Free Bronx Justice by Joseph Teller Page A

senior partner, Dick Arledge. “But I’m already certain he’s going to want to run a retest. So if it’s okay with you, I’m going to go ahead and schedule it for some time next week.”
    Jaywalker hesitated. Uncertainty was better than failure, but the test had cost five hundred dollars. He couldn’t be spending more of Marlin Kingston’s money without checking with him first. “The fee—”
    â€œDon’t worry,” said Sandusky. “There’s no additional charge.”
    â€œOkay,” Jaywalker agreed. “What do you think the problem is?”
    Sandusky shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “He’s nervous, he’s very tight. Some of it’s wearing off. A lot of times they’re calmer the second time around. They know what to expect, and the general anxiety is less. That way, the specific anxieties show up more. The lies.”
    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.
    â€œI know,” Jaywalker lied. “I spoke with him a little while ago.”
    â€œD-d-did he give you any idea of how I was doing?” Darren asked.
    â€œNo,” Jaywalker lied again. “He said he hadn’t had a chance to study the charts yet. Why, you worried?”
    â€œNo, 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.
    Â 
    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