Overkill

13

The sixteen jurors-twelve regulars and four alternates-were led into the courtroom and seated in the order they’d been selected. Judge Wexler addressed them for twenty minutes, outlining what they should expect over the coming week or two, instructing them on several basic principles of law, and describing both his role in the trial and theirs. Then he called upon Katherine Darcy to open on behalf of the People.

As Jaywalker had by that time fully expected she would, Darcy delivered a coherent, competent opening statement. Barely glancing at her notes, she demonstrated a comfortable command of the facts. She made the obligatory comparison between her opening and the table of contents of a book. She read the indictment, word for word. She outlined what witnesses she would call and, in broad strokes, what each of them would say. Then she told them that once all the evidence was in, she would have another opportunity to address them, at which time she would ask them to find the defendant guilty of murder. With that she sat down, barely fifteen minutes after she’d begun. It was an effective, if understated, opening.

Jaywalker’s would be different.

“It is May,” he began.

Years ago, he’d decided to dispense with the traditional “May it please the court.” And not too long after that, he’d gotten rid of “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” The last to go had been “Good morning” and “Good afternoon.” By the time Jeremy Estrada’s trial came around, Jaywalker had settled on launching directly into what had happened from his client’s perspective. What he liked to think of as the narrative opening.

The story.

He began the telling of it with those three little words, “It is May,” speaking them so softly that the jurors were not only forced into immediate and total silence, but were literally compelled to lean forward in their seats in order to hear him. And by standing directly in front of them, without so much as an index card in his hands, he demanded their visual attention, as well. Katherine Darcy had delivered her opening statement behind a lectern, a podium with a slanted top, perfect for placing documents or concealing notes. She’d ventured out from behind it once or twice, but had each time quickly retreated to its safety.

Jaywalker’s distaste for tradition was matched by his disdain of safety. He was about to tell the jurors a story, a story that he knew so well by then that he could have recited it backwards, had he been called upon to do so. He needed no notes, and he wanted no barrier.

Perhaps it was his ego at work, but Jaywalker was convinced that he could tell Jeremy’s story better even than Jeremy himself could. Jeremy’s turn would come, but it wouldn’t come for the better part of two weeks, after all the other witnesses for both sides had had their say. And when it came, it would come in Jeremy’s halting, hesitant way, constantly interrupted by objections and exceptions, sidebar conferences, rulings and recesses. Jaywalker simply couldn’t afford to wait that long for what might prove to be a fractured, fragmented account of the events. He’d decided instead to tell the story from start to finish now, in his own voice. That way, when the jurors eventually heard Jeremy’s account, they would not only have a framework, an overview of what had happened, they’d even be able to fill in the blanks Jeremy would invariably leave with details Jaywalker had already provided them.

“It is May. Perhaps it is even two years ago to this very day. Jeremy Estrada wakes up and gets ready for school. He’s all of seventeen years old. Seventeen. He’s a student, though not a very good one. Part of that is because Jeremy has learning disabilities, and things don’t come easily to him. And part of it is because he also works several part-time jobs after school and on weekends, as he has since the age of fourteen, in order to help out his mother and his sister. There is no father in the home.

“It’s a bright, sun-drenched morning as Jeremy walks down the avenue, his book bag slung over one shoulder. The stores on the avenue are just beginning to open for business. As he passes one of them, a flower shop, some slight movement off to his right catches his attention, and he glances inside. There he sees a young lady, a girl, really, also seventeen years old. And in that moment, in that split second, their eyes meet. And this case begins.”

Right at that point, Jaywalker suddenly and unexpectedly felt the full impact of the case come crashing down on him. For the first time he could feel-truly feel, way down deep in his gut-the terrible, undeserved plight of this boy, this child, sitting behind him in a huge courtroom built for and filled up with grown-ups. A boy whose only sin had been the unpardonable act of falling in love.

