True to his word, Judah Mermelstein went in to see Carter Drake on Monday, and on Tuesday an Express Mail envelope arrived at Jaywalker’s apartment. In it was a second envelope, bearing the hand-printed words From Carter Drake III. Privileged Communication For My Lawyers Only. The gummed seal of the inner envelope was still intact; Mermelstein hadn’t even opened it before forwarding it to Jaywalker.
One of the good things about being paranoid was how often you got to be pleasantly surprised by people.
STATEMENT OF CARTER DRAKE III
The day before the accident I had a meeting scheduled for 10:00 a.m. in Nyack, N.Y. The client I have there owns a bunch of real estate holdings, and he wanted to go over certain things with me. We worked straight through, and then we went to a nearby restaurant to get something to eat, since we had skipped lunch. From the restaurant, which was a sort of a sports bar with lots of TV sets tuned to ESPN and other sports channels, the client called his girlfriend and suggested she come over and meet us.
About an hour later, she showed up with 2 of her girlfriends. By the time they got there, I had already had some appetizers and a couple of drinks. I was drinking martinis, but when the girls joined us they started drinking tequila, so I switched over. I never did get around to eating a real dinner. Instead I had maybe 3 shots of tequila, for a total of 5 drinks, no more.
By the time I left it was just dark outside. I was able to drive okay, but somehow I missed the entrance for Route 9W heading south to NYC. When I reached Route 303, I decided to take it instead. I knew it would eventually take me to the Palisades Parkway and the G. Washington Bridge to the city.
As I was heading south, I noticed that a wasp was flying around inside my car. That worried me, because I’m highly allergic to insect bites. My eyes close up, my mouth gets all swollen, and I have trouble breathing. I’ve ended up in emergency rooms a couple of times. I know I should have stopped the car and gotten out, but just when I was getting ready to, the wasp landed on the inside of my windshield, toward the middle but closer to the driver’s side. I took a folded newspaper and I reached over and tried to kill it. In the process I must have swerved over the center line, because when I looked up, a white van was right in front of me, coming at me. I cut back sharply into my lane, and I thought the van passed safely by me on my left, so I continued on my way.
I made it all the way home without any other problems, getting there about 9:00. I was pretty exhausted, and I went right to bed.
The next morning, listening to the news, I heard about the accident and that the police were looking to question the driver of an Audi with a partial license plate the same as mine. So I contacted my lawyer Chet Ludlow and turned myself in. I wanted to explain everything that happened, but Chet insisted that I remain silent, so I did.
When I went before the judge, I thought he’d let me go. Instead he set 5 million dollars’ bail. And to make sure I couldn’t post it, they froze all my accounts and other assets. So here I am.
And that’s all I know. Honest to God.
Carter Drake III
Jaywalker read it from start to finish, three times. As statements went, it wasn’t bad. Sure, there could have been more detail, but that was to be expected, and would come over time. But substantively, it was fine. Drake’s version of the events laid out the makings of a pretty good defense. Under federal law imposed upon the states, with the cost of noncompliance being the denial of billions of dollars in highway funding, there is now a nationwide limit on the amount of alcohol a driver of a motor vehicle can legally have in his blood. That limit is .08 percent, or eight hundredths of a percentage point, calculated by weight. A good rule of thumb is that for every drink consumed by the average adult male, there’s a corresponding blood alcohol elevation of .02 percent. Women, for some reason other than a lower average body weight, experience a slightly higher elevation per drink, closer to .03 percent. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether that drink is a twelve-ounce bottle of beer, a four-ounce glass of wine or a single shot of something far stronger. Nor does it depend upon whether that shot is served straight-up, over ice, or diluted with soda, juice, water or anything else, so long as the anything else is nonalcoholic.
The math was easy enough. Five drinks would have put Drake at about. 10 percent over the limit, to be sure, but only by a bit. Hell, Jaywalker had seen readings in the .20s and .30s in his day. He’d even had a murder case where the deceased’s blood had read out at .45 percent on autopsy, or almost one part in fifty. Miraculously, the guy had still been standing, at least up to the point when his stepson had conked him on the head with a bottle. But that was an extreme case. Most people will pass out before they reach .30 percent, lapse into a coma around .35 percent, and die of acute alcohol poisoning around .40 percent.
Compared to those numbers, Carter Drake had been a model of sobriety.
And the business about the wasp was terrific. It explained how Drake had ended up in the wrong lane. Even the part about not realizing the van had gone off the road was good. Not only did it provide a defense for knowingly leaving the scene of an accident, it also negated the inference that Drake had fled because he knew how far over the limit he’d been. And it made him less of a villain for not stopping to help or turning himself in more quickly.
Of course, all that depended upon whether Drake’s version of the events—regarding his drinking, the accident, and his failure to stop—was to be believed. If he was lying about any or all of those things, it was a different story.
And that, Jaywalker knew, was one of the problems with the written statement. Writing his account at his leisure had given Drake time to ponder, to choose his words carefully, to sanitize things, emphasizing the good stuff and editing out things he thought might work against him. In short, to lie. Jaywalker would have much preferred hearing Drake describe the events orally and extemporaneously. He would have liked to be able to interrupt him, challenge him, even cross-examine him as to certain details. But that opportunity hadn’t been his.
It was one of Jaywalker’s pet peeves about the legal system. The rich got out on bail and were free to meet with their lawyers behind closed doors in plush offices. The poor had to settle for whispered conversations over ancient telephones in communal visiting rooms, or for opaque written statements, totally devoid of the usual indicia of credibility. Not that Carter Drake was poor, by any standard. It was just that he’d been rendered poor, or the functional equivalent of it, by the combination of a five-million-dollar bail and an order freezing his assets.
There had to be some poetic justice, Jaywalker decided, to that particular set of circumstances. Or at least some economic justice. The rich-and-powerful financier suddenly finding himself reduced to the status of an indigent defendant, no better than a pauper in the eyes of the law. The bleeding-heart liberal in Jaywalker found he kind of liked the idea. But the defense lawyer in him hated it, just as he’d always hated it on behalf of his truly indigent clients.
For consolation, he knew that sooner or later he’d get a chance to sit down with Carter Drake in a secure setting, and have a face-to-face conversation with him, a conversation in which all of Drake’s little tells would become apparent to Jaywalker’s trained eye—the tiny tics, the involuntary traveling of the hand upward to the mouth, the sudden breaking off of eye contact, the unnecessary repetition of the question to buy time before composing an answer, the pregnant pauses at inappropriate moments, the almost comical pulling back at the first mention of the word polygraph.
But all that would have to wait. For now, Jaywalker would have to settle for trying to locate a particular unnamed sports bar somewhere in the vicinity of Nyack, and seeing if Bartenders A and B, and Customers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 would verify Carter Drake’s account or put the lie to him.
Tomorrow.
Chapter Seven
The End Zone
The sports bar, it turned out, was a place called the End Zone, located on the outskirts