Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  It was one of the many things that endeared the courthouse staff to Jaywalker. It went beyond their identifying with him because of his law-enforcement background, or admiring him for being willing to piss off judges when he had a point to make, or feeling a kinship with him because in any given year he didn’t make any more money than they did. No, it was how he treated his clients. Here it was, already after five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and even if the stories were true and the guy didn’t have much of a life outside the courthouse, surely he could’ve found something better to do than spend the next hour behind bars with an accused murderer.

  And though he’d never admit it out loud, Jaywalker delighted in their allegiance to him. On a practical level, it brought him a certain amount of perks, everything from little kindnesses extended to his clients to crucial tips about what was going on in the jury room during deliberations. But even beyond that, it was gratifying to know that the crew, the working stiffs, were on his side. In many ways he felt more at ease with them than with the judges, other defenders and prosecutors he spent time with. They were civil servants, these regular guys and gals. To Jaywalker, they represented the closest approximation to a practice jury in the building. If he could win them over, didn’t it follow that he could just as easily win over those dozen men and women sitting in the real jury box?

  But all of that could wait. Right now he needed to talk with Jeremy about what the day’s witnesses had brought, and what lay in store for them next week.

  “Why does Porter have you picking up Quinones by the collar before firing the final shot?” he asked. “Unless it happened that way.”

  By way of answer, Jeremy shook his head slowly from side to side, before answering, “I don’t remember it that way.”

  It was how he always dealt with the issue. Not “He’s lying” or “It didn’t happen that way” or “He must be mistaken.” Simply that he, Jeremy, didn’t remember it that way. It was the great paradox of the case. The prosecution witnesses would describe the last shot just as Katherine Darcy herself had, as an execution. And the best Jeremy could offer to counter that characterization was a lack of recollection.

  “It’s going to get worse Monday,” Jaywalker said.

  “What happens Monday?”

  “Victor’s girlfriend, Teresa Morales.” It wasn’t just a guess on Jaywalker’s part, though it certainly would have been a logical one. He’d asked Katherine Darcy, and she’d told him. “Is she going to say the same thing?” Jaywalker asked.

  Jeremy smiled his sheepish smile and looked directly at Jaywalker with those pale blue eyes of his. “I guess so,” he said.

  God, it was hard to dislike this kid.

  “She’s going to bury you,” Jaywalker warned him. Trying to get a denial out of him, a contradiction, a bit of outrage, something.

  Instead, a shrug, another smile and a refrain that Jaywalker was getting much too accustomed to hearing: “I don’t remember it that way.”

  14

  STUBBORN AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE

  The ringing of the phone jarred him out of a fitful half sleep. He looked around to get his bearings, realized he was on his back on his un-pulled-out sofa bed, a stack of Teresa Morales discovery material piled on his chest. He reached around for the phone, picked it up, and said “Jaywalker.”

  “They chased her and threatened her,” said an excited voice with a vaguely familiar gravelly quality.

  “Who?” was the best Jaywalker could come up with.

  “Julie, my daughter. The guys, the same guys. They ran after her, saying bad things. They going to beat her up, or worse. Jew gotta do something.”

  Jaywalker sat up, spilling reports onto the floor. “Is she okay?”

  “No, a course she’s not okay,” said Carmen. “Would jew be?”

  “Is she there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Not now. I give her a pill, make her sleep. But I can’t let her be a witness. Not after this. Jew unnerstand?”

  Jaywalker said nothing. He was still trying to digest what had happened.

  “I got only two kids, Mr. Jakewalker. They already take my son away. I’m not going to let anything happen to my daughter. Jew hear me?”

  “I hear you,” said Jaywalker. “But I need to talk to Julie. Tomorrow. Okay?”

  “No, no, no. It’s not okay. Tomorrow I gonna take her to the Bronx, hide her. I gotta protect her from those guys.”

  “Good,” said Jaywalker.