Jaywalker’s voice had cracked on the second syllable of the word begins, and his lower lip had begun to quiver uncontrollably. He knew better than to continue, realizing that whatever he might try to say next would bring him to tears. Even as he turned away from the jury to hide his embarrassment from them, he knew they couldn’t have missed it; he’d made it impossible for them to miss anything. Yet all he could do was to stand there, his back to the jurors, and breathe in and out deeply, deliberately. Once, twice, a third time. He was a wuss by nature, Jaywalker was, a grown man easily brought to tears by a bad movie or a good commercial. But never before had anything quite like this happened to him in front of a jury.

After what seemed to him like minutes but was no doubt only seconds, he forced himself to turn back to the jury box, telling himself he could continue, telling himself he had to continue. And somehow he managed. Each word he spoke got him to the next one, and to the one after that, and gradually he regained control. And as he did, he became aware that something had changed. If possible, the jurors were paying even more attention now. It was as if his succumbing to his emotions, and his obvious embarrassment at doing so, had opened a window for them, a window into just how deeply Jeremy’s story had come to affect him.

One of the most valuable assets a successful trial lawyer can possess is his credibility in the eyes of the jury. Believe me, he urges them in a thousand tiny ways, and it follows from there that you’ll believe what I believe. Now, by the pure accident of having being blindsided by the sudden recognition of his own feelings, Jaywalker had stumbled upon an equally authentic corollary to that proposition. Trust me, his meltdown had invited the jurors, and it follows from there that you’ll come to feel as I feel. And though he hadn’t meant for the incident to occur in the first place, he now fully intended to take advantage of it.

By the time he sat down, he’d been on his feet for exactly an hour, making the opening statement his longest ever. Hell, he’d summed up in less time than that in plenty of cases. And during that hour, not once had he lost his train of thought or looked at a note. Although he’d planned on spending the entire time standing directly in front of the jurors, he hadn’t. Several times, as he’d described Jeremy’s torment at the hands of the Raiders, he’d made his way over to the defense table. There he’d taken up a position directly behind his seated client, placed his hands on Jeremy’s shoulders and continued to face the jurors as he spoke. These are my words, he’d been telling them, but this is what this young man actually lived through.

He’d described for them the fateful events that had left Victor Quinones dead and Jeremy himself thinking he’d been shot, as well. He’d told them about Jeremy’s fear of retaliation at the hands of Sandro and his gang, his panic that they could reach out and get him even in prison, especially in prison. He’d described Jeremy’s flight from the scene to his home, from his home to the Bronx, and from the Bronx all the way to the hills of Puerto Rico.

He’d paused, much as Jeremy must have paused at the notion of staying in those hills forever. But he’d chosen not to stay there, Jaywalker had told them. He’d made the conscious, deliberate decision to come back and face whatever awaited him.

“The day after his return to New York, he walks into the police station. He holds out his wrists so that handcuffs may be placed around them and locked shut. He goes to jail. He learns to call Rikers Island his home, and to surrender his name for a ten-digit inmate number. He’s brought to this building, where he listens as he’s charged with murder. He speaks the words Not guilty and asks for a trial, a trial in front of twelve ordinary men and women plucked from all walks of life. Twelve men and women who’ve set aside their jobs, their families-indeed, their very lives. Twelve men and women who’ve promised to be fair, to be impartial, to be open-minded. And all he asks of them is that they to listen to his story.

“Because this isn’t my story or Ms. Darcy’s story or Judge Wexler’s story. This isn’t even Victor Quinones’s story. Yes, he’s the victim. But as much as we mourn for him and feel for his family, and we do, this story isn’t really about him or his family.

“This is Jeremy’s story.”

With that, he’d turned from them, walked to the defense table and sat down. Just as he’d forgone opening pleasantries when he’d begun speaking to the jurors, so did he bypass thanking them for their attention or asking them-as Ms. Darcy had made a point of doing-to deliver a particular verdict at the end of the trial.

Harold Wexler immediately declared a recess.

