Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  “Any time jew like,” said Carmen.

  “How about ten?” Most of the lawyers would be in court by then, he knew. They might even be able to use one of the empty private offices.

  “Too early,” said Carmen. “She’s jung. They like to sleep late in the morning, the jung people.”

  “Eleven? Twelve?”

  “How about two?”

  “Two it is.”

  So much for any time you like.

  They showed up at a quarter of three, Carmen literally leading Miranda by the hand into the conference room.

  Very pretty didn’t even begin to describe her.

  Try stunning. Breathtaking. Exquisite. Gorgeous. And delicate, thin to the point of looking almost breakable. Long, straight hair, somewhere between red and auburn. Whether it was from nature’s palette or something poured out of a bottle, Jaywalker couldn’t tell. But then, he never could. Skin a shade too dark for an Anglo but a bit too light for a Latina. A perfect nose, a mouth just a trifle too full, and high cheekbones that might or might not have had something to do with her “Semaphore” blood.

  And then you got to the eyes.

  As blue-gray as Jeremy’s were, that was how brown Miranda’s were. And they were huge, disproportionally huge, making her look almost like one of those waifs that artist guy used to paint. Klee? Maybe. But his subjects ended up slightly freaky-looking, and Miranda was anything but that.

  “This is Miranda,” said Carmen, perhaps sensing that Jaywalker was too busy staring to introduce himself. “And this is the lawyer, Mr. Jameswalker.”

  They shook hands. Hers was impossibly thin. Again the word delicate came to Jaywalker’s mind.

  “Pleased to meetcha,” said Miranda.

  And immediately the spell was broken.

  It wasn’t just the meetcha, though certainly that was a big part of it. It was that as soon as she opened her mouth, she sounded just like any other teenager. And that threw him, the total and totally unexpected disconnect between her extraordinary looks and her very ordinary voice. And in some strange way, that disconnect comforted Jaywalker and allowed him to visualize Miranda and Jeremy as an item. Had she sounded like the goddess Jaywalker had fully expected her to once he’d seen her, he would have been incapable of putting the two of them together. But suddenly it made sense. Jeremy himself was exceedingly good-looking, but at the same time he was shy and introverted to a fault. Slow, to put it charitably. Now, Jaywalker realized one sentence into their meeting, so was Miranda. And he got it. In this beautiful but limited young lady, Jeremy had finally found himself, just as she’d found herself in him.

  He asked Carmen to go out to the waiting room so he could talk with Miranda in privacy.

  “But I’m Jeremy’s mother,” she protested.

  “That’s the point,” he explained. “I plan on calling both of you as witnesses. I don’t want the D.A. to be able to say we discussed the facts of the case together.”

  She grumbled, but she went.

  Still, it was impossible. As Miranda and he sat there at the conference table, lawyers who had rooms in the suite kept popping in and out, going to and from the copy room, the secretaries’ area, the restrooms or the conference room itself, which doubled as a library and was lined with stacks of law books that on any other day did nothing but collect dust and serve as decoration. But on this particular day, it seemed they’d all become instant, must-read bestsellers.

  Everyone wanted to get a look at Miranda.

  Or better yet, two or three or four looks.

  He finally found them an empty room and retreated to it, and they were able to speak for the better part of an hour. That was the good news. The bad news was that fifteen minutes into that hour, Jaywalker realized that Miranda wasn’t going to be able to help Jeremy.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; she did. But in the days following the shooting, the detectives had quickly identified her, located her and picked her up. They’d brought her to the precinct, whether voluntarily on her part or not. But legally, it made no difference. A criminal defendant gets to complain about violations of his rights, and if those violations are serious enough, evidence gathered as a result of them can be suppressed and kept out of his trial. But when the violations are of other people’s rights—Miranda’s, for example—the defendant lacks what lawyers call standing to object.