  There was a click, then silence. He cradled the phone. The clock next to it told him it was 1:42, and though he couldn’t be entirely certain, he was pretty sure it meant a.m. Either that or there was a total eclipse going on outside. He stood up, stretched and walked over to his two-burner stove. There was a pot of something on one of the burners, either thick coffee or thin, black bean soup. He lit the flame beneath it.

  There was work to be done.

  He called Katherine Darcy later that morning. He waited until nine, which he figured was late enough for a Saturday morning.

  “How did you get my home number?” she wanted to know. It was unlisted, as were those of all her colleagues. The district attorney apparently didn’t think it would be a good idea to have defendants and their families calling his assistants at home.

  “You gave it to me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well,” said Jaywalker, “someone who looked like you and sounded a lot like you did.”

  “When was that?”

  “Over coffee,” he said, “and a bagel. You had a bagel. I had tea with lemon. You scolded me for not eating.”

  That seemed to convince her, or at least quiet her. The part about the coffee and bagel and tea with lemon were true, of course. Even the part about the scolding. It was a technique Jaywalker had adopted and perfected back in his undercover days at the DEA, learning to sandwich his lies in between highly detailed demonstrable truths. And it had been right around the same time that he’d learned how to tease unlisted numbers from the directory assistance operators.

  “And just why did I give you my number?” Darcy asked him.

  “For emergency purposes.”

  “I see,” she said, a bit of doubt still lingering in her voice. “So what’s the emergency?”

  He explained what had happened to Julie Estrada, how she’d been chased five blocks by a half-dozen young Hispanic males, shouting curses at her and telling her that her life was over if she showed up in court again. Not that he’d had a chance to speak with Julie directly; Carmen still wouldn’t let him. But he’d had Carmen spell it out to him as best as she understood it. Now, just in case she’d missed anything or left anything out, he added a few embellishments of his own, like a knife and a couple of Oakland Raiders jackets.

  “I’ll look into it,” said Darcy.

  “That’s it? You’ll look into it?”

  “What would you like me to do?” she pleaded. “Go out and round up every kid in the city who roots for the Raiders during baseball season?”

  “Football,” he corrected her. “And no, just the ones who intimidated my witness and are trying to deny my client a fair trial.”

  “And how would you suggest I go about that?”

  “How about a sting operation?” Jaywalker suggested on the fly. “Get a couple of your detectives assigned, and we’ll follow her at a distance, see what happens.”

  “We?”

  “Sure. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “Mr. Jaywalker, it’s nine-fifteen on a Saturday morning. In order to fulfill my sense of adventure, I’ll be spending my weekend preparing to call witnesses in a trial we shouldn’t be having. And wouldn’t be having, if you and your client weren’t so damn stubborn and self-destructive.”

  Which was pretty much where the conversation ended.

  He spent the weekend getting ready for Teresa Morales and the rest of the week’s witnesses, both prosecution and defense. He worked on requests
to charge, things he wanted Judge Wexler to instruct the jury about. He reviewed his summation notes file. In between, he left half a dozen messages for Carmen Estrada, asking her to call him so he could at least talk to Julie. When Carmen finally got back to him Sunday evening, it was to tell him there was no way she was going to let her daughter testify.

  “Jew gotta unnerstand,” she explained. “I’m not going to scarface my daughter on account of to save my son.” Her English might have used some work, but her logic was pretty hard to argue with.

  And as he lay in bed that night, trying to get a decent night’s sleep before the week ahead, Jaywalker kept hearing Katherine Darcy’s characterization of him and his client.

  Stubborn and self-destructive.

  What hurt about her words was that she might just be right. Here she’d blinked and come off the murder count. Not only had she offered them a plea to manslaughter, but she’d said she was willing to take less time on it than Harold Wexler had promised to give Jeremy if the jury were to acquit him of murder and instead convict him on the very same manslaughter count. In other words, she’d offered them a win-win proposition. Because the chances of an outright, across-the-board acquittal on all charges were diminishing to the point of disappearing altogether, what with the testimony of Magdalena Lopez and Wallace Porter already in, and that of Teresa Morales still to come.

