Depraved Indifference j-3

by Joseph Teller

  A woman after his own heart.

  Even though he was pretty much satisfied with his explanation of why Amanda had been following him, he was tempted to come right out and ask her. Not so much to test his hypothesis as to show off his own superior instinct and skill at having spotted her. But he resisted the urge. Some cards are better played early on in the game; others are best held on to. Who knew if an opportune moment might arise when confronting Amanda would pay a dividend? So he'd settle for having made the tail, in more ways than one.

  He kept quiet, therefore, and turned his thoughts to the notion of getting back into the business of defending criminals-okay, accused criminals. And the lovehate relationship he'd long carried on with the way he'd been making his living for the past twenty-some years.

  As much as he'd been enjoying his extended sabbatical from the law, Jaywalker could feel the pull of getting back into the trenches. He missed the courthouse, that filthy place of long lines, broken elevators and peculiar smells. He missed the people, the camaraderie-defense lawyers and prosecutors he'd grown middle-aged with; judges who itched to hold him in contempt every time he stepped across some foolish line they'd drawn, but would have hired him in a New York minute if they themselves had gotten into trouble; court officers, corrections officers, clerks, court reporters and translators he'd come to feel he'd known forever. He missed even the defendants, often initially surly or even hostile, invariably self-destructive, but almost always deeply appreciative by the time he parted ways with them. He missed the battle, that matching of wits, that take-noprisoners struggle they called a trial but might just as well have called a war. He missed opening statements, crossexamination, summing up. He missed sitting on the edge of his seat and feeling his heart pounding in his chest as the jurors filed into the courtroom one last time to deliver their verdict. He missed the incredible high that lifted him into the stratosphere with each acquittal. He even missed, in some strange way, the depths of despair into which he plunged following a conviction.

  What's more, Jaywalker found himself intrigued by the case against Carter Drake. Should the act of driving, no matter how poorly or even recklessly, ever be a sufficient predicate for a murder charge and the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment it carried? Was Jaywalker being old-fashioned by thinking that before accusing a man of murder, the state ought to first be required to demonstrate that he'd set out to harm somebody? Was that asking too much?

  But beyond Jaywalker's interest in that legal issue, there was a much more mundane reason for wanting to get involved. And that was the worst invention Homo sapiens had ever managed to come up with. Money. A murder case, even one predicated upon the faulty operation of a motor vehicle, meant a five-figure fee. God knew he could use the money, which would be his first income in more than two years. And since Carter Drake was apparently willing to do whatever it would take to drag the case out until Jaywalker's suspension was over, things might actually work out. He'd have to be careful, of course. He'd have to steer clear of the New City courthouse, refrain from saying anything about the case that might find its way into the newspapers and avoid any conduct that might arguably constitute practicing law. And if he were to accept any money, he'd have to do it in such a way as to make it look like something other than a legal fee. But that could be done, he was pretty sure.

  Then there were the secondary drawbacks and benefits of getting involved. On the negative side was the sheer notoriety of the case. Taking on Carter Drake as his comeback act would mean that Jaywalker would be returning to the scene of his past transgressions with a considerable bang. Right off the bat, he'd be representing a high-profile murder defendant in what was sure to be a media-circus trial. The prospect of that kind of free publicity would no doubt have delighted every one of Jaywalker's colleagues, but in that respect he stood apart from them. In fact, the thought of it brought him dangerously close to gagging.

  Finally, there was the chance that one of the benefits of representing Carter Drake might be Amanda Drake. Then again, what a conflict of interest that w ould be! Jaywalker allowed himself a chuckle as he imagined a slew of new charges from the disciplinary committee. He could picture the presiding justice snarling down at him with righteous indignation. "So, Mr. Jaywalker, we conclude that you deliberately made certain that your client would remain locked up for as long as possible, just so you could continue to have an affair with his wife."

  Well, that was one benefit that might just have to be curtailed. But what a shame.