To be sure, they were by that time two hours into the morning session, and judges tend to be mindful of jurors’ limited attention spans and bladders. But Jaywalker strongly suspected that Wexler’s real interest was in breaking the spell that Jaywalker had created. For in the sixty minutes he’d been on his feet, he’d succeeded in turning the trial completely on its head, taking Jeremy Estrada from a prohibitive long shot to an odds-on favorite. And as Jaywalker sat at the defense table watching the jurors file out of the courtroom, he knew that he’d never been better and might never be. And he knew also that there was only one thing that could possibly undo the magic he’d just performed.

Unfortunately, that one thing was the evidence, and it would begin as soon as the recess ended.

“The People call Cesar Quinones,” Katherine Darcy announced when they resumed, adding that the witness would need the assistance of an English-Spanish interpreter. Cesar was the father of Victor Quinones. The ostensible purpose for which he was called was to tell the jury that he’d identified his son’s body at the medical examiner’s office the day after the shooting. Jaywalker had offered to stipulate to his testimony, to concede that it was indeed Victor Quinones who’d been killed. But Darcy wanted this little bit of drama played out in front of the jury, and he was powerless to prevent it. Knowing that, he’d brought it up during jury selection, warning the jurors that they would see and hear from a distraught member of the deceased’s family, in spite of the fact that the identity of the victim wasn’t in issue. Then, in order to avoid an objection, he’d turned the matter into a question, asking the jurors if they could remain fair and impartial nonetheless. For what it was worth, they’d assured him they could.

Now, as he watched this frail, broken man limp to the witness stand, Jaywalker had no way of knowing just how powerful his appearance would be to the jurors. Would they recognize it for what it was, a shameless theatrical stunt intended to prejudice them, right down to the black clothes the man wore, almost two full years after his son’s death? Or would they instead adopt the father’s grief as their own and hate Jeremy all the more for having caused it?

DARCY: Do you have children?

QUINONES: I used to. I had a son.

DARCY: What was his name?

QUINONES: Victor.

The witness removed a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at his eyes. Jaywalker took the opportunity to rise and once again offer to stipulate to the identity of the deceased. Doing so in front of the jury, after his offer had already been refused, was highly improper, and Judge Wexler angrily overruled him and told him to sit down. Still, he’d made his point.

DARCY: How old was Victor when he died?

QUINONES: Twenty.

The absolute silence of the courtroom told Jaywalker all he needed to know about the impact the witness was having upon the jury. When it came his turn for cross-examination, he said he had no questions. He tried to say it in a tone and with a shrug that implied “Why would I?” without being too heavy-handed about it, but it was a fine line to dance.

At one point he’d thought about asking Mr. Quinones a series of questions about his son, like whether he’d known he belonged to a gang, had half a dozen arrests and got a special kick out of terrorizing people. He’d given the idea some serious consideration for about five seconds before abandoning it. He could see Darcy jumping to her feet, Wexler not only sustaining her objection before she could make it but also warning Jaywalker he was seriously out of line, and the jurors nodding in agreement.

Quite apart from having no legitimate questions to ask Cesar Quinones, Jaywalker wanted him out of there as quickly as possible. But the man wouldn’t go away. Instead of leaving, he made his way from the witness stand to the spectator section, where he took a seat next to his wife. Together they would sit there for the remainder of the trial, these two destroyed people, dressed all in black. Their English was virtually nonexistent, and they would understand little of the proceedings. But their silent vigil would continue, their very presence a powerful witness for the prosecution.

The jurors, having followed Mr. Quinones’s every step as he limped to his seat, now tried to look away from him and back to the judge, but Jaywalker could see they were finding it almost impossible. At the table next to him, he felt Jeremy slip away from him just an inch, just that much closer to spending the rest of his life in prison. He wondered if Jeremy felt it, too.

Katherine Darcy hadn’t counted on Jaywalker’s summation to eat up an entire hour. She’d let him know in advance that she intended to call one of the eyewitnesses to the shooting next. But with only fifteen minutes left to the one-o’clock lunch recess, she decided to shift gears and put on a short witness, in more ways than one.

Adalberto Garcia was the detective who’d originally been assigned to the investigation into the death of Victor Quinones. He stood barely five feet, a height that once would have disqualified him from becoming a police officer. And his entire testimony, direct and cross, would take barely five minutes.

