Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  The buzzer sounded at 8:19 p.m.

  Once.

  We, the jury, would like to rehear the testimony of Dr. Seymour Kaplan regarding his reasons for concluding how close the gun was to Victor’s head when the defendant shot him between the eyes.

  William Craig

  Foreman

  P.S. Both direct and cross-examination.

  This was bad, thought Jaywalker, bad for a number of reasons. First of all, Kaplan was the last witness Jaywalker wanted the jurors to hear again. His opinion that the tip of the gun’s barrel had been at most five inches from its target was as devastating to Jeremy’s claim of self-defense as Detective Fortune’s forty-five-foot measurement had been. But unlike Fortune, Kaplan had come off as a thoroughly believable witness. So the jurors weren’t asking to hear his testimony again because they doubted him. Next there was the manner in which the note referred to the two young men. Victor Quinones had become “Victor,” in what Jaywalker took to be a humanizing touch. In contrast, Jeremy Estrada had had his name stripped away completely and had been reduced to the status of a depersonalized “defendant.” Then there was the inclusion of the phrase “shot him between the eyes.” To Jaywalker, those words seemed not only unnecessarily gratuitous but pointedly accusatory. The jurors could have said “the final shot,” “the fatal shot,” or even “the head shot.” But they hadn’t. They’d gone out of their way to make it sound like the overkill Katherine Darcy had argued it had been. Finally there was the specification that they wanted both direct examination and cross on the matter. That was a typical enough request, and under different circumstances Jaywalker would have been heartened by it. But here it had clearly been an afterthought. Not only had it been tacked onto the note as a postscript, it had been added in a handwriting visibly different from that of Mr. Craig’s. And whoever had written it apparently hadn’t felt on solid enough ground to have signed his or her name beneath it.

  All things considered, it was a very bad note.

  It was after nine o’clock by the time the jurors got what they’d asked for, and from the looks on their faces they would be more careful next time. It had taken the court reporter fifteen minutes to locate and mark the portions of the testimony relevant to the request, another fifteen minutes to reassemble everyone in the courtroom, and a third fifteen minutes for the reporter to read the questions and answers aloud to the jury. She did so, as reporters are instructed to do, without inflection, in order to avoid favoring one side or the other, either deliberately or unconsciously. The result was, as it almost always is in read-backs, a rapid-fire monotone so flat and so uninteresting as to be positively numbing.

  That said, it didn’t come off as devastatingly as Jaywalker had feared. To be sure, there was Dr. Kaplan’s opinion that the gun had been anywhere from a quarter of an inch to four or five inches away from its target. And in support of that opinion was his finding of “radial tearing” around the edge of the wound, indicating that the scalp had been literally lifted off the skull. But on cross, Jaywalker had succeeded in getting Kaplan to admit that he’d found no evidence of a “muzzle stamp,” singed eyebrows, “stippling” or “fouling.” And if the absence of those things didn’t truly undermine the doctor’s conclusion, it made for good listening.

  At least for Jaywalker.

  The jury’s final note of the evening arrived at 10:23 p.m., precisely seven minutes before Judge Wexler was going to send them to a hotel for the night whether they liked it or not.

  We, the jury, are tired and would like to stop deliberating. We also would like to hear, very first thing tomorrow morning, the testimony of the three eyewitnesses, Miss Lopez, Mr. Porter and Teresa Morales, regarding how after the first shot or shots, the defendant chased the victim before shooting him the last time, and exactly how the defendant fired the last shot.

  Nothing else, please. And we need only the direct examination this time.

  William Craig

  Jury Foreman

  This was worse, far worse.

  And not just the direct-examination-only specification. While it was painful to hear, the truth was that Jaywalker had asked few if any questions about the final chase and shot, having preferred at the time to get the three eyewitnesses off the stand before they could inflict more damage. And Jeremy’s testimony had never really addressed the issue. When it came right down to it, the most he’d been able to say was that he didn’t remember.

  No, this was worse because it meant that in the morning the jurors would resume their deliberations immediately after hearing the three most damaging portions of the eyewitness accounts, the portions that blew away Jeremy’s claim of self-defense and changed the case from justification to execution.

  So this was how it was going to end. The jurors would come back in the morning, listen to the three accounts and find Jeremy guilty. They might throw him a break and convict him only of manslaughter, on the theory that he’d been under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance. Or they might not. But what was the difference? Either way, he wouldn’t be seeing daylight for the next twenty or twenty-five years.

  The jurors were sent to their hotel. Jeremy was led back into the pens. The judge went home. The clerk and court officers began locking up. It was the court reporter who stopped Jaywalker and Katherine Darcy.

  “Listen,” she said. “I rotate with another reporter, and I’m not due back here until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. If you want the transcript marked for the read-back, we’ve got to do it now.”

  Darcy seemed agreeable enough. And why not? Here she was, on the verge of a conviction in her first murder trial. And she could always go down to her office on the seventh floor, find a sofa to curl up on and catch six or seven hours of sleep. Jaywalker, on the other hand, was totally out of adrenaline, in serious danger of crashing and a long subway ride from home. But it seemed he had no choice.