  According to Miranda, the detectives had threatened to arrest her as an accomplice to murder and as an “accessory after the fact,” a layman’s term that doesn’t even appear in the pages of the Penal Law. But they’d succeeded in frightening her sufficiently to get her to write out and sign a statement. In it she’d said she didn’t know whether it had been Victor Quinones who’d first pulled the gun or Jeremy, even though she now assured Jaywalker it had been Victor. And she’d described the final shot the same way the other witnesses had, putting the gun in Jeremy’s hand as he stood over his fallen victim, who lay helplessly on the pavement, looking up and begging for mercy.

  Miranda Raven was a poisoned witness.

  That meant whichever side called her would suffer the consequences. When a lawyer puts a person on the stand, whether to testify as a fact witness, an expert or a character witness, the jury anticipates that that person is going to help the side that’s called him. Sure, there may be some inroads made on cross-examination, but the natural expectation is that on balance, the witness will end up helping the side that called him. After all, that was why he was called in the first place, to help.

  If Jaywalker were to call Miranda, Katherine Darcy would have a field day attacking her with her signed statement. Even if Miranda were to disown it as the product of intimidation, her value to the defense would be so diminished that she’d end up hurting far more than helping. Conversely, if Katherine Darcy called her, no matter how many times she reminded Miranda of what she’d said in the statement, her repudiation of those things at trial would seriously undercut the prosecution’s chances. In other words, it mattered greatly which side chose to call Miranda, because in doing so, that side implicitly vouched for her credibility and stood to lose significantly in the eyes of the jury once she was neutralized on cross.

  So it wasn’t just a matter of Miranda being a mixed bag, a witness who would both help and hurt each side at the same time. In immediately sizing her up as a poisoned witness, Jaywalker was grasping a more fundamental and critical truth about her: that whichever side made the mistake of touching her first would be the one infected, and the results could well prove fatal.

  He didn’t tell her any of that, of course. To do so would have been nothing short of cruel. It would have been tantamount to saying, “You screwed up so badly by writing out and signing that statement that now you’re of no use to Jeremy, and as a result, he’s probably going to be convicted.” No, he couldn’t do that. All he could tell her was that they’d see how things played out, then ask her to keep in touch.

  “Can I see Jeremy?” was all she wanted to know.

  There was a part of Jaywalker that still wanted to say no. But as he thought about it, he realized that to do so would be to succumb to his anger at her. Why anger? Because she’d been so easily intimidated by the detectives. Because she’d been stupid enough to believe they could really charge her with a crime just for the accident of being present when one had been committed. He wanted to ask her how she possibly could have thought that and tell her how shallow her loyalty to Jeremy had been. He wanted to yell at her, to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. But it was too late for all that, he knew. All he would succeed in doing would be to make her cry.

  So he said, “Sure. Sure, you can see Jeremy.” And even described the steps she’d have to go through in order to do it.

  But it hurt. It hurt terribly. Of the four people who’d been in the immediate vicinity of the shooting, one was dead and another was severely compromised, first because he was the defendant, and second because he was so withdrawn and inarticulate. Now a third, wh
om Jaywalker had considered his greatest hope, had been rendered totally useless. That left only the fourth, Teresa Morales.

  Teresa Morales was anything but disinterested. She’d not only been a member of the Raiders gang herself, she’d been Victor Quinones’s girlfriend. Yet the way the trial was suddenly shaping up, it was beginning to look as though she was going to have the definitive word as to what had happened.

  Which was bad news indeed for Jeremy Estrada.

  11

  GETTING ANGRY

  If you’ve been lucky enough to have spent any significant time driving across the lower forty-eight, or even watching it go by from the window of a train—and Jaywalker had done both in younger days—you’ve learned not to look for city skyscrapers before you’ve first passed through outlying towns and suburbs; that on your way to the banks of the mightiest of rivers you’ll first have to cross a series of creeks, brooks and streams; and that mountains almost invariably have foothills.

  Trials have postponements.