DARCY: Did there come a time when you identified a suspect in connection with the shooting?

GARCIA: Yes, there did.

DARCY: Can you tell us the name of that suspect?

GARCIA: Jeremy Estrada.

DARCY: And what, if anything, did you do with respect to him?

GARCIA: I began to look for him, to arrest him.

DARCY: Do you happen to know when he was eventually arrested?

GARCIA: [Referring to notes] Yes. That was on May 14th of last year.

Jaywalker’s only interest on cross-examination was in amplifying the term arrest for the jurors.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever find Jeremy Estrada?

GARCIA: No.

JAYWALKER: Ever arrest him?

GARCIA: Me personally? No.

JAYWALKER: In fact, the arrest in this case was an arrest only in the technical sense. Correct?

GARCIA: I’m not sure what you mean.

JAYWALKER: What I mean is, on May 14th of last year, Jeremy Estrada walked into a police station voluntarily and gave himself up, knowing full well he’d be arrested. And he was. Isn’t that in fact what happened?

GARCIA: Yes.

It was a much better note to go to lunch on than Cesar Quinones’s testimony. Not that Jaywalker had any plans of going to lunch; he never did when he was on trial. Which didn’t sit well with Jeremy’s mother.

“Jew gotta eat,” said Carmen. “Jew gotta be strong.”

Jaywalker tried explaining that habits were habits, and that he needed to spend the hour preparing for the afternoon’s witnesses. Never mind that he’d been prepared for them for months now.

“That’s no good,” Carmen told him, shaking her head sadly, like the concerned mother she was. But she let it go, walking off with her daughter, Julie, in tow. Both had been in the audience all morning, but on the defendant’s side of the courtroom, as opposed to prosecution’s side, where the parents of Victor Quinones had sat. Trials are a little like weddings in that respect, where guests of the bride often sit across the aisle from those of the groom.

It had actually taken some doing on Jaywalker’s part, as well as some generosity on Katherine Darcy’s, to seat Carmen and Julie Estrada anywhere in the courtroom. Either side may ask that potential witnesses be excluded prior to testifying, and such requests are routinely granted. But Jaywalker had felt that the rule worked a special hardship in this case. Though he intended to call both Jeremy’s mother and sister, neither of them would be testifying to the same events the prosecution’s witnesses would be describing-the fistfight and the shooting-and their presence during the testimony of those witnesses would give them no advantage. Jaywalker had taken his concern to Darcy, who’d agreed to give it some thought.

“I’ll tell you what,” he’d added. “I’ll agree to call them at the very beginning of the defense case.”

“And keep whoever you’re calling second outside while the first one’s on the stand?”

“You got it,” Jaywalker had said, and they’d had a deal.

That afternoon Darcy called Magdalena Lopez to the stand. She was an eyewitness, one of the people who’d observed the fight and the shooting. She was a middle-aged, dark-skinned woman employed as an outreach worker at a cancer center for women. On the morning of the incident, she’d been walking through the projects with a friend when she’d noticed two young males arguing. As she’d watched, they’d begun fighting.

DARCY: What did you see?

LOPEZ: I seen them hitting each other.

DARCY: With what?

LOPEZ: Their fists.

DARCY: What happened next?

LOPEZ: One of them reached down the front of his pants. And when I looked at him, he had a gun in his hand. He started shooting at the other one, from very close to him. I heard one shot, then another. I got scared, and I started running toward the building. My friend grabbed me, pulled me back. There was a stray bullet coming our way. It passed me so close I could hear it as it went by. I seen it hit the building we was running to, cracked a piece of the brick. I looked back and I heard one more shot. They were in a different spot now, but I could still see good. And I seen the person down on the ground, the other one.

DARCY: The man who did the shooting. Do you see him in the courtroom?

LOPEZ: Yes, I do.

DARCY: Can you point him out for us?

LOPEZ: [Pointing] He’s over there.

Over there was Jeremy.

