Praise for the novels of
JOSEPH TELLER

“Teller’s richly suspenseful story will leave the reader eagerly anticipating the denouement and Jaywalker’s next adventure.”

—Publishers Weekly starred review of The Tenth Case

“Joseph Teller’s stellar The Tenth Case sets the standard for defense attorney procedurals.”

—Mysterious Reviews

“A glimpse into a different era and a peek into the psyche of the already intriguing Jaywalker, Teller’s novel draws readers in at the very beginning and doesn’t let up.”

—RT Book Reviews on Bronx Justice

“Jaywalker’s second legal thriller is once again an insightful look at the dysfunctional American jurisprudence system from the perspective of an attorney whose outlook on defending his clients is much different than the typical lawyer.”

—The Merry Genre Go Round Reviews on Bronx Justice

“Depraved Indifference is an excellent legal drama whose strength lies in the meticulous plotting.”

—The Mystery Reader

Overkill
Joseph Teller

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To Jason

CONTENTS

1: GUILTY WITH AN EXPLANATION

2: WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS AN EXECUTION

3: DUMB-ASSED QUESTIONS

4: A REAL NICE KID

5: JUST GETTING STARTED

6: WELCOME TO TOMBSTONE

7: BRICKS AND BOOKS

8: DUTCH TREAT

9: FRANKIE THE BARBER

10: MIRANDA

11: GETTING ANGRY

12: JURORS ENTERING

13: I HAD A SON

14: STUBBORN AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE

15: A TWO-BIT PUNK

16: SLIM AND NONE

17: THE PROBLEM AND THE ACCIDENT

18: THE WITNESS IN THE HALLWAY

19: JEREMY’S STORY

20: THE LOST WEEKEND

21: BUTTERFLIES

22: THE LAST WORD

23: WATCHING THE CLOCK

24: NICE SHOES, YOUR HONOR

25: YES IT IS

26: PERFECT SCHMERFECT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1
GUILTY WITH AN EXPLANATION

Jaywalker’s sitting in Part 30 when it happens. Part 30 is one of the Supreme Court arraignment courtrooms they have down at 100 Centre Street. It’s where you go before a judge for the first time after you’ve been formally charged with a felony. A felony being anything they can give you more than a year for. Like murder, say.

Jaywalker’s there for a sentencing. A client of his, a wiseguy-wannabe named Johnny Cantalupo, pleaded guilty to possession six weeks ago, in order to avoid going to prison for sale. It was cocaine, and not that awfully much of it, and Johnny’s white and had no record to speak of, so the assistant D.A. and the judge had agreed to probation and time served, specifically the two days Johnny had spent while he was in the system.

In the system.

Whenever he hears the expression, Jaywalker can’t help picturing a huge beast, gobbling up the newly arrested, digesting them for a day or two, and then, well, the rest is a bit vague. Spitting them out? Undigesting them into a courtroom? Or even worse, perhaps.

Although he was the first lawyer to show up this morning, and Johnny (under penalty of death by Jaywalker) the first defendant, they have to wait to get their case called. A written probation report first has to complete an arduous journey spanning three entire floors of the building, a feat that can take hours, sometimes days or even weeks. Never mind that the report will have no impact whatsoever on the sentence; its presence is mandated by law. In fact, the appearance before the judge this day promises to be a perfunctory one, the precise details of the sentence having been long ago worked out, recited on the record, and promised to the defendant on the sole condition that he show up today, which Johnny dutifully has. Consequently, Jaywalker will barely speak, having no need to convince the judge to do anything or refrain from doing anything. He’s therefore allowed his attention to wander from the half-finished crossword puzzle in his lap to the defendants who one by one are brought out to face the judge, stand beside their lawyers and hear the charges they’ve been indicted on by a grand jury.

The first thing that strikes Jaywalker as out of the ordinary is when the clerk calls a particular case and a lawyer, instead of simply rising from his seat in the audience and quietly making his way up to the defense table, shouts out, “Defendant!” This immediately brands him as a civil lawyer, unfamiliar with how they do things over here on the criminal side.

The guy even looks like a civil lawyer, Jaywalker decides. Not just that he’s short and bald; those descriptors apply to plenty of criminal lawyers. No, it’s more than that. There’s something decidedly shifty about him, something just a touch too practiced. Something that suggests ambulance chaser, or fixer. The old term shyster even comes to mind, but Jaywalker immediately banishes it, half forgiving himself only because he himself is half Jewish. Sort of like how African Americans are free to call each other nigger, but others need not apply.

They bring the guy’s client out from the door to the pen, and Jaywalker’s attention shifts to him. He’s a kid, a kid who looks no more than sixteen or seventeen. Tall, though, with good posture for a teen, pale skin and closely cropped blond hair. A couple of years older and he could be a marine recruit, thinks Jaywalker, or in his first year at West Point. But the thing that really stands out is how good-looking the kid is. Beautiful, almost. Though having grown up in the homophobic ’70s, Jaywalker still has a bit of trouble applying the term to a young man. Handsome, yes. Striking-looking, sure. But beautiful? No need to get carried away. But that’s how good-looking the kid is, even after a day or two in the system.

He misses the kid’s name, but leans forward and is able to catch the word murder as the clerk reads off the charges and asks the young man how he pleads, guilty or not guilty.

Now the thing is, the answer to that question is “Not guilty.” Always. Even if immediately after the phrase is spoken, the lawyers were to approach the bench, huddle with the judge, work out a plea, and sixty seconds later the not guilty plea were to be withdrawn and replaced by a guilty plea to some lesser charge with a reduced sentence. Precisely as had been the case with Johnny Cantalupo, six weeks ago.

Only that’s not what happens now.

Instead, as soon as the clerk asks the question, the civil lawyer answers for the kid. “Guilty with an explanation,” he says.

Now that may work in traffic court, or in the summons part. But here, what happens is the entire courtroom—and it’s a big courtroom, pretty much filled to capacity—goes stone-cold quiet.

“Excuse me?” says the judge, a white-haired old-timer named McGillicuddy.

“Guilty,” the lawyer repeats, “but with an explanation. It’s my feeling that probation would be an adequate sen—”

He gets no further than that before McGillicuddy waves him and the assistant district attorney to come up. Which, to Jaywalker’s way of thinking, is a pretty decent thing on the judge’s part, deciding not to show the guy up in front of a roomful of onlookers.

Because the thing is, you can’t get probation on a murder charge, not even if you have the best explanation in the history of the universe. The ten best explanations. The range of sentencing on a murder count begins with fifteen-to-life, and goes up from there.

Jaywalker can’t hear what’s being said up at the bench, but he can see that whatever the words are, the judge is saying most of them and is being considerably less charitable than he’d been a moment ago. The civil lawyer has been pretty much reduced to gesturing, mostly with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders. “Who knew?” he seems to be saying.

As for the A.D.A., a prettyish woman with dark hair, dark-rimmed glasses and a thick file under one arm, she’s shown the good sense to back away from the two of them as far as she can get, evidently wanting no part of an irate judge chewing out an incompetent defense lawyer. Meanwhile, back at the defense table, the defendant has been given a seat by a thoughtful court officer who must have decided that this sideshow is going to take a while.

Actually, it doesn’t.

It ends abruptly, with the judge suddenly standing up and ordering the lawyers back to their places. “Mr. Fudderman is relieved,” he announces. Then, scanning the front row of the audience, he looks for a replacement.

Jaywalker’s instinctive reaction is to break off eye contact. He’s been in the military, been in law enforcement, and learned long ago that you never, ever volunteer for anything. Nothing good can come from it, whereas the potential for disaster is virtually unlimited. So even as he senses colleagues to his left and right straightening up in their seats and subliminally begging the judge to choose them, Jaywalker locks onto his crossword puzzle, focusing all his energy on coming up with a six-letter word for annoy.

“Mr. Jaywalker?” he hears.

H-A-R-A-S-S, he pencils in, never quite sure how to spell it. It could be two r’s or two s’s, or even two of both. But if it’s two of both, it won’t—

“Mr. Jaywalker?” Louder, this time.

He looks up, feigning bewilderment.

“Come up, please.”

He glances to either side and over both shoulders before looking back at the judge.

“Yes, you.”

