David Ellis - Breach of Trust

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tomorrow afternoon, we have that thing, right? That death-row inmate?”

“Antwain Otis, yes, sir.”

“Make me look good in there, okay?” He winked at me.

I got up to leave. I looked for Hector, who was talking on his cell in the other room. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to wait for him, but I didn’t bother. I walked out of the suite and nodded to the security detail. I left the Ritz-Carlton and walked into the cool night air, not entirely sure how I was feeling.

Suite 410 had suddenly become a busy place. In the sole conference room, a transcriber was listening to the conversations captured today by my F-Bird and typing it up. I’d given a debriefing to Chris Moody and Lee Tucker. I could see Moody doing the calculations as I went on.

“So the governor has to either sign or veto this abortion bill by when?” Moody asked me.

“They said three days, I think.”

“And he wants the money from those pro-choice groups before then?”

“It wasn’t clear. I’m sure he would.”

Chris Moody absently scratched his cheek. “You’ll follow up on this?” he asked. “This will involve you?”

I really wasn’t sure. I’d done a lot of “fundraising” with Charlie but didn’t know if I would have anything to do with the shakedown of these abortion-rights’ groups.

“Tell me again what he said about Cimino,” said Tucker.

I didn’t remember precisely. “‘Charlie says you’re a great asset,’ something like that. It’s on the F-Bird.”

Both Moody and Tucker would analyze that phrase over and over. I could see them playing it to Charlie Cimino one day soon. We know you talked to the governor about your “fundraising.” We have the governor on tape saying so. But other than using it on Charlie, would it be enough on its own to get the governor? I didn’t see how. It was flirting with the line but not crossing it.

Tucker put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re all set for tomorrow?” My interviews with the supreme court candidates, he meant. My instructions from Madison Koehler had been to make this look like a legitimate evaluation and vetting process. So I’d chosen a handful of candidates-three men and two women; three white and two black-in addition to the prohibitive favorite, by which I mean the shoo-in, George Ippolito.

Chris Moody joined us. “You’re careful in your choice of words,” he said, not for the first time. “You don’t directly confront the issue. But try to stick the branch out and see if Ippolito grabs for it.”

“He probably won’t,” I said. “If he has any brains, he’ll play dumb.”

Moody nodded. “Does he have any brains?”

I laughed. George Ippolito didn’t have many. But on matters political, I suspected he had a little more going for him than he did on questions of law.

Moody stretched his arms. It was coming up on one in the morning now. I knew he wouldn’t be leaving until he’d listened to the F-Bird from today. He’d listen and relisten, read and reread, the words of Governor Snow today. The case was kicking into final gear now, and he wasn’t going to lose another high-profile political corruption case.

The next morning, I made it to the state office by seven. I had a packed day. In the morning, I was meeting with five of the six judges I was interviewing for the supreme court appointment. In the afternoon, I would finish with the guy who was going to win the beauty contest, George Ippolito. Then at two-thirty, the governor and I were going to sit down with a group of lawyers and clergymen seeking to spare Antwain Otis from execution a few days from now.

The judge interviews started at eight sharp, a half-hour each with fifteen minutes in between each one for some cushion. I’d be done by eleven-thirty.

I reviewed my list again. Four trial judges, two appellate. Had this been a real contest, I probably would have focused primarily on appellate court judges, as they are the closest in line to the supreme court, they have a set of published opinions to review, and they are accustomed to considering pure questions of law. Also, had this been a legitimate vetting process, I’d have talked to other lawyers-Paul Riley, for example-to get recommendations.

But this wasn’t a contest. This was a sham. And if the governor were going to choose a judge from the trial-court level to sit on the state’s highest court, which would come as a surprise to many people, I needed to lay the groundwork for it. Thus, the four trial judges on the short list. I wanted the word to get out that the governor was thinking outside the box, so to speak-he was looking beyond the ivory tower of the appellate court to judges who had gotten their hands dirty, who were on the front lines. So when Snow ultimately chose Ippolito, it wouldn’t look so odd that he’d picked a judge from the trial level.

It was with no shortage of dark humor that I observed my dual role here, the layers of deception I was mired in. I was assigned by the governor’s office to throw up a curtain of legitimacy around an illegal appointment-for-endorsement deal while, at the same time, I was assigned by the federal government to leave a little hole in said curtain so they could peek through. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse.

I’d written up a list of ten mostly softball questions, covering judicial philosophy and ethics and attorney discipline, for the interviews this morning. If you were a fly on the wall, you would have found the morning’s interviews to be little different from the exchanges you see in the Senate Judiciary Committee when questioning nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. Just for the fun of it, I wanted to ask them if they thought Roe v. Wade should be overruled.

But it wasn’t fun. It was, at best, a waste of time for the “candidates” and me. At worst, I was raising the hopes of people who had absolutely no chance of getting the appointment and who might be tarnished by association once the feds closed in.

I scheduled George Ippolito as the only afternoon interview, figuring I should save the worst for last. Plus it made the most sense from a practical standpoint. I needed to be wearing FeeBee for Ippolito, but I wouldn’t wear it for the other interviews. It had been one condition I had laid down that the feds had accepted. It was bad enough I was stringing along these other judges, bad enough that they might be tainted by this whole affair later. I wasn’t going to record their conversations with me when there was no reason to believe they were corrupt.

So I placed a little separation in time between Ippolito and the others and I went down to the food court in the basement of the state building after the other five interviews, ostensibly for a quick lunch. I dropped my tray of pasta on a table in the foyer just as another customer-one Lee Tucker-was vacating said table, leaving behind the F-Bird.

Back at my office, FeeBee in tow, I felt a knot form in my stomach as the receptionist informed me that Judge George Ippolito was here to see me.

George Ippolito was somewhere in his mid- to late fifties, I gathered, from his weathered features. His wispy hair was the color of sandpaper, which I assumed came from a bottle. He had liquid eyes, a tight mouth, and a thick nose that owed to a few too many nights at Rusty’s or Sidebar, one of the lawyer hangouts for the criminal bar. He was a reliable drinker, though no one was ever sure if that included daytime sauce. Judging from his temperament on the bench, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think he added a little flavor to his morning coffee, but I can’t say I ever heard him slur his words in the times I was before him. He was an asshole, but a sober one.

I could see from his expression when he walked in that he recognized my face, and he obviously knew my name, but he hadn’t previously put the two together. I’m sure he’d had hundreds of prosecutors pass before him in his day and they blurred together.