shopping, and with gas prices climbing, nobody, it seemed, was out for a weekend drive.
'So why did you lie to me?' he finally asked her.
'Carter,' she said. 'Carter insisted. He's a control freak, a certified micromanager, in case you haven't noticed. He insists that Eric be kept out of things, and me, too. He's afraid that if I admit being in the car, they'll charge me as an accomplice or something. And that they'll arrest Eric for having driven home with only a permit. Carter says they can take away his license for two years for that.'
'Bullshit.'
'He says he looked it up.'
'Let's assume he's right,' said Jaywalker, who had no idea if he was or wasn't. 'Who cares if Eric can't drive for a couple of years. He doesn't need to. He's at school, and he doesn't even have a car. And as far as you're concerned, there's no such thing as an accomplice to motor vehicle offenses. Meanwhile, Carter's looking at spending the rest of his life in prison.' It was an exaggeration, but not by all that much.
'Well,' said Amanda, 'why don't you try telling him?'
'I will. But right now he's not here, and you are. I need you to start by telling me what happened, from the moment you got into the Audi until the time Carter dropped you off.'
'Carter will kill me.'
Jaywalker looked over at her, just to make sure she didn't really mean it. But she was smiling, sort of. If you wanted to call a wry, bitter grin a smile. He decided her words had only been that: words, an expression. 'If you don't tell me,' he said, ' I'll kill you.'
She spoke for the next twenty minutes, almost without interruption. Carter had refused to give her the keys. He'd gotten behind the wheel of the Audi, started it up, and begun revving the engine noisily. For several minutes she'd begged him to let her drive, but he'd refused. Only when Eric had driven off in the Lexus and Carter had threatened to leave without her had she climbed in. Even as he drove, they'd continued to argue, about his driving too fast, drinking too much, whoring around, and all sorts of other stuff. At some point, he'd begun to go even faster, warning her to shut up or he'd kill them both.
'When that didn't work…'
He waited for her to finish her sentence, but she didn't.
'When that didn't work, what?'
He looked over at her again. This time, instead of sort of smiling, she was sort of crying. At least, a tear was running down the left side of her face, the only side he could see. He put on the four-way flashers, slowed down, and found a place to pull over. The driver of a huge SUV leaned on his horn as he sped by, spraying gravel against the side of the Lexus. Jaywalker killed the engine and turned to Amanda. 'When that didn't work, what?' he repeated.
'He pulled into the other lane.'
'The lane of oncoming traffic?'
She nodded. Tears were coming down both cheeks now, he could see.
'Did you shut up then?' he asked her.
'Shut up? No, I screamed.'
'And?'
'And you know the rest.'
'No,' he said. 'I don't.'
'A couple of cars managed to get out of his way. Don't ask me how. Then, all of a sudden, the van was right in front of us.'
He waited for more.
'It was like a game of chicken. The van tried to stop. Then it pulled to the right, our left. And as we passed it, I turned and saw it go over and disappear.'
'What did you do?' Jaywalker asked. He already knew what Carter had done.
'I opened my mouth to try to say something. But nothing would come out. By the time I was able to speak, to say we had to turn around and go back, we were miles away.'
'But you did say it?' He was beginning to have second thoughts about the accomplice thing.
'Yes.'
'And?'
'Carter said I could get out and walk back if I wanted to, but he was going home. And he did. And I've got to tell you, it was weird. It was like the whole thing sobered him up, just like that. He drove like a normal person the rest of the way. Slowly, but not too slowly. Carefully. Normally. When we got to the city, he dropped me off, and I went upstairs and cried myself to sleep, praying that nobody got hurt. In the morning, I turned on the TV, and found out otherwise. A little while later, Carter phoned to say that someone had gotten his license-plate number, or part of it, and he was going to turn himself in. I think I said, 'That's good.''
'How about the business of the wasp?' Jaywalker asked her. 'And the rolled-up newspaper?'
'He made it up sometime afterward. He is allergic. That much is true. So he figured his doctor would be able to back him up on that, and people would believe the story.'
'Anything else?'
'No. Yes.'
'What?' he asked.
She looked him in the eye. 'You have to promise me,' she said. 'You can't tell Carter I told you any of this. He really would kill me if he found out.'
Jaywalker studied her face, by now red and puffy from crying. And this time he decided they might not be just words after all.
'Promise me?'
Back in his DEA days, Jaywalker had learned how to write a C.I. out of a case. A C.I. was a confidential informant, a snitch who was trading information on bigger dealers for leniency on his own case or money, or sometimes both. Say a C.I. had told Jaywalker and his team that Vinnie Bug Eyes had forty kilos of pure heroin stashed in a warehouse on Columbia Street, over on the Brooklyn docks. The team would sit on the place for a couple of nights. They might see stuff, they might not. Then they'd go to an assistant U.S. attorney and say they'd observed known dealers coming and going at odd hours of the night, looking around furtively and lugging heavy- looking suitcases in and out. Stuff like that. One of them would sign an affidavit. The assistant would go before a judge or a magistrate and get a search warrant for the warehouse. They'd kick in the door, tear the place apart and find a shitload of drugs and money. Stash and cash, they used to call it. And the best part was, Vinnie Bug Eyes never found out there was a C.I. involved who'd given him up. Because they'd written him out of the search warrant, out of the case altogether.
Sure, it had involved a bit of perjury and a little making of false sworn statements, both felonies that could have landed Jaywalker and the rest of his team in federal prison for five or ten years. But in the process, they'd brought down the bad guy, gotten the drugs out of circulation, and kept the C.I. from turning up in some dark alley with a bullet in the back of his head, and his tongue cut off and shoved down his throat. So it was a matter of the end justifying the means, he'd rationalized at the time. And, he figured, if he could write a C.I. out of things back then, surely he could do as much for Amanda Drake now.
'I promise,' he told her.
Having spent Saturday driving up to Massachusetts and back, Jaywalker was forced to spend a good chunk of Sunday pondering what to do about this latest development. Amanda's admission that she'd been in the passenger seat of the Audi when her husband had run the van off the road was the least of things. Far more important was how she'd put the lie to the fable about the wasp and the rolled-up newspaper. Jaywalker now knew he couldn't call her as a witness, not without blowing away the only chance Carter had.
But it got even worse than that.
A lawyer doesn't necessarily have to believe his client in order to put him on the stand and have him tell his story. If that were a requirement, even fewer defendants would end up testifying than they now do. But, as with most things, there's a limit to the rule. A lawyer who knows for a fact that a witness intends to lie may not let him do so. That limitation applies to prosecutors and defenders alike, and extends to all witnesses, not just defendants.
Jaywalker was anything but naive, and he knew plenty of lawyers on both sides of the aisle who ignored the
