Overkill

15

First thing Monday morning, Katherine Darcy called her star witness to the stand. It was a move that even Jaywalker, who considered tactics and strategy key components in his trial arsenal, had to admit deserved a solid 10. Sure, she’d given Jaywalker all weekend to prepare his cross-examination, but that was something he’d done weeks ago, months ago. As Darcy no doubt knew. But by calling her most important witness-and clearly her most vulnerable one-at ten o’clock in the morning of a brand-new week, she could be assured of not only getting through her own direct examination by eleven or eleven-thirty, but of forcing Jaywalker to begin his cross without the benefit of a lunch break, and to complete it in the afternoon, without going overnight. It was little things like that, Jaywalker knew only too well, that could make the difference in a closely contested trial.

When Teresa Morales walked into the courtroom, it marked Jaywalker’s first glimpse of her. He’d had Jeremy describe her, but as was so often the case, Jeremy’s words had painted something less than a complete picture. He’d used adjectives like dark-haired, attractive and kind of pretty. And to be fair to Jeremy, none of those characterizations had been wrong, Jaywalker realized now, at least not in a technical sense. There was, for example, no disputing that Teresa had dark hair. And he would have been hard-pressed to deny that there was something attractive about her. Kind of pretty, however, was a stretch, and a rather long one if your idea of prettiness was Jeremy’s twin sister, Julie, or even Jeremy himself, if you were secure enough to attach the word to a young man. If, on the other hand, you wanted to use Miranda Raven as your gold standard, Teresa was immediately disqualified. Then again, so was just about everyone else on the planet.

The problem was that, to Jaywalker at least, there was something tough about Teresa. Or if not quite tough, then certainly hard, in the sense that she appeared just a bit too streetwise. Maybe he was being unfair, Jaywalker conceded. Maybe he knew too much about her. Where the jurors were seeing her white blouse, dark gray skirt and inch-and-a-half black heels, he was picturing her in a black leather Raiders jacket, skin-tight jeans and motorcycle boots. Where they were thinking manicured, he was remembering menacing.

All of these thoughts, understand, flashed through Jaywalker’s semiconscious mind during the five seconds or so it took Teresa to walk the thirty feet from the side door to the witness stand. And at the same time he was processing them, he was also busy arranging the contents of his cross-examination file on the table in front of him, locating a pad of paper on which to take notes, testing a couple of pens to see which of them wrote more fluidly, and leaning his body toward Jeremy’s to signal how comfortable he was with him, all the while projecting an air of quiet confidence that when his turn came he’d be able to expose this witness as something entirely different than what she might seem.

Trying cases was like that. At least, trying them the Jaywalker way was. Which was funny, because in any other venue he was a perfect example of the guy who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Stick him in front of a TV set, for example, and he’d have trouble eating a sandwich, let alone talking on the phone, reading a newspaper or conducting a conversation. But toss him into a courtroom with a thousand little things going on at once, and he suddenly became a world-class multitasker. Go figure.

Katherine Darcy began her direct examination by bringing out the fact that Teresa Morales was now married. A couple of months ago she’d become Teresa Rodriguez, or Teresa Rodriguez Morales, if you wanted to arrange the names the way Latinos do. Jaywalker wondered if the marriage had had something to do with his investigator’s inability to locate her and try to interview her prior to trial. That thought was quickly replaced with his marveling at Teresa’s resilience. She had, after all, been Victor Quinones’s girlfriend just over a year and a half ago. But if Victor’s parents, sitting silently in the second row of the audience, were destined to spend the rest of their lives grieving over the loss of their son, Teresa’s period of mourning had apparently been somewhat briefer.

From Teresa’s marriage, Darcy jumped unexpectedly to the day of the shooting. Unexpectedly, because Jaywalker found it hard to believe that she’d leave it to him to go into Teresa’s-and the rest of the Raiders’-past contacts with Jeremy. Was it possible he’d overestimated his adversary’s trial skills? He sure hoped so.

DARCY: Do you remember the day Victor died?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Were you there?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Did you see the man who shot him?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Would you recognize him if you saw him today?

