Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  Only on the twelfth and final count of the indictment was his answer different. “Guilty,” he said, “with a recommendation of—”

  Wexler banged his gavel repeatedly, loud enough to drown out the rest. Only when the courtroom had fallen silent, save for some muffled sobbing from the rear, did Mr. Craig take the opportunity to say “leniency.”

  Jaywalker and Jeremy slumped down into their seats like a pair of marionettes whose strings had suddenly been cut.

  “Do you wish the jury polled?” Jaywalker heard the judge asking him. He was about to say no, it wasn’t necessary. The twelfth count of the indictment had charged Jeremy with a violation of the New York City Administrative Code that made it unlawful to fire a gun within city limits. It was an unclassified misdemeanor that carried a maximum sentence of six months in jail or a five hundred dollar fine. Jeremy had already done a year in jail, the equivalent of time served. If anything, the system owed him six months change. So no, he had absolutely no problem at all with the verdict.

  But when he looked to the jury box to say that, Jaywalker saw a dozen heads nodding his way expectantly. And then he remembered. In his summation he’d made a point of promising them that it wouldn’t be he or the prosecutor or the judge who would have the last word of the trial. It would be them. And now they were going to hold him to his promise.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we’d like the jury polled.”

  He watched and listened as, one by one, twelve of his and Jeremy Estrada’s fellow citizens stood up, looked them in the eye and, when asked, answered in a loud and clear voice, “Yes, that is my verdict.”

  26

  PERFECT SCHMERFECT

  Katherine Darcy was the first one to congratulate Jaywalker.

  “Why are you congratulating me?” he asked her. “You got your conviction. I lost.” It was true, if only in the most technical of senses. But, as always, Jaywalker was being hard on himself. He knew lawyers who would say they’d won if they got a manslaughter conviction on a murder case. Hell, he knew lawyers who’d put a hung jury in their victory column, or call it a win if they managed to keep a jury out overnight. To Jaywalker, an acquittal had always been an acquittal and a conviction a conviction. So to his way of thinking, he’d indeed lost and Darcy had won, not only beating him but snapping his winning streak at, well, whatever it had been.

  But far more important than any of that stuff was the fact that Jeremy was free again, not only from jail and the threat of a lengthy prison term but, as things would turn out, from the Raiders, as well. In time Jaywalker would learn that they’d disbanded some months before the trial had even begun and had reportedly regrouped for their aborted courtroom reunion only, as he’d guessed, at the urging of one Johnny Cantalupo. When Cantalupo’s role in the incident would be discovered, he and Jaywalker would become the subject of an inquiry demanded by Judge Harold Wexler, an inquiry that Judge Miles Sternbridge would mysteriously recuse himself from without giving a reason for doing so. Investigators would go so far as to unseal the file of Cantalupo’s drug conviction, the one he was currently on probation for. They would be hoping to find a smoking gun, as they say, some connection between him and Jaywalker. But when they’d pull the file, they would be disappointed to see that the notice of appearance didn’t have Jaywalker’s name on it after all, but that of some other lawyer they’d never even heard of. Some guy named Alan Fudderman. And the inquiry would stop there, at a dead end.

  For his efforts on behalf of Jeremy, Jaywalker’s earnings came to four thousand, one hundred and twenty-five dollars, plus three lunches, none consumed. Had he taken the trouble to keep track of his hours, which of course he hadn’t, the hourly rate for his services would have come out to a fraction over three dollars and fourteen cents. And that would be without deducting some five hundred dollars for a round-trip to Puerto Rico.

  As he always did, especially following a conviction, Jaywalker made a point of speaking with the jurors before they scattered. They told him they’d never given any thought to convicting Jeremy of murder, having decided halfway through Jaywalker’s opening statement that the case was at worst manslaughter. One of the jurors—they wouldn’t tell him which one—had briefly held out for conviction and had insisted on rehearing the eyewitnesses’ testimonies. But as soon as the rest of them had agreed to find Jeremy guilty of something, that juror had caved and gone along.

