Bronx Justice

by Joseph Teller

  They appeared before Justice Davidoff on April 9th. Jaywalker made his application for a postponement, bas ing it on the fact that he was pursuing several leads. Pope, true to his word, voiced no objection. The judge put the sentencing over to May 15th. Six weeks.

  Pope returned the tape to Jaywalker. He'd found it inter esting, he'd said, but hardly the kind of stuff he could act upon.

  Jaywalker tried without success to locate a doctor will ing to inject Darren with truth serum. He began studying docket sheets and court calendars for defendants accused of rape or other sexual assaults. Whenever he came across one, he pulled the court file, telling a clerk that the family had expressed interest in retaining him. He looked for a mug shot, if there was one. He studied physical descrip tions and arrest records. He checked the complaint to see if the facts matched those of the Castle Hill attacks.

  He combed newspapers for articles about rapes and rapists, hoping the real perpetrator would somehow emerge from the print.

  Once again, he discovered that his old VW couldn't make it from Manhattan to New Jersey without veering off to the right and taking the Cross Bronx Expressway to Castle Hill. He became a regular in the projects, spending three, four, sometimes five afternoons a week there, staying until it was too dark to see any longer. He fanta sized about spotting Darren's look-alike, confronting him, chasing him, running him down, tackling him and drag ging him to the nearest precinct. Sometimes he caught him; sometimes he got away.

  He tried not to think about the knife.

  At work, his desk piled up with paperwork and his other cases went neglected. At home, his wife complained, and his daughter became a stranger to him.

  But still he went back.

  He was offered drugs by dealers and sex by prostitutes.

  He got tickets for parking illegally and a Housing Au thority summons for loitering.

  But still he went back.

  He simply didn't know what else to do, and the idea of doing nothing was unthinkable.

  Yet no look-alike appeared.

  The only shred of good news came from the post office. Darren had taken an unpaid leave of absence when the trial had begun. With the guilty verdict had come an automatic administrative suspension. Now, largely through the ef forts of P. G. Hamilton, he had been reinstated and was back at work. In the great scheme of things, it wasn't much. But it was something.

  May 15th came. They appeared again before Justice Davidoff. Jaywalker pleaded for another postponement of sentencing. Pope didn't object, but he did express concern that it should be the last one. The judge put the case over to June 19th, and said that sentencing would take place on that date, no matter what.

  Six more weeks.

  21

  MURDER BURGERS

  Toward the end of May, Jaywalker finally located a doctor who was willing to conduct a sodium amytol inter view of Darren. Stephen Corman, a psychiatrist with cre dentials nearly as impressive as those of Herbert Spraigue, agreed to meet with them. Jaywalker checked with Darren, who was as willing as ever. Again Jaywalker invited Jacob Pope to attend. Again he said he'd try. Jaywalker invested in another tape. Again Pope didn't show up.

  On May 29th, Jaywalker met up with Darren and his faithful sidekick Delroid at Dr. Corman's office. As before, Delroid stayed in the waiting room while Darren and Jay walker went inside.

  Stephen Corman had a lot more hair than Herbert Spraigue, but he, too, was intense in his manner. He seemed a bit less sure of himself than Spraigue had, but he'd worked extensively with sodium amytol, and had come highly recommended. He'd explained to Jaywalker on the phone the day before that the drug, which was actually a short-lived barbiturate, had a marked relaxing effect, which made it very difficult for the subject to control his responses to questions. Still, he'd cautioned, there was no guarantee that it would produce absolute truth-telling. Now, however, as he spoke to Darren, he made no such qualification. Apparently it was his intent to let Darren believe that once he was under the influence of the drug, he would be physically incapable of lying. It reminded Jaywalker of the technique used by Gene Sandusky, when he'd assured Darren that the polygraph machine would be able to pick up any lie, however minor.

  Corman conducted a preliminary interview of Darren, questioning him about family, friends, his job, any use of drugs and his sexual experiences. Darren admitted to the occasional use of alcohol, but denied ever having tried marijuana or other illegal drugs.

  Then Corman had Darren roll up a sleeve. He inserted a needle, found a vein and pulled back until blood ap peared. Around that point, Jaywalker averted his eyes. There'd been a time when he'd thought seriously about fol lowing in a favorite uncle's footsteps and applying to medical school. He'd even put on a gown, mask and gloves, and watched as his uncle had performed surgery. At the first cut of the scalpel, Jaywalker had grown lightheaded. The next thing he was aware of, he was lying on a gurney, having the back of his head stitched up. So much for medicine. In law, he would learn over the years, you bled every bit as much, but it was a slow bleeding—a drop here, a drop there. The problem was, there were no trans fusions available. What you lost never seemed to get re plenished, and if you kept at it long enough and tried enough cases—at least the way Jaywalker tried them— eventually you would run dry.

  Almost immediately, Darren reported feeling "very light." Dr. Corman instructed him to sit back and begin counting backward from one hundred. With obvious dif ficulty, Darren tried. His speech was slow and thick. He fought to keep his eyes open, and lost.

