Overkill

14

The ringing of the phone jarred him out of a fitful half sleep. He looked around to get his bearings, realized he was on his back on his un-pulled-out sofa bed, a stack of Teresa Morales discovery material piled on his chest. He reached around for the phone, picked it up, and said “Jaywalker.”

“They chased her and threatened her,” said an excited voice with a vaguely familiar gravelly quality.

“Who?” was the best Jaywalker could come up with.

“Julie, my daughter. The guys, the same guys. They ran after her, saying bad things. They going to beat her up, or worse. Jew gotta do something.”

Jaywalker sat up, spilling reports onto the floor. “Is she okay?”

“No, a course she’s not okay,” said Carmen. “Would jew be?”

“Is she there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“Not now. I give her a pill, make her sleep. But I can’t let her be a witness. Not after this. Jew unnerstand?”

Jaywalker said nothing. He was still trying to digest what had happened.

“I got only two kids, Mr. Jakewalker. They already take my son away. I’m not going to let anything happen to my daughter. Jew hear me?”

“I hear you,” said Jaywalker. “But I need to talk to Julie. Tomorrow. Okay?”

“No, no, no. It’s not okay. Tomorrow I gonna take her to the Bronx, hide her. I gotta protect her from those guys.”

“Good,” said Jaywalker.

There was a click, then silence. He cradled the phone. The clock next to it told him it was 1:42, and though he couldn’t be entirely certain, he was pretty sure it meant a.m. Either that or there was a total eclipse going on outside. He stood up, stretched and walked over to his two-burner stove. There was a pot of something on one of the burners, either thick coffee or thin, black bean soup. He lit the flame beneath it.

There was work to be done.

He called Katherine Darcy later that morning. He waited until nine, which he figured was late enough for a Saturday morning.

“How did you get my home number?” she wanted to know. It was unlisted, as were those of all her colleagues. The district attorney apparently didn’t think it would be a good idea to have defendants and their families calling his assistants at home.

“You gave it to me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well,” said Jaywalker, “someone who looked like you and sounded a lot like you did.”

“When was that?”

“Over coffee,” he said, “and a bagel. You had a bagel. I had tea with lemon. You scolded me for not eating.”

That seemed to convince her, or at least quiet her. The part about the coffee and bagel and tea with lemon were true, of course. Even the part about the scolding. It was a technique Jaywalker had adopted and perfected back in his undercover days at the DEA, learning to sandwich his lies in between highly detailed demonstrable truths. And it had been right around the same time that he’d learned how to tease unlisted numbers from the directory assistance operators.

“And just why did I give you my number?” Darcy asked him.

“For emergency purposes.”

“I see,” she said, a bit of doubt still lingering in her voice. “So what’s the emergency?”

He explained what had happened to Julie Estrada, how she’d been chased five blocks by a half-dozen young Hispanic males, shouting curses at her and telling her that her life was over if she showed up in court again. Not that he’d had a chance to speak with Julie directly; Carmen still wouldn’t let him. But he’d had Carmen spell it out to him as best as she understood it. Now, just in case she’d missed anything or left anything out, he added a few embellishments of his own, like a knife and a couple of Oakland Raiders jackets.

“I’ll look into it,” said Darcy.

“That’s it? You’ll look into it?”

“What would you like me to do?” she pleaded. “Go out and round up every kid in the city who roots for the Raiders during baseball season?”

“Football,” he corrected her. “And no, just the ones who intimidated my witness and are trying to deny my client a fair trial.”

“And how would you suggest I go about that?”

“How about a sting operation?” Jaywalker suggested on the fly. “Get a couple of your detectives assigned, and we’ll follow her at a distance, see what happens.”

“We?”

“Sure. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Mr. Jaywalker, it’s nine-fifteen on a Saturday morning. In order to fulfill my sense of adventure, I’ll be spending my weekend preparing to call witnesses in a trial we shouldn’t be having. And wouldn’t be having, if you and your client weren’t so damn stubborn and self-destructive.”

Which was pretty much where the conversation ended.

He spent the weekend getting ready for Teresa Morales and the rest of the week’s witnesses, both prosecution and defense. He worked on requests to charge, things he wanted Judge Wexler to instruct the jury about. He reviewed his summation notes file. In between, he left half a dozen messages for Carmen Estrada, asking her to call him so he could at least talk to Julie. When Carmen finally got back to him Sunday evening, it was to tell him there was no way she was going to let her daughter testify.

“Jew gotta unnerstand,” she explained. “I’m not going to scarface my daughter on account of to save my son.” Her English might have used some work, but her logic was pretty hard to argue with.

And as he lay in bed that night, trying to get a decent night’s sleep before the week ahead, Jaywalker kept hearing Katherine Darcy’s characterization of him and his client.

Stubborn and self-destructive.

What hurt about her words was that she might just be right. Here she’d blinked and come off the murder count. Not only had she offered them a plea to manslaughter, but she’d said she was willing to take less time on it than Harold Wexler had promised to give Jeremy if the jury were to acquit him of murder and instead convict him on the very same manslaughter count. In other words, she’d offered them a win-win proposition. Because the chances of an outright, across-the-board acquittal on all charges were diminishing to the point of disappearing altogether, what with the testimony of Magdalena Lopez and Wallace Porter already in, and that of Teresa Morales still to come.

So she certainly had a point. They were being stubborn and self-destructive. Jaywalker won more of his trials than anyone he knew, but even he was human, and he lost from time to time. On the occasions when he did, the experience was excruciatingly painful. And if he were to lose this one-as it was looking more and more certain he would-it would be in large part because he’d allowed his client to insist upon going to trial in a case they couldn’t possibly win.

It was thoughts like that that kept Jaywalker awake, leaving his average night’s sleep hovering somewhere between three and four hours. And that was on weekends, when he tried to catch up.

Stubborn. Stubborn and self-destructive.

Damn Katherine Darcy.

Damn her for being right.