home with them and wonder about. Gold nugget number 4.
JAYWALKER: Let me draw your attention to this photograph, one of several you took of the interior of the Audi.
SHEETZ: Yes, sir.
JAYWALKER: I wonder if you can tell us what this is, right here on the console? (Pointing)
SHEETZ: This?
JAYWALKER: Yes, that.
SHEETZ: It appears to be a newspaper.
JAYWALKER: Appears to be?
SHEETZ: It's hard to tell.
JAYWALKER: Why?
SHEETZ: Because it's rolled up.
JAYWALKER: I see.
With the weekend upon them, Jaywalker relented and took Amanda up on her offer to follow her home. In the process, he rationalized, he was doing more than merely giving in to his libido, more even than falling in with the culture's Thank-God-It's-Friday attitude. This was one of the weekends Eric was due to come home from school. For some time now, despite Carter's insistence that his son be left out of things and not called as a defense witness, Jaywalker had insisted on at least sitting down with the boy and seeing what he had to say about his father's level of intoxication the evening he'd been sent in to fetch him out of the End Zone. And for some time now, Amanda had been promising to deliver Eric for that conversation. But each time, something would come up. Eric was behind in his courses and needed to stay at school to catch up. Or his ride with a classmate had fallen through. Or Greyhound had changed its schedule so that the bus to Manhattan no longer stopped anywhere near the school, which was in western Massachusetts.
Finally Jaywalker had put his foot down. He'd insisted that Amanda call Eric and extract from him a solemn promise that no matter what, he'd be at his mother's by noon this Saturday. After some hemming and hawing, Amanda had agreed and then reported back that it was a done deal. So Jaywalker would have to work on the weekend while on trial. What else was new?
That said, by midnight Friday, he was hardly regretting his decision. He and Amanda had enjoyed a memorable dinner at the Union Square Cafe, her treat, despite his protests. And afterward, they'd enjoyed an equally memorable follow-up in her bedroom. And while he'd surely needed the meal, not having eaten in the previous twenty-four hours, if asked to choose, he would have had no problem. No reservation required, no waiting for a table, no calories to speak of, and no check to fight over.
It was only the following morning that the ringing of the telephone brought the news that Eric had been prohibited from leaving the campus because he'd been placed on both academic and social probation. Was that, Jaywalker wondered, the equivalent of the double-secret probation that had threatened to ground an entire fraternity in 'Animal House,' his all-time favorite movie?
'Get up,' he told Amanda, 'and get dressed.'
'Why? What for?'
'Road trip.'
19
The drive up to Massachusetts took the better part of three hours, even in Amanda's Lexus. Jaywalker had seriously questioned whether his Mercury was up to the task, so he'd volunteered his driving services if Amanda was willing to supply the wheels, and she'd grudgingly agreed. When he expressed surprise that she didn't exactly seem overjoyed at the prospect of seeing her son, she smiled knowingly.
'You haven't met Eric,' she said.
'No,' he agreed.
'Eric has issues.'
'Issues?'
'Eric is a full-time, 24/7 rebel,' she explained. 'He lies, he steals, he drinks, he does drugs. But he does it all with great charm. He's very good at manipulating people.'
'Me, too.'
It was the truth. More than once, Jaywalker had referred to himself as a master manipulator. He'd earned the distinction back in his DEA days, when his success, and occasionally his very life, had depended upon his ability to convince dealers to accept him as one of their own, trust him fully, and sell him enough bulk narcotics to put them away for significant chunks of their lives. And he'd carried the skill over to his lawyering, where he made his living by manipulating adversaries, witnesses, judges and juries, also with considerable charm. In one dark moment he'd confided to his wife that he was no better than a jostler, a guy on the subway who bumped into you to distract you even as he picked your pocket, and afterward apologized profusely for his clumsiness.
'Well, don't let Eric con you,' Amanda was saying. 'He's not to be trusted, no matter how sincerely he looks at you. He's very, very good at it.'
The Berkshire Academy for Boys and Youths, unaffectionately referred to by its inhabitants as 'BABY,' was a cluster of redbrick buildings scattered over a snowcovered, 240-acre campus that would have been the envy of many good-size universities. Constructed in the 1890s with state funds, it had originally served as a combination orphanage and home for the severely retarded, a warehouse of sorts for the hundreds, and at times thousands, of boys throughout Massachusetts who either had no other home, or had one but were unwelcome there. By the 1940s, the number of inhabitants had dwindled to the point where it was no longer economically feasible to continue funding the home, and it had closed down and fallen into decay. In 1951, it was put on the auction block and sold for what was at the time considered a handsome price, eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Over the next thirty years it changed hands several times, eventually bought by the Cabot Foundation, which rehabilitated it and turned it into an all-boys preparatory school. But rather than attract the sort of Ivy League- bound student population that Philips Exeter, Choate and Deerfield had, Berkshire gradually became a repository for the underachiever, the problem child and the downright delinquent. For many young men of privileged background- according to Amanda, tuition, room and board came to something in excess of seventy thousand dollars per year-it represented the last stop before reform school, juvenile detention or worse.
Eric Drake, it would seem, fit right in.
They met him at the main administration building after a half hour's wait. Jaywalker had brought along a subpoena, the Samoan penny type, in case it came to a showdown, but it didn't. In fact, none of the three administrators they spoke with knew anything about the academic and social probation that had prevented Eric from traveling to New York for the weekend.
'Didn't I tell you what he's like?' said Amanda. 'He must have made that all up. Probably had a party he wanted to go to. Or a baseball game.'
'It's January,' Jaywalker pointed out.
'Whatever.'
When Eric appeared, dressed all in black and escorted by a teacher's aide, he seemed genuinely surprised to see his mother, and totally confounded by Jaywalker's presence, once Amanda had introduced him as Carter's lawyer.
'Is everything all right?' he asked. 'I mean, with the trial.'
It was almost as if he'd never planned on heading to the city, and had no knowledge of being rebuffed in attempting to. And when Jaywalker made an oblique reference to double-secret probation, he drew nothing but a blank stare. Then again, the kid was only eighteen. But still…
'I need to speak with you,' he told Eric.
'Sure.'
'Alone.'