  That night, in the privacy of his own place, Jaywalker thought things over. Unlike Amanda Carter's fourbedroom triplex just off Fifth Avenue, Jaywalker's apartment wasn't much more than a furnished room. What it was, was a fourth-floor walk-up studio in what real estate agents tend to write off as a developing neighborhood, much the same way economists might refer to a developing nation. Implicit in both terms is the suggestion that the entity being described still has a long way to go before qualifying for actually being developed. So as he pondered the advisability of getting involved in Carter Drake's case, Jaywalker stretched out on his sofa, which doubled as his bed, and also served from time to time as his laundry sorter, work surface and exercise mat.

  A criminal case begins, as Jaywalker well knew, with an investigation, followed by an arrest. Or sometimes it's the other way around, an arrest followed by an investigation. By the time a defense lawyer gets contacted, selected, and either hired by the family or appointed by the court, that lawyer already finds himself playing catch-up. It had already been three weeks since Carter Drake's arrest, and based upon the little that Jaywalker remembered from the newspaper accounts, the only representation Drake had had in that time was from the business lawyer who'd surrendered him, followed by some local guy who'd stood up for him when he got to court. It would be another seven or eight months before Jaywalker would be allowed to practice again. That would mean an eight-month head start for the prosecution, an all but insurmountable advantage.

  So what was Jaywalker to do in the meantime? He couldn't contact the D.A.'s office or the state police, or risk calling either of the lawyers who'd been representing Drake; any one of them could turn him in for doing so. Yet he couldn't just sit on his hands and watch his future client languish in the hands of a couple of incompetents while the prosecution perfected its case, could he?

  He found a half-smoked joint, fired it up and inhaled deeply. Ever since he'd given up drinking, Jaywalker had resorted to the old devil weed for occasional inspiration. It soothed him, relaxed him, helped him see things a bit more clearly, and brought on a moderate case of the "munchies"-an indispensable aid to a man who, to the envy of most men and every woman he knew, had serious trouble keeping his weight up. With no known adverse side effects and no possibility of a lethal overdose, it was, as Martha Stewart might have put it, a good thing. Little wonder, thought Jaywalker, that the government had criminalized it, or that the last administration had chosen to make it the primary target of its war against drugs.

  It didn't take long for Jaywalker to hatch a plan. What he'd do would be to have Amanda hire him as a private investigator for her husband. That would allow Jaywalker to go into jail and talk with Drake, gather police reports and other documents, locate and interview witnesses, and generally snoop around. His DEA background more than prepared him for the job, and his law degree qualified him, much the same way it permitted lawyers to act as real estate brokers and notary publics without having to undergo additional training or licensing. It was all part of the genius behind the scheme of having laws that are written by lawyers, enforced by lawyers who've become judges, for the benefit and protection of lawyers.

  Now, did the little matter of Jaywalker's suspension disqualify him from availing himself of those benefits and protections? No, he decided; that would be overthinking it. He was still a lawyer, albeit one who was temporarily incapacitated. Kind of like how a baseball player who was on the disabled list was still a baseball player, no? A perfect analogy. So as long as
Jaywalker were to stick to investigating, he wouldn't really be practicing law, w ould he be?

  He allowed himself another hit of the joint.

  Yeah, investigating would be just fine.

  He broke the news to Amanda two days later. They met at the same luncheonette they'd gone to from the library. She looked every bit as stunning as he'd remembered her, and he found himself powerless to keep his eyes off her. He managed somewhat better when it came to his hands, but it was hard. Keeping his hands off her, that is.

  This time they had lunch instead of just coffee, she a fancy wrap of some sort, he a tuna-fish sandwich. As they ate, he outlined his plan, and Amanda was quick to approve it. And that was pretty much it. Unlike the events of two days earlier, they didn't follow things up with a cab ride to Amanda's apartment. And if Jaywalker was disappointed in that nondevelopment, and surely he was, he was at least consoled by the fact that he came away from the meeting with a check in the pocket of his jeans in the amount of five thousand dollars, exactly twice what he'd asked Amanda for. He'd instructed her to make it out to "Harrison Jay Walker, Private Investigator," and had made her fill in the Memo blank with the words " Not for legal services."

