Jaywalker is dreaming when the ringing of his phone jars him awake. Something about hiking with his wife in the Canadian Rockies. He understands right away it has to have been a dream, because his wife has been dead for nearly ten years now, and he hasn’t hiked the Rockies in twice that long.
Groping out in the darkness for the phone, his first fear is for his daughter. Is she out driving? Riding with some pimply-faced boyfriend who’s had his learner’s permit for two weeks now and thinks of driving as some sort of video game? Then he remembers. His daughter is in her early thirties. She has a husband with no pimples, a child of her own, a career, and a house in New Jersey.
“Hello?” Jaywalker says into the phone, then holds his breath and readies himself for the worst. The clock radio next to the phone glows 3:17.
“Pete?” says an unfamiliar male voice.
“I think,” says Jaywalker, “that you may have dialed the wrong number. What number were you trying to¾“
The line goes dead. No “Sorry,” no “Ooops.” Just a click, followed by silence and eventually a dial tone.
Jaywalker re-cradles the phone. He lies on his back in the dark, feeling his pulse pounding in his temples. Relief and annoyance duel for his attention, but only briefly. For already, Jaywalker is elsewhere. He’s lying in bed in the dark, to be sure, but somehow his hair is brown instead of gray, his face less lined, his body more muscular. And his wife lies beside him, her warm body pressed against his back.
“Who was it?” she asks him.
“A mother,” he says. “A mother whose son has just been arrested. A rape case. And it sounds like a bad one.”
“For them,” says Jaywalker’s wife. “But that means a good one for you, right?”
“Right,” agrees Jaywalker. He’s not yet thirty, this younger version of him. He’s been out of Legal Aid for a little over a year now, struggling to build a practice on his own. And struggling is definitely the operative word here. So he knows his wife is right: what’s bad for the young man and his family is at the same time good for the lawyer and his. One of the strange paradoxes of the criminal law that Jaywalker will never quite get comfortable with, that his earning a living is dependent upon the suffering of others.
What he doesn’t know, what he has absolutely no way of knowing at this point, as he lies in the dark, is that this new case will be different, that it will mark a crossroads in his career and in his life. Should he live to be a hundred, no case that will ever come his way will end up affecting him as this one will. Before he’s done with it, and it with him, it will change him in ways that will be as profound as they are unimaginable. It will transform him, molding him and pounding him and shaping him into the lawyer and the man he is today, almost thirty years later. So this is more than just the case he’ll forever wake up to when the phone rings in the middle of the night. This is the case that he’ll retry in his mind over and over again for the rest of his days, changing a phrase here, adding a word there, tweaking his summation for the hundredth¾no, the thousandth time. And long after he’s grown old and senile and has forgotten the names and faces and details of other cases, this is the one that Jaywalker will remember on his deathbed, as clearly and as vividly as if it began yesterday.
Thus begins Bronx Justice, the second installment of the highly-acclaimed Jaywalker Cases. Unlike the first book, the award-winning The Tenth Case, which was set in real time, Bronx Justice is a flashback, transporting the reader back into the 1970’s and reintroducing Harrison J. Walker, better known as Jaywalker, as a younger, less jaded criminal defense lawyer. Called upon to represent a young black man accused of a series of knifepoint rapes committed against young white women, Jaywalker finds himself torn between accepting the victims’ identifications of his client and the young man’s insistence that he’s not the perpetrator. And gradually, as he gets deeper and deeper into the investigation, Jaywalker becomes convinced that the case is every defender’s worst nightmare, an absolutely innocent client who appears all but certain to be convicted.
And the most astonishing thing about this book is that it isn’t based upon a real case or inspired by a real case—it is a real case! Lifted exactly as it happened from the files of attorney-author Joseph Teller, from official court transcripts and from unedited tape recordings, this story will haunt you long after you’ve read the final page, just as it will force you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the criminal justice system.
Little wonder then that readers have hailed Bronx Justice as “nothing short of astounding”…“totally mind-boggling”…“absolutely riveting”…and “Teller’s most compelling book yet.” Don’t miss it!
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