The Last Plea Bargain

by Randy Singer

  “Jamie Brock is one of my best friends,” he told the reporter. “I can guarantee you one thing—that woman does not have a racist bone in her body. I first met her in law school. And racist girls don’t usually go out with dudes like me. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly the redneck type.”

  Isaiah and I had been close friends. In truth, we had hung out together a lot, but I had refused every offer of a date. Yet I wasn’t about to call the station to clarify.

  “And I find it insulting that one of the other television networks would let this white criminal-defense attorney from an all-white law firm hide behind racism as if his people had somehow been the victims of lynchings.” Isaiah was getting fired up now, his neck muscles tight. The camera zoomed in so viewers could better see the fire in his eyes.

  “I’ve done some checking on Mr. Tate, and I found that his firm only employs two African Americans. One is a personal driver for Mr. Tate and some of his high-paid partners. The other is a courier.”

  Isaiah took a breath, and the reporter interjected: “Why is that relevant?”

  “Because a guy who grew up in Buckhead with rich white parents and now runs with the country-club crowd shouldn’t be allowed to trot out the race card against a young attorney whom I know to be one of the most tolerant and open-minded people I’ve ever met.”

  The reporter wrapped up the interview with a cutaway line to the anchor while Isaiah posed for the camera. I wanted to kiss the TV. Instead, I called Isaiah immediately.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “I got your back, Jamie. Just make sure you get a conviction.”

  At midnight, I got my second unannounced visitor of the night. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and Justice went crazy when he heard the doorbell. I jerked awake, and my heart banged against my chest. I tried to collect my thoughts, separating the nightmare I had been experiencing from the reality I had just rejoined. I shuffled to the front door and turned on the porch light.

  It was Chris.

  I opened the front door, and Justice mauled him.

  I had to blink twice to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming. Chris lived several hours away in the mountains.

  “Thought you could use a little company tonight,” he said. “Got any extra rooms?”

  He came into the hallway, and I gave him a big hug. But before I could say anything, before I could even thank him for coming, I started crying. I put my head on his shoulder and let the tears flow. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether I was missing my father or thankful for my brother or mad at everything that had happened at work. I just knew I had to let it out.

  “Okay,” I said when I finally pulled myself together. “I needed that. You can go back home now.”

  26

  Chris didn’t go home. Having him in the house overnight allowed me to get a good night’s sleep. Knowing how much he hated being away from Amanda and the girls made it even more moving that he had made the trip. The next morning, I took Justice out for a run and struggled to complete my short three-mile course. The emotional trauma of the last few weeks had caught up with me.

  After the run, Chris and I ate breakfast together, and he told me about his trip to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. Although I wished he had filled me in before going, I was proud of my brother for standing up to Mace James and Antoine Marshall.

  After breakfast, I put on my black pin-striped skirt and jacket that I’d always considered my best power suit and went a little heavier than normal on the makeup. I used some concealer to get rid of the dark circles under both eyes and strapped on a stylish new watch I had bought last Christmas. On the way out the door, I hugged Chris and thanked him for coming.

  “Do you need anything?” he asked. I knew he needed to get back to Rabun.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  At work, I went about my normal business of handling the morning docket, which consisted mostly of motions to suppress and bond revocations. Though nobody said anything about the prior night’s news report, I could tell that most of the defense attorneys were happy I was getting my turn in the hot seat. By eleven thirty I was back in my office, working on a memorandum to Bill Masterson on the issue of Caleb Tate’s polygraph test. I knew that Masterson wouldn’t be worried about the admissibility of the test into evidence—the law was clear on that. But I was concerned that he might give it too much weight in his evaluation of the case.

  Because most law enforcement agencies rely on polygraph tests as one of their investigative techniques, the reliability of the test tends to be greatly overestimated by cops and prosecutors. I knew better, based in part on my experience with Antoine Marshall’s appeal, where the admissibility and reliability of the test had been major issues.

  In my memo to Masterson, I cited a National Academy of Sciences report showing that fifty-seven of the eighty research studies supporting the reliability of polygraphs came to their conclusions using flawed data. The NAS study concluded that the level of a polygraph’s reliability was “greater than chance, yet short of perfection.” There was a high percentage of false positives, and at the same time some famous criminals had beaten polygraph tests on more than one occasion. Aldrich Ames, for example, a notorious Soviet spy working for the CIA, passed with flying colors—not once but twice.

  I also explained how people could defeat the test by manufacturing a crisis during the control questions. Some suspects would force themselves to think about their most painful real-life experience while others would bite the insides of their cheeks so the pain would increase their breathing and heart rate. These same persons would calm themselves when facing the relevant questions and make sure they kept their breathing under control. I thought Tate had probably taken the test a few times off air, mastered these techniques, and then subjected himself to the televised test we had watched.

  I proofread the memo a couple of times and added a final paragraph stating that I knew I was no longer on the case but hoped this might help whoever took over.

