Overkill

16

When Jaywalker went into the pens and talked with Jeremy before court the following morning, he found his client as resolute as ever.

“I think it’s going pretty well, Jay.”

Jaywalker tried to explain for the third time in fifteen minutes that no matter how well things seemed to be going, there was still the problem of the final point-blank shot between the eyes. The one that had been fired at a point when Victor had no longer posed a threat of any sort.

“I don’t remember it that way,” said Jeremy for the umpteenth time. “And I’d rather take my chances.”

Jaywalker had once listened to an interview with Bill Russell, a long-ago basketball star for the Boston Celtics. Asked about the prospects of some other team beating them in the championship series, Russell had said, “They got two chances. Slim and none.” Despite the fact that Jaywalker had been trying his best to explain that those words described their own chances of an acquittal to a T, the choice to continue the trial or not was still Jeremy’s. When it came to tactics and strategy, Jaywalker took over, never allowing a client to tell him how to try a case, lest the advice interfere with his winning it. But on the fundamental question of whether to take a plea or go to trial-or in this case, continue with a trial-that decision was the defendant’s, and the defendant’s alone. Jaywalker could and did give advice on the matter. He often weighed in heavily on one side or the other, with a good ninety percent of his recommendations being to cop-out. If he felt strongly enough-and Jaywalker had never been a stranger to strong feelings-he’d resort to arm-twisting and head-banging. But when he was done with the twisting and the banging, he’d move on and redirect his efforts to winning. Other lawyers he knew admitted to taking a measure of satisfaction from telling a client, “I told you so,” after losing a case. Jaywalker delighted in hearing those very same words from a client, after he’d won a case he’d called unwinnable. And hear those words he had. Not always, but a lot.

Though he knew he probably never would from Jeremy.

Katherine Darcy called Police Officer Joseph Campanella to the stand. Campanella had been the first officer to respond to the scene of the shooting. Checking his memo-book entries from time to time, he recalled how he’d found someone identified later as V. Quinones lying on the pavement in a semiconscious state, apparently the victim of multiple gunshot wounds. He’d also encountered a young woman named Teresa Morales, who’d been attempting to aid Mr. Quinones.

DARCY: You say “semiconscious.” Was he talking?

CAMPANELLA: No, ma’am. He was breathing, but he didn’t respond to any verbal requests I made of him. He wasn’t making any motions. His eyes were closed, and it was-it appeared as though he was sleeping.

Officer Campanella had called for an ambulance. While waiting for it to arrive, he’d done chest compressions on the victim, while someone else had performed mouth-to-mouth breathing. Then the ambulance had arrived and EMTs had placed the victim inside it. Miss Morales and Officer Campanella had also gotten in.

DARCY: What happened in the ambulance?

CAMPANELLA: They were rendering whatever aid they could give him.

DARCY: What was Mr. Quinones’s condition as time went on?

CAMPANELLA: It was progressively worsening.

DARCY: Tell us how.

CAMPANELLA: He never regained consciousness. He never spoke or opened his eyes. From what I observed, his vital signs were diminishing. He was becoming paler as the minutes were passing. And he was just generally deteriorating.

DARCY: What happened at the hospital?

CAMPANELLA: Shortly after our arrival, he was pronounced dead by the emergency room doctor.

Officer Campanella had completed some paperwork, checked in with his precinct commander, and then returned to East 113th Street to help secure the crime scene. Darcy asked him if he’d noticed any sort of evidence upon his return.

CAMPANELLA: Yes, I did. There was a sweatshirt. And if I’m not mistaken, there were two shell casings and two spent rounds lying on the walk-way. I’d also recovered another spent round in the ambulance.

DARCY: What was done with those items, if you know?

CAMPANELLA: They were all vouchered and removed as evidence.

DARCY: Were you able to draw any conclusions about the type of weapon or weapons that had been involved in the shooting?

CAMPANELLA: Only that there’d been an automatic involved.

Asked to clarify, he explained that while a revolver retained its spent shells in its cylinder after firing, an automatic or semiautomatic discharged each empty shell as it was fired. As for the “spent rounds” he’d referred to, those were the slugs or projectiles that were fired from the shells.

DARCY: Did you do something else in connection with this case several days later?

CAMPANELLA: Yes, I did.

DARCY: What was that?

CAMPANELLA: I went to the city morgue and identified the body of Mr. Quinones.

Jaywalker asked the officer no questions. Campanella had been a good witness. He’d managed to avoid lapsing into copspeak, a strange dialect that for some reason compels its ranks to favor “At that point in time I did proceed to take exit of my vehicle” over “Then I got out of my car.” He’d been clear, concise and direct. That said, he hadn’t really said anything that hurt Jeremy, and Jaywalker saw no particular reason to give him a chance. Multiple shots had in fact been fired from a semiautomatic weapon. Victor Quinones had been shot, and had died of his wounds not too long afterward. Ballistics evidence and a sweatshirt had been recovered at the scene.

