Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  JAYWALKER: Did the guys come inside?

  ZAPATA: No. I locked the door. But they kept shouting through the window and threatening Jerry.

  JAYWALKER: What did you see?

  His answer was to point his index finger to his temple, his thumb pointed upward. Jaywalker described the demonstration for the record. Then he asked the witness if he’d been able to hear any of the things the guys had shouted.

  ZAPATA: They were saying they were going to get him, to kill him. They were saying bad things, using bad language, in English and in Spanish. Very bad.

  JAYWALKER: Please tell us exactly what they said.

  ZAPATA: They called him a son of a bitch.

  JAYWALKER: Was that the worst?

  Frankie smiled nervously and looked down at his feet. Just two hours earlier, he’d told Jaywalker much worse. But now he was clearly too embarrassed to repeat the words in open court.

  JAYWALKER: Would your honor direct the witness to answer.

  THE COURT: Yes. Use the actual language you heard.

  Frankie leaned over to the court reporter and repeated the words. But the courtroom had grown stone-cold quiet, and despite his whispering, no one could have missed his answer.

  ZAPATA: They called him maricon. That’s how we say faggot in Spanish. They called him pussy and…

  JAYWALKER: And?

  ZAPATA: And cunt-face.

  JAYWALKER: How many of them were there?

  ZAPATA: Six or seven. I’m not sure.

  JAYWALKER: How old did they look?

  ZAPATA: A few years older than Jerry. Nineteen, twenty. Something like that.

  JAYWALKER: Were they all guys?

  ZAPATA: There was one girl.

  Frankie described how finally he’d gone outside, shutting the door behind him, and tried to talk to them. They’d quieted down after a minute or two and assured the barber they had no problem with him. “But we’re going to get him,” they’d said, pointing.

  JAYWALKER: Who did they point at?

  ZAPATA: At Jerry.

  JAYWALKER: Did there come a time when they left?

  ZAPATA: Finally. I had a van parked around the corner. I went and got it, and pulled in front of the shop. I put Jerry and his girlfriend in my van, and I took them to his house.

  JAYWALKER: How did Jerry seem on the way to his house?

  ZAPATA: He was very, very nervous, shaking. His face was white. His eyes, he was like he wanted to cry. But I guess he was ashamed to cry in front of his girlfriend.

  THE COURT: The part about what the witness guesses is stricken. The jury will disregard it.

  JAYWALKER: Mr. Zapata, you can only tell us what you saw, what you heard and what you did. Okay?

  ZAPATA: Okay. Sorry.

  The remark hadn’t been for the witness, of course. It had been for the contempt citation, in case Harold Wexler were to decide that Jaywalker had planted that little nugget of objectionable testimony, too. Although that one Wexler would forget.

  JAYWALKER: When you got to Jerry’s building, did you leave him and his girlfriend downstairs?

  ZAPATA: No, I was too scared for Jerry. I took them upstairs, and I told his mother to keep him there in the house, not let him go out.

  Katherine Darcy spent only a few minutes cross-examining Zapata. Jaywalker sensed that she knew his testimony had been truthful, and that probing for inconsistencies or more detail could only get her into trouble. Or perhaps she was trying to take a page from Jaywalker’s playbook and send a message to the jurors that Zapata really hadn’t hurt her case.

  DARCY: Did you see any guns that day?

  ZAPATA: Real guns?

  DARCY: Yes, real guns.

  ZAPATA: No.

  DARCY: Any knives?

  ZAPATA: No.

  DARCY: Did the shop have a large storefront window?

  ZAPATA: Not so large.

  DARCY: Did they break it?

  ZAPATA: No.

  DARCY: Did they try?

  ZAPATA: No.

  DARCY: When you went outside to talk to them, did they harm you?

  ZAPATA: No.

  DARCY: And they left, didn’t they?

  ZAPATA: Not right away.

  DARCY: But after a few minutes?

  ZAPATA: Yes. After a few minutes, they left.