  Though, for some reason, lawyers prefer to think of them as adjournments. Perhaps the bias has something to do with the differing implications inherent in the words themselves. To postpone is to put off, to avoid for the present an unpleasant task or event. It carries a distinctly negative connotation. To adjourn, on the other hand, is an act of continuance, a forward-looking promise to reconvene and readdress the matter on another day. It somehow manages to suggest that progress is being made, that the journey goes on.

  And just as the foothills grow taller as the mountain is approached, the density of homes increases as the city looms larger on the horizon, and the streams deepen and broaden as the river nears, so, too, do adjournments change. Their intervals become increasingly shorter. They take on new designations of purpose: “for discovery,” “for control purposes,” “for hearing,” and, finally, “for trial.” Warning labels begin popping up: “People to be ready,” “final versus defendant,” “no further adjournments,” “final versus both sides,” and eventually “date absolutely certain for trial.”

  Jaywalker was more than just fluent in the language; he loved the journey itself. He’d learned long ago that every case had a built-in clock of its own, an inner circadian rhythm to guide it as it ripened and readied itself toward maturity. He knew that with rare exception prosecutors could rush cases to trial only so much, defense lawyers could dodge the day of reckoning only so long, and even judges—yes, even the Harold Wexlers of the system—were pretty much powerless to significantly speed things up or slow them down. To succeed in doing so would be tantamount to hastening the sunrise or holding back the tide.

  Jaywalker hardly spent the intervening months sitting back and enjoying the passage of time. In the buildup to a trial, sitting back became all but constitutionally impossible for him. To be sure, he didn’t focus on Jeremy’s case to the exclusion of everything else. There were other cases to attend to, and even a couple of trials. But they were lesser trials. One was a bench trial, a non-jury affair over whether a client named Adam Williams had known that the suitcase he’d found in an alley and decided to claim as his own had been stolen property. It had indeed been stolen, as Jaywalker readily conceded, but Adam had had no way of knowing that; to him it appeared to have been discarded, abandoned. A judge reluctantly agreed, but not before delivering a stern lecture to Adam on how foolish he’d been to pick the thing up and carry it off, and how lucky he’d been to find a good lawyer. The other case Jaywalker tried to a jury, but a jury of six, not twelve. That was all you were entitled to on a misdemeanor, and drunk driving was a misdemeanor. The officers claimed that Tammy Cuccinotta had blown a .15 on the station house breathalyzer test, nearly double the .08 required for a conviction. Jaywalker put her on the stand, where she claimed the cops had fabricated the result after she’d threatened to sue them for false arrest. The jurors didn’t actually buy that, they confided to Jaywalker afterwards; their acquittal actually had more to do with liking Tammy, a single working mother of three young children, and also liking the short skirts she wore to court each day. This time Jaywalker delivered the lecture.

  But he learned from those trials, just as he took something home from every case he tried. From Adam Williams he was reminded anew that reality wasn’t everything; it was sometimes the defendant’s perception of reality that mattered. And from Tammy Cuccinotta he received a refresher course in just how absolutely crucial it was that jurors found a defendant likeable. Now, if he could just find a short skirt in a men’s medium….

  And, of course, Jaywalker continued to work on Jeremy’s case. He reported back to Katherine Darcy that there would be no manslaughter plea. He spent more hours over more visits with Jeremy than he could count. He mined Carmen’s and Julie’s memories for details of how Jeremy had acted during the summer of his ordeal. He had a pathologist friend of his go over the autopsy report line by line in case he himself had missed something (he hadn’t), and coaxed an old chemistry major friend into attempting to quantify the exact amount of opiates present in a sample of Victor Quinones’s blood (he couldn’t). He tapped a private investigator who owed him a favor, and sent him out to find and interview Teresa Morales. But after a month of searching, the guy reported back that Teresa was nowhere to be found.

  “She’s not in jail and she’s not in the neighborhood,” he told Jaywalker. “She doesn’t have a driver’s license, a Social Security number, a Medicaid card or a credit card. She doesn’t work on the books, vote at election time or own a cell phone. And she doesn’t have a criminal record. Are you sure she exists?”

