JAYWALKER: A few times? How about seventeen times, not counting the barbershop?
He’d made up the number on the spot. He’d learned over the years that if you were specific enough with numbers or pretended to be reading from some official-looking piece of paper, people tended to get intimidated and ended up agreeing with you.
TERESA: I don’t know. I wasn’t really keeping count.
Jaywalker decided to leave it there, figuring it was about as good as he was going to get before he began to draw denials from Teresa and yawns from the jury box. He knew that when it came time for him to put Jeremy on the stand, he’d be able to go into the earlier confrontations in depth and breadth. And all he’d be up against would be Teresa’s lame
Now he took a look at the clock, saw it was ten minutes to one. He was about to move forward to the day of the fight and the shooting, but he didn’t want to do so only to have to stop ten minutes in. So rather than ask a question, he caught Judge Wexler’s eye. Wexler, who’d tried a few cases in his day as a defense lawyer, got the message.
“This might be a good time,” he announced, “to break for lunch.”
Once the jurors had been led out one door and Jeremy had been escorted through a very different one, Jaywalker sat back down and began gathering up his notes and files. As always, he intended to find a bench or a windowsill where he could spend the next hour refining the rest of his cross-examination. But suddenly Jeremy’s mother was hovering over him, extending a brown paper bag his way.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Lunch,” she said. “Jew gotta eat somesing.”
Jaywalker stared at the bag. There was a large grease spot on one side of it, and a strong smell emanating from it. Cumin, perhaps? Garlic? He looked away, forcing himself to breathe through his mouth. Had he eaten breakfast, he would have been in serious danger of losing it right then and there.
“It’s good,” Carmen assured him. “I make it myself. Pork, rice and beans. Very good for jew. Give jew energy, Mr. Jailwalker.”
He looked around for help, but the only court officer in sight, an old friend who was quite familiar with Jaywalker’s trial diet, was trying his hardest not to burst out laughing at the scene. Everyone else had left, like rats fleeing a doomed ship. Next thing he knew, Jaywalker found himself not only accepting the bag-grease spot, aroma and all-but thanking Carmen for her thoughtfulness. He’d learned over time that you didn’t reject heartfelt offerings from people of modest means. When the court-appointed client with no roof over his head extended a twenty-dollar bill your way after a hard-earned acquittal, you explained that the rules prohibited you from accepting it, that the city would be sending you a check to cover your hours. But when the guy insisted and said, “Please, you saved my life,” you took the twenty and you pocketed it. To refuse a second time would be nothing less than a slap in the face, a rejection of a kindness. And if the disciplinary judges wanted to disbar him for that, so be it, they could have his ticket.
He thanked Carmen again and took the bag with him to the fifteenth floor, where he opened it, gagged from an overwhelming whiff of its contents and left it on a bench. Someone, he told himself, would be thrilled to discover it. Someone with a stomach far stronger and even emptier than his own.
When they resumed that afternoon, Jaywalker had the sense that the jurors were looking at Teresa Morales a little differently from the way they’d regarded her first thing that morning. In their eyes, she’d begun the day as not just a witness but a victim of sorts. Her boyfriend had been beaten up in front of her, then shot, chased and murdered. She’d tried to stop him from bleeding to death and had been unable to. The last she’d seen of him had been when he’d been wheeled away from her at the emergency room.
But as the morning wore on, the jurors had learned other things about Teresa. She’d gotten married to another man within a year, for one. She’d been forced to admit that she’d been part of a group that had followed Jeremy, called him names, taunted him, promised to “get” him, and finally backed up their words with gestures that could only be construed-unless you happened to be Katherine Darcy-as mimicking gunfire. So by the time the afternoon session began, the average defense lawyer would have concluded that Teresa had been softened up to the point where she was now ripe for the kill, and would have pounced on her.
Jaywalker, however, was anything but your average defense lawyer. Never was, never would be. As strong as the temptation was to attack a wounded witness, he knew better than to try. For one thing, he considered it entirely plausible that Teresa Morales had told the truth that morning and would continue to do so that afternoon. With very few exceptions-the Raiders jackets and which boy had first pulled the gun-nothing Jeremy had ever told Jaywalker contradicted Teresa’s testimony in general and her account of the day of the shooting in particular. So a full-bore attack ran the risk of accomplishing nothing more than getting her to repeat herself, only in more-and more convincing-detail than before. Again Jaywalker reminded himself that Jeremy would have his turn on the witness stand. Any blanks in the story left by Teresa meant more room for Jeremy to fill in as he recalled things.
In other words, less could actually be more. A proposition that sounded so alien and counterintuitive to most lawyers that they rejected it out of hand.
JAYWALKER: Do you remember who threw the first punch, Victor or Jeremy?
TERESA: No.
JAYWALKER: But after a while it became apparent that Jeremy was winning the fight. Right?
TERESA: Right.
JAYWALKER: And at some point Victor stopped to take off his sweatshirt. Right?
TERESA: Right.
JAYWALKER: In order to do that, did he have to pull it up over his head?
TERESA: Yes.
JAYWALKER: Did Jeremy attack him while Victor was busy doing that, while-
TERESA: No.
JAYWALKER: — he was blind and defenseless?
TERESA: No, not that I remember.
JAYWALKER: And then they resumed fighting?
TERESA: Yes.
JAYWALKER: Victor was now wearing just a T-shirt, a long T-shirt. Right?
This was actually an important point. According to Jeremy, the first he’d seen of the gun had been when Victor had pulled it from his waistband. That meant it must still have been hidden by something after Victor had removed his sweatshirt.
TERESA: I don’t remember.
JAYWALKER: Well, he wasn’t bare-chested, was he?
TERESA: I don’t remember.
Jaywalker decided that was good enough. Jeremy would testify that Victor still had on a shirt of some sort. Teresa claimed she couldn’t remember, and neither of the other eyewitnesses, Magdalena Lopez and Wallace Porter, had ever described Victor as being shirtless at any point. In his summation, Jaywalker would argue that had that been so, surely at least one of them would have recalled it and mentioned it, if only to differentiate between the two young men who’d been nameless strangers to them.
JAYWALKER: How about Jeremy? He had a shirt on the whole time, too. Didn’t he?
TERESA: Yes.
JAYWALKER: Did you ever notice what Jeremy had on his feet?
TERESA: No, not really.
JAYWALKER: Do you have any recollection that he had two or three pairs of sweat socks on?