TERESA: Yes.

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

And, of course, Teresa pointed directly at Jeremy.

At that point, Katherine Darcy surprised Jaywalker again. Rather than going into the details of the shooting, she backed up. But not to the fistfight that had immediately preceded the gunfire, nor to the first of the series of encounters Teresa and her friends had had with Jeremy. Instead she took her witness back a week, to the day of the barbershop incident, and had her describe how Victor and several others had stood in front of the shop, calling Jeremy to come out.

DARCY: How many people were telling him to come out?

TERESA: Just Victor and his friends.

DARCY: Do you know the names of his friends? Any of them?

TERESA: One was Sandro. Shorty. Diego, maybe. But I don’t remember everybody’s name.

DARCY: What happened outside the barbershop?

TERESA: The guys were calling him out and, you know, playing with their fingers, going like this to him [indicating], trying to get him to come out. But he wouldn’t.

Jaywalker jumped to his feet. Teresa had formed her fingers into the shape of a gun, complete with a trigger-pulling motion. He wanted the gesture made part of the record, lest some appellate court judge two years down the line tried to fob it off as a harmless wave.

JAYWALKER: Could we describe the motion?

THE COURT: Yes, describe it.

Darcy tried her best to put a neutral spin on it.

DARCY: For the record, indicating like a finger pointing.

But for once Judge Wexler came to the rescue of the defense. He, too, had seen the motion.

THE COURT: She has a thumb up and the index finger fully extended, and the index finger keeps moving back and forth.

Jaywalker sat down. He couldn’t have described it any better if he’d wanted to.

Teresa went on to describe how Victor and his friends had tried to get Jeremy to come out and fight, until finally an older man from the barbershop had come out and gotten the group to leave. From there Darcy returned to the day of the shooting. This struck Jaywalker as something of a mistake on her part. He’d been the one who’d told her about the barbershop incident in the first place. Obviously Darcy had questioned Teresa about it, and when Teresa had confirmed that it had taken place, Darcy had preemptively made it part of her direct examination, trying her best to play it down. But at the same time she’d apparently chosen to ignore the other occasions-and over coffee she’d stated that there’d been at least a dozen of them-on which Teresa, and presumably her friends, had encountered Jeremy.

Jaywalker, needless to say, had no intention of ignoring them. To the extent that he had one, the sum of those encounters-including but by no means limited to the barbershop incident-was his defense.

As Teresa returned to day of the shooting, she described how things had begun casually enough. She and Victor had been on 110th Street, walking toward Third Avenue, when they’d almost bumped into Jeremy and his “lady.” There’d been two girls with them, one a good bit younger than the other.

DARCY: The person you described as his lady. Do you know her name?

TERESA: I heard her name was Miranda. But I don’t really know her.

DARCY: Do you know what she looks like?

TERESA: She’s got reddish hair. She’s slim.

DARCY: Tell us what happened.

TERESA: Victor told him, “Come on, tough guy. I heard you want to fight me.” And they were calling each other names. “Punk.” “Chicken.” Stuff like that.

She described how she and Victor had walked north to 113th Street, when she noticed that Jeremy and his lady had followed them.

DARCY: Then what happened?

TERESA: When I noticed he was behind us, I tried to get Victor to walk faster. But it happened so quickly. They just started fighting, hitting each other.

DARCY: Tell us what you saw.

TERESA: The guy, he punched Victor in the lip. Victor took off his sweatshirt, and they kept on fighting. After a minute or two they backed off, and the guy just pulled out a gun from his waist. I told Victor, “Run, run!” And when he ran, the guy shot him, and Victor like went down on the ground. Then he got up, and the guy shot again, and it hit the street. Then Victor ran again, inside the park, around a bench. But he tripped. And then the guy just walked over, grabbed him and killed him.

She recounted how, following the shooting, Jeremy and his lady had run from the scene, toward Third Avenue and out of sight.

DARCY: What did you do?

TERESA: I was screaming for help.

DARCY: What else?

TERESA: I was laying down, holding his neck.

DARCY: Why?