2
WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS AN EXECUTION

It turned out his name was Estrada, Jeremy Estrada. Jaywalker found this out in the pen, sitting across from the kid and conducting what might charitably be called a short-form interview. Judge McGillicuddy hadn’t actually ordered him to do it, but up at the bench he’d made it pretty clear that in his book Jaywalker owed him as much and more, without spelling it out. As soon as Jaywalker had begun protesting (immediately) that he was much too busy (he wasn’t), McGillicuddy had silently mouthed the word “Bullshit.” The A.D.A. had smiled just the tiniest bit at that but had quickly recovered by adjusting her glasses. No doubt she chalked up the incident as a pair of alpha males squaring off. But the judge’s drift hadn’t been lost on Jaywalker. About six months ago, in the midst of a run-of-the-mill larceny case, McGillicuddy had made a questionable ruling on a piece of evidence, and Jaywalker had muttered “Bullshit” loudly enough for the jury to hear. The judge had ignored it, even pretended he hadn’t heard it, though surely he had. Instead of clearing the courtroom, holding Jaywalker in contempt and maybe even giving him an overnight to reflect upon his outburst, he’d simply filed the incident away, evidently determined to save it for a rainy day. And though it was clear and dry this particular May morning, it might as well have been pouring. The debt had been called.

That the kid turned out to have a Latino last name came as something of a surprise to Jaywalker; he’d figured from the fair complexion, blond hair and blue-gray eyes that he was dealing with a runaway from Iowa or Minnesota, or someplace like that. But when asked if he spoke English, Jeremy answered softly, “Yes, I was born here,” without any trace of an accent.

“Do you understand what just happened out there in the courtroom?” Jaywalker asked him.

“No, not really.” In a voice so soft that the words were barely audible.

“Well, for starters, your lawyer tried to plead you guilty to a life sentence. Where’d you manage to dig him up from?”

“My mother found him. She said he helped her after they shut off the electric in the apartment. And I guess there wasn’t a lot of time, you know.”

Jaywalker didn’t know, and was almost afraid to ask. He’d agreed to spend ten minutes talking with the kid before letting McGillicuddy know if he was willing to represent him at assigned-counsel rates. Jaywalker had tried to explain that he was no longer on the panel of lawyers who took assignments, having been kicked off some time ago for turning in his payment vouchers months after they were due, sometimes years. But the judge had brushed him off. “Maybe the family has some money,” he’d said. “Or you could always do it pro bono. It certainly sounds like a manslaughter plea, from what that other clown was saying. In other words, an appearance or two.”

That other clown, by which he had to be referring to the civil lawyer, seemed like something of a backhanded slap, but Jaywalker had held his tongue. More to the point, the shutting off of the electricity pretty much answered the question of whether the family had money. And as for pro bono, it was an old Latin phrase that loosely translated as “Okay, you get to do the work, but you don’t get paid.”

They spoke for twenty minutes, just long enough for Jaywalker to seriously doubt that the case was a plea to manslaughter or anything else, not with the way Jeremy was already talking about self-defense. So instead of being an appearance or two, it was just as likely to be a protracted negotiation or even a trial, which meant a year’s worth of appearances and a ton of work.

And yet.

What was the and yet part?

Jaywalker would ask himself that very question a hundred times over the weeks and months to come. And each time he asked it, the best answer he could come up with was that the kid was so damn likeable, with his soft voice and guileless expression, and the way he looked directly at you with those big pale blue eyes of his. What was Jaywalker supposed to have told the judge? Sorry, I won’t do it? Go get some other sucker?

No, McGillicuddy had known exactly what he was doing when he’d singled out Jaywalker from among the dozen lawyers sitting in the front row of his courtroom. He’d known full well that there was one among them who, no matter how easily he might mouth off to a judge in open court, simply didn’t have it in his power to say no to a kid in deep trouble.

Talk about bullshit.

“So,” the judge asked when the case was recalled. “Will you be representing Mr. Estrada?”

Jaywalker was standing at the defense table with Jeremy this time. Apparently McGillicuddy didn’t intend to offer him the luxury of an off-the-record bench conference, where he might attempt to refuse in relative privacy. But the judge needn’t have worried.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, would you like to approach with Ms. Darcy, to discuss a possible disposition of the charges?”

“Nothing personal, but no, sir.”

“Very well. Fill out a notice of appearance. The case is assigned to Judge Wexler in Part 55. Three weeks for defense motions. Same bail conditions. Next case.”

Back in the pen adjoining the courtroom—Jaywalker never left a courtroom without first explaining to his client what had just happened and what was likely to happen between now and the next court appearance—he told Jeremy that later in the week he’d have him brought over for a real visit. The young man smiled at the thought. No doubt he and Mr. Fudderman hadn’t spent too much time together.

“Can you do me a favor?” Jeremy asked.

“I’ll try.”

“My mom’s in the courtroom. Could you tell her I’m okay?”

“Sure.”

“And…” And here Jeremy hesitated, as though embarrassed to ask.

“Yes?”

“Could you ask her to bring me some socks? It gets cold at night.”

“Yes, I can do that.”

They both stood, though they’d shortly be heading in very different directions. Jaywalker would be going back into the courtroom and then, once Johnny Cantalupo’s sentencing was done, out into the fresh air of Centre Street. Okay, relatively fresh air. Jeremy would be moved to another pen, there to wait for the one o’clock bus back to Rikers Island.

Jaywalker extended a hand, and they shook. In the age of AIDS, hepatitis C and drug-resistant TB, his fellow defense lawyers had long abandoned the practice. For Jaywalker, that was just one more reason to adhere to it.

“Thank you for taking my case, Mr. Jaywalker,” said Jeremy, reading the name with some difficulty from the business card Jaywalker had handed him earlier, the one with the home phone number on it. Another thing that distinguished Jaywalker from his colleagues.

“Call me Jay.”

Jeremy smiled. “Jay Jaywalker?”

“Just Jay.” It didn’t seem necessary to explain that once upon a time he’d been Harrison J. Walker, and that he’d dropped the Harrison part as too pretentious and rejected Harry as too Lower East Side.

“Thank you, Mr. Jay.”

Back in the courtroom, Jaywalker found Jeremy’s mother and ushered her out to the hallway. She was a short, stout woman who answered to the name Carmen. He relayed her son’s message about being okay. He didn’t mention the socks.

“How does it look for him?” she asked in a gravelly voice, thick with an accent.

“It’s too early to tell,” said Jaywalker.

“Jew gotta do your best for him, Mr. Joewalker. Jew gotta promise.” It would be her first of many attempts to get his name right. As for her mispronunciation of the word “you,” he’d get over that, too, but it would take some doing.

Jaywalker promised. He’d won cases and lost cases, but no one—no one—had ever accused him of not doing his best.

She reached into her pocket and withdrew a handful of crumpled bills. “I brought this for Mr. Fudderman,” she explained. “Am I supposed to give it to jew instead?”

“That’s up to you,” said Jaywalker. He would have loved to say no, that wasn’t necessary. But he was a month and half behind with his rent, so he allowed her to hand him the money, and thanked her. He waited until after they’d spoken and she’d walked away before bothering to line up the bills and count them.

They added up to fifty-eight dollars, a pretty modest retainer even by Jaywalker’s standards. Not even his rent was that low.

Johnny Cantalupo finally got his probation about 12:30 p.m., but Jaywalker still didn’t leave the building. Instead he took the elevator down to the seventh floor and the district attorney’s office, for a meeting with Katherine Darcy, the assistant who’d stepped up to the bench earlier that morning. It turned out it was her case, meaning she would stay with it, even try it, if it came to that.

Now, sitting across her desk, he decided she was older than he’d thought—maybe forty, he guessed—but every bit as pretty, if only she’d lighten up a bit. She could start, he almost suggested, by taking off the glasses; they made her look like a librarian, or a detention hall monitor. But he fought off the impulse to share his insights with her, pretty sure that voicing them could only get him into trouble and hurt his client at the same time.

“So,” he asked her, “what do we have here?”

“What we have here is a couple of young macho studs and their girlfriends,” she said. She said it easily, without having to look at the file. It was clear that she knew her case. “One of them says, ‘You lookin’ at me?’ and the other says, ‘Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you.’ To tell you the truth, I don’t know who started it. But it doesn’t matter. A challenge is thrown down and accepted. They walk a few blocks, square off and duke it out.”

Duke it out? Maybe she was older than she looked.

“It’s a fair fight,” she continued, “with fists. By all accounts, your guy wins it. Then, not satisfied, he pulls out a gun and shoots the victim, a twenty-year-old kid named Victor Quinones.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Witnesses?” Jaywalker asked her.

