Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  Following his reinstatement, he’d tried a murder case up in Rockland County and handled a few things that had come his way, such as Johnny Cantalupo’s drug case. But he’d been slow to rebuild his practice, unsure that he wanted to keep lawyering for a living. He’d tried his hand at writing, figuring he had plenty of stories to tell. But writing took self-discipline, he’d soon discovered, and Jaywalker and self-discipline had always had something of a rocky relationship.

  So out to Rikers it would be, to the grim little island plunked halfway between the Bronx and Queens. From afar it could fool you, its redbrick buildings looking pretty much like the public housing on the mainland. It was only when you got close that you noticed. On top of those buildings were guard towers manned by sharpshooters with automatic rifles and 12-gauge shotguns. And where there were openings for windows, in place of glass there were thick steel bars that held back the equivalent of a medium-sized city’s entire population.

  “Thanks for coming out,” said Jeremy once they were seated across a table in the counsel visit room. There was no wire mesh partition separating them this time, only a uniformed corrections officer sitting thirty feet away. “None of the other lawyers ever come here,” Jeremy added.

  Jaywalker smiled. He liked nothing better than to be reminded that he was different from other lawyers. “You’re welcome,” he said. Then he explained his purpose in making the trip. “Last time we met, you gave me a pretty good idea of what happened, in general terms. It was very helpful, a good place to start. Today, I’m here for the details. Do you know what details are?”

  “Sure,” said Jeremy.

  But his uncertain smile left Jaywalker less than convinced. “Do me a favor, will you?”

  Jeremy nodded. As would always be the case, he was eager to please. The problem was that he often didn’t know how to. He reminded Jaywalker of a not-too-bright puppy he’d gotten his daughter when she was five or six. Asked to sit, it would lie down. Told to lie down, it would roll over. Instructed to stay, it would come running. But it did everything with such unflagging energy and good humor that it was impossible to punish, and ended up getting more treats than a kid on Halloween.

  “Describe me,” said Jaywalker, “in as much detail as you possibly can.”

  “Describe you?” said an uncertain Jeremy.

  “Yeah. Pretend you’re describing me for somebody who’s never met me and will have to pick me out from fifty people on a subway platform. Pretend your life depends on his being able to recognize me, just from what you tell him I look like.”

  “Can I look at you while I do it?” Jeremy asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  Jeremy gave it his best shot, but as shots went, it fell far short of the rim. Jaywalker had to prompt him half a dozen times, reminding him to include clothing, height, weight, body build, hair color, absence or presence of facial hair, and age. With the prompting, Jeremy proved that he was a competent enough observer. In other words, if Jaywalker tried hard enough and long enough, he could extract accurate details. Well, except for age, anyway. When he got to that, Jeremy looked him up and down several times, then took a guess.

  “Thirty-five?”

  “Thank you,” said Jaywalker, unable to hide a smile. It wasn’t that he was flattered; Jaywalker didn’t do flattered. No, he was remembering back when he himself had been in his teens, and anyone over thirty was so ancient that the numbers didn’t matter.

  “Was I close?” Jeremy asked.

  “I’m actually fifty-two,” Jaywalker confessed.

  “Wow!” said Jeremy. “Don’t die before my case is over, okay?”

  Jaywalker assured him he’d try his best not to.

  They spent the next two hours going over the events that had led up to the day of the shooting, with Jaywalker prodding for details and Jeremy doing his best to supply them. At first it went surprisingly well, with Jeremy’s face lighting up from time to time, and his words, if not quite flowing, at least trickling out at a fairly steady pace.

  He’d been walking to school one morning. It had to have been sometime in May, a little over a year ago. It was a new school he was going to, that he’d begun in January. He’d been going to Catholic school before then, but his mother had reached the point where she could no longer afford the tuition.

  He’d started noticing this girl. This young lady, he called her. She worked in a flower shop on the avenue, and he’d see her out front sometimes, sweeping out the place before opening up. It had taken him a week to get up the courage to stop and talk to her, but finally he’d made himself do it. They’d told each other their names. Hers was Miranda.

