Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  “I think February or March is realistic,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of witnesses to locate. One is out of state, and the other is out of the country.”

  “This case is already fourteen months old,” said Wexler. The implication was clear.

  “So it is,” said Jaywalker. “And that’s exactly how much time Ms. Darcy has had to prepare. I’ve had three months.”

  “February first,” said the judge. “For trial.”

  “That’s a Sunday,” observed the court clerk.

  “Terrific. February second.”

  And that was Harold Wexler on a good day.

  “What witnesses?” Katherine Darcy asked Jaywalker as soon as they were outside the courtroom.

  He could have told her it was none of her business. Under New York rules, neither side was under an obligation to reveal the names of its witnesses at this point, and with a few specific exceptions like alibis and psychiatrists, the defense was never required to do so. But Jaywalker was a horse trader at heart, and he immediately sized up the question as an opportunity to learn something.

  “Who wants to know?” he asked in mock seriousness.

  “Never mind,” she said. All serious, no mock.

  “Don’t you ever lighten up?”

  “Of course I do,” she insisted. “Only this is a murder case, and a bad one.” And with that, she began walking away, toward the elevator bank.

  “Got any good ones?” he asked, lengthening his stride to catch up to her without making it too obvious.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You mean it’s an execution.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “Listen,” said Jaywalker. “Do you have anything else on?”

  Her response was to glance down at her dress, then to look back up at him with a mixture of confusion and panic. Had it been a New Yorker cartoon contest calling for a caption, his entry would have been, “What do you have, X-ray eyes?”

  He decided some clarification was in order. “In court, I mean. Do you have anything else on in court? Like other cases?”

  “Oh,” she said, her face instantly turning red. It was the same blush she’d displayed at an earlier court appearance, back when Judge Wexler had made a reference to Jaywalker’s reputation for indiscretion. Now, as then, her steely exterior had cracked just a bit, allowing the Katie in her to emerge.

  “No,” she said. “I have no other cases on this morning.”

  “Good,” said Jaywalker. “I need a cup of coffee, and I’d love you to join me.”

  She looked around. He couldn’t tell if she was checking to see if any of her supervisors were in the area, or hoping to find an excuse to turn him down. But there were no supervisors or excuses in sight. Just defendants, family members, court officers, and other lawyers waiting around for an elevator to show up.

  “Okay,” she said. “But it’s got to be Dutch treat. You understand I can’t allow you to pay for me. It would be—”

  “Perish the thought,” said Jaywalker.

  At Jaywalker’s insistence, they bypassed the first-floor luncheonette and found a place a block west, on Lafayette Street. In-house loyalty was one thing, but ptomaine poisoning was quite another.

  She ordered coffee and a bagel, he tea with lemon.

  “You should eat something,” she said. For some reason, women were always telling him that. Maybe it was the combination of his being six feet tall and weighing a hundred and fifty pounds. Okay, a hundred and forty-eight.

  “I try to make it a point to avoid eating before five o’clock,” he said.

  “That’s terrible. Don’t you like food?”

  “I love food,” he explained. “But I’m a binge eater. So I put off eating till the end of the day. Postponed gratification.”

  “That’s really, really bad for you.” Then again, maybe something about him brought out the mothering instinct in them.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” he agreed. “And it’s not like I’m recommending it or anything. I was just answering your question.”

  “Which makes you one for two.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I actually asked you two questions,” she said. “You only answered one of them.”

  And here he thought he’d been paying close attention to her. He stared at her for a moment from across the booth that separated them, and in the process managed to lose track of the conversation. He’d forgotten how pretty she was, glasses and all. But suggesting she try contacts would be way over the line, wouldn’t it? Particularly if it turned out she had some terrible condition that prevented her from wearing them.

  “You only answered one of my questions,” she said again.

  “What was the other one again?” He truly had no idea.

  “I asked you, ‘What witnesses?’”

  “Ahhhh.” He laughed at her segue back to business. “That question. All right, but you still haven’t answered one of mine.”

  “Don’t change the subject.” Only this time, the mock clearly overtook the serious. Somehow, in less than an hour’s time, she’d gone from Ms. Darcy to Katherine, and now she was threatening to morph all the way into the elusive Katie. He thought of The Three Faces of Eve but decided against mentioning it.

  “I’m not changing the subject,” he said instead. “You were supposed to let me know how many times Teresa Morales had seen my client before she picked him out at a lineup.”

  “So I was,” she admitted.

  “So you tell me that,” he said, “and I’ll tell you who my witnesses are.”

  “Sorta like, I’ll show you mine, you show me yours?”

  “Sorta like,” he echoed.

  No blush in sight this time. Too bad.

  “Okay,” she said. “Teresa Morales says she knew your client from the neighborhood, that she’d seen him at least a dozen times, at least half of those for extended periods of time. I meant to put that on the record this morning. I will next time.”