  That afternoon, I took the memo to court so I could personally deliver it to Masterson. I had to give the guy credit—while other DAs delegated all of the cases to their top assistants, Masterson insisted on trying some of the more-serious felonies. On this day, he was handling a murder charge against a man accused of killing a prostitute. Granted, he was probably getting some political mileage out of the case, but at least he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. In fact, Masterson looked like he was rather enjoying himself.

  The defense attorney used a lot of electronic exhibits and relied heavily on PowerPoint during his closing argument. But Masterson just paced around the courtroom and thundered against the defendant—old school and very effective. It was the kind of dominating performance that I hoped to be able to replicate one day. I found myself studying his style as I had done so many times before. When and why does he pause? How does he use voice inflections? How does he incorporate the testimony and exhibits into what he’s saying? I knew I had to maintain my own style in the courtroom, but I was humble enough to realize that I could learn a lot from an old pro like Bill Masterson.

  When the jury retired to deliberate, Masterson came back to where I was seated and greeted me warmly. I was always a bundle of nerves while the jury was out deliberating, but Masterson appeared ready to move on to the next thing as if the verdict was a foregone conclusion.

  “I did a little memo on the reliability of polygraph tests,” I said, handing him the paper.

  He glanced at it and gave it back to me. “Can you e-mail me an electronic copy?”

  “Sure,” I said, a bit disappointed. I’d been hoping we could at least discuss it.

  “You got a minute?” Masterson asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He led me out of the courtroom and down the hallway to a small conference room. We talked for a few minutes about his closing argument. I was sitting up straight in my chair while Masterson slouched back, draped over his chair
, legs crossed at the ankles. He loved it when other attorneys came to watch him in court, and he was eager to get my evaluation. “What did you think of my closing? Anything you would have done differently? What’s your take on the jury?”

  I answered his questions, and then he abruptly changed direction.

  “What did Caleb Tate say to you before you told him you wanted to lynch him?”

  “Well . . . again, I don’t think I used that particular word. But he basically told me that if we tried to indict him for the murder of his wife, it would get ugly for him and for us. I took it as a threat.”

  Masterson grunted and I got his message—prosecutors need to have thick skin. “You sure he didn’t call you some kind of name?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It would help if he cussed you out.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “Okay, have you ever used the N-word or made any racial slurs against anybody?”

  “You know me better than that.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “No. Never.”

  “This guy Isaiah Haywood did a nice job for you last night.”

  “I saw.”

  Masterson stretched a little. “You think they’ll find him guilty?”

  “Caleb Tate?”

  Masterson laughed. “No, the defendant in the case I just tried.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never seen you lose one yet. Some would say you cherry-pick ’em.”

  This made Masterson smile. “You get to be DA, you can cherry-pick ’em too.”

  “No thanks. I hate politics.”

  Masterson checked his watch and apparently decided he needed to get back to the courtroom. “I guess that wraps it up,” he said.

  I furrowed my brow. I was having a hard time keeping up with him today. “Wraps what up?”

  “My investigation. I’ll probably wait a few days before I issue an official report.”

  “That’s it?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly. “That’s your whole investigation?”

  He gave me a sly look. “Are you saying I shouldn’t trust you?”

  “No, it’s just—”

  “Seems to me that you’re still the best prosecutor for the job. If I let defense attorneys disqualify every prosecutor who stood up to them, it’d be impossible to run this office.”

  It felt like somebody had lifted a hundred pounds from my shoulders. “Are you saying—?”

  “You’ll get my report in a few days,” he interrupted. “I’m just giving you fair warning that you shouldn’t close your file out.”

  I wanted to give the guy a hug, but I decided to play it professional. Though I stayed calm on the outside, the party had started inside. “You won’t be sorry.”

  He shrugged it off. “Next time, Jamie, keep your mouth shut.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Later that week, LA called with results from the fingernail tests. The levels of oxycodone and codeine in the fingernail segments that represented the last six months of Rikki’s life were high, matching the hair results. But the levels from the fingernail segments that represented the year before that were barely detectable. Taken as a whole, the results indicated that she had probably started taking the drugs in earnest about six months or so prior to her death. “It might have been seven months,” LA said, “which would explain the trace amounts in the older segments of her fingernails. Or she might have taken a few pills off and on during those earlier months. But nothing serious until the last six months of her life.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Baby, that’s way past good.”

  I smiled. It was our first major break.

  “And one more thing. The older fingernail extracts also contained trace amounts of morphine.”

  “Morphine?” I asked.

  “Could be a result of heroin use,” LA said. “But O’Leary doubts it. When heroin breaks down in the body, it turns into morphine and some other metabolite. The lab didn’t find that other metabolite. Makes O’Leary think that somebody slipped her morphine.”

