Bronx Justice
Joseph Teller
It is the late 1970s and criminal defense attorney Harrison J. Walker, better known as Jaywalker for his rebellious tactics, is struggling to build his own practice when he receives a call from a desperate mother. Her son, Darren Kingston, has been arrested for raping five white women in Castle Hill, an area of the Bronx long forgotten by the city. A young, goodlooking black man, Darren is positively identified by four of the victims as the fifth prepares to do the same.Everyone from the prosecution to the community at largesees this as an openandshut case with solid eyewitness testimony. Everyone, that is, except Jaywalker. The young attorney looks deep into the crimes, studying both the characters involved and the character of our society. What he finds will haunt him for the rest of his career.
BRONX JUSTICE
Also by
JOSEPH TELLER
THE TENTH CASE
Watch for
DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE
Available November 2009
JOSEPH TELLER
BRONX JUSTICE
To Sheila, who put up with me back then, at a time
when I’m sure I was impossible to put up with.
And to my children, Wendy, Ron and Tracy,
who must have suffered mightily by having a father
absent in more ways than one, but never complained
about it, then or since.
CONTENTS
1: IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
2: NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER
3: EIGHTY YEARS
4: HEDGING BETS
5: THE LITTLE BLACK BOX
6: LAST CHANCE
7: THE BRICK WALL
8: NIGHTS ON THE COUCH
9: THE FREE LOOK
10: A STUBBORN FOG
11: BOARD GAMES
12: DISCREPANCIES
13: THE CYCLONE
14: FAMILY AND FRIENDS
15: DARREN
16: THE OTHER MAN
17: LOW BLOWS
18: THREE PITIFUL WEAPONS
19: THE SHORTEST DAY
20: IN THIS HEART OF MINE
21: MURDER BURGERS
22: A NEW YEAR’S TOAST
23: NO PLACE TO BE
24: JAMMED UP PRETTY GOOD
25: THE NICEST THANK-YOU
26: ELEVEN POINTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
Jaywalker is dreaming when the ringing of his phone jars him awake. Something about hiking with his wife in the Canadian Rockies. He understands right away it has to have been a dream, because his wife has been dead for nearly ten years now, and he hasn’t hiked the Rockies in twice that long.
Groping in the darkness for the phone, his first fear is for his daughter. Is she out driving? Riding with some pimply-faced boyfriend who’s had his learner’s permit for two weeks now and thinks of driving as some sort of video game? Then he remembers. His daughter is in her early thirties. She has a husband with no pimples, a child of her own, a career, and a house in New Jersey.
“Hello?” Jaywalker says into the phone, then holds his breath and readies himself for the worst. The clock radio next to the phone glows 3:17.
“Pete?” says an unfamiliar male voice.
“I think,” says Jaywalker, “that you may have dialed the wrong number. What number were you trying to—”
The line goes dead. No “Sorry,” no “Oops.” Just a click, followed by silence and eventually a dial tone.
Jaywalker recradles the phone. He lies on his back in the dark, feeling his pulse pounding in his temples. Relief and annoyance duel for his attention, but only briefly. For already, Jaywalker is elsewhere. He’s lying in bed in the dark, to be sure, but somehow his hair is brown instead of gray, his face less lined, his body more muscular. And his wife lies beside him, her warm body pressed against his back.
“Who was it?” she asks him.
“A mother,” he says. “A mother whose son has just been arrested. A rape case. And it sounds like a bad one.”
“For them,” says Jaywalker’s wife. “But that means a good one for you, right?”
“Right,” agrees Jaywalker. He’s not yet thirty, this younger version of him. He’s been out of Legal Aid for a little over a year now, struggling to build a practice on his own. And struggling is definitely the operative word here. So he knows his wife is right: what’s bad for the young man and his family is at the same time good for the lawyer and his. One of the strange paradoxes of criminal law that Jaywalker will never quite get comfortable with: that his earning a living is dependent upon the suffering of others.
What this younger Jaywalker doesn’t know, what he has absolutely no way of knowing at this point, as he lies in the dark, is that this new case will be different, that it will mark a crossroads in his career and in his life. Should he live to be a hundred, no case that will ever come his way will end up affecting him as this one will. Before he’s done with it, and it with him, it will change him in ways that will be as profound as they are unimaginable. It will transform him, molding him and pounding him and shaping him into the lawyer and the man he is today, almost thirty years later. So this is more than just the case he’ll forever wake up to when the phone rings in the middle of the night. This is the case that he’ll retry in his mind over and over again for the rest of his days, changing a phrase here, adding a word there, tweaking his summation for the hundredth—no, the thousandth—time. And long after he’s grown old and senile and has forgotten the names and faces and details of other cases, this is the one that Jaywalker will remember on his deathbed, as clearly and as vividly as if it began yesterday.
2
NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER
That the case had come Jaywalker’s way at 3:17 in the morning, while unusual, was not entirely unprecedented. That it had come by way of his home telephone was actually rather typical. Jaywalker had early on developed the habit of giving out his home number liberally. It was but one of many things that distinguished him from his colleagues, who never would have thought of doing such a thing, the functional equivalent of a physician’s house call. Moreover, as technology advanced, with the advent of beepers, pagers, car phones, cell phones and BlackBerries, Jaywalker stuck to the practice with characteristic stubbornness, continuing to invite clients and their families to call him at home whenever the need arose. As it had apparently arisen for Inez Kingston on that particular night in September of 1979.
Then, as now, Jaywalker had answered with a fearful “Hello?” notwithstanding the fact that he knew his daughter was safely in bed upstairs and wouldn’t even be of driving age for another twelve or thirteen years. Whatever the circumstance, there seems to be something about the midnight phone call that inspires instant dread.
“Mr. Jaywalker?” the woman had said.
“Yes.”
“This is Inez Kingston. You represented my son Darren last year. Maybe you remember.”
“Sure,” said Jaywalker. “I remember.” The name did sound familiar, though if pressed, he would have had trouble attaching a face to it, or recalling what the charges had been and how the case had turned out.
“I’m afraid it’s Darren again,” she said. “They’ve got him at the precinct. They say he raped some women. They won’t tell me any more.”
“What precinct?”
“The Forty-third.”
Jaywalker jotted down Inez’s number in the dark, something he’d learned to do. Otherwise, brilliant ideas that came to him in the middle of the night had a way of vanishing before morning. Written down on paper, they tended to lose some of their brilliance, but at least they survived.
He found the number for the 43rd Precinct. He knew from the precinct number that it had to be somewhere in the Bronx, but other than that, he didn’t have a clue. Ninety percent of his practice was in Manhattan, which he liked to think of in sports language as his home court. Of course, at this particular stage of his career, the math wasn’t all that hard to do: it didn’t exactly require a calculator to convert nine out of ten cases into a percentage.
He reached the precinct and had the desk officer transfer his call to the squad room. There a detective confirmed that they did indeed have a Darren Kingston locked up. He’d been booked for five separate rapes and would be making court in the morning.
Jaywalker thanked the detective and called Inez back. He told her what he’d been able to find out, and offered to meet her in court at nine o’clock. Before hanging up, he told her not to worry. Like most people, if you woke Jaywalker up in the middle of the night, he could be pretty stupid.
It took him an hour or so, and the continued warmth of his wife’s body pressed up against his own, but he eventually managed to fall back to sleep. He was sure Inez Kingston didn’t.
He had a car back in those days, Jaywalker did. Or sort of. It was an ancient Volkswagen Beetle, its exterior equal parts blue paint and orange rust. The running boards had fallen off, the heater was history, the wipers stuck when they weren’t busy scratching the windshield, and the horn worked if you were lucky enough to happen upon the “sweet spot” of the rim.
But it was transportation, something that came in handy when you’d been forced to flee the city’s rich rents and poor public schools, and move to the suburbs. If Bergenfield, New Jersey, qualified as a suburb. What it was, was a blue-collar, working-class community, where Jaywalker could mow his own lawn, rake his own leaves and shovel his own driveway without being mistaken for a hired man. Even if his wife hoped for better things, it suited him just fine.
Aiming the VW toward the Bronx that following morning, Jaywalker tried to remember what he could about Darren Kingston. He’d been one of Jaywalker’s first clients after he’d left Legal Aid. His mother, Inez, worked at what today is referred to as the Department of Social Services. Back then it was the Welfare Department. Progress, no doubt. One of Inez’s coworkers there was Jaywalker’s sister-in-law. It had been at her suggestion that Inez had called Jaywalker when Darren had gotten into trouble. Along with two other young black men, he’d been arrested for robbing an elderly white man. Although the case had sounded bad at first, it turned out to be pretty harmless. One of the other defendants had done some work for the man and had had a dispute over how much money was owed him. When he went to collect, he brought his friends along. One of his friends being a knife. Seeing as Darren himself hadn’t possessed it, had had very little involvement in the matter and had never been in any sort of trouble before, the charges against him had eventually been dropped.
This time, Jaywalker thought as he maneuvered around the potholes, trash and broken glass of the South Bronx, he was pretty sure things weren’t going to be quite so easy.
Arraignments took place in a dark gray building at 161st Street and Washington Avenue, half a block from the abandoned elevated tracks above Third Avenue. It was one of two buildings that together made up the Bronx Criminal Court. Rumor had it that both had been condemned as unsafe since the early 1950s, and in fact they would finally be abandoned a few years later, replaced by a large modern structure closer to the Grand Concourse.
At the time, however, the decaying building was, for most people, their first encounter with what passed for Bronx justice. The floors were stained and uneven. Where they were supposed to be tiled, whole sections of tiles had been removed. Where they were wood, they were splintered and suffering from years of dry rot. The walls were cracked and paint-chipped, and covered with graffiti that was anti-police, anti-white, anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay, anti-just about everything. The two elevators took turns being out of order. Rather than guessing, Jaywalker headed for the stairwell. Just before entering, he took a deep gulp of air, then breathed through his mouth as he climbed, in order to block out as much of the stench of old urine as he could.
Reaching the second floor, he recognized Inez Kingston and her husband, Marlin. She was a short, heavyset woman whose pleasant smile and soft West Indian accent masked an inner nervousness and chronic high blood pressure. He was an equally short, wiry man with a face that wore the two-day-old stubble of a nightshift worker for the Transit Department. As accustomed as Inez was to hiding her feelings, Marlin was not, and his face that Wednesday morning was tense and unsmiling.
Jaywalker headed over and greeted them. Inez introduced him to her younger brother, who’d come along for support. Jaywalker asked if anything was new since the night before.
“No,” said Inez, “but the detective’s here. Rendell. He won’t tell us anything, but he did say he’d talk to you. I told him we had a lawyer coming. Was that all right?”
“Yes,” said Jaywalker. “Where is he now?”
“In there.” She pointed to a door. A sign on it warned passersby to keep out.
COMPLAINT ROOM
POLICE OFFICERS ONLY
“Point him out to me when he comes out, okay?”
It didn’t take long. Robert Rendell, all six foot three of him, opened the door and strode out. He was young for a detective, and handsome, with a shock of graying black hair that fell across his forehead. Jaywalker immediately sized him up as a formidable witness. Then he moved to intercept him before he made it to the courtroom.
“Detective Rendell?”
“Yup.”
“My name is Jaywalker. I’m going to be representing Darren Kingston. The family said you might be able to give me a little information. They seem pretty confused.”
“What can I tell you, counselor? I’ve got five CWs—” complaining witnesses, Jaywalker translated mentally “—and everything they say points to your man.”
“Lineups?” Jaywalker probed.
“You’re going to have to talk to the D.A.”
“Jesus,” said Jaywalker, a seriously lapsed Jew. “I’ve known this kid for years.” It was an exaggeration, but a modest one. “Shocks the shit outta you. When did these rapes take place?”
“August, mostly. But I’ve been looking for him for a couple of weeks.”
“Statements?”
“No, nothing really,” said the detective. “Says he’s innocent. Tell you what, counselor. I got one of the girls coming down this morning. She IDs him, or she doesn’t.” He shrugged. “If he’s not the guy, I don’t want him.” With that, he excused himself and walked into the courtroom.
Jaywalker looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after ten. Court was supposed to begin at 9:30 a.m., but the judge hadn’t taken the bench yet. Nothing new there.
Jaywalker took a minute to consider what he had. Rendell hadn’t given him much, but at least he’d added a few more facts to piece into the picture. There were five victims. At least one of them—the one who was on her way to court—apparently hadn’t seen Darren since the incident. Assuming it was Darren. Most of the rapes had occurred in August, a month ago. That could be good. But Rendell’s comment that he’d been looking for Darren sounded bad. It meant that Darren had been positively identified as the result of some sort of investigation. It also suggested that Darren might have been hiding out, trying to avoid arrest. Consciousness of guilt? That there were no admissions was good. If he was guilty, at least Darren had been smart enough to keep his mouth shut.
