Overkill

by Joseph Teller

  JAYWALKER: And what was that?

  JEREMY: In my mind, I was trying to save my life.

  It had been a long and emotional direct examination, and Judge Wexler granted Katherine Darcy a recess before requiring her to begin her cross.

  To Jaywalker’s way of thinking, Jeremy had come through with flying colors, far exceeding expectations. And it had been powerful stuff, which had to have moved the jurors. But direct examination often turns out to be the easy part, where sufficient preparation is almost guaranteed to pay dividends. Even Jeremy’s final series of responses had been all but rehearsed, right down to the “in my mind,” a phrase that, come summation time, Jaywalker would argue were the three most important words of the entire trial.

  Cross-examination was different. On cross, instead of being a friendly teammate, the examiner was suddenly a hostile opponent. And the questions, far from being softballs lobbed over the middle of the plate, are fastballs, curves and nasty sliders aimed at the corners. But Jaywalker knew that, and he’d literally spent dozens of hours playing the role of prosecutor, trying to anticipate every conceivable pitch Darcy might try to throw at Jeremy. So the problem wouldn’t be the unexpected question; Jaywalker had seen to that. The problem would be that there simply was no best answer to Dr. Seymour Kaplan’s conclusion that the fatal shot between the eyes had been fired from a distance of no more than five inches, or to Detective Regina Fortune’s assertion that Jeremy must have chased Victor Quinones some forty-five feet before delivering that shot. Those were facts that weren’t going to go away, no matter how thorough Jaywalker’s preparation had been, or how well Jeremy were to testify.

  After the recess, Katherine Darcy showed just how smart she was. Instead of working chronologically, as Jaywalker had on direct, beginning with school and jobs and first meeting Miranda, Darcy moved right in for the kill.

  DARCY: Mr. Estrada, did I hear you say you killed Victor Quinones in order to save your life?

  JEREMY: That’s how it felt to me at the time.

  DARCY: How many guns did Victor have?

  JEREMY: One.

  DARCY: When you shot him between the eyes, who had the gun?

  JEREMY: I did.

  DARCY: What was Victor doing at that point?

  JEREMY: I’m not sure. Falling, I think.

  DARCY: Falling on you, or falling away from you?

  JEREMY: Falling down. Sort of away from me, I guess.

  DARCY: You hadn’t been shot, had you?

  JEREMY: I thought I had.

  DARCY: But the truth is, you hadn’t been. Isn’t that right?

  JEREMY: Yes.

  Not the best answer.

  And whenever that happened, Jaywalker blamed himself for having failed to anticipate the question. Better by far would have been, “The truth is, I thought I had been shot. Today, a year and half later, I know I wasn’t.” And then let Darcy wrestle with that one. But it was too late now. Not that Jaywalker wouldn’t lose an hour of sleep over it that night, kicking himself for having let Jeremy—and himself—down.

  Darcy backed up and spent a few minutes questioning Jeremy about his shoddy school attendance even before he’d met Miranda. She asked him about his marijuana conviction, which he readily admitted. Taking Harold Wexler’s cue, she next tried to get Jeremy to admit that the taunts of Sandro and his friends had made him angry. But Jeremy refused to take the bait. He’d been scared, humiliated, even felt paranoid at times. But he didn’t remember feeling anger.

  DARCY: How about when Victor sucker punched you in the face? That made you angry, didn’t it?

  JEREMY: Yes, that did.

  DARCY: So you chased him, right?

  JEREMY: After I got up, yes.

  DARCY: Weren’t you afraid he might have some kind of a weapon? A knife, a razor or something like that?

  JEREMY: I don’t remember thinking about that.

  DARCY: You weren’t afraid?

  JEREMY: I don’t remember being afraid at that time.

  DARCY: In fact, you had a very good reason not to be afraid. Didn’t you?

  JEREMY: [No response.]

  DARCY: And that good reason was that you had your gun. You had a loaded gun, didn’t you?

  JEREMY: No, not at that point.

  DARCY: Oh, right. You say Victor had it first. So when was the first time you saw it?

  JEREMY: After the fight, right after somebody screamed. I looked up and I saw it in Victor’s hand.

  DARCY: Did you run away?

  JEREMY: No.

