Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  JAYWALKER: And that’s when you say you saw Jeremy pull the gun. Right?

  TERESA: Right.

  JAYWALKER: From his waist.

  TERESA: Yeah.

  JAYWALKER: Not his socks?

  TERESA: No.

  JAYWALKER: Did you ever see him do something like this with the gun [gesturing], pulling something back on the top of it with his other hand?

  TERESA: No.

  Teresa couldn’t say how many shots she’d heard, but Jaywalker got her to agree that everything had occurred “very fast” at that point, with Jeremy “just shooting like crazy.”

  Which, Jaywalker decided, was as good a place as any to quit. Whoever had first pulled the gun, it was agreed that Jeremy had ended up with it and done the shooting. And the image of things happening very quickly, with Jeremy momentarily out of control, dovetailed nicely with Jaywalker’s theory of the case. As for Victor’s getting up, running, stumbling and being shot again as he lay defenseless on the pavement, there was no way Jaywalker was going to get Teresa to retreat from those assertions. So the less said about them, the better.

  “I have no further questions of the witness,” he said.

  Trials are something like trains, to the extent that neither of them tend to run too closely on schedule. One of the jurors had developed a toothache overnight and had that morning asked Judge Wexler’s permission to visit her dentist that afternoon, explaining that the dentist could squeeze her in as an emergency at four-thirty. Now Wexler announced that her request would be granted, and that the trial would be in recess until the following morning. Then, as soon as the jurors had filed out of the courtroom, he summoned the lawyers up to the bench. “You know what they call a lawyer who asks about everything but the crime?” he asked.

  Jaywalker was willing to take a stab at it. “A genius?”

  It drew a muffled laugh from Katherine Darcy but seemed to do nothing for Wexler’s disposition. “Not in my book,” he said. “How about a loser?”

  Jaywalker figured that particular question was a rhetorical one, and except for a shrug, he let it go unanswered. Wexler turned his attention to Darcy. “Are you still willing to consider offering the manslaughter plea?” he asked her. “With twenty years?”

  “I suppose so,” she answered. “I’d have to talk to my bureau chief.”

  “I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you talk to your client, Jaywalker. If the jury convicts him of murder, you can tell him I’m going to give him twenty-five to life. You may think you’re going to be able to fool them into returning a manslaughter verdict, but I don’t. And I’ll promise you this much—there’s no way you’re walking out of here with an acquittal, not once I’ve finished charging them on when the right to use deadly force ends. To me, Jaywalker, your client’s nothing but a two-bit punk who killed another punk, and if our legislature had any balls, he’d get the same sentence the victim got. So why don’t you do us all a favor and stop trying to be a hero for once in your life, and start kicking some sense into this kid, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Jaywalker.

  And then, in spite of the fact that he’d planned on going into the pens and spending a few minutes with Jeremy, he made it a point of turning around, picking up his things as quickly as possible and walking not into the pens at all, but out the front doors. And for good measure, muttering “Fuck you” under his breath.

  Okay, not exactly under his breath.

  As pissed off as Jaywalker had been at the time by Judge Wexler’s appraisal of the case, he’d calmed down by that evening. Food and the simple passage of time had a way of doing that. Not that a few hits from a joint hadn’t helped.

  And the truth was, he had to admit, Wexler did have a point. Here Jaywalker had thought he’d had a pretty good day with Teresa Morales. Even on direct examination, she’d described the barbershop incident pretty much the way Jeremy would in turn, complete with taunting, name-calling, simulating guns and threatening to get him next time. On cross, she’d admitted there’d been earlier encounters, though she’d been vague on the numbers. And if he hadn’t quite gotten her to concede that the group called themselves the Raiders and favored Oakland Raiders leather jackets, her “Not that I’m aware of” demurrer had come off as pretty lame. As far as the fight was concerned, she’d not only agreed that Jeremy had been winning it, but portrayed him as too gentlemanly to go after his opponent while Victor had been taking off his sweatshirt and had been momentarily defenseless.

