Depraved Indifference j-3 Page 29

  At Route 23 he turned right, and they stopped to get gas and lunch at a diner. He liked the way she didn't wait for him to come around and open her door, hopping out on her own instead. As he watched from the driver's seat, she bent over to stretch her back muscles. The unexpected view of her rear, which might have had forty years under its belt but sure didn't look like it, was worth the trip right there.

  They ordered sandwiches and Cokes, and ate outside at a picnic table, underneath a huge white umbrella. It was nearly eighty degrees in the shade, and the cold days of New City in January seemed light-years away.

  Only after they'd climbed back into the Merc, and Jaywalker had turned the key in the ignition, did he realize he'd left the headlights on. He'd developed the habit of driving with them on even in the daytime after reading somewhere that it cut head-on collisions by sixty percent. But being old, his car didn't have one of those annoying little chimes that reminded you to turn the lights off when you got out.

  What that added up to now was a very dead battery.

  He had no jumper cables, his last set having mysteriously disappeared from the trunk long ago. He looked around for help, and even asked a couple of people sitting inside if they had cables. But if anyone did, they weren't admitting it.

  "Do you have AAA?" Amanda asked.

  "No," he said, not bothering to add that the closest he'd ever gotten was AA.

  "So what do we do now?"

  "You get in the driver's seat," he told her. "Turn the key to the On position, but not Start. Put the car in first gear, and keep your foot on the clutch. I'm going to push, and when it gets moving, pop the clutch."

  But instead of getting in, she just stood there, looking away from him. And when he asked her what the matter was, she turned and walked a couple of steps away.

  It didn't take much effort for him to catch up to her. "You can do this," he told her.

  "No, I can't."

  "What do you mean, you can't?"

  For a long moment she said nothing. When finally she spoke, it was with eyes still averted, and in a small, tentative voice, the sort of voice a child might use when owning up to breaking a good lamp or an expensive piece of pottery. "I've never driven a standard-shift car," she said. "I don't know how."

  He found a couple of guys to give them a push, and they got back on their way. He said nothing to Amanda, not a word. But sometimes silence can be more deafening than rage, and just after they'd crossed over the New York-Massachusetts line, she asked him to pull over and turn off the engine. He did, this time remembering to turn off the lights, as well.

  "You think I'm horrible," she said.

  "I don't know what to think," he told her. It was the truth.

  She took a deep breath. "I sought you out," she began, "because everyone kept telling me you were the best. Even if you were suspended. You're going to think I'm a complete wacko, but I followed you, trying to make it look like an accident."

  "I know."

  "You know I followed you?"

  He nodded. "For two days."

  "Three," she said.

  "I guess I must have been out of practice."

  "Then, when the revolving door got stuck-"

  "It didn't get stuck," he said. "I stopped it."

  She smiled. It had been a while. "It was all Carter's idea," she said. "He said if either of us, or even both of us, said I'd been driving, nobody would believe us. That it would just look like I was trying to protect him because I had a license and I hadn't been drinking. He said the only way it would work was for him to take the stand, say he was driving, and then somehow slip up. But he said he needed me to find a lawyer smart enough to catch the slipup, and clever enough to know what to do with it. So I found you."

  "And played me."

  She nodded.

  "Jesus," w as all he could say. Here he thought he'd pulled off a miracle, won an absolutely unwinnable trial, a Tenth Case. When all he'd really done was to play the part of the village idiot, and play it to perfection. Between them, Carter and Amanda had done all the heavy lifting. The left-handed mistake had been nothing but Carter's invention, the inability to reach the clutch a fallback measure, just in case Jaywalker had been asleep at the switch and missed the first cue.

  "And our…"

  "That was real," she assured him, her hand reaching out and finding his forearm. "All of that was real."

  But how could he possibly believe that? How could he not think that their lovemaking had been just another part of the Grand Plan? A part that Amanda had kept her husband apprised of in minute detail, no doubt.

  "I feel like an absolute idiot," said Jaywalker, drawing his arm back from her grasp.

  "An idiot? Y ou were brilliant. Everyone was right about you."

  "And you?" he asked. "Suppose Judah Mermelstein hadn't been sitting in the courtroom? Suppose he hadn't been smart enough to tell you to take the Fifth? What would you have done then?"

  "He didn't tell me to take the Fifth," said Amanda. "I told him I was going to. He wasn't even sure I could. But Carter had looked it all up, and checked it out. He knew."

  "You barely needed me," said Jaywalker. It was the truth, and it was hard to swallow. "You paid me all that money to be, to be… I don't know what I was. I was like the magician's assistant. You know, the dope he pulls up from the audience, the one who stands on the stage while they pull rabbits out of his ears."

  "You were nothing like that," said Amanda. "You were wonderful. You were the best."

  But her words were just that.

  Words.

  26

  DEUS FEDEX MACHINA

  After that, there was only one more twist left to the story. It took place the following January, almost a year to the day after Carter Drake had walked out of court a free man.