Already Jaywalker could sense things shaping up as a classic identification case. Five women had been raped. Was Darren Kingston the man who had raped them?
He reported his findings to the family. Then he went into the clerk’s office, filled out a Notice of Appearance and traded it for a copy of the complaint. Computers not yet having arrived in the courthouse, the complaint consisted of a preprinted form with the blanks filled in by someone using an ancient typewriter and a generous supply of carbon paper.
Criminal Court of the City of New York
Part A, County of The Bronx
STATE OF NEW YORK
ss.: FELONY COMPLAINT
COUNTY OF The Bronx
Joanne Kenarden, being duly sworn, deposes and says that on August 16, 1979, in the County of The Bronx, City and State of New York, the defendant(s) Darren Kingston committed the offense(s) of rape in the first degree and sodomy in the first degree under the following circumstances:
Deponent states that at the above time and place defendant forcibly at knifepoint committed an act of sexual intercourse upon her without her consent, and also forced her to commit an act of oral sodomy. Knife not recovered.
Sworn to before me
…………………….
……………, 19….. Deponent
……………………
Judge
Jaywalker was reading it through for a second time when Inez Kingston walked up to him. “The detective just took Darren across the hall,” she said.
Jaywalker followed her out of the clerk’s office. She pointed to a door, one without a sign. Jaywalker knocked on it. When there was no answer, he pushed it open. After all, he reasoned, there was no sign saying not to. Inside were Detective Rendell, Darren Kingston and a third man, who looked up and said, “Yes?”
“I’m his lawyer,” said Jaywalker. “May I know what’s going on?”
“Oh, sure.” The third man was young, thin and, when he stood up, closer to Jaywalker’s height than Rendell’s. His face was dominated by a black mustache. “My name is Jacob Pope,” he said. “I’m an assistant district attorney in the Mob.”
“The Mob?” echoed Jaywalker. It struck him as a curious affiliation.
“The Major Offense Bureau. I was just about to ask Mr. Kingston some questions regarding pedigree, for bail purposes. I didn’t realize he had an attorney.”
Jaywalker looked back and forth from Pope to Rendell. One of them was playing dirty here—Pope, if Rendell had told him about Jaywalker, Rendell if he’d neglected to. A prosecutor was strictly forbidden from speaking with a defendant who had a lawyer unless the lawyer was present or gave his express permission. And pedigree was just a fancy way of describing a series of questions that began with name and address and ended with, “Where’d you hide the body?”
Darren was seated, his wrists handcuffed in his lap. Jaywalker had forgotten how good-looking he was. Model good-looking, almost. “How’re you doing, Darren?” he asked him.
“N-n-n-not so good.”
The stutter. Jaywalker had forgotten that, too. Darren had a severe stutter that grew worse when he became nervous. Jaywalker turned to Pope. “Can you give me a moment with my client?” he asked. “Then maybe we’ll talk to you.”
“Sure,” said Pope. “Go right ahead.” But neither he nor Rendell made any move to give them privacy.
“Can we take the cuffs off?” Jaywalker asked.
Pope nodded at the detective, who produced a key and removed the handcuffs. Darren rubbed each wrist in turn. Jaywalker waited until Pope and Rendell had walked to the far end of the room. Then he positioned himself between Darren and them, giving them his back. It wasn’t much, but it was as good as it was going to get.
As quietly as he could, he asked Darren what was going on.
“I don’t know. They say I r-r-r-raped a bunch of women. I didn’t do anything like that. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Darren, they’ve got five women who say you’re the guy. I’m here to help you, a hundred percent. I can help you if you’re innocent. But understand this—I can also help you if you’re guilty. There are hospitals, there are sexual offender programs.” There were; it wasn’t a complete lie. “The only way I can’t help you,” Jaywalker went on, “is if you don’t tell me. So you’ve got to try to trust me.” He wanted to add “and start telling me the truth.” But he didn’t. Not yet, anyway.
Darren’s eyes met Jaywalker’s. “I do trust you, Jay.” His use of the name brought a smile to Jaywalker’s face. A year ago, it had taken him a long time to get Darren to stop calling him Mr. Jaywalker. But Jaywalker had insisted. If he was going to address his clients by their first names—and he did, always—then they were going to do the same with him. Not that Jay was really his first name. But when your parents hang Harrison Jason Walker on you, you’re happy to settle for Jay. Or, as a few of his Hispanic clients pronounced it, Yay.
“Good,” said Jaywalker.
“But you gotta trust me, too, Jay. I d-d-didn’t do this.”
Jaywalker nodded. He knew it was useless to push at this point. He decided to let Darren answer Pope’s questions in his presence. It was his hope to learn a few things, while giving up nothing in return. At the same time, he was looking for any edge he could get. He knew that Pope’s recommendation on bail would carry a lot of weight with the judge.
After learning that Darren was twenty-two, married, living with his wife, the father of one child and expecting another, Pope moved on to Darren’s employment.
“You work for the post office, right?”
“Right.”
“The night shift?”
“Right.”
It was obvious that Pope, or perhaps Rendell, had done his homework.
“Were you working the last two weeks of August, or was that your vacation time?”
Jaywalker held up a hand. “I’m not sure that’s pedigree,” he said. He didn’t want Pope fishing around and testing an alibi defense before Jaywalker had had a chance to explore it himself.
“Okay,” said Pope, realizing he wasn’t going to get anything else. “Is there any statement you want to make, Mr. Kingston?”
“Yes, there is.” The voice was loud and clear. It was also Jaywalker’s. “He says he’s innocent, and you’ve got the wrong guy.”
Pope nodded dismissively. It was clear that he doubted the words as much as Jaywalker himself did.
Detective Rendell put the handcuffs back on Darren before he led him out of the room. Jaywalker followed them, reminding Darren to say nothing further. Then he walked over to the Kingstons and brought them up-to-date on what he knew, holding back nothing. He told them that one of the women was coming down to court, and that unless she said their son wasn’t the right man, he would be charged with threatening her with a knife, raping her, and forcing her to take his penis in her mouth.
Inez Kingston didn’t seem to react. It was as though she already understood and had accepted the gravity of the situation. Marlin said, “Oh, God,” and started to cry, then put his arms around his wife, right there in the corridor, with total strangers streaming by. They stood like that for several minutes, he crying quietly and she making no attempt to escape his embrace. Finally Marlin let go of his wife. He looked straight at Jaywalker, his eyes red but fixed.
“Jay, that’s my son, you see? You got to do what you can for him. He didn’t rape anybody. I don’t care what it costs, I’ll get the money somehow. But you got to help him.”
“I’ll help him,” said Jaywalker.
They spent the next hour and a half in the courtroom, waiting for the arrival of Joanne Kenarden, the victim who was named in the complaint. Jaywalker passed the time watching the parade of arraignments, people who’d been arrested the previous night. An assault, his own head bandaged. A gypsy cab stickup. Four for possession of heroin. A gun. A homicide, a man who’d beaten his two-year-old stepson to death. Almost all were black or Hispanic. In almost every case the judge set high bail and the defendant was walked back into the pen area, out of sight. Family members, who’d moved forward to the railing to hear better and perhaps be noticed, straggled out of the courtroom, sometimes sobbing, sometimes angry, always confused.
It was a quarter past twelve when Joanne Kenarden showed up. She poked her thin face into the courtroom and looked around uncertainly. Something in Jaywalker told him it was her even before Detective Rendell spotted her, stood up and walked over to her. Jaywalker watched them as they spoke briefly at the door. Then Rendell found her a place to sit, had her sign some papers, motioned her to wait and left the room.
Jaywalker moved his own seat in order to get a better look at her. She was pretty, if a bit hard-looking. The thinness of her face and body made guessing her age difficult. Thirty, maybe. She was dressed in inexpensive clothes, jeans and a black top, but carefully. And she was white.
When Rendell came back into the courtroom, Jacob Pope was with him. While Pope took a seat up front, Rendell disappeared into the pen area. When he emerged several minutes later, he was leading Darren by the arm. Today that act itself would be called a suggestive identification procedure; back then, it was simply how things were done. In any event, as soon as she saw Darren, Joanne Kenarden stiffened visibly in her seat and nodded almost reflexively. To Jaywalker’s eye, her response seemed involuntary and genuine. He wondered if Pope had caught it.
“Docket number X974513, Darren Kingston,” called the bridgeman, his title derived from his position between the judge and the rest of the courtroom. “Charged with rape, on the complaint of Joanne Kenarden. Detective Rendell.” Shielding rape victims’ identities didn’t happen back then, either.
Jaywalker rose, made his way forward and took his place at the center of a long wooden table in front of the judge’s bench. To his left stood Darren, hands cuffed in front of him, a uniformed court officer immediately behind him. To Jaywalker’s right stood Jacob Pope, Detective Rendell and Joanne Kenarden.
“Miss Kenarden,” said the bridgeman, “do you swear to the truth and contents of your affidavit?” In 1979, there was no such thing as a Ms. You were Miss, or you were Mrs.
“I do.”
“Counselor, do you waive the reading of the rights and charges?”
“Yes,” said Jaywalker, “we do.”
The judge, a fairly recent appointee named Howard Goldman, turned to Pope, waiting for his bail recommendation. Pope responded by describing the Kenarden rape and sodomy, emphasizing the knife. He pointed out that there were four additional rape victims, and added that it had taken the police several weeks to locate the defendant once he’d been identified. The clear implication was that Darren would be likely to flee if released. “Accordingly,” Pope concluded, “the People request that bail be set in the amount of fifty thousand dollars.”
It was Jaywalker’s turn. He pointed to Darren’s family in the courtroom, described Darren’s job and theirs, and mentioned the lack of any prior convictions. He stressed Darren’s wife, their child and her pregnancy. He said that he’d known the family for almost two years and felt privileged to have done so.
“I consider these very serious charges,” said Judge Goldman.
“So do I,” Jaywalker agreed. “I also consider it very possible that this is the wrong man.”
Goldman turned toward Joanne Kenarden. “Young lady,” he said, “I want you to answer me truthfully. Is there any doubt in your mind, any doubt whatsoever, that this is the man who attacked you? Take a good look at him before you answer me.”
Jaywalker took a step back so that she could get a better look at Darren. But even as he did so, he knew it was a futile gesture. They were enacting a charade, after all. Not twenty minutes earlier, having seen Darren led into the courtroom by Detective Rendell, she’d put her signature on an affidavit, swearing that this was the man who’d raped and orally sodomized her. What was she supposed to say now, that she’d changed her mind?
“No doubt whatsoever,” she said.
“Bail is fifty thousand dollars,” said the judge.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jaywalker could see Darren’s shoulders sag, notice him shake his head slowly from side to side. The case was adjourned one week, for a preliminary hearing. But Jaywalker knew there would be no hearing. Pope would present his case directly to a grand jury, who would listen to Joanne Kenarden, and perhaps the other victims as well, and vote an indictment. Jaywalker toyed briefly with the idea of having Darren testify at the grand jury, but quickly rejected it. All Darren could say was that he was innocent. Having him do so, and then exposing him to cross-examination at this early stage, would accomplish little and risk much.
“Anything else?” asked the judge.
“No,” said Jaywalker.
“Next case.”
Less than ten minutes after it had begun, the arraignment was over. Darren was led back into the pen from which he’d come.
Outside on the sidewalk, Jaywalker explained the bail to Darren’s parents. In order to get their son out of jail, they would either have to come up with fifty thousand dollars in cash or go to a bondsman, who would require maybe half that much, as well as the balance in property—bank-books, jewelry, deeds to buildings or similar collateral. Marlin Kingston shook his head in disbelief, or maybe despair. Jaywalker told him they had an option, to let a few days pass and then go over to the Supreme Court building on the Grand Concourse, where they could make an application to get the figure reduced.
He kissed Inez goodbye, something he didn’t ordinarily do. Perhaps it was her own warmth, radiating outward, that compelled him to do so. When he went to shake Marlin’s hand, he felt something pressed against his palm.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A hundred dollars,” said Marlin. “For today.”
“No,” said Jaywalker. “You save it. You’re going to need every penny to try to get Darren out.” But he realized he was only getting to know this little man, who could cry unashamedly one minute and fight like a warrior the next, when Marlin spoke again.