  With the drug at its most potent level in Darren's blood stream, Corman began to question him about his where abouts in the early afternoon hours of last August 16th. Darren said he'd been home, asleep. Corman asked him to describe the women in his family. Darren characterized his wife as "pretty" and his mother as "nice." He spoke about his sister in detached terms.

  Corman asked him about knives. "When's the last time you carried one, Darren?"

  "When I was about t-t-ten," said Darren. "I had a knife. I used to throw it against trees."

  "Did you get pretty good at it?"

  "No." Darren laughed.

  And Jaywalker, fool that he was, took heart. What young man, after all, would admit that even with practice, he never mastered the art of sticking the point of a knife into a tree trunk from five or ten paces? Only a man compelled to tell the absolute truth, that's who. And as he had with the poly graphs and the hypnosis, Jaywalker once again dared to believe. That little vial of truth serum, their last chance at magic, was somehow going to come to their rescue.

  It turned out that Darren's confession to his inexpertise with knives would be the last word out of him for a good five minutes. The full impact of the barbiturate hit him, and he succumbed as one might to a general anaesthetic. Dr. Corman called his name repeatedly and tried to rouse him several times, before giving up and explaining that they would simply have to wait a while. As he had when Dr. Spraigue had brought Darren out of a trance on the wrong date, Jaywalker could only envision total disaster. Was this what Spraigue had meant when he'd said that hypnosis was safer to work with than sodium amytol? At the moment, death by overdose seemed by far the likeliest outcome to Jaywalker, followed closely by massive brain damage and permanent, drooling confinement to a wheel chair. He wondered how he was going to go about explain ing any of that to the Kingston family.

  But Darren finally came around, and eventually he reached the point where he was able to respond once again. Dr. Corman questioned him at length about his sexual experiences and fantasies. For a while it seemed to Jay walker that he was overdoing it. Wasn't an hour a pretty short time to practice Freudian techniques? But then Corman connected the subject to the rape accusations. Darren had described a number of experiences. Many had been erotic, some were humorous. All were embarrassing enough to have kept private, and as he'd listened, Jay walker had once again felt like a voyeur. But when it came to the rapes, Darren was steadfast in his denial that he'd had anything to do wit
h them.

  Jaywalker took a turn at the questioning and asked Darren when he'd last been up to Castle Hill.

  "The White Castle?" he asked.

  "No." The White Castle was a hamburger joint, a poor man's McDonald's, and one of Jaywalker's personal favor ites. The hamburgers were wafer-thin squares with holes punched in them. Murder burgers, they used to call them. They were the best. "No," Jaywalker repeated, "the Castle Hill Houses, in the Bronx."

  "Long time," said Darren. "No," he corrected himself, "not so long ago."

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jaywalker could sense Dr. Corman's sudden interest. "When was that?" the doctor asked.

  Jaywalker couldn't tell whether Corman was hoping that the drug had caused Darren to slip up or was merely following up with the next logical question. But Jaywalker himself had no cause for worry. By this time, he knew the answer every bit as well as Darren did.

  "Me an' McCarthy was up there," said Darren, before explaining that except for that visit, he hadn't been in the area for four or five years.

  No, Darren wasn't going to slip. Not hooked up to a polygraph machine, not on cross-examination, not under hypnosis, not under a drug powerful enough to render him unconscious. You could break this kid's bones, Jaywalker knew. You could pull his fingernails off one by one. And you were still going to get the same answers. Because those answers were true. Because, when you came right down to it, Darren really was as innocent of those crimes as Jaywalker himself was. He cursed the jury for not having seen that, cursed himself for not having been able to make them see it.

  "How about these young women, Darren?" Jaywalker asked him, not for himself any longer, but for the tape recorder, and for Jacob Pope, if he found the time to listen to it. "How about these young women who swear you raped them and made them go down on you?"

  "They're lying," Darren slurred. "Or they been c-c-con ditioned to think it's me. But they're wrong."

  "When's the first time you saw Joanne Kenarden?" Jaywalker asked him.

  "At the arraignment. She was the one who c-c-came to the arraignment. Right?"

  "Right," said Jaywalker, surprised by the tears in his eyes. He suddenly felt tremendous pride in Darren. He knew he could question him for the rest of his life. So could Jacob Pope and Herbert Spraigue and Stephen Corman, Gene Sandusky and DickArledge and Lou Paulson. It didn't matter what questions they asked, or how they asked them, how many times they asked them, or what they did to him before asking them. The answers were always going to be the same. They were going to be the answers of an innocent man.

  "How about Eleanor Cerami?" Jaywalker asked. "When's the first time you saw her?"

  "At the hearing," said Darren. "Right?"

  "Right," said Jaywalker, the tears overflowing.

  The following day, Jaywalker brought a copy of the tape to Pope's office. Pope said he had an hour, so Jay walker set it up and played it, and they listened to it to gether. Pope's reaction was pretty much the same as it had been to the Spraigue tape. He was impressed by Darren's consistency, but he felt that nothing new had been discov ered to change things.

  What, Jaywalker was forced to ask himself, if there simply was nothing new to be discovered?

