Overkill

largely disappeared. It might simply have been a matter of Jaywalker’s getting older and no longer being perceived as on the prowl. Because right around the same time, he’d noticed that the checkout girls at the supermarket had stopped smiling at him seductively; they were by that time much more interested in the young managers or the boys bagging groceries.

Katherine Darcy was no checkout girl, and no recent law-school graduate. At forty, or whatever she was, she had nothing to fear from the twenty-five and thirty-year-old defense lawyers. Them she could treat as schoolboys. But Jaywalker had turned fifty not too long ago. When he straightened up, he was an even six feet. He’d kept his hair, even though it was currently working its way from gray to white. And enough women had told him he was good-looking, at least in a craggy sort of a way, that he’d come to accept it as a fact. Was it possible that in Katherine Darcy’s mind he posed a threat, much the same way he had to a younger generation of her officemates, twenty years ago? Was she perhaps afraid Jaywalker was approaching her not as a fellow lawyer sharing a case with her, albeit on opposite sides, but as a predator seeking to take advantage of her because he equated being a woman with weakness? Or, more simply put, maybe she thought he was trying to get into her pants so he could get into her files.

As if.

“That’s how it’s usually done,” she was telling him now.

“How what’s usually done?” Getting into her pants?

“Serving papers. At the reception desk.”

“Right,” said Jaywalker. “It’s just that I had a couple of questions and thought if you weren’t too busy…” He let the thought hang there, inviting her to say that of course she wasn’t too busy.

“What kind of questions?” she asked, making a point of looking first at her watch and then at the clock on the wall.

“Well,” he said, “for one thing, have you by any chance heard of the Raiders?”

“Aren’t they a baseball team?”

“Close,” he said without bothering to correct her. His wife had had the same problem. Football, baseball, basketball. To her, they’d all been “sports,” and pretty much interchangeable. In her mind, and perhaps in Katherine Darcy’s, too, each fall the players put their bats and gloves in storage and replaced them with helmets and shoulder pads. In wintertime, when the cold chased them indoors, they simply stripped down to shorts and undershirts. They were still the same players and teams; only the uniforms and equipment had changed.

“The Raiders are also a group of young thugs,” said Jaywalker. “A loosely organized gang who made it their business to target my client.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of them.”

“Why don’t you ask Teresa Morales about them?” he suggested.

“What makes you think she’s heard of them?”

“Because if my client’s telling the truth, and I think he is, she was one of them.”

“You’re trying to tell me it was a coed gang?”

“Hey,” said Jaywalker. “Welcome to the twenty-first century. No more stay-at-home moms or glass ceilings. If Mother Teresa were still with us, she might’ve traded in her rosary long ago and be packing a Ruger.”

And in spite of herself, Katherine Darcy actually broke into something vaguely resembling a smile before quickly regaining control. “You said you had a couple of questions,” she reminded Jaywalker. “What’s the next one?”

“I see you gave Mr. Fudderman a copy of the autopsy protocol,” he said. “But I didn’t notice a serology or toxicology report.” Both would show the presence of drugs or alcohol in Victor Quinones’s system at the time of his death, the former in his blood, the latter in tissue samples removed from his body.

“Those take a little longer to come back.”

“It’s been eight months,” said Jaywalker. He knew from experience that “a little longer to come back” generally meant two to three weeks at most.

“I’ll look into it,” said Katherine Darcy. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Has the name Sandro come up at all? Or Alesandro?”

“Not that I can recall. Why?”

“Because,” said Jaywalker, “he seems to have been the leader of the gang.”

She shrugged.

“How about Shorty? Or Diego? Or Mousey?”

Three more shrugs.

“How about Man One and five years?”

That brought a real smile from Katherine Darcy. “You don’t quit trying, do you?” she asked with what Jaywalker took to be a hint of grudging admiration.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “And what’s more, before this case is over, I’m going to get you to like me, or at least to realize I’m not out to hurt you. And I’m going to get an offer out of you, too. Because as you begin to look into some of these questions, I think you’re going to come to see that this isn’t really a murder case after all.”

“I like you just fine,” she said, though it came out sounding like Barack Obama telling Hillary Clinton that she was likeable enough. “But you’re never going to get an offer out of me. Never.”

Two days later, Jeremy’s mother met Jaywalker at the information booth of the courthouse. He would have preferred having her come to his office, but there was that little impediment of not having an office for her to come to. And he seriously doubted that she could survive climbing the three flights of stairs to his apartment.

“This is Julie,” she said of a pretty young woman standing by her side. “Jeremy’s sister.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Jaywalker, shaking hands with her. “Older or younger?” To a woman who looked to him to be anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five, he had no idea which the more tactful guess might be.

“Older,” said Julie. “By ten minutes.”

“Aha.”

So Jeremy had a twin sister. Funny, he’d never mentioned her. Then again, Jeremy wasn’t much of a mentioner. He volunteered little, revealing things only when absolutely forced to.

“So how does it look for my son, Mr. Jakewalker?”

Jaywalker turned back to Carmen. “We’re just getting started,” he told her. “But it’s a very serious case, as you know.”

“Those guys gave him a very hard time,” said Julie.

“Did you see any of it?” Jaywalker asked her. Maybe she could be a witness, able to testify to some of the things they’d said or done.

“No,” she said. “But it had to be real bad.”

“How do you know?”

“Jeremy.”

“Things he said?”

Even as he waited for Julie’s answer, he braced himself for the disappointment it would bring. No matter how graphically Jeremy might have described what the Raiders had done to him, neither his mother nor his sister would be permitted to repeat his accounts in court. It would be hearsay, the secondhand account of someone who hadn’t been there.

But Julie surprised him. “No,” she told him. “It wasn’t just the things he said. It was how he said them, and how he acted.”

“Here,” said Carmen, before slipping Jaywalker another of her folded envelopes. She did it so furtively that for an instant he feared it might contain drugs, instead of just money.

They spoke for about half an hour. Jaywalker had to break up the meeting. He actually had a case on that morning, a young couple accused of shoplifting thirty dollars’ worth of baby food and formula for their hungry child. He had a little speech prepared that he was hoping would bring the judge to tears and the case to an end. He thanked Carmen and Julie, and headed to the bank of elevators to see if any of them might be working. As he waited to find out, he tore open the folded envelope and found two hundred dollars inside it.

But that was hardly the best news of the morning. Julie Estrada had supplied that. It turned out that both she and her mother could testify after all. Not to anything Jeremy had said to them, but to how he’d acted that summer. That wouldn’t be secondhand words; it would be firsthand