Depraved Indifference j-3

by Joseph Teller

  SHEETZ: It appears to be a newspaper.

  JAYWALKER: Appears to be?

  SHEETZ: It's hard to tell.

  JAYWALKER: Why?

  SHEETZ: Because it's rolled up.

  JAYWALKER: I see.

  With the weekend upon them, Jaywalker relented and took Amanda up on her offer to follow her home. In the process, he rationalized, he was doing more than merely giving in to his libido, more even than falling in with the culture's Thank-God-It's-Friday attitude. This was one of the weekends Eric was due to come home from school. For some time now, despite Carter's insistence that his son be left out of things and not called as a defense witness, Jaywalker had insisted on at least sitting down with the boy and seeing what he had to say about his father's level of intoxication the evening he'd been sent in to fetch him out of the End Zone. And for some time now, Amanda had been promising to deliver Eric for that conversation. But each time, something would come up. Eric was behind in his courses and needed to stay at school to catch up. Or his ride with a classmate had fallen through. Or Greyhound had changed its schedule so that the bus to Manhattan no longer stopped anywhere near the school, which was in western Massachusetts.

  Finally Jaywalker had put his foot down. He'd insisted that Amanda call Eric and extract from him a solemn promise that no matter what, he'd be at his mother's by noon this Saturday. After some hemming and hawing, Amanda had agreed and then reported back that it was a done deal. So Jaywalker would have to work on the weekend while on trial. What else was new?

  That said, by midnight Friday, he was hardly regretting his decision. He and Amanda had enjoyed a memorable dinner at the Union Square Cafe, her treat, despite his protests. And afterward, they'd enjoyed an equally memorable follow-up in her bedroom. And while he'd surely needed the meal, not having eaten in the previous twenty-four hours, if asked to choose, he would have had no problem. No reservation required, no waiting for a table, no calories to speak of, and no check to fight over.

  It was only the following morning that the ringing of the telephone brought the news that Eric had been prohibited from leaving the campus because he'd been placed on both academic and social probation. Was that, Jaywalker wondered, the equivalent of the double-secret probation that had threatened to ground an entire fraternity in "Animal House," his all-time favorite movie?

  "Get up," he told Amanda, "and get dressed."

  "Why? What for?"

  "Road trip."

  19

  ROAD TRIP

  The drive up to Massachusetts took the better part of three hours, even in Amanda's Lexus. Jaywalker had seriously questioned whether his Mercury was up to the task, so he'd volunteered his driving services if Amanda was willing to supply the wheels, and she'd grudgingly agreed. When he expressed surprise that she didn't exactly seem overjoyed at the prospect of seeing her son, she smiled knowingly.

  "You haven't met Eric," she said.

  "No," he agreed.

  "Eric has issues."

  "Issues?"

  "Eric is a full-time, 24/7 rebel," she explained. "He lies, he steals, he drinks, he does drugs. But he does it all with great charm. He's very good at manipulating people."

  "Me, too."

  It was the truth. More than once, Jaywalker had referred to himself as a master manipulator. He'd earned the distinction back in his DEA days, when his success, and occasionally his very life, had depended upon his ability to convince dealers to accept him as one of their own, trust him fully, and sell him enough bulk narcotics to put them away for significant chunks of their lives. And he'd carried the skill over to his lawyering, where he made his living by manipulating adversaries, witnesses, judges and juries, also with considerable charm. In one dark moment he'd confided to his wife that he was no better than a jostler, a guy on the subway who bumped into you to distract you even as he picked your pocket, and afterward apologized profusely for his clumsiness.

  "Well, don't let Eric con you," Amanda was saying. "He's not to be trusted, no matter how sincerely he looks at you. He's very, very good at it."

