Overkill. Joseph Teller
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?”