Overkill

found the building that matched the address Jeremy had listed at the time of his arrest. He slipped the lock of the outer door with a credit card and found the tenant board. There were two Estradas listed, one for 3G and the other for 8F. He pressed the buzzer for 3G, hoping it would be the right one. He knew from experience that the chances of either of the elevators working were slim, and the prospect of climbing seven floors was somewhat less than appealing.

“Quit pressing the buzzer, you fuckin’ junkie bastards!”

He tried 8F.

“Who are jew?” came the familiar gravelly voice of a woman.

He spent the first half hour in Carmen’s apartment trying to catch his breath, the next half hour declining her offers of food, and the final half hour quizzing her on what she knew about Miranda.

“Very, very pretty.”

There seemed to be something of a consensus on that point.

“Miranda Raven.”

A last name.

“’Cause her father was like a Indian, a real Indian. From Florida. Her mother told me that, when Jeremy was in Puerto Rico. The Semaphore tribe, I think she said.”

Or perhaps the Seminoles. But whichever it was, she’d fled the city immediately after the shooting, afraid for her daughter. “To Baltimore,” said Carmen. “That’s in Marilyn.” She still had a phone number for them, though. She’d saved it for Jeremy, so that when the problem was finally over, he could call Miranda up if he wanted to and go looking for her.

“Very, very pretty,” she repeated, as though that was explanation enough. And maybe it was.

She dug out the number and let Jaywalker copy it down. “Jew going to call her?” she asked.

“No,” said Jaywalker, who didn’t want to frighten Miranda off with a call from a total stranger. “You’re going to call her mother and ask her to have Miranda call me.”

“Okay. But are jew sure you don’t want something to eat?”

Funny, she didn’t look Jewish.

The following day Jaywalker checked with the licensing division of the Department of State. Francisco Zapata had indeed been the sole proprietor of the barbershop where the botanica now was, and he’d done business under the name “Frankie and Friends.” If he’d employed anyone, it had been strictly off the books. Officially, at least, his “friends” appeared to have been his customers. And a little over seven months ago, Zapata had indeed sold his shop and requested that his licensing status be changed from active to retired. Despite a requirement that he furnish a forwarding address for tax purposes and service of process, he’d failed to do so, and the appropriate blank on the form listed his current whereabouts as “unknown” and his next of kin as “none.”

Now most other investigators, and just about all other lawyers, would have quit right there, writing off the notion of the barbershop owner being a witness as a dead end. But Jaywalker was stubborn to a fault. To him there were no dead ends, just detours. So he made a note in his To Do file, which had by that time grown to a dozen pages. He’d reached the age in life where he no longer trusted his memory to serve him. If something was worth remembering, it was worth putting down on paper. That way, he could save his diminishing brain cells for the important stuff, like remembering to eat at least once a day, shaving every other day and calling his daughter once a week. Back when his wife had been alive, one of her jobs had been to serve as his constant reminder. He’d been ambivalent about it at the time, and had even accused her of being a nag when she got pushy about it. Only with her death had he come to realize just how many hats she’d worn during their marriage, and how utterly lost he was without her.

Katherine Darcy called the following day. Evidently Jaywalker’s “close to the breast” slip had caused her to take a step back from being Katie. Once again, she was all business on the phone.

“The toxicology and serology reports have come in,” she said. Not “I found them,” or “I’ve decided to let you in on what they say.” No, they’d come in. Almost a year late. Which, to Jaywalker, could only mean there had to be something in them that was good for him and bad for her.

“Do you want me to send you copies of them?” she asked. “Or fax them to you?”

“You can send them,” he said. “My fax is down at the moment.” As it no doubt would have been, if he’d had one. “So what do they show?” he asked her, knowing it would make her squirm to read off anything that might give him an advantage, however small.

“The usual,” she said. “Ethanol and opiates in blood, bile and brain.”

Unless Victor Quinones had been tanking up on gasoline additives, the presence of ethanol meant he’d been drinking. And opiates would be heroin.

“How much ethanol?” he asked.

“Let me see. Point one one.”

“And the opiates?”

“Not quantified,” she said.

“Didn’t this thing happen in the morning?” Jaywalker asked. He knew the answer, of course. The witnesses had placed the shooting at a few minutes after 11:00 a.m.

“The victim was pronounced at twelve-fifteen in the afternoon. And they didn’t take samples until the autopsy, which was conducted the next day.”

She was right, technically. According to the death certificate, which Jaywalker had also committed to memory some time ago, Quinones hadn’t been officially pronounced dead until an hour after the shooting, at the hospital. And the autopsy hadn’t been performed until the following afternoon. But none of that mattered. Death had a funny way of bringing the body’s metabolism to a screeching halt. If Victor had had a.11 reading lying on the morgue table, he’d had the same exact reading when he’d taken a bullet between the eyes some thirty hours earlier. A.11 meant eleven hundredths of a percentage point of alcohol in his system, by weight. It might not have sounded like much to a layman, but to Jaywalker it translated out to roughly five drinks, all of them knocked back well before noon. Enough to place him over the limit for driving and into the category of legally intoxicated. And that was before you even started talking about the undetermined amount of heroin he’d had in his system.

“Nice breakfast,” said Jaywalker.

Over the weeks that followed, he spent three full days rereading the crime-scene reports, the ballistics findings and the autopsy protocol. When the serology and toxicology reports showed up in the mail, he read those, too, even though he’d already had Katherine Darcy read them to him over the phone two days earlier. He revisited the crime scene, taking more measurements and snapping more photos than he had the last time he’d been there.

He had Jeremy brought over to 10 °Centre Street for a dozen more counsel visits, each time probing for greater detail about both the months leading up to the fatal day and the events of that day itself. The process continued to feel like dentistry, but over time Jeremy gradually became a more cooperative patient. Where he’d once dug in and resisted every inch of the way, he now finally began to let go of his secrets. Not happily, and certainly not easily. But with Jaywalker constantly reminding him how important it was to their chances at trial, Jeremy finally demonstrated that he got it, that he made the connection between his providing sufficient detail and a jury believing what he was telling them. Still, it continued to be a painstaking process, as well as one that promised to continue right up to the minute the young man would finally take the witness stand.

Jaywalker met twice more with Jeremy’s mother and his twin sister, Julie, pushing them to tell him again about the changes they’d noticed in Jeremy over the course of the summer of the “problem.” After the second session, he was already on his feet, gathering up his papers and stuffing them back into his briefcase, having politely but firmly resisted Carmen’s insistence that he take home some pork, rice and beans in a “dog bag,” when she stopped him.

“Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot to tell jew.”

“Forgot what?”

“She called.”

“She?”

“The girl,” said Carmen. “The girl, Miranda. She called, just like I told her mother she had to do.”