Depraved Indifference

25

It was May, three and a half months after the verdict. A lot had happened in that time. Carter Drake had been released from jail. His Audi had been returned to him, minus a few parts, and his bank accounts unfrozen. His civil lawyers had reached settlements with the families of seven of the nine victims, and were said to be on the verge of settling with the remaining two. The combined value of the settlements was reported to exceed twenty million dollars, and to cover Amanda, as well as Carter. Because of the not-guilty verdict, and because the evidence now strongly suggested that Amanda had been driving the Audi, her insurance company was contributing significantly to the settlement pool. The defenses the company had originally asserted-namely, that Carter Drake had been unlicensed, uninsured and intoxicated-had ceased to apply once it had been determined that he hadn't been the driver.

Abe Firestone had tried to indict Drake for perjury and obstruction of justice, on the theory that he'd lied by saying he'd been driving. But two separate grand juries had refused to vote true bills. There's long been an unwritten rule that bars bringing charges against a defendant who takes the stand and, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, testifies under oath that he's innocent. In the event of a conviction, a second prosecution for perjury looks a lot like overkill. And in the event of an acquittal, it smacks of poor losing. When a defendant insists he's guilty, in the face of overwhelming evidence of his innocence, no grand jury in the world is going to indict him for perjury, especially if he was trying to take the blame for a crime committed by his wife.

Firestone hadn't stopped there. Next he'd tried to build a murder case against Amanda. But there'd simply been too many obstacles standing in his way. First, there'd been no indication that she'd been drinking. Then there'd been Concepcion Testigo's identification, however weak and however based upon "jello hair," of Carter as the driver. Firestone had even gone so far as to do what Jaywalker had only pretended to, subpoenaing photographs from EZPass. But when the photos arrived at his office, they'd showed only the license plates of the Audi as it went through the tollbooth, not the occupants. With little to go on but Firestone's own anger and sense of justice, his case against Amanda had never even made it as far as the grand jury.

By mid-April, Carter and Amanda had not only both escaped prosecution and settled most of the civil cases against them, they'd resolved most of the personal differences between them, too. Amanda still kept her own apartment, but only because the lease wouldn't be up for another three months. For all intents and purposes, she'd moved back in with her husband, making Jaywalker's pledge to stop seeing her an easy one to carry out. He hadn't done quite so well in terms of visiting the dentist or scheduling a colonoscopy or a PSA test, but he was getting ready to clean up his apartment any day now.

So it came as something of a surprise when he got a phone call from Amanda, wondering if by any chance he wanted to take another ride up to Massachusetts with her to pick up Eric, whose semester was ending the following day. "Carter's stuck out of town," she said, "and my car's in the body shop, recovering from a fender bender. So we'd have to take yours."

"Sure," he said. "Why not?" He'd actually taken the Merc in for its annual oil change not too long ago, and it was running pretty well, all things considered. So he figured it might just be up to the task. Besides, when all was said and done, he was still the same old Jaywalker, and the thought of seeing Amanda again, with her husband out of town, was impossible to resist.

He picked her up at nine, and they were on the Taconic forty-five minutes later, heading north on a beautiful spring morning. Sitting beside him on the front seat, Amanda looked terrific, and Jaywalker kept both hands on the wheel, lest one of them wander toward her of its own volition. They talked little about the past, and barely mentioned the trial. She asked how his other cases were going, he asked about her design jobs. They listened to old favorites on the Merc's AM radio, oblivious to the static.

At Route 23 he turned right, and they stopped to get gas and lunch at a diner. He liked the way she didn't wait for him to come around and open her door, hopping out on her own instead. As he watched from the driver's seat, she bent over to stretch her back muscles. The unexpected view of her rear, which might have had forty years under its belt but sure didn't look like it, was worth the trip right there.

They ordered sandwiches and Cokes, and ate outside at a picnic table, underneath a huge white umbrella. It was nearly eighty degrees in the shade, and the cold days of New City in January seemed light-years away.

