it.
Now, as Hannah Weintraub entered the courtroom, dwarfed by a state trooper, Jaywalker got his first look at her. Shorter even than Firestone, she had to be in her seventies. And judging from the thick glasses she wore, she had to have the eyesight of an aging mole.
This, thought Jaywalker, was going to be easy.
FIRESTONE: Where do you reside, Mrs. Weintraub?
WEINTRAUB: Reside?
FIRESTONE: Live.
WEINTRAUB: Right here in New City.
FIRESTONE: Do you recall where you were on the eve ning of May 27, at about nine o'clock?
WEINTRAUB: Yes, I do.
FIRESTONE: And where were you?
She'd been driving her friend Bessie Katz home from a mah-jongg game in Pearl River. Bessie had recently undergone a hip transplant, Hannah explained, and wasn't yet able to drive herself. A case of the blind leading the lame, thought Jaywalker, reminding himself to be gentle on cross-examination.
FIRESTONE: And did something unusual happen?
WEINTRAUB: I'll say.
Jaywalker noticed a couple of tentative smiles in the jury box. Not good.
FIRESTONE: Tell us what happened.
WEINTRAUB: A little red car, like a sports car, zoomed past us. It had to be going about a million miles an hour.
The smiles broadened, and there was even some muffled laughter. Not good at all.
FIRESTONE: Did it pass you on the left, or on the right?
WEINTRAUB: How could it pass me on the right? I was on the right.
FIRESTONE: So it passed you on the left?
WEINTRAUB: Right.
That took a few minutes to sort out, but with Justice Hinkley's help, the Who's-on-first? routine was soon resolved. The red car had come up from behind them, passed them, and then stayed in the left lane, the one meant for oncoming traffic.
FIRESTONE: Did you see what it did after it passed you?
WEINTRAUB: Sure I saw. It kept zooming, and it stayed in the lane it didn't belong in.
FIRESTONE: Did you lose sight of it?
WEINTRAUB: Naturally.
FIRESTONE: Did you ever see it again?
WEINTRAUB: Only in a picture you showed me.
Firestone produced a photograph and had it marked in evidence. Mrs. Weintraub identified the car depicted in it as the one that had zoomed past her. Then, with a little coaching from Firestone, she more or less pointed out on a large map the spot where she'd been on the highway when that had happened.
On cross-examination, Jaywalker established that, even corrected, the witness's eyesight left a lot to be desired. Asked to tell him the time by looking at a clock on the rear wall of the courtroom, she was unable to.
'But I can tell it's a clock,' she said. 'Just like I could tell it was a red car.'
Jaywalker smiled indulgently. But when he shot a glance over at the jury box, he saw only love. The jurors were eating up every word of Hannah's testimony. They absolutely adored her. So did he try to get her estimate of the red car's speed down from a million miles an hour to, say, a more plausible thousand? Did he ask her how fast she herself had been going when the car seemed to speed by, figuring her answer might well be in the single digits? Did he underscore the fact that Firestone hadn't even tried to have her identify the defendant as the other driver?
'No further questions,' said Jaywalker.
Julie Napolitano took over for Firestone and called Moishe Leopold. Jaywalker had been aware of Leopold for several months. He'd discovered a one-page report in the three cartons of stuff Firestone had given him, referring to an interview way back in July. It had been one of the four gold nuggets hidden among the mud and silt. Leopold, too, had been out driving on that evening in May. He, too, had seen a red car speeding in the wrong lane. But unlike Hannah Weintraub, Leopold had been going in the opposite direction and would have been run off the road himself, had he not managed to swerve onto the shoulder.
Not that Firestone had turned over the report so early out of the goodness of his heart, assuming he had one. No, the report constituted exculpatory material, because it contained several things that could reasonably be considered favorable to the defendant. Years ago, in a case called Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court had ruled that any such material had to be turned over to the defense at the earliest possible moment.
The first of these exculpatory matters was Leopold's misidentification of the car. Not content to call it a 'little red sports car' and leave it at that, as Hannah Weintraub had been willing to do, Leopold had stated with certainty that it had been a 'late-model Porsche.' The second mistake Leopold had made was to tell the trooper who'd interviewed him that there'd been not one but two people in the car.
To Jaywalker's way of thinking, neither of those errors had been particularly significant, given the fact that Carter Drake was going to admit that it had been he, in his Audi, who had forced the van off the road, and that he'd been alone at the time. But of course Firestone hadn't known that back in July. Back then, he'd had to assume that the defense would make him prove who the driver of the red car had been, and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. And because Moishe Leopold's inaccuracies might undermine his credibility, Firestone had acted properly, for once. Even if he'd then tried to bury the evidence.
As Firestone had with Weintraub, Julie Napolitano had Leopold recount the events of May 27. He described with some detail how he'd almost lost his life that evening. Then, on the same map Firestone had used, he pointed out the spot where he'd encountered the red car. It was almost a quarter of a mile from where the driver of the van had been considerably less fortunate. The implication was clear. The red car had stayed in the wrong lane for a considerable period of time.
NAPOLITANO: Tell me, Mr. Leopold. Back when you first saw the car coming towards you in your lane, what did you do?
LEOPOLD: I beeped. I flashed my lights, my high beams. But it kept coming right at me-fast.
NAPOLITANO: Then what did you do?
LEOPOLD: I pulled to the right, onto the shoulder. And I, I NAPOLITANO: Yes?
LEOPOLD: And I…soiled my trousers. That's how scared I was.
Nobody laughed at that.
Napolitano then took the trouble to preemptively bring out the errors Leopold had made in his statement to the troopers. She even produced photos of a latemodel Porsche, red, and had them marked in evidence so that the witness could compare them with Carter Drake's Audi.
'I see I was wrong,' said Leopold. 'But they sure do look similar.' And even Jaywalker had to agree.
NAPOLITANO: And when you said you thought there might have been two people in the red car…?
LEOPOLD: I could have been wrong about that, too. As I said, it all happened very fast, and it scared the THE COURT: Yes, okay. I think we get the idea.
Jaywalker had jotted down a dozen questions or so for Mr. Leopold. He could have played around with the misidentification of the car or the existence of a phantom passenger in it. But Julie Napolitano had already covered both of those things for him, and neither was worth overemphasizing. When it came right down to it, Jaywalker realized, Moishe Leopold was telling the truth as he knew it. No amount of cross-examination was going to get him to change his testimony or unsoil his trousers. As far as Jaywalker was concerned, the sooner he got rid of Leopold the better.
'I have no questions of the witness,' he said, trying to sound as though the reason was obvious, that his testimony hadn't hurt the defense at all.
Just in case there were any idiots on the jury.
Following Moishe Leopold's testimony, the judge broke for lunch. Amanda was a bit put off when Jaywalker explained that he wouldn't be joining her at the diner. This time it wasn't just Pagesixaphobia that made him decline her offer. Never much of a breakfast eater, unless you wanted to count pretzels and iced tea, it had been
