Jaywalker shrugged. There'd be plenty of time to revisit the matter, he knew. Still, it was a curious position for Drake to take. Here he had two witnesses who were in a position to help him, if only tangentially. One he was lukewarm about, the other adamantly negative.
Was it possible, Jaywalker found himself wondering on the drive home, that Carter Drake was in a hurry to go to trial and not looking for help because he was so consumed with guilt that he wanted to be convicted? If so, that would be a first for Jaywalker. Sure, back in his Legal Aid days he'd stood up for a wino or two who'd requested a couple of nights in jail to dry out, and a homeless guy who'd copped out to ninety days one December, just so they'd send him to Rikers Island and give him 'three hots and a cot' till the worst of winter was over. But twenty- five to life? Nobody wanted that kind of time. Nobody but a total lunatic.
'I need to talk with Eric.'
'I thought Carter said to leave him out of it.'
'He did,' said Jaywalker. 'That's why I need to talk with him.'
They were sitting in her hot tub, or Jacuzzi, or whatever the thing was called. It took up half her bathroom, held about fifty thousand gallons of water, and had more jets than Boeing. But it did wonderful things to Amanda's nipples, which in turn did wonderful things to Jaywalker.
'He's off at school,' said Amanda. She explained that Eric was on his sixth high school in as many years. This particular one was a boarding school up in Massachusetts. It was what they called an alternative school, she said, leaving it at that.
'It's still August,' Jaywalker pointed out.
'They start early.'
'When will he be home next?'
Amanda shrugged. ' Home is something of a flexible concept for Eric,' she said. 'At any given time, it might mean here, or his father's apartment, or his grandmother's, or any of several friends with kindhearted parents.'
'What I mean is, when will he be physically in the city, so I can meet with him?'
'Thanksgiving? Christmas, more likely.'
Which would be three weeks before trial. 'How long does it take to drive up there?' he asked.
'Two and a half, three hours. But they don't allow visitors.'
Jaywalker frowned. 'Just how alternative is this school?' he asked.
'Let me put it this way,' said Amanda. 'It was that or a secure juvenile facility until his twenty-first birthday. Okay?'
'Okay.'
'Now I have a question,' said Amanda.
Jaywalker waited.
'Is that some kind of periscope you've got there? Or are you trying to tell me you're in the mood again?'
A week later, Nicolo LeGrosso showed up at Jaywalker's apartment with a thick packet of medical records. He'd subpoenaed three physicians, two emergency rooms, a walk-in clinic and a pharmacy. They in turn had supplied him with over a hundred pages of documents attesting to the fact that Carter Drake III was indeed highly allergic to insect stings and would go into full anaphylactic shock unless treated promptly with epinephrine, better known as adrenaline. One of Drake's doctors had prescribed an EpiPen for him, a self-contained device he was to keep with him at all times in case of emergency.
'Good stuff,' said Jaywalker. 'Anybody willing to testify?' Getting a doctor to show up in court, he knew, was a little bit like getting a cat to show up for a bath.
'Yeah,' said LeGrosso. 'The guy who wrote the scrip for the works.'
Nicky tended to talk like the ex-detective he was, at least when he was in the company of a former DEA agent. A scrip was a prescription, a set of works a junkie's tools for injecting himself.
'Said he'll need three large for half a day,' LeGrosso added.
And three large was what it sounded like, three thousand dollars. Not too shabby for a few hours spent in court. But even at that rate, it would be worth it. There were times when it paid to be rich, Jaywalker knew, and standing trial on a murder charge was definitely one of those times.
The following day Jaywalker received an envelope containing a written solicitation from a firm that special ized in assisting lawyers- attorneys, it called them- with jury selection. For a 'reasonable fee,' which worked out to just under twenty-five hundred dollars a day plus expenses, the firm promised to create a profile of the 'ideal juror' Jaywalker should be looking for to sit on Carter Drake's trial, and then to supply an 'experienced consultant' to sit with him at the defense table during jury selection, also at twenty-five hundred dollars a day.
Jaywalker had by that time given considerable thought to just what kind of jury he wanted, and the answer was as alarming as it was elusive.
Normally he looked for racial minorities, blacks and Hispanics. Over the years he'd found them to be distrustful of cops and prone to identify with defendants. But there were precious few of either group in Rockland County, and fewer still who voted, owned a home or registered a vehicle there, the three things that would qualify them for jury service.
His other favorite demographic was young people. They tended to be idealistic, and not yet cynical about crime and criminals. But Abe Firestone-who, like Jaywalker would have twenty peremptory challenges to play with-wasn't going to let anyone under forty on the jury if he could help it.
Next came Jews, whom Jaywalker considered compassionate and forgiving. Maybe it was something about their collective history of persecution. Whatever it was, all things being equal, he'd take a Jew any day over an Irishman, a German or an Asian. Except in this case, of course, where the victims were Jewish, the prosecutor was Jewish, and the defendant had already been unfavorably compared to Hitler.
Women, he'd found, were generally preferable to men. They tended to be softer, more sympathetic, less prone to anger. But in this case, women were actually problematic. Every one of those eight dead children had a grieving mother, and in a close community like New City, there would hardly be a woman who wouldn't know someone directly affected by the tragedy.
Teachers, social workers and nurses made up another good group. They'd sacrificed big paychecks in order to join the ranks of the helping professionals, dedicating their efforts to the young, the needy and the ailing. But here again, the nature of the case stood conventional logic on its head. Young, needy and ailing didn't describe the defendant. It described the victims and their loved ones.
Carter Drake was a rich, unlikable, forty-four-year-old, non-Jewish man whose reckless conduct and depraved indifference had led directly to nine deaths, eight of them young Jewish children. There simply was no ideal juror for him. Chances were, there weren't even any acceptable jurors for him. But Jaywalker didn't need to pay anybody twenty-five hundred dollars a day to sit next to him and tell him he should be looking for young, childless, black Muslim soup-kitchen volunteers who'd just arrived in New City on a spaceship from Mars. He put the solicitation back into its envelope and tossed it into the trash.
Which was right around when a thought occurred to him. How about no jurors at all? What if he-with Drake's agreement, of course-were to waive a jury altogether, and take his chances with a bench trial?
He'd done so before, with almost uniformly good results. But in many of those cases he'd been prompted by a judge who'd let on that he or she didn't think much of the prosecution's case. Or he'd known the judge well enough to peg him or her as someone who'd be inclined to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt. While that was something the law actually demanded of all f inders of the facts, meaning jurors and judges alike, there were plenty of judges out there who'd convict their own mothers, and then sentence them to the maximum.
So which category did Travis Hinkley fall into?
On the plus column, she'd struck Jaywalker as both smart and fair. She'd come right out and said she liked him, always an important consideration. And she seemed to have a limited tolerance for Abe Firestone. Finally, she wasn't Jewish, a fact that might insulate her just a tiny bit from the community's wrath.
But there was plenty in column B. She was Irish, and in Jaywalker's book, going non-jury in front of an Irish judge created a prima facie case of ineffective assistance of counsel. Next she'd not only expressed her dislike of the defendant, she'd promised to throw the book at him after he was convicted. Not if he was convicted, but after. Then there were the pure mathematics of the calculation: it would take twelve jurors to convict Drake, but only one judge. With a jury, Jaywalker could hope for a weirdo who'd hold out and hang the jury. But there was no such thing as a hung judge, so long as one were to discount the rumors about 'Long John' McGrath. Finally, there was an
