make eye contact as ever. And studying them, Jaywalker hoped he understood that anger. Let them be angry, he prayed. Let them be angry at Carter Drake, but only for setting in motion the chain of events that hadn't ended until nine people lay incinerated beyond recognition. Let them be angry at Amanda for whatever she'd done to cause the Audi to wander into the wrong lane, and to fail to get it back where it belonged. Let them be angry at the prosecution for being so stupid as to indict the wrong person. Let them be angry at me for being the one to show them they had to acquit. Let their anger be the anger of frustration, not the anger of retribution.
'Will the foreperson please rise?'
Juror number one stood. She was a pleasant-looking woman, a teacher's aide with two young children of her own. She was thirty-four, she'd told them during jury selection a thousand years ago, and an orthodox Jew who wore a wig in public and kept a kosher home. And to look at her face, she was very, very nervous. But Jaywalker wasn't looking at her face. He was looking at her hands. They were empty. They held no verdict sheet, no note, no written breakdown of how the jury had voted on each of the ninety-three counts in the indictment.
Which could mean only one thing.
Either the jury was about to convict Carter Drake of everything, or they were going to convict him of nothing.
'Will the defendant please rise?' said the clerk. And as Drake stood, so did Jaywalker. He'd been secondguessed for that a couple of times, accused of showboating, even asked once if he was prepared to share the defendant's sentence in the event of a conviction. 'Sure,' he'd said, having already seen the jurors' smiles. The point was, he didn't care what others thought. It was his verdict as much as his client's. If the jury was about to reject his client, then they'd rejected him, too, and he'd take it standing up. What warrior ever chose to sit before his firing squad?
'Madame Forelady, has the jury reached a verdict?'
'Yes, we have.'
'As to all ninety-three counts?'
'Yes.'
'On count one of the indictment, charging the defendant with the murder of Walter Najinsky on the theory of recklessness evincing a depraved indifference to human life, how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?'
24
It would have taken an hour, perhaps more, for the clerk to read each of the counts contained in the indictment, and for the teacher's aide to recite the words Not guilty ninety-three times. Graciously, if perhaps a wee bit testily, Abe Firestone rose to his feet after five such recitals, and suggested that the court might wish to inquire whether the news on the remaining eighty-eight counts was going to follow the pattern suggested by the first five.
'Thank you,' said the judge. Then, turning to the forelady, she said, 'Please answer this question 'Yes' or 'No.' Has the jury found the defendant not guilty on all ninety-three counts of the indictment? Just 'Yes' or 'No,' please. Nothing else.'
'Yes.'
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.