  “What did she look like?” Jaywalker asked, wondering if their exercise a few minutes earlier would pay dividends.

  “She was pretty,” said Jeremy. “Very, very, very pretty. Thin, real thin like. A couple inches shorter than me. I’m five-nine, five-ten. Reddish-brown hair, long and straight. And these great big brown eyes. Yeah, very pretty.”

  They’d begun seeing each other. “Not like going out, you know. Not really dating. We’d sit on a park bench and talk. We’d eat ice cream cones. We’d talk about TV shows, our families. Silly stuff like that. I know it’s gonna sound dumb, but it was the happiest time of my life.”

  “Doesn’t sound dumb at all,” said Jaywalker. “Sounds wonderful.” What he didn’t say was that for the young man sitting across the table from him in the orange jumpsuit, the chances of his ever feeling that way again were just this side of nonexistent.

  Up to that point, Jeremy had performed beyond Jaywalker’s expectations. Sure, there’d been some interruptions and requests for specifics, but at one point Jeremy had spoken uninterrupted for a minute or more, which might have been a record for him. Then again, he’d been talking about Miranda and what he’d described as the best part of his life. Now he was about to begin talking about the worst part of his life, the “problem,” as his mother called it. And even as Jeremy got ready to go on, Jaywalker could see an unmistakable tightening of the young man’s facial muscles and sense a noticeable tensing of his entire body.

  “Then these guys started coming around.”

  “How many?” Jaywalker asked.

  “Usually there were about six or seven of them. Sometimes a few more, sometimes less. One was a girl. And one of them, sorta the leader, would go like Miranda was his lady.”

  “Was that true? I mean, had she been?”

  “Nah. He was just runnin’ his mouth, was all.”

  “How old were they?” Jaywalker asked. He knew from the death certificate that Victor Quinones had been twenty at the time of his death.

  “My age, I guess. Or a little bit older.”

  At first it had just been taunts and name-calling, harmless enough stuff. But soon it began to escalate into more.

  “What kind of more?”

  “They’d follow us, or follow me if I was alone. They’d say they were going to get me. That kind of stuff. You know.”

  “No,” said Jaywalker, “I don’t know. You have to tell me. Just like you were able to tell me what Miranda looked like.”

  But as easy as it had been for Jeremy to describe Miranda, that was how hard it was for him to talk about the “stuff” he’d had to put up with at the hands of his tormenters. They got through it, Jaywalker and Jeremy, but it was tough slogging, and by the time they reached the day of the fight and the shooting, they’d been it at it for almost three hours, and Jaywalker decided to call it a day. He still had precious little in the way of real detail, but he’d learned a few things.

  The group that had given Jeremy such a hard time that summer had called themselves the Raiders. Members had occasionally sported Oakland Raider football jerseys or caps, bearing the skull and crossbones of pirate lore. Several had matching tattoos, and a few had worn windowpanes, decorative coverings on their teeth. Their self-appointed leader, the one who’d acted as though Miranda belonged to him, had been a young man named Alesandro, whom the others had cal
led Sandro. Among his followers had been Shorty, a guy who Jeremy guessed couldn’t have been more than five-two, but who had a quick temper and a foul mouth. There’d been Diego, a tall, skinny kid with tattoos covering both arms, and a little guy called Mousey. The female member of the group had been Teresa, a name Jaywalker recognized from the papers Alan Fudderman had given him. If she was Teresa Morales, she’d been the girlfriend of Victor Quinones, and had been an eyewitness to the fight and the shooting.

  Which, of course, created a problem.

  Of the four people who’d been right there for that final shot, one—Victor—was dead. As for Miranda, Jeremy hadn’t seen or heard from her in eight months, and had no idea where she might be. Jeremy himself was what the law referred to as an interested witness, which meant that his version of the events was likely to be devalued by a jury. There was even an instruction a judge was permitted to include in his charge to the jurors, specifying that in assessing the defendant’s credibility, they could consider his stake in the outcome of the trial, a stake that was greater than that of any other witness.