  On the issue of where Jeremy had supposedly pulled the gun from, Teresa’s recollection that it had been from his waist contradicted Wallace Porter’s version that it had been from his socks. But Jaywalker wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. Porter had obviously lied as to several other points. First there’d been his insistence that he and his friends hadn’t been drinking beer, only seconds after he himself had slipped and mentioned that they had been. Then there’d been his statement to the detectives that he’d heard the two young men arguing over money just before they began fighting. Porter had been forced to admit that while that statement had had no truth to it, he’d never attempted to correct it. In fact, he now said he didn’t even know why he’d said it in the first place.

  But Jaywalker did. Porter had simply been drawing on his own personal experience. Two young guys fighting to the death could mean only one thing to Wallace Porter: drugs. And drugs equalled money. So he’d simply embellished the tale with some details of his own. Why did Jaywalker see this so clearly? Because it was the kind of thing he himself did from time to time.

  So if indeed it had been Jeremy who’d pulled the gun—and despite Jeremy’s denials, Jaywalker considered that a distinct possibility—Teresa Morales’s waistband version was much more likely than Wallace Porter’s sweat-sock story. Still, the contradiction was a major one, and there was no way the jurors could have missed it. And just in case they had, Jaywalker would hammer the point in his summation. So all things considered, Jaywalker felt he’d survived the testimony of the three eyewitnesses in pretty fair shape. Yet here was Harold Wexler telling him in so many words that he was dead in the water.

  It’s often been said that because the prosecutor gets to sum up after the defense lawyer does, he or she has the last word in a trial. But Jaywalker knew that wasn’t really the case. Following the summations, it’s the judge who gets to speak last, often for an hour or more, while he charges the jury, lecturing them in detail on the various principles of law they’re required to follow during their deliberations and in arriving at a verdict. When Harold Wexler had warned Jaywalker up at the bench that Jeremy’s chances of being acquitted would vanish the moment the jury heard the charge on the limits of deadly force, he had a point. Even if the jurors were to remain as undecided as Jaywalker was on the issue of who’d begun the day with the gun, even if they felt Jeremy had been defending himself the first time he’d fired—or arguably the second or third time—once Victor had been lying helpless on the ground, there was no way that Jeremy’s shooting him a final time between the eyes could be deemed justified. Wexler intended to make that point to the jury, and to make it as loudly and clearly as he possibly could. His message to Jaywalker had been direct and to the point: you can talk about justification and extreme emotional disturbance all you want, but there’s no way you’re getting around that final shot, not in my courtroom.

  And if you chose to combine Harold Wexler’s words with those of Katherine Darcy, uttered the very first time Jaywalker had met her, you had the case distilled right down to its essence. It was all about that stumble Victor had taken, that moment when he’d fallen to the ground and been reduced to begging for his life. That marked the precise instant when self-defense and sympathy ended, and the execution began.

  He would talk to Jeremy tomorrow. Tonight he would sleep.

  Or at least try to.

  16

  SLIM AND NONE

  When Jaywalker went into the pens and talked with Jeremy before court the
following morning, he found his client as resolute as ever.

  “I think it’s going pretty well, Jay.”

  Jaywalker tried to explain for the third time in fifteen minutes that no matter how well things seemed to be going, there was still the problem of the final point-blank shot between the eyes. The one that had been fired at a point when Victor had no longer posed a threat of any sort.

  “I don’t remember it that way,” said Jeremy for the umpteenth time. “And I’d rather take my chances.”

