Overkill

get his name right. As for her mispronunciation of the word “you,” he’d get over that, too, but it would take some doing.

Jaywalker promised. He’d won cases and lost cases, but no one-no one-had ever accused him of not doing his best.

She reached into her pocket and withdrew a handful of crumpled bills. “I brought this for Mr. Fudderman,” she explained. “Am I supposed to give it to jew instead?”

“That’s up to you,” said Jaywalker. He would have loved to say no, that wasn’t necessary. But he was a month and half behind with his rent, so he allowed her to hand him the money, and thanked her. He waited until after they’d spoken and she’d walked away before bothering to line up the bills and count them.

They added up to fifty-eight dollars, a pretty modest retainer even by Jaywalker’s standards. Not even his rent was that low.

Johnny Cantalupo finally got his probation about 12:30 p.m., but Jaywalker still didn’t leave the building. Instead he took the elevator down to the seventh floor and the district attorney’s office, for a meeting with Katherine Darcy, the assistant who’d stepped up to the bench earlier that morning. It turned out it was her case, meaning she would stay with it, even try it, if it came to that.

Now, sitting across her desk, he decided she was older than he’d thought-maybe forty, he guessed-but every bit as pretty, if only she’d lighten up a bit. She could start, he almost suggested, by taking off the glasses; they made her look like a librarian, or a detention hall monitor. But he fought off the impulse to share his insights with her, pretty sure that voicing them could only get him into trouble and hurt his client at the same time.

“So,” he asked her, “what do we have here?”

“What we have here is a couple of young macho studs and their girlfriends,” she said. She said it easily, without having to look at the file. It was clear that she knew her case. “One of them says, ‘You lookin’ at me?’ and the other says, ‘Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you.’ To tell you the truth, I don’t know who started it. But it doesn’t matter. A challenge is thrown down and accepted. They walk a few blocks, square off and duke it out.”

Duke it out? Maybe she was older than she looked.

“It’s a fair fight,” she continued, “with fists. By all accounts, your guy wins it. Then, not satisfied, he pulls out a gun and shoots the victim, a twenty-year-old kid named Victor Quinones.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Witnesses?” Jaywalker asked her.

“Witnesses. Three of them, maybe four. The first wound isn’t bad, a freaky in-and-out shot that grazes Victor’s abdomen. He runs. Your guy catches up to him and, as Victor’s lying on the pavement begging for mercy, grabs him by the hair and shoots him between the eyes at point-blank range. The next day, he takes off for Puerto Rico. Stays there six, seven months. Comes back, turns himself in. Must have gotten rid of the gun by then, and figured the witnesses would be long gone. Only they’re not. They’re all around and available. So, to answer your question as plainly and as simply as I possibly can, what we have here is an execution.”

3

DUMB-ASSED QUESTIONS

“So I suppose, then,” Jaywalker said to Katherine Darcy, “that a plea to disorderly conduct is pretty much out of the question.”

“I’m glad you find the case so amusing,” she said. But on the middle syllable of amusing, her voice broke just the tiniest bit. Jaywalker caught it, and raised both eyebrows-he’d tried to master raising just one at a time, but had given up some time ago-to let her know he hadn’t missed it. But she refused to acknowledge his look, choosing instead to pretend that nothing had happened. And maybe nothing had. Maybe the poor woman had a speech defect, for all Jaywalker knew, or polyps in her throat, or a cold. He let it go.

“I try to find something amusing in all of my cases,” he told her. “If I didn’t, I’d have blown my brains out a long time ago.”

She said nothing.

“So tell me,” Jaywalker asked her. “What would you need on a Man One?” Unlike murder, on a plea to first- degree manslaughter a judge would have a broad sentencing range, from as much as twenty-five years all the way down to as little as five.

But Katherine Darcy wasn’t biting. “Let me make myself clear,” she said. “There’s not going to be an offer in this case, not to Man One or anything else. I’ve run it by my bureau chief and presented it at a weekly meeting. Nobody gets too excited about the first shot. Heat of the moment, no serious injury, not such a big deal. But as soon as they hear about the last shot, the coup de grace, everyone agrees that’s a deal-breaker. Or, like I said a little while ago, an execution. So it’s a murder case, and it’s going to stay a murder case. If some judge wants to give your guy the minimum on a plea to the charge, so be it. I have no control over that.”

Not that she needed any control over that. The minimum sentence on murder was fifteen to life. “Sounds like you want to try the case,” said Jaywalker.

She shrugged her shoulders. “If I don’t try this one, I’ll try another one. It honestly makes no difference to me.”

Jaywalker stood up. It seemed as good a time as any to leave, before he started getting really pissed off at her. In his book, it was okay for a prosecutor to be tough, as long as he or she was reasonable about it and willing to be flexible when the situation called for it. It was quite another thing to treat all cases as fungible commodities, and to act as though defendants were readily interchangeable. They weren’t interchangeable, at least not to Jaywalker’s way of thinking. Each one was a human being, however imperfect and flawed. Each one was different, and the facts and circumstances of each case were different. It might not always seem that way from a distance, but if you got close enough, you could see it was true.

“How many murders have you tried?” he asked her, trying to make the question sound innocent and born out of nothing but idle curiosity. Small talk.

She hesitated for a moment, and he thought she might be counting in her head. But it turned out she wasn’t. “This will actually be my first,” she said. “But I’ve been in the appeals bureau for eight and a half years, and I bet I’ve briefed and argued at least fifteen or twenty.”

“It’s not quite the same,” he suggested.

“I’m sure it’s not,” she said with what he took for a condescending smile. “But I’ll manage. And in the process, it’ll be a great honor to learn from the very best. I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Jaywalker, and-”

“Jay.”

“-and I’m very much looking forward to the experience. I really am.”

Riding down the elevator, Jaywalker told himself to breathe deeply, calm down and not take Ms. Darcy’s attitude personally. Working in the appeals bureau was something like practicing in a law library. You dealt with statutes crafted in legalese, abstract principles of law and cold rules of evidence. You spent your time reading transcripts of trials hundreds of pages long, sometimes thousands. They might contain each word spoken from the witness stand and every comment made on the record. But what they didn’t have, what they left out, was just as important: the stammering and sweating of the witnesses, their inability to make and maintain eye contact, the repetition of phrases or mispronunciations that, in real time and place, spoke volumes, volumes that never showed up on the printed page. The transcripts said nothing about the young man or broken woman sitting shaking in the defendant’s chair, nothing about the mother sobbing softly back in the third row. To the appellate lawyer, sentences were numbers, governed by statutory minimums and maximums and measured against statistical means and averages. They told you nothing about the filthy cells those sentences would have to be served in, nothing about the rapes that would be almost as regular as the meals, nothing about the toddlers back home who’d be growing up without fathers or mothers, or sometimes both.