Bronx Justice. Joseph Teller

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