Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  They added up to fifty-eight dollars, a pretty modest retainer even by Jaywalker’s standards. Not even his rent was that low.

  Johnny Cantalupo finally got his probation about 12:30 p.m., but Jaywalker still didn’t leave the building. Instead he took the elevator down to the seventh floor and the district attorney’s office, for a meeting with Katherine Darcy, the assistant who’d stepped up to the bench earlier that morning. It turned out it was her case, meaning she would stay with it, even try it, if it came to that.

  Now, sitting across her desk, he decided she was older than he’d thought—maybe forty, he guessed—but every bit as pretty, if only she’d lighten up a bit. She could start, he almost suggested, by taking off the glasses; they made her look like a librarian, or a detention hall monitor. But he fought off the impulse to share his insights with her, pretty sure that voicing them could only get him into trouble and hurt his client at the same time.

  “So,” he asked her, “what do we have here?”

  “What we have here is a couple of young macho studs and their girlfriends,” she said. She said it easily, without having to look at the file. It was clear that she knew her case. “One of them says, ‘You lookin’ at me?’ and the other says, ‘Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you.’ To tell you the truth, I don’t know who started it. But it doesn’t matter. A challenge is thrown down and accepted. They walk a few blocks, square off and duke it out.”

  Duke it out? Maybe she was older than she looked.

  “It’s a fair fight,” she continued, “with fists. By all accounts, your guy wins it. Then, not satisfied, he pulls out a gun and shoots the victim, a twenty-year-old kid named Victor Quinones.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Witnesses?” Jaywalker asked her.

  “Witnesses. Three of them, maybe four. The first wound isn’t bad, a freaky in-and-out shot that grazes Victor’s abdomen. He runs. Your guy catches up to him and, as Victor’s lying on the pavement begging for mercy, grabs him by the hair and shoots him between the eyes at point-blank range. The next day, he takes off for Puerto Rico. Stays there six, seven months. Comes back, turns himself in. Must have gotten rid of the gun by then, and figured the witnesses would be long gone. Only they’re not. They’re all around and available. So, to answer your question as plainly and as simply as I possibly can, what we have here is an execution.”

  3

  DUMB-ASSED QUESTIONS

  “So I suppose, then,” Jaywalker said to Katherine Darcy, “that a plea to disorderly conduct is pretty much out of the question.”

  “I’m glad you find the case so amusing,” she said. But on the middle syllable of amusing, her voice broke just the tiniest bit. Jaywalker caught it, and raised both eyebrows—he’d tried to master raising just one at a time, but had given up some time ago—to let her know he hadn’t missed it. But she refused to acknowledge his look, choosing instead to pretend that nothing had happened. And maybe nothing had. Maybe the poor woman had a speech defect, for all Jaywalker knew, or polyps in her throat, or a cold. He let it go.

  “I try to find something amusing in all of my cases,” he told her. “If I didn’t, I’d have blown my brains out a long time ago.”

  She said nothing.

  “So tell me,” Jaywalker asked her. “What would you need on a Man One?” Unlike murder, on a plea to first-degree manslaughter a judge would have a broad sentencing range, from as much as twenty-five years all the way down to as little as five.

  But Katherine Darcy wasn’t biting. “Let me make myself clear,” she said. “There’s not going to be an offer in this case, not to Man One or anything else. I’ve run it by my bureau chief and presented it at a weekly meeting. Nobody gets too excited about the first shot. Heat of the moment, no serious injury, not such a big deal. But as soon as they hear about the last shot, the coup de grace, everyone agrees that’s a deal-breaker. Or, like I said a little while ago, an execution. So it’s a murder case, and it’s going to stay a murder case. If some judge wants to give your guy the minimum on a plea to the charge, so be it. I have no control over that.”

  Not that she needed any control over that. The minimum sentence on murder was fifteen to life. “Sounds like you want to try the case,” said Jaywalker.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “If I don’t try this one, I’ll try another one. It honestly makes no difference to me.”