Only after they'd climbed back into the Merc, and Jaywalker had turned the key in the ignition, did he realize he'd left the headlights on. He'd developed the habit of driving with them on even in the daytime after reading somewhere that it cut head-on collisions by sixty percent. But being old, his car didn't have one of those annoying little chimes that reminded you to turn the lights off when you got out.

What that added up to now was a very dead battery.

He had no jumper cables, his last set having mysteriously disappeared from the trunk long ago. He looked around for help, and even asked a couple of people sitting inside if they had cables. But if anyone did, they weren't admitting it.

"Do you have AAA?" Amanda asked.

"No," he said, not bothering to add that the closest he'd ever gotten was AA.

"So what do we do now?"

"You get in the driver's seat," he told her. "Turn the key to the On position, but not Start. Put the car in first gear, and keep your foot on the clutch. I'm going to push, and when it gets moving, pop the clutch."

But instead of getting in, she just stood there, looking away from him. And when he asked her what the matter was, she turned and walked a couple of steps away.

It didn't take much effort for him to catch up to her. "You can do this," he told her.

"No, I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?"

For a long moment she said nothing. When finally she spoke, it was with eyes still averted, and in a small, tentative voice, the sort of voice a child might use when owning up to breaking a good lamp or an expensive piece of pottery. "I've never driven a standard-shift car," she said. "I don't know how."

He found a couple of guys to give them a push, and they got back on their way. He said nothing to Amanda, not a word. But sometimes silence can be more deafening than rage, and just after they'd crossed over the New York-Massachusetts line, she asked him to pull over and turn off the engine. He did, this time remembering to turn off the lights, as well.

"You think I'm horrible," she said.

"I don't know what to think," he told her. It was the truth.

She took a deep breath. "I sought you out," she began, "because everyone kept telling me you were the best. Even if you were suspended. You're going to think I'm a complete wacko, but I followed you, trying to make it look like an accident."

"I know."

"You know I followed you?"

He nodded. "For two days."

"Three," she said.

"I guess I must have been out of practice."

"Then, when the revolving door got stuck-"

"It didn't get stuck," he said. "I stopped it."

She smiled. It had been a while. "It was all Carter's idea," she said. "He said if either of us, or even both of us, said I'd been driving, nobody would believe us. That it would just look like I was trying to protect him because I had a license and I hadn't been drinking. He said the only way it would work was for him to take the stand, say he was driving, and then somehow slip up. But he said he needed me to find a lawyer smart enough to catch the slipup, and clever enough to know what to do with it. So I found you."

"And played me."

She nodded.

"Jesus," w as all he could say. Here he thought he'd pulled off a miracle, won an absolutely unwinnable trial, a Tenth Case. When all he'd really done was to play the part of the village idiot, and play it to perfection. Between them, Carter and Amanda had done all the heavy lifting. The left-handed mistake had been nothing but Carter's invention, the inability to reach the clutch a fallback measure, just in case Jaywalker had been asleep at the switch and missed the first cue.

"And our…"

"That was real," she assured him, her hand reaching out and finding his forearm. "All of that was real."

But how could he possibly believe that? How could he not think that their lovemaking had been just another part of the Grand Plan? A part that Amanda had kept her husband apprised of in minute detail, no doubt.

"I feel like an absolute idiot," said Jaywalker, drawing his arm back from her grasp.

"An idiot? Y ou were brilliant. Everyone was right about you."

"And you?" he asked. "Suppose Judah Mermelstein hadn't been sitting in the courtroom? Suppose he hadn't been smart enough to tell you to take the Fifth? What would you have done then?"

"He didn't tell me to take the Fifth," said Amanda. "I told him I was going to. He wasn't even sure I could. But Carter had looked it all up, and checked it out. He knew."

"You barely needed me," said Jaywalker. It was the truth, and it was hard to swallow. "You paid me all that money to be, to be… I don't know what I was. I was like the magician's assistant. You know, the dope he pulls up from the audience, the one who stands on the stage while they pull rabbits out of his ears."

"You were nothing like that," said Amanda. "You were wonderful. You were the best."

But her words were just that.

Words.