  So with Miranda missing and Jeremy’s testimony likely to be viewed with skepticism, Teresa Morales promised to be a key witness. And the fact that she’d been Victor’s girlfriend didn’t exactly comfort Jaywalker. Was she going to agree that Victor and the others had harassed Jeremy in the weeks and months leading up to the fight? And was she likely to support Jeremy’s account of the killing?

  Not a chance.

  So Jaywalker had made a point of pressing Jeremy to find out if there was anyone else who might be able to back up his version of things.

  “No,” said Jeremy. “Only me and Miranda.”

  He did describe one incident that had taken place about a week before the shooting. The group had tried to get at him, he said, while he was in a barbershop. But the shop had since closed, he’d heard, and the owner—who, except for Jeremy and Miranda, had been the only one around that day—had moved back to Puerto Rico.

  Other than that, Jeremy couldn’t come up with anybody who might be able to corroborate his account of anything.

  Riding the subway back home, Jaywalker played back the meeting in his mind. One of the things that struck him was the contrast in Jeremy’s moods. It almost seemed to him that there were two Jeremys. Early on in the visit—while talking about Miranda, for example—he’d been bright-eyed and forthcoming, capable of providing exactly the sort of specifics that would make him a pretty decent witness on the stand. But moments later he’d tightened up and reverted to the quiet Jeremy, the Jeremy of nods and grunts and one-word answers. And Jaywalker? He thought he understood the reason, figured it was attributable to a combination of Jeremy’s natural shyness and slowness, along with the best-of-times/worst-of-times business. After all, who didn’t prefer to talk about the good stuff and minimize the bad? Jaywalker himself was no exception to the rule. Ask him how a trial of his had turned out and he’d tell you, “We won,” and launch into an unbidden twenty-minute monologue. But if it had gone badly, he would unconsciously remove himself and his ego from the equation and answer, “They convicted him,” and let it go at that.

  But looking back later at these early stages of his dialogue with Jeremy Estrada, Jaywalker would realize that he’d been missing something important. Despite all his probing and prompting, and notwithstanding his clever examples and constant reminders, when it came down to comprehending the real reason behind Jeremy’s reticence and his own inability to pierce through it, he was making little progress. In time he’d come to understand that it hadn’t simply been a matter of a young man’s natural preference for focusing on good things rather than bad ones. No, the real reason for Jeremy’s reluctance to talk about that summer ran much deeper than that, and would eventually take both lawyer and client into much darker territory.

  5

  JUST GETTING STARTED

  That night, Jaywalker sat down at his computer. It actually had its own table, if you didn’t want to get too picky about table. Its former life had been spent as a shipping crate. And not one of those cutesy things they sell at Pottery Barn or Eddie Bauer, either. This one was the real thing, complete with bent nails, rusted wire and fist-sized holes where shipboard mice had gnawed through the wood. It bore tags and stamps from faraway places like Singapore, Jakarta and someplace that looked like Hangcock but probably wasn’t. And every inch of the thing’s surface was covered with a thousand daggerlike splinters-in-waiting.

  But as lovely as it was, it made for a pretty lousy desk. Its surface was uneven, it lacked both drawers and knee room, and the whole thing wobbled from side to side and vibrated in synch with the printer. All that said, the price had been right. He’d found it abandoned on a street corner eight or nine years ago. At least he’d assumed it had been abandoned. Still, he’d lapsed back into his DEA days and conducted surveillance on it for a while with negative results. Then he’d pounced, dragging the thing off as fast as he could. Two minutes into a five-block struggle, he’d noticed a couple of guys catching up to him from the rear. “Busted,” he’d thought, and was already thinking up defenses like entrapment, lack of intent and temporary insanity. But the guys turned out to be neither cops nor crate owners, only day laborers on their way home from work. Assessing the situation without comment, they proceeded to hoist the thing up in the air and carry it four and a half blocks and then up three flights of stairs. All a grateful Jaywalker could do was to take their lunch pails and lead the way, thanking them more times than was seemly. And when he tried to force a twenty-dollar bill on them, they declined with broad smiles and “No, gracias.” Was it possible that there was not only one god on duty that day, but two? And that both of them were likely to be undocumented aliens?