  So she certainly had a point. They were being stubborn and self-destructive. Jaywalker won more of his trials than anyone he knew, but even he was human, and he lost from time to time. On the occasions when he did, the experience was excruciatingly painful. And if he were to lose this one—as it was looking more and more certain he would—it would be in large part because he’d allowed his client to insist upon going to trial in a case they couldn’t possibly win.

  It was thoughts like that that kept Jaywalker awake, leaving his average night’s sleep hovering somewhere between three and four hours. And that was on weekends, when he tried to catch up.

  Stubborn. Stubborn and self-destructive.

  Damn Katherine Darcy.

  Damn her for being right.

  15

  A TWO-BIT PUNK

  First thing Monday morning, Katherine Darcy called her star witness to the stand. It was a move that even Jaywalker, who considered tactics and strategy key components in his trial arsenal, had to admit deserved a solid 10. Sure, she’d given Jaywalker all weekend to prepare his cross-examination, but that was something he’d done weeks ago, months ago. As Darcy no doubt knew. But by calling her most important witness—and clearly her most vulnerable one—at ten o’clock in the morning of a brand-new week, she could be assured of not only getting through her own direct examination by eleven or eleven-thirty, but of forcing Jaywalker to begin his cross without the benefit of a lunch break, and to complete it in the afternoon, without going overnight. It was little things like that, Jaywalker knew only too well, that could make the difference in a closely contested trial.

  When Teresa Morales walked into the courtroom, it marked Jaywalker’s first glimpse of her. He’d had Jeremy describe her, but as was so often the case, Jeremy’s words had painted something less than a complete picture. He’d used adjectives like dark-haired, attractive and kind of pretty. And to be fair to Jeremy, none of those characterizations had been wrong, Jaywalker realized now, at least not in a technical sense. There was, for example, no disputing that Teresa had dark hair. And he would have been hard-pressed to deny that there was something attractive about her. Kind of pretty, however, was a stretch, and a rather long one if your idea of prettiness was Jeremy’s twin sister, Julie, or even Jeremy himself, if you were secure enough to attach the word to a young man. If, on the other hand, you wanted to use Miranda Raven as your gold standard, Teresa was immediately disqualified. Then again, so was just about everyone else on the planet.

  The problem was that, to Jaywalker at least, there was something tough about Teresa. Or if not quite tough, then certainly hard, in the sense that she appeared just a bit too streetwise. Maybe he was being unfair, Jaywalker conceded. Maybe he knew too much about her. Where the jurors were seeing her white blouse, dark gray skirt and inch-and-a-half black heels, he was picturing her in a black leather Raiders jacket, skin-tight jeans and motorcycle boots. Where they were thinking manicured, he was remembering menacing.

  All of these thoughts, understand, flashed through Jaywalker’s semiconscious mind during the five seconds or so it took Teresa to walk the thirty feet from the side door to the witness stand. And at the same time he was processing them, he was also busy arranging the contents of his cross-examination file on the table in front of him, locating a pad of paper on which to take notes, testing a couple of pens to see which of them wrote more fluidly, and leaning his body toward Jeremy’s to signal how comfortable he was with him, all the while projecting an air of quiet confidence that when his turn came he’d be able to expose this witness as something entirely different than what she might seem.

  Trying cases was like that. At least, trying them the Jaywalker way was. Which was funny, because in any other venue he was a perfect example of the guy who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Stick him in front of a TV set, for example, and he’d have trouble eating a sandwich, let alone talking on the phone, reading a newspaper or conducting a conversation. But toss him into a courtroom with a thousand little things going on at once, and he suddenly became a world-class multitasker. Go figure.