  Francisco Zapata stepped down from the stand, and Judge Wexler excused the jury for the day. The following morning, Frankie the Barber would board a plane and fly back to Puerto Rico. Although he’d been able to testify to less than an hour of Jeremy Estrada’s torment, Jaywalker felt that Zapata’s had been a powerful presence at the trial. The simple fact was that he’d traveled some fifteen hundred miles at his own expense in order to answer questions about an incident that had taken place some twenty months earlier, involving a young man whose last name he didn’t even know. To Jaywalker, that said an awful lot about Frankie right there. Perhaps, to the jurors, it might say something about Jeremy, too.

  After sitting through his warning from Judge Wexler, Jaywalker retreated to the pens to spend one last hour preparing Jeremy for his testimony the following day. Had this been a court-appointed case, Jaywalker would have been expected to keep track of his time and how he’d spent it. But even in those situations, he’d ended up seriously under-reporting when it had come time to enter a number alongside Trial Preparation. While most of his colleagues padded their hours, some flagrantly, Jaywalker had known better than to submit an honest accounting of the sessions he’d devoted to readying his witnesses. How, for example, could he submit a voucher asserting that he’d spent over a hundred hours with Jeremy alone, when he knew lawyers who routinely put their clients on the stand after interviewing them for forty-five minutes? So he always ended up cutting his hours by more than half, fully expecting trial judges to do the same again before signing off on them.

  The unreimbursed hours? He’d tended to think of them as taxes withheld by the government, and he liked to think he’d compensated for the lost income by cheating on his 1040 Form as much as he possibly could. But even if he hadn’t, he still would have gone into the pens to spend one last hour getting his client ready. He told himself it was for Jeremy, because of how much he liked the kid and what a raw deal life had given him. But that was only part of the story, of course. The rest was that he was Jaywalker, and being Jaywalker, he simply couldn’t help himself.

  18

  THE WITNESS IN THE HALLWAY

  Thursday.

  Jeremy’s day.

  Jaywalker had characteristically slept little. To him, the day had long loomed as no less nerve-wracking than a summation day or an argument before the Court of Appeals in Albany. Perhaps Jeremy’s case was unwinnable, one of those one-in-ten trials that no matter what he were to do, an outright acquittal would remain forever out of reach. But Jaywalker wasn’t ready to admit that. Not yet, anyway. What he did understand, what was absolutely clear, was that for them to win it, Jeremy would have to come off as a near-perfect witness. He would have to be able to describe his first—and perhaps last—encounter with love in a way that would make the jurors ache with memories of their own. He would have to be willing to go into the painful details of his torment at the hands of the Raiders, and describe the effects that torment had had on his body and his psyche. And he would somehow have to convince twelve strangers that in shooting another young man between the eyes from a distance of no more than five inches, he’d acted not as an executioner but as a blinded man trying to save his own life. And all the while, he would have to make those jurors like him—indeed, love him—enough to want to forgive him and set him free.

  It was a tall order, made even taller by Jeremy’s lifelong shyness and natural reticence to talk about himself, by his limited education and intellect, and by a lot of extremely inconvenient facts. Still, Jaywalker felt that if ever he himself would be prepared to tackle the challenge, it was now. He could only hope that Jeremy was ready, too.

  But as ready as he was, Jaywalker was about to discove
r that the vagaries that invariably accompany a trial had one of their surprises in store for him that morning. The messenger in this particular instance wore a court officer’s blue uniform and approached Jaywalker just seconds before the jurors were about to enter the courtroom.

  “You’ve got a witness waiting for you,” the officer told him. “Out in the hallway.”

  And since Jeremy was his only remaining witness, Jaywalker’s knee-jerk reaction was that his client had somehow managed to escape or post bail. But there was no bail; Jeremy had been held in remand status since his surrender a year ago, and not even Jaywalker had deluded himself into thinking some judge might set bail. And if his client had escaped, why wasn’t the court officer out in the hallway himself, trying to wrestle Jeremy to the floor and handcuff him?

  The bewildered expression on Jaywalker’s face was enough to prompt a bit of information from the officer. “It’s a young woman,” he said. “Pretty. Eighteen, nineteen.”

  Miranda.