  You could never be too careful.

  But even if he was only an investigator for the time being, Jaywalker knew better. He was back in the game.

  3

  FIVE TINY FINGERS

  The very first thing Jaywalker did the following morning was to pay a visit to his bank. There he endorsed and deposited the five-thousand-dollar check Amanda Drake had given him. As soon as the teller had completed the transaction, he asked her for his current balance. She tapped some keys on her computer and handed him a slip of paper. There were a bunch of numbers on it, showing which funds were available, which weren't, and when they would be. But he chose to ignore the qualifiers, and went right to the bottom line, which included Amanda's check: $5,176.24

  It had been that close.

  After that, Jaywalker the Investigator got to work. He started off by making a visit to the scene. Not the scene of the crime-or accident, as he preferred to call it- where the van had been run off the road. That would come, but for now it could wait. Instead, he returned to the scene of his first meeting with Amanda, the Fortysecond Street branch of the New York Public Library. There he went to the newspaper archives room and pulled up on a microfiche screen all the articles he could find on the crash, the surrender and arrest of Carter Drake, and the developments that had occurred since. Had he been a better navigator of the Internet, he probably could have found them on his computer. But he was stubbornly oldfashioned at times, Jaywalker was, and besides, he loved the archives room. He figured it was as good a place as any to get an overview of things, a starting point before he began to dig for details and tried to get first-person accounts.

  As overviews go, it turned out to be pretty devastating stuff for the home team.

  The photos of the burned van, and of the immediate area where it had come to rest, were hard to look at. Jaywalker could only guess at the ones that had been kept out of the papers, that the editors had deemed too graphic to print. He'd see those later, no doubt, with the police reports. There'd be charred bodies, charred tiny bodies. He shuddered at the thought, shuddered again at the jurors' reactions to the carnage.

  Several of the papers had run with the early rumors of a terrorist cell and the premature detonation of an explosive device, or of a van overcrowded with undocumented migrant apple pickers. Only with the following day's editions had the truth come out, that eight of the nine dead were young children enrolled at one of New City's several yeshivas, or Jewish religious schools. There were interviews with the driver of the pickup truck who'd stopped to offer assistance, including his account of the car that had run the van off the road. Looking for the public's help, the police had released the partial license plate ending in 724 and were imploring other witnesses to come forward. Then, in the next day's accounts, there was the surrender of Carter Drake and his arrest, as well as some brief comments by his "business attorney." Jaywalker paused to smile at the phrase. There were business attorneys, patent attor neys, corporate attorneys, trust and estate attorneys, even admiralty attorneys. But when things got truly nasty, you were well advised to go out and get yourself a criminal lawyer. All of a sudden, it was a lawyer you needed. Down in the trenches, there was no room for attorneys.

  "Mr. Drake is guilty of absolutely nothing," the business attorney had said. "He hadn't been drinking, and he wasn't speeding. He momentarily lost control of his vehicle. As unfortunate and tragic as the results were- and our hearts go out to the victims and their families- it was an accident, pure and simple. An accident."

  The judge who'd set Carter Drake's bail at five million dollars had apparently begged to differ.

  The newspaper stories had continued for almost a week. There were interviews with grieving parents and outraged school officials. There were calls for tighter seat-belt laws and looser seat-belt laws, the proponents of the latter camp arguing that some of the children might have escaped the fire had they not been restrained, though a look at the extent of the damage shown in the photos strongly suggested otherwise. And there were the funerals, the terrible funerals, accompanied by snapshots of tiny faces smiling out at the camera in happier times.

  After that, the coverage dwindled and all but stopped. The exception was the Rockland County Register, which ran editorials daily for nearly three weeks, demanding restoration of the death penalty, "complete with excruciating suffering" for the "cold-blooded killer" of the community's "most treasured and vulnerable citizens."

