Overkill

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“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.”