Overkill

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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.