“Witnesses. Three of them, maybe four. The first wound isn’t bad, a freaky in-and-out shot that grazes Victor’s abdomen. He runs. Your guy catches up to him and, as Victor’s lying on the pavement begging for mercy, grabs him by the hair and shoots him between the eyes at point-blank range. The next day, he takes off for Puerto Rico. Stays there six, seven months. Comes back, turns himself in. Must have gotten rid of the gun by then, and figured the witnesses would be long gone. Only they’re not. They’re all around and available. So, to answer your question as plainly and as simply as I possibly can, what we have here is an execution.”

3
DUMB-ASSED QUESTIONS

“So I suppose, then,” Jaywalker said to Katherine Darcy, “that a plea to disorderly conduct is pretty much out of the question.”

“I’m glad you find the case so amusing,” she said. But on the middle syllable of amusing, her voice broke just the tiniest bit. Jaywalker caught it, and raised both eyebrows—he’d tried to master raising just one at a time, but had given up some time ago—to let her know he hadn’t missed it. But she refused to acknowledge his look, choosing instead to pretend that nothing had happened. And maybe nothing had. Maybe the poor woman had a speech defect, for all Jaywalker knew, or polyps in her throat, or a cold. He let it go.

“I try to find something amusing in all of my cases,” he told her. “If I didn’t, I’d have blown my brains out a long time ago.”

She said nothing.

“So tell me,” Jaywalker asked her. “What would you need on a Man One?” Unlike murder, on a plea to first-degree manslaughter a judge would have a broad sentencing range, from as much as twenty-five years all the way down to as little as five.

But Katherine Darcy wasn’t biting. “Let me make myself clear,” she said. “There’s not going to be an offer in this case, not to Man One or anything else. I’ve run it by my bureau chief and presented it at a weekly meeting. Nobody gets too excited about the first shot. Heat of the moment, no serious injury, not such a big deal. But as soon as they hear about the last shot, the coup de grace, everyone agrees that’s a deal-breaker. Or, like I said a little while ago, an execution. So it’s a murder case, and it’s going to stay a murder case. If some judge wants to give your guy the minimum on a plea to the charge, so be it. I have no control over that.”

Not that she needed any control over that. The minimum sentence on murder was fifteen to life. “Sounds like you want to try the case,” said Jaywalker.

She shrugged her shoulders. “If I don’t try this one, I’ll try another one. It honestly makes no difference to me.”

Jaywalker stood up. It seemed as good a time as any to leave, before he started getting really pissed off at her. In his book, it was okay for a prosecutor to be tough, as long as he or she was reasonable about it and willing to be flexible when the situation called for it. It was quite another thing to treat all cases as fungible commodities, and to act as though defendants were readily interchangeable. They weren’t interchangeable, at least not to Jaywalker’s way of thinking. Each one was a human being, however imperfect and flawed. Each one was different, and the facts and circumstances of each case were different. It might not always seem that way from a distance, but if you got close enough, you could see it was true.

“How many murders have you tried?” he asked her, trying to make the question sound innocent and born out of nothing but idle curiosity. Small talk.

She hesitated for a moment, and he thought she might be counting in her head. But it turned out she wasn’t. “This will actually be my first,” she said. “But I’ve been in the appeals bureau for eight and a half years, and I bet I’ve briefed and argued at least fifteen or twenty.”

“It’s not quite the same,” he suggested.

“I’m sure it’s not,” she said with what he took for a condescending smile. “But I’ll manage. And in the process, it’ll be a great honor to learn from the very best. I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Jaywalker, and—”

“Jay.”

“—and I’m very much looking forward to the experience. I really am.”

Riding down the elevator, Jaywalker told himself to breathe deeply, calm down and not take Ms. Darcy’s attitude personally. Working in the appeals bureau was something like practicing in a law library. You dealt with statutes crafted in legalese, abstract principles of law and cold rules of evidence. You spent your time reading transcripts of trials hundreds of pages long, sometimes thousands. They might contain each word spoken from the witness stand and every comment made on the record. But what they didn’t have, what they left out, was just as important: the stammering and sweating of the witnesses, their inability to make and maintain eye contact, the repetition of phrases or mispronunciations that, in real time and place, spoke volumes, volumes that never showed up on the printed page. The transcripts said nothing about the young man or broken woman sitting shaking in the defendant’s chair, nothing about the mother sobbing softly back in the third row. To the appellate lawyer, sentences were numbers, governed by statutory minimums and maximums and measured against statistical means and averages. They told you nothing about the filthy cells those sentences would have to be served in, nothing about the rapes that would be almost as regular as the meals, nothing about the toddlers back home who’d be growing up without fathers or mothers, or sometimes both.

But even as he told himself these things and tried to excuse Katherine Darcy’s ignorance as nothing more than the product of her cloistered career, Jaywalker wasn’t quite ready to forgive her. He’d been around long enough to know how things worked in the D.A.’s office. When an assistant was ready to handle her first homicide case, they’d hand her an absolute winner, an open-and-shut felony murder, or a case with ten eyewitnesses and a full videotaped confession. Something along those lines. Evidently they considered Jeremy Estrada’s case a perfect example. But instead of approaching it with a sense of humility over the fact that one young man was dead and another likely to grow old in prison, she was looking at it as a numbers game, in which she was determined to rack up as high a score as possible. To her, that meant no lesser plea. And if it went to trial, so much the better. Along the way, she might pick up a thing or two and hone her courtroom skills. If not, the next one would go to trial, or the one after that.

And Jaywalker’s reaction to that?

As much as he hated rolling the dice with somebody’s freedom at stake, already there was a part of him that wanted to try the case, just so to he could beat her, watch her face drop as she listened to some jury foreperson read off the words Not guilty. See if that didn’t knock that smug little smile off her face, along with those library-issue glasses of hers. And not just because he wanted to see how pretty she might be without them, either.

Though that was surely part of it.

He had his first real sit-down meeting with Jeremy Estrada two days later, in an attorney visit room on the thirteenth floor. A lot of buildings don’t even have thirteenth floors; they’re generally considered bad luck and therefore undesirable. At 100 Centre Street, just about everyone had had bad luck and was considered an undesirable, so somebody must have decided that the number made no difference.

Jeremy showed up looking tired and wearing an orange jumpsuit, courtesy of the Department of Corrections, and a pair of old sneakers. Jaywalker, who had no cases of his own on this day, was decked out in his casual Friday finest, faded jeans and a denim work shirt with a frayed collar. It also served as his casual rest-of-the-week finest. A lot of things were important to Jaywalker, but clothes weren’t one of them.

“What time did they wake you up?” he asked Jeremy, once they’d taken seats across from one another, separated by a wire-mesh partition.

Jeremy smiled. “About three o’clock,” he said.

“Sorry.” He knew the drill. Up at three, to be herded into the dayroom at four to wait a few hours. Onto the bus at seven or seven-fifteen. At the courthouse by eight, eight-thirty. Up to the pens at nine. After that, it all depended on when your lawyer showed up. That could mean as early as nine-thirty if you were lucky enough to have a Jaywalker, or as late as four in the afternoon if you weren’t. If your case got called in the morning session, you made the one-o’clock bus and were back on Rikers by three. If you missed the one o’clock, you had to wait for the five o’clock, which never pulled out before six-thirty, and got you back to the Rock around ten or ten-thirty. Meaning you’d not only miss chow, but if you had to be back in court the next day, you’d get three hours of sleep if you were lucky. Jaywalker knew all this not only because he’d heard it from defendants, but because he’d been in the system himself more than once, whether serving an overnight contempt sentence after pissing off some judge, or something equally silly, like getting caught snooping around in the chief clerk’s office in order to get a peek at the judicial courtroom assignment sheet for the following month, so he could engage in a little judge-shopping.

“So,” he said, “how about telling me what happened.”

“Where would you like me to start?” Jeremy asked in a voice so soft Jaywalker had to lean forward to hear it.

“I’d like you to start at the beginning. And take your time. I need details.”

Jeremy took a deep breath and smiled. “It’s kind of a long story,” he said.

“I’ve got all day,” Jaywalker told him.

“I guess it started,” Jeremy said, “when I met this girl.”

No shock there. Jaywalker had learned long ago that most murders were about money or drugs. But if they weren’t, they were about girls. “What was her name?” he asked.

“Miranda. Her name was Miranda.”

“And?”

“We, we became friends.”

“Friends?” Jaywalker asked. “Or lovers, too?”

“No. We never got a chance.”

“How did it go?” Jaywalker asked him. “The friendship.”

“It went good, at first.”

“And then?”

