Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  Apparently not.

  “You could have just left this at the reception desk, you know.”

  Perhaps it was something he’d said or done, or not said or done. Maybe it was his faded jeans and work shirt, or the fact that he hadn’t shaved in two days. Or his showing up without an appointment, announced only by a voice over the intercom at the front desk. But Jaywalker had the distinct feeling it was none of those things.

  Back when he’d left the Legal Aid Society and gone into practice for himself, law schools were only beginning to turn out women graduates in significant numbers. As a result, women filled only a tiny minority of slots in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. The early arrivals, or at least those whom Jaywalker encountered, struck him as uniformly young, bright and attractive. They also tended to be extremely guarded, as though afraid some slightly older male defense lawyer was going to somehow take advantage of them.

  It took some doing, but over time Jaywalker managed to overcome that obstacle. It helped considerably that he soon developed a reputation as a good lawyer who could be trusted. But he learned some things along the way, too. Accustomed to calling male prosecutors by their first names without giving it a second thought, he discovered that if he did the same thing right off the bat with a female prosecutor, she was likely to take offense, thinking he was hitting on her. Or, worse yet, hitting on her to gain some edge in the courtroom. So he got smarter about that, and more careful in general.

  As the ranks of women prosecutors gradually grew from a small minority to a virtual majority, the problem largely disappeared. It might simply have been a matter of Jaywalker’s getting older and no longer being perceived as on the prowl. Because right around the same time, he’d noticed that the checkout girls at the supermarket had stopped smiling at him seductively; they were by that time much more interested in the young managers or the boys bagging groceries.

  Katherine Darcy was no checkout girl, and no recent law-school graduate. At forty, or whatever she was, she had nothing to fear from the twenty-five and thirty-year-old defense lawyers. Them she could treat as schoolboys. But Jaywalker had turned fifty not too long ago. When he straightened up, he was an even six feet. He’d kept his hair, even though it was currently working its way from gray to white. And enough women had told him he was good-looking, at least in a craggy sort of a way, that he’d come to accept it as a fact. Was it possible that in Katherine Darcy’s mind he posed a threat, much the same way he had to a younger generation of her officemates, twenty years ago? Was she perhaps afraid Jaywalker was approaching her not as a fellow lawyer sharing a case with her, albeit on opposite sides, but as a predator seeking to take advantage of her because he equated being a woman with weakness? Or, more simply put, maybe she thought he was trying to get into her pants so he could get into her files.

  As if.

  “That’s how it’s usually done,” she was telling him now.

  “How what’s usually done?” Getting into her pants?

  “Serving papers. At the reception desk.”

  “Right,” said Jaywalker. “It’s just that I had a couple of questions and thought if you weren’t too busy…” He let the thought hang there, inviting her to say that of course she wasn’t too busy.

  “What kind of questions?” she asked, making a point of looking first at her watch and then at the clock on the wall.

  “Well,” he said, “for one thing, have you by any chance heard of the Raiders?”

  “Aren’t they a baseball team?”

  “Close,” he said without bothering to correct her. His wife had had the same problem. Football, baseball, basketball. To her, they’d all been “sports,” and pretty much interchangeable. In her mind, and perhaps in Katherine Darcy’s, too, each fall the players put their bats and gloves in storage and replaced them with helmets and shoulder pads. In wintertime, when the cold chased them indoors, they simply stripped down to shorts and undershirts. They were still the same players and teams; only the uniforms and equipment had changed.

  “The Raiders are also a group of young thugs,” said Jaywalker. “A loosely organized gang who made it their business to target my client.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Why don’t you ask Teresa Morales about them?” he suggested.

  “What makes you think she’s heard of them?”

  “Because if my client’s telling the truth, and I think he is, she was one of them.”

  “You’re trying to tell me it was a coed gang?”

  “Hey,” said Jaywalker. “Welcome to the twenty-first century. No more stay-at-home moms or glass ceilings. If Mother Teresa were still with us, she might’ve traded in her rosary long ago and be packing a Ruger.”

  And in spite of herself, Katherine Darcy actually broke into something vaguely resembling a smile before quickly regaining control. “You said you had a couple of questions,” she reminded Jaywalker. “What’s the next one?”

  “I see you gave Mr. Fudderman a copy of the autopsy protocol,” he said. “But I didn’t notice a serology or toxicology report.” Both would show the presence of drugs or alcohol in Victor Quinones’s system at the time of his death, the former in his blood, the latter in tissue samples removed from his body.

  “Those take a little longer to come back.”

  “It’s been eight months,” said Jaywalker. He knew from experience that “a little longer to come back” generally meant two to three weeks at most.

  “I’ll look into it,” said Katherine Darcy. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Has the name Sandro come up at all? Or Alesandro?”

  “Not that I can recall. Why?”

  “Because,” said Jaywalker, “he seems to have been the leader of the gang.”

  She shrugged.

  “How about Shorty? Or Diego? Or Mousey?”

  Three more shrugs.

  “How about Man One and five years?”