  Jaywalker stood up. It seemed as good a time as any to leave, before he started getting really pissed off at her. In his book, it was okay for a prosecutor to be tough, as long as he or she was reasonable about it and willing to be flexible when the situation called for it. It was quite another thing to treat all cases as fungible commodities, and to act as though defendants were readily interchangeable. They weren’t interchangeable, at least not to Jaywalker’s way of thinking. Each one was a human being, however imperfect and flawed. Each one was different, and the facts and circumstances of each case were different. It might not always seem that way from a distance, but if you got close enough, you could see it was true.

  “How many murders have you tried?” he asked her, trying to make the question sound innocent and born out of nothing but idle curiosity. Small talk.

  She hesitated for a moment, and he thought she might be counting in her head. But it turned out she wasn’t. “This will actually be my first,” she said. “But I’ve been in the appeals bureau for eight and a half years, and I bet I’ve briefed and argued at least fifteen or twenty.”

  “It’s not quite the same,” he suggested.

  “I’m sure it’s not,” she said with what he took for a condescending smile. “But I’ll manage. And in the process, it’ll be a great honor to learn from the very best. I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Jaywalker, and—”

  “Jay.”

  “—and I’m very much looking forward to the experience. I really am.”

  Riding down the elevator, Jaywalker told himself to breathe deeply, calm down and not take Ms. Darcy’s attitude personally. Working in the appeals bureau was something like practicing in a law library. You dealt with statutes crafted in legalese, abstract principles of law and cold rules of evidence. You spent your time reading transcripts of trials hundreds of pages long, sometimes thousands. They might contain each word spoken from the witness stand and every comment made on the record. But what they didn’t have, what they left out, was just as important: the stammering and sweating of the witnesses, their inability to make and maintain eye contact, the repetition of phrases or mispronunciations that, in real time and place, spoke volumes, volumes that never showed up on the printed page. The transcripts said nothing about the young man or broken woman sitting shaking in the defendant’s chair, nothing about the mother sobbing softly back in the third row. To the appellate lawyer, sentences were numbers, governed by statutory minimums and maximums and measured against statistical means and averages. They told you nothing about the filthy cells those sentences would have to be served in, nothing about the rapes that would be almost as regular as the meals, nothing about the toddlers back home who’d be growing up without fathers or mothers, or sometimes both.

  But even as he told himself these things and tried to excuse Katherine Darcy’s ignorance as nothing more than the product of her cloistered career, Jaywalker wasn’t quite ready to forgive her. He’d been around long enough to know how things worked in the D.A.’s office. When an assistant was ready to handle her first homicide case, they’d hand her an absolute winner, an open-and-shut felony murder, or a case with ten eyewitnesses and a full videotaped confession. Something along those lines. Evidently they considered Jeremy Estrada’s case a perfect example. But instead of approaching it with a sense of humility over the fact that one young man was dead and another likely to grow old in prison, she was looking at it as a numbers game, in which she was determined to rack up as high a score as possible. To her, that meant no lesser plea. And if it went to trial, so much the better. Along the way, she might pi
ck up a thing or two and hone her courtroom skills. If not, the next one would go to trial, or the one after that.

  And Jaywalker’s reaction to that?

  As much as he hated rolling the dice with somebody’s freedom at stake, already there was a part of him that wanted to try the case, just so to he could beat her, watch her face drop as she listened to some jury foreperson read off the words Not guilty. See if that didn’t knock that smug little smile off her face, along with those library-issue glasses of hers. And not just because he wanted to see how pretty she might be without them, either.

  Though that was surely part of it.

  He had his first real sit-down meeting with Jeremy Estrada two days later, in an attorney visit room on the thirteenth floor. A lot of buildings don’t even have thirteenth floors; they’re generally considered bad luck and therefore undesirable. At 100 Centre Street, just about everyone had had bad luck and was considered an undesirable, so somebody must have decided that the number made no difference.