Jaywalker had a loose rule of thumb that went something like this. When he was going to put his client on the stand to dispute the testimony of an eyewitness who was pretty much telling the truth, he wanted to get that eyewitness off the stand quickly. He’d found over the years that too many lawyers spent too much time cross-examining such witnesses. They rarely made much headway, and their efforts often served only to reinforce the witness’s testimony in the minds of the jurors.

Still, he couldn’t resist asking Magdalena Lopez about the bullet she’d heard whiz by her and then seen strike the building. To have actually observed either of those things was a long shot up there with winning the lottery. To have observed both of them was flat-out impossible, the stuff of grade B Westerns or video games. Yet Ms. Lopez stuck to her story, insisting that her memory of what she’d heard and seen was still vivid.

JAYWALKER: How about the friend you were with? What can you tell us about her? Or him?

LOPEZ: Her.

JAYWALKER: Okay, her. What’s her name?

LOPEZ: I don’t know.

Jaywalker had known that would be her answer. A month ago he’d asked Katherine Darcy for the name of Ms. Lopez’s friend so he could try to find her on his own and see what she’d seen and heard. A week later Darcy had reported back that Lopez had never supplied the name and could no longer recall it.

JAYWALKER: Well, did you ever know her name?

LOPEZ: Yes, sure, back then. But that was a long time ago, like a whole year or more.

JAYWALKER: So let me get this straight. Today you’re telling us you can no longer remember the name of your own friend who was with you that day?

LOPEZ: That’s right.

JAYWALKER: Not even her first name?

LOPEZ: No.

JAYWALKER: A nickname?

LOPEZ: No.

It wasn’t much, but he figured it was as good a place to quit as he was going to get. Come summation time, he’d point out to the jurors that if Magdalena Lopez’s memory was so faulty, they should discount her account of the incident itself, which had actually taken place a year and a half ago. Or, in the alternative, if they disbelieved her testimony that she couldn’t remember her friend’s name, they might want to wonder why she’d lied about that. Had she been afraid, perhaps, that if identified, located and called to testify, her friend might have described the events in quite different terms?

Katherine Darcy followed up Lopez’s testimony by calling Wallace Porter to the stand. Porter was the second of the prosecution’s three eyewitnesses, and in some ways he would prove to be the most damaging to the defense.

Porter hadn’t come to court alone. Rather than being summoned from the witness room or the hallway, he was led in through a side door and escorted to the witness stand by a pair of uniformed court officers. Accompanying him was a young man whom the judge introduced to the jury as Mr. Porter’s lawyer. The reason for all this special attention would soon become obvious. Wallace Porter was, like Jeremy Estrada, a guest of the state. Several weeks earlier he’d pleaded guilty to a low-level sale of drugs, and he was awaiting sentencing.

Porter was a slender, dark-skinned African-American, dressed in a gaudy red satin warm-up suit. Both his appearance and his demeanor suggested something slick and evasive, and Jaywalker eyed the jurors to see if they were responding to him the same way he was. That said, Jaywalker knew better than to sit back and relax. He’d learned over the years that the same juror who’s tough on crime is at the same time fascinated by criminals. Having already pleaded guilty to the charges against him, Porter had nothing to lose by admitting that he was a drug seller. And Katherine Darcy would have worked long and hard with him to make sure he did just that. His willingness to do so, and to go into the details of his own crimes, would end up earning him points for candor. “Look at how honest he was in talking about his past,” Darcy would argue to the jury. “That shows he’s telling you the truth about what he saw.”

It didn’t, of course, not for a minute. Still, there was a logic of sorts to the argument. And Jaywalker knew that if he chose to underestimate either it or Wallace Porter, he’d be doing so at his peril and, more importantly, at Jeremy’s.

Darcy wasted no time in bringing out Porter’s criminal record. In addition to the case he was awaiting sentencing on, Porter admitted to two prior arrests, a larceny bust in Massachusetts back in 1999, and a drug possession in Brooklyn in 2005. Both were misdemeanors, minor crimes. From there Darcy moved on to the day of the shooting.

DARCY: Do you recall that day?

PORTER: Yup.

DARCY: Where were you about five o’clock that afternoon?

