Bronx Justice. Joseph Teller

      “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?”