Читать книгу Bronx Justice - Joseph Teller, Joseph Teller - Страница 11

CERTIFIED

LIE DETECTION

INSTITUTE

read the sign on the door. Jaywalker rang the bell and waited, afraid he was too early. Eventually a shadow appeared beyond the frosted glass and the door swung open.

“Mr. Jaywalker?”

“Yes.”

“Come on in. I’m Gene Sandusky.”

Sandusky was Dick Arledge’s assistant. He was young, meticulously groomed, and polished. His black hair was precisely combed to cover a bald spot that vanity prevented him from yielding to.

While they waited for Darren to arrive, Sandusky and Jaywalker went over the facts of the case in detail. Sandusky drew up releases from liability that Darren would have to sign. He explained the procedure that he would be following in this particular case: picking one of the rapes and concentrating on it. He would compose his test questions after beginning his interview of Darren, and sprinkle in some control questions. Jaywalker could observe the test if he wanted to, but because his presence might interfere with Darren’s concentration, he would have to do so through a special mirror from another room, without Darren’s knowledge. To this day, Jaywalker can’t remember if Sandusky referred to it as a two-way or a one-way mirror, and has no idea which term is correct. But he got the idea.

Darren showed up promptly at 9:30 a.m., accompanied by his cousin Delroid. Jaywalker was glad to see Darren was still following his instructions to have another adult with him at all times. He introduced them to Sandusky.

“Pl-pl-pl-pleased to meet you,” Darren managed to say.

Jaywalker wondered if the stutter was a bad omen.

Leaving Delroid in the waiting area, Jaywalker and Darren followed Sandusky to a small conference room. There they spent ten minutes on preliminaries—the payment of the fee, the executing of the releases and a discussion of the case in general terms. Then Sandusky announced that Jaywalker would have to leave. Jaywalker rose, shook hands with Darren, wished him luck and said he would call him later. He felt a little bit as though he were abandoning him. He didn’t know what Darren felt.

Sandusky led Jaywalker out of the room, then out of the office altogether. Once in the corridor, he unlocked a second door and ushered Jaywalker into a small room, closing the door behind them. The room was dark, the only light coming through a two-way—or perhaps a one-way—mirror, which looked into the testing room. The glass was adorned with shelves on the other side, which in turn held small figurines, in order to give the test subject the impression that the mirror was purely decorative. The testing room itself was also small. It contained only a table, a couple of straight-backed chairs and the polygraph machine.

Sandusky motioned to a chair directly in front of the glass, and while Jaywalker seated himself, Sandusky adjusted the knobs on some audio equipment.

“Keep the lights off,” he cautioned, “and try to make as little noise as possible. And don’t smoke. A match or even a lit cigarette can be seen from the other side. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Sandusky closed the door tightly behind him. A minute or two later, he appeared in the testing room, followed by Darren. Jaywalker’s instinctive reaction was to lean back, away from the glass, certain he could be seen. But Darren’s gaze paused only momentarily at the mirror, without any sign of recognition.

“All right, Darren,” said Sandusky. “Why don’t you have a seat right here.” His voice was loud and clear through the speaker. If Jaywalker had earlier felt he was abandoning his client, he now had the sense that he was spying on him. But it didn’t occur to him to look away or cover his ears. Instead, he watched and listened intently as Darren sat down. He took his eyes off him only long enough to glance at his watch. It was 9:44.

“Now,” said Sandusky, “this is the machine we’ve all been talking about.” He patted the polygraph affectionately. It was about the size of a large phonograph or old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and had wires that led to various attachments. At one end of the machine was a roll of graph paper, with needles balanced on it.

Sandusky flicked a switch on the side of the machine. The paper began to move slowly. The needles didn’t.

“You see what it’s doing?” he asked.

“It’s dr-dr-drawing straight lines,” said Darren.

“Right. How come a straight line?”

“It’s not turned on?” Darren guessed.

“No, it’s turned on,” said Sandusky. “See, the paper’s moving. But how come the lines aren’t moving up and down?”

“It’s not attached to anything?”

“Exactly. This machine does one thing, and only one thing.” Here Sandusky paused for effect. “It moves paper. You do the rest.”

Sandusky began making adjustments to the machine, continuing to speak as he did so. “Darren,” he said, “put your right hand out in front of you and wiggle your fingers.”

