JAYWALKER: How old did they look?
ZAPATA: A few years older than Jerry. Nineteen, twenty. Something like that.
JAYWALKER: Were they all guys?
ZAPATA: There was one girl.
Frankie described how finally he’d gone outside, shutting the door behind him, and tried to talk to them. They’d quieted down after a minute or two and assured the barber they had no problem with him. “But we’re going to get him,” they’d said, pointing.
JAYWALKER: Who did they point at?
ZAPATA: At Jerry.
JAYWALKER: Did there come a time when they left?
ZAPATA: Finally. I had a van parked around the corner. I went and got it, and pulled in front of the shop. I put Jerry and his girlfriend in my van, and I took them to his house.
JAYWALKER: How did Jerry seem on the way to his house?
ZAPATA: He was very, very nervous, shaking. His face was white. His eyes, he was like he wanted to cry. But I guess he was ashamed to cry in front of his girlfriend.
THE COURT: The part about what the witness guesses is stricken. The jury will disregard it.
JAYWALKER: Mr. Zapata, you can only tell us what you saw, what you heard and what you did. Okay?
ZAPATA: Okay. Sorry.
The remark hadn’t been for the witness, of course. It had been for the contempt citation, in case Harold Wexler were to decide that Jaywalker had planted that little nugget of objectionable testimony, too. Although that one Wexler would forget.
JAYWALKER: When you got to Jerry’s building, did you leave him and his girlfriend downstairs?
ZAPATA: No, I was too scared for Jerry. I took them upstairs, and I told his mother to keep him there in the house, not let him go out.
Katherine Darcy spent only a few minutes cross-examining Zapata. Jaywalker sensed that she knew his testimony had been truthful, and that probing for inconsistencies or more detail could only get her into trouble. Or perhaps she was trying to take a page from Jaywalker’s playbook and send a message to the jurors that Zapata really hadn’t hurt her case.
DARCY: Did you see any guns that day?
ZAPATA: Real guns?
DARCY: Yes, real guns.
ZAPATA: No.
DARCY: Any knives?
ZAPATA: No.
DARCY: Did the shop have a large storefront window?
ZAPATA: Not so large.
DARCY: Did they break it?
ZAPATA: No.
DARCY: Did they try?
ZAPATA: No.
DARCY: When you went outside to talk to them, did they harm you?
ZAPATA: No.
DARCY: And they left, didn’t they?
ZAPATA: Not right away.
DARCY: But after a few minutes?
ZAPATA: Yes. After a few minutes, they left.
Francisco Zapata stepped down from the stand, and Judge Wexler excused the jury for the day. The following morning, Frankie the Barber would board a plane and fly back to Puerto Rico. Although he’d been able to testify to less than an hour of Jeremy Estrada’s torment, Jaywalker felt that Zapata’s had been a powerful presence at the trial. The simple fact was that he’d traveled some fifteen hundred miles at his own expense in order to answer questions about an incident that had taken place some twenty months earlier, involving a young man whose last name he didn’t even know. To Jaywalker, that said an awful lot about Frankie right there. Perhaps, to the jurors, it might say something about Jeremy, too.
After sitting through his warning from Judge Wexler, Jaywalker retreated to the pens to spend one last hour preparing Jeremy for his testimony the following day. Had this been a court-appointed case, Jaywalker would have been expected to keep track of his time and how he’d spent it. But even in those situations, he’d ended up seriously under-reporting when it had come time to enter a number alongside
The unreimbursed hours? He’d tended to think of them as taxes withheld by the government, and he liked to think he’d compensated for the lost income by cheating on his 1040 Form as much as he possibly could. But even if he hadn’t, he still would have gone into the pens to spend one last hour getting his client ready. He told himself it was for Jeremy, because of how much he liked the kid and what a raw deal life had given him. But that was only part of the story, of course. The rest was that he was Jaywalker, and being Jaywalker, he simply couldn’t help himself.
18
Thursday. Jeremy’s day.
Jaywalker had characteristically slept little. To him, the day had long loomed as no less nerve-wracking than a summation day or an argument before the Court of Appeals in Albany. Perhaps Jeremy’s case was unwinnable, one of those one-in-ten trials that no matter what he were to do, an outright acquittal would remain forever out of reach. But Jaywalker wasn’t ready to admit that. Not yet, anyway. What he did understand, what was absolutely clear, was that for them to win it, Jeremy would have to come off as a near-perfect witness. He would have to be able to describe his first-and perhaps last-encounter with love in a way that would make the jurors ache with memories of their own. He would have to be willing to go into the painful details of his torment at the hands of the Raiders, and describe the effects that torment had had on his body and his psyche. And he would somehow have to convince twelve strangers that in shooting another young man between the eyes from a distance of no more than five inches, he’d acted not as an executioner but as a blinded man trying to save his own life. And all the while, he would have to make those jurors like him-indeed, love him-enough to want to forgive him and set him free.
It was a tall order, made even taller by Jeremy’s lifelong shyness and natural reticence to talk about himself, by his limited education and intellect, and by a lot of extremely inconvenient facts. Still, Jaywalker felt that if ever he himself would be prepared to tackle the challenge, it was now. He could only hope that Jeremy was ready, too.