PORTER: I was playing cards in a little park area in the projects, the Jefferson Houses.

DARCY: How many people were playing cards?

PORTER: It was four of us, and two others on the side.

DARCY: Other than playing cards, what were you doing?

PORTER: We was barbecuing. We had chicken, franks and burgers. Stuff like that.

DARCY: As you were playing cards and barbecuing, did something happen?

PORTER: Yeah. We was sitting there, we was playing cards. And I seen this girl and this dude walk by, and this guy running behind them, and another girl following him. And they started fighting, the two guys. The one was pretty good, and he beat up the other one pretty bad. He was bleeding a little from his nose and his mouth. He reached into his socks. He had like two or three pairs of sweat socks on. I thought he was pulling out a knife, but he had a gun, he pulled out a gun. And he just shot the guy, he shot him. Then he chased him and shot him like three more times. When he fell to the ground, he picked him up by the collar and he shot one or two more times at him.

Katherine Darcy had to back up and have her witness clarify who was who. It was the guy who’d won the fight, Porter explained, who’d pulled the gun and done all the chasing and shooting.

DARCY: Do you think you’d recognize him if you saw him again today?

PORTER: Yup.

DARCY: Would you look around the courtroom and see if you see him?

PORTER: I see him right there.

And he pointed directly at Jeremy.

It got worse. Porter described seeing the shooter pull back the slide of the gun just before firing it. He recounted how the victim had begged for his life before the final shot, asking, “Why you gotta shoot me?” He recalled looking at the victim close-up following the shooting, seeing the police arrive and telling them that he’d witnessed the incident. He concluded by saying he knew neither the shooter nor the victim, nor the two girls who’d been with them, nor a woman named Magdalena Lopez, the witness who’d preceded him.

During the short span of twenty-five minutes, Wallace Porter had transformed himself from a sleazy-looking drug dealer to an astute, impartial observer. An observer who, if believed, had described a scenario in which Jeremy Estrada was nothing but a cold-blooded murderer. As Jaywalker rose from behind the defense table, he knew he had to go after Porter. Ridiculing him for claiming he’d ducked a bullet whizzing by his head, as he’d been able to do with Magdalena Lopez, wasn’t an option and wouldn’t have been good enough, anyway.

JAYWALKER: It was hot that day, wasn’t it?

PORTER: In more ways than one.

JAYWALKER: Well, let’s stick with the weather for a moment, okay?

PORTER: Okay.

JAYWALKER: It was hot?

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: So in addition to the burgers and franks you were barbecuing, you and your group were having something to drink, right?

PORTER: No, we wasn’t drinking at all. We just had food and beers. Not beers, soda and stuff.

JAYWALKER: Didn’t you just say food and beer?

PORTER: You confused me.

JAYWALKER: How did I confuse you?

PORTER: By mentioning beer.

Jaywalker had the court reporter read the exchange back from her stenotype notes. Then he got Porter to agree that he himself had made the first mention of beer. He’d made an honest mistake, Porter then explained.

JAYWALKER: No beer?

PORTER: No beer.

JAYWALKER: Just soda and stuff.

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: The kind of stuff you smoke? Or the kind you might sniff through a straw?

PORTER: No, man. None of that kind of stuff.

JAYWALKER: What did you mean by “stuff,” then?

PORTER: Just soda.

JAYWALKER: So when you said “just soda and stuff,” you really meant “soda and soda.” Is that right?

PORTER: You messin’ wid me, man.

JAYWALKER: Sorry.

It wasn’t much, but at least it restored some of Porter’s slipperiness. From there, Jaywalker moved on to an inconsistency he’d noticed between Porter’s testimony and something he’d told the detectives at the scene, shortly after the incident.

JAYWALKER: Did you hear the shooter and the victim arguing about money?

PORTER: No.

JAYWALKER: Did you tell the detectives you had?

PORTER: I mighta.

JAYWALKER: Did you tell them [reading], “Right before the shooting, I could hear the two of them arguing about money?” Were those your words to the detectives, just minutes after the incident?

PORTER: Yeah, I said that to the detectives. But it was a mistake.