  DARCY: Why not?

  JEREMY: I’m not sure. I guess ’cause I was too close to him to run. If I’d turned and tried to run, he would have shot me in the back. Or maybe shot Miranda. I don’t know.

  Darcy tried to pin Jeremy down about the number of times he’d fired, but he said he was unsure. He didn’t know if he’d emptied the gun or not, or how many rounds it held. And he claimed to have absolutely no recollection of having chased Victor some forty-five feet while holding the gun in his hand.

  Jaywalker bit his lip, knowing the worst was about to come. But knowing also that there was nothing he could do about it.

  DARCY: Did you hear Detective Fortune say it was forty-five feet from where the fight was to where Victor was found?

  JEREMY: Yes.

  DARCY: And did you hear Dr. Kaplan say there’s no way Victor could have walked or run those forty-five feet after being shot in the head?

  JEREMY: Yes.

  DARCY: So how do you explain how Victor got there, unless the true answer is that you chased him and shot him there?

  JEREMY: I—I can’t explain it.

  DARCY: Do you think Detective Fortune was lying about the forty-five feet, or Dr. Kaplan was lying about Victor’s not having been able to run after he’d been shot in the head?

  Jaywalker could have objected, not only because it was two questions in one, but because it called for an opinion as to other witnesses’ testimony. But he decided to let it go. They’d been over this part a lot, the two of them, and he was pretty sure Jeremy could handle it.

  JEREMY: I’m not saying they’re lying. I’m just saying I honestly don’t remember chasing him once I had the gun. I only remember getting it away from him and shooting at him until he was on the ground.

  DARCY: How about holding the gun no more than four or five inches from him while you shot him between the eyes? Are you telling us you don’t remember that, either?

  JEREMY: I know we were close. I don’t know exactly how close.

  DARCY: How about Victor’s begging for his life right before you shot him between the eyes? Remember that?

  JEREMY: No. No, I don’t.

  DARCY: Or picking him up a little bit off the ground before shooting him between the eyes and letting him fall back down on the pavement? Remember that?

  JEREMY: No.

  DARCY: Could those things have happened?

  JEREMY: I guess they could have. They must have. But I honestly don’t remember them.

  DARCY: How about your being the one who had the gun in the first place? Could that have happened, too?

  JEREMY: No, that didn’t happen. I’d know that.

  DARCY: Yet you heard Magdalena Lopez say it happened, didn’t you?

  JEREMY: Yes.

  DARCY: And you heard Wallace Porter say it happened, didn’t you?

  JEREMY: Yes.

  DARCY: And you heard Teresa Morales say it happened, didn’t you?

  JEREMY: Yes.

  DARCY: And she was standing right there, wasn’t she?

  JEREMY: Yes.

  It was devastating stuff.

  Jaywalker spent ten minutes on redirect, trying to rehabilitate Jeremy as best as he could. But he knew he wasn’t fooling anybody, not even himself. With Katherine Darcy’s last line of questions, the entire momentum of the trial had abruptly shifted. During direct examination and even up to a point on cross, the case had been up for grabs and the jury might even have been leaning to the defense’s
side. Then Darcy had systematically pointed out that in order for Jeremy’s claim to be believed—that he’d still been trying to save his life when he’d fired the final shot—the jurors were going to have to flatly reject the testimony of a detective, an impartial medical examiner, and not one, but all three of the prosecution’s eyewitnesses.

  That was asking an awful lot of them.

  Once Jeremy made his way back to the defense table, Jaywalker rose and announced that the defense was resting. Katherine Darcy stated that the prosecution was resting, too, though she referred to her side as “the People,” as prosecutors love to do.

  The next day was Friday, and not wanting to give the case to the jury with a weekend coming up, the judge excused the jurors until first thing Monday morning, when they would hear the lawyers’ summations. “The court officers,” he told them, “will explain what procedures you’ll need to follow.” Meaning: bring a toothbrush and a change of clothes, because you won’t be going home Monday night unless you’ve reached a verdict.

  The lawyers, on the other hand, would be due back in the morning, in order to meet with the judge and go over the instructions he’d be including in his charge to the jury.

  “Do you want your client here tomorrow?” the judge asked Jaywalker, once the jurors had left the courtroom. “For the charge conference?”