Already Jaywalker could see that getting information out of Jeremy was going to be a slow and painful process. Over time, he’d come to liken it to dental extraction. Not only did Jeremy speak in something between a whisper and a murmur, he summarized. A summary can be helpful if you want to get from the beginning of a story to the end of it in a hurry. On the other hand, if you’re interested in finding out what really happened and why, a summary is the opposite of what you’re looking for. Again Jaywalker told Jeremy to take his time, that it was detail he was after. But if Jeremy understood the word, he was for some reason unable to follow the direction.

“There was a problem,” he said.

“What kind of a problem?”

“There were these guys,” said Jeremy. “Seven or eight guys, actually, and one girl. One of the guys, the main one, kept going like Miranda belonged to him, even though she didn’t. And they gave me a hard time because of that. You know.”

“No, I don’t. How did they give you a hard time?”

“They followed me. They called me names. They told me they were going to get me. That kinda stuff. You know.”

“And?”

“And finally I had a face-off with one of them.”

“A face-off?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it,” said Jaywalker. His therapist used to say that, back when Jaywalker had gone into treatment following his wife’s death, because he couldn’t sleep at night, couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, couldn’t even remember why he was supposed to. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” “How does it make you feel?” “What do you think about it?” The therapy hadn’t lasted too long. But bit by bit, Jaywalker had begun sleeping at night again, and getting out of bed in the morning, and life had somehow gone on. So who was to say? Maybe the therapy had helped. Maybe the same sort of dumb-assed questions might work with Jeremy.

“We had a fight, him and me.”

“A fight. With weapons?”

“No,” said Jeremy. “With fists.”

“Who won?”

A shrug. “I did, I guess.”

“Then what?”

“He pulled a gun,” said Jeremy. “We fought over it. It went off. I got it away from him.”

“And then?”

“And then I shot it at him.”

“Once?” Jaywalker asked him. “Or more than once?”

“More than once.”

“How many times?”

Jeremy shrugged again. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“But you killed him?”

Jeremy’s answer was so soft Jaywalker couldn’t hear it and had to say, “What?”

“I guess so.”

“Shot him between the eyes?”

“If that’s what they say.”

“That’s what they say,” said Jaywalker.

“Then I guess it must be true.”

“Why did you shoot him between the eyes?”

Jeremy seemed to think about that for a minute. Or maybe he was honestly trying to remember. Squinting through the wire mesh of the partition that separated them, it was hard for Jaywalker to tell.

“Self-defense?” But the way Jeremy said the words, they came out sounding more like a question than an answer or a recollection. No doubt he knew nothing about the nuances of justification, the body of law that allows one to use force—occasionally even deadly force—to protect one’s self or someone else. But despite his ignorance, it was pretty obvious that even Jeremy knew it wasn’t going to be much of a fit to the events he’d described.

Jaywalker figured it was as good a time as any to start finding out. “Was the guy armed at the moment you fired that shot?” he asked. “The one that hit him between the eyes?”

“No,” said Jeremy. “Not then he wasn’t.”

“Was he coming at you?”

“No.”

“Threatening you in any way?”

“No.”

“What was he doing?”

Jeremy closed his eyes. Maybe he was trying to picture things as they’d happened that day, seven months ago. Maybe he was even trying to relive the incident, seeing if he somehow couldn’t make it come out differently this time. After a long moment, he opened his eyes and, looking directly at Jaywalker, said, “I don’t really remember.”

So much for self-defense.

They talked for a while more before Jeremy asked what time it was. And even though Jaywalker told him it was barely noon, Jeremy repeated the question five minutes later.

“You want to make the one o’clock?” he asked.

Jeremy nodded sheepishly.

“Okay,” said Jaywalker. They hadn’t been talking all that long, but he sensed that still might amount to something of a record for Jeremy. And so far, all he’d been able to pull out of the kid was the most basic outline of the shooting and the events that had led up to it. But there’d be time, and Jeremy certainly wasn’t going anywhere. In New York State the right to bail is pretty broad, but it stops at the door of the accused murderer’s cell. And even before McGillicuddy had gotten a hold of the case, another judge had ordered Jeremy held in remand. Meaning there was no bail set at all. Not that Carmen Estrada and her fifty-eight dollars could have come up with it anyway.

But before they parted, Jaywalker had one more order of business with Jeremy. “Do me a favor,” he told him, “and put these on.” Taking two pairs of woolen socks from his briefcase, he slid them beneath the wire-mesh partition.

“Put them on here? Both pairs?”

“Yup,” Jaywalker told him. “Otherwise the C.O.’s will take them away from you and have me arrested for smuggling contraband into the jail.” The C.O.’s were the corrections officers, and the truth was, they never would have had him arrested. Others, yes, but not Jaywalker. To them, he was one of the good guys. Not only did he talk like them and ask about their wives and kids, he had a law enforcement background. And most of all, he did right by his clients, even the ones who were jammed up the worst. Especially the ones who were jammed up the worst. In other words, he was one of them. So Jaywalker wasn’t worried about himself at all. He was looking out for the C.O.’s themselves, lest some captain spot Jeremy carrying in the socks and write up one of the C.O.’s for looking the other way and allowing them in.

Jeremy slipped off his sneakers and did as he was told. But when he tried to put his sneakers back on, he found it all but impossible. He ended up having to leave them spread wide open. Lacing them up was no issue; shoelaces weren’t allowed on Rikers Island. They could too easily be used as a weapon, to strangle another inmate. Or to “hang up,” as in committing suicide.

Jeremy stood up and tried walking a few paces. From the way he did it, it was clear he was going to need some practice.

But his feet sure were going to be warm at night.

4
A REAL NICE KID

He’d only been on the case three days, but already Jaywalker pretty much knew that the fact that Jeremy Estrada’s feet would be warm was about all the good news he should expect.

Murder cases pretty much fell into two distinct groups, Jaywalker had long ago learned. There were the whodunnits, where the issue was whether the prosecution could prove that it was the defendant who’d committed the crime. And there were, for lack of a better term, what he called the yesbuts. That was his catchall category for all the other cases, where the identity of the killer was beyond serious dispute, and if the case was going to be won, it was going to be won with a “yesbut” defense. Yes, the defendant had killed the deceased, but it had been an accident, or he’d acted in self-defense, or had been too young or too retarded or too insane to make it murder, or—and this one you were unlikely to find in the statute books, unless maybe you were in Mississippi or Alabama or west Texas—the victim had needed killing.

Unfortunately, none of those defenses seemed to apply to Jeremy’s case.

To begin with, not only did Jeremy readily admit that he was the killer, but Katherine Darcy, if she was to be believed, had a handful of witnesses ready to walk into court and prove it to a jury’s satisfaction. So it wasn’t a whodunnit. Which meant it didn’t call for a SODDI defense, the letters referring to a highly technical principle of law which, spelled out in full, stood for Some Other Dude Did It.

But when Jaywalker turned to the question of what exactly had made Jeremy do it, things didn’t get any more promising. The shot between the eyes at point-blank range could hardly be excused as an accident. And with Victor Quinones lying unarmed and helpless on the ground, self-defense was pretty much out of the question. Next, although Jeremy might look fifteen, it turned out he was actually seventeen, the same age he’d been at the time of the killing. And appearance didn’t count; the fact was, he was old enough to be considered an adult under the murder statute. And if he seemed a bit on the slow and quiet side, he certainly didn’t strike Jaywalker as being either not legally responsible for his acts or incompetent to stand trial. Under New York law, you were competent if you knew what you were charged with and could carry on a conversation with your lawyer. Hell, Jaywalker had come across radishes that passed that test. In terms of insanity, Jeremy had no psychiatric history that Jaywalker knew of, and his behavior seemed calculated and purposeful, hardly the product of a mental disease or defect, something an insanity defense required. Finally, they were in Manhattan, the enlightened heart of New York City, not the deep South; “deserving to die” simply didn’t cut it here. And even if it had, giving someone a hard time by calling him names and then losing a fistfight to him hardly rose to the level of sufficient provocation.

The most that Jaywalker had to work with so far was the fact that Jeremy had eventually turned himself in to face the music. And that he was soft-spoken, extremely good-looking and didn’t seem capable of hurting a fly, much less blowing someone’s brains out.

Which wasn’t much help, seeing as that was exactly what he’d done.