Darren obeyed.

“Very good. Now your left hand.”

Darren obeyed again.

“Good. You’ve just used part of your nervous system. We have two types of nerves,” Sandusky explained, “voluntary nerves and involuntary nerves. By moving your fingers, you just controlled certain nerves in your hands. Because you can control them, we call them voluntary. Now,” he continued, attaching a blood pressure cuff to Darren’s forearm and inflating it, “notice that our machine works after all.”

Indeed, one of the needles had come to life and was dancing up and down on the paper.

“Okay, Darren, I want you to make your heart stop pumping for thirty seconds.”

Darren smiled uncertainly.

“What’s so funny?” Sandusky asked.

“I c-c-can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t stop your heart.”

“Precisely,” Sandusky agreed. “That’s because your heart is run by involuntary nerves. You can’t control them. And that’s all that this test is about, involuntary nerves. Things that happen inside your body that you can’t control.”

Jaywalker couldn’t help but smile. It was mesmerizing. This guy could have been a terrific car salesman, he decided, or an awesome preacher. Or both. He could sell used Chevys all week and salvation come Sunday.

Even as he’d been talking, Sandusky had attached a second strap to Darren’s other wrist, and two to his torso—one around his chest, the other around his midsection. “By the way,” he assured Darren, “none of this is going to hurt at all.” He taped a final strap to the palm of one of Darren’s hands. Each attachment—and there were now five of them—was connected by a wire to one of the needles, which moved visibly up and down on the graph paper and recorded Darren’s blood pressure, pulse, upper and lower respiration, and galvanic skin response…the electrical conductivity of the skin, which increases with sweating.

“Now, Darren,” said Sandusky, “I’ve got three cards here.” He held them up so that not only Darren, but also Jaywalker, could see that the first was blue, the second pink and the third blue except for a pink border along the top. “I’m going to ask you some questions about them. I want you to answer ‘Yes’ to each of my questions. No matter what, just answer ‘Yes.’ Understand?”

“Yes,” said Darren.

Sandusky held up the blue card. “Is this card blue?” he asked.

“Yes,” Darren answered.

Sandusky held up the pink card. “Is this card blue?”

“Yes,” Darren answered.

Sandusky held up the blue card with the pink border. “Is this card blue?”

“Yes.”

After each response, Sandusky had marked the graph paper for later reference. Now he stopped the machine and deflated the blood pressure cuff. While Darren stretched and rubbed his forearm, Sandusky studied the paper.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “We’re not going to have any trouble, not a bit. I’d say you’re a very sensitive young man, Darren. Has anyone ever told you that? That you’re sensitive?”

“Yes,” said Darren. “I’ve heard people say that.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Sandusky, still studying the paper. “These responses are very sharp. On the first question, about the blue card, you showed a definite truth. On the second question, the pink card, you showed a definite lie, no question about it. What do you think you showed on the third question?” He held up the blue card with the pink border.

“I d-d-d-don’t know,” said Darren. “Half and half?”

“Nope, not according to this. On the third question, you showed a lie, just as strong as the second. See, this card really isn’t blue, is it?” He held it up again. “Now you may think that’s not fair, that you were being mostly truthful when you said it was blue. But I’m afraid you can’t get away with mostly here. It’s sort of like the kind of white lie we sometimes tell people, like saying ‘I love you,’ or ‘I feel fine,’ or ‘You look terrific,’ when it’s not completely true. You see, it may be okay to tell white lies to people, to spare their feelings, say. But not to the machine. The machine has no feelings. To the machine, a white lie is like any other lie.

“Let me give you an example, Darren, one actually not too different from your case. I tested a guy last year on a rape. Girl claimed the guy had followed her home, forced his way into her apartment and raped her. He denied it, claimed he’d never seen the girl in his life. His lawyer asked him if he’d be willing to take a polygraph test. He said okay, and he came to see me. I tested him, and he flunked. It was only months later that I found out the real story. Seems he’d picked the girl up in a bar, and she’d invited him back to her apartment. They started to get real friendly, know what I mean?”

Darren nodded.