  Jaywalker put the question to Jeremy, who opted not to be woken up at three o’clock in the morning just to be brought over from Rikers Island for an hour of legal wrangling. A friendly court officer then allowed him to sit across the railing from his mother and then his sister for a few minutes, before leading him back into the pens.

  “So how does it look, Mr. Jailworker?”

  “I don’t know,” he told Carmen as they waited for an elevator.

  “They still want to give him so much time?”

  “Yup.”

  “Jew gotta get him less,” said Carmen. “After all, it was only a accident.”

  20

  THE LOST WEEKEND

  Heading to Judge Wexler’s courtroom the following morning for the charge conference, Jaywalker ran into his old client Johnny Cantalupo, who was in the building to check in with his probation officer. And because Jaywalker was characteristically a half an hour early, he stopped to catch up with Johnny.

  “You staying out of trouble?” he asked.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Johnny. “Pretty much.”

  “What does pretty much mean?”

  “I missed a ’pointment,” Johnny confessed. “And there was this…” His voice trailed off into an almost inaudible mumble.

  “What for?” asked Jaywalker, who was actually quite fluent in mumble.

  “Nuthin’. Disorderly conduct for smokin’ reefer in a subway station. No biggie. Howbowchoo? You keepin’ your nose clean?”

  Jaywalker smiled. Johnny always seemed to get a big kick out of the fact that his lawyer got into trouble almost as often as he did.

  “I’ve got to,” said Jaywalker. “I’m on trial.”

  “Fronta McGillicuddy?”

  “No. Wexler.”

  “I’ve hoid he’s tough,” said Johnny.

  “You’ve heard right.”

  “What kinda case?” Johnny wanted to know.

  “Murder.”

  “No shit?”

  Jaywalker spent a few minutes describing the case. When he got to the part about the Raiders, Johnny stopped him. “Those punks? Buncha greasy spics who hang out up over on Toid Avenue?”

  “Yeah,” said Jaywalker. “Only this is the twenty-first century, Johnny, and we refer to them as American citizens of Latino extraction.”

  “I got your Latino extraction,” Johnny mimicked, grabbing his crotch for emphasis. “Buncha losers, is what they are.”

  “You want to hear about the case or not?”

  Johnny nodded, and managed to listen without interrupting again while Jaywalker finished telling him about the trial. But as soon as he had, Johnny jumped in with another, “No shit? Your guy popped him? Just like that?”

  “Seems so,” said Jaywalker, glancing down at his watch. He still had fifteen minutes to get up to the eleventh floor.

  “Stupid fuck,” was Johnny’s appraisal of Jeremy’s conduct. And when Jaywalker nodded in agreement, Johnny seemed to take that as an invitation to amplify. “I mean,” he said, “those guys are nuthin’ but hot air. They never woulda done nuthin’ to him.”

  Jaywalker looked around to make sure there were no stray jurors within earshot before remembering that they’d been excused for the day. “Do me a big favor,” he told Johnny. “Don’t go around repeating that.”

  “You got it,” said Johnny. “But lissen. Anythin’ I can do for you, you just say the word. I owe you, man.”

  Jaywalker promised he’d keep that in mind, though he had a bit of difficulty imagining exactly how Johnny Cantalupo could help out Jeremy Estrada. But once again, it was one of those heartfelt offers from a client that he hated to reject outright.

  The charge conference was pretty uninspiring. Judge Wexler indicated what counts he intended to submit to the jury, starting with murder, following up with first-degree manslaughter and continuing all the way down to the unauthorized discharge of an unlicensed firearm within city limits. He agreed to instruct the jurors on both justification and extreme emotional disturbance, the former as a complete defense to all charges, the latter as a partial defense to the murder count only.

  “How long do you expect your summations to take?” he asked. “Ballpark.”

  “Less than three days,” said Jaywalker, who honestly had no idea, and certainly had no intention of committing himself. He knew Wexler well enough not to put it past the judge to interrupt him after an hour and say, “You told me you were going to be forty-five minutes.”

  “An hour” was Katherine Darcy’s estimate.