So as much as a part of Jaywalker would have loved to try the case and teach Katherine Darcy a little humility, he knew he wasn’t going to get his chance. Not on this case, anyway. To begin with, Jaywalker wasn’t a gunslinger by nature, a cowboy who tried cases for the fun of it. Or for the fee of it, the extra money it brought in if you were on the clock and were interested in running up the hours. As good as he was at trial—and those who’d been up against him, alongside him or anywhere else in the courtroom would tell you there was no one better—Jaywalker hated trying cases. For one thing, he put so much of himself into the battle that each time out, it nearly killed him. He stopped eating, he lost weight, his hair fell out in clumps and he didn’t sleep at night. But those things he regarded as minor inconveniences. More to the point, he recognized that a trial was nothing but a crapshoot, a roll of the dice. It ultimately left the defendant’s fate in the hands of a judge or jury. And though Jaywalker’s acquittal rate was up in the ninety-percent range, an unheard-of statistic, the fact remained that he lost cases. Not often, but occasionally. The only lawyers who didn’t lose were television lawyers or were liars. And if Jaywalker were to lose this one, if the dice happened to come up wrong for Jeremy Estrada, it would mean a life sentence.

No, this wasn’t a case that could be tried. It was one of the ninety percent that would have to be plea-bargained. And even though Katherine Darcy had talked tough, insisting that there would be no offer, that was now. Jaywalker’s job, as he saw it, was to convince her otherwise, to overcome her resistance.

Just how would he go about doing that?

Well, time would be on his side, for one thing. Eight months had already passed since the death of Victor Quinones. By the time the case was trial-ready, Jaywalker would see that another year had gone by. He’d draw out the discovery process, do some serious investigating, file written motions, ask for pretrial hearings, and do everything else in his power to play the clock. Little by little, Katherine Darcy would get worn-out and distracted. She’d get assigned other cases and find herself fighting other battles. Witnesses would disappear, detectives would retire and move to Florida or Arizona, and family members of the victim would give up and go back to Puerto Rico. Who knew? With a little bit of luck, the rigid Ms. Darcy might even mellow a bit and develop a sense of proportion.

There was one small problem with that strategy, of course. It meant that Jaywalker had to get down to work.

One of the built-in advantages the prosecution enjoys over the defense is its head start. In a typical case, that head start may be as minimal as a day or two. A crime gets committed. A person gets arrested, processed at the station house of the local precinct and brought to the courthouse. There the arresting officer or detective sits down with an assistant district attorney, and together they draw up a complaint. Essential witnesses are interviewed while their recollections of events are fresh. If the case is a felony, particularly a serious one like murder, a grand jury presentation is quickly scheduled. The assistant district attorney conducts that presentation, both as prosecutor and “legal advisor” to the grand jurors. There’s no judge present, and nobody to represent the defendant. The sole exception to the last part of that occurs when a defense lawyer insists that his client be permitted to testify. But even in the rare instance when that happens, the lawyer gets to ask no questions, raise no objections and make no statements; he’s effectively gagged. Meanwhile, the assistant district attorney is free to cross-examine the defendant and pin him down at a point when he’s barely had time to explain the events to his own lawyer.

Not that any of that had happened in Jeremy Estrada’s case. By fleeing to Puerto Rico immediately following the shooting, Jeremy had forfeited his right to appear at the grand jury. And by staying away for seven months, he’d taken the prosecution’s customary day-or-two head start and multiplied it by a factor of several hundred.

Normally Jaywalker’s approach to catching up would have involved an extended sit-down with the prosecutor. There were plenty of assistant D.A.s who would have been willing to pretty much open their case files to him and supply him with copies of documents he wasn’t even remotely entitled to at that point. But Katherine Darcy had already made it clear that she wasn’t from that school. Getting information out of her, he knew, was going to be about as easy as getting it out of Jeremy. So Jaywalker wasn’t ready to go back to her. Not yet, anyway.

Instead, he took a deep breath, told himself to be nice, and put in a call to Alan Fudderman, the civil lawyer who’d stood up for Jeremy at his arraignment. The guy who’d helped Carmen when they’d turned off her electricity, and then tried to plead Jeremy guilty to murder, hoping for probation.

They met at Fudderman’s office, a cramped cubbyhole in a high-rise on lower Broadway. The walls were stained and peeling, and there was so much paper on top of the desk that separated them that Jaywalker had to sit up straight just to see over it. But Fudderman himself turned out to be as affable in person as he’d been adrift in criminal court. He didn’t bother making copies of the documents in his file; he simply turned over all the originals to Jaywalker.

“I’m glad they’ve found someone who seems to know what he’s doing,” he said. “I was a little out of my element.”

“Happens to the best of us,” said Jaywalker. Though it never happened to him. But that was because he wouldn’t have been caught dead in civil court, or housing court, or before the Taxi and Limousine Commission. He didn’t write wills, handle divorces or do closings. There were even criminal cases he wouldn’t touch, because they required some specialized knowledge he lacked. The list included prosecutions involving securities, wire fraud, stock transfers, money laundering and the like. Just about anything calling for a knowledge of how money worked. Money, Jaywalker had come to realize long ago, was something he was no good at, whether that meant understanding it, earning it, investing it or simply keeping it from evaporating into thin air.

“He seems like a real nice kid,” said Fudderman.

“Yeah,” Jaywalker agreed. “He does.”

“I hope you can do something for him.”

“Me, too.”

Jaywalker thanked him for his time. At the door, Fudderman extended his hand. Jaywalker had to shift the file from one arm to the other in order to shake with him.

“Let me know,” said Fudderman, “if there’s anything else I can ever do for you.”

“Thanks,” said Jaywalker.

Come to think of it, he was two months behind with his electric bill.

That night, Jaywalker passed up watching a Yankee game. It actually wasn’t that much of a sacrifice, as he thought about it. They were already so far out of contention for a playoff spot that he’d given up on them and was instead already looking forward to football season and the Giants.

His wife had accused him of being a fair-weather fan, and there was some truth to it. She’d never understood how he could turn off a game just because his team was a couple of runs or touchdowns behind, but could stay up past midnight to catch the final out of a blowout victory. He’d tried to explain to her that it was all about enjoyment; if it looked like his guys were going to win, every minute of it was fun, if it didn’t, why would he want to torture himself?

“But suppose they make a comeback?” she’d asked him more than once.

“From fourteen down?”

“It could happen,” she would say.

God, how he missed her. More than a decade had passed now since her death, and he still reached out for her in the dark of night.

“Enough,” he said out loud.

He did that from time to time. Talked to himself in the privacy of his studio apartment. He’d worried about it at first, wondering if it was an early symptom of dementia. But then he’d convinced himself that it really wasn’t so different from whistling in an empty elevator, or singing to himself in his car on the rare occasions when he drove it.

“Enough,” he said again. And walked over to his desk/dining room table/laundry sorter/ironing board, where he’d placed the accordion file Alan Fudderman had given him that afternoon.

He untied the little stringy thing that kept it closed and dumped the contents onto the table. There wasn’t much. A copy of the indictment; a warrant issued long ago for Jeremy’s arrest; his rap sheet, showing one prior for marijuana possession but no disposition for it; a paper copy of what must have been a morgue photo of Victor Quinones, too grainy to really show what he’d looked like; a sketch of the crime scene, indicating where the fistfight had taken place and where Quinones had been found by the first responders; the autopsy report and death certificate; a police property voucher for two shell casings from a 9-mm pistol and a small piece of deformed lead; and a few other miscellaneous documents, none of which promised to give up any secrets.

He spent the next two hours reading, rereading, making notes and organizing the material into subfiles. Then he made a list of things that weren’t there, that Katherine Darcy had notably declined to turn over to Alan Fudderman, and that she’d no doubt resist turning over to Jaywalker. By the time he was finished, the list dwarfed the items she’d actually supplied.

He walked over to the TV set, turned it on and found the Yankee game. A graphic at the top of the screen told him they were down 7-3 in the bottom of the eighth. He watched Derek Jeter strike out on a nasty slider in the dirt, clicked it off and went to bed. Bed being a pullout sofa that he hadn’t bothered pulling out in three months, or whenever the last time was that he’d had company of the sleepover variety.

The next morning, when other lawyers were taking cabs downtown to their offices, corporate clients or courthouses, Jaywalker took three subways to the Upper East Side. Not the Upper East Side of uniformed doormen, handsomely groomed poodles and multimillion dollar apartments, but the Upper East Side of housing projects, bodegas and car repair shops. The upper Upper East Side.

He could have hired a private investigator to do it, but there wasn’t room in his fifty-eight dollar retainer to do that. Besides, Jaywalker had long been his own investigator. His background as a DEA agent equipped him for the task, and though he no longer carried a gun—it was somewhere in the bottom of his closet, probably, but he’d had no reason to dig it out for years now, and would no doubt shoot himself in the foot as soon as he did—he was no stranger to bad neighborhoods, having spent half his life in them. The secret was to dress the part, and then look and sound like you belonged, all talents that came easily to him.

