one more transgression. And this one would have been a whopper, a felony, in fact. Criminal Impersonation, they called it, and it carried four years. Not that they’d have given him all of that. But he certainly could have wound up in jail.
Which struck him as just a bit ironic, since that was precisely where he intended to wind up next. Because tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock sharp, Jaywalker had an appointment at the Rockland County Jail to have a face-to-face with Carter Drake.
Chapter Four
Jimmy Chipmunk
“What the fuck is this supposed to be?”
For a moment there, it seemed that the corrections officer at the outer gate wasn’t nearly as impressed with Jaywalker’s identification card as Jaywalker himself had been the evening before. But after twenty minutes’ worth of calls to the man’s supervisor and his supervisor’s supervisor, as well as to Amanda Drake and Judah Mermelstein, Private Investigator Jaywalker was finally buzzed in, to begin another half hour of being searched, signing forms and waiting.
When he was finally escorted through a long underground corridor and up a flight of steps to the visiting room, Jaywalker discovered that his meeting with Carter Drake would be a face-to-face one in only the most literal sense. In order to actually speak and be heard through the three-quarter-inch, wire-reinforced, bulletproof glass separating them, they’d have to use a pair of black phone receivers with frayed cords and exposed wires, things that had likely been around since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.
“Hi,” said Jaywalker.
“Hello,” said Drake over the static. He was an athletic-looking man with blond hair that was just beginning to turn gray. A good match for Amanda, thought Jaywalker. And he was seeing Drake outside his element. He tried picturing him propped up behind a big mahogany desk, or at the end of a long boardroom table, instead of inside a cubicle at the Rockland County Jail, but it wasn’t easy to do. Jail had a funny way of making you look like you belonged there.
“My name is Jaywalker. I’m a private investigator at the moment. Seven or eight months from now I expect to be a lawyer again, and your wife would like me—”
“My estranged wife,” said Drake.
“Oh?”
“We’ve been separated for five months now.”
Jaywalker considered the implications of that for a moment. It might make Amanda a more credible witness if he were to put her on the stand. She could come off as hostile enough to Carter to have left him, but at the same time she could back him up on any factual or character matters. And for another thing—
“So it’s okay if you’re sleeping with her.”
“Who said I’m sleeping with her?” asked Jaywalker, doing his best to summon up an appropriate measure of righteous indignation at the idea.
“Nobody,” said Drake. “All I said was, it’s okay if you are.”
Jaywalker shifted his weight in his chair. “What I was about to tell you,” he said, “was that your wife, estranged or not, would like me to take over for Mr. Mermelstein at some point.”
“So she told me.”
“So how about we discuss your case?” Jaywalker suggested.
“Here?”
Jaywalker looked around. “I suppose we could reserve a table at the Oyster Bar,” he said.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Drake. “Everyone says these phones are monitored.”
Jaywalker was about to explain that while that was no doubt true, the guards knew enough not to record or listen in on lawyer-client conversations, which were privileged. Then he realized: he wasn’t Drake’s lawyer, or a lawyer at all, for that matter. So this wasn’t a lawyer-client conversation. And even though he was arguably there on behalf of Mermelstein, who was a lawyer, he could hardly count on the corrections officials who ran the place to grasp such nuances. “You’re right,” he agreed.
“Can you get me out?” Drake asked. “I mean, five million dollars’ bail on a drunk-driving case? Not that I couldn’t have come up with it. But the lawyers for the families have gone into civil court and frozen all my assets.”
“It’s not really a drunk-driving case,” said Jaywalker. “Nine people died.”
“I know that,” said Drake. “But it was still an accident. I mean, I never meant to kill them. Everyone knows that.”
He had a point there. Jaywalker had long marveled at the courts’ schizophrenic attitude toward drinking and driving. If you got pulled over at a checkpoint with six or seven drinks in your system, you paid a fine and got your license suspended for ninety days. The second time, the fine got a little bigger, the suspension a little longer. You got what, maybe four or five bites of the apple before they got serious and actually revoked your license, and one or two more before they slapped you in the local jail for thirty days.
But God help you if you had those same six or seven drinks and got into the same car and drove at exactly the same speed, but were unlucky enough to broadside a school bus, or run a vanful of kids off a road and into a fireball. Then suddenly you were a murderer, front-page stuff, Public Enemy Number One. And you were looking at twenty-five years to life.
Where had this institutional hypocrisy come from? Jaywalker—who, if asked, had a theory for most things—had a pretty good idea.
Judges were lawyers, after all. They’d come from privileged-enough backgrounds to have been able to afford to go off first to college and then law school. They were financially able to have bankrolled their own campaigns, or to cough up enough political contributions to the campaigns of others who, once elected, had appointed them to the bench. In other words, they weren’t street people. They didn’t go around committing robberies, burglarizing apartments or selling drugs, and they had little natural empathy for those who did. But they drank, some of them, and they drove. And occasionally they even combined the two endeavors. That was something they could empathize with. So they were ready to look the other way or apply an understanding slap to the wrist of anyone who happened to get caught doing what they themselves had done more than once.
But kill someone? Kill nine someones? Including eight innocent little Jewish kids? That was a different story altogether. For one thing, they’d never done that, had they? And sitting there in the glare of publicity, with the families of the victims, the media and the rest of the world screaming for blood, those very same judges all of a sudden became the toughest lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key law-and-order types that ever lived. Murder? You bet! Five million dollars’ bail? Not a penny less! We’ll show those vicious drunk-driver menaces that we mean business!
“No,” he told Drake, “I can’t get you out of here. But I’ll talk to Mr. Mermelstein, see if he can do anything about getting some of your assets untied. In the meantime, I’d like you to do something for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Get a hold of some paper and a pen, and write out, in as much detail as you possibly can, everything that happened over the twenty-four-hour period preceding the accident, the accident itself and everything afterward, up to the time