“This is yours, Jay,” he said. “Darren is my son. I’ll get him out somehow. Don’t you worry.”
Jaywalker pocketed the money. It was 1979, and he couldn’t afford to sneeze at a hundred dollars. Not with a wife, a child of his own, a mortgage and a stack of bills. But he did worry. If a hundred dollars was nothing to sneeze at, what did that say about fifty thousand?
3
EIGHTY YEARS
On Friday, Jaywalker got another call from Inez Kingston. “We bailed Darren out,” she said, “and I was wondering if you wanted to talk to him or anything.”
“You’re kidding!” Jaywalker couldn’t believe it.
“I’m not kidding. Marlin went out to Rikers Island last night to get him. They didn’t get back till three this morning, and I didn’t want to wake you. But he’s here now, if you want to talk to him.”
“Of course I do. Put him on.”
There was a pause, followed by Darren’s voice. “Hello, J-J-Jay.”
“Hey! How the hell are you?”
“P-p-pretty good, Jay.”
They spoke for a few minutes. Jaywalker told Darren he didn’t want him to be alone at all, whether he was indoors or out, that some responsible adult should be with him at all times. That way, if any more rapes were to occur, they would have an alibi, proof that it couldn’t be him. Darren said he would make sure of that. They made an appointment to meet at Jaywalker’s office on Monday. Jaywalker ended the conversation by telling Darren how happy he was.
“M-me, too, Jay.”
Jaywalker hung up the phone absolutely elated. He marveled at the way the Kingstons must have scraped together every cent they had, borrowed what they didn’t and put up their small house as collateral. But as happy as he was for them and Darren, he also had a selfish reason to be pleased. A defendant who can’t make bail has two strikes against him. His opportunities to sit down and discuss his case with his lawyer are limited in terms of time, place and privacy. He’s unable to assist in the legwork of investigating and preparing his case—visiting the scene of the crime, locating and rounding up witnesses, and helping out with a bunch of other details about which he, as the accused, may have the greatest knowledge. He loses his job or drops out of school, or both. As a result, he becomes a less compelling witness in front of the jury, and a less likely candidate for a lenient sentence in the eyes of the judge. Bail, and having the resources to post it, may not be the most obvious way the system discriminates between the rich and the poor, but it often becomes one of the most significant.
So Darren’s getting bailed out was as crucial as it was surprising. It was also, Jaywalker dared to hope, something of a good omen. The case had started out badly. The arrest, the disclosure of multiple rapes, the certainty of Joanne Kenarden’s identification and the setting of high bail had been one blow after another. Maybe the tide was beginning to turn. Maybe something else good would happen.
Nothing happened.
Had Jaywalker simply been deluding himself when he’d told Darren he wanted his movements monitored round-the-clock by a responsible adult? Had he been engaging in nothing but wishful thinking by pretending that Darren wasn’t the rapist, and that somehow five victims could all have misidentified him?
Or had he simply been doing what defense lawyers do, willingly playing along with a client’s insistence upon his innocence until the time was ripe to get real and face the unpleasant truth? In quiet moments that weekend, it surely seemed so.
On Monday afternoon, Darren showed up at Jaywalker’s office, accompanied by his father. They spent two hours together, a good part of it with Marlin banished to the waiting room. Admitting you were a rapist was hard enough, Jaywalker reasoned; admitting it in front of your father might border on the impossible. But to Darren, it seemed to make no difference. He continued to deny any knowledge of the rapes.
Jaywalker did his best to hide his disbelief. One victim could certainly be mistaken. Two, perhaps. Even three, however unlikely, was possible. But five?
Yet throughout the session, Darren never once wavered in his denials. Nor did he avoid making and holding eye contact, or lapse into any of the other familiar tells Jaywalker had seen so often in his Legal Aid days—the barely noticeable facial tics, the collar tugs, the hand involuntarily rising to cover the mouth, the sudden interest in one’s shoes or the pencils on the desk or the pictures on the wall. He did stutter from time to time, but—or so it seemed to Jaywalker—no more or less than usual when pressed about his claim of innocence. And every so often, in spite of himself, Jaywalker would find himself wondering if perhaps Darren might be telling the truth after all. But then he would remember that there were five women, each of them prepared to point Darren out as her attacker. As much as he liked this young man—and he was terribly easy to like—and wanted to believe him, Jaywalker kept reminding himself that Darren was lying. He had to be.
Marlin asked what the fee was going to be. Jaywalker started to explain that it looked as though they were in this for the long haul, that there was going to be a trial, maybe even several.
“I understand, Jay. You tell me how much, and I’ll pay it. It may take me some time, but I’ll pay it.”
Up to that point, the most that Jaywalker had ever charged for a case had been twenty-five hundred dollars. It had been a drug dealer, who’d probably been pocketing that much in a week. Jaywalker had gotten him a plea bargain, five years probation. For Darren, there wasn’t going to be a plea bargain, and there certainly wasn’t going to be any probation.
“Five thousand dollars,” said Jaywalker, and held his breath.
Marlin squinted skeptically. “Are you sure that’s enough?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” said Jaywalker, and they shook hands on it.
Enough? Jaywalker felt like he’d broken the bank.
Wednesday came. Jaywalker met Darren outside the courtroom known as Part 1-D. Both his parents were with him, as well as his wife, Charlene. She’d missed the arraignment and the office appointment because she’d been home caring for their son, and because she’d feared the experience might prove too much for her. Or maybe it was the thought that her husband was a rapist. In any event, on this day Darren’s sister Janie had been enlisted to babysit, freeing Charlene to come. She was short and a bit on the heavy side, not so unlike her mother-in-law. Perhaps it was her pregnancy beginning to show, perhaps not. Although she had a pleasant enough smile, she wasn’t nearly as pretty as Darren was handsome. Jaywalker found himself wondering if Charlene’s physical shortcomings might not have contributed to her husband’s having become a rapist.
Inez reported that Darren’s name didn’t seem to be listed on the calendar posted outside the courtroom. Jaywalker looked and couldn’t find it, either. A check with the clerk’s office revealed the reason.
KINGSTON, Darren
Docket No. X974513
Off Calendar—Indicted
Part 12, 9/21
Jaywalker explained to the Kingstons that their trip had been a wasted one. As expected, Jacob Pope had gone directly to the grand jury. There would be no preliminary hearing. Instead, Darren would be arraigned on an indictment in Supreme Court that Friday. Not that anyone had called Jaywalker to alert him and save them the trip. To the system, defendants, their families and their lawyers were pretty much chopped liver.
Downstairs, Jaywalker ushered Darren away from his family. He had a question for him, and he not only wanted to hear Darren’s answer, but he also wanted to see his reaction. And he didn’t want Darren posturing for the benefit of his family, or looking to them for advice. He watched the young man closely as he spoke to him.
“Darren,” he said, “how would you feel about taking a lie detector test?” He used the phrase lie detector test, instead of the more technically correct polygraph examination, because he wanted to make sure Darren understood the question the first time he asked him and wouldn’t be able to buy time by asking, “What’s that?”
Darren’s answer came without hesitation. “I’d love to, Jay, if it’ll help.”
“Well,” said Jaywalker, “I can’t promise it’ll help. But it will show if you’re telling the truth. The problem is, it’ll also show if you’re lying. I can guarantee that.”
“I’m not lying, Jay.”
“I know that, Darren.” It was Jaywalker’s second lie in as many statements. “But I’m prejudiced. I’m your lawyer. Besides that, I like you. So as much as I believe you, I have to remind myself that I could be wrong. And you have to understand that if you did commit the rapes, the worst possible thing you could do now would be to take the test.”
Darren started to say something, but Jaywalker held up a hand and cut him off in mid-stutter. He wanted Darren to hear him out.
“Look,” he said, “if you did do those things, if something happened to make you snap, if it is you these women are talking about, it’s not the end of the world. There are doctors, psychiatrists, programs. There are ways to get you help. Believe it or not, there are even ways to keep you out of prison.” It was yet another lie. “So take a moment to think before you decide.”
Jaywalker’s little speech finished, he looked Darren hard in the eye. And as he waited for a response, he realized that just as he was torn between wanting to believe Darren and not being able to, so, too, was he torn between wanting him to be innocent and wanting him to be guilty. What he really wanted was for Darren to tell him, “I can’t take a lie detector, Jay. I did those things.” Together they could break the news to his parents, to his wife. There would be some initial shock and disbelief, followed by a lot of crying all around. But the rest would be simple and straightforward. Psychiatrists, psychologists. Perhaps even an insanity defense, but more likely a guilty plea. But the worst would be over, the nagging uncertainty gone, and the terrible burden of representing a man who seemed to be guilty but claimed to be innocent lifted from his shoulders. Oh, how Jaywalker wanted Darren to break down and come clean at that moment!
But he didn’t. Break down? Come clean? He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even stutter, for once. Instead he looked directly into Jaywalker’s eyes and said, “I want the test.”
On Friday morning Jaywalker drove to the Bronx County Courthouse, which housed all of the Supreme Court parts. It covered then, as it covers now, an entire city block, from the Grand Concourse on the east to Walton Avenue on the west, and from 160th Street to 161st. From its upper floors you could see then, as you can still see today, the elevated train tracks above Jerome Avenue, and Yankee Stadium just beyond.
Jaywalker took one of the elevators to the sixth floor. The building was laid out around a square center courtyard, and no matter how many times he’d been there, he always found himself disoriented as soon as he stepped off the elevator. As usual, he walked three-quarters of the way around just to get to a courtroom that would have been right around the corner, had only he chosen to walk the other way.
Darren, Charlene, Inez and Marlin Kingston were waiting for him outside Part 12. They exchanged greetings and went inside. Jacob Pope was already there. He handed Jaywalker a copy of the indictment.
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK COUNTY OF BRONX
——————————————————-x
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
x
x INDICTMENT
—against—
x 5476/79
DARREN KINGSTON, x
Defendant.
——————————————————-x
THE GRAND JURY OF THE COUNTY OF BRONX, by this indictment, accuse the defendant of the crime of RAPE IN THE FIRST DEGREE, committed as follows:
The defendant, in the County of Bronx, on or about August 16, 1979, being a male, engaged in sexual intercourse with Eleanor Cerami, a female, by forcible compulsion.
SECOND COUNT:
AND THE GRAND JURY AFORESAID, by this indictment, further accuse the defendant of the crime of RAPE IN THE FIRST DEGREE, committed as follows:
The defendant, in the County of Bronx, on or about August 16, 1979, being a male, engaged in sexual intercourse with Joanne Kenarden, a female, by forcible compulsion.
THIRD COUNT:
AND THE GRAND JURY AFORESAID, by this indictment, further accuse the defendant of the crime of AN ATTEMPT TO COMMIT THE CRIME OF RAPE IN THE FIRST DEGREE, committed as follows:
The defendant, in the County of Bronx, on or about August 17, 1979, being a male, attempted to engage in sexual intercourse with Tania Maldonado, a female, by forcible compulsion.
FOURTH COUNT:
AND THE GRAND JURY AFORESAID, by this indictment, further accuse the defendant of the crime of AN ATTEMPT TO COMMIT THE CRIME OF RAPE IN THE FIRST DEGREE, committed as follows:
The defendant, in the County of Bronx, on or about September 5, 1979, being a male, attempted to engage in sexual intercourse with Elvira Caldwell, a female, by forcible compulsion.
And that was only page one. The indictment went on to charge Darren with additional counts of first-degree sodomy, sexual misconduct, sexual abuse, assault against two of the victims, and criminal possession of a weapon—a knife—on each occasion. In all, there were twenty-three separate crimes charged. The only pieces of good news, if they could be called that, were that from the original five victims, it seemed now they were down to four who were willing to testify, and of those only two had apparently been actually raped; the other two counts were of attempted rape. Still, Jaywalker could do the math in his head: two completed rapes, each carrying a maximum sentence of twenty-five years, plus two attempts, worth fifteen each. Add them all up, and Darren was facing eighty years in prison.
The case was called in its turn, and Jaywalker accompanied Darren to the podium. The clerk asked how the defendant pleaded, and Darren answered, “Not guilty.” His voice was soft, but he didn’t stutter. Perhaps he’d been practicing the words, having been told ahead of time by Jaywalker that he would be required to say them. Bail was ordered continued, and the case was adjourned for three weeks, to give the defense time to submit written motions.
Outside the courtroom, Jaywalker cornered Pope and asked him if he would consider giving Darren a polygraph examination. Pope raised an eyebrow as he seemed to think about it, but Jaywalker could see Why rock the boat? written all over his face.