  “But how’d you settle on that administrative code violation?” Jaywalker asked them.

  It hadn’t been all that hard, they explained. Since the indictment began with murder and from there went to manslaughter and a bunch of lesser things, they figured the counts were arranged in order of severity of punishment. And once the judge had tried to sweet-talk them into trusting him to be lenient, they’d decided, in the words of William Craig, that “we couldn’t trust him farther than we could throw him.” So count twelve it had been.

  “Juries,” thought Jaywalker aloud that night as he lay in bed, exhausted but still exhilarated. “No matter how hard you try, you can never really predict what they’re going to do. But how I wish I had a dollar for every time they’ve surprised me by figuring things out and ending up returning the perfect verdict.”

  “Perfect schmerfect,” said Katherine Darcy. “And turn the light out, will you, so we can get a little sleep for once?”

  He dutifully turned off the light. Fortunately, the switch was within easy reach. Then again, in Jaywalker’s apartment, just about everything was within easy reach.

  “So tell me,” he said. “What does it stand for?”

  “If you’re talking about that thing you’ve got between your legs, it seems to me it stands for everything. Haven’t I told you how impressed I—”

  “No, no, not that. I mean the t in Katherine T. Darcy. As in K.T.”

  “Oh, that. It stands for terrific,” she said without missing a beat.

  He laughed out loud in the dark, the full-throated laugh of a man without a care in the world. Come to think of it, he’d been doing an awful lot of that over the past day or so.

  And Jeremy?

  Following the verdict, it had taken the New York City Department of Corrections four hours to release him from custody, which was just about average. Someone in records first had to determine that he had no open cases, outstanding warrants or detainers, and—notwithstanding the fact that he was a native-born American citizen—that he wasn’t wanted by Immigration. Then, this time in spite of the fact that for an entire year he’d been the only Jeremy Estrada in the entire system, a captain had to be summoned to make sure he was the right one. And finally Jeremy had to take and pass a quiz that required him to know not only his home address and date of birth, but the color of his eyes.

  Jaywalker hadn’t waited for him to come out, having had better things to do at the time. But two days later, Jeremy called to express his and his family’s appreciation, and to say that Jaywalker had saved his life.

  After that, there would be no word at all from him for a full year and a half. Which wasn’t all that unusual in Jaywalker’s business, where clients seemed to appear out of nowhere and then to disappear just as abruptly. But then, days before Christmas, a card would arrive in the mail, a mushy store-bought thing adorned with bluebirds and angels fluttering over a pair of newborn fawns nestled in the snow. Beneath the printed greeting, in careful manuscript, would be the words, “God bless you and thank you for everything, from both of us.” And although there would be no printed names or inked signatures, whether by design or simple inadvertence, the postmark on the envelope would divulge the origin. It was from Baltimore, which, as everyone knows, is in Marilyn.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I take very little credit for the story you’ve just read. It’s lifted from an actual case I myself tried at 100 Centre Street some years back. While much of it—including the incident that gave rise to the case, and the trial itself—is faithfully reported, I’ve made a number of changes, not only to disguise the participants
, but hopefully to make for a more readable and therefore better book. Unabridged trials, it turns out, can be pretty tedious affairs.

  As always, I’m extremely fortunate to have had the assistance of a wonderful literary agent in Bob Diforio and a fabulous editor in Leslie Wainger, and I can’t thank either of them enough. My wife, Sandy, continues to be my toughest critic but, once she finally gets around to reading what I’ve written, my biggest fan. Not far behind are my sister, Tillie, and her husband, Dave, my children Wendy, Ron and Tracy, and these days my granddaughters Darcy, Katie, Rachel and Amy.

  Finally, let me use this space to preemptively beg the forgiveness of Tom Farber—a good friend, former adversary and these days a very good judge, I’m quite sure—for allowing me to turn him into a woman, and then some. Sorry about that, Tom.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-6403-2

  OVERKILL

  Copyright © 2010 by Joseph Teller.

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