Jaywalker was a lot of things, but one thing he wasn’t was a showman. He never questioned witnesses for the sake of questioning them, or to show off his cross-examination skills. And for the life of him, he failed to understand why so many of his colleagues seemed compelled to do so.

Although it was only eleven o’clock, Judge Wexler decided to take his midmorning recess early, and he excused the jurors for fifteen minutes. The reason soon became apparent: the arrival of a dignitary of sorts, a justice from the appellate division.

Jaywalker couldn’t quite place the man at first, though he looked very familiar. And then it came to him. He was Miles Sternbridge, the presiding member of the three-judge disciplinary committee that had suspended Jaywalker from practice some years back. Sternbridge had actually treated Jaywalker fairly, first by grudgingly allowing him to finish up ten of his pending cases before the suspension had kicked in, and later by terminating it early in order to appease a Rockland County judge anxious to move along the case of a defendant who wanted to hire Jaywalker. Still, Jaywalker found it hard to feel all warm and fuzzy about the man. To begin with, what kind of a guy went around calling himself Miles Sternbridge? Not that he’d named himself, of course. But had Jaywalker been tagged with a handle like that, he would have done something about it, just as he had with Harrison J. Walker. Then there’d been the bit about that “sexual gratuity” Jaywalker had been accused of accepting. Sternbridge had to have known that hadn’t been his idea, and the stairwell security video had even backed him up, showing him trying to resist the efforts of his overly appreciative client. But in the absence of a sound track of any sort, Sternbridge had claimed to be able to divine that Jaywalker’s opening-and-closing of his mouth signified moaning, rather than protestations of “No, no!”

Okay, so maybe it had been a combination of the two. But even if it had been, was it really so different from accepting the twenty-dollar bill from the insistent guy you’d just won an acquittal for? Wouldn’t both clients have been equally offended by outright rejection of their expressions of gratitude?

“Come up, Mr. Jaywalker.” It was Harold Wexler’s voice, summoning Jaywalker up to the bench, where the two judges had been huddling for several minutes.

Jaywalker approached cautiously, wondering what it was he’d done this time. Going to trial instead of taking a plea couldn’t possibly be grounds for disciplinary action, could it? He looked around the courtroom, wondering if he was going to need a lawyer, but didn’t see anyone he would be interested in hiring even if he’d had the money.

“Nice to see you again,” said Sternbridge.

“Likewise, I’m sure.” He’d heard John Malkovich say that once in a movie, one of those things where everyone was wearing powdered wigs and pirate shirts.

“Harold here tells me you’ve been behaving yourself.” Said with obvious astonishment, and perhaps even a tinge of disappointment.

“I’ve been trying,” said Jaywalker.

“Good,” said Sternbridge. “Good.”

Jaywalker said nothing.

“Well, then,” said Sternbridge, “carry on, gentlemen.” And shaking hands with Wexler-and only Wexler-he turned and left.

“Friend of yours?” Wexler asked with a smile, once Sternbridge was out the door.

“Oh, yeah,” said Jaywalker, and they exchanged smiles. Wexler knew all about Jaywalker’s run-in with the committee; everyone did. Now he motioned Katherine Darcy to come up and join them at the bench. Once she had, he assured her that they hadn’t been discussing the case, only Jaywalker’s criminal record. Darcy answered with a knowing smile.

“So,” Wexler asked her, “have you talked to your bureau chief?”

“I have.”

“And are you authorized to agree to twenty years on a manslaughter plea?”

“Yes.”

Even before the judge turned his way, Jaywalker was shaking his head from side to side. “He doesn’t want it,” he explained.

“Big mistake,” was all Wexler would say, his jaw set tightly. Then he stood up and walked out of the room, leaving the two lawyers standing there. He could be like that, Jaywalker knew. Putting in a good word for you one minute, then turning on you the next. But the thing of it was, come sentencing time, it wouldn’t be the smiling Harold Wexler who’d be sentencing Jeremy Estrada. It would be the other one, the angry, vindictive Harold Wexler.

Just one more example of how the words I told you so always seemed to come into play down at 10 °Centre Street.

Katherine Darcy called Detective Regina Fortune. A member of the Crime Scene Unit, Detective Fortune would succeed in demonstrating, by the time she stepped down from the witness stand, that her name was far and away the best thing about her.

Darcy began her examination by asking about the duties of her unit.

FORTUNE: CSU responds to certain crimes within the five boroughs. All homicides, assaults where a person is likely to die, sex crimes-rape, sodomy, child abuse-and what we call pattern robberies or pattern burglaries. We respond in order to preserve the crime scene, and we do that through taking photos, making notes and drawing sketches and diagrams. And when we recover any type of evidence at a scene, we photograph it and note it in our sketches and diagrams.

