Overkill

But as ready as he was, Jaywalker was about to discover that the vagaries that invariably accompany a trial had one of their surprises in store for him that morning. The messenger in this particular instance wore a court officer’s blue uniform and approached Jaywalker just seconds before the jurors were about to enter the courtroom.

“You’ve got a witness waiting for you,” the officer told him. “Out in the hallway.”

And since Jeremy was his only remaining witness, Jaywalker’s knee-jerk reaction was that his client had somehow managed to escape or post bail. But there was no bail; Jeremy had been held in remand status since his surrender a year ago, and not even Jaywalker had deluded himself into thinking some judge might set bail. And if his client had escaped, why wasn’t the court officer out in the hallway himself, trying to wrestle Jeremy to the floor and handcuff him?

The bewildered expression on Jaywalker’s face was enough to prompt a bit of information from the officer. “It’s a young woman,” he said. “Pretty. Eighteen, nineteen.”

Miranda.

This could be disastrous, Jaywalker realized. Here he’d taken pains to make sure she was nowhere around, knowing that the statement she’d written out for the detectives hurt Jeremy far more than her testimony could possibly help him. And now she’d shown up on her own? What was he supposed to do? Put her on the stand at Jeremy’s peril? Turn her over to the prosecution? Or accept a missing witness charge that her testimony would have conflicted with the rest of his case’s? Whichever one of those three doors he chose to open promised nothing but disaster.

He got Judge Wexler’s permission to step outside for a moment and fell in behind the court officer, who led Jaywalker up the aisle, pushed against the courtroom door and held it open for him. As Jaywalker stepped out into the hallway, he was still trying to figure out what he would say to Miranda. Could he tell her to get lost, to dart into the nearest stairwell and disappear? Would the court officer give him up, or support his claim that by the time they got out there, Miranda was nowhere to be found?

Which actually seemed to be the case.

Because as he looked all around him, Jaywalker saw absolutely no sign of her. Not her auburn hair, not her almost-too-thin body, not her arresting brown eyes.

“I’m here,” she said, standing right in front of him, so close he almost jumped.

Once, as a young boy, Jaywalker-back then Harrison J. Walker-had sneaked out to the kitchen late one night to raid the refrigerator. But even before he’d opened it, he’d noticed a generous dollop of chocolate sauce on the countertop. He’d gleefully scooped it up with his index finger and deposited it onto the tip of his tongue, savoring its forbidden richness. And the truth was that for a second or two, it really had tasted like chocolate. Then his senses had registered the fact that it wasn’t. It had actually been thick grease that had dripped from the electric meter directly above the counter.

It was that way now. So convinced had Jaywalker been that he would encounter Miranda in the hallway, that even as he stood in front of the young woman, his mind continued to compel him to believe that she’d not only dyed her hair blonde, but had put on fifteen or twenty pounds, as well, and somehow changed the color of her eyes from brown to blue-gray. And had she not spoken her name aloud at that point, he no doubt would have persisted in trying to reconcile the discrepancies between how he remembered her and how she looked today, just four months later.

“Julie,” she said.

But it didn’t register.

“Julie,” she repeated, before adding, “Jeremy’s sister?” Her voice rising on the last word, the way teenagers can turn a simple declaratory statement into a question.

“Julie!” Jaywalker half shouted, loudly enough to turn heads in the hallway. “You’re supposed to be hiding out in, in-”

“The Bronx.”

“Right,” said Jaywalker, before realizing that some of the turning heads might be attached to the jurors back in the courtroom. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he herded her into the nearest stairwell and closed the door behind them. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m going to testify,” she said.

“What?”

Not a incredulous “What?” as in “What, are you crazy?” More like the “What?” of a middle-aged man with mediocre hearing, two descriptives that actually fit Jaywalker pretty well. But it wasn’t just that. The truth was, he’d been so busy looking around for surveillance cameras that he’d allowed his attention to wander, and if he’d heard Julie’s answer, it hadn’t quite registered.

So she repeated it.

“I’m going to testify,” she said, looking Jaywalker squarely in the eye.

“But your mother-”

“I don’t care about my mother,” she said. “Jeremy is my twin brother. I’ll spend the rest of my life blaming myself if I hide out somewhere and they find him guilty. I can’t do that.”

Jaywalker thought about it for a moment, but only a moment. Had he himself had a twin brother or sister facing a murder charge, he would no doubt have spoken pretty much the same words as Julie had, and he wouldn’t have let anyone talk him out of it. Still, Carmen was Jeremy and Julie’s mother. She’d hired Jaywalker, at least after a fashion, and was paying his fee, slowly if not so surely. Over a year’s time, she’d given him a little over two thousand dollars. If she were to continue making payments at that rate-a statistical rarity, given that, win or lose, the end of a trial almost always brought with it the end of payments-she would have the balance paid off sometime around 2025.

But none of that mattered.

It wasn’t Carmen’s case any more than it was Jaywalker’s. It was Jeremy’s case. Julie was nineteen, old enough to vote and enlist and get married without her mother’s permission. If she wanted to testify, it was going to be her decision, hers and her brother’s.

Jaywalker had her wait in the stairwell while he headed back into the courtroom to deal with a confused client, an impatient judge and a mother he at least owed an explanation. Then again, what could she do about it? Threaten to cut off his fee payments a few days early? Stop bringing him lunch, please God?

In the end, she did neither of those things, and Jaywalker thought he even detected a bit of motherly pride over her daughter’s decision. As for Jeremy, he was willing, if Jaywalker thought it might help. And Harold Wexler displayed both his generosity and its limits by granting Jaywalker ten minutes to prepare what would now be his next-to-last witness.

It would be enough.

JAYWALKER: The defense calls Julie Estrada.

The jurors watched intently as she made her way forward to the witness stand. If she wasn’t quite as pretty as Jeremy was handsome, she was still good to look at, with the same surprising blond hair and blue-gray eyes as her brother. And there was a hint of defiance in the way she walked and held herself, a hint that Jaywalker hoped wasn’t lost on the jurors, or misread by them.

JAYWALKER: Are you related to the defendant?

JULIE: Yes. He’s my brother.

JAYWALKER: Are you older than he is, or younger?

JULIE: I’m older, by about five minutes.

Jaywalker’s peripheral vision picked up a handful of smiles and nods in the jury box. This was going to work, he told himself. It better, came the response.

He had Julie describe the brother she’d once had, back before the summer of Miranda and the Raiders. Jeremy had been almost perfect, she recalled. He’d never been the smartest kid at school. He was, well, a little slow, according to his teachers. And he was shy. But he was polite and considerate, and he worked to bring home money to help his mother. And he was always fun to be around.