  Jaywalker had once listened to an interview with Bill Russell, a long-ago basketball star for the Boston Celtics. Asked about the prospects of some other team beating them in the championship series, Russell had said, “They got two chances. Slim and none.” Despite the fact that Jaywalker had been trying his best to explain that those words described their own chances of an acquittal to a T, the choice to continue the trial or not was still Jeremy’s. When it came to tactics and strategy, Jaywalker took over, never allowing a client to tell him how to try a case, lest the advice interfere with his winning it. But on the fundamental question of whether to take a plea or go to trial—or in this case, continue with a trial—that decision was the defendant’s, and the defendant’s alone. Jaywalker could and did give advice on the matter. He often weighed in heavily on one side or the other, with a good ninety percent of his recommendations being to cop-out. If he felt strongly enough—and Jaywalker had never been a stranger to strong feelings—he’d resort to arm-twisting and head-banging. But when he was done with the twisting and the banging, he’d move on and redirect his efforts to winning. Other lawyers he knew admitted to taking a measure of satisfaction from telling a client, “I told you so,” after losing a case. Jaywalker delighted in hearing those very same words from a client, after he’d won a case he’d called unwinnable. And hear those words he had. Not always, but a lot.

  Though he knew he probably never would from Jeremy.

  Katherine Darcy called Police Officer Joseph Campanella to the stand. Campanella had been the first officer to respond to the scene of the shooting. Checking his memo-book entries from time to time, he recalled how he’d found someone identified later as V. Quinones lying on the pavement in a semiconscious state, apparently the victim of multiple gunshot wounds. He’d also encountered a young woman named Teresa Morales, who’d been attempting to aid Mr. Quinones.

  DARCY: You say “semiconscious.” Was he talking?

  CAMPANELLA: No, ma’am. He was breathing, but he didn’t respond to any verbal requests I made of him. He wasn’t making any motions. His eyes were closed, and it was—it appeared as though he was sleeping.

  Officer Campanella had called for an ambulance. While waiting for it to arrive, he’d done chest compressions on the victim, while someone else had performed mouth-to-mouth breathing. Then the ambulance had arrived and EMTs had placed the victim inside it. Miss Morales and Officer Campanella had also gotten in.

  DARCY: What happened in the ambulance?

  CAMPANELLA: They were rendering whatever aid they could give him.

  DARCY: What was Mr. Quinones’s condition as time went on?

  CAMPANELLA: It was progressively worsening.

  DARCY: Tell us how.

  CAMPANELLA: He never regained consciousness. He never spoke or opened his eyes. From what I observed, his vital signs were diminishing. He was becoming paler as the minutes were passing. And he was just generally deteriorating.

  DARCY: What happened at the hospital?

  CAMPANELLA: Shortly after our arrival, he was pronounced dead by the emergency room doctor.

  Officer Campanella had completed some paperwork, checked in with his precinct commander, and then returned to East 113th Street to help secure the crime scene. Darcy asked him if he’d noticed any sort of evidence upon his return.

  CAMPANELLA: Yes, I did. There was a sweatshirt. And if I’m not mistaken, there were two shell casings and two spent rounds lying on the walk-way. I’d also recovered another spent round in the ambulance.

  DARCY: What was done with those items, if you know?

  CAMPANELLA: They were all vouchered and removed as evidence.

  DARCY: Were you able to draw any conclusions about the type of weapon or weapons that had been involved in the shooting?

  CAMPANELLA: Only that there’d been an automatic involved.

  Asked to clarify, he explained that while a revolver retained its spent shells in its cylinder after firing, an automatic or semiautomatic discharged each empty shell as it was fired. As for the “spent rounds” he’d referred to, those were the slugs or projectiles that were fired from the shells.

  DARCY: Did you do something else in connection with this case several days later?

  CAMPANELLA: Yes, I did.

  DARCY: What was that?

  CAMPANELLA: I went to the city morgue and identified the body of Mr. Quinones.

  Jaywalker asked the officer no questions. Campanella had been a good witness. He’d managed to avoid lapsing into copspeak, a strange dialect that for some reason compels its ranks to favor “At that point in time I did proceed to take exit of my vehicle” over “Then I got out of my car.” He’d been clear, concise and direct. That said, he hadn’t really said anything that hurt Jeremy, and Jaywalker saw no particular reason to give him a chance. Multiple shots had in fact been fired from a semiautomatic weapon. Victor Quinones had been shot, and had died of his wounds not too long afterward. Ballistics evidence and a sweatshirt had been recovered at the scene.