JAYWALKER: Can you tell us how it is that you made that mistake?

PORTER: I don’t know. It just came out.

JAYWALKER: You just said it, even though there was absolutely no truth to it?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever correct it?

PORTER: They never asked me again.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever take it upon yourself to say, “Hey, I made a mistake back there. I said I heard them arguing about money, but I didn’t. I just decided to make that part up”? Did you ever say anything like that?

PORTER: No.

Jaywalker had done a little amateur boxing back in his youth. Right now he felt like he was seriously behind in the last round and needed a knockout in order to win the fight. But all he seemed capable of doing was scoring a few points here and there on jabs. He knew it wasn’t going to get the job done.

He moved on to Porter’s criminal record. Katherine Darcy had done her best to preempt the subject by bringing it out herself. But that didn’t mean Jaywalker couldn’t take a shot at it.

JAYWALKER: How many times have you been locked up, Mr. Porter?

DARCY: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: May we approach?

Up at the bench, Judge Wexler reminded Jaywalker that only convictions, not arrests, were relevant to the witness’s credibility.

“I know that,” said Jaywalker. “But Ms. Darcy asked about prior arrests. By doing so, she opened the door. I have a right to ask if there’ve been more arrests than the two the witness admitted to. If there are, he lied, and that goes to credibility, too.”

It wasn’t often that Harold Wexler was forced to reverse himself on a ruling, but when Darcy nodded meekly at Jaywalker’s account of her direct examination, Wexler did just that. But in order to make it look otherwise, he directed Jaywalker to rephrase the question, without using the objectionable words locked up.

JAYWALKER: How many times, in total, have you been arrested, Mr. Porter?

PORTER: No more than five or six.

JAYWALKER: I see. The 1999 Massachusetts larceny, right?

PORTER: Right.

JAYWALKER: What did you steal?

PORTER: Nothing.

JAYWALKER: What did they say you stole?

PORTER: A TV set.

JAYWALKER: The Brooklyn drug possession in 2005.

PORTER: Right.

JAYWALKER: What drug?

PORTER: Cocaine.

JAYWALKER: Powder?

PORTER: No.

JAYWALKER: Crack?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: What else?

PORTER: A coupla loiterings, a disorderly conduct kinda thing. That’s all. Nothing big.

JAYWALKER: And the sale case you’re awaiting sentencing on.

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: What are you looking at on that?

PORTER: Two to six.

JAYWALKER: Years?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: The original charge carried eight and a third to twenty-five, right?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Do you expect to get two to six?

PORTER: I hope to get time served.

JAYWALKER: In other words, you might walk on it, do no more time at all?

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: And why might that happen, do you think?

PORTER: In consideration of my testimony.

JAYWALKER: Your testimony where?

PORTER: Here.

JAYWALKER: In other words, if Ms. Darcy is pleased with your testimony in this trial, she’s going to go to bat for you and try to get you less time, or no additional time at all, on your case. Is that your understanding?

PORTER: Yeah, something like that.

JAYWALKER: Well, am I wrong, the way I just described your understanding?

PORTER: No, you ain’t wrong.

JAYWALKER: Tell me, Mr. Porter. Have you discussed this case with anyone?

PORTER: No.

JAYWALKER: No one at all?

PORTER: No one at all.

JAYWALKER: How about your lawyer here? Haven’t you discussed it with him?

PORTER: My lawyer? Sure.

JAYWALKER: How about Ms. Darcy? Discussed it with her?

PORTER: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Discussed it with the detectives?

PORTER: Yeah.

There were two factual areas Jaywalker would have liked to question Porter about. The first was the business about the shooter’s having pulled the gun out from his socks, and the second was his having jacked the slide back before firing. He decided to let the first one go, fearing all he would accomplish was to reinforce Porter’s version. But he took a stab at the second.

JAYWALKER: Now you know a little something about guns, right?

DARCY: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: You say you saw the shooter pull back the slide of the gun. Is that right?

PORTER: Yup.

JAYWALKER: How many times do you claim you saw him do that?

PORTER: Just once.