Finally he said, “Let me run it by my boss.” Passing the buck, no doubt, not wanting to be the one to say no. “Oh, one other thing,” he added. “Tell your man he’d better keep out of the area up there.”
“What do you mean?” Jaywalker was puzzled.
“I mean this,” said Pope, in a tone even more serious than his usual humorless one. “I got a call from Detective Rendell the other day. He said one of the girls phoned him and said she’d seen the guy again, in her lobby. Rendell figured shit, maybe we’ve got the wrong guy locked up. He called me. I did some checking and found out your client had made bail.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know,” said Pope. “Beginning of the week, maybe. He was out before the weekend, right?”
“Right,” Jaywalker had to agree. It was true.
“Now understand me,” said Pope, his eyes narrowing. “This is a free country. I’m not telling your man where he’s allowed to go and where he’s not. But he starts intimidating my witnesses, I’ll have him back in jail in an hour, and his family can see if they can make fifty million dollars. I suggest you tell him that.”
“I will,” Jaywalker said soberly. “She’s sure it was him?”
“She’s sure.”
Jaywalker didn’t know whether to hate Pope for threatening them or thank him for the warning. Before he had a chance to do either, Pope turned and walked away.
Jaywalker lost no time in confronting Darren with what he’d just been told. He was about to read him the riot act for disobeying explicit instructions when Darren interrupted him. “Jay, you know that’s not m-m-me she’s talking about. I haven’t been out of the house alone for one minute since I got out.”
Darren’s family jumped to his defense, backing him up completely and persuasively. So Jaywalker sent them off with homework assignments. Each of them was to take paper and pencil and write out everything they could remember about Darren’s movements since his release on bail, as well as his whereabouts on the three days listed in the indictment, August 16th and 17th, and September 5th. Jaywalker instructed Darren to buy a pocket calendar and begin making detailed entries of his comings and goings each day, cursing himself for not thinking of it earlier. Then they set up an appointment at his office for Monday and parted ways.
Jaywalker headed for his car buoyed by a feeling of excitement. Admittedly, the indictment had been bad. Of the five victims, Pope had succeeded in getting four of them before the grand jury on short notice, and if he got the fifth, he could always go back in, have her testify and get a superseding indictment. Jaywalker’s suggestion of a polygraph examination had met with fairly predictable skepticism, but at least Pope hadn’t quite responded with a flat-out no. But by far the most interesting development had been the business about one of the victims claiming to have seen Darren in the lobby of her building since his release. For starters, Darren and the rest of the Kingston family insisted that he hadn’t been out alone since Marlin had brought him home from Rikers Island. But even beyond that, it just didn’t make sense. In the movies and on TV, the perpetrator invariably returns to the scene of the crime, blending into the crowd or lurking around furtively to watch the investigators at work. But in real life, having been unlucky enough to be arrested but lucky enough to have gotten out on bail, wouldn’t he want to stay as far away as he possibly could?
It sure seemed that way to Jaywalker.
Monday’s meeting produced very little. While Darren’s recollection of his whereabouts since being released from jail was detailed and complete, mid-August was another matter. He’d been working nights at the post office, midnight to 8:00 a.m., to be exact. During the daytime, he was generally home alone, either sleeping or attending to chores. Charlene had been working days, and their son—whose name was Philip, but whom everyone called “Pooh”—was left in the care of Darren’s sister, Janie, at their parents’ house, the same house that was now the collateral on Darren’s bail bond. Nobody had any specific recollection regarding the first two dates in the indictment, August 16th—when two of the incidents had occurred—and August 17th. But September 5th stood out a bit. That was the day after Labor Day, and therefore the day Janie’s classes at school had resumed after summer vacation. So on that day, for the first time, Pooh had been left with a neighbor. Darren recalled having come home from work as usual, about 9:30 in the morning, and hearing Pooh crying next door. He’d called his mother and asked her if she thought he should go knock on the door. Inez had said no, that if he did that the woman would feel they didn’t trust her, and that anyway, the child would have to get used to the new arrangement. Darren had reluctantly accepted the advice, stayed in his apartment and gone to bed.
“But it was h-h-hard,” he remembered.
It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something. Jaywalker jotted a note to himself to include a request for the precise time of each of the attacks in his motion papers.
The meeting broke up. By that time, Jaywalker had fully succumbed to the Kingstons’ habit of embracing at each greeting and parting. He particularly enjoyed hugging Marlin. Each time he felt the rough stubble of the older man’s beard against his face, Jaywalker was reminded of his grandfather, his father’s father, whose whiskers had felt like sandpaper and left his young cheeks glowing bright red. So Marlin’s hugs were extra-special.
God, these were good people! Born black in a country that too often tended to be kinder by far to whites, living in a borough that in those days got commonly compared to a war zone, often unfavorably, they’d managed to carve out a life for themselves. They got up and went to work or school, or sometimes both. They took care of their children. From modest salaries, they somehow saved enough to buy a home. They didn’t seem to drink, use drugs, gamble, curse, get angry or do any of the other things that used to get so many of Jaywalker’s Legal Aid clients into trouble so often. In many ways, the Kingstons epitomized that most overworked of all clichés, the American Dream. They lived honest, hardworking and productive lives, day in and day out. They didn’t look to others to take care of them; they took care of themselves, and of each other. Now something terrible had happened to one of their number. Some outside force, not fully comprehensible in its awfulness and randomness, had suddenly reared up and threatened to destroy everything. Their reaction was as simple as it was immediate. Even as they’d reached out to Jaywalker for outside help, they’d drawn together even more tightly. They’d mustered their collective strengths, pooled their resources and drawn on their faith. That faith was not so much in a higher power as it was in the system itself. They trusted that the system, which they’d always believed in and lived by, would now protect them.
But the system, Jaywalker knew only too well, protected no one. The system was cold and impersonal. The system was all about budgets and payrolls, statistics and seniority, politics and patronage. When it came right down to it, in an adversarial contest that pitted a professional prosecutor against a designated defender, a person could be protected only by another person. And for better or for worse, because of the absurd accident that Inez Kingston happened to work in the same Welfare Department office as Jaywalker’s sister-in-law, he had become the person charged with the responsibility of protecting a young man and, with him, the rest of his family, born and unborn. It was a responsibility that Jaywalker both wanted and didn’t want, one that he relished even as he loathed it, and one that was already waking him up each morning and accompanying him to bed each night.
In the short space of a month’s time, it had become a responsibility that scared the living shit out of him.
4
HEDGING BETS
Jaywalker busied himself preparing motions.
The days of the computer had not yet arrived, at least for a seat-of-the-pants solo practitioner like Jaywalker. That meant typing out a set of papers the old-fashioned way, on a trusty Remington, the kind that fit into a square black box and came without a cord, much less a battery. He moved for suppression of any statements that might be attributed to Darren as admissions or confessions, exclusion of any identifications of him that might have been tainted by suggestive police procedures, and a severance that would divide the case into four separate trials instead of one. He asked for court-ordered discovery of police reports, medical records, photographs, artists’ sketches and the like. He demanded particulars regarding the precise date, time and place of each of the crimes charged. He made copies, served and filed them, and waited for Pope’s written response.
Next Jaywalker contacted a private investigator. He called John McCarthy, a former NYPD detective who would go on to do work for F. Lee Bailey, among others. McCarthy was bright, capable, and would make a good appearance on the witness stand, if his testimony were needed. Jaywalker had him come to the office to meet Darren, and the three of them went over the facts of the case in as much detail as they knew them. He instructed McCarthy to use his contacts in the department to gain access to whatever police and housing authority records he could. He told him there would come a time when he’d want him to see if the victims would talk with him. Finally, Jaywalker asked him to spend some time in the Castle Hill area of the Bronx, where the attacks had taken place, on the outside chance that he might be able to locate the real rapist, assuming it wasn’t Darren. At that suggestion, McCarthy looked up from his notepad and stared at Jaywalker as though he were on drugs.
Jaywalker looked away.
Things slowed down. And Jaywalker had no complaint about that. A speedy trial, which is a defendant’s constitutional right—and these days his statutory right, as well—is in fact a defendant’s worst enemy. Time is his ally. Time for his lawyer and his investigator to do their jobs; time for the victims to grow less vindictive and more forgetful; time even for another attack to occur while the defendant’s presence elsewhere could be documented. And with Darren out on bail, time also brought the opportunity for him to get back to work, family and normalcy—if there was such a thing as normalcy for a young man facing eighty years in prison.
On a more practical note, time also allowed Jaywalker to attend to the rest of his practice, which he’d begun to neglect as he became immersed in Darren’s case. He tried a forgery case in federal court and came away with a lucky acquittal. A robbery defendant, whose victim had leaped out of a fourth-story window in order to escape his captors, pleaded guilty and accepted a five-year prison term. The victim had somehow survived a broken back and was now walking with a cane. Had he not, it would have become a murder case.
And on the personal front, time also gave Jaywalker an opportunity to get reacquainted with his own family, who’d seen precious little of him over the past few weeks. He prided himself on being an active, if not quite equal, partner in the raising of his daughter. Lately, however, his wife had begun to comment that he seemed to be distracted and complained about his growing habit of being absent even when he was present. If their daughter noticed, she didn’t say anything. Of course, she was only four. But kids didn’t miss much, he knew.
Jacob Pope’s response to Jaywalker’s motions arrived in the mail. First off, he supplied the locations and times of the crimes. As Jaywalker read the numbers and transposed them from military time to civilian, he could see that each of the attacks had taken place in the early afternoon hours. Even though he’d been expecting as much, seeing it in black and white came as a major blow. It meant Darren had no alibi. He hadn’t been at work during any of the incidents.
Jaywalker reacted almost viscerally. During those early weeks and months, his belief in Darren’s innocence had swung back and forth like an unseen but ever-present pendulum. One day Darren would look him in the eye and swear he knew nothing of the rapes, and Jaywalker would believe him with all his heart. The next day would bring some new fact or development that would point directly and inexorably at Darren, and Jaywalker would be filled with doubt all over again. The realization that he wasn’t going to be able to call a single witness to account for Darren’s presence on any of three separate days was a perfect example. And with each such setback, Jaywalker had to contend once again with the distinct possibility—indeed, the overwhelming probability—that maybe they had the right guy after all.
Pope’s response continued. He stated that he had no admission or confession of Darren’s to offer at the trial. He conceded that a pretrial identification hearing would be necessary, because a photographic lineup had been conducted, and a judge would have to decide if it had been fair or overly suggestive. He resisted supplying the defense with police reports the law didn’t require him to turn over yet. And he opposed the request for a severance, contending that all four attacks should be tried together, as one case.
The severance issue was one that bothered Jaywalker. Did he really want one grand roll of the dice, a single trial including all of the victims, winner take all? Or would it truly be better if the case were split up into four, so that a jury trying one part of it wouldn’t even learn of the other three attacks? The advantage to such an approach was obvious: they would avoid the prejudice that would flow from the sheer number of incidents and wouldn’t have to contend with a jury’s falling into a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire mindset. But there was an equally obvious downside, too: severance would give Pope multiple opportunities to convict Darren. They were looking at as many as four separate trials—five, if the remaining victim surfaced. He could win three or even four times, only to lose the last one, and still have Darren end up with a fifteen-or twenty-five-year prison sentence.
As the defense lawyer, Jaywalker had had no choice but to make the motion. Failure to have done so would have risen to the level of ineffective assistance of counsel, maybe even malpractice. More to the point, it was the right thing to do. But now, as he thought about it, he began to wonder if they shouldn’t be careful about what they asked for, on the chance that they might just get it.
He opted to postpone making a decision on the matter. It could wait, he knew, until such time as he and Pope had to argue the question in front of a trial judge. By that time, though, he would have to decide if he really wanted separate trials or would prefer for the judge to turn him down. There was a way to argue forcefully, after all, and a way to just go through the motions. Besides which, if his motion was turned down and they were forced to defend against all the charges in front of a single jury, and convictions resulted on all counts—as they almost surely would—the issue would have been preserved, and the judgment might well be reversed on appeal. Then, with retrials ordered, they would get a second bite at the apple—or four or five bites, to be more accurate.
The phone rang. It was John McCarthy, calling with the initial results of some legwork. By checking NYPD and Housing Authority records, he’d confirmed that a fifth victim, Maria Sanchez, had been attacked. But she’d been only fourteen, and her parents had refused to let her view photos, testify at the grand jury or otherwise cooperate with the investigation. About all McCarthy had been able to find out about her was that she’d lied about her age to her attacker, telling him she was only twelve, and he’d let her go. McCarthy had also gotten hold of the various descriptions of the perpetrator given by the victims following the attacks. To McCarthy, it seemed there were more than the usual discrepancies that invariably arose. All the victims had described a man slightly heavier and a bit older-looking than the twenty-two-year-old Darren. And although all of them had reported things the attacker had said to them, none of the reports included any mention of a stutter. He was anxious to take a shot at interviewing the victims himself.