  It took them forty minutes to isolate and mark all the relevant portions of the testimony. Jaywalker pretty much sat back and let Darcy and the reporter do the work. They’d been her witnesses, after all, and she knew from her notes where she’d asked them what. Still, it seemed to take forever. When they were finally finished, the reporter thanked them and ducked out the side door, the only one that wasn’t double-bolted shut. “Turn off the lights on your way out,” she told them. “The door will lock itself.”

  Jaywalker took one last look at the clock. 11:43 p.m. He discovered he could barely stand up. It wasn’t just lack of sleep, and it certainly wasn’t lack of food: that Velveeta-on-white must have had a good two hundred calories in it, not to mention a week’s requirement of sodium, guar gum, xanthan gum and food coloring. No, it was the losing, or at least the certainty that he was going to.

  “You okay?” Darcy asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “No. I don’t know. But hey, congratulations.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Anything can still happen. They’re a weird bunch, this jury.”

  Like she was an old hand at this.

  He followed her out of the courtroom, flicking off the lights and pulling the side door closed until he heard the lock click. He knew from night-court experiences that the north bank of elevators would be shut down. Besides which, only the south bank ones opened onto the seventh floor, where the district attorney’s offices were. But when he pressed the button, no little orange light came on. He figured maybe the bulb had burned out, but when he tried the button on the other side of the bank, the same thing happened.

  They waited five or six minutes, elevatorless.

  “You up for walking?” he asked her.

  “Okay,” she said. “But no funny stuff. I’ve heard about you and stairwells.”

  He smiled as much as he could, which wasn’t much. But when he tried the doorknob to the first set of stairs, he found it locked. As he did with the second set. “Welcome to post-9/11 security,” he said. “I guess they lock these things up at night now.”

  “So we’re stranded?”


  “Nah,” he said. “Got your cell phone?”

  “It’s in my office.”

  “Great.”

  “How about yours?”

  “Don’t own one.” It was the truth, a lawyer without a cell phone. But Jaywalker was a dinosaur among lawyers, a throwback to the Jurassic era, and he was determined to go to his grave without ever having had one of the damned things.

  Then he got an idea. “Follow me,” he said, and started walking back to the north end of the corridor.

  Darcy hesitated. Some part of her must have sensed that following Jaywalker was right up there with falling in line behind a column of lemmings. But follow she did, though at a distance.

  Down at the end of the hall was a door. It, too, was locked, as Jaywalker had fully expected. He reached into his jacket pocket. He might not have a cell phone, but he did have a wallet. There was no money in it—that he carried folded in his back pocket and secured against jostlers by a thick rubber band—but he did have plastic. He found his get-out-of-jail card, more officially known as a New York City Department of Corrections Attorney Identification. It took him ten seconds to slip the lock with it. Back in his DEA days, it would have been less than five.

  “What’s in here?” Darcy asked.

  “Judges’ chambers. And,” he added, turning on the lights and rounding a corner, “voila! Their private elevator.” He pressed the button, and within half a minute an empty elevator opened in front of their eyes and beckoned them aboard. It was much smaller than the building’s regular ones, and much nicer. Instead of graffiti-resistant brushed metal walls, this one was paneled in what looked to be real wood. In place of industrial flooring, it sported red carpeting. A bit faded and worn, to be sure, but red carpeting nonetheless. And where the building’s other elevators were illuminated by harsh fluorescent bulbs glaring down through low-hanging plastic grids, this one was bathed in soft tones from invisible fixtures recessed into a ceiling a good ten feet above their heads.

  “So this is how the other half lives,” said Darcy, stepping in gingerly, not unlike the way Cinderella must have mounted the steps to the coach that was to take her to the ball.

  “This, a black robe and a gavel,” said Jaywalker. “Not to mention a special ticket-proof license plate.” He followed her on and pressed One. The door closed, and they began descending silently.

  “Well,” said Darcy, “I want to thank you for getting us out of here. And I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Jaywalker looked at his watch. “It is morning,” he announced, noticing that it was actually a minute past midnight.

  But evidently Jaywalker’s watch was a minute fast. Or perhaps it was a matter of the elevator’s automatic timing mechanism being a minute slow. Whichever was the case, the result was indisputable. Only seconds into their descent, the lights above them flickered once and went off, leaving them in absolute blackness as they gently slowed to a complete stop.

  24

  NICE SHOES, YOUR HONOR

  “You did that,” were the first words out of Katherine Darcy’s mouth.

  “I’d love to take the credit for it,” said Jaywalker. “But I’m not half that clever.” He explained that the thing must have been on some sort of timer, and that it seemed to have been their bad luck to discover that the hard way.

  “Don’t the night-court judges use this elevator?” Darcy asked. Or at least her voice asked. It was an eerie feeling, talking with somebody in such complete blackness. Sure, Jaywalker had had his share of conversations in the dark and then some. But not this kind of dark. Not absolute, utter, unrelenting darkness. It was spooky, is what it was.

  “Don’t they?” Darcy’s voice was asking.

  “Don’t they what?”

  “Use this elevator? The judges who work night court?”