  Ask people what the term lost weekend means to them, and anyone old enough is apt to recall an ancient black-and-white movie of the same title, in which William Holden does his level best to drink himself into oblivion. Even those too young to have seen or heard of the movie are likely to associate the expression with a protracted bout with the bottle, a phenomenon commonly referred to these days as “binge drinking.”

  Jaywalker’s drinking days were behind him by several years, but that fact didn’t prevent him from occasionally experiencing his own version of the lost weekend. Only he called his Getting Ready to Sum Up.

  Not that he couldn’t have gotten up and delivered a competent summation that same Friday morning on a moment’s notice. The truth was, he could have done it six months ago, and he could have done it without benefit of notes. He knew the case so well that he could have done it in his sleep, if he’d had to, and he did precisely that on a fairly regular basis.

  But there was competent, and there was Jaywalker. And being the uncompromising obsessive-compulsive that he was, that particular distinction meant that for Harrison J. Walker, the next seventy hours would become an agonizing exercise in reading, rereading and reviewing every last word of the twelve-hundred-plus pages of the trial transcript; combing every inch of the miles of handwritten notes he’d scribbled over the past two weeks; and examining and reexamining every single shred of paper the case had generated over its two-year life. And the thing was, doing all that would be merely preliminary. Only once he’d dispensed with those tasks would he turn his attention to structuring what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. After that he would get down to the business of refining it into language designed not just to inform and persuade the jurors, but to move them emotionally to a place where it would become all but impossible for them to find Jeremy Estrada guilty of anything. In other words, all Jaywalker was striving for was absolute, one hundred percent pure perfection. And he wouldn’t quit until he got there, along the way ignoring such niceties as sleep, nourishment, sunlight, human companionship and personal hygiene. Think Ray Milland if you’re old enough to, or sophomore year of colle
ge if you’re not.

  Either way, as one might readily imagine, the recipe was pretty much guaranteed to make for a very lost weekend indeed.

  21

  BUTTERFLIES

  Monday.

  Told to be in court by ten o’clock, Jaywalker showed up at nine-fifteen and had to be let in a side door by a sympathetic court officer, the captain in charge of the part. Although he was as ready to sum up as he would ever be, that fact provided Jaywalker with not an ounce of comfort. He found it impossible to sit, excruciating to make small talk with the court personnel. He walked out of the courtroom, visited the pay phone down the hall, the men’s room, the windowsill by the elevator bank.

  His old friends the butterflies were back.

  Another lawyer, a good one, wandered over and was about to say something. Noticing Jaywalker’s blue suit, ironed white shirt and unwillingness to make eye contact, he caught himself, mumbled, “Good luck,” and walked off. Having been there himself, he could tell, just like that.

  Back in the courtroom, Jaywalker forced himself to sit down at the defense table and arrange his notes, notes he would never so much as glance at once he began. Jeremy was brought in and seated next to him, and they hugged. Katherine Darcy showed up, and spectators—many of them Jaywalker groupies—began filling up the front rows of the audience section. A Jaywalker summation had come to be regarded as something of an event at 100 Centre Street, something not to be missed.

  Without fanfare, Harold Wexler entered by a side door and took the bench. “Are you ready, counsel?” he asked.

  Darcy and Jaywalker answered that they were. The butterflies added their agreement by increasing the beating of their wings to a level somewhere beyond excruciating.

  “Bring in the jury,” Wexler told the captain.

  They entered a moment later, the twelve regular jurors and four alternates. Earlier they’d stowed their travel bags in the jury room, just in case their deliberations should go overnight, and given their lunch orders to a court officer. Despite the fact that those with young children, old parents or needy pets had had a full weekend to make arrangements, they looked worried to Jaywalker. No doubt the thought of a night in “jail” was weighing heavily on their minds. Then again, Jeremy Estrada had by that time spent something like the past three hundred and eighty nights in a real jail, and was likely to spend the next twenty-five years in state prison. Even as the judge was telling the jurors they were about to hear the lawyers’ summations and explaining that summations weren’t evidence, Jaywalker found himself idiotically trying to do the math, twenty-five times three hundred and sixty-five, when he became aware of a disturbance coming from the audience section of the courtroom, behind him. He turned around in time to see a court officer talking with a group of five or six young men standing in the aisle and trying to find seats.