Overkill

“No.”

To the court clerk, Wexler said, “Get me Judge Sternbridge.” Then, turning back to the five in handcuffs, he asked them what they thought they were doing there.

“Exercisin’ our constitutional right to assemblify,” said Shorty. “Jus’ like cops do when wunna them gets murdered. Nobody stops them from showin’ up at the trial, do they?”

He actually had a point there.

“Showin’ support for a fallen brotha,” chimed in Sandro.

“Get them out of here,” Wexler ordered the captain. “Now.”

“Maricon,” muttered one of the Raiders, but no one could say exactly which one.

Too bad the jurors missed that, thought Jaywalker, smiling ever so slightly, but apparently not so slightly that Wexler missed it. “Mr. Jaywalker!” boomed the judge. “If I find out you had anything to do with this, anything at all, you’ll think that three-year suspension of yours was nothing but a hiccup. We’ll be in recess for fifteen minutes.”

And all Jaywalker could think was that somehow, in all the excitement, the butterflies had vanished. Well, that and one other thought.

Johnny Cantalupo.

22

THE LAST WORD

“It is twenty months ago,” Jaywalker told the jurors once they’d reassembled in the courtroom. “September. Labor Day, in fact. You and I are waking up to a beautiful morning with temperatures promised in the low eighties. Perhaps it’s a family gathering we’re looking forward to this day, a picnic or a barbecue.

“Up on 115th Street, in the tiny apartment he shares with his mother and twin sister, Jeremy Estrada wakes up, too. Has it been one of those nights of little or no sleep, of vivid nightmares? Has he been up with stomach cramps or diarrhea? Is it one of those mornings when he has to take his sheets, roll them into a ball and hide them in the bottom of his closet because he’s wet his bed and doesn’t want his mother and sister to know? Even though you and I now understand that they did know, and were just too kind to let on.”

The image of Jeremy and his urine-drenched sheets blindsided Jaywalker for a moment, just as, during his opening statement a week and a half ago, the first encounter between Jeremy and Miranda had blindsided him. But this time Jaywalker refused to let it stop him, and he managed to continue without interruption. Still, he could tell that the jurors hadn’t missed it, could sense that they were every bit as affected by Jeremy’s plight as he himself was.

He reminded them how it had been six days since the barbershop incident, six days during which Jeremy hadn’t once left the apartment. And there would no doubt have been a seventh such day, and more to follow, had not Miranda called to say she was taking her little sister and niece to the carnival.

“And Jeremy? Jeremy dares to think that in the midst of the carnival there’ll be safety. With all those hundreds of people, with dozens of police officers mingling with the crowd, what can possibly go wrong?

“We watch as he dresses for the warm weather. Jeans, a shirt, sneakers. There are no two or three pairs of sweat socks, no ankle holster tucked into them. To this day, Jeremy honestly can’t tell us if he put on a single pair of socks or not that morning. And why would he remember?

“We follow him downstairs and out onto the avenue as he walks to meet Miranda and the girls. We imagine them greeting each other, smiling, holding hands. We enjoy the rides, the games, the music, the food, the aromas. And we, too, dare to think that maybe, just maybe, things will be all right today.

“We’re wrong, of course. Things will not be all right this day. By nightfall, Victor Quinones will be dead, and Jeremy Estrada will be transformed from a seventeen-year-old boy to a haunted young man fleeing retaliation and facing life in prison. But like Jeremy, we don’t know any of that yet.”

Jaywalker paused for just a moment. Barely ten minutes into his summation, he knew already that he had them, just as he’d known the same thing during his opening statement. The case was his to win or lose, he told himself. If he did it right, if he did it absolutely perfectly, he could walk Jeremy out of the courtroom. Never mind the fact that extreme emotional disturbance was a defense to murder but not to manslaughter. Never mind that justification ended when the threat to one’s life no longer existed. Never mind Katherine Darcy’s ability to show just how far Jeremy had chased Victor before taking final aim at him, or just how close he’d held the gun to him before squeezing the trigger. And never mind Harold Wexler and his guarantee of not only a conviction, but a maximum sentence. No, this wasn’t Darcy’s case, wasn’t Wexler’s case. It never had been. This wasn’t even Jeremy’s case anymore.

Right now, this was Jaywalker’s case.

“Suddenly,” he told them, “we see Victor. And worse yet, Victor has seen us. There’s no place to hide, and it’s too late to run. Victor approaches, his girlfriend Teresa in tow. There’s a confrontation, a conversation and a challenge. Although Jeremy’s no fighter, the thought of a fistfight somehow strikes him as acceptable. Win or lose, it holds out the promise of bringing to an end a summer’s worth of torture. So he says okay, he accepts the challenge.”

Jaywalker turned from the jury box, walked over to the defense table and placed his hands on Jeremy’s shoulders. “This poor kid is so naive, and so stupid, that he really thinks it’s going to be a fair fight. What does it cost him?” Jaywalker asked. “A sucker punch, hard enough to put him on the pavement. Right after Victor had pretended to be a gentleman and refused to fight with the girls present.

“Does Jeremy stay down? After all, he’s spent the entire summer staying down. What difference could one more humiliation possibly make? But something in Jeremy says no, not this time. Something in Jeremy causes him to get back up off the pavement and give chase.”

Jaywalker spent a few minutes describing how Jeremy had run after Victor, fast enough to catch up with him. He pointed out how difficult that would have been if he’d had a gun in his waistband or his socks. And if he’d had a gun, what better time would there ever be to use it than right now? “But that doesn’t happen, does it? It doesn’t happen for one simple reason. It doesn’t happen because Jeremy doesn’t have a gun.”

He described the fight, dwelling on the time-out Victor called to pull his sweatshirt over his head. Again a perfect opportunity for Jeremy to have pulled a gun and shot him. “Only Jeremy doesn’t have a gun,” Jaywalker repeated. “Instead he waits, waits like an idiot for the fight to resume. And he wins the fight, Jeremy does. Victor raises his hands and surrenders. And Jeremy, still playing by the rules, stops fighting.

“Who wants to get even after a fight?” Jaywalker asked the jurors. He waited just long enough to see several understanding nods and even hear one “The loser” from the second row.

“That’s right-it’s the loser who wants to get even. Jeremy’s won. He’s thinking his torment may finally be over. He’s shown Victor and Teresa and the rest of the Raiders that he’s willing and able to take a punch and fight back. He’s not a pussy after all, not a cunt-face, not a maricon. Finally, in his moment of triumph, his humiliation may be over.

“So who’s humiliated?” Jaywalker asked, and it seemed as though sixteen mouths in front of him formed the name Victor. “Who’s issued a challenge, fought dirty and still lost?” Sixteen more silent Victors.

“Forget what Teresa Morales told you. She’s one of them. She was Victor’s girlfriend, for God’s sake. Forget Magdalena Lopez and her ability to hear bullets whiz by her head and then turn in time to see them hit buildings. And forget Wallace Porter and his lies about not drinking beer, having heard an argument about money, having seen a gun pulled from two or three pairs of sweat socks, and everything else he said in an attempt to lower his own sentence. Forget them and use your own, everyday common sense. You win a fight, you’re on top of the world. You lose, and you’re humiliated. Jeremy and humiliation were no strangers. Hell, he’d spent an entire summer being humiliated. But Victor? Victor had just been beaten up in a fair fight by the pussy, the cunt-face, the maricon. How was he ever going to live