TERESA: I was putting my fingers on the hole at the back of his neck where he was bleeding from.

DARCY: What happened then?

TERESA: After a while, the cops came, and then an ambulance. We went to the hospital, to the emergency room, and they wheeled him away.

DARCY: Did you ever see Victor alive again?

TERESA: No.

Cross-examining a sympathetic witness could be tricky business, as Jaywalker well knew. Even if she’d gone and gotten married to another man not too long after the incident, Teresa Morales had seen her boyfriend gunned down in front of her, and he’d all but died in her arms. To top that off, in the eyes of the jury she’d come off as a pretty straightforward witness. Jeremy insisted that it had been Victor, not he, who’d first pulled the gun, and he continued to deny any recollection of firing the last shot as Victor lay helpless on the ground. Jaywalker’s own internal jury was still out on both those questions. But the jurors had now heard three accounts of the incident, and while they varied from version to version, all three put the gun in Jeremy’s hands first and pretty much agreed about the final shot.

The execution.

What was more, Teresa hadn’t even appeared to stretch things. Her account of the barbershop incident had been pretty much as Jeremy had described it. Her graphic demonstration of the way in which Victor and his friends had mimed shooting had, Jaywalker strongly suspected, taken Katherine Darcy by surprise. And it had been Darcy, rather than Teresa, who’d tried to gloss it over as nothing but an innocent pointing gesture. So Jaywalker knew he had to proceed cautiously, lest he run the risk of antagonizing the jurors. Still, he couldn’t tread all that carefully; Teresa had been too damaging a witness for him to leave alone.

He began gently, asking her about her relationship with Victor, trying to establish her loyalty to him and, consequently, her natural bias against the man who’d killed him. He asked her what Victor had done for a living, and when the best she could come up with was “odd jobs,” Jaywalker decided to let her off the hook. He figured there was little to be gained from attacking the victim’s reputation with not only his former girlfriend on the witness stand, but his grieving parents present, as well. Besides, Jaywalker had a surrogate to attack, another member of the gang who had no supporters in the courtroom.

JAYWALKER: Tell me about Alesandro.

TERESA: Who?

JAYWALKER: Maybe you knew him as Sandro?

TERESA: I knew him. Not well, though.

JAYWALKER: How long had you known him for?

TERESA: Not long. Three or four years.

JAYWALKER: What was his last name?

TERESA: I don’t know.

JAYWALKER: You knew him three or four years, yet you never learned his last name?

TERESA: Yeah. It’s like that on the street. You know people by their first names, or maybe their nicknames.

JAYWALKER: I see. What were some of the other first names or nicknames of the members of the gang?

DARCY: Objection to the term “gang.” There’s been absolutely no testimony-

THE COURT: Sustained. Rephrase the question.

JAYWALKER: Sure. Ms. Morales, it’s true that you used to hang out with Victor and Sandro and some other guys, right?

TERESA: Sort of.

JAYWALKER: And that’s what you were doing the day the guys were going like this [demonstrating] outside the barbershop? Not doing anything illegal, just hanging out like a gang of friends. Right?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Objection, again, to the word “gang.”

THE COURT: Well, the witness seems to have agreed with Mr. Jaywalker’s terminology. So your objection is overruled.

JAYWALKER: Was Victor there that day?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Sandro?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Who else?

TERESA: Shorty. Diego. Mousey. Maybe a couple of others. I don’t remember.

JAYWALKER: How many of them were wearing their Raiders jackets that day?

TERESA: Excuse me?

By sneaking the question in unexpectedly, Jaywalker had hoped to camouflage its importance from Teresa and get not only a number out of her, but an acknowledgment that the group referred to themselves as the Raiders. But she hadn’t bitten. He asked her a few innocuous questions before taking another stab at it.

JAYWALKER: Whose idea was it to call the group the Raiders?

Not “Did the group have a name?” or “Was the group called the Raiders?” or even “Wasn’t the group called the Raiders?” Put any of those ways, the question not only telegraphed its own significance but could be answered with a simple “no.” But by phrasing it in such a way as to assume that the group was called the Raiders, asking instead the completely irrelevant question of whose idea that had been, Jaywalker hoped to slide it by Teresa and get her to identify the person. In so doing, of course, she’d be agreeing with the assumption.

