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.'"
"How about the business of the wasp?" Jaywalker asked her. "And the rolled-up newspaper?"
"He made it up sometime afterward. He is allergic. That much is true. So he figured his doctor would be able to back him up on that, and people would believe the story."
"Anything else?"
"No. Yes."
"What?" he asked.
She looked him in the eye. "You have to promise me," she said. "You can't tell Carter I told you any of this. He really would kill me if he found out."
Jaywalker studied her face, by now red and puffy from crying. And this time he decided they might not be just words after all.
"Promise me?"
Back in his DEA days, Jaywalker had learned how to write a C.I. out of a case. A C.I. was a confidential informant, a snitch who was trading information on bigger dealers for leniency on his own case or money, or sometimes both. Say a C.I. had told Jaywalker and his team that Vinnie Bug Eyes had forty kilos of pure heroin stashed in a warehouse on Columbia Street, over on the Brooklyn docks. The team would sit on the place for a couple of nights. They might see stuff, they might not. Then they'd go to an assistant U.S. attorney and say they'd observed known dealers coming and going at odd hours of the night, looking around furtively and lugging heavy-looking suitcases in and out. Stuff like that. One of them would sign an affidavit. The assistant would go before a judge or a magistrate and get a search warrant for the warehouse. They'd kick in the door, tear the place apart and find a shitload of drugs and money. Stash and cash, they used to call it. And the best part was, Vinnie Bug Eyes never found out there was a C.I. involved who'd given him up. Because they'd written him out of the search warrant, out of the case altogether.
Sure, it had involved a bit of perjury and a little making of false sworn statements, both felonies that could have landed Jaywalker and the rest of his team in federal prison for five or ten years. But in the process, they'd brought down the bad guy, gotten the drugs out of circulation, and kept the C.I. from turning up in some dark alley with a bullet in the back of his head, and his tongue cut off and shoved down his throat. So it was a matter of the end justifying the means, he'd rationalized at the time. And, he figured, if he could write a C.I. out of things back then, surely he could do as much for Amanda Drake now.
"I promise," he told her.
Having spent Saturday driving up to Massachusetts and back, Jaywalker was forced to spend a good chunk of Sunday pondering what to do about this latest development. Amanda's admission that she'd been in the passenger seat of the Audi when her husband had run the van off the road was the least of things. Far more important was how she'd put the lie to the fable about the wasp and the rolled-up newspaper. Jaywalker now knew he couldn't call her as a witness, not without blowing away the only chance Carter had.
But it got even worse than that.
A lawyer doesn't necessarily have to believe his client in order to put him on the stand and have him tell his story. If that were a requirement, even fewer defendants would end up testifying than they now do. But, as with most things, there's a limit to the rule. A lawyer who knows for a fact that a witness intends to lie may not let him do so. That limitation applies to prosecutors and defenders alike, and extends to all witnesses, not just defendants.
Jaywalker was anything but naive, and he knew plenty of lawyers on both sides of the aisle who ignored the limitation. But as much of a rule breaker as he was, ethics were a different matter to him, and he drew a bright line when it came to suborning perjury. He was willing to coach a witness on how to say something, but not what to say. And more than once in his career he'd thrown a phony-alibi witness out of his office, once so roughly that he'd been arrested for assault.
He now knew this much. Come Monday morning, he'd have to confront Carter Drake about the wasp business. He'd promised Amanda he wouldn't let her husband know she'd given him up on it, and he'd honor that promise. Years ago, when his daughter had grown old enough to ask him to promise her certain things, he'd learned never to do so unless it was within his power to deliver. So "I promise I'll always love you" was okay, but "I promise I'll always be here for you" wasn't. A promise was just that, a promise.
Lying, on the other hand, was occasionally permitted under Jaywalker's personal code of conduct. Back when his wife lay dying, her body reduced to skin and bones, her face ravaged and contorted in pain, he must have told her a hundred times that she was still beautiful. And when her breath was fouled from swallowing what little was left of her own blood, he'd assured her it still smelled sweet, though both of them had surely known better. So just as he'd lied to Eric about the phantom EZPass photo, so too would he lie to his own client, in order to protect Amanda but at the same time get her husband to come clean. And once he'd done that, Carter would be stripped of his own lie and the only defense he had. At that point, he'd be willing to talk about a plea, and all that would be left was twisting Abe Firestone's arm hard enough to get him to let go of the murder count.
But in the meantime, just in case he was wrong about any of that, there were Monday morning's witnesses to prepare for.