  Katherine Darcy began her direct examination by bringing out the fact that Teresa Morales was now married. A couple of months ago she’d become Teresa Rodriguez, or Teresa Rodriguez Morales, if you wanted to arrange the names the way Latinos do. Jaywalker wondered if the marriage had had something to do with his investigator’s inability to locate her and try to interview her prior to trial. That thought was quickly replaced with his marveling at Teresa’s resilience. She had, after all, been Victor Quinones’s girlfriend just over a year and a half ago. But if Victor’s parents, sitting silently in the second row of the audience, were destined to spend the rest of their lives grieving over the loss of their son, Teresa’s period of mourning had apparently been somewhat briefer.

  From Teresa’s marriage, Darcy jumped unexpectedly to the day of the shooting. Unexpectedly, because Jaywalker found it hard to believe that she’d leave it to him to go into Teresa’s—and the rest of the Raiders’—past contacts with Jeremy. Was it possible he’d overestimated his adversary’s trial skills? He sure hoped so.

  DARCY: Do you remember the day Victor died?

  TERESA: Yes.

  DARCY: Were you there?

  TERESA: Yes.

  DARCY: Did you see the man who shot him?

  TERESA: Yes.

  DARCY: Would you recognize him if you saw him today?

  TERESA: Yes.

  DARCY: Would you look around the courtroom and tell us if you see him?

  And, of course, Teresa pointed directly at Jeremy.

  At that point, Katherine Darcy surprised Jaywalker again. Rather than going into the details of the shooting, she backed up. But not to the fistfight that had immediately preceded the gunfire, nor to the first of the series of encounters Teresa and her friends had had with Jeremy. Instead she took her witness back a week, to the day of the barbershop incident, and had her describe how Victor and several others had stood in front of the shop, calling Jeremy to come out.

  DARCY: How many people were telling him to come out?

  TERESA: Just Victor and his friends.

  DARCY: Do you know the names of his friends? Any of them?

  TERESA: One was Sandro. Shorty. Diego, maybe. But I don’t remember everybody’s name.

  DARCY: What happened outside the barbershop?

  TERESA: The guys were calling him out and, you know, playing with their fingers, going like this to him [indicating], trying to get him to come out. But he wouldn’t.

  Jaywalker jumped to his feet. Teresa had formed her fingers into the shape of a gun, complete with
a trigger-pulling motion. He wanted the gesture made part of the record, lest some appellate court judge two years down the line tried to fob it off as a harmless wave.

  JAYWALKER: Could we describe the motion?

  THE COURT: Yes, describe it.

  Darcy tried her best to put a neutral spin on it.

  DARCY: For the record, indicating like a finger pointing.

  But for once Judge Wexler came to the rescue of the defense. He, too, had seen the motion.

  THE COURT: She has a thumb up and the index finger fully extended, and the index finger keeps moving back and forth.

  Jaywalker sat down. He couldn’t have described it any better if he’d wanted to.

  Teresa went on to describe how Victor and his friends had tried to get Jeremy to come out and fight, until finally an older man from the barbershop had come out and gotten the group to leave. From there Darcy returned to the day of the shooting. This struck Jaywalker as something of a mistake on her part. He’d been the one who’d told her about the barbershop incident in the first place. Obviously Darcy had questioned Teresa about it, and when Teresa had confirmed that it had taken place, Darcy had preemptively made it part of her direct examination, trying her best to play it down. But at the same time she’d apparently chosen to ignore the other occasions—and over coffee she’d stated that there’d been at least a dozen of them—on which Teresa, and presumably her friends, had encountered Jeremy.

  Jaywalker, needless to say, had no intention of ignoring them. To the extent that he had one, the sum of those encounters—including but by no means limited to the barbershop incident—was his defense.

  As Teresa returned to day of the shooting, she described how things had begun casually enough. She and Victor had been on 110th Street, walking toward Third Avenue, when they’d almost bumped into Jeremy and his “lady.” There’d been two girls with them, one a good bit younger than the other.