  In any event, from that moment on the thing was more than just a crate; it was the embodiment of people at their best. And the sight of it would always bring a smile to Jaywalker’s face.

  So he sat at it now, composing a set of motion papers in Jeremy’s case. He’d long ago developed a template of sorts, so it was pretty much a matter of filling in the blanks and fine-tuning what relief to ask the court for.

  There was nothing he needed to suppress because of any Constitutional violation of his client’s rights. Because Jeremy had surrendered seven months after the killing, no physical evidence had been seized from him. Because he’d been accompanied by an attorney, even one unschooled in criminal practice, the detectives hadn’t questioned him. They’d arranged a lineup at which an unnamed witness had identified Jeremy. But according to papers Fudderman had received from the D.A.’s office, the ID had been merely “confirmatory,” because the witness “had seen the defendant on a number of prior occasions.” To Jaywalker, that careful wording almost certainly meant that the identifier had been Victor Quinones’s girlfriend, Teresa Morales. Still, he included a motion to suppress her identification of Jeremy, figuring it might get him a pretrial hearing, or at least force Katherine Darcy to elaborate a bit on the number of prior occasions. If that number turned out to be substantial enough, it might work in Jeremy’s favor, corroborating his claim that the group had been constantly harassing him.

  Next Jaywalker moved to exclude any inquiry by the prosecution into Jeremy’s prior arrest. It had been for marijuana possession, and Jaywalker still didn’t know exactly what had happened with the case. But he already knew that if they were ever to go to trial, Jeremy would have to testify. And he didn’t want some juror turning against him just because he’d smoked a joint back when he was sixteen.

  He knocked out a Demand to Produce, asking the prosecution for all sorts of documents, reports, photographs and particulars relating to the case. Finally, he asked the court to dismiss the case altogether, or in the alternative to reduce the charge from murder to some level of manslaughter. This request, he knew full well, would be DOA. If Teresa Morales had testified before the grand jury, as Jaywalker was all but certain she had, she would have described the final point-blank shot between the eyes,
and no judge on earth was going to dismiss or reduce anything. It had been, as Darcy had so delicately described it, an execution.

  He printed out half a dozen copies of the papers. Jaywalker always made it a point to give his client a copy, whether he’d requested it or not. The D.A. got one, and the court clerk got one. The remaining three Jaywalker would place in separate files for safekeeping, obsessive-compulsive that he was.

  With no business in court over the next few days, he thought about mailing the D.A. and the court clerk their copies. But it being a murder case, the motion papers were a bit more lengthy than usual, and Jaywalker was short on stamps and couldn’t be sure how much postage would be required. He could have walked the dozen blocks to the post office and stood in line for twenty minutes, but the thought of doing either of those things was resistible. So he said “Fuck it,” and went on to Plan C, which would mean taking the subway downtown to serve and file the things the old-fashioned way, by hand.

  And then he had a sudden inspiration. Plan C, Variation 2, he would have called it, had he been talking to himself at that moment. Instead of simply serving the D.A.’s office by dropping a copy off at their seventh-floor reception desk and having them time-stamp the others, he decided he might as well peek in on his good friend Katherine Darcy and personally deliver her a courtesy copy. Just that morning there’d been an article in the Times on global warming. The polar ice caps, it seemed, were melting at an accelerated rate, far more rapidly than computer models had predicted just two years ago. So who was to say? Could the icy Ms. Darcy, too, have thawed just a bit over the past few days?