“Right at the last minute, she gets cold feet. But he figures she’s only being cute, playing hard to get. And he’s not about to stop by that time, anyway. So he goes through with it. Was it really a rape? Who knows? She must have thought so, ’cause right after he leaves, she calls the police. When they bring him in for questioning, he denies knowing the girl or having been in her apartment, everything. And he had the police believing him, figuring they had the wrong guy. But not the machine. The machine—” and here Sandusky patted it affectionately “—showed only that he was lying. It didn’t understand mostly.

“The result was,” Sandusky continued, “the guy got jammed up real bad. Much worse than if he’d come clean in the first place. I’m only sorry he didn’t tell me up front.” He began reinflating the blood pressure cuff. “Or his lawyer. I like to think that the lawyer and I are part of the same team. After all, we’re both working for the guy that’s paying us, right?”

“Right,” Darren agreed.

Sandusky started up the machine again. “Tell me,” he said, “before you were arrested on this case, had you ever seen Joanne Kenarden?”

“No,” said Darren, without hesitation.

Sandusky marked the paper.

“Is there any chance your fingerprints might have been found on her clothing or things?”

“No.”

Sandusky made another mark and shut off the machine. He stood up, came around to Darren, and removed the blood pressure cuff and other straps. Darren stretched.

“Seeing as this is your test,” Sandusky said, “are there any questions you’d like me to include?”

Darren seemed to think for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. Ask me if I’ve even been up in that area the past couple of years.”

“The Castle Hill Project area?”

“Yes.”

“Fair enough. Now, are there any questions you’d like me to stay away from, for any reason?”

Darren thought again before saying no.

“Okay,” said Sandusky. “Why don’t you relax. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” With that, he left the room, closing the door behind him. Jaywalker got up and moved back away from the mirror in anticipation of Sandusky’s coming into the observation room, fearful that the light from the opening door might reveal him to Darren.

When Sandusky did enter, the first thing he did was study Darren through the glass. Darren continued to stretch, humming softly to himself. Sandusky motioned Jaywalker to follow him out of the room. When they reached the conference room, he lit a cigarette.

“He’s very nervous,” he said.

“I would be, too.” As soon as Jaywalker had said the words, he realized he was being overly defensive of his client. But that was his job, wasn’t it? Besides, there was something about Sandusky’s observation he didn’t like.

Sandusky ignored the comment. He sat down at his desk and searched through a drawer until he found the form he was looking for. Then he used it to write out the questions he was going to ask Darren. He inserted them in the blanks for questions 2, 3, 6, 7 and 9. Questions 1, 4, 5 and 8 he left open. He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up.

Jaywalker resumed his post in the observation room. Darren was singing softly when Sandusky reappeared in the testing room. Jaywalker didn’t recognize the tune.

“All right,” said Sandusky. “These are going to be the questions I’ll be asking you. Who raped Joanne Kenarden? Do you know who did it? Did you rape her? Did you see her blow you? Did you threaten her with a knife?”

Sitting in the observation room, Jaywalker was a bit surprised that Sandusky would telegraph the test questions to Darren that way. Wouldn’t springing them on him be a more effective tactic? But the more he thought about it, the more he came around to understanding Sandusky’s strategy. By letting Darren know exactly what questions were coming, he was giving him a chance to build up additional anxiety over the fact that he was going to be lying in his responses.

“How ab-b-b-bout the question I suggested?” Darren asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t use it,” said Sandusky, without further explanation.

Darren looked disappointed by the answer, and perhaps by Sandusky’s dismissive tone, as well. Jaywalker wondered if Sandusky was deliberately trying to agitate Darren by first requesting his input and then rejecting it. But hadn’t he just commented on how nervous Darren already was?

“Now,” Sandusky was saying, “before we begin the actual test, let’s talk about guilt for a moment.”

“G-g-guilt?”

“Yes. Darren, when you were growing up, which of your parents would you say was stricter, was more concerned with teaching you right from wrong?”

“They were both pretty strict.”

Jaywalker could believe that.

“Which one would more likely have told you it was wrong to hurt people?”

Darren seemed to think a moment before saying, “My dad, I guess.”

“How about sex education? Which one took more of a role in teaching you about sex?”

Darren thought again. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I—I—I learned that pretty much on my own.” Then, when Sandusky didn’t react, he added, “I guess it would have b-been my dad again.”

“Okay,” said Sandusky. “Psychologists and psychiatrists tell us that hurting values and sexual values are taught to us by our parents when we’re very young, and that deviance from these values is what produces guilt feelings.”

