Chapter 105: The Proffer
There are two offices and they do not work for each other. It took me a month to understand that.
The Attorney General's office defends my conviction. It is their duty to keep the judgment standing.
The county District Attorney charges crimes in the county. That office was now looking at Bree.
Same state. Same building for parking purposes. Different lawyers, different files, different incentives.
The AG did not want my conviction disturbed. The DA wanted a fresh case with a live defendant.
Dean's lawyer took him to the DA. Naturally. That is where the deal is.
They call it a proffer. Some people call it queen for a day, which I have never liked.
It means he sits in a room and tells them everything, and if he tells the truth they cannot use his own words against him directly.
If he lies, the letter is void and everything is on the table.
He proffered on a Thursday in June for four hours and forty minutes.
I was not in the room. I was never going to be in the room. I was scanning receipts in Marisol's back office.
Brandt did not call me that day. She called me nineteen days later, when she had paper.
“They've given us the proffer summary. Six pages. You should read it here, not at home.”
I took two buses and read it in the file room with the door open.
Six pages, double spaced, prepared by an investigator named Halima Oyelaran.
Page one was who was present and what warnings were given.
Page two was the Sedgewick. What they drank, what time they left, who paid.
Page three was the crash. He said he felt it, did not see it, thought it was a post.
Page four was what he did afterward, in eleven numbered steps, which is how investigators write.
Step six. Opened driver's door. Step seven. Removed B. Halloway from driver's seat by the left arm.
Step eight. Placed B. Halloway in front passenger seat. Step nine. Closed driver's door.
Step ten. Remained outside vehicle. Step eleven. Did not enter driver's compartment at any time.
Page five was the telephone calls. Bree called her mother at 22:36. The ambulance was called at 22:40.
Four minutes. I read those two lines eleven or twelve times.
Page six was what he wanted for it.
Plea to a single count of tampering with evidence and one count of obstruction.
Agreed recommendation of eighteen months, with credit, eligible at nine.
Full cooperation, including testimony against B. Halloway and R. Halloway if charged.
There was one more line, at the bottom, in the same flat font as everything else.
The People take no position regarding the pending post-conviction petition of C. Mercer.
I read that line and then I put the summary down on the table and squared the edges of it.
Brandt was standing in the doorway with her cold coffee.
“You've got to the bottom of page six,” she said.
“They take no position.”
“They take no position. That is the most honest sentence in the document.”
“Eighteen months,” I said. “For moving a woman out of a seat.”
“Eighteen months for the count they charged. Nothing else fits that isn't time-barred.”
“He gets nine.” She said he probably got nine, and she said it without any weight on it at all.
I did the arithmetic out loud because I wanted somebody else to hear it in a room.
Seventy-two months for me. Nine for him. Eight to one.
Brandt let me finish and then she said the thing I have repeated to other people since.
“Understand what he's doing. He is not helping you. He is trading you.”
“I know that.”
“I want you to know it in advance, because in about six weeks he will start telling people he helped you.”
She was right. He did. He said it to a reporter in October and I did not correct him.
“Does any of this help the petition.”
“Some. Not as much as you think.” I asked her to explain it.
“His proffer is not evidence in your case. It's a statement to a different office in a different matter.”
“So the AG can ignore it.”
“The AG can say it's self-serving hearsay from a man buying nine months, and they will say exactly that.”
“Then what's it worth.”
“It's worth what it makes possible. If the DA charges her, we get a case file we could never have built ourselves.”
Two weeks later the DA's investigator called Marisol's landline, because I do not have a phone at work.
Oyelaran asked whether I would come in and speak with her as a witness.
A witness. In the matter of the death of Nadine Okoro.
I said yes and asked what date and wrote it on the wall calendar over the printer.
Then I stood there and looked at what I had written.
Six years and eleven months earlier I had been the defendant in that same matter.
Now I was on a witness list, with a number beside my name, in somebody else's case.