Bronx Justice. Joseph Teller

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