  Jeremy showed up looking tired and wearing an orange jumpsuit, courtesy of the Department of Corrections, and a pair of old sneakers. Jaywalker, who had no cases of his own on this day, was decked out in his casual Friday finest, faded jeans and a denim work shirt with a frayed collar. It also served as his casual rest-of-the-week finest. A lot of things were important to Jaywalker, but clothes weren’t one of them.

  “What time did they wake you up?” he asked Jeremy, once they’d taken seats across from one another, separated by a wire-mesh partition.

  Jeremy smiled. “About three o’clock,” he said.

  “Sorry.” He knew the drill. Up at three, to be herded into the dayroom at four to wait a few hours. Onto the bus at seven or seven-fifteen. At the courthouse by eight, eight-thirty. Up to the pens at nine. After that, it all depended on when your lawyer showed up. That could mean as early as nine-thirty if you were lucky enough to have a Jaywalker, or as late as four in the afternoon if you weren’t. If your case got called in the morning session, you made the one-o’clock bus and were back on Rikers by three. If you missed the one o’clock, you had to wait for the five o’clock, which never pulled out before six-thirty, and got you back to the Rock around ten or ten-thirty. Meaning you’d not only miss chow, but if you had to be back in court the next day, you’d get three hours of sleep if you were lucky. Jaywalker knew all this not only because he’d heard it from defendants, but because he’d been in the system himself more than once, whether serving an overnight contempt sentence after pissing off some judge, or something equally silly, like getting caught snooping around in the chief clerk’s office in order to get a peek at the judicial courtroom assignment sheet for the following month, so he could engage in a little judge-shopping.

  “So,” he said, “how about telling me what happened.”

  “Where would you like me to start?” Jeremy asked in a voice so soft Jaywalker had to lean forward to hear it.

  “I’d like you to start at the beginning. And take your time. I need details.”

  Jeremy took a deep breath and smiled. “It’s kind of a long story,” he said.

  “I’ve got all day,” Jaywalker told him.

  “I guess it started,” Jeremy said, “when I met this girl.”

  No shock there. Jaywalker had learned long ago that most murders were about money or drugs. But if they weren’t, they were about girls. “What was her name?” he asked.

  “Miranda. Her name was Miranda.”

  “And?”

  “We, we became friends.”

  “Friends?” Jaywalker asked. “Or lovers, too?”

  “No. We never got a chance.”

  “How did it go?” Jaywalker asked him. “The friendship.”

  “It went good, at first.”

  “And then?”

  Already Jaywalker could see that getting information out of Jeremy was going to be a slow and painful process. Over time, he’d come to liken it to dental extraction. Not only did Jeremy speak in something between a whisper and a murmur, he summarized. A summary can be helpful if you want to get from the beginning of a story to the end of it in a hurry. On the other hand, if you’re interested in finding out what really happened and why, a summary is the opposite of what you’re looking for. Again Jaywalker told Jeremy to take his time, that it was detail he was after. But if Jeremy understood the word, he was for some reason unable to follow the direction.

  “There was a problem,” he said.

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “There were these guys,” said Jeremy. “Seven or eight guys, actually, and one girl. One of the guys, the main one, kept going like Miranda belonged to him, even though she didn’t. And they gave me a hard time because of that. You know.”

  “No, I don’t. How did they give you a hard time?”

  “They followed me. They called me names. They told me they were going to get me. That kinda stuff. You know.”

  “And?”

  “And finally I had a face-off with one of them.”

  “A face-off?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it,” said Jaywalker. His therapist used to say that, back when Jaywalker had gone into treatment following his wife’s death, because he couldn’t sleep at night, couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, couldn’t even remember why he was supposed to. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” “How does it make you feel?” “What do you think about it?” The therapy hadn’t lasted too long. But bit by bit, Jaywalker had begun sleeping at night again, and getting out of bed in the morning, and life had somehow gone on. So who was to say? Maybe the therapy had helped. Maybe the same sort of dumb-assed questions might work with Jeremy.