  Jaywalker was a lot of things, but one thing he wasn’t was a showman. He never questioned witnesses for the sake of questioning them, or to show off his cross-examination skills. And for the life of him, he failed to understand why so many of his colleagues seemed compelled to do so.

  Although it was only eleven o’clock, Judge Wexler decided to take his midmorning recess early, and he excused the jurors for fifteen minutes. The reason soon became apparent: the arrival of a dignitary of sorts, a justice from the appellate division.

  Jaywalker couldn’t quite place the man at first, though he looked very familiar. And then it came to him. He was Miles Sternbridge, the presiding member of the three-judge disciplinary committee that had suspended Jaywalker from practice some years back. Sternbridge had actually treated Jaywalker fairly, first by grudgingly allowing him to finish up ten of his pending cases before the suspension had kicked in, and later by terminating it early in order to appease a Rockland County judge anxious to move along the case of a defendant who wanted to hire Jaywalker. Still, Jaywalker found it hard to feel all warm and fuzzy about the man. To begin with, what kind of a guy went around calling himself Miles Sternbridge? Not that he’d named himself, of course. But had Jaywalker been tagged with a handle like that, he would have done something about it, just as he had with Harrison J. Walker. Then there’d been the bit about that “sexual gratuity” Jaywalker had been accused of accepting. Sternbridge had to have known that hadn’t been his idea, and the stairwell security video had even backed him up, showing him trying to resist the efforts of his overly appreciative client. But in the absence of a sound track of any sort, Sternbridge had claimed to be able to divine that Jaywalker’s opening-and-closing of his mouth signified moaning, rather than protestations of “No, no!”

  Okay, so maybe it had been a combination of the two. But even if it had been, was it really so different from accepting the twenty-dollar bill from the insistent guy you’d just won an acquittal for? Wouldn’t both clients have been equally offended by outright rejection of their expressions of gratitude?

  “Come up, Mr. Jaywalker.” It was Harold Wexler’s voice, summoning Jaywalker up to the bench, where the two judges had been huddling for several minutes.

  Jaywalker approached cautiously, wondering what it was he’d done this time. Going to trial instead of taking a plea couldn’t possibly be grounds for disciplinary action, could it? He looked around the courtroom, wondering if he was going to need a lawyer, but didn’t see anyone he wo
uld be interested in hiring even if he’d had the money.

  “Nice to see you again,” said Sternbridge.

  “Likewise, I’m sure.” He’d heard John Malkovich say that once in a movie, one of those things where everyone was wearing powdered wigs and pirate shirts.

  “Harold here tells me you’ve been behaving yourself.” Said with obvious astonishment, and perhaps even a tinge of disappointment.

  “I’ve been trying,” said Jaywalker.

  “Good,” said Sternbridge. “Good.”

  Jaywalker said nothing.

  “Well, then,” said Sternbridge, “carry on, gentlemen.” And shaking hands with Wexler—and only Wexler—he turned and left.

  “Friend of yours?” Wexler asked with a smile, once Sternbridge was out the door.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Jaywalker, and they exchanged smiles. Wexler knew all about Jaywalker’s run-in with the committee; everyone did. Now he motioned Katherine Darcy to come up and join them at the bench. Once she had, he assured her that they hadn’t been discussing the case, only Jaywalker’s criminal record. Darcy answered with a knowing smile.

  “So,” Wexler asked her, “have you talked to your bureau chief?”

  “I have.”

  “And are you authorized to agree to twenty years on a manslaughter plea?”

  “Yes.”

  Even before the judge turned his way, Jaywalker was shaking his head from side to side. “He doesn’t want it,” he explained.

  “Big mistake,” was all Wexler would say, his jaw set tightly. Then he stood up and walked out of the room, leaving the two lawyers standing there. He could be like that, Jaywalker knew. Putting in a good word for you one minute, then turning on you the next. But the thing of it was, come sentencing time, it wouldn’t be the smiling Harold Wexler who’d be sentencing Jeremy Estrada. It would be the other one, the angry, vindictive Harold Wexler.