Chapter 115: Immunity
Renata Halloway was never charged with anything.
I want to put that on its own line because that is how it sits in my life.
The reasons are not mysterious and they are not a scandal. They are ordinary law, applied ordinarily.
The insurance counts were time-barred.
The endorsement was written ninety-four days before the crash, which was more than seven years before anybody looked at it.
The limitation period for that offence is five years. It had expired while I was in the laundry.
Witness tampering did not fit either.
That statute requires an official proceeding to be pending, or at least reasonably foreseeable.
On the fourteenth, when the statement was drafted, there was no proceeding, because there was no collision yet.
That is the perfect part of what she did, and I have never heard anybody else say it out loud.
She acted early enough that the statutes written to punish what she did had nothing to attach to.
Conspiracy to obstruct was theoretically available.
The proof was the problem, and the proof was always going to be the problem.
Every act she committed was a sentence spoken in a kitchen to two relatives.
There is no document anywhere with her name on it saying any of it.
The witnesses to those sentences were me and Bree.
I am a woman whose conviction had just been vacated and who had a compensation claim pending, which is a motive to say anything.
Bree was by then a convicted felon who had received a plea deal, which is a motive to say anything.
Feld would have destroyed both of us and a jury would have been right to worry.
Oyelaran, the DA's investigator, explained all of it to me herself.
A small room, twenty minutes, and a diagram she drew upside down so I could read it.
I appreciated the diagram. Nobody else in seven years had drawn me one.
Renata testified before the grand jury under a written grant of immunity in the Halloway matter.
She testified against her daughter.
She did it in one morning, and by all accounts she did not appear to find it difficult.
Her statement was consistent with the documents, complete on the facts, and entirely silent on her own state of mind.
She said Bree was driving. She said Dean moved her.
She said she was telephoned at 22:36, and she gave the time without being pressed for it.
She said the statement was Grover Lisle's idea. Lisle, by then, was in Arizona and asserting privilege.
There was one administrative proceeding, and it is the only official document in the world that says she did anything wrong.
The Department of Insurance opened a market conduct file in the spring.
It closed by consent order in October.
Licence surrendered. Twelve thousand dollar civil penalty. No admission of wrongdoing.
Four pages. I have a copy. Paragraph 9 states expressly that the licensee neither admits nor denies the allegations.
She sold Halloway and Dettmer to a regional broker the following March. A trade paper reported the figure at somewhere over two million.
I looked into a civil suit. I want to be exact about how that ended, because people assume there is always a lawsuit.
I saw two firms.
The first spoke to me for forty minutes and did not call back, which is an answer.
The second was a woman named Persis Okuma who took an hour and a half and was completely straight with me.
Fraud claims carry a six-year limitation.
There is a discovery rule, and I would have had an argument on it, and it would have been a real one.
The argument would have cost thirty thousand dollars to run and would have been decided on a motion before any jury heard anything.
Then there were the assets. The Verrall Street house went into a family trust in 2020, three months after I was sentenced.
The agency was owned by a corporation. The commission was paid to the corporation. The corporation was dissolved in 2022.
Okuma said the sentence I have quoted to a great many people since.
“I believe you completely. There is nothing to collect. Those are two different problems and I can only help you with one.”
She did not charge me for the hour and a half. I sent her a card and she sent one back.
I saw Renata once after all of it. The third-floor lift lobby of the courthouse, the day of Bree's sentencing.
She was standing by the window with her coat over her arm, waiting, the way she waits.
She saw me.
She did not look away. She has never once looked away, in my whole life.
She nodded. That is all. A small nod, of the kind you give an acquaintance in a car park.
Then the lift came and she got into it, and I took the stairs, which I have already said.
I have never spoken to her again and I do not expect to and I have stopped rehearsing it.
She kept the commission.
Forty-one thousand three hundred and eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents. Paid in 2020, on cheque 0043117.
Nobody ever asked for it back. There is no mechanism by which anybody could.