  So the lineup had indeed been confirmatory, meaning Jaywalker wouldn’t get a hearing into how it had been conducted. On the plus side, Teresa’s testimony that there’d been as many as a dozen pre-shooting encounters between Jeremy and the Raiders would corroborate Jeremy’s account of being constantly harassed by them.

  Jeremy and the Raiders. Wasn’t that a rock group?

  “Your turn,” said K. T. Darcy.

  “Fair enough. The first witness I’m looking for is a former barber named Frankie something.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. He was named Frankie something, even if Jaywalker happened to know what the something was. He didn’t want Darcy’s investigators getting to his witnesses before he did. He was willing to play this show-me game, but only up to a point. And that point was located right before revealing so much that it might hurt his client.

  “What’s this Frankie going to say?” she asked.

  “Frankie says he witnessed an encounter between my client and the gang. I’m sorry, the Christian youth group. Only now Frankie’s retired, and all I know is he’s supposed to be somewhere in Puerto Rico. Probably the rain forest.”

  “And?”

  “And the other witness,” said Jaywalker, “is a young lady who goes by the name Miranda.”

  “Might that be Miranda Raven?”

  “It might be.” Jaywalker nodded. Actually, he’d intended to fudge on her last name, too, and was surprised to learn that Darcy not only knew it but had it on the tip of her tongue.

  “We’re looking for her, too,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” said Darcy. “Have you spoken with her yet?”

  “Uh, not exactly.”

  “Well, we have,” said Darcy. “And she corroborates our other witnesses’ accounts of the fight and the shooting.”

  “Including the shot between the eyes?” Jaywalker asked, his voice audibly catching on the word eyes.

  “Including the shot between the eyes,” said Darcy. “The o
ne where the victim’s lying on his back, begging for his life. And your client calmly takes it away from him.”

  “Calmly? Miranda said calmly?”

  “Okay,” said Darcy. “Maybe that wasn’t precisely the word she used. But find her if you can, and talk to her. Then get back to me, and we’ll compare what she tells you with the statement she wrote out and signed for the detectives.”

  For a moment Jaywalker was speechless. When he recovered, it was to ask, “How about showing me her statement now, so I can confront her with it?”

  “Were you going to tell me her last name?”

  “No,” said Jaywalker. “No, I wasn’t. Mea culpa.”

  “How about Frankie the Former Barber?”

  “His last name I honestly don’t know,” he lied.

  “You talk with Miranda,” said Katherine Darcy. “And then we’ll take a look at her statement together.”

  God, she was good.

  The check came to $5.75, and after protesting that her having had a bagel meant she should pay most of it, she relented and agreed to split it down the middle. Outside on the street, Jaywalker thanked her for having joined him. “Too bad the stakes of this case are so high,” he told her. “Otherwise, it would be fun.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”

  Afterwards, he played those last four words over in his head fifty times before coming to the conclusion that they’d been nothing but a polite rejoinder, her way of agreeing that trying a shoplifting case, say, or an auto theft, would likely prove a more pleasant experience than going up against each other in a murder trial.

  But, being Jaywalker, at the time she’d said it, he hadn’t taken it that way at all. No, he’d heard the words Maybe some other time as a direct response to his comment about having fun together. And immediately invited his imagination to take over from there. Thus emboldened, he proceeded to do exactly what his upper brain, the one located between his ears, had managed to keep him from doing not half an hour earlier.

  “Have you ever tried wearing contacts?” he distinctly heard his lower brain say.

  “Why would I?” Suspiciously.

  “Oh, you know. They don’t break or fog up. Less glare. Much easier on your ears and the bridge of your nose. Then there’s all that pocket space they free up. Lots of reasons.” All, of course, except the real one. But he couldn’t very well come out and say, “Because your glasses hide that pretty face of yours.” People got fired, even went to jail, these days for saying stuff like that, didn’t they?

  “It wouldn’t make much sense,” she said.

  Now he’d done it. Here comes the part about cancer of the cornea, he decided, or retinitis fatalis.

  “They’re nothing but plain glass,” she told him. “My eyes are fine. I wear these to look older, and so people will take me more seriously. Here.” And with that she removed them and simultaneously shook her head so that her hair came free of whatever had been holding it back.

  All the usually glib Jaywalker could do was gulp. And not silently, or even softly. No, this was a full-throated gulp, one that would have done a bullfrog in mating season proud.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said Jaywalker, pretending to be absorbed in looking through the glasses. She was right; they were definitely nothing but plain glass.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he assured her. “Just releasing a bit of excess testosterone into the atmosphere. I belong to a cap-and-trade program, actually.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” said Katherine Darcy, standing up. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  Well, he’d certainly managed to screw that up, hadn’t he? He was reminded of an airline commercial he’d seen on TV not too long ago. This guy’s at a big office meeting, and he nods off. He starts dreaming about his dog, petting him and calling him “good boy” over and over again. He wakes up to realize he’s been saying that out loud and stroking the hair of the woman sitting next to him, while everyone else in the room is staring at him like he’s totally lost it.