This struck Jaywalker as mumbo jumbo, double-talk. He had the feeling that Sandusky was deliberately trying to lose Darren here, though he didn’t know why.

“The problem is,” Sandusky explained, “guilt feelings can interfere with the test.” To Jaywalker, that sounded counterintuitive. Wasn’t the test premised upon the existence of feelings of guilt and designed to ferret them out?

“So,” Sandusky continued, “when we get started, I’m going to include a couple of questions to eliminate them. One will be about hurting, the other about sex. And by the way, these two questions will be between you and me. I won’t report them to anyone, not even your lawyer. Okay?”

Darren nodded.

“Do you know what masturbation is, Darren?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?” Evidently Sandusky wanted to be certain.

“It’s when you p-p-p-play with yourself.”

“Right,” said Sandusky. “Have you ever masturbated, Darren?”

“Yes,” Darren admitted.

Jaywalker found himself feeling more like a voyeur than ever. But it was riveting stuff, and he was beginning to see where Sandusky was going with it.

“When was the last time?”

“I c-c-can’t recall.”

“How old are you now?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well,” said Sandusky, “that makes you pretty old. I guess it would have had to have been when you were ten or eleven, huh?”

“I g-g-guess so,” Darren agreed.

Jaywalker’s hunch had been right. Sandusky was building a lie into the test, deliberately coaching Darren to be deceitful when the time came. That way, he would have a control response to a lie, against which he could measure the real responses.

“Well,” said Sandusky, “you can’t remember masturbating in the last ten years, can you?”

“No,” said Darren, swallowing the bait.

“Good. Now, have you ever hurt anybody?”

“Yes,” said Darren. “I guess so.”

“Who?”

“I’ve hurt Charlene, my wife, by saying things.”

“Can you remember anyone else you’ve hurt?”

Darren hesitated for a moment. “No,” he said.

“Okay,” said Sandusky. Once again he attached the straps to Darren’s body and inflated the blood pressure cuff. “Now,” he said, “put your hands on the arms of the chair. Feet flat on the floor. I want you to face forward and close your eyes. As I ask you questions, you just answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” He turned on the machine.

Jaywalker had to remind himself to breathe.

“Do you live in the United States?” asked Sandusky.

“Yes,” answered Darren.

“Did you rape Joanne Kenarden?”

“No.”

“Do you know who did rape Joanne Kenarden?”

“No.”

“Is your name Darren Kingston?”

“Yes.”

“Since you were twelve years old, can you remember masturbating even one time?”

Darren opened his eyes, turned to Sandusky and raised his hand, as though signaling for a time-out. “I remembered,” he said. “I think I did it once since then.”

Sandusky stopped the machine, walked over and undid the straps. “How old were you at that time?” he asked. “Thirteen?”

“I m-m-must have been.”

“Okay,” said Sandusky. “Let’s take a break.”

Sandusky and Jaywalker met in the conference room again. Sandusky smoked nervously. Jaywalker feared the worst.

“Doesn’t look good?” he asked.

“He’s just so damn tight. I’m going to have to try to get him to believe in the test a little more.”

Jaywalker resumed his observation post as Sandusky returned to the test room. “All right,” he told Darren, “we’ve been going quite a while. I want to check the machine.” He hooked it up to Darren again. Then he produced seven oversized playing cards. Jaywalker could see that each one had a different number printed on its face. Sandusky shuffled them and fanned them out in front of Darren, facedown. “Take one,” he said, “without letting me see the other side of it.”

Darren did as he was told. When he lifted the card to look at it, Jaywalker could see the number thirteen on it. He wondered if he was the only one who’d associated the choice with bad luck.

“Look at it,” said Sandusky, “remember it and put it back. Don’t tell me what it is.”

Darren complied.

“Now,” said Sandusky, turning on the machine, “I want you to listen carefully to my questions, but answer ‘No’ to each one. No ‘Yeses,’ just ‘Noes.’ Understand?”

“Yes,” said Darren.

“Did you pick the number three?”

“No.”

“Did you pick the number five?”

“No.”

“Did you pick the number seven?”

“No.”

“Did you pick the number eight?”

“No.”

“Did you pick the number ten?”

“No.”

“Did you pick the number thirteen?”

“No.”