  This could be disastrous, Jaywalker realized. Here he’d taken pains to make sure she was nowhere around, knowing that the statement she’d written out for the detectives hurt Jeremy far more than her testimony could possibly help him. And now she’d shown up on her own? What was he supposed to do? Put her on the stand at Jeremy’s peril? Turn her over to the prosecution? Or accept a missing witness charge that her testimony would have conflicted with the rest of his case’s? Whichever one of those three doors he chose to open promised nothing but disaster.

  He got Judge Wexler’s permission to step outside for a moment and fell in behind the court officer, who led Jaywalker up the aisle, pushed against the courtroom door and held it open for him. As Jaywalker stepped out into the hallway, he was still trying to figure out what he would say to Miranda. Could he tell her to get lost, to dart into the nearest stairwell and disappear? Would the court officer give him up, or support his claim that by the time they got out there, Miranda was nowhere to be found?

  Which actually seemed to be the case.

  Because as he looked all around him, Jaywalker saw absolutely no sign of her. Not her auburn hair, not her almost-too-thin body, not her arresting brown eyes.

  “I’m here,” she said, standing right in front of him, so close he almost jumped.

  Once, as a young boy, Jaywalker—back then Harrison J. Walker—had sneaked out to the kitchen late one night to raid the refrigerator. But even before he’d opened it, he’d noticed a generous dollop of chocolate sauce on the countertop. He’d gleefully scooped it up with his index finger and deposited it onto the tip of his tongue, savoring its forbidden richness. And the truth was that for a second or two, it really had tasted like chocolate. Then his senses had registered the fact that it wasn’t. It had actually been thick grease that had dripped from the electric meter directly above the counter.

  It was that way now. So convinced had Jaywalker been that he would encounter Miranda in the hallway, that even as he stood in front of the young woman, his mind continued to compel him to believe that she’d not only dyed her hair blonde, but had put on fifteen or twenty pounds, as well, and somehow changed the color of her eyes from brown to blue-gray. And had she not spoken her name aloud at that point, he no doubt would have persisted in trying to reconcile the discrepancies between how he remembered her and how she looked today, just four months later.

  “Julie,” she said.

  But it didn’t register.

  “Julie,” she repeated, before adding, “Jeremy’s sister?” Her voice rising on the last word, the way teenagers can turn a simple declaratory statement into a question.

  “Julie!” Jaywalker half shouted, loudly enough to turn heads in the hallway. “You’re supposed to be hiding out in, in—”

  “The Bronx.”

  “Right,” said Jaywalker, before realizing that some of the turning heads might be attached to the jurors back in the courtroom. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he herded her into the nearest stairwell and closed the door behind them. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I’m going to testify,” she said.

  “What?”

  Not a incredulous “What?” as in “What, are you crazy?” More like the “What?” of a middle-aged man with mediocre hearing, two descriptives that actually fit Jaywalker pretty well. But it wasn’t just that. The truth was, he’d been so busy looking around for surveillance cameras that he’d allowed his attention to wander, and if he’d heard Julie’s answer, it hadn’t quite registered.

  So she repeated it.

  “I’m going to testify,” she said, looking Jaywalker squarely in the eye.

  “But your mother—”

  “I don’t care about my mother,” she said. “Jeremy is my twin brother. I’ll spend the rest of my life blaming myself if I hide out somewhere and they find him guilty. I can’t do that.”

  Jaywalker thought about it for a moment, but only a moment. Had he himself had a twin brother or sister facing a murder charge, he would no doubt have spoken pretty much the same words as Julie had, and he wouldn’t have let anyone talk him out of it. Still, Carmen was Jeremy and Julie’s mother. She’d hired Jaywalker, at least after a fashion, and was paying his fee, slowly if not so surely. Over a year’s time, she’d given him a little over two thousand dollars. If she were to continue making payments at that rate—a statistical rarity, given that, win or lose, the end of a trial almost always brought with it the end of payments—she would have the balance paid off sometime around 2025.

  But none of that mattered.