  “Wanna get away?” the announcer asks.

  9

  FRANKIE THE BARBER

  Jaywalker wasn’t exactly a white-knuckle flyer. The fact was, the prospect of dying didn’t bother him all that much. It was something he knew he’d get around to sooner or later, so he didn’t spend much time worrying about it. That said, traveling by plane didn’t come easily to him. Days before his scheduled departure, he’d begin making exhaustive lists of everything he’d need to bring and do. The night before, he’d lay everything out on the floor and then pack obsessively in the smallest bag that could possibly hold his things. If that bag were to prove insufficient, he would move up a size, and he’d been known to go through three or four in the process. The next morning—he booked only early flights, because the equipment was always there, rather than being expected momentarily from Boston or Philadelphia—he’d set out for the airport neurotically early. He liked to allow enough time to get lost on the way, suffer not one but two blowouts, have trouble finding an empty spot in the long-term parking lot, discover that the shuttle bus wasn’t running, encounter record-breaking lines at the security checkpoint, and be pulled out, grilled and strip-searched as a suspected terrorist.

  The result, of course, was that he invariably ended up sitting for long hours at the gate as earlier flights arrived, unloaded, refueled, reloaded and departed. But that, too, Jaywalker had planned for, having brought along the morning’s New York Times, the latest unread issue of the New Yorker, the most recent Sunday Magazine section crossword puzzle, and—should all those diversions prove insufficient—a paperback book or two for good measure.

  Today, finally, he settled into his window seat, arranged his reading material and belted himself in. Outside, a thin freezing rain was falling, a mid-December harbinger of the coming winter. He smiled at his good fortune in having picked a good day to be leaving. Just then the loudspeaker system crackled, and he looked up, afraid he might miss some safety equipment demonstration or announcement of great importance. Like he was on the wrong plane, for example, or he’d left his headlights on in the parking lot.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard Southwest Airlines flight 562, nonstop from Newark to sunny San Juan, Puerto Rico.”

  Wanna get away?

  Most arriving visitors to the island make their first stop whatever hotel they’re staying at. A few melanomaphiles head directly to the beach. Still, others make a detour into Old San Juan for a picturesque lunch or dinner, depending on the time of day, or a bit of shopping.

  Jaywalker, unsurprisingly enough, did none of those things. Instead, he took a cab downtown to the large white government building that housed the Commonwealth’s division of the United States Department of Education, which he knew from his Internet search had jurisdiction over the licensing of barbers and cosmeticians. According to Jeremy’s best estimate, Frankie the Barber was in his fifties. And having once been given a ride home by Frankie, Jeremy distinctly remembered the vehicle, a beat-up old minivan. Even allowing for a significant margin of error in the age-guessing game, those two pieces of information suggested to Jaywalker that Francisco Zapata was too young to retire and spend the rest of his days sitting by the pool. And if he had to keep working to support himself and perhaps a family, as well, what better place was there for him to have started than the one where they issued barbers’ licenses?

  So Jaywalker started there, too.

  And immediately hit pay dirt.

  An hour later he had the name of a shop opened just two months earlier, a street address, the number of a provisional license, and a high level of confidence that he was hot on the trail of the very same Francisco Zapata he’d come looking for. The name of the shop? Frankie y Amigos.

  By seven-thirty that evening, he’d found Frankie, interviewed him, handed him a subpoena of dubious legitimacy and extracted from him a
solemn promise to honor it. From there Jaywalker took a cab to his hotel, checked in and made it down to the beach. To be sure, it was getting seriously dark by that time, and all of the turistas had long since departed for happy hour, dinner, dancing or other activities. The only remaining signs of life were the seagulls, the sand crabs, a toothless old man drinking cerveza out of a bottle and from time to time casting a line into the surf, and a couple of giggling teenagers making out furiously under a blanket.

  Perfect.

  10

  MIRANDA

  Jaywalker arrived back home four days later, a bit more rested, a trifle tanner and considerably poorer than before. It was a good thing that Frankie the Barber had decided to move no farther away than Puerto Rico. The low coach airfare had made the trip financially possible, if only barely, and not needing a passport had proven critical, seeing as he’d let his expire years ago, following his wife’s death. His days of transatlantic travel were behind him, he figured, unless they should suddenly decide to reinstate the draft and begin recalling guys in their fifties.

  Anyway, if Frankie proved true to his word, it meant Jaywalker had lined up his first witness, not counting Jeremy and his immediate family.

  A week later, the second one phoned him.

  “Mr. Jaywalker?” said a voice so hesitant and childlike that for a moment Jaywalker thought it might be his six-year-old granddaughter, playing a joke on him. But he was just uncertain enough to say “Yes?”