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Depraved Indifference
Joseph Teller
About the Author
JOSEPH TELLER was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from law school, he spent three years working undercover for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. For the next thirty-five years he was a criminal defence lawyer. Not too long ago he decided to “run from the law” and began writing fiction. Depraved Indifference is his second novel for MIRA Books.
Also Available
THE TENTH CASE
To Darcy, Katie, Amy and Rachel, with all my love.
And lest you think that makes me a terrible womanizer, think again. They are my granddaughters.
Acknowledgments
Once again I find myself deeply indebted to my literary agent Bob Diforio, who claims he’s deluged with other writers but continues to treat me as though I’m his only one, and to my fabulous editor Leslie Wainger and the rest of the gang at MIRA, who do pretty much the same. I would be totally lost without either one of them.
For some reason, I always seem to have great difficulty persuading my wonderful but terribly overcommitted wife, Sandy, to find time to read my latest manuscript. But eventually the sheer force of my nagging prevails. Warning me in advance that she’s going to absolutely hate it, she disappears into the den for the better part of the day. Sometime that evening, she emerges and tracks me down, a broad smile on her face, to pronounce the work my very best yet. That’s the moment when I know it’s okay to send it off.
Chapter One
A Very Bad D.W.I.
“So,” she said, raising herself onto one elbow, just high enough off the bed to reveal a single nipple, still visibly hard. “What do you do for a living, when you’re not busy knocking people down?”
She was Amanda. At least that was as much of a name as he’d gotten out of her over the hour and twenty minutes since he’d literally knocked her to the ground by being overly aggressive with a sticking revolving door at the Forty-second Street Public Library. Not that all of their time together since that moment had been devoted to small talk, or any other kind of talk, for that matter. Certainly not the last twenty minutes, anyway.
“I’m a lawyer,” said Jaywalker. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I’m not practicing these days,” he explained.
“What happened?” she asked. “You get burned out?”
“No,” he said, “more like thrown out. I’m serving a three-year suspension.”
“What for?”
“Oh, various things. Cutting corners. Breaking silly rules. Taking risks. Pissing off stupid judges. The usual stuff.”
“They suspend you for those things?”
“It seems so.” He left it at that. He didn’t feel any particular need to tell her about the juiciest charge of all, that he’d managed to get caught by a security camera in one of the stairwells of the courthouse, accepting—or at least not exactly fending off—an impromptu expression of heartfelt thanks from an accused prostitute for whom he’d just won a hard-fought acquittal.
“What did you say your name was?” she asked.
“I didn’t. But it’s Jaywalker.”
It wasn’t just a case of tit for tat, his withholding part of his name because she had. The single name was all he had, actually. Harrison J. Walker had years ago elided into Harrison Jaywalker, and not too long after that, the Harrison part had disappeared altogether. So for years now, he’d been known to just about everyone simply as Jaywalker.
“You’re that guy!” exclaimed Amanda, suddenly and self-consciously covering up her wayward nipple with a pillow. “I knew you looked familiar. I saw you on Page Six. You were dating that…that billionaire heiress murderer!”
Jaywalker winced painfully. Three years ago, had someone asked him to describe his own personal vision of what hell might be like, he might well have replied, “Showing up on the Entertainment Channel,” or “Landing on Page Six of the New York Post.” And thanks to a brief, torrid and not-so-discreet romance with a client named Samara Tannenbaum, he’d managed to accomplish not one but both of those distinctions, and in the short space of a single week.
“Yup,” he acknowledged meekly now, “that would be me.”
Amanda laughed out loud and threw her head back, her stylishly short blond hair framing her face, in what could easily have been a fashion model’s pose. In the process, both of her breasts came completely free of the sheets, causing a decided swelling in Jaywalker’s appreciation of her.
“So tell me, mister famous lawyer man,” she said. “How much do you charge for a drunk-driving case?”
“I don’t,” said Jaywalker. “I’m suspended, remember?”
“Right, but for how much longer?”
Jaywalker shrugged. “I don’t know, seven months, maybe eight.” The fact was, he hadn’t exactly been counting the days. If anything, he’d lately been giving some serious consideration to “re-upping” for another three years. Although even as he’d been enjoying his estrangement from the legal profession, his checking account balance was rapidly approaching zero, making such a choice problematic.
“And if you weren’t suspended?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. I used to get twenty-five hundred, thirty-five hundred, something like that.” And in spite of everything, he found himself already contemplating the variables, just as he used to do. First of all, it would depend on whether they were talking about a plea or a trial. After that, where the case was. A D.W.I. in Manhattan, the Bronx or Brooklyn was no big deal. If there’d been a blood-alcohol test and Amanda’s reading hadn’t been too high, there was a good chance he could get her a plea to driving while impaired, maybe even a reckless. A couple of appearances, and the case would be done. Queens and Staten Island tended to be a bit tougher. And as you worked your way out into the neighboring counties—Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk, where there was a lower volume of cases—the D.A.s got noticeably more hard-assed and could afford to insist upon a plea to the full charge. Not that it mattered all that much, though. What they were talking about here was a fine, a license suspension, or at very worst a revocation, a court-ordered one-day safe-driving course and a substantial increase in her insurance premiums. In other words, a slap on the wrist and a smack on the wallet.
“Where were you arrested?” he asked her. “And did you take a test?” He couldn’t help himself.
“Oh,
