Overkill

Jaywalker had met her, you had the case distilled right down to its essence. It was all about that stumble Victor had taken, that moment when he’d fallen to the ground and been reduced to begging for his life. That marked the precise instant when self-defense and sympathy ended, and the execution began.

He would talk to Jeremy tomorrow. Tonight he would sleep.

Or at least try to.

16

SLIM AND NONE

When Jaywalker went into the pens and talked with Jeremy before court the following morning, he found his client as resolute as ever.

“I think it’s going pretty well, Jay.”

Jaywalker tried to explain for the third time in fifteen minutes that no matter how well things seemed to be going, there was still the problem of the final point-blank shot between the eyes. The one that had been fired at a point when Victor had no longer posed a threat of any sort.

“I don’t remember it that way,” said Jeremy for the umpteenth time. “And I’d rather take my chances.”

Jaywalker had once listened to an interview with Bill Russell, a long-ago basketball star for the Boston Celtics. Asked about the prospects of some other team beating them in the championship series, Russell had said, “They got two chances. Slim and none.” Despite the fact that Jaywalker had been trying his best to explain that those words described their own chances of an acquittal to a T, the choice to continue the trial or not was still Jeremy’s. When it came to tactics and strategy, Jaywalker took over, never allowing a client to tell him how to try a case, lest the advice interfere with his winning it. But on the fundamental question of whether to take a plea or go to trial-or in this case, continue with a trial-that decision was the defendant’s, and the defendant’s alone. Jaywalker could and did give advice on the matter. He often weighed in heavily on one side or the other, with a good ninety percent of his recommendations being to cop-out. If he felt strongly enough-and Jaywalker had never been a stranger to strong feelings-he’d resort to arm-twisting and head-banging. But when he was done with the twisting and the banging, he’d move on and redirect his efforts to winning. Other lawyers he knew admitted to taking a measure of satisfaction from telling a client, “I told you so,” after losing a case. Jaywalker delighted in hearing those very same words from a client, after he’d won a case he’d called unwinnable. And hear those words he had. Not always, but a lot.

Though he knew he probably never would from Jeremy.

Katherine Darcy called Police Officer Joseph Campanella to the stand. Campanella had been the first officer to respond to the scene of the shooting. Checking his memo-book entries from time to time, he recalled how he’d found someone identified later as V. Quinones lying on the pavement in a semiconscious state, apparently the victim of multiple gunshot wounds. He’d also encountered a young woman named Teresa Morales, who’d been attempting to aid Mr. Quinones.

DARCY: You say “semiconscious.” Was he talking?

CAMPANELLA: No, ma’am. He was breathing, but he didn’t respond to any verbal requests I made of him. He wasn’t making any motions. His eyes were closed, and it was-it appeared as though he was sleeping.

Officer Campanella had called for an ambulance. While waiting for it to arrive, he’d done chest compressions on the victim, while someone else had performed mouth-to-mouth breathing. Then the ambulance had arrived and EMTs had placed the victim inside it. Miss Morales and Officer Campanella had also gotten in.

DARCY: What happened in the ambulance?

CAMPANELLA: They were rendering whatever aid they could give him.

DARCY: What was Mr. Quinones’s condition as time went on?

CAMPANELLA: It was progressively worsening.

DARCY: Tell us how.

CAMPANELLA: He never regained consciousness. He never spoke or opened his eyes. From what I observed, his vital signs were diminishing. He was becoming paler as the minutes were passing. And he was just generally deteriorating.

DARCY: What happened at the hospital?

CAMPANELLA: Shortly after our arrival, he was pronounced dead by the emergency room doctor.

Officer Campanella had completed some paperwork, checked in with his precinct commander, and then returned to East 113th Street to help secure the crime scene. Darcy asked him if he’d noticed any sort of evidence upon his return.

CAMPANELLA: Yes, I did. There was a sweatshirt. And if I’m not mistaken, there were two shell casings and two spent rounds lying on the walk-way. I’d also recovered another spent round in the ambulance.

DARCY: What was done with those items, if you know?

CAMPANELLA: They were all vouchered and removed as evidence.

DARCY: Were you able to draw any conclusions about the type of weapon or weapons that had been involved in the shooting?

CAMPANELLA: Only that there’d been an automatic involved.

Asked to clarify, he explained that while a revolver retained its spent shells in its cylinder after firing, an automatic or semiautomatic discharged each empty shell as it was fired. As for the “spent rounds” he’d referred to, those were the slugs or projectiles that were fired from the shells.

DARCY: Did you do something else in connection with this case several days later?

CAMPANELLA: Yes, I did.

DARCY: What was that?

CAMPANELLA: I went to the city morgue and identified the body of Mr. Quinones.

Jaywalker asked the officer no questions. Campanella had been a good witness. He’d managed to avoid lapsing into copspeak, a strange dialect that for some reason compels its ranks to favor “At that point in time I did proceed to take exit of my vehicle” over “Then I got out of my car.” He’d been clear, concise and direct. That said, he hadn’t really said anything that hurt Jeremy, and Jaywalker saw no particular reason to give him a chance. Multiple shots had in fact been fired from a semiautomatic weapon. Victor Quinones had been shot, and had died of his wounds not too long afterward. Ballistics evidence and a sweatshirt had been recovered at the scene.

Jaywalker was a lot of things, but one thing he wasn’t was a showman. He never questioned witnesses for the sake of questioning them, or to show off his cross-examination skills. And for the life of him, he failed to understand why so many of his colleagues seemed compelled to do so.

Although it was only eleven o’clock, Judge Wexler decided to take his midmorning recess early, and he excused the jurors for fifteen minutes. The reason soon became apparent: the arrival of a dignitary of sorts, a justice from the appellate division.

Jaywalker couldn’t quite place the man at first, though he looked very familiar. And then it came to him. He was Miles Sternbridge, the presiding member of the three-judge disciplinary committee that had suspended Jaywalker from practice some years back. Sternbridge had actually treated Jaywalker fairly, first by grudgingly allowing him to finish up ten of his pending cases before the suspension had kicked in, and later by terminating it