Overkill

20

Heading to Judge Wexler’s courtroom the following morning for the charge conference, Jaywalker ran into his old client Johnny Cantalupo, who was in the building to check in with his probation officer. And because Jaywalker was characteristically a half an hour early, he stopped to catch up with Johnny.

“You staying out of trouble?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Johnny. “Pretty much.”

“What does pretty much mean?”

“I missed a ’pointment,” Johnny confessed. “And there was this…” His voice trailed off into an almost inaudible mumble.

“What for?” asked Jaywalker, who was actually quite fluent in mumble.

“Nuthin’. Disorderly conduct for smokin’ reefer in a subway station. No biggie. Howbowchoo? You keepin’ your nose clean?”

Jaywalker smiled. Johnny always seemed to get a big kick out of the fact that his lawyer got into trouble almost as often as he did.

“I’ve got to,” said Jaywalker. “I’m on trial.”

“Fronta McGillicuddy?”

“No. Wexler.”

“I’ve hoid he’s tough,” said Johnny.

“You’ve heard right.”

“What kinda case?” Johnny wanted to know.

“Murder.”

“No shit?”

Jaywalker spent a few minutes describing the case. When he got to the part about the Raiders, Johnny stopped him. “Those punks? Buncha greasy spics who hang out up over on Toid Avenue?”

“Yeah,” said Jaywalker. “Only this is the twenty-first century, Johnny, and we refer to them as American citizens of Latino extraction.”

“I got your Latino extraction,” Johnny mimicked, grabbing his crotch for emphasis. “Buncha losers, is what they are.”

“You want to hear about the case or not?”

Johnny nodded, and managed to listen without interrupting again while Jaywalker finished telling him about the trial. But as soon as he had, Johnny jumped in with another, “No shit? Your guy popped him? Just like that?”

“Seems so,” said Jaywalker, glancing down at his watch. He still had fifteen minutes to get up to the eleventh floor.

“Stupid fuck,” was Johnny’s appraisal of Jeremy’s conduct. And when Jaywalker nodded in agreement, Johnny seemed to take that as an invitation to amplify. “I mean,” he said, “those guys are nuthin’ but hot air. They never woulda done nuthin’ to him.”

Jaywalker looked around to make sure there were no stray jurors within earshot before remembering that they’d been excused for the day. “Do me a big favor,” he told Johnny. “Don’t go around repeating that.”

“You got it,” said Johnny. “But lissen. Anythin’ I can do for you, you just say the word. I owe you, man.”

Jaywalker promised he’d keep that in mind, though he had a bit of difficulty imagining exactly how Johnny Cantalupo could help out Jeremy Estrada. But once again, it was one of those heartfelt offers from a client that he hated to reject outright.

The charge conference was pretty uninspiring. Judge Wexler indicated what counts he intended to submit to the jury, starting with murder, following up with first-degree manslaughter and continuing all the way down to the unauthorized discharge of an unlicensed firearm within city limits. He agreed to instruct the jurors on both justification and extreme emotional disturbance, the former as a complete defense to all charges, the latter as a partial defense to the murder count only.

“How long do you expect your summations to take?” he asked. “Ballpark.”

“Less than three days,” said Jaywalker, who honestly had no idea, and certainly had no intention of committing himself. He knew Wexler well enough not to put it past the judge to interrupt him after an hour and say, “You told me you were going to be forty-five minutes.”

“An hour” was Katherine Darcy’s estimate.

Ask people what the term lost weekend means to them, and anyone old enough is apt to recall an ancient black-and-white movie of the same title, in which William Holden does his level best to drink himself into oblivion. Even those too young to have seen or heard of the movie are likely to associate the expression with a protracted bout with the bottle, a phenomenon commonly referred to these days as “binge drinking.”

Jaywalker’s drinking days were behind him by several years, but that fact didn’t prevent him from occasionally experiencing his own version of the lost weekend. Only he called his Getting Ready to Sum Up.

Not that he couldn’t have gotten up and delivered a competent summation that same Friday morning on a moment’s notice. The truth was, he could have done it six months ago, and he could have done it without benefit of notes. He knew the case so well that he could have done it in his sleep, if he’d had to, and he did precisely that on a fairly regular basis.

But there was competent, and there was Jaywalker. And being the uncompromising obsessive-compulsive that he was, that particular distinction meant that for Harrison J. Walker, the next seventy hours would become an agonizing exercise in reading, rereading and reviewing every last word of the twelve-hundred-plus pages of the trial transcript; combing every inch of the miles of handwritten notes he’d scribbled over the past two weeks; and examining and reexamining every single shred of paper the case had generated over its two-year life. And the thing was, doing all that would be merely preliminary. Only once he’d dispensed with those tasks would he turn his attention to structuring what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. After that he would get down to the business of refining it into language designed not just to inform and persuade the jurors, but to move them emotionally to a place where it would become all but impossible for them to find Jeremy Estrada guilty of anything. In other words, all Jaywalker was striving for was absolute, one hundred percent pure perfection. And he wouldn’t quit until he got there, along the way ignoring such niceties as sleep, nourishment, sunlight, human companionship and personal hygiene. Think Ray Milland if you’re old enough to, or sophomore year of college if you’re not.

Either way, as one might readily imagine, the recipe was pretty much guaranteed to make for a very lost weekend indeed.