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“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.
