TERESA: The guys were calling him out and, you know, playing with their fingers, going like this to him
Jaywalker jumped to his feet. Teresa had formed her fingers into the shape of a gun, complete with a trigger-pulling motion. He wanted the gesture made part of the record, lest some appellate court judge two years down the line tried to fob it off as a harmless wave.
JAYWALKER: Could we describe the motion?
THE COURT: Yes, describe it.
Darcy tried her best to put a neutral spin on it.
DARCY: For the record, indicating like a finger pointing.
But for once Judge Wexler came to the rescue of the defense. He, too, had seen the motion.
THE COURT: She has a thumb up and the index finger fully extended, and the index finger keeps moving back and forth.
Jaywalker sat down. He couldn’t have described it any better if he’d wanted to.
Teresa went on to describe how Victor and his friends had tried to get Jeremy to come out and fight, until finally an older man from the barbershop had come out and gotten the group to leave. From there Darcy returned to the day of the shooting. This struck Jaywalker as something of a mistake on her part. He’d been the one who’d told her about the barbershop incident in the first place. Obviously Darcy had questioned Teresa about it, and when Teresa had confirmed that it had taken place, Darcy had preemptively made it part of her direct examination, trying her best to play it down. But at the same time she’d apparently chosen to ignore the other occasions-and over coffee she’d stated that there’d been at least a dozen of them-on which Teresa, and presumably her friends, had encountered Jeremy.
Jaywalker, needless to say, had no intention of ignoring them. To the extent that he had one, the sum of those encounters-including but by no means limited to the barbershop incident-was his defense.
As Teresa returned to day of the shooting, she described how things had begun casually enough. She and Victor had been on 110th Street, walking toward Third Avenue, when they’d almost bumped into Jeremy and his “lady.” There’d been two girls with them, one a good bit younger than the other.
DARCY: The person you described as his lady. Do you know her name?
TERESA: I heard her name was Miranda. But I don’t really know her.
DARCY: Do you know what she looks like?
TERESA: She’s got reddish hair. She’s slim.
DARCY: Tell us what happened.
TERESA: Victor told him, “Come on, tough guy. I heard you want to fight me.” And they were calling each other names. “Punk.” “Chicken.” Stuff like that.
She described how she and Victor had walked north to 113th Street, when she noticed that Jeremy and his lady had followed them.
DARCY: Then what happened?
TERESA: When I noticed he was behind us, I tried to get Victor to walk faster. But it happened so quickly. They just started fighting, hitting each other.
DARCY: Tell us what you saw.
TERESA: The guy, he punched Victor in the lip. Victor took off his sweatshirt, and they kept on fighting. After a minute or two they backed off, and the guy just pulled out a gun from his waist. I told Victor, “Run, run!” And when he ran, the guy shot him, and Victor like went down on the ground. Then he got up, and the guy shot again, and it hit the street. Then Victor ran again, inside the park, around a bench. But he tripped. And then the guy just walked over, grabbed him and killed him.
She recounted how, following the shooting, Jeremy and his lady had run from the scene, toward Third Avenue and out of sight.
DARCY: What did you do?
TERESA: I was screaming for help.
DARCY: What else?
TERESA: I was laying down, holding his neck.
DARCY: Why?
TERESA: I was putting my fingers on the hole at the back of his neck where he was bleeding from.
DARCY: What happened then?
TERESA: After a while, the cops came, and then an ambulance. We went to the hospital, to the emergency room, and they wheeled him away.
DARCY: Did you ever see Victor alive again?
TERESA: No.
Cross-examining a sympathetic witness could be tricky business, as Jaywalker well knew. Even if she’d gone and gotten married to another man not too long after the incident, Teresa Morales had seen her boyfriend gunned down in front of her, and he’d all but died in her arms. To top that off, in the eyes of the jury she’d come off as a pretty straightforward witness. Jeremy insisted that it had been Victor, not he, who’d first pulled the gun, and he continued to deny any recollection of firing the last shot as Victor lay helpless on the ground. Jaywalker’s own internal jury was still out on both those questions. But the jurors had now heard three accounts of the incident, and while they varied from version to version, all three put the gun in Jeremy’s hands first and pretty much agreed about the final shot.
The execution.
What was more, Teresa hadn’t even appeared to stretch things. Her account of the barbershop incident had been pretty much as Jeremy had described it. Her graphic demonstration of the way in which Victor and his friends had mimed shooting had, Jaywalker strongly suspected, taken Katherine Darcy by surprise. And it had been Darcy, rather than Teresa, who’d tried to gloss it over as nothing but an innocent pointing gesture. So Jaywalker knew he had to proceed cautiously, lest he run the risk of antagonizing the jurors. Still, he couldn’t tread all that carefully; Teresa had been too damaging a witness for him to leave alone.
He began gently, asking her about her relationship with Victor, trying to establish her loyalty to him and, consequently, her natural bias against the man who’d killed him. He asked her what Victor had done for a living, and when the best she could come up with was “odd jobs,” Jaywalker decided to let her off the hook. He figured there was little to be gained from attacking the victim’s reputation with not only his former girlfriend on the witness stand, but his grieving parents present, as well. Besides, Jaywalker had a surrogate to attack, another member of the gang who had no supporters in the courtroom.
JAYWALKER: Tell me about Alesandro.
TERESA: Who?
JAYWALKER: Maybe you knew him as Sandro?
TERESA: I knew him. Not well, though.
JAYWALKER: How long had you known him for?
TERESA: Not long. Three or four years.
JAYWALKER: What was his last name?