He also needed to slide it past Katherine Darcy. A question that contains an assumption not established by the evidence is improper. The oft-cited example is “When did you stop beating your wife?” But Jaywalker had burned Darcy a few minutes earlier over his inclusion of the word gang in several of his questions. Granted, her initial objection had been sustained, but a moment later he’d gotten Teresa to concede that she and her friends had been just that. Darcy had won the skirmish but lost the battle, and Jaywalker guessed that this time she’d be gun-shy and let the question be answered without objecting. And in fact, she did.

But Teresa didn’t.

TERESA: We didn’t call ourselves anything.

JAYWALKER: Well, weren’t you aware that other people called you the Raiders?

TERESA: I wouldn’t know.

JAYWALKER: But members of the gang-I’m sorry, the group-did wear Raiders jackets, didn’t they?

TERESA: Not that I’m aware of.

Twice burned, Jaywalker gave up on the Raiders and got back to Sandro. He asked Teresa if she knew what he did for a living. She said she didn’t, that she hadn’t been aware that he’d had a job of any sort.

JAYWALKER: In all of the three or four years you knew him, he never once went to work?

TERESA: Not that I remember.

JAYWALKER: Never talked about working?

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: And that’s because Sandro supported himself by selling drugs, didn’t he?

TERESA: I don’t know.

Jaywalker stared at her, letting her words hang in the air for a few seconds.

JAYWALKER: Were you ever aware of a relationship between Sandro and Miranda, the young woman who was with Jeremy the day of the shooting?

TERESA: Sandro once told me he was seeing her.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever see the two of them together, Sandro and Miranda?

TERESA: What do you mean, together?

JAYWALKER: Well, not when the group was chasing Jeremy, or pretending their fingers were guns and-

DARCY: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: I mean “together” like man and woman, like you and Victor. Did you ever see Sandro and Miranda like that?

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: Never?

TERESA: Never.

He took her through the barbershop incident, making her repeat some of the names the group had called Jeremy by, and some of the taunts they’d hurled his way. He had her describe how the owner had come out and finally gotten them to leave.

JAYWALKER: Even as they were leaving, they said things to Jeremy, didn’t they?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: What did they say?

TERESA: “We’ll get you next time.”

JAYWALKER: Excuse me?

TERESA: “We’ll see you next time.”

JAYWALKER: Well which was it, “We’ll see you” or “We’ll get you”?

TERESA: “We’ll see you.”

Jaywalker had heard her correctly the first time, of course. He just wanted to make sure the jurors had.

JAYWALKER: And that day at the barbershop, that wasn’t the first time the group had chased Jeremy and threatened to get him, was it?

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: It had happened a number of times that summer, hadn’t it?

TERESA: A few times.

JAYWALKER: A few times? How about seventeen times, not counting the barbershop?

He’d made up the number on the spot. He’d learned over the years that if you were specific enough with numbers or pretended to be reading from some official-looking piece of paper, people tended to get intimidated and ended up agreeing with you.

TERESA: I don’t know. I wasn’t really keeping count.

Jaywalker decided to leave it there, figuring it was about as good as he was going to get before he began to draw denials from Teresa and yawns from the jury box. He knew that when it came time for him to put Jeremy on the stand, he’d be able to go into the earlier confrontations in depth and breadth. And all he’d be up against would be Teresa’s lame I don’t know, I wasn’t counting as the prosecution’s version.

Now he took a look at the clock, saw it was ten minutes to one. He was about to move forward to the day of the fight and the shooting, but he didn’t want to do so only to have to stop ten minutes in. So rather than ask a question, he caught Judge Wexler’s eye. Wexler, who’d tried a few cases in his day as a defense lawyer, got the message.

“This might be a good time,” he announced, “to break for lunch.”