  That brought a real smile from Katherine Darcy. “You don’t quit trying, do you?” she asked with what Jaywalker took to be a hint of grudging admiration.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “And what’s more, before this case is over, I’m going to get you to like me, or at least to realize I’m not out to hurt you. And I’m going to get an offer out of you, too. Because as you begin to look into some of these questions, I think you’re going to come to see that this isn’t really a murder case after all.”

  “I like you just fine,” she said, though it came out sounding like Barack Obama telling Hillary Clinton that she was likeable enough. “But you’re never going to get an offer out of me. Never.”

  Two days later, Jeremy’s mother met Jaywalker at the information booth of the courthouse. He would have preferred having her come to his office, but there was that little impediment of not having an office for her to come to. And he seriously doubted that she could survive climbing the three flights of stairs to his apartment.

  “This is Julie,” she said of a pretty young woman standing by her side. “Jeremy’s sister.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Jaywalker, shaking hands with her. “Older or younger?” To a woman who looked to him to be anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five, he had no idea which the more tactful guess might be.

  “Older,” said Julie. “By ten minutes.”

  “Aha.”

  So Jeremy had a twin sister. Funny, he’d never mentioned her. Then again, Jeremy wasn’t much of a mentioner. He volunteered little, revealing things only when absolutely forced to.

  “So how does it look for my son, Mr. Jakewalker?”

  Jaywalker turned back to Carmen. “We’re just getting started,” he told her. “But it’s a very serious case, as you know.”

  “Those guys gave him a very hard time,” said Julie.

  “Did you see any of it?” Jaywalker asked her. Maybe she could be a witness, able to testify to some of the things they’d said or done.

  “No,” she said. “But it had to be real
bad.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Jeremy.”

  “Things he said?”

  Even as he waited for Julie’s answer, he braced himself for the disappointment it would bring. No matter how graphically Jeremy might have described what the Raiders had done to him, neither his mother nor his sister would be permitted to repeat his accounts in court. It would be hearsay, the secondhand account of someone who hadn’t been there.

  But Julie surprised him. “No,” she told him. “It wasn’t just the things he said. It was how he said them, and how he acted.”

  “Here,” said Carmen, before slipping Jaywalker another of her folded envelopes. She did it so furtively that for an instant he feared it might contain drugs, instead of just money.

  They spoke for about half an hour. Jaywalker had to break up the meeting. He actually had a case on that morning, a young couple accused of shoplifting thirty dollars’ worth of baby food and formula for their hungry child. He had a little speech prepared that he was hoping would bring the judge to tears and the case to an end. He thanked Carmen and Julie, and headed to the bank of elevators to see if any of them might be working. As he waited to find out, he tore open the folded envelope and found two hundred dollars inside it.

  But that was hardly the best news of the morning. Julie Estrada had supplied that. It turned out that both she and her mother could testify after all. Not to anything Jeremy had said to them, but to how he’d acted that summer. That wouldn’t be secondhand words; it would be firsthand observations.

  And there was more.

  If Jeremy’s torment had been so significant as to be readily visible at home, it must have been far more severe than Jeremy had so far let on. Surely Jaywalker had made it clear how important the details were, how essential to any possible defense they might mount. Jeremy had to have heard that. Yet he’d continued to summarize, to gloss over events without ever going into particulars.

  Why?

  What was Jaywalker missing here?

  And all he could think was that it must be time for another trip out to Rikers Island.

  If Jaywalker’s earlier meetings with Jeremy had reminded him of dental extractions, Friday’s session proved to be the equivalent of a root canal. Instead of picking up where they’d left off and moving forward into the day of the fight and the shooting, Jaywalker insisted on backtracking, on going over the same events they’d already covered. But this time he demanded far more detail and focused on something he’d failed to do earlier.

  He forced Jeremy to not only describe the things that Sandro and his cohorts had done to him, but to talk about how those things had made him feel.

  They made little progress at first, because Jeremy was such a stranger to his own emotions. He could use words like nervous, scared and upset, but more revealing terms like embarrassed and humiliated simply weren’t part of his vocabulary. Finally Jaywalker decided to try a different tack. Instead of prodding his client for more and better descriptions of his inner reactions, he asked him if his everyday activities had changed, and if so, how.

  And the ice broke.

  Not all at once, of course; that would have been too much to expect from a young man as inarticulate as Jeremy. But while feelings were almost impossible for him to describe, activities were something else.

  In order to avoid the Raiders, Jeremy had been forced to alter his entire schedule. Having helped his mother out with after-school and weekend earnings since the age of fourteen, Jeremy lost three jobs over the course of that summer. He dropped out of school. He became a virtual prisoner, afraid to leave the apartment for days at a time. He was unable to eat or sleep, and lost so much weight that his clothes no longer fit him. He got blinding headaches and stomach cramps that doubled him over in pain, prompting his mother to threaten more than once to take him to the doctor. That would have meant the emergency room of the local hospital, which served the medical needs not only of the Estradas, but thousands of others who knew what it was like to have their electricity cut off.

