Overkill

18

Thursday. Jeremy’s day.

Jaywalker had characteristically slept little. To him, the day had long loomed as no less nerve-wracking than a summation day or an argument before the Court of Appeals in Albany. Perhaps Jeremy’s case was unwinnable, one of those one-in-ten trials that no matter what he were to do, an outright acquittal would remain forever out of reach. But Jaywalker wasn’t ready to admit that. Not yet, anyway. What he did understand, what was absolutely clear, was that for them to win it, Jeremy would have to come off as a near-perfect witness. He would have to be able to describe his first-and perhaps last-encounter with love in a way that would make the jurors ache with memories of their own. He would have to be willing to go into the painful details of his torment at the hands of the Raiders, and describe the effects that torment had had on his body and his psyche. And he would somehow have to convince twelve strangers that in shooting another young man between the eyes from a distance of no more than five inches, he’d acted not as an executioner but as a blinded man trying to save his own life. And all the while, he would have to make those jurors like him-indeed, love him-enough to want to forgive him and set him free.

It was a tall order, made even taller by Jeremy’s lifelong shyness and natural reticence to talk about himself, by his limited education and intellect, and by a lot of extremely inconvenient facts. Still, Jaywalker felt that if ever he himself would be prepared to tackle the challenge, it was now. He could only hope that Jeremy was ready, too.

But as ready as he was, Jaywalker was about to discover that the vagaries that invariably accompany a trial had one of their surprises in store for him that morning. The messenger in this particular instance wore a court officer’s blue uniform and approached Jaywalker just seconds before the jurors were about to enter the courtroom.

“You’ve got a witness waiting for you,” the officer told him. “Out in the hallway.”

And since Jeremy was his only remaining witness, Jaywalker’s knee-jerk reaction was that his client had somehow managed to escape or post bail. But there was no bail; Jeremy had been held in remand status since his surrender a year ago, and not even Jaywalker had deluded himself into thinking some judge might set bail. And if his client had escaped, why wasn’t the court officer out in the hallway himself, trying to wrestle Jeremy to the floor and handcuff him?

The bewildered expression on Jaywalker’s face was enough to prompt a bit of information from the officer. “It’s a young woman,” he said. “Pretty. Eighteen, nineteen.”

Miranda.

This could be disastrous, Jaywalker realized. Here he’d taken pains to make sure she was nowhere around, knowing that the statement she’d written out for the detectives hurt Jeremy far more than her testimony could possibly help him. And now she’d shown up on her own? What was he supposed to do? Put her on the stand at Jeremy’s peril? Turn her over to the prosecution? Or accept a missing witness charge that her testimony would have conflicted with the rest of his case’s? Whichever one of those three doors he chose to open promised nothing but disaster.

He got Judge Wexler’s permission to step outside for a moment and fell in behind the court officer, who led Jaywalker up the aisle, pushed against the courtroom door and held it open for him. As Jaywalker stepped out into the hallway, he was still trying to figure out what he would say to Miranda. Could he tell her to get lost, to dart into the nearest stairwell and disappear? Would the court officer give him up, or support his claim that by the time they got out there, Miranda was nowhere to be found?

Which actually seemed to be the case.

Because as he looked all around him, Jaywalker saw absolutely no sign of her. Not her auburn hair, not her almost-too-thin body, not her arresting brown eyes.

“I’m here,” she said, standing right in front of him, so close he almost jumped.

Once, as a young boy, Jaywalker-back then Harrison J. Walker-had sneaked out to the kitchen late one night to raid the refrigerator. But even before he’d opened it, he’d noticed a generous dollop of chocolate sauce on the countertop. He’d gleefully scooped it up with his index finger and deposited it onto the tip of his tongue, savoring its forbidden richness. And the truth was that for a second or two, it really had tasted like chocolate. Then his senses had registered the fact that it wasn’t. It had actually been thick grease that had dripped from the electric meter directly above the counter.

It was that way now. So convinced had Jaywalker been that he would encounter Miranda in the hallway, that even as he stood in front of the young woman, his mind continued to compel him to believe that she’d not only dyed her hair blonde, but had put on fifteen or twenty pounds, as well, and somehow changed the color of her eyes from brown to blue-gray. And had she not spoken her name aloud at that point, he no doubt would have persisted in trying to reconcile the discrepancies between how he remembered her and how she looked today, just four months later.

“Julie,” she said.

But it didn’t register.

“Julie,” she repeated, before adding, “Jeremy’s sister?” Her voice rising on the last word, the way teenagers can turn a simple declaratory statement into a question.