Once the jurors had been led out one door and Jeremy had been escorted through a very different one, Jaywalker sat back down and began gathering up his notes and files. As always, he intended to find a bench or a windowsill where he could spend the next hour refining the rest of his cross-examination. But suddenly Jeremy’s mother was hovering over him, extending a brown paper bag his way.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Lunch,” she said. “Jew gotta eat somesing.”

Jaywalker stared at the bag. There was a large grease spot on one side of it, and a strong smell emanating from it. Cumin, perhaps? Garlic? He looked away, forcing himself to breathe through his mouth. Had he eaten breakfast, he would have been in serious danger of losing it right then and there.

“It’s good,” Carmen assured him. “I make it myself. Pork, rice and beans. Very good for jew. Give jew energy, Mr. Jailwalker.”

He looked around for help, but the only court officer in sight, an old friend who was quite familiar with Jaywalker’s trial diet, was trying his hardest not to burst out laughing at the scene. Everyone else had left, like rats fleeing a doomed ship. Next thing he knew, Jaywalker found himself not only accepting the bag-grease spot, aroma and all-but thanking Carmen for her thoughtfulness. He’d learned over time that you didn’t reject heartfelt offerings from people of modest means. When the court-appointed client with no roof over his head extended a twenty-dollar bill your way after a hard-earned acquittal, you explained that the rules prohibited you from accepting it, that the city would be sending you a check to cover your hours. But when the guy insisted and said, “Please, you saved my life,” you took the twenty and you pocketed it. To refuse a second time would be nothing less than a slap in the face, a rejection of a kindness. And if the disciplinary judges wanted to disbar him for that, so be it, they could have his ticket.

He thanked Carmen again and took the bag with him to the fifteenth floor, where he opened it, gagged from an overwhelming whiff of its contents and left it on a bench. Someone, he told himself, would be thrilled to discover it. Someone with a stomach far stronger and even emptier than his own.

When they resumed that afternoon, Jaywalker had the sense that the jurors were looking at Teresa Morales a little differently from the way they’d regarded her first thing that morning. In their eyes, she’d begun the day as not just a witness but a victim of sorts. Her boyfriend had been beaten up in front of her, then shot, chased and murdered. She’d tried to stop him from bleeding to death and had been unable to. The last she’d seen of him had been when he’d been wheeled away from her at the emergency room.

But as the morning wore on, the jurors had learned other things about Teresa. She’d gotten married to another man within a year, for one. She’d been forced to admit that she’d been part of a group that had followed Jeremy, called him names, taunted him, promised to “get” him, and finally backed up their words with gestures that could only be construed-unless you happened to be Katherine Darcy-as mimicking gunfire. So by the time the afternoon session began, the average defense lawyer would have concluded that Teresa had been softened up to the point where she was now ripe for the kill, and would have pounced on her.

Jaywalker, however, was anything but your average defense lawyer. Never was, never would be. As strong as the temptation was to attack a wounded witness, he knew better than to try. For one thing, he considered it entirely plausible that Teresa Morales had told the truth that morning and would continue to do so that afternoon. With very few exceptions-the Raiders jackets and which boy had first pulled the gun-nothing Jeremy had ever told Jaywalker contradicted Teresa’s testimony in general and her account of the day of the shooting in particular. So a full-bore attack ran the risk of accomplishing nothing more than getting her to repeat herself, only in more-and more convincing-detail than before. Again Jaywalker reminded himself that Jeremy would have his turn on the witness stand. Any blanks in the story left by Teresa meant more room for Jeremy to fill in as he recalled things.

In other words, less could actually be more. A proposition that sounded so alien and counterintuitive to most lawyers that they rejected it out of hand.

JAYWALKER: Do you remember who threw the first punch, Victor or Jeremy?

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: But after a while it became apparent that Jeremy was winning the fight. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: And at some point Victor stopped to take off his sweatshirt. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: In order to do that, did he have to pull it up over his head?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Did Jeremy attack him while Victor was busy doing that, while-

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: — he was blind and defenseless?

TERESA: No, not that I remember.

JAYWALKER: And then they resumed fighting?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Victor was now wearing just a T-shirt, a long T-shirt. Right?