Using the crime-scene sketch as a road map, he got off the train at 110th Street and walked east to Third Avenue. There he turned left and headed north. It was a little after eight o’clock, early afternoon by Jaywalker standards, and the sun was just beginning to clear the buildings to his right. He kept to the west side of the avenue, where he could feel its warmth. By afternoon, he knew, he’d be looking for shade.

He walked three blocks before crossing over and turning into the courtyard that would take him into the little pocket park carved out of the redbrick buildings of the housing project. He found the benches drawn in the sketch and marking the site of the fistfight, where back in September two young men had squared off. One of them had thought it was going to be a fair fight. The other had come “packing,” “strapped” for the occasion, as they said on the street. From there, Jaywalker paced off the distance to the spot where Victor Quinones had found death in the form of a 9-mm bullet.

If there’d been blood on the pavement, or the chalked outline of a human body, it was long gone, washed clean by a hundred rains. If there’d been witnesses other than the ones Katherine Darcy promised were “around and available,” they weren’t showing their heads this morning. Jaywalker straightened up and looked around in all directions. It was almost as though he was hoping the crime scene would speak to him, reward him for his pilgrimage. All he needed was some clue, some tiny nugget that might help him understand just what had driven Jeremy Estrada to take the life of another young man. Something he could take away with him and bring to the office of a tough prosecutor who, when she looked at the case, saw only an execution. Or to a jury, if all else failed.

But there were no clues in sight this morning, no tiny nuggets.

The park was saying nothing.

He met again with Carmen Estrada, Jeremy’s mother. She came to his office that afternoon. Or, technically, the office of a colleague, Jaywalker having given up his own space in the building back at the time of his suspension, some five years ago.

About the killing and the events that had led up to it, Carmen was short on specifics but long on loyalty.

“It wasn’t Jeremy’s fault, Mr. Johnnywalker. It was all on account of the problem he had with those guys,” she explained. “On account of the girl, Miranda. The guys, they made him do it. It’s all their fault, the accident that happened.”

Over the weeks and months to follow, he wouldn’t get much more than that out of her. It was easy to see where Jeremy had learned the habit of summarizing instead of going into factual detail. To Carmen, the harassment her son had been subjected to would always be “the problem,” just as the deadly culmination of that problem would always be “the accident.”

Before leaving, she reached down the front of her dress, and for a frightening moment Jaywalker thought she might be about to undress. Not that it would have been a first for him. But he’d already decided that Jeremy must have gotten his good looks from his father’s side of the family. And loyalty, while surely a virtue, was hardly what Jaywalker looked for in a bed partner.

But when Carmen’s hand reappeared from between her breasts, it was clutching an envelope, folded in half. “Here,” she said. “It’s for jew.”

Inside, he would find five well-used twenty-dollar bills.

So if the going rate for a murder case was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars, that meant he had only $49,842 to go.

With Carmen Estrada proving to be something less than a font of information, Jaywalker resigned himself to trying another visit with Jeremy. On their previous meeting, he’d found Jeremy so preoccupied with making the one-o’clock bus back to Rikers Island that he was incapable of going into the facts of the case in any really useful detail. So Jaywalker decided to do it the old-fashioned way. Rather than having his client brought over to 100 Centre Street for a counsel visit, he would make the trip out to Rikers himself. Sure, by the time he was back it would have cost him an entire day, what with subway rides back and forth, long waits for short hops on Department of Corrections buses, sign-ins and searches and more waiting. But, he figured, what else did he have to do with his time?

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 called 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?

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.

Jaywalker had known Harold Wexler as an angry young civil rights lawyer, long before he’d become an angry middle-aged judge. As bright as anyone on the bench and as well-read in the law, he too often fell victim to his own impatience and his inability to suffer fools, be they defendants, defenders, prosecutors or innocent bystanders. He appreciated good lawyering when he saw it in his courtroom, and he saw it unfailingly in Jaywalker. Those he didn’t see it in, he attacked with a biting wit, his sarcasm projecting to the farthest row of the audience. A lawyer who hadn’t done his homework could expect to be told, “I see you’ve avoided the dangers of over-preparation, Mr. Jacobs.” Another, forced to answer “No” when asked if she was ready for trial, might hear, “Well, at least that has the virtue of clarity.”

Generally, Jaywalker had learned, you got a fair trial from Harold Wexler. But he tended to get emotionally involved in his cases. If your client was truly sympathetic, Wexler could be your best friend. But if he decided your client was a total slimebag who deserved to be locked up for the remainder of the century, you were in for a long week or two.

It mattered.

And because it mattered, Jaywalker had made it a point to arrive at Part 55 that morning neurotically early, so early that the doors hadn’t even been unlocked by the court officers. Jaywalker knew them, too, and the clerks and interpreters and stenographers and corrections officers. They knew him and liked him, and it made his job easier in a hundred little ways.

So once the doors had been unlocked and the other early arrivals had begun trickling in, the clerk mentioned to Judge Wexler that Mr. Jaywalker was there on Jeremy Estrada’s case.

“Why don’t you come up and tell me about it?” said the judge.

Which, of course, was the whole idea.

Katherine Darcy, meanwhile, was nowhere in sight. So a younger assistant joined Jaywalker at the bench, an assistant who had a file but knew absolutely nothing about the case. He kept glancing toward the front door, hoping Ms. Darcy would show up and rescue him.

“What do we have here?” the judge wanted to know.

“What we have,” said Jaywalker, “is a seventeen-year-old kid who makes the mistake of falling in love. A local gang of thugs rewards him by tormenting him for three months, placing him under virtual house arrest. Finally, he sees one of them alone. They have a fistfight, which by all accounts the defendant wins. But the other guy turns out to be a poor loser. According to my guy, he pulls a gun, they struggle over it, my guy gets it away from him and shoots him. Unfortunately, his aim happens to be very good.”

Wexler looked to the young A.D.A., but the poor guy was busy leafing through the file, trying his best to decipher handwritten notes.

“It’s Katherine Darcy’s case,” said Jaywalker. “She’s going to tell you it’s a no-plea case, an execution.”

“And you? What are you going to tell me?”

“I’m going to tell you that if it’s not justification, it’s certainly extreme emotional disturbance. To me it’s a Man One, five years.”

“Here comes Ms. Darcy now,” said the young assistant. All eyes turned to see her hurrying up the aisle like a bride late for her own wedding.

“Looks like I missed something,” she said.

“Feel free to arrive in my courtroom at nine-thirty,” Judge Wexler told her, “and I assure you you’ll miss nothing.”

“Sorry.”

Not that the judge didn’t give Katherine Darcy a chance to explain her view of the case. He did, and she placed the gun in Jeremy’s hand, not Victor’s, and described how he’d delivered the final shot to a victim who lay helpless on the ground, begging for mercy.

At that Wexler turned to Jaywalker and said, “There goes your justification defense.”

“That’s why I told you Man One and five years.”

“No way,” said Darcy.

The judge gave her a hard look. “You really see this as a no-lesser-plea case?”

“Absolutely,” she said, trying to trump his skepticism with complete certainty.

Jaywalker said nothing. But he did look up at the ceiling, his not-so-subtle substitute for rolling his eyes in exasperation.

“I see cases like this all the time,” said Wexler. “Two guys, one girl, much too much testosterone. I’d split the difference. I agree it’s a first-degree manslaughter, but I think it’s worth the maximum, twenty-five years. Talk to your client, Mr. Jaywalker. And you go meet with your supervisors, Ms. Darcy. Only this time?”

“Yes?”

“I suggest you don’t show up late.”

She didn’t call him until the following afternoon. He was sitting at his computer at the time, trying to write. He’d been trying to write for several years now, trying being the operative word. Still, he had this fantasy of getting out, of running from the law and becoming a bestselling author, the next John Grisham or Scott Turow. Because the thing was, he had all these incredible stories from his years in the trenches, and he thought he knew how to write well enough to tell them. Hell, he’d been an English major once. Which was why he’d had to go off to law school after college, to learn a trade. But he really could write, no small feat for a lawyer. The problem seemed to lie elsewhere. His old therapist had suggested that perhaps Jaywalker didn’t want to get out at all, that in fact he preferred to spend the rest of his days down at 100 Centre Street, trying cases until they carried him out in a box.

He answered the phone on the third ring with his customary, “Jaywalker.”

“Hi,” said a woman’s voice he didn’t recognize. “This is Katie Darcy. From the D.A.’s office. Jeremy Estrada’s case?”