  The Berkshire Academy for Boys and Youths, unaffectionately referred to by its inhabitants as "BABY," was a cluster of redbrick buildings scattered over a snowcovered, 240-acre campus that would have been the envy of many good-size universities. Constructed in the 1890s with state funds, it had originally served as a combination orphanage and home for the severely retarded, a warehouse of sorts for the hundreds, and at times thousands, of boys throughout Massachusetts who either had no other home, or had one but were unwelcome there. By the 1940s, the number of inhabitants had dwindled to the point where it was no longer economically feasible to continue funding the home, and it had closed down and fallen into decay. In 1951, it was put on the auction block and sold for what was at the time considered a handsome price, eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Over the next thirty years it changed hands several times, eventually bought by the Cabot Foundation, which rehabilitated it and turned it into an all-boys preparatory school. But rather than attract the sort of Ivy League-bound student population that Philips Exeter, Choate and Deerfield had, Berkshire gradually became a repository for the underachiever, the problem child and the downright delinquent. For many young men of privileged background-according to Amanda, tuition, room and board came to something in excess of seventy thousand dollars per year-it represented the last stop before reform school, juvenile detention or worse.

  Eric Drake, it would seem, fit right in.

  They met him at the main administration building after a half hour's wait. Jaywalker had brought along a subpoena, the Samoan penny type, in case it came to a showdown, but it didn't. In fact, none of the three administrators they spoke with knew anything about the academic and social probation that had prevented Eric from traveling to New York for the weekend.

  "Didn't I tell you what he's like?" said Amanda. "He must have made that all up. Probably had a party he wanted to go to. Or a baseball game."

  "It's January," Jaywalker pointed out.

  "Whatever."

  When Eric appeared, dressed all in black and escorted by a teacher's aide, he seemed genuinely surprised to see his mother, and totally confounded by Jaywalker's presence, once Amanda had introduced him as Carter's lawyer.

  "Is everything all right?" he asked. "I mean, with the trial."

  It was almost as if he'd never planned on heading to the city, and had no knowledge of being rebuffed in attempting to. And when Jaywalker made an oblique reference to double-secret probation, he drew nothing but a blank stare. Then again, the kid was only eighteen. But still…

  "I need to speak with you," he told Eric.

  "Sure."

  "Alone."

  Amanda protested, saying she'd traveled three hours to see her son, only to be told now to disappear, to sit once more on the courthouse bench, so to speak. But Jaywalker insisted. He'd learned over the years that you didn't interview young people in the presence of their parents, not if you wanted the truth from them.

  The aide found them an empty office and closed the door on his way out. There was a desk in the room, and several chairs. Jaywalker motioned Eric to sit, and then chose a chair nearby. He didn't want the desk to act as a barrier between them. He figured thirty-some years and his own lack of either a nose ring or orange hair were sufficient obstacles.

  "How's school?" he asked.

  "Sucks."

  So much for small talk.

  "How's my dad?" Eric asked.

  "Good," said Jaywalker. "Amazingly good, considering."

  "What's going to happen?"

  "He's going to get convicted on some of the charges. Drunk driving, reckless driving, vehicular manslaughter, maybe leaving the scene. I think we've got a shot on the murder count, but it's going to be uphill."

  "What kind of time is he looking at?"

  They were all normal questions, asked normally. What a psychologist might have termed appropriate, both in form and content.

  "If he's lucky,
ten or twelve years. If he's not…" Jaywalker found himself unable to finish the sentence. How did you tell a kid his father was in real danger of ending up with a sentence of twenty-five to life? Especially a kid who, despite the Halloween costume and the advance billing, seemed genuinely likable?

  "I need to ask you a few questions," he said instead.

  "Shoot."

  "The evening you drove up to Nyack with your mother-"

  "I didn't drive," said Eric. "My mom drove."

  "Right," said Jaywalker. This kid would make a pretty good lawyer, he decided. "She drove. But you went into the bar, the club. Right?"

  "Right."

  "How did your father seem?"

  Eric hesitated for just an instant. "What do you want me to say?" he asked, turning his palms up.

  "The truth. There's no jury here."

  "He seemed drunk. Drunk and belligerent."

  Jaywalker nodded, his way of telling Eric that was fine, he just needed to hear it. "Tell me what happened," he said. "In as much detail as you possibly can."