This was actually an important point. According to Jeremy, the first he’d seen of the gun had been when Victor had pulled it from his waistband. That meant it must still have been hidden by something after Victor had removed his sweatshirt.

TERESA: I don’t remember.

JAYWALKER: Well, he wasn’t bare-chested, was he?

TERESA: I don’t remember.

Jaywalker decided that was good enough. Jeremy would testify that Victor still had on a shirt of some sort. Teresa claimed she couldn’t remember, and neither of the other eyewitnesses, Magdalena Lopez and Wallace Porter, had ever described Victor as being shirtless at any point. In his summation, Jaywalker would argue that had that been so, surely at least one of them would have recalled it and mentioned it, if only to differentiate between the two young men who’d been nameless strangers to them.

JAYWALKER: How about Jeremy? He had a shirt on the whole time, too. Didn’t he?

TERESA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever notice what Jeremy had on his feet?

TERESA: No, not really.

JAYWALKER: Do you have any recollection that he had two or three pairs of sweat socks on?

That, of course, had been Wallace Porter’s version, along with his claim that he’d seen Jeremy pull the gun from his socks.

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: No recollection whatsoever. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: So who finally won the fight?

TERESA: Him, I guess [pointing].

JAYWALKER: Jeremy?

TERESA: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Victor kind of gave up?

TERESA: Kind of.

JAYWALKER: And that’s when you say you saw Jeremy pull the gun. Right?

TERESA: Right.

JAYWALKER: From his waist.

TERESA: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Not his socks?

TERESA: No.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever see him do something like this with the gun [gesturing], pulling something back on the top of it with his other hand?

TERESA: No.

Teresa couldn’t say how many shots she’d heard, but Jaywalker got her to agree that everything had occurred “very fast” at that point, with Jeremy “just shooting like crazy.”

Which, Jaywalker decided, was as good a place as any to quit. Whoever had first pulled the gun, it was agreed that Jeremy had ended up with it and done the shooting. And the image of things happening very quickly, with Jeremy momentarily out of control, dovetailed nicely with Jaywalker’s theory of the case. As for Victor’s getting up, running, stumbling and being shot again as he lay defenseless on the pavement, there was no way Jaywalker was going to get Teresa to retreat from those assertions. So the less said about them, the better.

“I have no further questions of the witness,” he said.

Trials are something like trains, to the extent that neither of them tend to run too closely on schedule. One of the jurors had developed a toothache overnight and had that morning asked Judge Wexler’s permission to visit her dentist that afternoon, explaining that the dentist could squeeze her in as an emergency at four-thirty. Now Wexler announced that her request would be granted, and that the trial would be in recess until the following morning. Then, as soon as the jurors had filed out of the courtroom, he summoned the lawyers up to the bench. “You know what they call a lawyer who asks about everything but the crime?” he asked.

Jaywalker was willing to take a stab at it. “A genius?”

It drew a muffled laugh from Katherine Darcy but seemed to do nothing for Wexler’s disposition. “Not in my book,” he said. “How about a loser?”

Jaywalker figured that particular question was a rhetorical one, and except for a shrug, he let it go unanswered. Wexler turned his attention to Darcy. “Are you still willing to consider offering the manslaughter plea?” he asked her. “With twenty years?”

“I suppose so,” she answered. “I’d have to talk to my bureau chief.”

“I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you talk to your client, Jaywalker. If the jury convicts him of murder, you can tell him I’m going to give him twenty-five to life. You may think you’re going to be able to fool them into returning a manslaughter verdict, but I don’t. And I’ll promise you this much-there’s no way you’re walking out of here with an acquittal, not once I’ve finished charging them on when the right to use deadly force ends. To me, Jaywalker, your client’s nothing but a two-bit punk who killed another punk, and if our legislature had any balls, he’d get the same sentence the victim got. So why don’t you do us all a favor and stop trying to be a hero for once in your life, and start kicking some sense into this kid, will you?”

“I’ll do my best,” said Jaywalker.

