in after the city trucks came by. “Don’t forget to take Justice for a walk. I’ll probably be working late tonight, so don’t worry if I’m not home for dinner.”

  There was no hug. No I love you. My dad was already in his study, pretending to be hard at work.

  “See you later,” I’d said. “Have a good day.”

  And now, as we stood at his bed one last time, it seemed futile to try to make up for that. I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and looked at Chris. “I can’t say anything.”

  Chris nodded. “It’s okay. We’ll see him again one day. You can tell him everything then.”

  I leaned down and kissed my dad on the cheek, my fresh tears wetting his face. The nurses shaved him every day, but I could still feel the stubble from his beard. When I was little, he would wrestle with Chris and me and sometimes pin us down and tickle us or rub that stubble gently against our cheeks.

  The thought of it made my heart hurt. We hadn’t been a picture-perfect family, but we were doing our best until Antoine Marshall came along and blew it all away. I straightened and held my fist over my mouth
, trying to hold it together. I sniffed and nodded at Chris.

  I don’t remember him going out to get Dr. Guptara, but I remember the doctor taking my spot next to the bed, scribbling on his chart, telling us that this was the best thing for my dad, and unhooking the life-support machines.

  When Dad passed, I was standing near the foot of his bed, watching the monitors. It was amazing to see how quickly and quietly my dad’s heart stopped beating. A wave of grief and guilt washed over me as the finality of it sank in—we had just taken away all hope of a miraculous recovery. My knees buckled, and the room started spinning.

  Chris came over and gave me a long hug. Neither of us spoke. Eventually I moved back to the bed and gave my dad one last kiss on the forehead.

  Numb, I filled out the paperwork and assured Chris and Amanda that I would be all right.

  I don’t remember the drive home. I felt dead myself, as if someone had taken over my body and forced me to go through the motions of life while I floated outside myself in a pool of grief and despair. At home, Justice sensed immediately that something was wrong and tried his best to console me. He found a toy and nudged it against my leg—Wanna play? When I refused, he lay down next to me, placing his head gently on my feet, occasionally glancing up at me to see if I was okay.

  After a few hours, I put on my dry-wick running clothes and took Justice on a long run. I worked the hills hard until it felt like my lungs might explode. The pain helped dull some of the sorrow. When I finally arrived home, exhausted to the core, I sat on the steps of the front porch for a long time, my head down and Justice lying next to me. I remembered the good times with my dad, and the tears began to flow again, forming a little puddle between my feet. This time, I did nothing to stop them.

  After I showered, I put on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and one of my dad’s sweatshirts, then curled up on the couch. I had agreed to meet Chris at the funeral home at five. We had a memorial service to plan and burial details to discuss and an obituary to write, but I also knew that everything would get done with or without me.

  The house seemed more lifeless than ever, and I struggled with the thought of having to clean out my dad’s stuff and put the house on the market.

  “It was his time,” Chris had said at the hospital. “But nobody can take the memories.”

  On that point, Chris was right. So I went into my dad’s study and pulled out the book that he had read to me as a little girl. I snuggled with it on the couch, and Justice looked up at me with pleading eyes. I patted the cushion beside me, and he jumped up and curled next to my legs.

  For the next two hours, I was my daddy’s girl again. He was Aslan, and I was Lucy, and whenever he would try to put the book down and tell me it was time to go to bed, I would beg him to read just one more chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

  13

  I spent the next few days in a fog of grief and disbelief. In the South, we have lots of traditions that occupy our hands and minds in the days following a death that allow us to push the real mourning back by at least a week. On the day my dad died, Chris and I finalized the obituary and made plans for the funeral. The next day, Chris and Amanda helped clean the house so we could have a proper reception for family, friends, and well-wishers. Food arrived in massive quantities, as if the house were a staging area for disaster relief rather than the home of a family who had just lost a loved one.

  The greatest torture was the two hours I spent in the receiving line at the viewing. The line snaked out the door of the funeral home and seemed interminable. When people finally got to the head of the line to shake my hand and hug Chris, Amanda, and their two girls, they would speak in hushed voices and tell me how sorry they were, as if they might have somehow caused my dad’s death themselves. Everybody was ill at ease, and you could tell there were a million places they would rather be.

  Well, not everybody. The few exceptions brightened my night. One was an old law school classmate of mine named Isaiah Haywood. He had always been irreverent, loud, and obnoxious, and he obviously saw no reason to make an exception just because my father had died.

  “Thanks for coming,” I told Isaiah. As usual, he had decided to be the best-dressed man at the occasion. He was now working as the in-house attorney for a sports agency and was apparently making enough money to afford five-hundred-dollar suits.