Darcy drew Detective Fortune’s attention to September 6th. Referring to her notes, she testified that she’d arrived at 113th Street and Third Avenue shortly after four o’clock that afternoon. She’d found the scene already secured and evidence preserved by uniformed patrol officers who’d arrived earlier. She’d noted a sweatshirt, two.380 shell casings and a spent round, which she more accurately described as “a piece of deformed lead.” She’d made notes, taken measurements and photographs, and drawn a rough sketch of the area. Back at her office, she’d created a large diagram of the scene, drawn to scale and showing the relative location of the various items she’d spotted. Without objection from Jaywalker-he had no interest in making it seem worth fighting over-the diagram was received in evidence and published to the jurors. For some reason that Jaywalker had never understood, lawyers seem to prefer using words like publish when mundane ones like show would do just fine.

Up to that point, Regina Fortune had been a model witness, and perhaps it was that fact that led Katherine Darcy to get greedy. As Harold Wexler might have put it, it was a big mistake. But prosecutors are lawyers, too, and they occasionally succumb to the temptation to ask too many questions of a witness.

DARCY: You mentioned a.380 shell.

FORTUNE: Yes.

DARCY: What is a.380 shell?

FORTUNE: The number signifies the size of the caliber. Guns come in all sizes-.38s, 9 mms, 45s. A.380 is a middle-range gun. It’s bigger than a.38, smaller than a 9 mm, much smaller than a.45. Those are all caliber sizes.

DARCY: Have you seen.38s and.380s?

FORTUNE: Yes, I have.

DARCY: And are you able to approximate the size of a.380?

FORTUNE: A.380 would probably be the size of my hand. It’s an automatic. It’s streamlined, kind of thin. But it would probably be the size of my hand.

It suddenly dawned on Jaywalker where Darcy was going with this line of questioning. Wallace Porter had claimed to have seen Jeremy pulling the gun from beneath two or three pairs of sweat socks. Despite the unlikelihood of that having happened-Teresa Morales’s waistband version had struck Jaywalker as far more plausible-Darcy was now casting her lot with Porter and trying to get Detective Fortune to say that it could have happened the way he’d testified. And sure enough…

DARCY: Anything about a.380 that would be inconsistent with its being carried in somebody’s sock?

FORTUNE: No, it could be carried in somebody’s sock.

DARCY: Are you familiar with ankle holsters?

FORTUNE: Yes.

DARCY: If somebody were to pull sweat socks over an ankle holster, would that conceal the holster?

FORTUNE: Yes, it would.

Sooner or later, there came a moment in most trials when Jaywalker woke up. Not that he’d been asleep up to this point. But knowing that he would eventually be putting Jeremy on the stand, he’d pretty much sat back and let the early witnesses have their say. He hadn’t even gone after the eyewitnesses too hard-Magdalena Lopez, Wallace Porter and Teresa Morales-preferring to get them off the stand fairly quickly. But for some reason, Katherine Darcy’s last line of questioning with Detective Fortune pissed him off. Perhaps it was no more than his frustration over not being able to dent the consensus that it had been Jeremy who’d pulled the gun and murdered a defenseless victim. Or perhaps it had been Harold Wexler’s certainty that there was going to be a conviction and that he was going to bang Jeremy out at sentencing time. Maybe it had even had something to do with Miles Sternbridge’s cameo appearance that morning, and his snide remark about being glad to hear that Jaywalker had been behaving himself. Whatever it was, the juices were suddenly boiling within Jaywalker’s belly. That was something that didn’t happen all that often, but when it did, it made him an exceedingly dangerous cross-examiner, as Regina Fortune was about to find out.

JAYWALKER: Detective Fortune, have you ever owned a.380 automatic?

FORTUNE: Me? No.

But Jaywalker had, back in his DEA days. A nickel-plated one, with genuine walnut grips. It had been big, the exact size of a.45, and had taken one round in the chamber and eleven in the clip, and you could go to war with it if you had to.

JAYWALKER: Are you by any chance familiar with the Browning.380?

FORTUNE: I’ve seen it. It’s about the size of my hand.

JAYWALKER: Is the Browning.380 a very common.380?

FORTUNE: I wouldn’t know.

JAYWALKER: What are some other makes of.380s?

FORTUNE: I see so many guns, I wouldn’t know.

JAYWALKER: Tell me one other.

FORTUNE: I can’t remember right now.

JAYWALKER: I’ll give you a few minutes.

FORTUNE: I don’t know makes of guns, really.

JAYWALKER: Do you know the difference between a.380 and a 9 mm?

FORTUNE: The size of the gun. Because the caliber is a little bigger?

From the way she raised her voice at the end, turning her answer into question, it was clear that not even Detective Fortune believed that one. But before Jaywalker could continue, Judge Wexler came to her rescue.

THE COURT: You’re not a ballistics expert, are you?

FORTUNE: No, I’m not.