  It was midafternoon by the time Jaywalker emerged from the library. He found himself startled by the sudden brightness of the sunshine, and it took his eyes a few moments to make the adjustment. It reminded him of coming out of the movies after a matinee, something he hadn't done since his wife's death, a dozen years ago.

  He found a phone booth, no mean feat in the Age of the Cell Phone. But Jaywalker had long resisted the ads that promised a powerful network, five bars, and unlimited nighttime and weekend minutes with family and friends. He figured that if he lived long enough, he might just be the last holdout on the planet. Sure, going phoneless meant being inconvenienced from time to time, but that was a small price to pay for the retention of his privacy. Besides, now was no time to g et connected, or whatever it was they called it, not while he was still suspended and trying to fly beneath the radar.

  Jaywalker had gotten the name of Carter Drake's business attorney from his newspaper research and found a phone number for him on the Internet. Now he dropped a Samoan penny into the coin slot-they just happened to be the same size as U.S. quarters, so he'd ordered a hundred of them through a Times Square coin dealer for three dollars-and dialed the number.

  "PetersonKellnerWhiteandTayler," said a woman's voice, as if it were all one name. "How may I direct your call?"

  "I'm trying to reach Chester Ludlow," said Jaywalker.

  "Please hold for his administrative aide."

  Jaywalker held, wondering where he'd been while secretaries had turned into administrative aides.

  "Mr. Ludlow's office," said another female voice.

  Jaywalker identified himself and stated his business. If he'd thought doing so might open doors, he was in for a surprise. Over the next fifteen minutes, he sparred first with the administrative aide, and then with a young man who described himself as Ludlow's e xecutive assistant. Yes, Mr. Ludlow would be more than happy to take a meeting with him, but he billed out at seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour, payable in advance.

  "How about six minutes?" Jaywalker asked. He'd neglected to discuss expenses with Amanda, and wasn't about to spend seven hundred and fifty dollars of his own money, or hers, either-at least not without checking with her first. On the other hand, he figured shelling out seventy-five bucks for a tenth of an hour…

  The executive assistant was evidently not amused.

  Eventually
they settled on a five-minute phone conference, pro bono. Jaywalker was instructed to call Chet back the following day, at 10:15 a.m. "Not any earlier, not any later."

  Fuck you! Jaywalker wanted to say. And fuck Chet, too. Instead he said, "Thank you very much," and hung up.

  Maybe it wasn't going to be such a picnic after all, this investigator gig.

  Next he called Carter Drake's current lawyer up in New City, a man named Judah Mermelstein. The Samoan pennies were too cumbersome for the job, not to mention too precious, so he used a calling card.

  Mermelstein answered his own phone, a sure sign that he was user-friendly and a good indication that he worked on a shoestring budget. Both were attributes that Jaywalker was quite familiar with. As he had with Chester Ludlow's staff, he explained his business and said he'd like to meet with Mermelstein.

  "Sure, sure. C'mon up."

  They agreed on one o'clock the following day. Jaywalker didn't want to jeopardize his five-minute phone conference with Chet, after all.

  The following morning's five-minute phone conference with Chester Ludlow went pretty much as Jay walker had expected. Ludlow was brusque, dismissive and completely uninformative. Carter Drake, for whom he'd been doing some complicated mergers-and-acquisitions work-the implication being that it was well beyond Jaywalker's understanding-had phoned the office and said he was the "Audi Assassin," and that he wanted to turn himself in before the police figured out he was the one they were looking for and came to arrest him. Ludlow had agreed and had accompanied him to state police headquarters. He'd had no idea where it was, he added, "So I set the GPS on my car. We got there, and they took him into custody. And that was pretty much it. Now," he said, clearing his throat loudly, "if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting-"

  "I still have nineteen seconds," Jaywalker pointed out. Actually, he had no idea how long they'd been talking, but he doubted that Ludlow did, either. "What was the basis of your comment to the press," he asked, "that Drake hadn't been drinking or speeding prior to the accident?"