  “She exists,” said Jaywalker, and sent the investigator back out to find her. But he never did.

  Jaywalker checked in so regularly with Frankie the Barber in Puerto Rico that the phone company threatened to cut off his long-distance service. “You do that,” Jaywalker warned the representative, “and I’ll sic Alan Fudderman on you.”

  “Who?”

  He met once more with Miranda, to help her with the documents she needed to get her onto Rikers Island to visit Jeremy. But he charged her for the service, after a fashion. Before allowing her to leave, he snapped a half dozen photos of her. “Just in case the jury never gets to meet you in person,” he explained, “I want them to see the face that launched a thousand ships.” If he’d thought for a moment there was any chance they still read Homer in high school, her blank stare was answer enough.

  And each time they went back to court, Harold Wexler would warn Jeremy that he was making a big mistake in turning down the manslaughter plea. “Your lawyer’s good,” he’d say, “but he’s not that good.”

  And each time Jeremy would smile sheepishly, shake his head slowly from side to side and say softly, “I’d like a trial.”

  “Wonderful,” Wexler told him on the last such occasion. “You just keep on taking advice from all those jailhouse lawyers on Rikers Island. Don’t stop to ask yourself why, if they’re all so smart, they’re still there.”

  “I’d like a trial,” said Jeremy.

  “Then a trial you shall have. February second. That’s a date absolutely certain for trial. Do I make myself clear?”

  Both lawyers assured him he had. But as Jaywalker left the courtroom to visit once more with Jeremy in the pens, the word clear kept echoing in his head. It was the same word he’d heard shouted back when his wife’s heart had stopped beating toward the very end and they’d called a code. A dozen hospital personnel had rushed into the room, pushing him aside and reducing him to a bystander. They’d ripped her gown open, slammed the paddles onto her chest and shouted “Clear!” They’d managed to save her that time, but the experience had taught Jaywalker that there would be no second time, or third or fourth.

  Goddamn you, Harold Wexler, he thought, for having yanked him back in time to a memory he’d done his best to keep buried for a dozen years. But if ever there’d been a judge who knew how to push Jaywalker’s buttons, Wexler was the one. There were others who were tougher and plenty who were me
aner, but their heavy-handedness invariably gave them away on the printed page and got them reversed on appeal. Wexler was smart enough to cover himself, to get away with tilting the playing field in whatever direction he wanted. And from his long-running commentary, it was pretty clear that what he wanted in Jeremy’s case was going to make it a steep climb for the defense. But that was okay. As much as he preferred working with a judge who had no agenda, Jaywalker relished the occasional street brawl. It got his adrenaline pumping, his juices flowing. It got him angry.

  And right then and there, standing in front of an eleventh-floor feeder pen at 100 Centre Street, he looked upward toward the heavens—which on this particular day bore a striking resemblance to peeling yellow paint—and silently vowed to his wife that even if it turned out to be the last case he ever tried, he was going to win it, not just for Jeremy, but for her.

  Then he broke out laughing at the absurdity of it.

  Well, he still had a whole week to get angry again.

  12

  JURORS ENTERING

  “Jurors entering!”

  With those two words the trial of the People of the State of New York versus Jeremy Estrada got under way. No “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.” No “Draw nigh, give your attention, and you shall be heard.” Not in Harold Wexler’s court. About the only concession to ritual that Wexler made was the black robe he wore from time to time. Other judges circulated detailed written rules of decorum, banged their gavels, raised their voices and threatened to clear their courtrooms at the slightest disruption. Wexler simply peered out over rimless reading glasses, his shoulders hunched slightly forward, his jaw set tightly in a withering stare. Rumor had it that back in his Legal Aid days he’d punched out his immediate supervisor, a guy who’d outweighed him by fifty pounds and stood five inches taller than he did. Jaywalker happened to have been there at the time and knew it was no rumor.