  Jaywalker had nothing to do with it this time, not even a bit part. Nor did Amanda or Abe Firestone or Judah Mermelstein, or any of the other players who'd had roles in the earlier performance.

  It happened on a Tuesday, a weekday, when Carter Drake was at his office in midtown Manhattan. A package arrived, delivered by the FedEx man. Not the regular one who stopped by almost every day, but a substitute whom no one could remember seeing before or after. The package was a fairly large one, approximately three feet by two feet by eight inches high. It was marked PERISHABLE- DO NOT FREEZE, and the shipping label indicated it had been mailed from a well-known purveyor of fruit and gifts called Harry and David, out in Bear Creek, Oregon. But according to the investigation that followed, neither Harry nor David nor anyone else had any record of having shipped it, and the professional-looking tracking label it bore turned out to have been created on a home computer.

  Carter Drake must have used a letter opener to pry it open, because they found one on the carpet of his office. Inside the box he'd discovered oranges, grapefruits, clementines, and an assortment of little jars of honey, marmalade and fruit preserves. There even appeared to be a small branch, sprouting green leaves and snow-white orange blossoms in full bloom. But upon closer inspection, the branch turned out to be a cutting suitable for planting, complete with its own tiny root system encased in peat moss and wrapped in a clear plastic bag. And attached to the branch and tucked in among the orange blossoms was a small object, pretty much the size, shape and color of a wellused Ping-Pong ball. But it wasn't a Ping-Pong ball. It was a hive.

  They found Drake an hour later, doubled over on the carpet. The paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. An autopsy was conducted, and the cause of death was determined to have been suffocation brought on by an acute anaphylactic reaction to insect venom. That insect venom appeared to have been introduced to Carter Drake's body by exactly nine separate bee stings. Nine.

  In a way, many agreed, it was an appropriate ending. But perhaps no one summed it up more cleverly than the New York Times reporter who likened it to a Deus FedEx Machina.

  To Jaywalker, it was an ironic final chapter to a strange, sad story. To his way of thinking, Carter
Drake's drunken and reckless driving might not have added up to murder. But if you were to throw in the cavalier way in which he'd gone on to manipulate his wife, his son, his own lawyer, the jury, and the entire criminal justice system, there was probably no better way to describe his conduct than by using the words the grand jury had settled on a year earlier, back when they'd handed up the indictment.

  Depraved indifference to human life.

  There came a time when Jaywalker cranked up the Merc and took one last drive up to Rockland County. He waited until fall came, and even when fall came, he waited for a clear day, knowing how the sun would light up the brilliant colors of the changing leaves along the Palisades Parkway.

  He found the eight memorials by the side of Route

  303. They were neat and well tended, but the number of artifacts had dwindled. There were fewer photos, cards, stuffed animals and items of clothing. Even the tiny baseball mitt was gone. But there was a forwarding address of sorts. Propped up against a small Star of David was a funeral announcement someone had encased in plastic, evidently to protect it from the elements. Following the service, it said, interments would take place at the Beth El Cemetery in Valley Cottage.

  He located it without too much trouble, and parked inside the metal gates. He told an old man wearing a yarmulke what he was looking for, and the man smiled and pointed to a rise, a small hilltop in the distance.

  "You can drive up there, if you like."

  But Jaywalker preferred to walk.

  He found them beneath the shade of a huge maple tree that he guessed had to be older then he was, older even than the man with the yarmulke. They were in a single row, small rounded mounds marked by smaller headstones. It had been eighteen months since the accident, half a year since the unveilings would have taken place, and the grass atop the mounds had taken root, sprouted, grown and filled in. And as they had been in both life and death, the children were still together.

  All eight of them.

  From there he drove over to New City, where he spent the rest of the afternoon. He walked the streets, sampled the shops and exchanged small talk with anyone willing to share a few minutes of time with him. They talked about nothing in particular. The weather, the fall colors, the price of gasoline. What they didn't talk about was the case, not unless he pressed them to. And when he did, they surprised him. Where Jaywalker had fully expected to find lingering anger, bitterness and frustration, he found only a readiness to move on. A few people even mentioned that they recognized him as the lawyer for the accused, but none seemed determined to hold it against him. One went so far as to tell him he was a good lawyer and a mensch.

  Driving home, he couldn't help but marvel at the way the community had managed not only to survive, but to come together and heal. The eight families had opted for a single funeral service, he'd been told, and then buried their children shoulder to shoulder beneath the same tree on the same hill in the same cemetery. Somehow they'd gotten past all of it-Carter Drake's initial responsibility for all that had happened, Amanda Drake's unwillingness to implicate him or herself, and Abe Firestone's ultimate inability to place blame upon either one of them.

  They'd moved on.

  To Jaywalker, that sheer depth of resilience, that capacity of the families and the community to survive, was nothing less than astounding. It was enough to make him drive the rest of the way home with a wry smile on his face. It was enough, he realized at some point, to make a guy wonder…

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