  But the very next day, May 31st, something new was discovered. Deep within its pages, the New York Post reported that a young man named Richard Timmons had been arrested and charged with rape. It wasn't the first newspaper lead Jaywalker would pursue, and it wouldn't be the last. An avid Times reader, he'd taken to buying the Post and the Daily News on a regular basis. He told his wife it was for their extended sports coverage, but he knew better, and she probably did, too. The Times simply didn't consider every rape arrest fit to print.

  This particular article held out more promise than most, though. There had been a series of rapes; they'd taken place in the Bronx; the accused was a young black man; and the arraignment was to take place that very day.

  Jaywalker dropped what he was doing and drove to the Bronx Criminal Courthouse, the same old building where Darren had first been taken following his arrest. He hung around all day, waiting to get a glimpse of Richard Timmons. But he never did. Timmons's case was adjourned without his ever being brought into the courtroom. Jay walker made a note of the new date, June 13th, and circled it in his calendar. Then, figuring he was already in the Bronx and there were several hours of daylight left, he drove north and east once more, to Castle Hill.

  As the spring days were getting longer, so was the weather turning warmer. Jaywalker's self-appointed vigil no longer meant frozen toes and chapped lips. And as the temperature rose and leaves began appearing on the trees, more and more people ventured out into the courtyards and onto the walkways of the project. And each new person, Jaywalker told himself, could be the one he was looking for. After all, it had been mid-August when the rapist had struck, mid-August and early September. Surely it was warm enough for him to surface again.

  But a new problem worried Jaywalker now, the problem of time. With each passing day, he realized that his mission was turning into an obsession and beginning to take on a distinct Don Quixote aspect. He knew that after all this time, it was becoming less and less likely that he would spot the real rapist or recognize him if he did. And how could he possibly expect the victims to remember what the man really looked like? They'd seen him for fifteen or twenty minutes, nine months ago. Since then, they'd seen Darren's photograph and picked it out from among sev enteen others. They'd seen him in person in court, for hours at a time, and had pointed directly to him. They'd said they were absolutely certain he was the man. And twelve jurors had adopted their certainty and made it their own. Even if Jaywalker were somehow able to spot the real rapist, subdue him and dump him in front of the victims, they would shake their heads and say no, it had been Darren Kingston who'd raped them. What had once been mere certainty was by now carved in stone.

  The shadows lengthened that afternoon in Castle Hill, and the walkways gradually emptied. Jaywalker got back into his VW and turned it toward home, knowing he would still go back. It was better than sitting in his office and doing nothing, or staying home and feeling guilty.

  And he did go back, again and again. And he combed the newspapers. And spoke with detectives and prosecu tors, defense attorneys and court officers, asking about any rape cases they might have heard of. And he watched the days grow fewer as Darren's sentencing date drew nearer and nearer.

  On June 13th, Jaywalker was back in Bronx Criminal Court to get a look at Richard Timmons, the defendant he'd missed earlier. This time, he got to see him. His case was called, and he was led out of the pen area to be taken before the judge. Jaywalker got up from his seat in the audience and headed for the pen. As he passed by Timmons, he was able to get a glimpse of him, but only a glimpse. He was pretty close to Darren's height of fiveeight or five-nine, and of similar complexion. Jaywalker already knew Timmons's age; he'd stolen a look at the court papers, which listed him as twenty. Darren had been twenty-two when the victims had first picked out his photo. But the photo had been taken when he, too, had been twenty.

  Jaywalker needed to get a better look at Timmons. He flashed his ID card and was admitted to the pen area. Instead of continuing, he stopped just inside the door, the door Timmons would be coming back through in a minute or so. A corrections officer asked if he could help him.

  "No, thanks," said Jaywalker.

  The door leading to the courtroom suddenly swung open, and Jaywalker found himself face-to-face with Richard Timmons. He was a baby. He might have been twenty, but he looked more like fourteen or fifteen. The Castle Hill victims had all described a man who looked like he was between twenty-five and thirty.

  "Excuse us, counselor," a court officer was saying.

  Jaywalker stepped aside.

  "Fuckin' lawyers," said another court officer. "Nuthin' better to do than stand around, collectin' taxpayers' money."

  22

  A NEW YEAR'S TOAST

  Darren Kingston was sentenced on
June 19th, 1980.

  Jaywalker met the Kingstons outside Part 16, the same courtroom in which Darren had been tried and convicted three months earlier. With Darren were Charlene, Inez, Marlin and a half-dozen other members of the family. They knew they were out of postponements.

  Any defendant will literally beg you to bail him out. Jail is a horrible place, more horrible by a factor of ten than you can possibly imagine. Jaywalker himself had found that out the hard way in his younger years. Being out on bail becomes pure heaven. But everything changes come sentencing day. Suddenly the defendant in jail is the lucky one, for whom the event is just one more bump in the road. The defendant out on bail becomes the big loser. He has to walk through the courthouse door of his own free will, knowing he won't be walking out. He has to kiss his wife or girlfriend goodbye, tell his kids to grow up right, and know from the look on his mother's face that he might just as well have stabbed her through the heart.