Jaywalker thought about it, but only for a moment. “No,” he said. “I want you to hold off. I want Pope’s answer on the polygraph first.”
“These witnesses don’t belong to him, you know.”
It was true. Despite the common perception that someone is a prosecution witness or a defense witness, those labels only attach at trial and are determined by which side calls the individual to the stand. Unlike expert or character witnesses, “fact witnesses,” as they’re called, are the exclusive province of neither side; their only allegiance is to the facts themselves. Or so the theory goes.
“You’re right,” Jaywalker told McCarthy. “But I can’t afford to make waves right now. You reach out to the victims, the first thing they’re going to do is pick up the phone and call Pope or Rendell. They may even have been instructed to do so. That could sour Pope on the polygraph. And the way I look at it, John, that little black box may be the only real chance this kid has. So I need you to hold off for now.”
“Hey,” said McCarthy, “it’s your show, Jay.”
They went over a few other things before hanging up. McCarthy was right on both counts, Jaywalker knew. They needed to interview the victims, and it was Jaywalker’s show. And when it came down to the tough calls, he had to make them and hope he was right. On this one, he had to play it safe.
Which didn’t stop him from wondering if maybe his biggest mistake hadn’t been deciding against becoming a doctor.
October came. The motions Jaywalker had made and Pope had opposed were formally submitted to the Part 12 judge for consideration, a process that would take several weeks. This was a bail case, after all, and there was no particular urgency on anyone’s part to put it on a fast track. The fact that there were motions outstanding meant they would be looking at another postponement on the next date, as well, the 18th.
Again Jaywalker played catch-up with the rest of his cases, and reintroduced himself to his wife and daughter. They made it to a museum and a movie, and he even created a pizza from scratch, managing not to burn the bottom of the crust too badly. They paid a visit to a farm stand and bought the biggest pumpkin they could find. It took up the entire backseat of the Volkswagen, weighed about a ton, required all three of them to lug it into the house and cost Jaywalker half the retainer that Marlin Kingston had pressed into his hand a month earlier.
Not that Marlin hadn’t been as good as his word, following up with small sums every time they met at court or at Jaywalker’s office. And to a lawyer accustomed to getting most of his income in the form of small checks, smaller money orders, bail receipts conditioned upon a defendant’s return to court or hand-scribbled IOUs, cash was always a delight, even as it had a way of burning a hole in Jaywalker’s pocket. But no matter. As his daughter assured him, it was a great pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
The 18th came, and with it the first court appearance before the man who would become Darren Kingston’s trial judge.
Even though it’s a jury that renders the verdict, the judge can affect that verdict in many ways—some major, others minor; some obvious, others subtle; some entirely legitimate, others highly inappropriate. The judge decides if the defendant remains out on bail or is returned to custody once the trial commences. He rules on motions, acting as both judge and jury at pretrial hearings. He decides which items of evidence will be allowed in and which will be kept from the jury. A judge can shape the outcome of a trial by sustaining or overruling a single objection, or by the way in which he treats one lawyer or the other in front of the jurors, or by something so seemingly insignificant as the inflection of his voice when he reaches a key word or phrase during his charge to the jury. So it not only matters who the trial judge is, it matters a lot. Any lawyer who doubts that ought to think seriously about another career.
Max Davidoff was in his mid-to late-sixties, but his face was deeply lined and his hair nearly white. To Jaywalker, he looked like what a judge was supposed to look like. Prior to being appointed and then elected to the bench, he’d been the District Attorney of Bronx County. In other words, Jacob Pope’s boss. Jaywalker did his best to assure the Kingstons that that fact alone was no cause for either disqualification or concern. Indeed, he told them, it was former defense lawyers who often turned into the toughest judges, having learned over the years that defendants weren’t always to be believed. Former prosecutors, who had spent those same years realizing that cops weren’t, either, occasionally became the defense’s best friends.
Wherever the truth really lay, the fact was that Max Davidoff had proved himself a pretty good judge. The book on him—and Jaywalker sought out a handful of Bronx Legal Aid lawyers to compile an oral scouting report—was that Davidoff ran a reasonably relaxed courtroom, tended to be fair to both sides, was reasonably knowledgeable when it came to matters of law, and treated attorneys with respect and defendants with compassion. Above all, he had a reputation for letting a lawyer try his case his way. Jaywalker could have asked for more, but not much more.
The case was called. Jacob Pope rose and explained that there were motions pending back in Part 12. Jaywalker suggested a date two weeks off. The case was adjourned.
Outside the courtroom, Darren’s family didn’t seem to know whether to be amused or irritated that they’d missed a day’s work and traipsed halfway across the Bronx just to witness the sixty-second performance they’d been treated to. Jaywalker was in the midst of explaining how over time the family’s presence could influence the judge’s attitude toward Darren when Pope came out of the courtroom and got his attention.
“Could I talk to you a minute, Mr. Jaywalker?”
“Sure. But it’s not Mr. Jaywalker, it’s Jay.”
“Jay.”
He excused himself to the Kingstons and followed Pope over to the large window that overlooked the building’s center courtyard. He wondered if he was about to hear that Darren had once again been spotted by one of the victims.
“I spoke to my boss,” Pope said. “We’re willing to give your man a polygraph.”
“Wonderful!” said Jaywalker, making no attempt to hide either his surprise or his pleasure.
“It’ll be with the usual stipulation,” Pope continued. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with that or not.”
“Vaguely,” Jaywalker lied. Stipulation?
“If he passes, we D.O.R. the case. If he flunks, the jury gets to hear that he did. I’ll go ahead and set up a date with Detective Paulson, who’ll administer the test. I suggest you call him in a day or two and get the date. I know he’s pretty backed up right now, so it’s likely to be a month, at the least.”
“Good enough. And I appreciate this,” Jaywalker felt compelled to add. Because he really did.
“Let me put it this way,” said Pope, all business all the time. “I’ve got four girls who say they’re sure of their identifications. I believe them. But who knows? I could be wrong.” And with that, he shrugged, turned and walked away.
Jaywalker lost no time in sharing the news with the Kingstons, who seemed every bit as elated as he was. And if Darren was secretly apprehensive about the sudden reality of undergoing a lie detector test, he never once showed it.
Jaywalker went over the ground rules, explained that a “D.O.R.” meant a discharge on one’s own recognizance, the functional equivalent of a dismissal of all charges. He added that the flip side, the defense’s agreement to let the jury know if Darren flunked the test, was unenforceable. Pope no doubt knew that, and had to assume that Jaywalker did, too. But as a practical matter, the bargain generally served its purpose. Defendants who flunked polygraph exams tended to fold their cards soon afterward and plead guilty.
“Next,” said Jaywalker, “we’ve got to decide whether we want to go into the test cold, or schedule our own private one beforehand.”
Marlin was the first to speak. “We leave it up to you, Jay,” he said.
“You can’t leave it up to me. It’s not my money. And it could cost anywhere from three hundred to five hundred dollars.”
Marlin took a moment to ponder that. In addition to the strain of having posted Darren’s bail, he had Jaywalker’s fee to contend with and was also responsible for paying John McCarthy, the investigator. The burden had to be enormous for him.
None of the other family members spoke. Inez may have been the ranking expert on child rearing, and Jaywalker had the sense that she ran a pretty tight ship at home, but on matters of money, they all deferred to Marlin.
“Let’s take the private test first,” he said finally.
Jaywalker caught himself wondering if that amounted to a hedge of sorts. Did Marlin, too, harbor second thoughts about his son’s innocence? But it was a question that went unasked and, therefore, unanswered.
“Fine,” said Jaywalker. “I’ll set it up as soon as I can. Okay with you, Darren?”
“Okay with me, Jay.” His broad smile completely trumped his father’s hesitancy, and with it, Jaywalker’s own doubts. Once again, it was as though the case was shadowed by a giant overhead pendulum, which would swing one moment in the direction of guilt and the next moment back to innocence.
In a year and half of private practice, and in two before that with Legal Aid, Jaywalker had never had a client take a polygraph examination. There was a reason for that. Polygraph results—unlike fingerprint evidence, blood typing (and now DNA tests), ballistics comparisons, hair and fiber analyses, and even handwriting and voice comparisons—were then, and continue to be, inadmissible at trial. The rule that excludes them is a sound one. Controlled studies have demonstrated their accuracy rate to be anywhere from fifty to ninety percent. Even a ninety-percent certainty leaves much to be desired in a system that prides itself on requiring proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before there can be a conviction. As for a fifty-percent accuracy rate, that’s the equivalent of a coin toss.
That said, polygraphs can still be useful tools. For one thing, it’s always interesting, and occasionally quite revealing, to watch a suspect’s reaction to the suggestion that he submit to a test, particularly when he’s been told that the test is guaranteed to reveal deception. Some suspects will hem and haw, make up excuses, or even admit their guilt at that point. Jaywalker had tried the tactic several times already with Darren, warning him that failure would bring disaster. Each time, Darren had, without flinching, reaffirmed his eagerness to take the test.
Secondly, the exam by its nature includes an in-depth interview of the subject, something that law enforcement personnel are always eager to conduct. Many a suspect has been coaxed or tricked into a revealing admission during the interview, occasionally even into an outright confession.
Finally, whatever its intrinsic worth or evidentiary value, a favorable polygraph result becomes something to hang one’s hat on. A defense lawyer will leak it to a newspaper reporter; a prosecutor will cite it as a reason to recommend dismissal of a case; and a judge will refer to it in granting that dismissal.
Hypocrisy? Junk science elevated to mainstream thinking? Perhaps. But Jaywalker wasn’t going to let such philosophical considerations deter him. Jacob Pope had offered them a way out, and they were going to do their best to take advantage of it.
Over the next few days, Jaywalker asked around about polygraph operators and came up with a handful of names. The one he kept hearing was Dick Arledge, a man who taught and trained other examiners, and who’d refined the technology to the point of developing and designing his own machines. Jaywalker called his office, set up an appointment, and notified Darren of the date and time, and the fee he would have to bring. He also phoned the district attorney’s office and learned that they’d scheduled their exam for early December. That was good; it gave the defense ample time to get their own test done and evaluate the results.
Jaywalker didn’t bother telling either Pope or Detective Paulson, the polygraphist he’d chosen, that he was having Darren examined on his own. Just as Marlin had hedged his bet by opting for the private test, so was Jaywalker hedging by his silence. That way, if Darren were to pass, great; he would go into the D.A.’s test more confident than ever. And if he were to flunk, they could always pull out of the second one. “I’ve done a little checking,” he could always tell Pope. “I never knew how unreliable these things are. We’ll take our chances at trial.”
Looking back later, Jaywalker would come to realize that the week waiting for that first exam was a strange time, an interlude during which he fantasized that his role in the case was drawing to an end. In spite of everything he knew about polygraphs and their shortcomings, he gradually put that knowledge aside. Instead, he began to engage in a bit of magical thinking. He became convinced that the test would solve everything. After all, this wasn’t a case involving nuances. There was no claim of self-defense, for example, or of an innocent mistake; there were no state-of-mind issues to be debated. No, Darren was either completely innocent or he was just as completely guilty. Now a little black box with a bunch of wires attached to it was going to tell them, for once and for all.
Which made it only natural to wonder just which answer the box was going to spit out.
Jaywalker had begun by assuming Darren’s guilt. Three years of lawyering, and two before that with the DEA, had taught him to doubt everyone he encountered, whether it was on the street, across a desk or through the bars of a jail cell. They were all innocent, every last one of them. The junkie with heroin in his pocket had mistakenly put on his roommate’s pants. The shoplifter had simply been taking the leather bomber jacket to another department to see how it looked with a white scarf. The burglar was just trying to find his cousin’s apartment. The cocaine dealer had all that cash in his sock to buy a stroller for his baby’s mama. And the murderer hadn’t meant to stab anyone; he’d simply been cleaning his knife when the victim had accidentally backed into it—thirty-three times.
Learning the morning of Darren’s first court appearance that no less than five victims had identified him as their attacker, Jaywalker had drawn the obvious conclusion. They couldn’t all be wrong. Darren had to be guilty.
