Overkill

observations.

And there was more.

If Jeremy’s torment had been so significant as to be readily visible at home, it must have been far more severe than Jeremy had so far let on. Surely Jaywalker had made it clear how important the details were, how essential to any possible defense they might mount. Jeremy had to have heard that. Yet he’d continued to summarize, to gloss over events without ever going into particulars.

Why?

What was Jaywalker missing here?

And all he could think was that it must be time for another trip out to Rikers Island.

If Jaywalker’s earlier meetings with Jeremy had reminded him of dental extractions, Friday’s session proved to be the equivalent of a root canal. Instead of picking up where they’d left off and moving forward into the day of the fight and the shooting, Jaywalker insisted on backtracking, on going over the same events they’d already covered. But this time he demanded far more detail and focused on something he’d failed to do earlier.

He forced Jeremy to not only describe the things that Sandro and his cohorts had done to him, but to talk about how those things had made him feel.

They made little progress at first, because Jeremy was such a stranger to his own emotions. He could use words like nervous, scared and upset, but more revealing terms like embarrassed and humiliated simply weren’t part of his vocabulary. Finally Jaywalker decided to try a different tack. Instead of prodding his client for more and better descriptions of his inner reactions, he asked him if his everyday activities had changed, and if so, how.

And the ice broke.

Not all at once, of course; that would have been too much to expect from a young man as inarticulate as Jeremy. But while feelings were almost impossible for him to describe, activities were something else.

In order to avoid the Raiders, Jeremy had been forced to alter his entire schedule. Having helped his mother out with after-school and weekend earnings since the age of fourteen, Jeremy lost three jobs over the course of that summer. He dropped out of school. He became a virtual prisoner, afraid to leave the apartment for days at a time. He was unable to eat or sleep, and lost so much weight that his clothes no longer fit him. He got blinding headaches and stomach cramps that doubled him over in pain, prompting his mother to threaten more than once to take him to the doctor. That would have meant the emergency room of the local hospital, which served the medical needs not only of the Estradas, but thousands of others who knew what it was like to have their electricity cut off.

“Good!” exclaimed Jaywalker after one such revelation, causing Jeremy to look at him so strangely that he had to add, “Good you could tell me that, I mean.”

From there they moved forward to the final day, and for the first time Jaywalker learned how seamless the transition had been, how Jeremy’s four months of anguish had all but dictated the ending. The fistfight with Victor Quinones hadn’t been some “You lookin’ at me?” “Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you” exchange between a couple of macho teenagers at all. It had been the predictable, almost inevitable explosion of everything that had preceded it. And the shooting that had followed it? Well, it would be Jaywalker’s job to show that it, too, had been just as predictable-and just as inevitable.

He came away from Rikers Island with a whole new understanding of the case. Throughout his previous conversations with Jeremy, he’d completely failed to grasp the impact of everything that had happened to him. He hadn’t been harassed by Sandro and the others; he’d been tortured. He hadn’t just been embarrassed in front of his new girlfriend; he’d been devastated, over and over again, right up to and past the breaking point. And it had been the degree of that torture, and the depth of that devastation, that had combined to make it so painful for Jeremy to talk about. Pushed to the wall, he’d finally had it. And only then had Jaywalker come to appreciate the extent of what the young man had lived through, and what it had done to him.

Riding the subway back to Manhattan, Jaywalker knew that his trip had been more than worth the effort. Because out of the ashes of that very same torture, up from the embers of that utter devastation, would rise his defense of Jeremy Estrada.

6

WELCOME TO TOMBSTONE

Under New York State law, the crime of murder is defined as intentionally causing the death of another person. Gone are such archaic considerations as motive, premeditation and malice aforethought. It is sufficient that the defendant intends to cause the death of another and succeeds. It isn’t even necessary that his victim be the one he meant to kill.

But there’s a defense written into the statute, too. If the jury can be persuaded that the defendant acted under the influence of “extreme emotional disturbance,” it may return a verdict of not guilty on a murder charge.

If those words applied to anyone, Jaywalker decided, they had to apply to Jeremy Estrada. The cumulative effect of his torment at the hands of Sandro, Shorty, Diego, Victor and the rest of the Raiders had surely disturbed Jeremy, not only emotionally, but physically, as well. Could there possibly be any doubt that that disturbance had been “extreme”? It would take a closer reading of the statute to make sure, and an exhaustive study of the case law, but already Jaywalker knew he had the raw materials to make a good argument that the words fit Jeremy like a glove.

There was one hitch, however, and it was a big one. The same statute that spoke of extreme emotional disturbance made it abundantly clear that it was a defense only to murder, not to manslaughter. In other words, it was a partial defense, permitting a jury to knock the crime down a notch, but not to forgive it altogether.

Not that it wasn’t a start. A murder conviction would mean a mandatory life sentence, with the minimum to be set by the judge at anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five years. A sentence for first-degree manslaughter, on the other hand, had to be a determinate-or fixed-one, and could range from as little as five years to as many as twenty-five, again depending on the judge’s discretion.

So in his mind, Jaywalker had already figured out a way to avoid a life sentence for Jeremy, even if a term of twenty-five years still loomed as a very real possibility. But he’d accomplished something else, too. He’d found the key with which he might just be able to unlock Katherine Darcy’s stranglehold on the case. She could talk all she wanted to about the case being an execution, and how she’d never offer a Man One on it. But Jaywalker no longer needed her to do that; a jury could do it on its own, without her blessing and even over her objection.

Which, of course, Jaywalker would be sure to point out to her, next time they met. But he felt no particular need to rush back to see her. He might not exactly be in the driver’s seat yet, but at least he was no longer being dragged along bodily, clinging to the back bumper.

The following Wednesday they appeared in Part 55 before the man who, for better or for worse, was to be their trial judge. Unlike Judge McGillicuddy, who worked in an “up front” part and sent cases out after a single appearance, Harold Wexler would hold on to the case forever. Forever being a relative term, but not all that relative. In Jeremy Estrada’s case, it would include all pretrial proceedings and hearings, the trial itself, if there was to be one, and the sentencing in the event the prosecution prevailed, which was about eighty percent of the time generally, though only about ten percent of the time if Jaywalker happened to be representing the defendant. Only after all that would the case finally leave Part 55 to begin its climb through appellate courts manned by other judges.

Actually, to say, “They appeared in Part 55,” while technically true, would be pregnant with omission. A more instructive way of phrasing it would be, “Jaywalker appeared in Part 55 before Katherine Darcy did.”

Jaywalker had been knocking around 10 °Centre Street for more than twenty years. It was his