Depraved Indifference - Joseph Teller

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      Jimmy Chipmunk was what they called a stand-up guy. That designation described somebody you could trust to watch your back and not rat you out. And Jaywalker had done both of those things for Jimmy one night in East New York, which at the time—along with Bed-Stuy, Brownsville and Red Hook—had made parts of Brooklyn more dangerous than Manhattan’s Harlem. These days, Red Hook was an up-and-coming yuppie neighborhood. Go figure. Jimmy had half stupidly and half drunkenly gotten himself into a shoot-out. Jaywalker had gotten him out of it, and together they’d made Jimmy come out like a hero on paper. Which meant Jimmy owed Jaywalker big-time, and always would.

      It was time to call in the acorns.

      Chippamunga had left the DEA not too long after Jaywalker did. But while Jaywalker was learning how to try a case at Legal Aid and then building a law practice of his own, Jimmy had moved over to the NYPD and risen through the ranks to his present assignment as a high-ranking Commander in the office of the Chief of Detectives.

      They met in a bar in midtown, shortly after Jimmy’s four-to-midnight shift was over. Over Jack Daniel’s and Cokes—the former Jimmy’s, the latter Jaywalker’s—they reminisced about old times. Old times always included the East New York adventure, now well past the five-year statute of limitations. It wasn’t until the fourth round of drinks, and the third round of men’s-room visits, that Jaywalker handed Jimmy the envelope.

      To the untrained eye, it might have looked as if Jimmy was a cop on the take, accepting a payoff of some sort from a civilian. But the untrained eye would have been fooled. There was no money inside the envelope. What was in it were half a dozen subpoenas duces tecum, demands for copies of all the police reports that had been generated in the case against Carter Drake III. They were attorney’s subpoenas, rather than court-ordered ones, which put them pretty much into the same category as Jaywalker’s Samoan pennies: they weren’t quite as good as the real thing, but they tended to get the job done. And that was especially true when placed in the hands of Jimmy Chipmunk. On the couple of times Jaywalker had asked the same favor of Cippamunga, Jimmy had returned a couple of days later, both times with copies of just about every document Jaywalker had requested. Of course, both of those cases had been in Manhattan. And on both occasions, Jimmy had explained afterward, it turned out he didn’t even have to actually serve the subpoena. “But,” he’d added, “it’s a good idea just the same. Keeps the both of us covered. Know what I mean?”

      Jaywalker had known exactly what he’d meant.

      Chippamunga polished off Jack Daniel’s Number 4 before opening the envelope. “Rockland County, huh? A little bit outta my bailiwick.”

      Only a veteran law-enforcement type would use a term like bailiwick, the same way he’d refer to a suspect’s girlfriend as his paramour, or say “I did proceed to exit my vehicle at that particular point in time,” instead of “Then I got out of my car.”

      Jaywalker, despite the severe handicap of being a lawyer, liked to keep things as brief as possible. Short words, simple sentences. Right now, he needed neither. He simply shrugged his shoulders. It was his vote of confidence, his silent but overt expression of complete faith that Jimmy would somehow work his magic and overcome all obstacles, bailiwick related or not. After all, they weren’t talking the niceties of jurisdiction here, or venue; they were talking clout.

      “I suppose…” Jimmy’s voice trailed off. “Gimme a coupla days, willya?”

      “You got it,” said Jaywalker, throwing back the last of his fourth large Cokes. God, they were huge. The bartender, a former NYPD lieutenant who’d worked under Cippamunga at one time, was either an extremely generous soul, or else he’d somehow mixed up the flower vases with the soda glasses. Jaywalker took a wet paper napkin off the bar and lifted it to his mouth, not so much to wipe anything, but to stifle what otherwise might have proved to be a belch of room-clearing proportions. All the while he kept his thighs tightly crossed, desperately trying to forestall a fourth trip to the men’s room for as long as possible, or at least another thirty seconds.

      

      That had been Friday night, or, technically, early Saturday morning. Until he had Carter Drake’s written account of his actions, or whatever Jimmy Chipmunk could turn up in the way of police reports, there wasn’t much more for Jaywalker to do on the case. So he slept late Saturday morning—the real Saturday morning—late being somewhere in the neighborhood of seven o’clock. Then he downed his usual breakfast, which consisted of a couple of pretzels and a glass of iced tea. The pretzels were the old-fashioned sourdough kind, big enough to choke a horse and hard enough to break a tooth on. The iced tea was a homemade concoction, with enough sugar to kill a diabetic, and a generous squeeze of fresh lemon juice that, to Jaywalker’s way of thinking, balanced the sugar by acting as a sort of natural insulin. And right there he had all of what he considered the four essential nutrition groups—salt, sugar, caffeine and crunchiness.

      With nothing else to do, Jaywalker spent the afternoon hitting the books. It wasn’t just a matter of needing a refresher course to shake off the accumulation of more than two years of rust. The fact was, in his twenty-plus years of defending criminals, Jaywalker had never handled, much less tried, a case even remotely similar to Carter Drake’s. Under New York law, 99.9 percent of murder cases fall into two categories. There are intentional murders, and there are felony murders, and Jaywalker had had his share of both. An intentional murder, simply put, is one where the defendant intended to kill someone. Gone are such archaic notions as premeditation or malice aforethought. Nowadays in New York, you kill someone while intending to kill someone, it’s murder.

      Jaywalker had tried dozens of intentional murders. He’d tried one where the defendant, intending to kill a suspected informer, had aimed poorly and mistakenly killed a man standing next to him. Murder nonetheless. He’d defended a serial murderer who’d killed six almost randomly selected victims over as many weeks, but when asked why, could offer no better rationale than “I found out it was something I could do.” Still, at the time he’d shot each of them, he’d intended to kill them.

      Felony murder was a bit different. There the legislature has decreed that under a certain specific combination of circumstances, there can be murder even in the absence of an intent to kill. How? If a defendant is engaged in the commission of any of several enumerated serious felonies—think robbery, kidnapping or arson, for good examples—and if he’s armed with a deadly weapon or knows that an accomplice is, he can be convicted of murder if someone dies in the process. Those crimes are deemed so dangerous, and so likely to lead to a death, that the lawmakers have substituted the defendant’s participation in them for his actual intent to kill anyone.

      Again, Jaywalker had tried his share of felony murders, though the number was far fewer. And there was an interesting reason for that. Caught after a robbery-gone-bad, perpetrators invariably rush to distance themselves from the resulting death. They’ll readily implicate an accomplice as the planner or the one who put the tape over the victim’s mouth, insisting that their own role was minor and in no way related to the fatality. “We were just after his money and his watch, was all. And I stayed in the car the whole time. I never meant for him to die or anything like that.” Felony murder.

      But the list of crimes that could trigger a felony murder didn’t include drunk driving or speeding or being in the wrong lane of a two-lane highway, or anything remotely like those offenses. How then, assuming that Carter Drake hadn’t run the van off the road in order to intentionally kill its occupants, could the prosecution possibly charge him with murder?

      Jaywalker knew the answer, but he still had to look it up in order to remind himself of the precise wording of the statute. And there it was, sandwiched in between intentional murder and felony murder, buried in paragraph 2 of section 125.25 of that perennial bestseller and summer-reading favorite, the New York State Penal Law.

      

      A person is guilty of murder when…under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engages in conduct which causes a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person.

      

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