Jaywalker did his best to hide his disappointment. He’d been hoping Porter would say “each time he fired.” That would have made no sense at all. The signature feature of a semiautomatic weapon was that each squeeze of the trigger not only fired off a round, but at the same time it caused the slide to move back and forth, first ejecting the spent shell, then chambering the next bullet in the magazine. Either Porter had been telling the truth when he’d said “just once,” or he knew enough about guns to spot Jaywalker’s trap and steer clear of it. Still, his “just once” left the obvious question, “When?”

Logically, the shooter would have had a good reason to jack the slide back before firing the first shot, if the chamber had been empty up to that point. To have jacked the slide at any other point would have accomplished nothing but ejecting one live bullet just to replace it with the next one. Jaywalker was toying with idea of trying to get Porter to say the “just once” had been right before the final shot. He was thinking if he loaded the question up enough-by using words like deadly, fatal or coup de grace-he might appeal to Porter’s ego and get him to bite. But would Porter even understand coup de grace? And as Jaywalker was searching his mind for a suitable street synonym, he noticed that Porter was looking directly into his eyes from the witness stand, a tiny but unmistakable smirk on his face.

I dare you, he was saying.

“No further questions,” said Jaywalker.

They broke for the day.

Though he was tired and hungry, having slept little the night before and eaten nothing all day, Jaywalker didn’t leave the courtroom by walking out the front door with just about everyone else. Instead he fell in behind Jeremy as a couple of uniformed court officers led them through a side door and into the pens, where a corrections officer locked lawyer and client into a holding cell.

It was one of the many things that endeared the courthouse staff to Jaywalker. It went beyond their identifying with him because of his law-enforcement background, or admiring him for being willing to piss off judges when he had a point to make, or feeling a kinship with him because in any given year he didn’t make any more money than they did. No, it was how he treated his clients. Here it was, already after five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and even if the stories were true and the guy didn’t have much of a life outside the courthouse, surely he could’ve found something better to do than spend the next hour behind bars with an accused murderer.

And though he’d never admit it out loud, Jaywalker delighted in their allegiance to him. On a practical level, it brought him a certain amount of perks, everything from little kindnesses extended to his clients to crucial tips about what was going on in the jury room during deliberations. But even beyond that, it was gratifying to know that the crew, the working stiffs, were on his side. In many ways he felt more at ease with them than with the judges, other defenders and prosecutors he spent time with. They were civil servants, these regular guys and gals. To Jaywalker, they represented the closest approximation to a practice jury in the building. If he could win them over, didn’t it follow that he could just as easily win over those dozen men and women sitting in the real jury box?

But all of that could wait. Right now he needed to talk with Jeremy about what the day’s witnesses had brought, and what lay in store for them next week.

“Why does Porter have you picking up Quinones by the collar before firing the final shot?” he asked. “Unless it happened that way.”

By way of answer, Jeremy shook his head slowly from side to side, before answering, “I don’t remember it that way.”

It was how he always dealt with the issue. Not “He’s lying” or “It didn’t happen that way” or “He must be mistaken.” Simply that he, Jeremy, didn’t remember it that way. It was the great paradox of the case. The prosecution witnesses would describe the last shot just as Katherine Darcy herself had, as an execution. And the best Jeremy could offer to counter that characterization was a lack of recollection.

“It’s going to get worse Monday,” Jaywalker said.

“What happens Monday?”

“Victor’s girlfriend, Teresa Morales.” It wasn’t just a guess on Jaywalker’s part, though it certainly would have been a logical one. He’d asked Katherine Darcy, and she’d told him. “Is she going to say the same thing?” Jaywalker asked.

Jeremy smiled his sheepish smile and looked directly at Jaywalker with those pale blue eyes of his. “I guess so,” he said.

God, it was hard to dislike this kid.

“She’s going to bury you,” Jaywalker warned him. Trying to get a denial out of him, a contradiction, a bit of outrage, something.

Instead, a shrug, another smile and a refrain that Jaywalker was getting much too accustomed to hearing: “I don’t remember it that way.”