Free Bronx Justice by Joseph Teller Page B

there was no evidence that thedriver 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.
    Â 
    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.”
    â€œDid you tell Darren?” Jaywalker asked.
    â€œNo,” 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.
    â€œStrictly off the record,” said Jaywalker. “If you had to make a guess, would you say he’s lying or telling the truth?”
    â€œOn the basis of the tests?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAnd on the basis of anything else?”
    â€œOn 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 wifepregnant, 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