Overkill

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.