But by asking her about guns on direct examination, Katherine Darcy had opened the door to Jaywalker’s line of questioning, and Wexler was obviously smart enough to know he had no choice but to let things continue.

JAYWALKER: Detective, when we talk about millimeters, a 9 mm versus a.380, say, what are we referring to?

FORTUNE: It’s the size of the caliber of the gun.

JAYWALKER: What does that mean?

FORTUNE: It’s the size of the bullet.

JAYWALKER: Is that in length? Diameter? Radius? Or circumference?

FORTUNE: It’s measured by weight.

That one took even Jaywalker surprise. Here he’d been nice enough to make things easy for the witness by asking her a multiple-choice question. And she’d decided to go with “none of the above.”

JAYWALKER: The millimeter is a unit of weight?

FORTUNE: That’s how they determine it.

JAYWALKER: How about a meter? Is that a unit of weight?

FORTUNE: No, it’s not.

JAYWALKER: Isn’t a millimeter a fraction of a meter?

FORTUNE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: What fraction would that be?

FORTUNE: A hundredth?

JAYWALKER: Close. How about a thousandth?

FORTUNE: Okay.

JAYWALKER: Does that perhaps cause you to change your previous answer that a millimeter is a unit of weight?

FORTUNE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Good. So do millimeters refer to the diameter of the bullet, the radius of the bullet, the circumference of the bullet, or the length of the bullet? Now that we’ve ruled out weight.

FORTUNE: I believe it’s lengthwise, the length of the shell.

This from a detective, mind you. A detective assigned to the Crime Scene Unit.

JAYWALKER: Ever heard of a.22?

FORTUNE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Is there such a thing as a.22 long?

FORTUNE: Yes, there is.

JAYWALKER: Such a thing as a.22 short? Sometimes called a.22 corto?

FORTUNE: The.22 short I know. Yes.

JAYWALKER: Yet they’re all.22’s, in spite of the fact that they have different lengths. Aren’t they?

FORTUNE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Does that by any chance cause you to change your previous answer that the term millimeters refers to length? To think that it refers instead to the diameter of the bullet?

FORTUNE: I guess so. I’m not an expert.

At least that much was clear. But Jaywalker still needed to undermine the detective’s claim that the discovery of.380 shell casings told her something about the size of the gun they’d come from.

JAYWALKER: Now you told us that a.380 automatic is smaller than a 9 mm. Right?

FORTUNE: Right.

JAYWALKER: Yet they can both fire.380 ammunition, can’t they?

FORTUNE: Yes, I guess so.

JAYWALKER: And either one can be as big as a.45 automatic. Right?

FORTUNE: Right.

JAYWALKER: Which would make it considerably bigger than your hand. Right again?

FORTUNE: Right.

JAYWALKER: So the fact that.380 shell casings were found at the scene really tells us just about nothing in terms of the overall size of the gun they came from. Isn’t that true?

FORTUNE: Yes.

From there, Jaywalker moved on to the subject of ankle holsters.

JAYWALKER: You’ve seen lots of ankle holsters, haven’t you?

FORTUNE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: And is it fair to say that whenever you’ve seen one, it was for a two-inch, snub-nosed.38 revolver?

FORTUNE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: You’ve never, ever seen one for a.380 automatic, have you?

FORTUNE: No.

JAYWALKER: Or a 9 mm?

FORTUNE: No.

JAYWALKER: In fact, neither of those guns would fit into an ankle holster made for a two-inch.38 revolver? Would they?

FORTUNE: No.

JAYWALKER: What would be likely to happen if you tried to wear one of them in such an ankle holster?

FORTUNE: It’s too big. It would probably fall out.

JAYWALKER: Kind of like if you tried to wear it in just your socks, without a holster?

FORTUNE: Kind of like that.

JAYWALKER: Probably fall out?

FORTUNE: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Same thing even if you wore extra pairs of socks?

FORTUNE: Same thing.

At some point during the morning, Jaywalker’s daughter had slipped into the courtroom. She’d been in the neighborhood, having had to pick up some document at the Board of Health a few blocks away. As soon as Jaywalker finished his cross-examination of Detective Fortune, Judge Wexler recessed for lunch. At that point Jaywalker’s daughter walked over to him, hugged him and said, “You shredded her, Dad.”

And it was true. Regina Fortune had been a terrible witness, far too ready to testify to things about which she knew little or nothing. And Katherine Darcy had been complicit in unmasking the detective by asking her questions she didn’t need to and never should have.

But Jaywalker knew something his daughter didn’t. From Detective Fortune’s scale-drawn diagram of the crime scene, the jurors would be able to determine the precise distance between the area where Jeremy Estrada and Victor Quinones had fought to the spot where Victor had ultimately sustained the fatal shot and bled out onto the pavement. That distance, Jaywalker also knew, would form the cornerstone of Katherine Darcy’s summation argument that Victor had indeed attempted to flee from Jeremy after being shot the first time, and that Jeremy in turn had run him down and executed him.

