unauthorized discharge of an unlicensed firearm within city limits. He agreed to instruct the jurors on both justification and extreme emotional disturbance, the former as a complete defense to all charges, the latter as a partial defense to the murder count only.

“How long do you expect your summations to take?” he asked. “Ballpark.”

“Less than three days,” said Jaywalker, who honestly had no idea, and certainly had no intention of committing himself. He knew Wexler well enough not to put it past the judge to interrupt him after an hour and say, “You told me you were going to be forty-five minutes.”

“An hour” was Katherine Darcy’s estimate.

Ask people what the term lost weekend means to them, and anyone old enough is apt to recall an ancient black-and-white movie of the same title, in which William Holden does his level best to drink himself into oblivion. Even those too young to have seen or heard of the movie are likely to associate the expression with a protracted bout with the bottle, a phenomenon commonly referred to these days as “binge drinking.”

Jaywalker’s drinking days were behind him by several years, but that fact didn’t prevent him from occasionally experiencing his own version of the lost weekend. Only he called his Getting Ready to Sum Up.

Not that he couldn’t have gotten up and delivered a competent summation that same Friday morning on a moment’s notice. The truth was, he could have done it six months ago, and he could have done it without benefit of notes. He knew the case so well that he could have done it in his sleep, if he’d had to, and he did precisely that on a fairly regular basis.

But there was competent, and there was Jaywalker. And being the uncompromising obsessive-compulsive that he was, that particular distinction meant that for Harrison J. Walker, the next seventy hours would become an agonizing exercise in reading, rereading and reviewing every last word of the twelve-hundred-plus pages of the trial transcript; combing every inch of the miles of handwritten notes he’d scribbled over the past two weeks; and examining and reexamining every single shred of paper the case had generated over its two-year life. And the thing was, doing all that would be merely preliminary. Only once he’d dispensed with those tasks would he turn his attention to structuring what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. After that he would get down to the business of refining it into language designed not just to inform and persuade the jurors, but to move them emotionally to a place where it would become all but impossible for them to find Jeremy Estrada guilty of anything. In other words, all Jaywalker was striving for was absolute, one hundred percent pure perfection. And he wouldn’t quit until he got there, along the way ignoring such niceties as sleep, nourishment, sunlight, human companionship and personal hygiene. Think Ray Milland if you’re old enough to, or sophomore year of college if you’re not.

Either way, as one might readily imagine, the recipe was pretty much guaranteed to make for a very lost weekend indeed.

21

BUTTERFLIES

Monday.

Told to be in court by ten o’clock, Jaywalker showed up at nine-fifteen and had to be let in a side door by a sympathetic court officer, the captain in charge of the part. Although he was as ready to sum up as he would ever be, that fact provided Jaywalker with not an ounce of comfort. He found it impossible to sit, excruciating to make small talk with the court personnel. He walked out of the courtroom, visited the pay phone down the hall, the men’s room, the windowsill by the elevator bank.

His old friends the butterflies were back.

Another lawyer, a good one, wandered over and was about to say something. Noticing Jaywalker’s blue suit, ironed white shirt and unwillingness to make eye contact, he caught himself, mumbled, “Good luck,” and walked off. Having been there himself, he could tell, just like that.

Back in the courtroom, Jaywalker forced himself to sit down at the defense table and arrange his notes, notes he would never so much as glance at once he began. Jeremy was brought in and seated next to him, and they hugged. Katherine Darcy showed up, and spectators-many of them Jaywalker groupies-began filling up the front rows of the audience section. A Jaywalker summation had come to be regarded as something of an event at 10 °Centre Street, something not to be missed.

Without fanfare, Harold Wexler entered by a side door and took the bench. “Are you ready, counsel?” he asked.

Darcy and Jaywalker answered that they were. The butterflies added their agreement by increasing the beating of their wings to a level somewhere beyond excruciating.

“Bring in the jury,” Wexler told the captain.

They entered a moment later, the twelve regular jurors and four alternates. Earlier they’d stowed their travel bags in the jury room, just in case their deliberations should go overnight, and given their lunch orders to a court officer. Despite the fact that those with young children, old parents or needy pets had had a full weekend to make arrangements, they looked worried to Jaywalker. No doubt the thought of a night in “jail” was weighing heavily on their minds. Then again, Jeremy Estrada had by that time spent something like the past three hundred and eighty nights in a real jail, and was likely to spend the next twenty-five years in state prison. Even as the judge was telling the jurors they were about to hear the lawyers’ summations and explaining that summations weren’t evidence, Jaywalker found himself idiotically trying to do the math, twenty-five times three hundred and sixty-five, when he became aware of a disturbance coming from the audience section of the courtroom, behind him. He turned around in time to see a court officer talking with a group of five or six young men standing in the aisle and trying to find seats.

Harold Wexler was on his feet, banging his gavel and ordering other officers to remove the jurors from the courtroom. But the officers, evidently mishearing or misunderstanding him, must have thought he meant for them to remove the young men instead. As a result, two officers rushed to join their colleague, one of them dramatically vaulting over the wooden rail that separated the front of the room from the audience section. And sixteen jurors, quite naturally, turned as one to see what was going on.

What they saw were three uniformed court officers trying their best to usher half a dozen uniformed young men out the door. Uniformed, to the extent that every one of the young men wore either a black jacket, sweatshirt or T-shirt with an identical motif. Specifically, the menacing one-eyed, crossed-sword likeness of an Oakland Raider. Nor were the young men leaving willingly, with several of them loudly and pointedly objecting that it was a public courtroom and they had every right to be there. One of them added, “What? You gonna throw us out just ’cause we’re Latino?”

Judge Wexler finally succeeded in getting the jury removed and the Raiders brought before him in handcuffs. He had each of them identify himself by name and nickname, under threat of an immediate thirty-day contempt citation.

“Alesandro Comacho,” said the first. “They call me Sandro.”

“Esteban Izquierdo. Shorty.”

“Diego Herrera. I don’t got no nickname.”

“Wilfredo Rivera. Me neetha.”

“Jorge Santana. Just Santana.”

“Who put you up to this?” Wexler demanded to know.

“Nobody put us up to nussing,” said Just Santana.

“Do you know this man here?” the judge asked, pointing at Jaywalker.

“No.”

“Ever seen him before?”

“No.”

“Spoken to him?”

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