  “Good!” exclaimed Jaywalker after one such revelation, causing Jeremy to look at him so strangely that he had to add, “Good you could tell me that, I mean.”

  From there they moved forward to the final day, and for the first time Jaywalker learned how seamless the transition had been, how Jeremy’s four months of anguish had all but dictated the ending. The fistfight with Victor Quinones hadn’t been some “You lookin’ at me?” “Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you” exchange between a couple of macho teenagers at all. It had been the predictable, almost inevitable explosion of everything that had preceded it. And the shooting that had followed it? Well, it would be Jaywalker’s job to show that it, too, had been just as predictable—and just as inevitable.

  He came away from Rikers Island with a whole new understanding of the case. Throughout his previous conversations with Jeremy, he’d completely failed to grasp the impact of everything that had happened to him. He hadn’t been harassed by Sandro and the others; he’d been tortured. He hadn’t just been embarrassed in front of his new girlfriend; he’d been devastated, over and over again, right up to and past the breaking point. And it had been the degree of that torture, and the depth of that devastation, that had combined to make it so painful for Jeremy to talk about. Pushed to the wall, he’d finally had it. And only then had Jaywalker come to appreciate the extent of what the young man had lived through, and what it had done to him.

  Riding the subway back to Manhattan, Jaywalker knew that his trip had been more than worth the effort. Because out of the ashes of that very same torture, up from the embers of that utter devastation, would rise his defense of Jeremy Estrada.

  6

  WELCOME TO TOMBSTONE

  Under New York State law, the crime of murder is defined as intentionally causing the death of another person. Gone are such archaic considerations as motive, premeditation and malice aforethought. It is sufficient that the defendant intends to cause the death of another and succeeds. It isn’t even necessary that his victim be the one he meant to kill.

  But there’s a defense written into the statute, too. If the jury can be persuaded that the defendant acted under the influence of “extreme emotional disturbance,” it may return a verdict of not guilty on a murder charge.

  If those words applied to anyone, Jaywalker decided, they had to apply to Jeremy Estrada. The cumulative effect of his torment at the hands of Sandro, Shorty, Diego, Victor and the rest of the Raiders had surely disturbed Jeremy, not only emotionally, but physically, as well. Could there possibly be any doubt that that disturbance had been “extreme”? It would take a closer reading of the statute to make sure, and an exhaustive study of the case law, but already Jaywalker knew he had the raw materials to make a good argument that the words fit Jeremy like a glove.

  There was one hitch, however, and it was a big one. The same statute that spoke of extreme emotional disturbance made it abundantly clear that it was a defense only to murder, not to manslaughter. In other words, it was a partial defense, permitting a jury to knock the crime down a notch, but not to forgive it altogether.

  Not that it wasn’t a start. A murder conviction would mean a mandatory life sentence, with the minimum to be set by the judge at anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five years. A sentence for first-degree manslaughter, on the other hand, had to be a determinate—or fixed—one, and could range from as little as five years to as many as twenty-five, again depending on the judge’s discretion.

  So in his mind, Jaywalker had already figured out a way to avoid a life sentence for Jeremy, even if a term of twenty-five years still loomed as a very real possibility. But he’d accomplished something else, too. He’d found the key with which he might just be able to unlock Katherine Darcy’s stranglehold on the case. She could talk all she wanted to about the case being an execution, and how she’d never offer a Man One on it. But Jaywalker no longer needed her to do that; a jury could do it on its own, without her blessing and even over her objection.


  Which, of course, Jaywalker would be sure to point out to her, next time they met. But he felt no particular need to rush back to see her. He might not exactly be in the driver’s seat yet, but at least he was no longer being dragged along bodily, clinging to the back bumper.

  The following Wednesday they appeared in Part 55 before the man who, for better or for worse, was to be their trial judge. Unlike Judge McGillicuddy, who worked in an “up front” part and sent cases out after a single appearance, Harold Wexler would hold on to the case forever. Forever being a relative term, but not all that relative. In Jeremy Estrada’s case, it would include all pretrial proceedings and hearings, the trial itself, if there was to be one, and the sentencing in the event the prosecution prevailed, which was about eighty percent of the time generally, though only about ten percent of the time if Jaywalker happened to be representing the defendant. Only after all that would the case finally leave Part 55 to begin its climb through appellate courts manned by other judges.

  Actually, to say, “They appeared in Part 55,” while technically true, would be pregnant with omission. A more instructive way of phrasing it would be, “Jaywalker appeared in Part 55 before Katherine Darcy did.”

  Jaywalker had been knocking around 100 Centre Street for more than twenty years. It was his home court, as he liked to call it, and he knew the players. He especially knew the judges, because it was his business to. Not that he socialized with them; Jaywalker didn’t socialize with anybody if he could help it. But he’d known a lot of the judges from back when they’d been colleagues of his at Legal Aid or adversaries in the D.A.’s office. Together they’d grown up in the system, often battling, sometimes brutally, but never personally. Jaywalker’s occasional antics might drive some of them crazy, but not one among them doubted that if the police were ever to come banging on the door after midnight, his would be the number they’d call.