That distance had been forty-five feet.

As Jaywalker was busy explaining that little detail to his daughter, Jeremy’s mother sidled up to them, another greasy paper bag in her hands.

“She’s your daughter,” said Carmen.

Not “Is she your daughter?” or “This must be your daughter.” No, the way Carmen stated it left absolutely no room for doubt. She might just as easily have been presenting a newborn baby to a mother in the delivery room, or announcing the results of a DNA test excluding any other possibility by a factor of a billion to one. And while it was true that there was a certain resemblance between Jaywalker and his daughter, it wasn’t like they were mirror images of each other. Which made Carmen’s pronouncement seem all the more like something straight from the mouth of a clairvoyant or a Gypsy fortune-teller.

Jaywalker introduced the two of them, and they traded a “Pleased to meet jew” for an “I hope things work out for your son.” Then Carmen turned back to Jaywalker, and the dreaded moment came.

“Chicken,” she said. “I made jew chicken with brown graven.”

Jaywalker took the bag and thanked her. They spoke for a few more seconds before a court officer anxious to clear the courtroom ushered Carmen out. Jaywalker and his daughter he left alone, knowing they’d know to use the side door.

“Thanks for stopping by,” said Jaywalker, who saw little of his daughter these days, now that she was living in New Jersey with her husband and children of her own. “I miss you. And do me a favor, will you?”

“What’s that?”

He extended the bag in her direction. She laughed at the offer, but immediately put her hands behind her back. Family resemblances were one thing, and blood might indeed be thicker than water. But when it came to chicken and brown graven, it seemed Jaywalker was still pretty much on his own.

That afternoon Katherine Darcy called Dr. Seymour Kaplan to the stand as her eighth and final witness. Dr. Kaplan was an assistant to the chief medical examiner of the City of New York, and he would prove to be as good a witness as Detective Fortune had been a bad one.

Darcy began by having Dr. Kaplan run through his credentials and qualifications, and they were truly impressive. After graduating from Harvard, he’d earned a doctorate in neuroanatomy, and taught anatomy and histology at Albert Einstein Medical School, before enrolling there himself. Following graduation and an internship, he’d completed a three-year residency in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. From there he’d returned to New York to accept a teaching fellowship in forensic pathology at Mount Sinai. He was board certified in both anatomical pathology and forensic pathology, which he described as the interaction between the science of the medical cause of death and the legal world of the criminal justice system. He’d worked as an assistant medical examiner in New York for eleven years, during which time he’d performed over two thousand autopsies himself, as well as assisting at more than three times that number.

Twice during the recital Jaywalker offered to stipulate that Dr. Kaplan was qualified as an expert in forensic pathology. But Katherine Darcy could evidently sense the jury’s reaction to her witness’s resume and intended to play it for all it was worth. Finally, on the third attempt, Jaywalker’s offer was accepted. At that point Judge Wexler took a moment to explain to the jurors that having been qualified as an expert, Dr. Kaplan would be permitted to offer his medical and scientific opinion within the field of his particular expertise.

Darcy had him describe what an autopsy was, and how he’d performed one on the body of Victor Quinones. In response to her questions, he stated that he’d found two gunshot wounds, a non-fatal one to the torso, and a fatal one to the head, both complete with telltale entrance and exit holes. He was careful to say that from his examination he had no way of telling which wound had been sustained first.

DARCY: Would you describe for us the shot to the torso?

KAPLAN: Yes. That shot was actually a bit unusual, out of the ordinary in terms of its geometry. It was a shot through the body wall. It entered just below the ribs on the left side, and the bullet stayed within the soft tissue of the body wall. It came out the body wall without ever entering the abdomen or causing internal damage. It formed a very nice linear streak, which is visible on the body. I probed the line, opened it up. And found there was no injury at all from it.

What also made it unique was that after the bullet left the body, there was a gap of a few inches where the skin was perfectly normal. And then there was an extension of that same line on the hip, indicating what appeared to me to be the continuation of the path of that bullet. It caused a grazing wound, a contusion. There was a bruise of the hip without the skin being broken. In other words, a bruising injury in a perfect line with the streak on the body wall that I described earlier.

Because I didn’t think these injuries were fatal, I didn’t include them on the death certificate as contributing in any way to the cause of death.

Darcy asked him to describe the other wound, the one that had proved fatal.

KAPLAN: There was a small, well-circumscribed wound just above the bridge of the nose, equidistant from the eyes. By “well-circumscribed,” I mean it was almost a complete circle in shape. I deemed it to be an entrance wound of a projectile, almost certainly a bullet. Following its trajectory with a thin metal probe, I discovered that it went through the skull, breaking off several small fragments as it did so. From there it entered the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, just slightly off the midline that divides the two hemispheres. At that point the projectile began to “wander” somewhat in what appeared to me to be a tumbling motion. As it did so, it caused massive damage to both hemispheres. There was significant evidence of herniation, or swelling of the brain itself within the skull. That would have happened as a result of bleeding, most of which would have taken place in the minutes following the impact.

