Joseph Teller - Depraved Indifference

He'd used his left hand, instead of his right.

Jaywalker had been standing back by the railing, the bar that separated the well of the courtroom from the spectator section. He tended to do that when he wanted his witness to speak louder, to project his voice. Now he walked to the podium and pretended to be studying his notes while he tried to figure out the significance of what had just happened. But a rushing noise and a pounding at his temples made concentrating all but impossible. Had he been the only one to notice Carter Drake's error? Was it possible he'd only imagined it? He turned toward the audience section so that his own body would be facing the same way the witness's was. No, Drake had definitely gestured with his left hand. But as he'd sat in the driver's seat, the gearbox would have been to his right.

Unless he hadn't been in the driver's seat.

JAYWALKER: Tell us, if you can, what prevented you from getting the car into a lower gear.

And suddenly there it was, a flash of panic in Drake's eyes. It lasted less than a second before vanishing, and the only reason Jaywalker saw it was because he'd been looking for it.

DRAKE: I don't know.

JAYWALKER: Don't you?

DRAKE: (No response)

JAYWALKER: Maybe I can help. Was it by any chance because you didn't have your left foot on the clutch pedal?

DRAKE: I don't remember.

JAYWALKER: How do you downshift in the Audi TT?

DRAKE: The same way you downshift with any man- ual-transmission car. You depress the clutch, move the stick into a lower gear, and release the clutch.

JAYWALKER: And the stick-the gearshift selector- is mounted on the floor, between the seats. Just as it's shown in this photograph that Investigator Sheetz took.

(Hands exhibit to witness)

JAYWALKER: Right?

DRAKE: Right.

JAYWALKER: Yet a minute ago, in demonstrating how you tried to force the stick shift into a lower gear, you used your left hand, and reached to your left with it- FIRESTONE: No, he didn't.

THE COURT: Yes, he did.

JAYWALKER: Didn't you?

DRAKE: If I did, it was by mistake.

Jaywalker let the answer hang in the air for a few seconds. Technically, the judge had been wrong to state her own recollection of the gesture. She should have told the jurors it was up to them to decide. But now, with her vote cast in Jaywalker's column, several jurors were nudging their neighbors, as if to say they'd picked up on it, too. And Drake's "by mistake" had by now taken on an absurd quality, somewhere the far side of plausible.

JAYWALKER: Let me ask you again. Isn't it a fact that the reason you couldn't downshift was because you didn't depress the clutch pedal with your left foot?

FIRESTONE: Objection. He's trying to impeach his own witness.

JAYWALKER: I ask that the witness be declared hostile.

It was a shot in the dark, he knew. For starters, he doubted there'd ever been an instance where a lawyer had succeeded in having his own client declared a hostile witness. But that sort of minor detail didn't bother Jaywalker. What worried him was that all a declaration of hostility triggered was the right to ask your own witness leading questions, in which the questions themselves contained or strongly suggested the answers, which could then be as limited as a simple yes or no. It didn't give you the right to impeach your witness, to attack him and try to show he was lying.

Fortunately, almost no one besides Jaywalker knew the rule or appreciated the distinction. Not even Justice Hinkley. "Overruled," she said.

JAYWALKER: You didn't step on the clutch, did you?

DRAKE: I, I, I guess not.

JAYWALKER: Yet you're an experienced driver, aren't you?

DRAKE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: How long had you had the Audi?

DRAKE: I don't know. Eight months.

JAYWALKER: How long had you been driving stan- dard-shift cars?

DRAKE: Since I was seventeen.

JAYWALKER: So what happened? Why didn't you step on the clutch before trying to downshift?

DRAKE: I don't know.

JAYWALKER: Yes you do.

FIRESTONE: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: You didn't step on the clutch because you couldn't reach it. Right?

DRAKE: (No response)

JAYWALKER: And you couldn't reach it because you weren't in the driver's seat at all. You were in the passenger seat, weren't you?

DRAKE: No.

JAYWALKER: And the reason you were in the passenger seat is that your wife was driving. Wasn't she?

The collective gasp from the jury drowned out Carter Drake's response, and Justice Hinkley had to ask him to repeat it.

DRAKE: Leave her out of it. It wasn't her fault. It was my fault.

JAYWALKER: Maybe it was your fault. But you weren't behind the wheel, were you?

DRAKE: Yes, I was. It was all my fault, every bit of it. So leave my wife out of it, and leave my son out of it. They had nothing to do with it. I'm the one who's responsible here. I'm the one who killed those kids. Me, me, me. I was driving. I was driving. I was…

Whatever else he might have wanted to say was lost in his sobs, drowned out by huge body-racking convulsions that completely overcame him. It was almost as though Carter Drake had suddenly regressed right there in front of their eyes and become a boy, a ten-year-old version of himself. A boy who believed that by shutting his eyes as hard as he could, clapping his hands tightly over his ears, and continuing to say over and over again that it wasn't so, he could somehow blot out the truth.

But Truth can have a funny way of revealing herself, and to everyone else in the courtroom, with the possible exception of Abe Firestone and his two assistants, she'd suddenly and unexpectedly laid herself bare, for all to see. Carter Drake had no doubt gotten it half-right. In large measure, he was responsible for what had happened. Had he not had too much to drink and needed help getting home, those eight children and their driver would still be alive. But he hadn't killed them. He hadn't driven their van off the road. He hadn't even been driving.

"I have no further questions," said Jaywalker.

But Firestone did.

For a full two hours, he took Drake back over every detail of what had happened in the car. The easy part was getting Drake to say he'd been driving. But when it came to explaining away his having gestured with his left hand reaching for the gearshift, or his left foot's not having been able to reach the clutch pedal, Firestone made no headway at all. And that fact must have been as obvious to Drake as it was to everyone else, because at one point, when it had become clear that his insistence that he'd been driving was ringing hollow, he looked away from Firestone and toward Justice Hinkley. And turning both of his palms upward, he asked, "Can't I just plead guilty?"

"No," said the judge, "you cannot. Your job is to answer the questions."

Firestone finally gave up trying and sat down, but his frustration and anger never once ebbed. Even after the jurors had filed out of the courtroom for the evening, and Jaywalker was packing his files and notes into his briefcase, the D.A. was in front of Jaywalker, spraying a fine mist of spittle as he delivered his unsolicited opinion.

"He's lying!" he shouted, his face crimson, the veins in his forehead bulging. "He's goddamned lying, and you know it. You put him up to this. They warned me. They told me you were one clever son of a bitch. But this…this is fucking criminal! This is an outrage! The guy goes out and kills nine people, and you twist things around to make it look like he was nothing but an innocent passenger! Well, fuck you! I'm still going to get him. You watch. And I'm going to get you, too, before I'm done."

Jaywalker finished packing his briefcase and snapped it shut. "You flatter me," he said. "And I suppose I appreciate your calling me clever. But I'm not that clever. Nobody is."