  “Yeah,” said Jaywalker. “But they have special keys to override the system. Like the fire department.”

  “Still—”

  “What’s tonight?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Darcy. “Get-Stranded-in-the-Elevator Night?”

  “No, what night of the week?”

  “Monday,” she said. “Or at least it was until you proclaimed it morning.”

  “Is that why you wore black—”

  “What?”

  “—to show the jury you were in mourning for Victor Quinones?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” said the voice.

  Okay, so maybe he’d been mistaken about that. “Sorry,” he said.

  The voice said nothing.

  “Anyway,” he told it, “if it’s Monday, or was Monday, that means there’s no night court tonight. Or last night.”

  “Great.” The voice was back. “So what do we do?”

  “We start,” he said, “by playing with the buttons.”

  He found them quickly enough simply by running his hands across the front panels of the elevator. But no matter how he pushed or pulled them, or in what order or combination, none of them did anything. With some additional groping, he located the slit for the override key and spent twenty minutes trying to turn it with one of his keys or pick it with a paper clip. Eventually the end of the paper clip broke off, sticking in the slit and making further attempts impossible. He spent twenty more minutes unsuccessfully trying to find a release mechanism for the door, and another ten assuring himself that there was no emergency phone anywhere in the elevator.

  “I give up,” he said.

  “It’s getting hot in here,” Darcy said.

  She was right. The elevator’s air-conditioning had obviously gone off when the lights and power had. And it was the middle of May, after all, and the past few Mays, present month included, had been pretty much holding their own in the global-warming sweepstakes. Jaywalker thought about commenting on Darcy’s decision to wear a long skirt but decided against it. He’d taken off his jacket, loosened his tie and turned up his shirtsleeves even before he’d played Find the Button. Then again, he tended to do those things as soon as he was out of the courtroom.

  But yes, it was getting hot.

  “How long can we last in here?” Darcy asked.

  “Oh, at least another five minutes.”

  “I’m serious.” And she sounded it.

  “Longer than you’d think,” said Jaywalker.

  “What’s that supposed to that mean?”

  “That I have absolutely no idea,” he admitted.

  She tried calling out for a while, alternating between “Help!” and “Hello there!” She tried banging on the walls, stomping on the floor, and shaking the elevator back and forth. It turned out to be well insulated, padded and impervious to shaking.

  Jaywalker took off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. Placing his back against the wall of the elevator, he allowed himself to slide down until he came to a sitting position. “Relax,” he said. “You’re using up too much oxygen.” A moment later he felt her join him. Not quite felt her, but sensed her closeness.

  “Seriously,” she said. “How long before we run out of oxygen?”

  “I once read you don’t die of oxygen starvation,” he assured her. “Carbon dioxide poisoning kills you first.”

  “That’s comforting,” she said. “Hey.”

  “Hey, what?”

  “That was a great summation.”

  “Yours, too.”

  “No,” she said. “I really mean it. By the time you sat down, half of me was rooting for your kid.”

  “Right. And then you got up and blew us out of the water.”

  “I was only doing my job,” she said.

  “Well, you did it very well. For a rookie.”

  He felt an elbow jab him in the ribs. Or maybe it had been a fist; in the dark it was hard to tell. But he readied his hand to catch it next time, just in case.

  “How did you get those clowns to show up in Oakland Raiders outfits?” she wanted to know.

  “I swear I had nothing to do with that,” he said. “I ran int
o a former client, and he wanted to know all about the case. So I told him. He must’ve figured it out on his own that it might help if they were to make a cameo appearance.”

  “Jaywalker the innocent.”

  “Always.”

  “And this is for making a fool of Detective Fortune, who just happens to be married to my neph—”

  He caught her on the word this, or pretty close to it. And it must have been a fist, because he caught her by the wrist. It was surprisingly thin, thin enough for him to wrap his hand completely around it and hold on. And it must have been the wrist farther from him, because when he pulled on it, the rest of her came with it, across his body and onto his lap. They kissed, or at least he did.

  “That was my eye,” she told him.

  He tried again.

  “Better.”

  But if making out in the dark on the floor of an elevator was Jaywalker’s idea of a good time, it apparently wasn’t Darcy’s. “We have to get some air in here,” she insisted, “before we die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “Carbon dioxide poisoning.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No you didn’t,” he said. “You said—”

  “Whatever. Get us some air, Jaywalker.”

  As much as he hated to get up, he did. This time he reached upward, for the ceiling. He figured there had to be a removable panel somewhere up there. Didn’t all elevators have one, in order to get at the cables? But the ceiling was too high. He crouched low and jumped. Nothing.

  “What are you doing?” Darcy wanted to know.

  “Trying to get you some air.”

  “By doing jumping jacks?”

  He explained his thinking to her. It was she who came up with the idea of climbing up on his shoulders, as he would remind her several times over the days to come.

  The first impediment, as they quickly discovered when she placed one foot atop his extended knee, was her heels. The result was painful, but easily enough remedied. Not so her long narrow skirt, which made it difficult for her to bend her own knees and would have made sitting on his shoulders all but impossible.