“Sure,” said Jaywalker. “Right.” His silence wasn’t the result of his not knowing who she was, or who employed her, or what case they had together. It was the first name that had caught him. Just when had she ceased to be Katherine and become Katie? And whenever it had been, wasn’t it, as Martha Stuart might have put it, a good thing?

“Is this a bad time?” she asked.

“No, no. It’s a fine time.”

For a moment neither of them said anything. As curious as he was about the reason for her call, Jaywalker wasn’t about to ask. As they used to say back in the old days, before double-digit inflation, it was her dime.

“I truly believe,” she finally said, “that Judge Wexler is dead wrong. I think the case is a murder case. But I’ve got to tell you. After spending fifteen minutes with him, I have no desire to be his punching bag for two weeks. If your client wants the Man One, he can have it.”

“With five years?”

“No,” she laughed. Actually laughed. “With twenty-five years, and not a day less.”

If the “it” wasn’t quite ice in the wintertime, it was pretty close. Nonetheless, Jaywalker didn’t want to be rude. Not when Katherine had become Katie and made them an offer of any sort, all in one conversation. “I’ll talk to Jeremy,” he said. He could have said “my client,” but he preferred to personalize him. He wanted to begin the process of getting Katie to think of Jeremy Estrada as a kid, instead of as a case.

Obviously that Katherine-to-Katie switch had gotten to him. So much so that it seemed silly to ignore it. “So,” he asked her, “when did you become Katie?”

“I’ve always been Katie,” she deadpanned. “My middle initial is T. So I’m really K. T. Darcy.”

“What’s the T stand for?”

“Ahhh,” she said. “That’s for me to know.”

He had Jeremy brought over two days later for a counsel visit. The two trips to Rikers Island had worn Jaywalker out. He figured it was Jeremy’s turn to travel.

“What’s up?” Jeremy asked, his eyes puffy from the 3:00 a.m. wake-up.

“The D.A.’s willing to give you a manslaughter plea,” Jaywalker told him. “But only if we agree to a twenty-five year sentence.”

“How much do I do on that?”

“Around twenty.” A dozen years back, truth-in-labeling had come to sentencing. Gone were the days when a judge could sentence a defendant to a public-pleasing thirty-year prison term, confident the parole board would quietly let him go home in six months.

“Do I have to take it?” Jeremy asked.

“Of course not.”

“Will you be mad at me if I don’t?”

“Jeremy, this isn’t my case. It’s yours.”

“And you’ll still fight your hardest for me, even if I don’t take it?”

“Absolutely.”

Jeremy’s mother was somewhat more empathetic.

“That’s too much time, Mr. Walkerjay. He was only a boy. They made him do it.”

Jaywalker tried to explain that he was simply the messenger. But the distinction seemed totally lost on Carmen Estrada. “Jew gotta do better for him,” she insisted. “I’m paying jew a lotta money here. Jew gotta get him less time, a lot less.” And she handed him another envelope, this one with seventy-five dollars in it.

A lotta money indeed.

They went back before Judge Wexler in mid-October. He ruled on Jaywalker’s motions, predictably refusing to dismiss the murder charge or reduce it to manslaughter. He postponed until just before trial any decision on whether the prosecution would be entitled to ask Jeremy Estrada about his prior arrest if he were to take the stand. When it came to the issue of the fairness of the lineup at which Teresa Morales had picked Jeremy out, the judge turned to Ms. Darcy.

“You’re saying the identification was purely confirmatory?”

“That’s correct.”

“They knew each other?” the judge asked.

“So to speak.”

“What she’s trying to tell you,” said Jaywalker, “is that Teresa Morales is one of the gang members who stalked the defendant for three months.”

“Gang members?” said Wexler and Darcy in unison.

Jaywalker let out a snort, a hybrid somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. The existence of gangs in the five boroughs had long been one of the city’s dirty little secrets. Gangs were a phenomenon supposedly restricted to other places, like the Watts area of Los Angeles, the South Side of Chicago, and pretty much all of Newark and Camden, New Jersey. New York City might have a colorful history of Irish Westies and Italian Mafiosi, but when it came to modern counterparts with names like Bloods and Crips and Latin Kings, the official word of the day was denial. So Jaywalker’s use of the term had bordered on burn-him-at-the-stake heresy.

“Please forgive me,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is to disparage the emperor’s new clothes.”

“You’ll have to excuse Mr. Jaywalker,” said Wexler to Ms. Darcy. “From time to time he mistakes my constant smile and jovial good humor as an invitation to make bad jokes.”

“Let me withdraw the term gang,” said Jaywalker. “How about marauding band of drug-dealing thugs?”

“How about instead we get to the point?” suggested the judge. “How many times, Ms. Darcy, had your witness encountered the defendant prior to the incident?”

Which, of course, was precisely what Jaywalker had wanted to hear all along. If her answer were to be “just once or twice,” then the lineup hadn’t been merely confirmatory, and the defense would be entitled to a pretrial hearing on its admissibility. If, on the other hand, she were to say “a dozen or more,” that fact would play nicely into Jeremy’s claim of constant, continued harassment at the hands of the Raiders.

Ms. Darcy’s hesitation to answer suggested she recognized the trap. “I don’t know the precise number,” she said.

“Perhaps,” said Wexler, “you could give us a ballpark figure. Like more than five, ten to twenty, less than a thousand.”

“Less than a thousand,” she said, apparently taking the judge literally.

“She likes to play things close to the breast.” As soon as the words were out of Jaywalker’s mouth, he knew they didn’t sound quite right. He hoped the other two had missed it. But Harold Wexler never missed anything.

“I believe,” he said, “that the expression is close to the vest.”

“That, too.”

“Once again, Ms. Darcy, you’ll have to forgive Mr. Jaywalker. If only a small fraction of recent rumors are to be credited, his competence before the court is rivaled only by his legendary exploits between the sheets.”

Jaywalker could only wince, while Katherine Darcy actually blushed, something Jaywalker thought had gone extinct around 1940, along with fainting couches and lace handkerchiefs.

“Listen,” said the judge. “Can’t we resolve this case? Is there still no offer here?”

“As a matter of fact, there is an offer,” said Ms. Darcy, happy to move on. “I’ve told counsel that Mr. Estrada can have the first-degree manslaughter plea if he wants it.”

“With twenty-five years,” added Jaywalker.

“Fair enough,” said Wexler. “Mr. Jaywalker?”

“We’re not even close. He’d take five, maybe six or seven, though I’d probably have to break his arm. But twenty-five? That’s way—”

“Let me make my own position clear,” said the judge. “I’m strongly inclined to agree with Ms. Darcy’s assessment of this case. The first shot doesn’t disturb me too much. But the second one, the one at point-blank range between the eyes, as the victim lies on the ground begging for his life? I think execution is an appropriate description of that. So the defendant can have the twenty-five years and be out in twenty. Or he can go to trial, get convicted of murder, and have the exact same twenty-five years, but as his minimum, with life as his maximum. His choice. I could care less. Next case.”

If you happen to be a devotee of old black-and-white Westerns, as Jaywalker had been in his youth, you soon learn that long before the arrival of Technicolor, things were already pretty much color-coded. The good guy almost invariably sported a white hat and rode a white horse, or perhaps a palomino, if white horses happened to be in short supply. The bad guys just as uniformly wore black and rode black.

Just three weeks ago, Katherine Darcy had been the villain in Part 55 for the sin of refusing to offer a manslaughter plea. She’d quickly discovered it was a role she didn’t enjoy playing. So she’d done something about it. She’d offered Jeremy Estrada the plea, but only on the condition that he accept the maximum allowable sentence of twenty-five years. Now the judge had not only agreed with her and adopted her position as his own, he’d threatened to impose the maximum sentence for murder if the defendant rejected the offer and the jury were to convict him of the top count.

Or, put another way, in the short space of three weeks, Jaywalker had gone from good guy to bad guy. He would ride into trial wearing the black hat, astride the black horse. The judge would do everything in his power to make sure there was a guilty verdict on the murder count. Not that he would be obvious about it. Harold Wexler was much too smart to be heavy-handed in dispensing biased justice. No, he’d do it in small and subtle ways, all but unnoticeable to both a jury and an appellate court reviewing a transcript. But the cumulative effect would be absolutely devastating.

Welcome to Tombstone.