  It wasn’t Carmen’s case any more than it was Jaywalker’s. It was Jeremy’s case. Julie was nineteen, old enough to vote and enlist and get married without her mother’s permission. If she wanted to testify, it was going to be her decision, hers and her brother’s.

  Jaywalker had her wait in the stairwell while he headed back into the courtroom to deal with a confused client, an impatient judge and a mother he at least owed an explanation. Then again, what could she do about it? Threaten to cut off his fee payments a few days early? Stop bringing him lunch, please God?

  In the end, she did neither of those things, and Jaywalker thought he even detected a bit of motherly pride over her daughter’s decision. As for Jeremy, he was willing, if Jaywalker thought it might help. And Harold Wexler displayed both his generosity and its limits by granting Jaywalker ten minutes to prepare what would now be his next-to-last witness.

  It would be enough.

  JAYWALKER: The defense calls Julie Estrada.

  The jurors watched intently as she made her way forward to the witness stand. If she wasn’t quite as pretty as Jeremy was handsome, she was still good to look at, with the same surprising blond hair and blue-gray eyes as her brother. And there was a hint of defiance in the way she walked and held herself, a hint that Jaywalker hoped wasn’t lost on the jurors, or misread by them.

  JAYWALKER: Are you related to the defendant?

  JULIE: Yes. He’s my brother.

  JAYWALKER: Are you older than he is, or younger?

  JULIE: I’m older, by about five minutes.

  Jaywalker’s peripheral vision picked up a handful of smiles and nods in the jury box. This was going to work, he told himself. It better, came the response.

  He had Julie describe the brother she’d once had, back before the summer of Miranda and the Raiders. Jeremy had been almost perfect, she recalled. He’d never been the smartest kid at school. He was, well, a little slow, according to his teachers. And he was shy. But he was polite and considerate, and he worked to bring home money to help his mother. And he was always fun to be around.

  JAYWALKER: Anything else?

  JULIE: [Inaudible.]

  JAYWALKER: I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that.

  JULIE: Nothing.

  JAYWALKER: What was it you said?

  JULIE: I said, “I want him back.”

  As the tears ran down her face, she made no attempt to hide them. And Jaywalker, who knew how to be a gentlema
n and where they kept the tissues for just such moments, didn’t go to her rescue. Instead, he moved forward into June and July, and asked her if she’d begun to observe a different Jeremy.

  JULIE: Yes, very different.

  JAYWALKER: In what ways?

  JULIE: He started seeming afraid of everything all the time. He thought he was being followed. He couldn’t sleep. He stopped eating. He’d move the food around on his plate, but he wouldn’t eat it. He jumped at loud noises. He couldn’t look me in the eye anymore. He began to stutter, and he developed these funny movements in the muscles of his face, uh—

  JAYWALKER: Tics?

  JULIE: Yes, tics.

  JAYWALKER: As the weeks went on, did he seem to get better, or worse?

  JULIE: Worse, much worse.

  JAYWALKER: How so?

  JULIE: He lost weight. He got these dark circles around his eyes. He would cry for no reason, or at least no reason he would talk about. And he, he—

  JAYWALKER: What?

  JULIE: He began…he began to wet his bed. He didn’t think we knew, my mother and I. And we pretended we didn’t. But we did, we knew.

  Jaywalker let that one hang there for a few beats. He tried to imagine something more devastating to a seventeen-year-old boy than regressing into bed-wetting. The only thing he could come up with was having his mother and twin sister aware of it. And as Jaywalker opened his mouth to ask his next question, he heard a muffled sound behind him. When he turned to look, he saw that Jeremy had slumped forward and laid his head on the defense table. For a horrified second, Jaywalker thought the young man might have passed out or, worse yet, fallen asleep. But then the heaving of Jeremy’s shoulders gave him away, and Jaywalker could tell he was sobbing. And he realized that until that moment, the poor kid had thought he’d gotten away with stripping the wet sheets off, secretly washing and drying them, and then remaking his bed before nightfall. Even as Jaywalker winced at having added yet another layer of humiliation to his own client’s anguish, he caught himself wondering if the jurors had understood what had just happened, and found himself hoping they had.