“Julie!” Jaywalker half shouted, loudly enough to turn heads in the hallway. “You’re supposed to be hiding out in, in-”

“The Bronx.”

“Right,” said Jaywalker, before realizing that some of the turning heads might be attached to the jurors back in the courtroom. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he herded her into the nearest stairwell and closed the door behind them. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m going to testify,” she said.

“What?”

Not a incredulous “What?” as in “What, are you crazy?” More like the “What?” of a middle-aged man with mediocre hearing, two descriptives that actually fit Jaywalker pretty well. But it wasn’t just that. The truth was, he’d been so busy looking around for surveillance cameras that he’d allowed his attention to wander, and if he’d heard Julie’s answer, it hadn’t quite registered.

So she repeated it.

“I’m going to testify,” she said, looking Jaywalker squarely in the eye.

“But your mother-”

“I don’t care about my mother,” she said. “Jeremy is my twin brother. I’ll spend the rest of my life blaming myself if I hide out somewhere and they find him guilty. I can’t do that.”

Jaywalker thought about it for a moment, but only a moment. Had he himself had a twin brother or sister facing a murder charge, he would no doubt have spoken pretty much the same words as Julie had, and he wouldn’t have let anyone talk him out of it. Still, Carmen was Jeremy and Julie’s mother. She’d hired Jaywalker, at least after a fashion, and was paying his fee, slowly if not so surely. Over a year’s time, she’d given him a little over two thousand dollars. If she were to continue making payments at that rate-a statistical rarity, given that, win or lose, the end of a trial almost always brought with it the end of payments-she would have the balance paid off sometime around 2025.

But none of that mattered.

It wasn’t Carmen’s case any more than it was Jaywalker’s. It was Jeremy’s case. Julie was nineteen, old enough to vote and enlist and get married without her mother’s permission. If she wanted to testify, it was going to be her decision, hers and her brother’s.

Jaywalker had her wait in the stairwell while he headed back into the courtroom to deal with a confused client, an impatient judge and a mother he at least owed an explanation. Then again, what could she do about it? Threaten to cut off his fee payments a few days early? Stop bringing him lunch, please God?

In the end, she did neither of those things, and Jaywalker thought he even detected a bit of motherly pride over her daughter’s decision. As for Jeremy, he was willing, if Jaywalker thought it might help. And Harold Wexler displayed both his generosity and its limits by granting Jaywalker ten minutes to prepare what would now be his next-to-last witness.

It would be enough.

JAYWALKER: The defense calls Julie Estrada.

The jurors watched intently as she made her way forward to the witness stand. If she wasn’t quite as pretty as Jeremy was handsome, she was still good to look at, with the same surprising blond hair and blue-gray eyes as her brother. And there was a hint of defiance in the way she walked and held herself, a hint that Jaywalker hoped wasn’t lost on the jurors, or misread by them.

JAYWALKER: Are you related to the defendant?

JULIE: Yes. He’s my brother.

JAYWALKER: Are you older than he is, or younger?

JULIE: I’m older, by about five minutes.

Jaywalker’s peripheral vision picked up a handful of smiles and nods in the jury box. This was going to work, he told himself. It better, came the response.

He had Julie describe the brother she’d once had, back before the summer of Miranda and the Raiders. Jeremy had been almost perfect, she recalled. He’d never been the smartest kid at school. He was, well, a little slow, according to his teachers. And he was shy. But he was polite and considerate, and he worked to bring home money to help his mother. And he was always fun to be around.

JAYWALKER: Anything else?

JULIE: [Inaudible.]

JAYWALKER: I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that.

JULIE: Nothing.

JAYWALKER: What was it you said?

JULIE: I said, “I want him back.”

As the tears ran down her face, she made no attempt to hide them. And Jaywalker, who knew how to be a gentleman and where they kept the tissues for just such moments, didn’t go to her rescue. Instead, he moved forward into June and July, and asked her if she’d begun to observe a different Jeremy.

JULIE: Yes, very different.

JAYWALKER: In what ways?

JULIE: He started seeming afraid of everything all the time. He thought he was being followed. He couldn’t sleep. He stopped eating. He’d move the food around on his plate, but he wouldn’t eat it. He jumped at loud noises. He couldn’t look me in the eye anymore. He began to stutter, and he developed these funny movements in the muscles of his face, uh-

JAYWALKER: Tics?

JULIE: Yes, tics.

JAYWALKER: As the weeks went on, did he seem to get better, or worse?

JULIE: Worse, much worse.

JAYWALKER: How so?

JULIE: He lost weight. He got these dark circles around his eyes. He would cry for no reason, or at least no reason he would talk about. And he, he-

JAYWALKER: What?