7
BRICKS AND BOOKS

Exempt as they are from New York’s speedy trial rules, murder trials tend to travel through the system more slowly than other cases. Jeremy Estrada had been arrested only seven weeks ago, a fact that normally would have put him at the very end of the line. But in court time, Jeremy’s case had actually begun with his indictment seven months earlier and was therefore now approaching its first birthday. That fact alone immediately caused it to jump half the cases ahead of it. By Jaywalker’s calculation—and he considered it his business to be able to predict such things with accuracy—they were looking at a trial sometime around the middle of next year.

That might have seemed like an awful lot of time to somebody else, but not to Jaywalker. He was firmly convinced that of the acquittals he’d gotten—and he got more acquittals than most lawyers allow themselves to dream of—a good half of them were won before the trial had ever begun. Other lawyers prepared for trial. Jaywalker over-prepared; he ultra-super-hyper-over-prepared. He organized, interviewed, investigated, interrogated, subpoenaed, photographed, recorded and visited the crime scene. And then he did all those things over again, three or four times. He totally obsessed over every single case, no matter the simplicity or complexity of the charges, or the length of the potential sentence, and he did it to a degree that was arguably pathological. His therapist had suggested that he was engaged in a struggle to the death with his father, in order to win his mother’s affection.

“They’re both dead,” Jaywalker had commented dryly from the couch. Okay, the big leather chair.

“Ahaaa!”

Make that his former therapist.

So the time clock Jaywalker now envisioned in Jeremy Estrada’s case was anything but a generous one. In Jeremy he had a defendant who gave up information only grudgingly, and who would take endless hours to prepare. Then there were the other witnesses to hunt down and interview. There was research to conduct, cases to read on justification, deadly force and extreme emotional disturbance. There was the autopsy report to reread, break down and comb for clues. There were the ballistics report and the crime-scene sketch. Not only did the list go on, the list of lists went on. And as Jaywalker thought about it, the sheer amount of work that lay ahead of him was enough to trigger a migraine.

Nor did he have the usual comfort of knowing that his adversary would be in pretty much the same bind. Katherine Darcy had been working on the case from day one, or at least day two or three, when it had first been assigned to her. That fact had given her a significant head start, a head start that no matter how hard he worked, Jaywalker would never be able to erase.

So it was time to get down to work. And work would begin with hitting the bricks.

The first thing he wanted to do was to locate and nail down defense witnesses. Jeremy’s mother and twin sister could testify to the changes they’d observed in Jeremy as a result of his torment at the hands of the Raiders. But their value as witnesses would be limited. For one thing, they hadn’t actually seen any of the gang members or directly observed any of the events that had occurred. And even if they had, their relationship with Jeremy, and their understandable loyalty toward him, would immediately render their testimony suspect. But the good news was that neither Carmen nor Julie was going anywhere. They’d be right there for Jaywalker to interview indepth and prepare to testify, whenever he got around to it.

He was much more concerned with locating the two people who’d actually witnessed the harassment. The first of these, and by far the more important, was Miranda. For starters, she’d been the catalyst who’d set off the entire chain of events; she was the case’s Helen of Troy. Next, according to Jeremy, she’d been present on a number of occasions when Sandro and the others had confronted Jeremy and bullied him. Finally, she’d been right there at the fight between Jeremy and Victor Quinones, and at the shooting itself. Whatever Victor’s girlfriend Teresa Morales could say about those events, Miranda could contradict and hopefully neutralize. So in every sense of the word, she was indispensable.

But neither Jeremy nor his family had seen or heard from Miranda since the days following the shooting. And as Jaywalker pondered that fact, he realized that he didn’t even know her last name. It was a sobering thought, and it reminded him once again of how much work he had ahead of him.

The other witness he needed to find was the owner of the barbershop where the gang had tried to get at Jeremy. Jaywalker had already been told that the shop had since closed and the owner had returned to Puerto Rico. On top of that, in this instance Jaywalker didn’t even have a first name to work with, let alone a last.

He walked to the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and searched for something strong. But most of the pill bottles were either empty or bore expiration dates from the previous millennium. He settled on a couple of Motrin. Motrin? Perhaps some overnight guest had left them behind. Then again, headaches were sort of like brain cramps, weren’t they? Next he brewed himself a pot of strong caffeinated coffee and downed two cups, black and bitter.

No migraine was going to get in his way.

An hour later, Jaywalker found himself standing on the corner of 112th Street and Third Avenue, where, according to Jeremy, there’d once been a barbershop. He stopped everyone who looked like they might speak English, and asked them if they remembered one. To those who answered him with a blank stare and a “No comprendo,” he tried “Barberio” and pointed to his own hair, just to make sure they wouldn’t mistake him for a barbarian. Finally an old man with no teeth shook his head and said, “No más.”

“Sí, sí,” said Jaywalker. “But donde was it?”

Like an idiot, he’d taken French and Latin.

“Come with me,” said the man, in perfect English. And took him a half a block east, where he pointed out a small shop with the word Botanica printed above it.

Inside were rows upon rows of shelves overflowing with dusty jars and amber bottles of vitamins, supplements and herbal remedies. Bilingual hand-lettered signs explained which were good for stomach ailments, which immediately improved eyesight or hearing, and which promised to cure cancer or SIDA, the Spanish equivalent of AIDS. There were cloves for toothaches, mercury compounds for gout, and dried chicken heads for use in Santeria rituals.

Jaywalker was not tempted.

The proprietor, a small woman with a ready smile, spoke no English. “Momentito,” she said, and ducked beneath a curtain and into a back room. When she returned a momentito later, she was accompanied by a girl of seven or eight, presumably her daughter and translator.

Jaywalker explained his business. Did they know if the place had ever been a barbershop? Yes. By any chance, had they bought out the lease from the owner of the barbershop? Yes, exactly. Did they happen to remember his name? No, but if he cared to wait a few minutes, they had papers.

As Jaywalker’s former therapist might have said, “Ahaaa!”

Twenty minutes later, Jaywalker reemerged into the sunlight. In his left pocket, as a result of his appreciation and a twenty-dollar bill, was a small bottle containing a scary fetal-like object labeled Black Toadwort and unconditionally guaranteed to cure him of migraines forever. But even were it to fail to live up to its claim, it would be well worth the investment. For in his right pocket was a piece of paper bearing the careful, practiced lettering of a third grader.

Francisco Zapata

Frankie and Friends

Barbershop

It wasn’t all that far, so from the botanica Jaywalker walked north to 115th Street and the projects, where he found the building that matched the address Jeremy had listed at the time of his arrest. He slipped the lock of the outer door with a credit card and found the tenant board. There were two Estradas listed, one for 3G and the other for 8F. He pressed the buzzer for 3G, hoping it would be the right one. He knew from experience that the chances of either of the elevators working were slim, and the prospect of climbing seven floors was somewhat less than appealing.

“Quit pressing the buzzer, you fuckin’ junkie bastards!”

He tried 8F.

“Who are jew?” came the familiar gravelly voice of a woman.

He spent the first half hour in Carmen’s apartment trying to catch his breath, the next half hour declining her offers of food, and the final half hour quizzing her on what she knew about Miranda.

“Very, very pretty.”

There seemed to be something of a consensus on that point.

“Miranda Raven.”

A last name.

“’Cause her father was like a Indian, a real Indian. From Florida. Her mother told me that, when Jeremy was in Puerto Rico. The Semaphore tribe, I think she said.”

Or perhaps the Seminoles. But whichever it was, she’d fled the city immediately after the shooting, afraid for her daughter. “To Baltimore,” said Carmen. “That’s in Marilyn.” She still had a phone number for them, though. She’d saved it for Jeremy, so that when the problem was finally over, he could call Miranda up if he wanted to and go looking for her.

“Very, very pretty,” she repeated, as though that was explanation enough. And maybe it was.

She dug out the number and let Jaywalker copy it down. “Jew going to call her?” she asked.

“No,” said Jaywalker, who didn’t want to frighten Miranda off with a call from a total stranger. “You’re going to call her mother and ask her to have Miranda call me.”

“Okay. But are jew sure you don’t want something to eat?”

Funny, she didn’t look Jewish.

The following day Jaywalker checked with the licensing division of the Department of State. Francisco Zapata had indeed been the sole proprietor of the barbershop where the botanica now was, and he’d done business under the name “Frankie and Friends.” If he’d employed anyone, it had been strictly off the books. Officially, at least, his “friends” appeared to have been his customers. And a little over seven months ago, Zapata had indeed sold his shop and requested that his licensing status be changed from active to retired. Despite a requirement that he furnish a forwarding address for tax purposes and service of process, he’d failed to do so, and the appropriate blank on the form listed his current whereabouts as “unknown” and his next of kin as “none.”

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