Double Tap

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 charges. 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.

“What do you think I should do?” He looks at me through a blue haze curling toward the ceiling.

You can hurdle the bar exam and sally forth to spend decades in front of the bench. You can deflect thunderbolts tossed by gods in black robes and do battle daily with other lawyers. But in the end it is this question posed by someone in the position of Emiliano Ruiz that is the riddle most feared by every attorney I have ever met.

“We’re not talking dollar damages,” I tell him, “or whether you should do a few years of hard time as opposed to going to trial. We’re talking about your life.”

“You haven’t answered my question.” There is no fear visible in his eyes as he says it. It’s not that Ruiz is cavalier about death. If I had to guess, he has confronted the issue before and more than once, though maybe not on the certain level of capital punishment, which in this state is slow and tortuous at best, taking years to grind out appeals. But there is no question in my mind that Ruiz is a man who has studied closely the dimensions of his own mortality and done so enough times that, while what lies beyond the veil is a mystery, it is not one that terrifies him.

I’m shaking my head. “It’s the toughest thing for a lawyer. I can’t tell you what to do.”

“But you must have an opinion?” he says. “Forget the death penalty. What I want to know is, what are my chances of beating the case if we go to trial? Of walking free?”

He has already made up his mind. A man like Ruiz would claw the walls inside his cell until his fingers bled the moment he knew he had no chance of ever getting out. A death sentence-and my guess is he might not even appeal it-would be preferable to life without possibility of parole.

I have told Ruiz about my meeting with Harold Klepp and reports of an argument between Chapman and General Satz. According to Emiliano, this squares with Chapman’s concerns conveyed to him in the days immediately before her murder that Chapman was scared to death. This, according to Ruiz, was the reason she hired him off the books to provide security at a distance.

“You’re entitled to the truth. I won’t dress it up,” I tell him.

“It’s that bad, is it?”

“Unless we can crack the wall around Isotenics to get at the evidence of what was happening inside the company when Chapman was killed, if we go to trial we’ll be throwing dice for your life. And that’s a dangerous game. One usually reserved for fools and those who are desperate.”

“You’re telling me to take the deal?”

“I’m telling you that, given the evidence as it is right now, your chances of an acquittal are not good.”

He gets up from the table, cigarette to his lips. The guard outside the door turns to look through the glass to see if perhaps we are finished.

“Can they. .” Ruiz stops to reorganize his thoughts. “What happens if they convict me? They go to a penalty phase, right? The jury, I mean.”

“That’s right.” I have talked with him about the procedure before.

“What happens if they decide not to give me the death penalty?”

“If it’s a conviction for first-degree murder, you’ll be sentenced to life without possibility of parole.”

“Promise me one thing. Promise me that you won’t let that happen.”

“I can’t promise you that.”

“You have to.”

I shake my head, take a deep breath, and look up at him. “I’m your lawyer, not your executioner. I can’t do that.”

“I’d rather be dead than locked up for the rest of my life.”

“I know.” I sit in silence for a moment as he paces a couple of steps, all that the room will allow.

“I’ll convey the message to them. Tell them that you’ve rejected their offer.”

All I can see is his slowly nodding head from behind.

I would like to console him, tell him not to dwell in the dark corners. But anything I say at this moment would sound cheap, condescending. Ruiz is a man who is broken in many ways, has seen too much, and-unless I am wrong-has lived grasping the thin edge of life far too long.

To the average person his attitude at times can be off-putting, seemingly careless, almost casual in the face of death. I worry about the jury and what they might think if this becomes their perception of him at trial.

Recently in these sessions when we meet, looking at him through the haze of smoke, it is as if I see another aspect, larger, more brooding: memories of the dark visage of my uncle. I get flashes of Evo from my childhood, in the haunted decades of life after his return from Korea. I remember veiled and faded images of what had once been a hearty and happy soul, a spirit that was buried inside by the violence he had seen and what he had endured. Emiliano may be made of harder stuff, but when I listen to his voice and look into his eyes in times like these, moments of stress, I can see the outline of tiny fissures where the hard emotional veneer is beginning to pull away. I sense that he is starting to crack at the edges.

It is in these moments that the pain for me is real. Looking back, I cannot be sure when it happened, but at some point in the months that have intervened since we met, the trial of Emiliano Ruiz has taken on a frightening dimension that even I do not fully comprehend.

Lately this has been accompanied by dark visitations. They seem always to come at night when I am alone, after my daughter Sarah is asleep in her room. I am left to huddle with the documents that would condemn Emiliano-police reports and the state’s forensic details of the crime-and one set of items in particular: a few photos of Ruiz in uniform, battle fatigues, his face haggard and dirty. He is with a small group, other men similarly worn and tired, all huddled in a semicircle, giving it their all to smile.

The reason is no doubt lost in the dark recesses of my childhood, but looking at these pictures in the solitary hours of the night there is a palpable sense of fear. It emanates from somewhere deep in my core, ominous and cold, as if I am being paralyzed. There is a feeling that I am locked in battle with dark forces, held in a death embrace by the demon, scrapping, tearing, pulling hair at the edge of the pit for the damned who are about to be lost. Somehow this ordeal has become the battle I could never wage as a child. I cannot explain it, but Emiliano has become the proxy, the surrogate, that somehow has me struggling for the redemption of Evo’s soul.