After passing through the brain, the projectile again encountered the skull, this time from the inside, as it exited through the back of the head, the upper portion of the neck. Unlike the entrance wound, this exit wound was large and irregular, further evidence that the projectile had tumbled in the brain and had picked up both skull fragments and brain matter as it did so.

I deemed that shot to have been the fatal one.

A polite way, if Jaywalker understood correctly, of saying that Victor Quinones had died as a result of having a combination of metal and bone churn through his brain. Not too different from having had the Roto-Rooter man clean an ever-widening path through his skull, from front to back. But if that wasn’t bad enough, the worst was still to come. Darcy wanted to know if Dr. Kaplan was able to say how close the gun had been to the victim’s head when the fatal shot had been fired.

KAPLAN: I’m able to say it was quite close.

DARCY: What evidence did you see that supports that conclusion?

KAPLAN: The scalp was lifted off the skull enough so as to cause radial tearing around the edge of the wound.

DARCY: You used the words “quite close.” Are you able to give us a medical opinion as to just how close that shot was fired from the front of Victor Quinones’s head?

KAPLAN: Yes. What I found was consistent with a distance of anywhere from maybe a quarter of an inch to four or five inches.

Jaywalker had known for months that that detail was coming, not only from his own reading of the autopsy report, but from picking the brain of a friend who happened to be a pathologist. Still, as prepared as he was for it, and as ready as he ever would be to cross-examine on it, he knew he wouldn’t be able to seriously challenge Dr. Kaplan’s conclusion. Sometimes the truth is just that, and when delivered from the mouth of a bright, articulate witness with no interest in the outcome of the case, it tends to sparkle. Which on most days Jaywalker would agree was a wonderful thing.

Just not right now.

Because this particular bit of truth, that Jeremy Estrada had delivered the coup de grace at point-blank range, was every bit as devastating in its way as the fact that Victor Quinones had run forty-five feet before stumbling, looking up and seeing the gun pointed squarely between his eyes. It took only a furtive glance in the direction of the jurors to tell Jaywalker that their rapt attention and grim faces added up to no good for the defense.

And Darcy still wasn’t finished with Dr. Kaplan. She got him to agree that the nonfatal wound could have been sustained while the victim was in a crouched position, bent forward, with the shooter firing at him from directly in front of him. Finally Darcy asked her witness if, following the fatal shot-the one to the head-Victor Quinones would have been able to run or walk a distance of forty-five feet.

KAPLAN: In my opinion, that would have been virtually impossible. In all likelihood, the victim would have lost consciousness immediately or almost immediately.

DARCY: Would he have been able to talk? Specifically, to beg for his life?

KAPLAN: In my opinion, no and no. Given the damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls speech, the shot would have made it all but impossible for him to speak. And I would go so far as say that given the extent of the injuries, it would have been equally impossible for him to have formed the thought of begging, convert that thought into words, and utter those words. It’s my opinion that once the victim sustained that wound, he wouldn’t have been able to do much of anything other than to collapse and die shortly afterward.

Or, as Bill Russell might have put it, the chances that Victor had sustained the fatal wound where he and Jeremy had struggled over the gun, and then had either walked or run forty-five feet before collapsing-as Jeremy seemed to be telling Jaywalker-were slim and none.

From there Darcy drew Dr. Kaplan’s attention to a minor injury he’d noted in the autopsy report, a fresh cut Victor Quinones had sustained to the inside of his mouth.

DARCY: In your opinion, was that cut consistent with the victim’s having bitten his lip when his head was dropped to pavement?

KAPLAN: Yes, it was.

And with that last little tidbit, Katherine Darcy thanked her witness and sat down.

If the cross-examiner is smart enough to ask no questions of the witness who hasn’t hurt his client, what does he do with the witness who’s absolutely demolished him? That was the question on Jaywalker’s mind as he stood up now. Complicating his problem was the nature of Dr. Kaplan himself: not only had his testimony been devastating and his credentials impeccable, but his manner had been absolutely engaging. He’d instructed the jury without speaking down to them, had demonstrated an expertise uninfected by ego, and had restricted his opinions to those areas where he felt qualified to draw conclusions. As a result, he’d not only come off as objective and informative; he’d also ended up being thoroughly likeable.

So Jaywalker knew there was no way he could go after Dr. Kaplan the way, say, that he’d laid into Detective Fortune. At the same time, he knew he had to question the man. To leave him alone would have been tantamount to an admission of defeat, given how devastating the doctor’s testimony had been. But understanding that the most he could hope to accomplish was to score a point here or establish a fact there, Jaywalker knew he needed to lower his sights. In other words, rather than attacking Kaplan, he needed to adopt him as his own witness. Sometimes cross-examination can be a little bit like playground politics: if another kid looks too big to beat up, try getting him to join your side.