  “I would have crawled here across broken glass just to see you in that black dress again,” he said. The comment made me blush. Isaiah had made similar remarks all through law school. I had rebuffed him every time, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

  “I really am sorry for your loss,” Isaiah said. “He must have been a great man to raise such a wonderful daughter.”

  I leaned in to give him a hug. It was one of the few that I judiciously parceled out that night.

  Two days later, we staged a funeral that was attended by a large part of the Atlanta legal community. My dad had been a minor legend. Chris did an amazing job eulogizing him and somehow kept his composure throughout. We tried to make it a celebration of my father’s life, and we generally succeeded. I cried only once, and that was when I saw Chris’s girls, ten-year-old Lola and eight-year-old Sophie, each put a rose on their granddaddy’s casket.

  I was touched by the showing from the DA’s office. Bill Masterson was there and had apparently decreed that every person not in trial should show up as well. They occupied two full rows, and it was heartwarming to see the prosecutors paying their respects to a defense attorney who had generally been a thorn in their sides.

  By the time the funeral ended, I was drained from the pain and protocol and just wanted to be alone. But that wasn’t possible, because I lived in my parents’ house, where we held the reception. My aunts and uncles all came, along with my closest friends from law school and work. Justice made the rounds, working the crowd for scraps of food and scarfing down anything left on plates that had been abandoned on coffee tables.

  When the crowd thinned out, Chris and I started telling stories about our dad, and everyone had a few good laughs.

  My friends and relatives cleaned the place before they left, and finally, at eight that evening, I hugged Chris and his family, assured them again that I would be fine by myself, and waved at them from the front porch as they pulled away. When I went back inside, the house was deathly quiet. I felt the loneliness begin to descend and knew I needed a distraction. We had done a wonderful job of honoring my dad at the funeral, and putting that ceremony behind me seemed to alleviate some of the pressure that had been building in my chest. I didn’t believe for a minute that my dad would want me to sit around and wallow in self-pity. His solution to pretty much everything was to work a little harder. And even though Masterson had told me that I should take at least a week off, I was anxious to get back to the office and start wreaking havoc on the bad guys again.

  I spent the evening organizing the Rikki Tate materials that I had. I took the burgundy tablecloth and silver candlesticks off our dining room table and spread the case file on it, converting the dining room into my Rikki Tate war room. As I’d hoped it would, the task temporarily took my mind off my loss. I needed to get back into a routine, and I was more determined than ever to see that Caleb Tate got what he deserved.

  Justice responded to the uptick in my mood, and we played a game of tug-of-war before we went to bed. That night, for the first time since my dad’s death, I kicked Justice off the bed and made him sleep in his traditional spot on a blanket on the floor.

  Jamie Brock was back. And it was time to restore a little discipline.

  14

  Our house sat on a small hill at the end of a cul-de-sac. When I looked out the picture windows of my dad’s study, I could see a good portion of the Seven Oaks neighborhood, and I felt like a queen in her medieval castle.

  After my dad’s first stroke, he would spend several hours a day in there, acting busy, though he could no longer practice law. Many times, when I walked by the study on my way out the fr
ont door, he would just be sitting at his desk, staring out the windows, deep in thought. There would be a half-full cup of coffee next to his computer, getting cold. When I got home that night, I would dump it down the sink and put the cup in the dishwasher. Sometimes there would be two or three half-full cups scattered around the study, all apparently forgotten and abandoned.

  On the morning after my dad’s funeral, I took his spot and drank coffee at his desk, gazing out the windows. Neighborhood kids were waiting for the school bus at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, their parents standing with them, chatting and enjoying the beautiful spring day. I yearned for a life of normalcy like that. And I wished my father were still sitting in this chair, even with the weakened mind and altered personality that had followed his first stroke. I struggled to grasp the finality of everything—the hard fact that I would never see him in this house again, never be able to gain courage and strength from just knowing he was here.

  After I finished my coffee, I shook off the melancholy and moved to the Rikki Tate war room. I removed the pictures from the walls and set up an easel in the corner. There were some decorative tables lining the walls, and I cleared the tops of those as well.

  I taped a few pictures of Rikki to a side wall and sat down at my computer to start outlining her biography. This was the unique perspective I brought to cases like this. I would look at things through the victim’s eyes—study her habits, her friends, and her personality. I would practically become Rikki Tate so that I could understand what she was thinking and why someone might want her dead. Like others, I would also study the suspect. But big chunks of my time would be spent on the victim, something other law enforcement types didn’t emphasize enough.

  Rikki’s life read like a Shakespearean tragedy—from an abusive childhood to Vegas to an Atlanta escort service and ultimately to her marriage to Caleb Tate. I reviewed the pleadings from the civil lawsuits she had filed trying to get her topless pictures removed from the Internet. I read online reports about the angst this created among the purveyors of porn. I searched for a connection between them and Caleb Tate.