TESTIGO: It kept burning, but I couldn't do nothing, I couldn't get anywhere near it. Other people stopped, too. One guy had a fire 'stinguisher in his car, but it didn't work, nothing came out of it. Somebody with a cell phone called 9-1-1. And after a while the police came, and the fire trucks and ambulances. But it was too late, it was too late.
Firestone was smart enough to leave it right there, on an emotional high point. Jaywalker briefly considered asking no questions at all. Testigo really hadn't hurt the defense too badly. The Audi's speed was bad, but Hannah Weintraub had already established that. The wrong-lane business would have to wait until Carter Drake took the stand and told his wasp story. And his continuing on without slowing down or stopping could be explained by his belief that the driver of the van had recovered control of his vehicle and managed to keep it on the road. In an ironic way, Drake's speed might even work in his favor there. By the time the van had gone over the edge, he'd been too far away to be able to see. Though that might be a tough sell to the jury.
Still, Jaywalker had to ask Testigo something. Suppose the jurors were to get into deliberations and decide they wanted to hear his testimony again. A readback ending with a dramatic description of the van engulfed in flames, followed by no cross-examination whatsoever by the defense, could prove devastating. So he stood up, walked to the podium and gave it a shot.
JAYWALKER: When you first saw the red Audi in the wrong lane, did you beep your horn or flash your lights, or did it all happen too fast?
It was a trick question, of course. If Testigo hadn't beeped his horn or flashed his lights, chances were he'd now feel guilty, or at least sorry, about not having done so. In offering him an out, that it had all happened too fast for him to do either of those things, Jaywalker was just about putting words in his mouth. Not coincidentally, they were precisely the words he wanted the jurors to hear.
TESTIGO: No, I didn't have time. It happened too fast.
JAYWALKER: Is it fair to say that the whole thing, from the time you first saw the van until it disappeared, took only seconds?
TESTIGO: Yeah, that's fair to say.
It had been another trick question. Because the incident had to have taken only seconds. The key was leaving out the number of them. Come summation time, Jaywalker would remind the jury that even according to the prosecution's star eyewitness, the event had taken only seconds, which everyone thinks of as only a few seconds. But Jaywalker wanted more.
JAYWALKER: I'm going to ask you to close your eyes, Mr. Testigo, and try to visualize, to see in your mind, what you saw that evening. I'm going to say, 'Start,' and that'll mean you first see the Audi coming along. I want you to say, 'Stop,' as soon as the Audi disappears, and you can't see it anymore. Do you understand?
TESTIGO: You mean, to see how long it took?
JAYWALKER: Exactly. Okay, you ready?
TESTIGO: Yeah.
JAYWALKER: Start.
He kept one eye on the witness, the other on his watch. It was no mean feat, and definitely the stuff that migraines were made of.
TESTIGO: Stop.
According to Jaywalker's calculation, the interval had been about seven seconds. Short enough, he knew, to be explained by Drake's leaning over to swat at the wasp. Still, he would have liked it to have been even shorter.
JAYWALKER: May the record reflect that the interval between the end of my 'Start' and the beginning of the witness's 'Stop' was precisely five and a half seconds.
THE COURT: So noted.
That word 'precisely' got them every time. That, along with the inclusion of the half second. The implication was that he'd been looking at a sophisticated stopwatch, capable of breaking seconds down to fractions. The truth was, Jaywalker's watch didn't even have a second hand. It was a knockoff he'd bought on Canal Street for five dollars. 'Movado,' the Korean woman had told him, the same one who sold fake Gucci handbags and disposable three-dollar umbrellas. 'Very good watch.'
Jaywalker spent only a few more minutes on his cross-examination. He established a period at the beginning of the incident where Testigo could see the approaching Audi but couldn't yet see the driver. That would dovetail nicely with Drake's account that he'd been bent over to his right, trying to swat the wasp. Then he chipped away at the witness's estimate of the Audi's speed, getting him to concede that it might have been as low as sixty or sixty- five. Which would bring it down to ten or so miles an hour above the limit, something most drivers would be comfortable with, and few would be shocked by.
With that he thanked the witness and sat down.
Abe Firestone had evidently counted on Testigo's cross-examination lasting a lot longer than it had. He'd no doubt expected Jaywalker to contest not only the length of the incident and the speed of the Audi, but the make and model of the car, the identification of Carter Drake as the driver, his being in the wrong lane, and his failure to stop or even slow down after running the van off the road. But Jaywalker hadn't even touched on those subjects.
'May we approach?' Firestone asked.
'Yes,' said Justice Hinkley.
'My next witnesses won't be here until the morning,' he confessed. 'I assumed-'
'Don't assume,' said the judge. 'Who's up next?'
Firestone looked over at Jaywalker. 'Do I have to tell him? ' he asked.
'Oh, grow up, Abe, for God's sake. What's he going to do, go out and kill the guy?'
'The intoxication witnesses.'
Jaywalker had guessed as much, but it was good to know for sure. If nothing else, it would mean lugging fewer files to court tomorrow.
They stepped back from the bench and returned to their tables. 'I understand we may get a little snow this evening, or some freezing rain,' the judge told the jurors. 'For that reason, I'm going to let you go early. I'll see you tomorrow morning, at nine-thirty sharp.'
For some reason, judges love to lie.
It hadn't been a terrible day, Jaywalker admitted to Amanda outside the courthouse. As a witness yet to testify, she was prohibited from being in the courtroom during testimony. But he'd insisted on her showing up every day, even though that meant spending most of her time sitting on a bench in the hallway. The jurors would see her there as they came and went, and her presence was therefore important. She was doing the Hillary thing, he'd explained, standing by her man.
'How's Carter holding up?' she asked him.
It was a good question. What had struck Jaywalker most about his client over the past several days was his emotional detachment, his almost total disconnect from the goings-on. Here was a man who was looking down the loaded barrel of a twenty-five-year-to-life sentence, and it didn't seem to faze him in the least. Didn't he get it? Didn't he understand that the best he could possibly hope for was double-digit time on some of the lesser charges? And that was only if they got lucky and beat the murder count. Yet with all that, he just sat there, watching the jury selection, listening to the testimony, as though it was someone else's trial he was observing.
'He's okay,' said Jaywalker. The last thing he wanted to do was to start psychoanalyzing Carter for Amanda. He was into their marriage deep enough as it was. So to speak.
'What happens tomorrow?' she asked.
'The shit hits the fan,' he told her. 'They're going to put on the bartender from the End Zone, and probably a couple of people who drank with Carter. Then an expert to estimate how drunk he was.'
'Can they do that? I mean, legally?'
'I'm afraid so,' he said. 'It's not going to be a very good day. If you know what I mean.'
'Would a very good night help? If you know what I mean.'
He laughed out loud at the pure absurdity of it all. First Carter, who didn't seem to care about anything. And now Amanda, who seemed to care about only one thing.
'Not tonight,' he said.
But not without smiling.