He began with the issue of the position of Victor Quinones’s body at the moment he’d sustained the first, nonlethal wound. Jaywalker felt it was the weakest part of Dr. Kaplan’s testimony, not because Kaplan himself had overreached, but because Katherine Darcy had tried to get too much out of him by asking him if Victor “could have sustained” the wound while bent forward in a crouched position.

JAYWALKER: Would you agree that it’s every bit as likely that this wound was sustained while Mr. Quinones was standing up straight and struggling over the gun, which was chest high and pointed straight downward?

KAPLAN: Yes, I would.

JAYWALKER: That could just as easily explain the entrance wound just below the chest, the shallow trajectory, the exit wound on the abdominal wall, and even the hip wound?

KAPLAN: Yes, sir. That is correct.

JAYWALKER: And the gun could have been quite close to the entrance wound?

KAPLAN: It could have been. Yes, sir.

JAYWALKER: Nothing in your findings rules that out. Correct?

KAPLAN: That is correct.

From there Jaywalker moved on to the victim’s physical appearance. He wanted the jury to hear that Victor had been physically fit and presumably an equal match with Jeremy in a fistfight. Also that he’d been menacing-looking, and as ugly as Jeremy was handsome. While that fact might have lacked relevance in a technical sense, Jaywalker was nevertheless banking on it to affect the jurors. When you were fighting to keep someone out of prison for the rest of his life or pretty close to it, you looked for every advantage you could find, and you didn’t let the technical stuff get in your way.

JAYWALKER: I see from the autopsy report that you described Mr. Quinones as about five-nine, well developed and fairly muscular? Is that your recollection?

KAPLAN: Yes, it is.

JAYWALKER: Any facial hair?

KAPLAN: A thin, wispy mustache and chin whiskers.

Jaywalker walked over to the prosecution table and asked Katherine Darcy for the autopsy photos. From the half dozen she handed him, he picked out one taken of the victim’s face in which the entrance wound showed the least. Victor had had rather heavy eyebrows, and the wound was right between them, where they met just above his nose. His eyes were closed in the photo, and if you didn’t know better, you might have thought he was sleeping. But his mouth was open, and the “windowpanes” were visible on his teeth, and his cheeks were pockmarked from what looked like old acne scars.

Jaywalker had the photo marked for identification, then handed it to the witness.

JAYWALKER: Is that a fair representation of what Mr. Quinones looked like?

KAPLAN: Yes, it is.

JAYWALKER: I offer the photo into evidence as Defendant’s Exhibit A.

DARCY: No objection.

THE COURT: Received.

Which meant that the jurors would be able to look at the exhibit themselves. Whiskers, windowpanes, pockmarks and all.

JAYWALKER: Can you tell us what those things are on Mr. Quinones’s teeth?

KAPLAN: Those are called windowpanes.

JAYWALKER: What are windowpanes?

KAPLAN: They’re decorative coverings that are placed over the teeth, with a cutout vignette. Sometimes the cutout is a box or a circle, sometimes a heart or a star. It’s my understanding that they’re purely decorative, rather than for any dental necessity. And they covered three of Mr. Quinones’s teeth.

JAYWALKER: And in this particular case, what kind of finish was on the windowpanes?

KAPLAN: They were gold.

Jaywalker turned to the toxicology and serology reports, and brought out the fact that Victor Quinones had had both ethanol and opiates in his system. From the.11 blood-alcohol reading, he was able to get Dr. Kaplan to estimate the number of drinks Victor had consumed at five or six. And it had still been morning when he died. But the doctor had no way of quantifying the amount of opiates he’d taken.

JAYWALKER: And when we say opiates, what drug is the first one that comes to your mind?

KAPLAN: Heroin. Although it could have been dilaudid, or something like that. But heroin would be the most likely candidate.

It was time to get down to the most devastating area of Dr. Kaplan’s testimony, his opinion that the fatal shot had been fired at a distance of no more than four or five inches from Victor’s head. Jaywalker knew he wasn’t going to be able to get the witness to reverse himself on that conclusion, but he wanted to at least show that the basis for it was a fairly narrow one.

JAYWALKER: Are you familiar with the term “muzzle stamp”?

KAPLAN: Yes, I am.

JAYWALKER: What’s a muzzle stamp?

KAPLAN: A muzzle stamp occurs if the gun is placed against the skin when it’s fired, and the pressure and heat of the gasses coming out with the bullet cause an impression. That impression will show up on the skin as a contusion, a black-and-blue mark. And in size and shape it will be identical to the muzzle, the end of the barrel of the gun. Again, it occurs only when the gun is held against the skin, particularly if it’s held against it tightly.

JAYWALKER: Did you find any evidence of a muzzle stamp in this case?

KAPLAN: No. But I wouldn’t have expected to, because the point of entry was largely covered by the hair of his eyebrows.

