Chapter 107: Terms
Renata did not collapse. I need to say that plainly, because everyone expects the collapse.
Dean folded on a floor. Bree cried in a doorway. Renata made an appointment.
Her lawyer's office called the clinic on a Monday and asked for a meeting on neutral ground.
Brandt said no to neutral ground and yes to the clinic's conference room, and told me I did not have to attend.
I attended. I have thought about whether that was a mistake and I still do not know.
The lawyer was called Ordell Vasch. Sixty-ish, quiet suit, one legal pad, no assistant.
Renata was sixty-one. She had been my mother's older sister and she has my mother's hands.
She sat down, took off her coat, folded it over the chair beside her, and put a folder on the table.
She did not look away from me. She has never once looked away from me. That is the thing about her.
“Cass,” she said. “You've got older.”
I did not answer that and Brandt moved us on inside four seconds.
Vasch did the opening.
It was seven sentences and I could have written every one of them myself by then.
His client had information. His client was prepared to be useful. His client had exposure and understood that.
He wanted three things.
Written immunity from the District Attorney. A covenant not to sue from me. Confidentiality about all of it.
In return she would give a full statement about the night of the crash and about the execution of the confession.
Brandt asked what full meant. Vasch said full meant complete and truthful.
Brandt said she had been practising for twenty-six years and had never yet seen a proffer that was both.
Then Renata opened her folder and it was not the folder of a frightened woman.
Inside were tabs.
Actual printed tabs, the kind you buy in a stationery shop and run through a printer at home.
She had prepared exhibits for her own confession. I want the reader to sit with that for a second.
“Tab one is the notary's journal page,” she said. “The one you've been trying to get for a year.”
Brandt did not move. “How do you have that.”
“Grover gave me a copy in 2019. He gave everybody copies. That was his problem.”
“Tab two?”
“Tab two is the endorsement. You already have that. I'm told you found it in June.”
She looked at me when she said that. She wanted me to know she knew what I had been reading.
“Tab three is a list of what I will say and what I will not say.”
Brandt put her pen down. “That's not how a proffer works.”
“That is how mine works,” Renata said, and she did not raise her voice at any point in the meeting.
Then she turned to me and did the thing I had not prepared for.
“You want to ask me about Friday evening exposure.”
I said nothing. I had both hands on the back of the chair in front of me, and I had been standing since Vasch stopped talking.
I gripped it. I want to be accurate. I held the top rail of that chair hard enough that my thumbs went white, and then I let go and sat down.
“I knew she drank on Fridays,” Renata said. “Every mother of a twenty-one-year-old knows something.”
“You raised the coverage.”
“I raised the coverage. That is what a person in my profession does with a known exposure.”
“You didn't take the keys.”
“I took the keys twice in 2018.”
“And?”
“She took them back both times. You have not had a daughter.”
“You made forty-one thousand dollars.”
“I made a placement commission at the standard rate. It would have been paid to somebody. It was paid to me.”
She said all of it without heat, and without one word of apology, and without pretending there would be one.
Brandt asked her the direct question, for the record, in front of two students.
“Did you tell Cass Mercer she would serve two years?”
“I told her that was what the guidelines suggested for a first offender who accepted responsibility.”
“And did you know the confession had been drafted two days before the collision.”
Vasch said, “Don't answer that,” and Renata answered it anyway.
“I knew when it was signed. I was in the room. I am not going to say more about the drafting today.”
Then she closed the folder and squared it with the edge of the table, and she looked at me.
“What do you want, exactly? Write it down and I'll see what it costs.”
I did not answer her. Brandt ended the meeting eleven minutes later.
Renata put her coat on, and at the door she said one more thing, in the same voice she used to say dinner was ready.
“You'd have got the six years anyway, you know. He had a record. The judge was going to make an example either way.”
Then she left, and Vasch left after her, and one of the students went out and was sick.