  "There's not much to tell," Eric said. "My dad was pissed, and pissed off. He felt like the bartender had snitched on him. But he followed me out of the place. Once we got outside, I asked him for the keys. He asked me if it looked like daylight to me. Meaning I wasn't allowed to drive. I was still seventeen then, and all I had was a learner's permit. I said no, it didn't look like daylight. And he said, 'No fucking way, kiddo.'"

  "And?"

  "And I said, 'Fuck it.' I walked over to my mom's car and told her to deal with him."

  Jaywalker nodded, but said nothing. He wanted this to be a narrative as much as possible, not a Q and A.

  "So my mom got out and walked over to where my dad was standing, or staggering, and the two of them started arguing. Nothing new, it's what they do. Me, I got tired of listening to them, so I got back into my mom's car. After a while, my mom came over and handed me her car keys. 'Go straight to your father's,' she said. 'And don't you speed, or we'll all end up in jail.' Then she walked back over to my father. The last I saw of them, they were shouting at each other, across the Audi. Him refusing to give her the keys, she calling him a stupid asshole. Stuff like that. So I drove home to my dad's.

  "Whoa. Y ou drove home to your dad's? In the Lexus?"

  "Yeah. I do know how to drive, you know."

  "Yeah, I know. But…" Again Jaywalker stopped midthought. Both Amanda and Carter had told him that she'd given up on Carter, gone back to the Lexus, and driven Eric to Carter's place before driving herself home. This was a totally different version, one that put Amanda in the passenger seat alongside her husband.

  And then he remembered Amanda's warnings. Eric has issues…he lies…he's very good at manipulating people…don't let him con you…he's not to be trusted, no matter how sincerely he looks you in the eye…he's very, very good at it.

  So who was telling the truth here, and who was lying? Did you give the adults the benefit of the doubt? Was it majority rule? Did you discount Eric's version because of the nose ring and the orange hair? Did you heed Amanda's warning, or had she been deliberately trying to undermine her son's credibility in advance?

  "Had you ever been up to Nyack before?" Jaywalker asked Eric. It was something of an occupational hazard, resorting to cross-examination to test a story. But he needed to know.

  "No."

  "Did you know your way back to the city?"

  "No, I didn't have a clue."

  "Did you stop to ask anyone for directions?"

  "No."

  "Didn't you get lost?"

  "No."

  "So tell me," said Jaywalker, about to spring the jaws of the trap shut. "How did you happen to get home, in the dark, without getting lost?"

  Eric shrugged easily. "My mom's car has a GPS," he explained. "I punched in my dad's address."

  Okay, score one for the kid.

  "You had to cross the George Washington Bridge, right?"

  It was one of those crossings that had a one-way toll. You were free to leave the city, but once you did, it cost you a bundle to get back in. Not exactly a welcome mat, but it did cut down on the number of tollbooths needed.

  "So tell me. How much was the toll?"

  "I haven't a clue."

  Jaywalker shot him his best gotcha look.

  But Eric shrugged again. "EZPass," he said.

  Okay, two for two. But wasn't three the charm?

  "EZPass I know," said Jaywalker. "In fact, I subpoenaed their records a few months back, and I have here a photograph of the Lexus going through the tollbooth." He reached into a file, withdrew a photo and studied it. "It's taken from behind, so you can't see the faces. But there are two people in the car, and it sure looks like a woman's driving." The photo actually happened to be the one of the rolled-up newspaper on the console of the Audi, but from where he was sitting, Eric had no way of knowing that.

  "Nice try," said Eric. "But sorry. I was driving the Lexus. And I was alone. Whatever my parents may have told you, and whatever that's a photograph of."

  And the way he said it wasn't plaintive or insistent or argumentative. It was matter-of-fact, take it or leave it. The way you said something that was true.

  So Moishe Leopold had been only half-wrong. He may have mistaken the Audi for a Porsche, which was understandable, given how closely the two resembled each other. And a moment later, when Julie Napolitano had asked him if it could've been just one person in the front seat instead of two, as he'd originally thought, he'd been willing to back off on that point, as well, and concede he was probably wrong. But he hadn't been wrong about that; he'd been right. It was Carter and Amanda who'd been wrong.

  Not just wrong, lying.

