Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  “This is Miranda. Miranda Raven.”

  Jaywalker bolted upright and tried to say, “Hello,” “Thanks for calling” and “Where are you?” all at once. Then he caught himself and slowed down, but just a little.

  “I’m in Baltimore,” said Miranda. She sounded more grown-up now, at least twelve. How old had Jeremy said she was? Sixteen? Seventeen? Or hadn’t he said at all?

  “Carmen told me you’re coming to New York,” he said. “Is that right?” He realized he was overenunciating, the way one might speak to a foreigner or a hearing-impaired person or, yes, a small child.

  “That’s right,” she said. “We’ll be there a week from today.”

  “I need to see you,” said Jaywalker. “It’s very, very important for Jeremy.”

  “My mother’s afraid for me.”

  “Tell her not to be,” said Jaywalker, before realizing how stupid that sounded. “It’ll be okay.” As though that was any better.

  “How’s Jeremy?” Miranda asked.

  “He’s okay. He misses you.”

  “Can I see him?”

  He wanted to say yes, sure. But already a warning light was flashing. If Katherine Darcy really had a written statement from Miranda putting her account of the shooting at odds with Jeremy’s—and Jaywalker had no reason to doubt Darcy’s word on that—it meant Miranda was already a compromised witness. Allowing her to go out to Rikers Island to talk with Jeremy, and having her story suddenly line up with his, would smack of collusion. But he was afraid to tell Miranda that, afraid that suggesting she couldn’t see Jeremy might keep her away altogether.

  “Yes,” he heard himself telling her. “Yes, you can see him. But only after you and I meet. That way, it won’t look like you and Jeremy got together and decided what you should say.”

  Was it a lie? Maybe. He’d have to see how things shaped up. But all that could wait. As grateful as he was for Miranda’s having called him, his loyalty didn’t belong to her; it belonged to Jeremy. The defense lawyer’s path was full of conflicts of interest, laid out like land mines along the way. Over the years Jaywalker had developed a pretty simple way of looking at the problem. He worked for one person and one person only, and that person was his client. Not that client’s parents, not his boss, not his friends, and certainly not his witnesses. If Jaywalker had just lied to Miranda Raven, so be it. She was a big girl, and she’d get over it. Come on, she had to be at least sixteen. Didn’t she?

  The next day, Katherine Darcy phoned.

  “So how was Puerto Rico?” she asked.

  “Fine,” said Jaywalker, trying his hardest not to miss a beat. How on earth did she know he’d been there? Was he on some kind of combined terrorist-and-defense-lawyer watch list? But as much as he wanted to know, he’d be damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of asking.

  “Did you find her?” she asked.

  “Her.”

  “Miranda.”

  “No,” said Jaywalker. “No, actually I didn’t. But I’m working on—”

  “That’s because she’s in Maryland.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yup.”

  Jaywalker said nothing. He could be pretty good at playing dumb when he wanted to. And sometimes even when he didn’t.

  “Don’t you want to know how I knew you were in Puerto Rico?” she asked.

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  He read her silence as disappointment over his reaction. “I’ve got some more photos,” she said after a moment. “And some additional discovery material. Reports and stuff.”

  “Want to send me copies?”

  “I could,” she said. “But I’ve also got something you might want to see in person.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “We think we may have found the murder weapon.”

  He made it to her office a little after four o’clock. The first thing he noticed, being Jaywalker, was that she looked different—and terrific. The second thing was that she wasn’t wearing her glasses.

  “Where’d they go?” he asked her.

  “Where did who go?”

  “The prop.” By way of clarification, he raised an index finger to the outer corner of his eye.

  “Oh,” she said. “I had a birthday.”

  It didn’t strike him as much of an explanation, but he said “Happy birthday” anyway, and then followed up with “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “It was a big one,” she added with exaggerated gloominess.

  “Thirty?” He’d been around women long enough to know you took your lowest guess and then subtracted at least ten years. Fifteen, if you really wanted to play it safe.

  “Forty.”

  He raised both eyebrows in mock surprise. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “Thanks. Anyway, as soon as it happened, I developed this sudden urge to look younger.”

  It couldn’t be easy, being a woman.

  “And you,” she said, looking him over. “How come you’re not tan?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the price one pays for hitting the beach just before sunset.”

  “So aren’t you even a little bit curious as to how I knew you were there?”

  “No,” he lied, knowing that she was itching to tell him and would get around to it sooner or later.

  She located a folder of papers on her desk and extended it toward him. “A lot of this stuff you may already have,” she said, “but some of it’s new.”

  He took the folder. From the lack of heft, he decided there couldn’t be too much inside, old or new. “What about this gun you mentioned?” he asked.

  She got up, walked over to a metal filing cabinet, unlocked it, pulled the top drawer open and reached in. When her hand emerged, it was holding a good-sized silver semiautomatic. He knew from the ballistics report that the weapon had been a 9 mm or a .380. Either one was capable of firing the ammunition and discharging the spent shell casings that had been recovered.

  “Ballistics?” he asked.

  “Inconclusive.”