“Did you pick the number fifteen?”

“No.”

Sandusky had marked the graph paper following each response. Now he shut off the machine and studied the paper. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “You picked thirteen.”

Jaywalker exhaled. Still, he had the feeling that Sandusky had said it a bit tentatively and was more pleased than he should have been when Darren confirmed that he was right.

“Great,” said Sandusky, once again removing the straps. “Let’s take one more break. The machine’s working perfectly. When I come back in, we’ll do the actual test.”

In the conference room, Sandusky underscored his uncertainty by asking Jaywalker if Darren had in fact picked number thirteen. But neither of them mentioned the problem that was by this time evident to both of them.

ACTUAL TEST QUESTIONS AND

SUBJECT’S RESPONSES

POLYGRAPH EXAMINATION OF

Darren Kingston,

ADMINISTERED BYGene SanduskyON

October 25, 1979.

The test was over. Sandusky turned off the machine and removed the straps from Darren. He made one final mark on the graph paper before tearing it from the roll and heading to the conference room. Jaywalker met him there.

“All right,” said Sandusky, lighting another cigarette. “I was afraid of this. We’ve got a problem here.”

Jaywalker waited for the worst, the news that Darren had flunked cold. In his mind, he was already rehearsing his Okay-it’s-time-to-plead-guilty speech. The problem was, he was still thinking black and white, winner take all. And he was wrong.

“I want Dick to take a look at these charts,” said Sandusky, referring to his mentor and 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—”

“Don’t worry,” said Sandusky. “There’s no additional charge.”

“Okay,” 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.

“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 to rise, his pulse no reason to quicken, his breathing no reason to labor, his palms no reason to sweat….

Jaywalker took his half-eaten tuna-fish sandwich and threw it into the wastepaper basket. He picked up the phone and dialed Darren’s number, and told him to come down to the office. Not asked him. Told him.

Jaywalker was on the phone when Darren arrived. He motioned for him to take a seat. He continued the phone conversation, which wasn’t an important one, for another five minutes, making a point of forcing Darren to wait. Only when Jaywalker sensed the young man’s uneasiness did he finally hang up.

“Sorry,” he said offhandedly.

“That’s okay,” said Darren. “Wh-wh-what’s up?”

“Bad news, that’s what.”

“B-b-bad news? Wh-what kind of bad news, Jay?” He literally squirmed in his chair.

Jaywalker reached for a file on his desk. It happened to be the one from the taxi driver case, but Darren couldn’t see that. Jaywalker opened the file and pretended to study the first page or two.

“A messenger brought these over from Dick Arledge’s office,” he said. “I’m afraid you didn’t do so well after all.” He raised his eyes to study Darren’s. “These guys are friends of mine,” he said. “They did everything they possibly could to make it come out like you were telling the truth. But even with three separate tests, they couldn’t do it. Every time they ran you through it, you lied on questions two, five, seven and eight. The ones about the rapes.” Jaywalker held up the sheets. “It’s all here,” he said, shaking his head.

The reaction swept through Darren like a wave. There was no hesitation, no time to plan it. His confused frown disappeared, giving way first to a look of open astonishment and finally to one of frank disbelief.

“Jay,” he said, “that can’t be. I—I—I didn’t rape those women. There’s a mistake. The test has got to be wrong.” Tears welled up in his eyes and overflowed, running freely down both cheeks. He made no attempt to either wipe them away or avert his eyes.

“There’s no mistake,” Jaywalker forced himself to say. “I think we’d better start at the beginning, Darren. Don’t you?”

“Jay,” he pleaded, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I—”

Jaywalker was the first to break eye contact. His gaze dropped to Darren’s hands. Where he might have expected to see fists clenched to maintain control of a performance, he saw instead palms open and extended.

“—didn’t do it,” Darren finished softly, almost to himself.

“I know,” said Jaywalker. “I know.”

It had taken a truly cruel stunt on his part. He’d taken a young man—a young man whom he liked immensely, and whose family was not only putting their trust in him, but also backing up that trust with hard-earned money—and compelled him to make an hour’s trip each way, then lied to his face and explicitly accused him of being guilty and, worse yet, of refusing to acknowledge his guilt. But as bad as Jaywalker felt about the ordeal he’d put Darren through, he could live with it, because now he knew.

He knew.