“I need to see you. Don’t want to say why over the phone.”
“Everything okay up at Fort Jackson? I heard you were transferred there.”
“Sure. Prison’s just fine.”
“I didn’t mean that, Rufus. I was just wondering why you looked me up after all this time.”
“You’re still my lawyer, ain’t you? Only time I ever needed one.”
“My schedule’s kind of tight, and I don’t usually travel over that way.” Rider’s hand tightened on the phone with Harms’s next words.
“I really need to see you tomorrow, Samuel. You think you owe me that?”
“I did all I could for you back then.”
“You took the deal. Quick and easy.”
“No,” Rider countered, “we did the pretrial agreement with the convening authority, and the trial counsel signed off on it, and that was the smart thing to do.”
“You didn’t really try to beat it none on the sentencing. Most try to do that.”
“Who told you that?”
“Learn a lot in prison.”
“Well, you can’t waive the sentencing phase. We put on our case to the members, you know that.”
“But you didn’t call no witnesses, didn’t really do much that I could see.”
Rider now got very defensive. “I did the best I could. Remember something, Rufus, they could’ve executed you. A little white girl and all. They would’ve gone for first degree, they told me that. At least you got to live.”
“Tomorrow, Samuel. I put you on my visitors’ list. Around about nine A.M. Thank you. Thank you kindly. Oh, bring a little radio with you.” Before Rider could ask him why he should bring such a device, or why he should even come to see him, Harms had hung up the phone.
Rider eased back in his very comfortable chair and looked around his spacious, wood-paneled office. He practiced law in a small rural town some distance from Blacksburg, Virginia. He made a fine living: nice house, new Buick every three years, vacations twice annually. He had put the past behind him, particularly the most horrible case he had ever handled in his brief career as a military lawyer. The kind of case that had the same effect on your stomach as curdled milk, only no amount of Pepto-Bismol could right the discomfort.
Rider touched a hand to his face as his thoughts now drifted back to the early seventies, a time of chaos in the military, the country, the world. Everybody blaming everybody else for everything that had ever gone wrong in the history of the universe. Rufus Harms had sounded bitter over the phone, but he had killed that little girl. Brutally. Right in front of her family. Crushed her neck in a few seconds, before anyone could even attempt to stop him.
On Harms’s behalf, Rider had negotiated a pretrial agreement, but then, under the rules of military law, he had the right to attempt to beat that deal in the sentencing phase. The defendant would either receive the punishment in the pre-trial agreement, or the one meted out by the judge or by the members — the military counterpart of a jury — whichever involved less prison time. Harms’s words gnawed at the lawyer, though, for Rider had been persuaded at the time not to put on much of a case at the sentencing phase. He had agreed with the prosecutor not to bring in any witnesses from outside the area who could attest to Harms’s character and so forth. He had also agreed to rely on stipulations from the official record instead of attempting to find fresh evidence and witnesses.
That was not exactly playing by the rules, because a defendant’s right to beat the deal was not supposed to be waived or bargained away in any substantive manner. But without Rider working behind the scenes like that, the prosecutor would have gone for the death penalty, and with those facts, he probably would have gotten it. It mattered little that the murder had happened so quickly that proving premeditation would have been very difficult. The cold body of a child could derail the most logical of legal analyses.
The bald truth was nobody cared about Rufus Harms. He was a black man who had spent most of his Army career locked in the stockade. His senseless murder of a child certainly had not improved his standing in the eyes of the military. Such a man was not entitled to justice, many had felt, unless it was swift, painful, and lethal. And maybe Rider was one of those who felt that way. So he hadn’t exactly practiced the scorched-earth policy in his defense of the man, but Rider had gotten Rufus Harms life. That was the best any lawyer could have done.