28
Tuesday evening I received a text message from LA.
I texted back.
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 with 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.
“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?