JULIE: He began…he began to wet his bed. He didn’t think we knew, my mother and I. And we pretended we didn’t. But we did, we knew.

Jaywalker let that one hang there for a few beats. He tried to imagine something more devastating to a seventeen-year-old boy than regressing into bed-wetting. The only thing he could come up with was having his mother and twin sister aware of it. And as Jaywalker opened his mouth to ask his next question, he heard a muffled sound behind him. When he turned to look, he saw that Jeremy had slumped forward and laid his head on the defense table. For a horrified second, Jaywalker thought the young man might have passed out or, worse yet, fallen asleep. But then the heaving of Jeremy’s shoulders gave him away, and Jaywalker could tell he was sobbing. And he realized that until that moment, the poor kid had thought he’d gotten away with stripping the wet sheets off, secretly washing and drying them, and then remaking his bed before nightfall. Even as Jaywalker winced at having added yet another layer of humiliation to his own client’s anguish, he caught himself wondering if the jurors had understood what had just happened, and found himself hoping they had.

Judge Wexler declared a brief recess.

Jaywalker had fully intended to ask Julie about how she’d been chased and threatened by a group of the Raiders five or six days ago. He knew he would be on shaky ground, because technically, that incident had no relevance to the murder charge against her brother. But if he could get it in, it at least showed that there had been, and still was, a bunch of thugs who went around wearing Oakland Raiders jackets and intimidating people.

But Julie’s testimony, and her brother’s reaction to it, had created a powerful moment right before the recess, a moment in which the depth of Jeremy’s suffering had been revealed in full measure. Jaywalker had no desire to water that down now with a new line of questions that had more to do with Julie than with Jeremy. He also secretly hoped that Katherine Darcy, in cross-examining Julie, would blunder into opening the door to the recent incident. So when they resumed and the jury was brought back in, with the witness once again on the stand, Jaywalker rose and announced he had no further questions of her.

Which, he knew, created a dilemma for Darcy.

He watched her closely now as she stood and walked slowly to the lectern, saw from her hesitation that she recognized immediately the trap Jaywalker had set for her. And as she began her examination, he grudgingly gave her credit for not falling into it, as much as he would have liked her to. Still, he wondered if at some point she might not get careless.

DARCY: You are the defendant’s sister, aren’t you?

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: His twin sister, in fact.

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: Is it fair to say you love your brother?

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: Very much?

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: If he were in serious trouble, would you help him out if you could?

JULIE: Of course.

DARCY: Would you lie for him?

It was one of those questions prosecutors loved to death. If the witness were to say no, the jury would disbelieve her. What sister wouldn’t lie for a brother in serious trouble? Yet if the witness were to say yes, that she would lie, then her own answer would brand her as a perjurer unworthy of belief on the rest of her testimony. In other words, for the questioner it was one of those absolutely irresistible win-win questions, and the problem for the witness was that there seemed no way out of it.

The problem for Katherine Darcy, on the other hand, was that Jaywalker knew all that stuff, too. So he always-always-made it a habit to prepare his witnesses for the question. However, in the ten minutes the judge had allowed him this morning, he’d neglected to remind Julie Estrada to expect it. Was there any chance she might remember his advice from weeks or months ago? He bit deeply into the inside of his cheek as he listened to Darcy repeat the question.

DARCY: Would you lie for your twin brother?

JULIE: You know, I’m pretty sure I would, if it came down to that. But so far, I haven’t had to find out. Everything I’ve said is a hundred percent true, and even you know that.

Jaywalker had to hold on to the arms of his chair to keep from jumping to his feet and applauding. He couldn’t have come up with as good an answer himself. Though evidently he had, some weeks ago.

Darcy understandably refused to quit on that note. She asked five or six more questions, but none of them, or the answers they drew, amounted to much. When finally she succeeded in scoring a tiny point by getting Julie to admit she couldn’t remember the exact time frame of the bed-wetting, she quit. That said, Jaywalker had to admire her for her discipline. While he’d burned her on the lying-for-your-twin-brother business, Darcy had continued to steer clear of the even more dangerous territory Jaywalker had hoped she would stumble into. All she would have had to do was ask Julie the same innocuous question she’d put to Carmen-whether she herself had ever witnessed anyone in a Raiders jacket chasing Jeremy-and Julie could have answered, “No, but they chased me last week!” And even if Harold Wexler had let only the first word of the answer stand, Jaywalker’s Jewish half would have smiled and said Dayenu.

It would have been enough.

“Call your next witness,” said the judge.

Jaywalker stood, let a second or two click off the clock, and said, “The defense calls Jeremy Estrada.”