JAYWALKER: Hair singes rather easily, doesn’t it?

KAPLAN: It can, yes.

JAYWALKER: Any singing of the eyebrows in this case?

KAPLAN: No, sir.

JAYWALKER: What is “stippling”?

KAPLAN: Stippling is the term for little dots caused by tiny blood vessels-known as capillaries-breaking. It, too, is an indication that the shot was fired at close range.

JAYWALKER: Any stippling around the head wound?

KAPLAN: No, sir.

JAYWALKER: What is “fouling”?

KAPLAN: Fouling is the unburned powder that comes out of the muzzle. It would leave a grayish discoloration, if you were within close range. Though it could be washed off at the hospital, in the emergency room.

JAYWALKER: Any evidence of fouling in this case?

KAPLAN: No, sir.

JAYWALKER: So just to recap. With respect to the fatal wound, you found absolutely no evidence of a muzzle stamp, no singed hair, no stippling and no fouling. Do I have that right?

KAPLAN: You do.

There was one last area Jaywalker wanted to explore with the witness. Katherine Darcy had made a point of having Dr. Kaplan testify that a cut he’d noticed inside the victim’s mouth had been consistent with his having bitten his lip when his head had been dropped to the ground, presumably after Jeremy had shot him between the eyes.

JAYWALKER: Let’s talk about this term “consistent with” for a moment.

KAPLAN: Okay.

JAYWALKER: All that “consistent with” means is you can’t rule it out. Right?

KAPLAN: That is correct.

JAYWALKER: In other words, it’s one of perhaps any number of possibilities that you can’t eliminate.

KAPLAN: True.

JAYWALKER: Is there anything at all in the findings you saw that tells you Mr. Quinones’s head was ever picked up and dropped?

KAPLAN: No.

JAYWALKER: Were you ever informed that Mr. Quinones had been in a fistfight immediately prior to his death?

KAPLAN: I don’t believe I was.

JAYWALKER: Is this cut to his mouth every bit as consistent with his having taken a good right-handed punch to that area of the mouth as it is with anything else?

KAPLAN: Yes, sir. It’s consistent with absolutely anything that would have caused the tooth to bite through the lip.

JAYWALKER: Thank you.

And with that Jaywalker let him go. Despite his having been able to score a few points on cross, he knew that Dr. Kaplan had been a pivotal witness for the prosecution. And the fact that Katherine Darcy didn’t feel any need to get up and rehabilitate him on redirect examination underscored what Jaywalker already knew: the witness’s conclusion that the head shot had been fired from inches away-or even less-wasn’t really in doubt and was something the jurors would be hearing much more of during Darcy’s summation.

Between direct and cross, Seymour Kaplan’s testimony had taken over two hours, and by the time he stepped down from the witness stand it was nearly five o’clock. Judge Wexler recessed for the day. “And I know you’ll be disappointed to hear this,” he told the jurors, “but tomorrow is my calendar day. That means I’ll be spending the morning dealing with other cases, ones that aren’t on trial. As a result, your presence won’t be required until two-fifteen in the afternoon. But don’t let my generosity lull you into being late. I’m told by the Department of Corrections that there are plenty of vacancies on Rikers Island.”

Vintage Wexler, taking what promised to be a beautiful free morning in mid-May and turning it into a threat of jail time.

Even with the next day’s late start, that evening was a busy one for Jaywalker. Not that they all weren’t when he was on trial. But once they resumed Wednesday afternoon, Katherine Darcy would announce that the People were resting their case. That meant it would be the defense’s turn.

In exchange for Darcy’s agreement to permit Jeremy’s mother and sister to remain in the courtroom during the testimony of the prosecution witnesses, Jaywalker had promised to call them first, and it was a promise he intended to keep. Carmen had been steadfast in her refusal to allow her daughter to testify, and Jaywalker had neither seen Julie nor spoken with her since she’d been chased and threatened by the Raiders. As a result, following Carmen’s testimony he would be putting Francisco Zapata on the stand. True to his word, Frankie the Barber had flown in from Puerto Rico over the weekend, and Jaywalker now arranged to meet both Carmen and him at the courthouse at noon, to go over their testimony one last time.

After them, of course, would be Jeremy. And it was only fitting that he should be the trial’s final witness. In a very real sense, all those who preceded him on the stand-the grieving father, the three eyewitnesses, the police officers, the crime-scene detective and the medical examiner, and even the defense’s own witnesses-were nothing but a preface to the main act. The case wasn’t about Victor Quinones or his father, or Teresa Morales or Regina Fortune or Seymour Kaplan. No, it was about Jeremy, about his falling in love, paying a terrible price for having done so, and finally fighting back. Tomorrow afternoon his mother and his barber would set the stage for him. And then, most likely Thursday morning, the jurors would hear what this case was really about.

They would hear Jeremy’s story.