  “We had a fight, him and me.”

  “A fight. With weapons?”

  “No,” said Jeremy. “With fists.”

  “Who won?”

  A shrug. “I did, I guess.”

  “Then what?”

  “He pulled a gun,” said Jeremy. “We fought over it. It went off. I got it away from him.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I shot it at him.”

  “Once?” Jaywalker asked him. “Or more than once?”

  “More than once.”

  “How many times?”

  Jeremy shrugged again. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “But you killed him?”

  Jeremy’s answer was so soft Jaywalker couldn’t hear it and had to say, “What?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Shot him between the eyes?”

  “If that’s what they say.”

  “That’s what they say,” said Jaywalker.

  “Then I guess it must be true.”

  “Why did you shoot him between the eyes?”

  Jeremy seemed to think about that for a minute. Or maybe he was honestly trying to remember. Squinting through the wire mesh of the partition that separated them, it was hard for Jaywalker to tell.

  “Self-defense?” But the way Jeremy said the words, they came out sounding more like a question than an answer or a recollection. No doubt he knew nothing about the nuances of justification, the body of law that allows one to use force—occasionally even deadly force—to protect one’s self or someone else. But despite his ignorance, it was pretty obvious that even Jeremy knew it wasn’t going to be much of a fit to the events he’d described.

  Jaywalker figured it was as good a time as any to start finding out. “Was the guy armed at the moment you fired that shot?” he asked. “The one that hit him between the eyes?”

  “No,” said Jeremy. “Not then he wasn’t.”

  “Was he coming at you?”

  “No.”

  “Threatening you in any way?”

  “No.”

  “What was he doing?”

  Jeremy closed his eyes. Maybe he was trying to picture things as they’d happened that day, seven months ago. Maybe he was even trying to relive the incident, seeing if he somehow couldn’t make it come out
differently this time. After a long moment, he opened his eyes and, looking directly at Jaywalker, said, “I don’t really remember.”

  So much for self-defense.

  They talked for a while more before Jeremy asked what time it was. And even though Jaywalker told him it was barely noon, Jeremy repeated the question five minutes later.

  “You want to make the one o’clock?” he asked.

  Jeremy nodded sheepishly.

  “Okay,” said Jaywalker. They hadn’t been talking all that long, but he sensed that still might amount to something of a record for Jeremy. And so far, all he’d been able to pull out of the kid was the most basic outline of the shooting and the events that had led up to it. But there’d be time, and Jeremy certainly wasn’t going anywhere. In New York State the right to bail is pretty broad, but it stops at the door of the accused murderer’s cell. And even before McGillicuddy had gotten a hold of the case, another judge had ordered Jeremy held in remand. Meaning there was no bail set at all. Not that Carmen Estrada and her fifty-eight dollars could have come up with it anyway.

  But before they parted, Jaywalker had one more order of business with Jeremy. “Do me a favor,” he told him, “and put these on.” Taking two pairs of woolen socks from his briefcase, he slid them beneath the wire-mesh partition.

  “Put them on here? Both pairs?”

  “Yup,” Jaywalker told him. “Otherwise the C.O.’s will take them away from you and have me arrested for smuggling contraband into the jail.” The C.O.’s were the corrections officers, and the truth was, they never would have had him arrested. Others, yes, but not Jaywalker. To them, he was one of the good guys. Not only did he talk like them and ask about their wives and kids, he had a law enforcement background. And most of all, he did right by his clients, even the ones who were jammed up the worst. Especially the ones who were jammed up the worst. In other words, he was one of them. So Jaywalker wasn’t worried about himself at all. He was looking out for the C.O.’s themselves, lest some captain spot Jeremy carrying in the socks and write up one of the C.O.’s for looking the other way and allowing them in.