  That was a nonanswer if ever he’d heard one. Test-firing either established that this was the gun that had fired the recovered rounds or that it wasn’t. Without coming right out and saying it, Darcy was conceding that there was no match.

  “Prints?” he asked.

  “Not by the time we got it,” she said. “Some kid found it in an alley off 113th Street, took it home, played with it for a day and a half. Lucky for him, it was empty. His mother saw it finally, phoned the precinct. Patrol picked it up, didn’t know it might be a murder weapon.”

  “May I?”

  She extended the gun to him delicately, the way one might offer up a dead bird or mouse. He took it and held it by the grips. It felt good, pleasantly heavy but nicely balanced. Even without looking for the maker’s name, he recognized it as a Browning. He’d owned one back in his DEA days. Bought it for undercover work. You couldn’t very well show up to buy drugs packing a six-shot .38 Smith & Wesson Detective Special.

  Katherine Darcy had said they’d found the thing empty, and presumably it still was. But rule number one was that you always assumed the opposite. He jacked the slide back to clear the chamber. Nothing ejected. Applying gentle pressure to the trigger, he eased the hammer back in place. Then he depressed the magazine release, and the clip dropped easily into his palm. It, too, was empty. He visually checked the chamber, the safety and the firing pin, then jacked the slide back again to cock the gun. Taking aim at the on button of the air conditioner unit in the window, he dry-fired.

  “Bang!” he shouted, and smiled as Darcy lifted a full inch off the floor.

  Gripping the gun by the barrel, he handed it back to her. “It’s not the murder weapon,” he told her.

  “How do you know?”

  He said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you how I know you were in Puerto Rico,” she said. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

  He shrugged.
<
br />   “I’ll be your best friend.”

  “Getting warmer now,” he told her.

  “I’ll let you buy me that drink.”

  “You’re on,” he told her.

  “One of my girlfriends from appeals happened to spot you at the airport. She knows I have a case with you, and she thought I ought to know. Also…”

  “Yes?”

  “She said you were awfully early for your flight.”

  “That would be me,” Jaywalker conceded.

  “So why isn’t this the murder weapon?”

  “Because,” said Jaywalker, “there was no murder. If it was anything, it was manslaughter.”

  Which was arguably true, if you wanted to factor in extreme emotional disturbance, but was sneaky at best. What Jaywalker hadn’t told Katherine Darcy was that the Browning’s firing pin was just slightly off-center, a hair toward eight o’clock. From the ballistics photos of the recovered spent shell casings, he already knew that the gun that had killed Victor Quinones had a dead-center firing pin, and therefore almost certainly had to have been a Glock or a Tech Nine.

  That drink turned out to be nothing more exciting than a hot chocolate at a small coffee shop down by the federal courthouse. True to her word, Katherine Darcy actually let Jaywalker pick up the tab this time. And she waited until they were finishing and he was paying to bring up the case again.

  “So,” she said, “if you’re so confident this is nothing but a manslaughter case at worst, what’s your guy looking for?”

  “Five years,” said Jaywalker. He had absolutely no idea what, if anything, Jeremy might be willing to take. But five years was rock bottom for first-degree manslaughter and would be an absolute steal, especially for an execution. So it seemed to Jaywalker like a pretty good place to start.

  “Get serious,” she said.

  “What would be serious? Ten?”

  “Twenty,” she said. “Maybe eighteen or nineteen. But don’t count on it.”

  “Tell me ten,” said Jaywalker, “and I’ll ask him.”

  “Never. Absolutely never.”

  And that was how the discussion ended.

  But the thing was, not only had Katherine Darcy earlier backed off from her insistence that it was a murder case with no lesser plea, now she’d indicated a willingness to consider something less than the twenty-five-year maximum on a manslaughter plea. In other words, for the second time, the prosecution had blinked.

  Why?

  He met with Jeremy two days later.

  “Suppose I could get you twelve years,” he said. He figured if Darcy had already blinked and offered eighteen or twenty to his five, sooner or later he might be able to talk her into splitting the difference. “Would you be interested?”

  “How much of that would I have to do?”

  “On twelve? A dime.” He figured Jeremy had been in long enough by now to have picked up the language of state time. A dime was ten, of course, just like a deuce was two, a trey three, and a nickel or a pound five.

  Slowly Jeremy shook his head from side to side. There was nothing arrogant to the gesture, nothing the least bit defiant. Had Jaywalker been forced to come up with a word to describe it, the best he would have managed was sad.

  “I feel like, you know, like I put up with a lot from those guys,” said Jeremy. As he spoke, his eyes locked onto Jaywalker’s own. They were as blue-gray as ever, even in the poorly lit visiting area of 100 Centre Street, but there seemed to be some sort of film coating them. Jaywalker had never seen Jeremy cry, and had decided he never would. He wondered if the young man had shed more than his share of tears during the long summer of his torment, and if this slight watery look was all he had left. Or maybe Jeremy just wasn’t a crier.

  “You did,” Jaywalker agreed. “You put up with a lot.” He paused for a few seconds before following up with the caveat. “But the law doesn’t always look at it that way.”

  “Not even if I was trying to save my life?”

