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“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.
6
LAST CHANCE
At the same time as he’d said “I know” to Darren, Jaywalker had taken the file he’d been looking at and slid it across the desk. Darren had picked it up, opened it and begun to read. It took him several moments of total confusion before he began to get it. Then he’d looked up tentatively, the way a boy who thinks just maybe he’s got the answer might look up at his teacher. But only when he’d seen Jaywalker’s smile had he taken permission to smile in return.
“I’m a shit,” Jaywalker confessed, rising and coming around the desk. “And you owe me a punch in the mouth. The tests didn’t show anything one way or the other. I did that because I needed to be sure.” He withdrew a paper towel from his back pocket, his version of a handkerchief, and offered it to Darren.
Darren dried his tears unselfconsciously. “That’s okay,” he said. “I just didn’t see how I could’ve flunked it.”
“You couldn’t have. I’m just sorry I lied to you.”
“That’s all right, Jay. I won’t even p-p-punch you in the mouth.”
“You’d better not,” said Jaywalker. “It looks like we may be needing it.”
With the private polygraph lost as a weapon in the defense’s arsenal, and the realization that the district attorney’s test was likely to prove every bit as worthless, Jaywalker turned his efforts to other aspects of the case. He phoned his investigator, John McCarthy, who reported that he’d located all the victims and was ready to move in and interview them in rapid succession. Jaywalker gave him the go-ahead.
Earlier, Jaywalker had instructed Darren and the other members of the Kingston family to write down everything they could recall about Darren’s whereabouts during August, early September, and the week following Darren being bailed out. Now he collected the notes and studied them, searching desperately for some clue, some tiny lead, to jump from the pages in front of him.
Nothing did.
He began spending time in the Castle Hill area. He would change into old clothes before leaving his office at the end of the workday, and instead of heading home to New Jersey, he would aim his Volkswagen for the Bronx. Once up in the projects, he would walk through the lobbies or sit on a park bench or lean idly against a trash can, trying his best to blend in to the landscape. It wasn’t easy, because whites in the area were greatly outnumbered by blacks and Hispanics. Still, Jaywalker’s face was by no means the only white one in sight. And, he reminded himself, Joanne Kenarden and Eleanor Cerami were white, and so were Tania Maldonado and Elvira Caldwell and Maria Sanchez. At least they looked white. So Jaywalker pretended he was one of them. He hung around, waiting for Darren’s double to show up. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself spotting him, following him, jumping him, subduing him and dragging him off to the nearest precinct.
No double showed up.
He would get home past dark, in time to eat cold leftovers over the kitchen sink. If he was lucky, he’d get to kiss his daughter good-night before she was asleep. His wife put up with his behavior, but only because by that time she knew him well enough to know he couldn’t help himself.
In mid-November, the mail brought an envelope from the judge in Part 12, containing his decision on Jaywalker’s pretrial motions. As expected, he’d granted the defense a hearing on the propriety of the identification procedures the police had used. He’d left the question of a severance—whether there would be one trial or four—up to the discretion of the trial judge.
They went back to court at the end of the month. Again the appearance was a brief one. Pope told Justice Davidoff that there was a polygraph examination scheduled at his office the first week of December, and the case was adjourned.
Out in the corridor, Jaywalker huddled with the Kingston family. Despite the fact that he’d assured them that there would be a postponement, they’d all showed up. Now, while they were talking, Jacob Pope walked over and motioned Jaywalker aside. Pope wore his trademark dark suit, white shirt and red tie. As always, he was all business. He never once smiled, cracked a joke or allowed himself to chuckle at one of Jaywalker’s feeble attempts at humor.
“So,” he said, “we’re on for the sixth, right?”
“Right,” said Jaywalker. “I just hope we get an answer, one way or another.”
“We should,” said Pope. “Lou Paulson is good. Any reason you anticipate a problem?”
“No,” Jaywalker lied, something that was becoming a bit of a habit lately. “Only that he’s a pretty nervous kid. I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but he’s got a noticeable stutter, and—”
“I’m aware of it.”
He said it softly, calmly, but with deadly force. Jaywalker felt the wind knocked out of him. Pope turned and walked away, leaving Jaywalker standing there, dazed. How many of the victims had described the stutter? All of them? What was the difference, really? One would be more than enough to destroy Darren. A physical description was one thing. Height, weight, hair color and complexion were seldom enough to convince a jury. And John McCarthy had already reported finding some discrepancies there.
But a stutter!
Jaywalker headed back over to the Kingstons. They looked at him expectantly, too polite to ask what Pope and he had talked about, but obviously wanting to know. Cards on the table, Jaywalker decided. It was how he’d always operated, and how he always would. You told your people everything, even the worst news. Especially the worst news. That was the only way they would ever trust you when the time came to tell them something good. If ever it did. So he told them about the stutter.
“The detective, R-R-R-Rendell,” said Darren. “He knows I stutter, from arresting me. He c-c-could have told Pope.”