Since then, however, things had begun to happen. Little things. Nothing dramatic, nothing earthshaking. Darren’s unflagging insistence on his innocence; his eagerness to take a lie detector test, even after hearing it was guaranteed to reveal the truth; the claim by one of the victims that she’d seen him again in her building when his whole family insisted he hadn’t been there; the discrepancies between the victims’ descriptions and Darren; and the fact that not one of them had reported that her attacker spoke with a stutter. Not that any one of those things, standing by itself, convinced Jaywalker of Darren’s innocence. But combined, they’d gradually begun to take on an undeniable weight. Each new revelation had forced Jaywalker to rethink his initial knee-jerk reaction that Darren had to be the rapist. As the time for the polygraph exam approached, the truth was, he didn’t know what to think.
By far the most frequently asked question put to any criminal defense lawyer is “How can you represent someone you know is guilty?” Three years into practice, Jaywalker had developed his response, which he dusted off and repeated whenever asked. Phrases like “Everyone deserves someone in his corner,” “I believe in the system” and “Even society’s most despised members deserve representation” were met with approving nods or bewildered stares. But what Jaywalker was rarely called on to expound upon was the darker half of the equation. The truth was, as he’d quickly learned, that representing a guilty client brings enormous comfort. The lawyer’s job is simple and straightforward: listen to the client patiently, explain the system to him and get him a decent plea offer. If the client accepts it, the case is over. If he doesn’t, he takes his chances at trial. If that trial should somehow result in an acquittal, it would mean that Jaywalker had managed to defy the odds. If it should result in a conviction, as expected, it was because the defendant was guilty all along.
So it wasn’t the notion of representing a guilty defendant that bothered Jaywalker. It didn’t, not at all. What bothered him, what scared the life out of him, was the specter of representing an innocent defendant. Suddenly, none of the usual rules applied. To an innocent man, no plea bargain is acceptable. No amount of patient listening will placate him. No explanation of how the system works will suffice. A trial becomes inevitable, and the need to win at that trial becomes nothing less than essential. And whose responsibility is it to win? The defense lawyer’s, that’s who.
For Jaywalker, that responsibility, that need to win, was as unwelcome as it was awesome. The trial suddenly changes from an exercise in due process to a horror show. Every utterance by the prosecutor, every piece of evidence that suggests guilt, every look of disapproval from the jury box, becomes a gut-wrenching outrage. If the trial somehow ends with an acquittal, it’s no thanks to the lawyer: after all, the defendant was innocent, and the system simply worked as it was supposed to. But suppose for a moment that the trial ends with a conviction. What then? For Jaywalker, that was unthinkable; that was the stuff of nightmares.
Which was the beauty of the polygraph, the wonderful lure of the magical thinking in which he now lost himself. It was all so simple. Darren was guilty, or he was innocent. If he was innocent, Jacob Pope would do the right thing and D.O.R. the case. And now they were about to find out.
The little black box was going to tell them.
5
THE LITTLE BLACK BOX
CERTIFIED
LIE DETECTION
INSTITUTE
read the sign on the door. Jaywalker rang the bell and waited, afraid he was too early. Eventually a shadow appeared beyond the frosted glass and the door swung open.
“Mr. Jaywalker?”
“Yes.”
“Come on in. I’m Gene Sandusky.”
Sandusky was Dick Arledge’s assistant. He was young, meticulously groomed, and polished. His black hair was precisely combed to cover a bald spot that vanity prevented him from yielding to.
While they waited for Darren to arrive, Sandusky and Jaywalker went over the facts of the case in detail. Sandusky drew up releases from liability that Darren would have to sign. He explained the procedure that he would be following in this particular case: picking one of the rapes and concentrating on it. He would compose his test questions after beginning his interview of Darren, and sprinkle in some control questions. Jaywalker could observe the test if he wanted to, but because his presence might interfere with Darren’s concentration, he would have to do so through a special mirror from another room, without Darren’s knowledge. To this day, Jaywalker can’t remember if Sandusky referred to it as a two-way or a one-way mirror, and has no idea which term is correct. But he got the idea.
Darren showed up promptly at 9:30 a.m., accompanied by his cousin Delroid. Jaywalker was glad to see Darren was still following his instructions to have another adult with him at all times. He introduced them to Sandusky.
“Pl-pl-pl-pleased to meet you,” Darren managed to say.
Jaywalker wondered if the stutter was a bad omen.
Leaving Delroid in the waiting area, Jaywalker and Darren followed Sandusky to a small conference room. There they spent ten minutes on preliminaries—the payment of the fee, the executing of the releases and a discussion of the case in general terms. Then Sandusky announced that Jaywalker would have to leave. Jaywalker rose, shook hands with Darren, wished him luck and said he would call him later. He felt a little bit as though he were abandoning him. He didn’t know what Darren felt.
Sandusky led Jaywalker out of the room, then out of the office altogether. Once in the corridor, he unlocked a second door and ushered Jaywalker into a small room, closing the door behind them. The room was dark, the only light coming through a two-way—or perhaps a one-way—mirror, which looked into the testing room. The glass was adorned with shelves on the other side, which in turn held small figurines, in order to give the test subject the impression that the mirror was purely decorative. The testing room itself was also small. It contained only a table, a couple of straight-backed chairs and the polygraph machine.
Sandusky motioned to a chair directly in front of the glass, and while Jaywalker seated himself, Sandusky adjusted the knobs on some audio equipment.
“Keep the lights off,” he cautioned, “and try to make as little noise as possible. And don’t smoke. A match or even a lit cigarette can be seen from the other side. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Sandusky closed the door tightly behind him. A minute or two later, he appeared in the testing room, followed by Darren. Jaywalker’s instinctive reaction was to lean back, away from the glass, certain he could be seen. But Darren’s gaze paused only momentarily at the mirror, without any sign of recognition.
“All right, Darren,” said Sandusky. “Why don’t you have a seat right here.” His voice was loud and clear through the speaker. If Jaywalker had earlier felt he was abandoning his client, he now had the sense that he was spying on him. But it didn’t occur to him to look away or cover his ears. Instead, he watched and listened intently as Darren sat down. He took his eyes off him only long enough to glance at his watch. It was 9:44.
“Now,” said Sandusky, “this is the machine we’ve all been talking about.” He patted the polygraph affectionately. It was about the size of a large phonograph or old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and had wires that led to various attachments. At one end of the machine was a roll of graph paper, with needles balanced on it.
Sandusky flicked a switch on the side of the machine. The paper began to move slowly. The needles didn’t.
“You see what it’s doing?” he asked.
“It’s dr-dr-drawing straight lines,” said Darren.
“Right. How come a straight line?”
“It’s not turned on?” Darren guessed.
“No, it’s turned on,” said Sandusky. “See, the paper’s moving. But how come the lines aren’t moving up and down?”
“It’s not attached to anything?”
“Exactly. This machine does one thing, and only one thing.” Here Sandusky paused for effect. “It moves paper. You do the rest.”
Sandusky began making adjustments to the machine, continuing to speak as he did so. “Darren,” he said, “put your right hand out in front of you and wiggle your fingers.”
Darren obeyed.
“Very good. Now your left hand.”
Darren obeyed again.
“Good. You’ve just used part of your nervous system. We have two types of nerves,” Sandusky explained, “voluntary nerves and involuntary nerves. By moving your fingers, you just controlled certain nerves in your hands. Because you can control them, we call them voluntary. Now,” he continued, attaching a blood pressure cuff to Darren’s forearm and inflating it, “notice that our machine works after all.”
Indeed, one of the needles had come to life and was dancing up and down on the paper.
“Okay, Darren, I want you to make your heart stop pumping for thirty seconds.”
Darren smiled uncertainly.
“What’s so funny?” Sandusky asked.
“I c-c-can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t stop your heart.”
“Precisely,” Sandusky agreed. “That’s because your heart is run by involuntary nerves. You can’t control them. And that’s all that this test is about, involuntary nerves. Things that happen inside your body that you can’t control.”
Jaywalker couldn’t help but smile. It was mesmerizing. This guy could have been a terrific car salesman, he decided, or an awesome preacher. Or both. He could sell used Chevys all week and salvation come Sunday.
Even as he’d been talking, Sandusky had attached a second strap to Darren’s other wrist, and two to his torso—one around his chest, the other around his midsection. “By the way,” he assured Darren, “none of this is going to hurt at all.” He taped a final strap to the palm of one of Darren’s hands. Each attachment—and there were now five of them—was connected by a wire to one of the needles, which moved visibly up and down on the graph paper and recorded Darren’s blood pressure, pulse, upper and lower respiration, and galvanic skin response…the electrical conductivity of the skin, which increases with sweating.
“Now, Darren,” said Sandusky, “I’ve got three cards here.” He held them up so that not only Darren, but also Jaywalker, could see that the first was blue, the second pink and the third blue except for a pink border along the top. “I’m going to ask you some questions about them. I want you to answer ‘Yes’ to each of my questions. No matter what, just answer ‘Yes.’ Understand?”
“Yes,” said Darren.
Sandusky held up the blue card. “Is this card blue?” he asked.
“Yes,” Darren answered.
Sandusky held up the pink card. “Is this card blue?”
“Yes,” Darren answered.
Sandusky held up the blue card with the pink border. “Is this card blue?”
“Yes.”
After each response, Sandusky had marked the graph paper for later reference. Now he stopped the machine and deflated the blood pressure cuff. While Darren stretched and rubbed his forearm, Sandusky studied the paper.
“Wow!” he exclaimed. “We’re not going to have any trouble, not a bit. I’d say you’re a very sensitive young man, Darren. Has anyone ever told you that? That you’re sensitive?”
“Yes,” said Darren. “I’ve heard people say that.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Sandusky, still studying the paper. “These responses are very sharp. On the first question, about the blue card, you showed a definite truth. On the second question, the pink card, you showed a definite lie, no question about it. What do you think you showed on the third question?” He held up the blue card with the pink border.
“I d-d-d-don’t know,” said Darren. “Half and half?”
“Nope, not according to this. On the third question, you showed a lie, just as strong as the second. See, this card really isn’t blue, is it?” He held it up again. “Now you may think that’s not fair, that you were being mostly truthful when you said it was blue. But I’m afraid you can’t get away with mostly here. It’s sort of like the kind of white lie we sometimes tell people, like saying ‘I love you,’ or ‘I feel fine,’ or ‘You look terrific,’ when it’s not completely true. You see, it may be okay to tell white lies to people, to spare their feelings, say. But not to the machine. The machine has no feelings. To the machine, a white lie is like any other lie.
“Let me give you an example, Darren, one actually not too different from your case. I tested a guy last year on a rape. Girl claimed the guy had followed her home, forced his way into her apartment and raped her. He denied it, claimed he’d never seen the girl in his life. His lawyer asked him if he’d be willing to take a polygraph test. He said okay, and he came to see me. I tested him, and he flunked. It was only months later that I found out the real story. Seems he’d picked the girl up in a bar, and she’d invited him back to her apartment. They started to get real friendly, know what I mean?”
Darren nodded.
“Right at the last minute, she gets cold feet. But he figures she’s only being cute, playing hard to get. And he’s not about to stop by that time, anyway. So he goes through with it. Was it really a rape? Who knows? She must have thought so, ’cause right after he leaves, she calls the police. When they bring him in for questioning, he denies knowing the girl or having been in her apartment, everything. And he had the police believing him, figuring they had the wrong guy. But not the machine. The machine—” and here Sandusky patted it affectionately “—showed only that he was lying. It didn’t understand mostly.
“The result was,” Sandusky continued, “the guy got jammed up real bad. Much worse than if he’d come clean in the first place. I’m only sorry he didn’t tell me up front.” He began reinflating the blood pressure cuff. “Or his lawyer. I like to think that the lawyer and I are part of the same team. After all, we’re both working for the guy that’s paying us, right?”
“Right,” Darren agreed.
Sandusky started up the machine again. “Tell me,” he said, “before you were arrested on this case, had you ever seen Joanne Kenarden?”
“No,” said Darren, without hesitation.
Sandusky marked the paper.
“Is there any chance your fingerprints might have been found on her clothing or things?”
“No.”
Sandusky made another mark and shut off the machine. He stood up, came around to Darren, and removed the blood pressure cuff and other straps. Darren stretched.
“Seeing as this is your test,” Sandusky said, “are there any questions you’d like me to include?”
Darren seemed to think for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. Ask me if I’ve even been up in that area the past couple of years.”
“The Castle Hill Project area?”
“Yes.”
“Fair enough. Now, are there any questions you’d like me to stay away from, for any reason?”
Darren thought again before saying no.