  They rode the first hour home in silence, Jaywalker driving, Amanda staring out the passenger-side window. The snow-covered hills along the Taconic Parkway drifted by. They saw deer, wild turkeys and a red-tailed hawk. There was little in the way of traffic. It was Saturday, and the skiers were off skiing, the shoppers were off shopping, and with gas prices climbing, nobody, it seemed, was out for a weekend drive.

  "So why did you lie to me?" he finally asked her.

  "Carter," she said. "Carter insisted. He's a control freak, a certified micromanager, in case you haven't noticed. He insists that Eric be kept out of things, and me, too. He's afraid that if I admit being in the car, they'll charge me as an accomplice or something. And that they'll arrest Eric for having driven home with only a permit. Carter says they can take away his license for two years for that."

  "Bullshit."

  "He says he looked it up."

  "Let's assume he's right," said Jaywalker, who had no idea if he was or wasn't. "Who cares if Eric can't drive for a couple of years. He doesn't need to. He's at school, and he doesn't even have a car. And as far as you're concerned, there's no such thing as an accomplice to motor vehicle offenses. Meanwhile, Carter's looking at spending the rest of his life in prison." It was an exaggeration, but not by all that much.

  "Well," said Amanda, "why don't you try telling him?"

  "I will. But right now he's not here, and you are. I need you to start by telling me what happened, from the moment you got into the Audi until the time Carter dropped you off."

  "Carter will kill me."

  Jaywalker looked over at her, just to make sure she didn't really mean it. But she was smiling, sort of. If you wanted to call a wry, bitter grin a smile. He decided her words had only been that: words, an expression. "If you don't tell me," he said, " I'll kill you."

  She spoke for the next twenty minutes, almost without interruption. Carter had refused to give her the keys. He'd gotten behind the wheel of the Audi, started it up, and begun revving the engine noisily. For several minutes she'd begged him to let her drive, but he'd refused. Only when Eric had driven off in the Lexus and Carter had threatened to leave without her had she climbed in. Even as he drove, they'd continued to argue, about his driving too fast, drinking too much, whoring around, and all
sorts of other stuff. At some point, he'd begun to go even faster, warning her to shut up or he'd kill them both.

  "When that didn't work…"

  He waited for her to finish her sentence, but she didn't.

  "When that didn't work, what?"

  He looked over at her again. This time, instead of sort of smiling, she was sort of crying. At least, a tear was running down the left side of her face, the only side he could see. He put on the four-way flashers, slowed down, and found a place to pull over. The driver of a huge SUV leaned on his horn as he sped by, spraying gravel against the side of the Lexus. Jaywalker killed the engine and turned to Amanda. "When that didn't work, what?" he repeated.

  "He pulled into the other lane."

  "The lane of oncoming traffic?"

  She nodded. Tears were coming down both cheeks now, he could see.

  "Did you shut up then?" he asked her.

  "Shut up? No, I screamed."

  "And?"

  "And you know the rest."

  "No," he said. "I don't."

  "A couple of cars managed to get out of his way. Don't ask me how. Then, all of a sudden, the van was right in front of us."

  He waited for more.

  "It was like a game of chicken. The van tried to stop. Then it pulled to the right, our left. And as we passed it, I turned and saw it go over and disappear."

  "What did you do?" Jaywalker asked. He already knew what Carter had done.

  "I opened my mouth to try to say something. But nothing would come out. By the time I was able to speak, to say we had to turn around and go back, we were miles away."

  "But you did say it?" He was beginning to have second thoughts about the accomplice thing.

  "Yes."

  "And?"

  "Carter said I could get out and walk back if I wanted to, but he was going home. And he did. And I've got to tell you, it was weird. It was like the whole thing sobered him up, just like that. He drove like a normal person the rest of the way. Slowly, but not too slowly. Carefully. Normally. When we got to the city, he dropped me off, and I went upstairs and cried myself to sleep, praying that nobody got hurt. In the morning, I turned on the TV, and found out otherwise. A little while later, Carter phoned to say that someone had gotten his license-plate number, or part of it, and he was going to turn himself in. I think I said, 'That's good.'"