  “But not recently? More than six months ago?”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  27

  That weekend, I went to the gym with Dr. Gillespie for what we both knew was a therapy session. During my college years, I competed at a national level in kayaking and became a workout fanatic. During law school, I worked part-time as a trainer at a downtown gym. So it came as no shock that the big and somewhat-awkward psychiatrist had a hard time keeping pace with me.

  I pushed him pretty hard because he needed it. But that didn’t keep him, while catching his breath between exercises, from asking a lot of questions about how I was doing. I pretty much blew him off while we worked out, but afterward we grabbed bottles of water and sat down in an aerobics room that was not being used. Leaning against the wall, sweat pouring from his body, Gillespie told me to put the ambulance on speed dial.

  He asked me again how I was coping with my father’s death, and I told him the truth—not very well. Nightmares about the shooting from twelve years ago were coming back with a vengeance and I had been sleeping very little. In fact, I hated going to bed at night because I knew the nightmares would start. Gillespie said this didn’t surprise him, given the fact that I was still living in the same house where my mother died.

  He suggested some sleeping pills, and I politely listened but had no intention of following through. I had always been careful about what I put into my body, and even now, fighting with nearly debilitating sorrow, I was determined not to become dependent on chemicals just to survive.

  I eventually managed to shift the conversation away from me and to my theory about Rikki Tate’s death. “I know you can’t discuss your sessions with her, but we do have your notes,” I told Gillespie. “And we’ve learned a few other things.”

  I told Gillespie about the recent developments in the case, everything except the fingernail-testing evidence. We discussed the polygraph test, and I told him how I thought Tate passed.

  He wasn’t buying it.

  “Caleb Tate is a control freak. Even if he practiced beating the machine and had done it four times in a row, he would have known that there was a substantial chance of getting a bad result on live TV, particularly with stakes that high and the adrenaline pumping. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would take that chance.”

  I stood and started stretching. First one arm, then the other. I suggested that Gillespie might benefit from a little postworkout stretching too.

  He was now seated on the floor and made no effort to move.

  “So what’s your explanation for the test?” I asked.

  “I’d check out Dr. Feldman,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of time in my professional career studying the polygraph and even testified about it a few times. If the test is administered right, it’s not as easy to beat as you think. I see three possibilities. Either Feldman did a poor job, Caleb Tate took an uncharacteristic risk, or maybe Feldman is not as much on the up-and-up as his reputation suggests.”

  I sat down, spread my legs, and leaned toward my right leg, stretching the hamstring. I liked the way Gillespie was thinking. Like me, he was committed to the victim and therefore wouldn’t even consider the reason some people thought the polygraph test came back negative—because Rikki Tate had died of an accidental overdose.

  28

  Tuesday evening I received a text message from LA. Can u come to the jail? ASAP?

  What’s up? I texted back.

  An interesting development in Tate. Let’s talk when u get here.

  I changed from shorts to jeans. Black short-sleeved T-shirt. A pair of cute black patent-leather flats. I fussed with my hair a little and told myself I wasn’t doing it for LA. I was out the door in five minutes.

  By eight thirty I was sitting in a small interview booth. LA stood behind me, and a surly-looking Rafael Rivera sat in front of me on the other side of the glass. We could have met wi
th Rivera in an interrogation room, but LA didn’t want to make Rivera feel too important.

  The gangster sat there, insolent as ever. His facial hair had grown, his dreadlocks were fraying, and his eyes were red with hate. I hadn’t noticed it on the day Caleb Tate handled his bond hearing, but Rivera’s eyebrows seemed to come together in a permanent sneer. I was certain that he blamed me for the judge’s denying him bond.

  “I understand that you wanted to meet with me without your attorney present,” I said, trying to sound as calm and authoritative as possible. There was nothing this man could do to me now.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I need to record our conversation and ask you a few preliminary questions.” I took out a digital recorder and placed it next to the small round metal grate at the bottom of the glass that allowed us to hear each other.

  Rivera glanced at it, then returned his stare to me. “Okay.”

  I turned the recorder on and confirmed that he understood his right to legal counsel and that he had waived that right for purposes of this meeting. When I finished with the preliminaries, I gave him the floor. “You called me all the way down here. This better be good.”

  Rivera glanced at LA, who probably nodded or gave him some other signal. Then Rivera turned back to me, like he was sizing me up, and leaned closer to the metal slits.

  “Don’t worry, baby. It’s good. I’ve got what you need to convict Caleb Tate.” He said it slowly, confidently, biting off each word. “But I need to know what’s in it for me.”

  I kept a poker face. “You’ve been around long enough, Mr. Rivera, to know that’s not how it works. First of all, you came to the wrong person if you want to cut a deal. And second, even if I did cut deals, which I don’t, I’d make you tell me everything you have first—it’s called making a proffer—before I decide whether it’s something I can use.”

  We sat quietly for a moment, staring at each other. I already knew the gist of what he wanted to tell me, but I had to hear it from him, not LA.