Joseph Teller - Depraved Indifference

Way back in high school, Jaywalker had signed up for an elective after-school safe-driving course. Because the school had been a small one that couldn't afford to buy a dual-control car, the course had been nothing but a combination lecture and discussion group. It had been taught by a pleasant, bald man named Ed Shaughnessey, whom everyone had, naturally enough, called Driver's Ed. One of the things Driver's Ed had taught them was that while driving along, if you reached to your right- or even looked to your right, for that matter-you'd invariably pull the steering wheel to your right also. And over the years since, Jaywalker had found it to be true. You turned your head one way, or reached for something to one side of you, and as soon as you returned your attention to the road in front of you, you would find that you'd steered in the same direction you'd looked or reached, sometimes dangerously so. Drake's claim that he'd unconsciously steered left while swatting at something to his right was preposterous. Which was nothing but a fancy way of saying he'd been lying about that, too.

There'd been no wasp, no swat with a rolled-up newspaper. And Jaywalker knew that for another reason, as well. When he'd asked if Drake had succeeded in killing the thing, the only answer he'd gotten had been "I'm not sure." Hardly what you'd expect from someone who'd been scared to death of being stung.

So Drake had to have made the whole thing up. And Jaywalker, who'd certainly made up more than his share of things over his fifty years, had to grudgingly give his client a certain amount of credit, if only for inventiveness. It was a good story, as stories went, and with a bit of tweaking here and there, it might fool a jury into believing that even if he'd had as much to drink as Riley the Bartender was going to claim, Carter Drake's drunkenness hadn't been the cause of the accident at all.

In other words, they should blame the wasp, not the WASP.

The media was out in force again for Carter Drake's next court appearance. This time Jaywalker drove up to New City by himself, in the Mercury. He wanted to distance himself from Amanda as much as possible. One photo of the two of them together had been more than enough. He had asked her to make the trip, though, since this would be Carter's first appearance before Travis Hinkley, the judge who, at least according to the Disciplinary Committee, intended to put the case on a fast track to trial. And Jaywalker had suggested Amanda bring her son along this time. Not only was a little show of family solidarity in order, but he wanted to meet Eric and get his recollection of the evening of the accident. But Eric, it turned out, had an exam of some sort at school, and given his already spotty attendance record, he couldn't afford to miss it.

But if he'd driven up alone, Jaywalker had hardly arrived empty-handed. He'd brought along a set of motion papers, as well as a written Demand to Produce. Neither he, nor Judah Mermelstein before him, had so far received a shred of discovery material from the D.A.'s office. True, he had the reports that Jimmy Chipmunk had dug up, and the fruits of his own brief turn as a private investigator. But he wanted to force the prosecutors to pony up everything the law required of them. Not just to give them a hard time, but to preserve for appellate review their withholding of anything, in case of a conviction.

Because even this early on, those words, in case of a conviction, had become something of a silent mantra for Jaywalker. While he continued to think he had a fighting chance of beating the murder count, he had no illusions about some of the lesser charges in the indictment. A jury might conceivably buy Drake's account that he'd never been aware of the van's going off the highway and acquit him of leaving the scene of an accident. But given the testimony of Riley the Bartender, they were going to have to convict him of driving while intoxicated, and most likely of vehicular manslaughter, too. So appellate review w as something he had to be very much keeping in mind.

For several days Jaywalker had been trying to conjure up an image of Travis Hinkley. The last name, he'd decided, was a giveaway. Definitely Irish, never a good omen for a defendant. Conventional wisdom had it that judges of Irish ancestry were among the toughest you could draw, unless you were r eally unlucky and landed in front of a judge with a German name. And for once, Jaywalker subscribed to the conventional wisdom. So he started with a ruddy-faced, blustering, law-and-order ogre. On the positive side, maybe the guy drank. And drove.

It was the Tr avis part that intrigued him. Travis was a cowboy. Travis was a country-western singer who, when he wasn't riding his horse, drove an Americanmade pickup truck, a Chevy Silverado, Dodge Durango or Ford F-500. He ate meat and potatoes, chewed Red Man tobacco, and drank Budweiser straight from the bottle. But he was also something of a romantic, with a feel for the underdog.

With a little luck, Travis Hinkley might just turn out to be a regular guy.

The real Travis Hinkley turned out to be just a wee bit different from the one of Jaywalker's imagination. She might well have been Irish, given her flaming-red hair and piercing green eyes, but her face showed no signs of ruddiness, and there was no bluster to her. She was a small woman, short and stylishly thin, fiftyish. Her mouth was tightly pursed, and she opened it just enough to spit out a generic "Good morning," before retracting her tongue. Nothing about her suggested the possession of even a rudimentary sense of humor. To Jaywalker, who'd still been thinking country-western when she'd walked into the courtroom, she was the personification of a rather pretty rattlesnake.

Unlike the judge at the appearance several weeks ago, Hinkley had her clerk call all of the other matters on her calendar before Carter Drake's. Jaywalker had no way of knowing whether the order reflected the age of the cases, deference to the media, a flair for the dramatic, or a perverse desire to keep him waiting as long as she could. Some judges welcome "visiting" lawyers warmly; others seem threatened to the point of open hostility. Travis Hinkley made no secret as to which camp she belonged to.

As he waited, Jaywalker took the measure of his adversary. Jaywalker's expectations and the real thing matched up pretty well. Abe Firestone was a human bowling ball, barely five feet tall and nearly as wide. He squinted out at the world through thick glasses. What was left of his hair was gray. His suit was a three-piece relic from the previous millennium. And he had feisty written all over him.

"Call the murder case," the judge finally said, around a quarter of twelve, when there was nothing else left to call.

They brought Drake in through a side door. Again he was handcuffed behind his back, though the leg irons had disappeared. Still, Jaywalker made no complaint. This was the judge's courtroom, after all, and he wasn't about to hand her any easy victories.

"I have your motion papers," she said. "You'll receive my decision within ten business days. May I assume there has been an adequate exchange of discovery between the parties?"

In a criminal case, an e xchange of discovery between the parties is a misnomer. The defense is required to notify the prosecution of only two things-any alibi witnesses it intends to call at trial, and whether it plans on raising a psychiatric defense-neither of which had any application to Drake's case. The prosecution, on the other hand, is obligated to turn over all sorts of things: scientific reports, photographs, diagrams, drawings, maps and sketches, as well as exculpatory material, anything tending to demonstrate the defendant's innocence.

"I'm afraid," said Jaywalker, "that that would be an unwarranted assumption."