  “As long as you were trying to save your life,” explained Jaywalker, “what you did was absolutely justified. No question about that. But once you get the gun away from Victor, and once he’s lying on the ground unarmed and helpless…” He let his voice trail off from soft to silent. This wasn’t an argument they were having, after all, or a lecture he was delivering. It was more like a commiseration. In the short space of four months, Jaywalker had grown surprisingly fond of this young man, had come to care deeply about the impossible predicament in which he now found himself. But personal feelings were one thing, and being a criminal defense lawyer was another. The fact was, he owed Jeremy more than empathy, more than compassion, more than caring. In addition to all those things, he owed Jeremy the benefit of his twenty-some years in the trenches, and whatever wisdom might have come along during them. And leading a client valiantly into a battle they were sure to lose was no way to satisfy those debts.

  “The law says,” he told Jeremy, “that self-defense ends once the threat ends. From that moment on, no matter what you’ve been through, you can’t pull the trigger. You’re allowed to defend yourself, but you’re not allowed to get even. That’s what the judge is going to tell the jury, in so many words. He has no choice. The law requires him to do that. And it’s very hard for me to imagine twelve ordinary people getting together and agreeing to blow him off and do the opposite of what he’s told them.”

  “They weren’t there,” said Jeremy.

  “No, they weren’t,” Jaywalker agreed. “And that will make it even harder for them to understand how you felt. It will make it just about impossible, in fact.”

  “Can’t you explain it to them?”

  The question was so utterly simple, and yet so disarmingly naive, that it completely broke the spell and forced Jaywalker to smile broadly. “Sure,” he said, “I can try. But I’m going to need an awful lot of help from you.”

  “You won’t be mad at me?”

  “Mad at you? For what?”

  “For making you go to trial.”

  “Hey,” said Jaywalker. “Going to trial is what I do.”

  For a week and a half there was no word from Miranda. From what she’d told Jaywalker over the phone, he figured she should have been in New York at least three or four days by now. He called Jeremy’s mother half a dozen times. Half a dozen times she told him pretty much the same story, though it was hard not to detect a trend in the way she phrased it.

  “Be patient. She’s gonna call me. Jew gonna see.”

  “What can I say, Mr. Jackwalker? She told me she’d call me as soon as she get here.”

  “I still don’t hear from her. So, how does the case look? Jew got to get him less time, Mr. Jakewalker. I know the other boy, he passed away. But still, an accident is an accident, and that’s the truth. Right? I hope she calls.”

  “If it’s God’s will, she’ll call.”

  “The wedding was yesterday, I found out. And still she don’t call me. That’s not right.”

  “I don’t hear nothing from the little tramp.”

  The packet of additional discovery material Katherine Darcy had given Jaywalker turned out to contain nothing new, with a single exception. That exception was a photograph of Victor Quinones, evidently taken at the time of the autopsy. It was a black-and-white head shot, not too gory, but it showed the entrance wound of the fatal gunshot, squarely between the eyes. It also revealed what a scary dude Victor had been in life. In addition to scraggly chin whiskers and shiny windowpaning that covered several of his front teeth, he had pockmarks on both cheeks, which Jaywalker took to be old acne scars. He slipped the photo into a subfile entitled M.E., for Medical Examiner, resolving to figure out some way to get it in front of the jurors, just in case Katherine Darcy didn’t bother. Like so many things, it was something of a double-edged sword. The almost surgical precision of the wound was compelling evidence that Jeremy had aimed and fired deliberately and at close range. But if you were to factor in the windowpaning and Victor’s overall menaci
ng appearance, it was a plus for the defense. Now, was it relevant that the guy Jeremy had killed happened to have been exceedingly ugly? Technically, no, of course not. But in the real world, you bet it was. In the eyes of a juror sitting on a close case, it mattered hugely.

  Now all Jaywalker had to do was figure out how to make it a close case.

  So why had Katherine Darcy gone to the trouble of inviting him over to pick up the additional packet of discovery when she just as easily could have mailed it to him or waited until the next court appearance to hand it over? It certainly hadn’t been to show him the gun, which she must have known she wasn’t going to be able to introduce as the murder weapon, even if she thought it was.

  So it had to have been the offer—the twenty years, maybe eighteen or nineteen—that she’d wanted to make but hadn’t gotten around to actually offering until he was ready to pay for their hot chocolates.

  The Blink.

  Interesting.

  “She’s here.”

  The clock by the bed told him it was 6:14 a.m. For Jaywalker, that would have been late to still be lying in bed had it been summertime, or even late spring or early fall. But it was the last week of January and still pitch dark outside, not to mention cold. Hibernating season. He rubbed his eyes and shifted the phone receiver from his left ear to his right, the one that heard better. And tried to place the gravelly voice.

  “Who’s she?” he managed to ask.

  “She. The girl, Miranda. She’s here, with me.”

  “That’s good,” said Jaywalker, suddenly awake. “That’s great. What time can you bring her to the office?” The “office” was the conference room of a suite where he’d once rented a room. For an occasional contribution of copy paper, toner or fax machine cartridges, they still let him meet the occasional client there.