“Okay,” said Sandusky. “Why don’t you relax. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” With that, he left the room, closing the door behind him. Jaywalker got up and moved back away from the mirror in anticipation of Sandusky’s coming into the observation room, fearful that the light from the opening door might reveal him to Darren.
When Sandusky did enter, the first thing he did was study Darren through the glass. Darren continued to stretch, humming softly to himself. Sandusky motioned Jaywalker to follow him out of the room. When they reached the conference room, he lit a cigarette.
“He’s very nervous,” he said.
“I would be, too.” As soon as Jaywalker had said the words, he realized he was being overly defensive of his client. But that was his job, wasn’t it? Besides, there was something about Sandusky’s observation he didn’t like.
Sandusky ignored the comment. He sat down at his desk and searched through a drawer until he found the form he was looking for. Then he used it to write out the questions he was going to ask Darren. He inserted them in the blanks for questions 2, 3, 6, 7 and 9. Questions 1, 4, 5 and 8 he left open. He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up.
Jaywalker resumed his post in the observation room. Darren was singing softly when Sandusky reappeared in the testing room. Jaywalker didn’t recognize the tune.
“All right,” said Sandusky. “These are going to be the questions I’ll be asking you. Who raped Joanne Kenarden? Do you know who did it? Did you rape her? Did you see her blow you? Did you threaten her with a knife?”
Sitting in the observation room, Jaywalker was a bit surprised that Sandusky would telegraph the test questions to Darren that way. Wouldn’t springing them on him be a more effective tactic? But the more he thought about it, the more he came around to understanding Sandusky’s strategy. By letting Darren know exactly what questions were coming, he was giving him a chance to build up additional anxiety over the fact that he was going to be lying in his responses.
“How ab-b-b-bout the question I suggested?” Darren asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t use it,” said Sandusky, without further explanation.
Darren looked disappointed by the answer, and perhaps by Sandusky’s dismissive tone, as well. Jaywalker wondered if Sandusky was deliberately trying to agitate Darren by first requesting his input and then rejecting it. But hadn’t he just commented on how nervous Darren already was?
“Now,” Sandusky was saying, “before we begin the actual test, let’s talk about guilt for a moment.”
“G-g-guilt?”
“Yes. Darren, when you were growing up, which of your parents would you say was stricter, was more concerned with teaching you right from wrong?”
“They were both pretty strict.”
Jaywalker could believe that.
“Which one would more likely have told you it was wrong to hurt people?”
Darren seemed to think a moment before saying, “My dad, I guess.”
“How about sex education? Which one took more of a role in teaching you about sex?”
Darren thought again. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I—I—I learned that pretty much on my own.” Then, when Sandusky didn’t react, he added, “I guess it would have b-been my dad again.”
“Okay,” said Sandusky. “Psychologists and psychiatrists tell us that hurting values and sexual values are taught to us by our parents when we’re very young, and that deviance from these values is what produces guilt feelings.”
This struck Jaywalker as mumbo jumbo, double-talk. He had the feeling that Sandusky was deliberately trying to lose Darren here, though he didn’t know why.
“The problem is,” Sandusky explained, “guilt feelings can interfere with the test.” To Jaywalker, that sounded counterintuitive. Wasn’t the test premised upon the existence of feelings of guilt and designed to ferret them out?
“So,” Sandusky continued, “when we get started, I’m going to include a couple of questions to eliminate them. One will be about hurting, the other about sex. And by the way, these two questions will be between you and me. I won’t report them to anyone, not even your lawyer. Okay?”
Darren nodded.
“Do you know what masturbation is, Darren?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?” Evidently Sandusky wanted to be certain.
“It’s when you p-p-p-play with yourself.”
“Right,” said Sandusky. “Have you ever masturbated, Darren?”
“Yes,” Darren admitted.
Jaywalker found himself feeling more like a voyeur than ever. But it was riveting stuff, and he was beginning to see where Sandusky was going with it.
“When was the last time?”
“I c-c-can’t recall.”
“How old are you now?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Well,” said Sandusky, “that makes you pretty old. I guess it would have had to have been when you were ten or eleven, huh?”
“I g-g-guess so,” Darren agreed.
Jaywalker’s hunch had been right. Sandusky was building a lie into the test, deliberately coaching Darren to be deceitful when the time came. That way, he would have a control response to a lie, against which he could measure the real responses.
“Well,” said Sandusky, “you can’t remember masturbating in the last ten years, can you?”
“No,” said Darren, swallowing the bait.
“Good. Now, have you ever hurt anybody?”
“Yes,” said Darren. “I guess so.”
“Who?”
“I’ve hurt Charlene, my wife, by saying things.”
“Can you remember anyone else you’ve hurt?”
Darren hesitated for a moment. “No,” he said.
“Okay,” said Sandusky. Once again he attached the straps to Darren’s body and inflated the blood pressure cuff. “Now,” he said, “put your hands on the arms of the chair. Feet flat on the floor. I want you to face forward and close your eyes. As I ask you questions, you just answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” He turned on the machine.
Jaywalker had to remind himself to breathe.
“Do you live in the United States?” asked Sandusky.
“Yes,” answered Darren.
“Did you rape Joanne Kenarden?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did rape Joanne Kenarden?”
“No.”
“Is your name Darren Kingston?”
“Yes.”
“Since you were twelve years old, can you remember masturbating even one time?”
Darren opened his eyes, turned to Sandusky and raised his hand, as though signaling for a time-out. “I remembered,” he said. “I think I did it once since then.”
Sandusky stopped the machine, walked over and undid the straps. “How old were you at that time?” he asked. “Thirteen?”
“I m-m-must have been.”
“Okay,” said Sandusky. “Let’s take a break.”
Sandusky and Jaywalker met in the conference room again. Sandusky smoked nervously. Jaywalker feared the worst.
“Doesn’t look good?” he asked.
“He’s just so damn tight. I’m going to have to try to get him to believe in the test a little more.”
Jaywalker resumed his observation post as Sandusky returned to the test room. “All right,” he told Darren, “we’ve been going quite a while. I want to check the machine.” He hooked it up to Darren again. Then he produced seven oversized playing cards. Jaywalker could see that each one had a different number printed on its face. Sandusky shuffled them and fanned them out in front of Darren, facedown. “Take one,” he said, “without letting me see the other side of it.”
Darren did as he was told. When he lifted the card to look at it, Jaywalker could see the number thirteen on it. He wondered if he was the only one who’d associated the choice with bad luck.
“Look at it,” said Sandusky, “remember it and put it back. Don’t tell me what it is.”
Darren complied.
“Now,” said Sandusky, turning on the machine, “I want you to listen carefully to my questions, but answer ‘No’ to each one. No ‘Yeses,’ just ‘Noes.’ Understand?”
“Yes,” said Darren.
“Did you pick the number three?”
“No.”
“Did you pick the number five?”
“No.”
“Did you pick the number seven?”
“No.”
“Did you pick the number eight?”
“No.”
“Did you pick the number ten?”
“No.”
“Did you pick the number thirteen?”
“No.”
“Did you pick the number fifteen?”
“No.”
Sandusky had marked the graph paper following each response. Now he shut off the machine and studied the paper. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “You picked thirteen.”
Jaywalker exhaled. Still, he had the feeling that Sandusky had said it a bit tentatively and was more pleased than he should have been when Darren confirmed that he was right.
“Great,” said Sandusky, once again removing the straps. “Let’s take one more break. The machine’s working perfectly. When I come back in, we’ll do the actual test.”
In the conference room, Sandusky underscored his uncertainty by asking Jaywalker if Darren had in fact picked number thirteen. But neither of them mentioned the problem that was by this time evident to both of them.
ACTUAL TEST QUESTIONS AND
SUBJECT’S RESPONSES
POLYGRAPH EXAMINATION OF
Darren Kingston,
ADMINISTERED BYGene SanduskyON
October 25, 1979.
The test was over. Sandusky turned off the machine and removed the straps from Darren. He made one final mark on the graph paper before tearing it from the roll and heading to the conference room. Jaywalker met him there.
“All right,” said Sandusky, lighting another cigarette. “I was afraid of this. We’ve got a problem here.”
Jaywalker waited for the worst, the news that Darren had flunked cold. In his mind, he was already rehearsing his Okay-it’s-time-to-plead-guilty speech. The problem was, he was still thinking black and white, winner take all. And he was wrong.
“I want Dick to take a look at these charts,” said Sandusky, referring to his mentor and senior partner, Dick Arledge. “But I’m already certain he’s going to want to run a retest. So if it’s okay with you, I’m going to go ahead and schedule it for some time next week.”
Jaywalker hesitated. Uncertainty was better than failure, but the test had cost five hundred dollars. He couldn’t be spending more of Marlin Kingston’s money without checking with him first. “The fee—”
“Don’t worry,” said Sandusky. “There’s no additional charge.”
“Okay,” Jaywalker agreed. “What do you think the problem is?”
Sandusky shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “He’s nervous, he’s very tight. Some of it’s wearing off. A lot of times they’re calmer the second time around. They know what to expect, and the general anxiety is less. That way, the specific anxieties show up more. The lies.”
Jaywalker said nothing, but he found himself wondering if Sandusky wasn’t betraying a bias here. Had he been expecting lies from Darren? Was he surprised they hadn’t shown up clearly? And was he implying that a retest was needed in order to better expose them? Or was Jaywalker simply being paranoid?
Not that that would be a first.
Sandusky had Jaywalker leave the office before he went back in to break the news to Darren. Riding down in the elevator, Jaywalker could feel the fascination of the experience beginning to give way to depression. It was already dawning on him that what had seemed the defense’s best hope was proving worthless. He suddenly felt exhausted, totally drained.
He drove his VW downtown in silence. Even the radio, his sometimes companion, managed to irritate him. If only Darren could have passed, he thought. It would have been a reprieve from the governor, a rescue by the cavalry. No, he realized, it would have been a deus ex machina, in the most literal sense: god from the machine.
Or if only he’d flunked, Jaywalker admitted to himself grimly. If the test had established his guilt, it would have put an end to any notion of a trial. More importantly, it would have gotten Jaywalker off the hook. Darren and the rest of the Kingston family would have stopped expecting him to perform magic. The case would have become manageable, predictable. Safe. An exercise in damage control.
Instead, this. This nonanswer, the worst of all possible results. Sure, there’d be a retest. But already Jaywalker had begun to steel himself, to accept the inevitable. The result would be the same. The little black box simply wasn’t going to decide things. How ridiculous to have expected anything else.
He gave Darren an hour to get home before phoning him from the office. Not knowing that Jaywalker had observed the test, Darren explained what had happened in some detail. He concluded by saying that Mr. Sandusky wanted him to come back on Friday because he hadn’t had time to finish the questioning.
“I know,” Jaywalker lied. “I spoke with him a little while ago.”
“D-d-did he give you any idea of how I was doing?” Darren asked.
“No,” Jaywalker lied again. “He said he hadn’t had a chance to study the charts yet. Why, you worried?”
“No, Jay, I’m not worried. You know that.”
Jaywalker bit his tongue, sorry he’d said it. The truth was, as worried as he himself was, Darren seemed supremely confident. Either he was completely innocent, one hell of an actor—or a total psychopath.
Friday came, and with it the retest.
Jaywalker couldn’t go. He had a trial, a non-jury case involving a taxi driver charged with leaving the scene of an accident. The guy had pulled away from the curb without realizing—or so he said—that there was an elderly woman holding on to the handle of the cab’s rear door. She’d lost her balance, fallen and broken a hip. Jaywalker argued to the judge that there was no evidence that the driver had been aware of what had happened. The judge looked skeptical, but was forced to agree on the law. Not guilty. Jaywalker gathered up his papers, snapped his briefcase closed and strode out of the courtroom. The victory was a small one, but satisfying. If only they could all be so easy, he thought.
He reached Sandusky at 5:30 p.m. Dick Arledge had run the retest on Darren. Like Sandusky, he’d come up with an indefinite. But they wanted one final try, and had asked Darren to come back on Monday, at which time they would run him through it once more, together. Jaywalker said okay.
He hung up the phone, and settled back into his chair and his depression. The flush from the earlier acquittal was long gone. The weekend, with time to spend with his wife and daughter, took on a bittersweet quality.
Two strikes.
One to go.
Strike three came on Monday.
Dick Arledge called at noon to report that he and Sandusky had tested Darren once more, with the same result: indefinite. “It’s unusual,” he added, “but it happens.”
“Did you tell Darren?” Jaywalker asked.
“No,” said Arledge. “I figured I’d let you do that.”
