Amanda, the Forty-second Street branch of the New York Public Library. There he went to the newspaper archives room and pulled up on a microfiche screen all the articles he could find on the crash, the surrender and arrest of Carter Drake, and the developments that had occurred since. Had he been a better navigator of the Internet, he probably could have found them on his computer. But he was stubbornly old-fashioned at times, Jaywalker was, and besides, he loved the archives room. He figured it was as good a place as any to get an overview of things, a starting point before he began to dig for details and tried to get first-person accounts.
As overviews go, it turned out to be pretty devastating stuff for the home team.
The photos of the burned van, and of the immediate area where it had come to rest, were hard to look at. Jaywalker could only guess at the ones that had been kept out of the papers, that the editors had deemed too graphic to print. He’d see those later, no doubt, with the police reports. There’d be charred bodies, charred tiny bodies. He shuddered at the thought, shuddered again at the jurors’ reactions to the carnage.
Several of the papers had run with the early rumors of a terrorist cell and the premature detonation of an explosive device, or of a van overcrowded with undocumented migrant apple pickers. Only with the following day’s editions had the truth come out, that eight of the nine dead were young children enrolled at one of New City’s several yeshivas, or Jewish religious schools. There were interviews with the driver of the pickup truck who’d stopped to offer assistance, including his account of the car that had run the van off the road. Looking for the public’s help, the police had released the partial license plate ending in 724 and were imploring other witnesses to come forward. Then, in the next day’s accounts, there was the surrender of Carter Drake and his arrest, as well as some brief comments by his “business attorney.” Jaywalker paused to smile at the phrase. There were business attorneys, patent attorneys, corporate attorneys, trust and estate attorneys, even admiralty attorneys. But when things got truly nasty, you were well advised to go out and get yourself a criminal lawyer. All of a sudden, it was a lawyer you needed. Down in the trenches, there was no room for attorneys.
“Mr. Drake is guilty of absolutely nothing,” the business attorney had said. “He hadn’t been drinking, and he wasn’t speeding. He momentarily lost control of his vehicle. As unfortunate and tragic as the results were—and our hearts go out to the victims and their families—it was an accident, pure and simple. An accident.”
The judge who’d set Carter Drake’s bail at five million dollars had apparently begged to differ.
The newspaper stories had continued for almost a week. There were interviews with grieving parents and outraged school officials. There were calls for tighter seat-belt laws and looser seat-belt laws, the proponents of the latter camp arguing that some of the children might have escaped the fire had they not been restrained, though a look at the extent of the damage shown in the photos strongly suggested otherwise. And there were the funerals, the terrible funerals, accompanied by snapshots of tiny faces smiling out at the camera in happier times.
After that, the coverage dwindled and all but stopped. The exception was the Rockland County Register, which ran editorials daily for nearly three weeks, demanding restoration of the death penalty, “complete with excruciating suffering” for the “cold-blooded killer” of the community’s “most treasured and vulnerable citizens.”
It was midafternoon by the time Jaywalker emerged from the library. He found himself startled by the sudden brightness of the sunshine, and it took his eyes a few moments to make the adjustment. It reminded him of coming out of the movies after a matinee, something he hadn’t done since his wife’s death, a dozen years ago.
He found a phone booth, no mean feat in the Age of the Cell Phone. But Jaywalker had long resisted the ads that promised a powerful network, five bars, and unlimited nighttime and weekend minutes with family and friends. He figured that if he lived long enough, he might just be the last holdout on the planet. Sure, going phoneless meant being inconvenienced from time to time, but that was a small price to pay for the retention of his privacy. Besides, now was no time to get connected, or whatever it was they called it, not while he was still suspended and trying to fly beneath the radar.
Jaywalker had gotten the name of Carter Drake’s business attorney from his newspaper research and found a phone number for him on the Internet. Now he dropped a Samoan penny into the coin slot—they just happened to be the same size as U.S. quarters, so he’d ordered a hundred of them through a Times Square coin dealer for three dollars—and dialed the number.
“PetersonKellnerWhiteandTayler,” said a woman’s voice, as if it were all one name. “How may I direct your call?”
“I’m trying to reach Chester Ludlow,” said Jaywalker.
“Please hold for his administrative aide.”
Jaywalker held, wondering where he’d been while secretaries had turned into administrative aides.
“Mr. Ludlow’s office,” said another female voice.
Jaywalker identified himself and stated his business. If he’d thought doing so might open doors, he was in for a surprise. Over the next fifteen minutes, he sparred first with the administrative aide, and then with a young man who described himself as Ludlow’s executive assistant. Yes, Mr. Ludlow would be more than happy to take a meeting with him, but he billed out at seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour, payable in advance.
“How about six minutes?” Jaywalker asked. He’d neglected to discuss expenses with Amanda, and wasn’t about to spend seven hundred and fifty dollars of his own money, or hers, either—at least not without checking with her first. On the other hand, he figured shelling out seventy-five bucks for a tenth of an hour…
The executive assistant was evidently not amused.
Eventually they settled on a five-minute phone conference, pro bono. Jaywalker was instructed to call Chet back the following day, at 10:15 a.m. “Not any earlier, not any later.”
Fuck you! Jaywalker wanted to say. And fuck Chet, too. Instead he said, “Thank you very much,” and hung up.
Maybe it wasn’t going to be such a picnic after all, this investigator gig.
Next he called Carter Drake’s current lawyer up in New City, a man named Judah Mermelstein. The Samoan pennies were too cumbersome for the job, not to mention too precious, so he used a calling card.
Mermelstein answered his own phone, a sure sign that he was user-friendly and a good indication that he worked on a shoestring budget. Both were attributes that Jaywalker was quite familiar with. As he had with Chester Ludlow’s staff, he explained his business and said he’d like to meet with Mermelstein.
“Sure, sure. C’mon up.”
They agreed on one o’clock the following day. Jaywalker didn’t want to jeopardize his five-minute phone conference with Chet, after all.
The following morning’s five-minute phone conference with Chester Ludlow went pretty much as Jaywalker had expected. Ludlow was brusque, dismissive and completely uninformative. Carter Drake, for whom he’d been doing some complicated mergers-and-acquisi-tions work—the implication being that it was well beyond Jaywalker’s understanding—had phoned the office and said he was the “Audi Assassin,” and that he wanted to turn himself in before the