And then, in spite of the fact that he’d planned on going into the pens and spending a few minutes with Jeremy, he made it a point of turning around, picking up his things as quickly as possible and walking not into the pens at all, but out the front doors. And for good measure, muttering “Fuck you” under his breath.

Okay, not exactly under his breath.

As pissed off as Jaywalker had been at the time by Judge Wexler’s appraisal of the case, he’d calmed down by that evening. Food and the simple passage of time had a way of doing that. Not that a few hits from a joint hadn’t helped.

And the truth was, he had to admit, Wexler did have a point. Here Jaywalker had thought he’d had a pretty good day with Teresa Morales. Even on direct examination, she’d described the barbershop incident pretty much the way Jeremy would in turn, complete with taunting, name-calling, simulating guns and threatening to get him next time. On cross, she’d admitted there’d been earlier encounters, though she’d been vague on the numbers. And if he hadn’t quite gotten her to concede that the group called themselves the Raiders and favored Oakland Raiders leather jackets, her “Not that I’m aware of” demurrer had come off as pretty lame. As far as the fight was concerned, she’d not only agreed that Jeremy had been winning it, but portrayed him as too gentlemanly to go after his opponent while Victor had been taking off his sweatshirt and had been momentarily defenseless.

On the issue of where Jeremy had supposedly pulled the gun from, Teresa’s recollection that it had been from his waist contradicted Wallace Porter’s version that it had been from his socks. But Jaywalker wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. Porter had obviously lied as to several other points. First there’d been his insistence that he and his friends hadn’t been drinking beer, only seconds after he himself had slipped and mentioned that they had been. Then there’d been his statement to the detectives that he’d heard the two young men arguing over money just before they began fighting. Porter had been forced to admit that while that statement had had no truth to it, he’d never attempted to correct it. In fact, he now said he didn’t even know why he’d said it in the first place.

But Jaywalker did. Porter had simply been drawing on his own personal experience. Two young guys fighting to the death could mean only one thing to Wallace Porter: drugs. And drugs equalled money. So he’d simply embellished the tale with some details of his own. Why did Jaywalker see this so clearly? Because it was the kind of thing he himself did from time to time.

So if indeed it had been Jeremy who’d pulled the gun-and despite Jeremy’s denials, Jaywalker considered that a distinct possibility-Teresa Morales’s waistband version was much more likely than Wallace Porter’s sweat-sock story. Still, the contradiction was a major one, and there was no way the jurors could have missed it. And just in case they had, Jaywalker would hammer the point in his summation. So all things considered, Jaywalker felt he’d survived the testimony of the three eyewitnesses in pretty fair shape. Yet here was Harold Wexler telling him in so many words that he was dead in the water.

It’s often been said that because the prosecutor gets to sum up after the defense lawyer does, he or she has the last word in a trial. But Jaywalker knew that wasn’t really the case. Following the summations, it’s the judge who gets to speak last, often for an hour or more, while he charges the jury, lecturing them in detail on the various principles of law they’re required to follow during their deliberations and in arriving at a verdict. When Harold Wexler had warned Jaywalker up at the bench that Jeremy’s chances of being acquitted would vanish the moment the jury heard the charge on the limits of deadly force, he had a point. Even if the jurors were to remain as undecided as Jaywalker was on the issue of who’d begun the day with the gun, even if they felt Jeremy had been defending himself the first time he’d fired-or arguably the second or third time-once Victor had been lying helpless on the ground, there was no way that Jeremy’s shooting him a final time between the eyes could be deemed justified. Wexler intended to make that point to the jury, and to make it as loudly and clearly as he possibly could. His message to Jaywalker had been direct and to the point: you can talk about justification and extreme emotional disturbance all you want, but there’s no way you’re getting around that final shot, not in my courtroom.

And if you chose to combine Harold Wexler’s words with those of Katherine Darcy, uttered the very first time Jaywalker had met her, you had the case distilled right down to its essence. It was all about that stumble Victor had taken, that moment when he’d fallen to the ground and been reduced to begging for his life. That marked the precise instant when self-defense and sympathy ended, and the execution began.

He would talk to Jeremy tomorrow. Tonight he would sleep.

Or at least try to.