prepare Amanda for. And not to just say no; common sense dictated that a wife would lie to help her husband out, and jurors were smart enough to know that. AMANDA: I'm not sure. I might, I guess. But I haven't had to decide. I haven't lied up till now, certainly, and I don't expect to. Besides, I'm very bad at lying, and you'd know as soon as I tried.
(Laughter)
FIRESTONE: How about your relationship with Mr. Jaywalker?
AMANDA: I wouldn't characterize that as a love-hate relationship, if that's what you're driving at.
(Laughter)
FIRESTONE: How would you characterize it?
AMANDA: I was asked by my husband to find him the best criminal defense lawyer I could. I found Mr. Jay walker. Because he's my husband's lawyer, I've devel oped a professional relationship with him. I've also come to consider him a friend.
FIRESTONE: Have the two of you discussed the case?
It was another area prosecutors loved. And therefore another area Amanda was ready for.
AMANDA: Of course.
FIRESTONE: A number of times?
AMANDA: Naturally.
FIRESTONE: Were some of those conversations, shall we say, beneath the bedsheets?
THE COURT: Sustained, we shall say.
FIRESTONE: Well, you and Mr. Jaywalker have been intimate. Have you not been?
THE COURT: Sustained. Move on, Mr. Firestone.
FIRESTONE: By 'intimate,' I mean THE COURT: And by 'Move on,' I mean 'Move on.' Is that clear enough for you, Mr. Firestone, or do I need to explain myself further?
FIRESTONE: It's clear enough, Your Honor.
God bless.
FIRESTONE: Well, Mrs. Drake, did Mr. Jaywalker ever tell you what he wanted you to say when it came time for you to testify?
AMANDA: Yes, several times. He told me to tell the ab solute truth, no matter what happens.
Nicely done.
FIRESTONE: Did the two of you discuss strategy?
AMANDA: Strategy?
FIRESTONE: Yeah, trial strategy. In other words, how he intended to get your husband off.
AMANDA: No, we didn't.
FIRESTONE: Never?
AMANDA: Never.
FIRESTONE: And he never told you what to say? Not even once?
AMANDA: Only to tell the truth. He said that would be good enough, once the jury heard it.
Firestone didn't quite give up there, but he might as well have; it got no better for him. After another fifteen minutes of dancing, he finally quit, and Amanda was allowed to step down.
'The defense rests,' said Jaywalker, in a voice meant to sound both soft and self-assured. And just like that, the trial testimony had ended, not with a bang, but a whisper.
With the testimony completed, the lawyers spent the afternoon in conference with the judge. First, perhaps exhibiting a measure of buyer's remorse, Abe Firestone asked her to strike the testimony of Amanda Drake, as she'd earlier offered to do. Jaywalker objected, naturally.
'No,' she told Firestone. 'I gave you your choice, and you made it.' Then she spent the better part of an hour explaining how she intended to charge the jurors. Only when she'd finished did she turn to her clerk. 'Are the accommodations for Mr. Firestone and Mr. Jaywalker ready?' she asked.
'Won't you reconsider?' Kaminsky pleaded. 'I'm sure they're both sorry.'
Jaywalker said nothing. Sorry had never been a big part of his vocabulary.
'Certainly,' she said. 'Very well, I've reconsidered. And I'm not changing my mind. Take them away.'
So that night, the two of them doubled up in the same cell that Jaywalker had shared with his client two nights earlier. Firestone was livid; he kept complaining that he was supposed to be home, working on his summation. Jaywalker, who'd been working on his summation for six months, couldn't have cared less. He used his one phone call to ask Amanda to bring him another change of clothes.
'I don't have the key to your apartment this time,' she pointed out.
'Look under the doormat of the apartment across from mine,' he told her.
'The one across from yours?'
'Yeah. The little old lady's, 4-G. We keep each other's spare keys. Only this way, anyone who happens to discover one under the mat will find it won't unlock the door it's in front of.'
That night Jaywalker gallantly insisted on taking the upper bunk. The truth was, there was no way he was going to sleep directly beneath the two-hundred-andfifty-pound Firestone. The good news was that around midnight, Abe stopped complaining. The bad news was that a few minutes later, he started snoring.
23
'Michael Fishbein, eleven. Sarah Teitelbaum, eleven. Anna Moskowitz Zorn, ten. Andrew Tucker, nine. Sheilah Zucker, nine. Steven Sonnenshein, eight. Beth Levy-Strauss, seven. Richard Abraham Lubovich, six. Walter Najinsky, forty-three.' One by one, he recited their names and ages. He did it slowly, and as gravely as possible. And he did it from memory. He knew that if he didn't do it, Abe Firestone would.
'None of them should have died, not one of them. And but for the actions of my client, every one of them would be alive today. Because we can all agree, every one of us, that it was Carter Drake who set into motion the chain of events that took them from this life, and took them from you. In a very real sense, he bears responsibility. He will go to his grave bearing responsibility. He will meet his Maker bearing responsibility. Knowing full well that he would have to drive home that evening, he drank too much, perhaps far too much. That was an incredibly selfish act on his part, an act that neither you nor I, nor even this court, has the power to forgive.
'But we are a nation of laws, and a trial is an inquiry into whether our laws have been broken. Nothing more, nothing less. And under our laws, selfishness-no matter how blatant and how repugnant it may be to us-is not a crime. Search for it in the indictment. Read all ninetythree counts. You will find no mention of selfishness, no charge of arrogance, no accusation of ultimate responsibility. What you will find are the names of ninety-three specific crimes alleged to have been committed by my client at about nine o'clock on the evening of the twentyseventh day of May, some eight months ago. And as it turns out, despite his insistence that he is guilty of every one of those crimes, Carter Drake is guilty of none of them.'
He let that hang in the air a moment. He'd woken up during the middle of the night, Jaywalker had, totally disoriented, with no idea where he was. Only the sound of Abe Firestone's snoring had jarred him back to reality. Then, as he lay on his back on the upper bunk, the ceiling only inches from his face, a flood of panic had washed over him. Had the jurors caught Drake's left-handed blunder? Did they understand the significance of his inability to downshift? Or had those things gone right over their heads? He hadn't slept after that, had instead spent the rest of the night fighting off the sensation that the cell was filling with water. The rise and fall of Firestone's breathing beneath him became a giant bellows-driven pump, gushing out invisible gallons of seawater that would eventually rise and engulf him. He had failed, he knew. In his inability to get Drake to finally come out and admit he hadn't been driving, he'd left the jurors with too little to go on. They were going to convict.
That had been last night.
Now it was today. And if they were going to convict, they were going to do so over Jaywalker's dead body.
'You and I came into this trial,' he told them, 'absolutely certain of two things. The first thing we were
