Steve Martini - Double Tap

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?”