Like a doctor afraid to tell his patient he’s got cancer and is going to die. Let the nurse do it, or maybe the receptionist.
“Strictly off the record,” said Jaywalker. “If you had to make a guess, would you say he’s lying or telling the truth?”
“On the basis of the tests?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t even take a guess,” Arledge confessed. “For some reason, we simply couldn’t get a pattern on him. The truth controls look the same as the lie controls. We start getting what looks like a meaningful set of responses, and then, wham! No response where there’s got to be one. Or a response to his own name. No, on the basis of the tests, I can’t tell you it so much as leans an inch one-way or the other.”
“And on the basis of anything else?”
“On the basis of anything else…” Arledge repeated Jaywalker’s words and paused for a moment. “I like the kid. Gene and I both like him. He sure as hell doesn’t seem like a rapist.”
Jaywalker said he agreed. He accepted Dick Arledge’s apology, thanked him for his efforts, and hung up the phone. The strikeout was complete.
So they liked Darren. Great. Jaywalker liked Darren, too. Maybe that was half the problem right there. Nobody could imagine this good-looking, quiet, sensitive, stuttering kid as a vicious rapist with a knife in his hand. But what did rapists look like, anyway? Would you recognize one if you passed him on the street? Sat next to him on the Number 6 train? Did he have a perpetual leer in his eye? Did he drool? Walk around with a giant hard-on?
Or did he look like Darren Kingston? Average height, normal weight, medium complexion. Soft-spoken, well-liked, absolutely ordinary on the outside. Yet deep inside was a whole different person that emerged like some werewolf in the full moon. Only in Darren’s case, the full moon was times of stress and sexual frustration. His wife pregnant, his child crying, he himself home alone in the midday un-air-conditioned heat of August in the Bronx.
And what kind of person would get no meaningful responses to a lie detector test? A psychopath, that was who, someone for whom the line between fantasy and reality was blurred to the point of being unrecognizable. Someone who didn’t know what was true and what was false. Someone who could look you straight in the eye and tell you that in his entire life he’d never hurt a soul, other than perhaps his wife’s feelings, because in his mind he honestly believed that to be so.
Or better yet, suppose Darren was some kind of dual personality, a real-life Jekyll and Hyde. There was the normal, likeable Darren—good husband, loving father and son, responsible provider. And there was Darren the rapist. Perhaps the two were strangers to one another. Darren the good guy didn’t even know that Darren the rapist existed. So he could sit there with all sorts of wires attached to him and tell you that he never raped Joanne Kenarden or anyone else, and believe he was speaking the absolute truth. And so believing, he would have no reason to hesitate or flinch or contradict himself. His blood pressure would have no reason to rise, his pulse no reason to quicken, his breathing no reason to labor, his palms no reason to sweat….
Jaywalker took his half-eaten tuna-fish sandwich and threw it into the wastepaper basket. He picked up the phone and dialed Darren’s number, and told him to come down to the office. Not asked him. Told him.
Jaywalker was on the phone when Darren arrived. He motioned for him to take a seat. He continued the phone conversation, which wasn’t an important one, for another five minutes, making a point of forcing Darren to wait. Only when Jaywalker sensed the young man’s uneasiness did he finally hang up.
“Sorry,” he said offhandedly.
“That’s okay,” said Darren. “Wh-wh-what’s up?”
“Bad news, that’s what.”
“B-b-bad news? Wh-what kind of bad news, Jay?” He literally squirmed in his chair.
Jaywalker reached for a file on his desk. It happened to be the one from the taxi driver case, but Darren couldn’t see that. Jaywalker opened the file and pretended to study the first page or two.
“A messenger brought these over from Dick Arledge’s office,” he said. “I’m afraid you didn’t do so well after all.” He raised his eyes to study Darren’s. “These guys are friends of mine,” he said. “They did everything they possibly could to make it come out like you were telling the truth. But even with three separate tests, they couldn’t do it. Every time they ran you through it, you lied on questions two, five, seven and eight. The ones about the rapes.” Jaywalker held up the sheets. “It’s all here,” he said, shaking his head.
The reaction swept through Darren like a wave. There was no hesitation, no time to plan it. His confused frown disappeared, giving way first to a look of open astonishment and finally to one of frank disbelief.
“Jay,” he said, “that can’t be. I—I—I didn’t rape those women. There’s a mistake. The test has got to be wrong.” Tears welled up in his eyes and overflowed, running freely down both cheeks. He made no attempt to either wipe them away or avert his eyes.
“There’s no mistake,” Jaywalker forced himself to say. “I think we’d better start at the beginning, Darren. Don’t you?”
“Jay,” he pleaded, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I—”
Jaywalker was the first to break eye contact. His gaze dropped to Darren’s hands. Where he might have expected to see fists clenched to maintain control of a performance, he saw instead palms open and extended.
“—didn’t do it,” Darren finished softly, almost to himself.
“I know,” said Jaywalker. “I know.”
It had taken a truly cruel stunt on his part. He’d taken a young man—a young man whom he liked immensely, and whose family was not only putting their trust in him, but also backing up that trust with hard-earned money—and compelled him to make an hour’s trip each way, then lied to his face and explicitly accused him of being guilty and, worse yet, of refusing to acknowledge his guilt. But as bad as Jaywalker felt about the ordeal he’d put Darren through, he could live with it, because now he knew.
He knew.
6
LAST CHANCE
At the same time as he’d said “I know” to Darren, Jaywalker had taken the file he’d been looking at and slid it across the desk. Darren had picked it up, opened it and begun to read. It took him several moments of total confusion before he began to get it. Then he’d looked up tentatively, the way a boy who thinks just maybe he’s got the answer might look up at his teacher. But only when he’d seen Jaywalker’s smile had he taken permission to smile in return.
“I’m a shit,” Jaywalker confessed, rising and coming around the desk. “And you owe me a punch in the mouth. The tests didn’t show anything one way or the other. I did that because I needed to be sure.” He withdrew a paper towel from his back pocket, his version of a handkerchief, and offered it to Darren.
Darren dried his tears unselfconsciously. “That’s okay,” he said. “I just didn’t see how I could’ve flunked it.”
“You couldn’t have. I’m just sorry I lied to you.”
“That’s all right, Jay. I won’t even p-p-punch you in the mouth.”
“You’d better not,” said Jaywalker. “It looks like we may be needing it.”
With the private polygraph lost as a weapon in the defense’s arsenal, and the realization that the district attorney’s test was likely to prove every bit as worthless, Jaywalker turned his efforts to other aspects of the case. He phoned his investigator, John McCarthy, who reported that he’d located all the victims and was ready to move in and interview them in rapid succession. Jaywalker gave him the go-ahead.
Earlier, Jaywalker had instructed Darren and the other members of the Kingston family to write down everything they could recall about Darren’s whereabouts during August, early September, and the week following Darren being bailed out. Now he collected the notes and studied them, searching desperately for some clue, some tiny lead, to jump from the pages in front of him.
Nothing did.
He began spending time in the Castle Hill area. He would change into old clothes before leaving his office at the end of the workday, and instead of heading home to New Jersey, he would aim his Volkswagen for the Bronx. Once up in the projects, he would walk through the lobbies or sit on a park bench or lean idly against a trash can, trying his best to blend in to the landscape. It wasn’t easy, because whites in the area were greatly outnumbered by blacks and Hispanics. Still, Jaywalker’s face was by no means the only white one in sight. And, he reminded himself, Joanne Kenarden and Eleanor Cerami were white, and so were Tania Maldonado and Elvira Caldwell and Maria Sanchez. At least they looked white. So Jaywalker pretended he was one of them. He hung around, waiting for Darren’s double to show up. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself spotting him, following him, jumping him, subduing him and dragging him off to the nearest precinct.
No double showed up.
He would get home past dark, in time to eat cold leftovers over the kitchen sink. If he was lucky, he’d get to kiss his daughter good-night before she was asleep. His wife put up with his behavior, but only because by that time she knew him well enough to know he couldn’t help himself.
In mid-November, the mail brought an envelope from the judge in Part 12, containing his decision on Jaywalker’s pretrial motions. As expected, he’d granted the defense a hearing on the propriety of the identification procedures the police had used. He’d left the question of a severance—whether there would be one trial or four—up to the discretion of the trial judge.
They went back to court at the end of the month. Again the appearance was a brief one. Pope told Justice Davidoff that there was a polygraph examination scheduled at his office the first week of December, and the case was adjourned.
Out in the corridor, Jaywalker huddled with the Kingston family. Despite the fact that he’d assured them that there would be a postponement, they’d all showed up. Now, while they were talking, Jacob Pope walked over and motioned Jaywalker aside. Pope wore his trademark dark suit, white shirt and red tie. As always, he was all business. He never once smiled, cracked a joke or allowed himself to chuckle at one of Jaywalker’s feeble attempts at humor.
“So,” he said, “we’re on for the sixth, right?”
“Right,” said Jaywalker. “I just hope we get an answer, one way or another.”
“We should,” said Pope. “Lou Paulson is good. Any reason you anticipate a problem?”
“No,” Jaywalker lied, something that was becoming a bit of a habit lately. “Only that he’s a pretty nervous kid. I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but he’s got a noticeable stutter, and—”
“I’m aware of it.”
He said it softly, calmly, but with deadly force. Jaywalker felt the wind knocked out of him. Pope turned and walked away, leaving Jaywalker standing there, dazed. How many of the victims had described the stutter? All of them? What was the difference, really? One would be more than enough to destroy Darren. A physical description was one thing. Height, weight, hair color and complexion were seldom enough to convince a jury. And John McCarthy had already reported finding some discrepancies there.
But a stutter!
Jaywalker headed back over to the Kingstons. They looked at him expectantly, too polite to ask what Pope and he had talked about, but obviously wanting to know. Cards on the table, Jaywalker decided. It was how he’d always operated, and how he always would. You told your people everything, even the worst news. Especially the worst news. That was the only way they would ever trust you when the time came to tell them something good. If ever it did. So he told them about the stutter.
“The detective, R-R-R-Rendell,” said Darren. “He knows I stutter, from arresting me. He c-c-could have told Pope.”
“Maybe,” Jaywalker agreed. “McCarthy’s out interviewing the victims. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Still, Jaywalker didn’t like the sound of it. And unlike Darren, he wasn’t prepared to assume that a detective would coach a witness on something like this, not with so much at stake. Sure, cops lied. Jaywalker had learned that early in his DEA days. So did detectives, federal agents, state troopers, and just about everyone else who wore a badge and carried a gun. But they lied selectively. They lied about their own conduct, where they’d cut corners to make a collar stick or a search hold up, or where a case came down to a defendant’s word against one of their own. In those instances, an us-against-them mentality immediately kicked in, and truth became an early casualty. But in cases involving civilian complainants, where the role of law enforcement was more peripheral, lying on the part of the police was the exception, not the rule. Besides, Detective Rendell had impressed Jaywalker as being fair. “She IDs him or she doesn’t,” he’d said the morning they were waiting in court for Joanna Kenarden to show up and have a look at Darren. “If he’s not the guy, I don’t want him.”
No, if the victims were saying the rapist had stuttered, Jaywalker was willing to believe them. Which could mean only one thing, he knew.
Again, the pendulum had swung. Jaywalker had done it again. He’d allowed himself to be taken in, to be completely won over by Darren’s I didn’t do it, by his tears and open palms. Would he never learn? Just when he thought himself too hardened and cynical to be conned, along comes this twenty-two-year-old kid who can’t even pass a polygraph, and he turns Jaywalker into the easiest mark in town.
He felt like a total jerk.
John McCarthy called three days later. He’d succeeded in interviewing two of the victims, Eleanor Cerami and Elvira Caldwell. He’d been refused by one, Joanne Kenarden. Tania Maldonado was out of town, but would be back in a day or two. As for the fourteen-year-old, Maria Sanchez, her parents wouldn’t let her talk to anybody.
“Both of these girls, Cerami and Caldwell, identify Darren from the photo I showed them,” said McCarthy. “Although they both say he looks like he’s lost weight since they saw him.”
“Independently?”
“Independently. I interviewed them separately. Of course, I told each of them that the other one had already talked to me. Old police habits die hard, if you know what I mean.”
“What else did they say?” Jaywalker asked.
“Well,” said McCarthy, “the M.O. is identical. He follows them onto an elevator, presses a floor and, on the way up, pulls a knife, takes them off the elevator and up to a landing. There he first makes them blow him, and then he rapes them. He succeeded with Cerami. With Caldwell, there was a noise, and he split.”
“Were there conversations?”
“Yeah, both times. He seems to be quite a talker.”
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