left word that he’d be in his chambers upstairs. Katherine Darcy checked in by phone from her office, which was located in the same building. Jaywalker, who had no chambers and no office, stuck around. He talked with the clerk, the court officers, the corrections officers and the court reporter. He tried to calm Carmen and Julie down, but the truth was, they seemed calmer by far than he was. Twice he went into the pens to make sure Jeremy was okay. Both times he found Jeremy lying on a bench, his eyes closed. Jaywalker chalked it up to sleep deprivation, rather than complacency. Still, he couldn’t imagine falling asleep in Jeremy’s situation. Jaywalker himself was running on fumes, not having slept more than a couple of hours over the last two days. But the idea of sitting down, closing his eyes and napping was nothing less than unthinkable.
The buzzer sounded at 8:19 p.m.
Once.
We, the jury, would like to rehear the testimony of Dr. Seymour Kaplan regarding his reasons for concluding how close the gun was to Victor’s head when the defendant shot him between the eyes.
P.S. Both direct and cross-examination.
This was bad, thought Jaywalker, bad for a number of reasons. First of all, Kaplan was the last witness Jaywalker wanted the jurors to hear again. His opinion that the tip of the gun’s barrel had been at most five inches from its target was as devastating to Jeremy’s claim of self-defense as Detective Fortune’s forty-five-foot measurement had been. But unlike Fortune, Kaplan had come off as a thoroughly believable witness. So the jurors weren’t asking to hear his testimony again because they doubted him. Next there was the manner in which the note referred to the two young men. Victor Quinones had become “Victor,” in what Jaywalker took to be a humanizing touch. In contrast, Jeremy Estrada had had his name stripped away completely and had been reduced to the status of a depersonalized “defendant.” Then there was the inclusion of the phrase “shot him between the eyes.” To Jaywalker, those words seemed not only unnecessarily gratuitous but pointedly accusatory. The jurors could have said “the final shot,” “the fatal shot,” or even “the head shot.” But they hadn’t. They’d gone out of their way to make it sound like the overkill Katherine Darcy had argued it had been. Finally there was the specification that they wanted both direct examination and cross on the matter. That was a typical enough request, and under different circumstances Jaywalker would have been heartened by it. But here it had clearly been an afterthought. Not only had it been tacked onto the note as a postscript, it had been added in a handwriting visibly different from that of Mr. Craig’s. And whoever had written it apparently hadn’t felt on solid enough ground to have signed his or her name beneath it.
All things considered, it was a very bad note.
It was after nine o’clock by the time the jurors got what they’d asked for, and from the looks on their faces they would be more careful next time. It had taken the court reporter fifteen minutes to locate and mark the portions of the testimony relevant to the request, another fifteen minutes to reassemble everyone in the courtroom, and a third fifteen minutes for the reporter to read the questions and answers aloud to the jury. She did so, as reporters are instructed to do, without inflection, in order to avoid favoring one side or the other, either deliberately or unconsciously. The result was, as it almost always is in read-backs, a rapid-fire monotone so flat and so uninteresting as to be positively numbing.
That said, it didn’t come off as devastatingly as Jaywalker had feared. To be sure, there was Dr. Kaplan’s opinion that the gun had been anywhere from a quarter of an inch to four or five inches away from its target. And in support of that opinion was his finding of “radial tearing” around the edge of the wound, indicating that the scalp had been literally lifted off the skull. But on cross, Jaywalker had succeeded in getting Kaplan to admit that he’d found no evidence of a “muzzle stamp,” singed eyebrows, “stippling” or “fouling.” And if the absence of those things didn’t truly undermine the doctor’s conclusion, it made for good listening.
At least for Jaywalker.
The jury’s final note of the evening arrived at 10:23 p.m., precisely seven minutes before Judge Wexler was going to send them to a hotel for the night whether they liked it or not.
We, the jury, are tired and would like to stop deliberating. We also would like to hear, very first thing tomorrow morning, the testimony of the three eyewitnesses, Miss Lopez, Mr. Porter and Teresa Morales, regarding how after the first shot or shots, the defendant chased the victim before shooting him the last time, and exactly how the defendant fired the last shot.
Nothing else, please. And we need only the direct examination this time.
This was worse, far worse.
And not just the direct-examination-only specification. While it was painful to hear, the truth was that Jaywalker had asked few if any questions about the final chase and shot, having preferred at the time to get the three eyewitnesses off the stand before they could inflict more damage. And Jeremy’s testimony had never really addressed the issue. When it came right down to it, the most he’d been able to say was that he didn’t remember.
No, this was worse because it meant that in the morning the jurors would resume their deliberations immediately after hearing the three most damaging portions of the eyewitness accounts, the portions that blew away Jeremy’s claim of self-defense and changed the case from justification to execution.
So this was how it was going to end. The jurors would come back in the morning, listen to the three accounts and find Jeremy guilty. They might throw him a break and convict him only of manslaughter, on the theory that he’d been under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance. Or they might not. But what was the difference? Either way, he wouldn’t be seeing daylight for the next twenty or twenty-five years.
The jurors were sent to their hotel. Jeremy was led back into the pens. The judge went home. The clerk and court officers began locking up. It was the court reporter who stopped Jaywalker and Katherine Darcy.
“Listen,” she said. “I rotate with another reporter, and I’m not due back here until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. If you want the transcript marked for the read-back, we’ve got to do it now.”
Darcy seemed agreeable enough. And why not? Here she was, on the verge of a conviction in her first murder trial. And she could always go down to her office on the seventh floor, find a sofa to curl up on and catch six or seven hours of sleep. Jaywalker, on the other hand, was totally out of adrenaline, in serious danger of crashing and a long subway ride from home. But it seemed he had no choice.
It took them forty minutes to isolate and mark all the relevant portions of the testimony. Jaywalker pretty much sat back and let Darcy and the reporter do the work. They’d been her witnesses, after all, and she knew from her notes where she’d asked them what. Still, it seemed to take forever. When they were finally finished, the reporter thanked them and ducked out the side door, the only one that wasn’t double-bolted shut. “Turn off the lights on your way out,” she told them. “The door will lock itself.”
Jaywalker took one last look at the clock. 11:43 p.m. He discovered he could barely stand up. It wasn’t just lack of sleep, and it certainly wasn’t lack of food: that Velveeta-on-white must have had a good two hundred calories in it, not to mention a week’s requirement of sodium, guar gum, xanthan gum and food coloring. No, it was the losing, or at least the certainty that he was going to.
“You okay?” Darcy asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “No. I don’t know. But hey, congratulations.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Anything can still happen. They’re a weird bunch, this jury.”
Like she was an old hand at this.
He followed her out of the courtroom, flicking off the lights and pulling the side door closed until he heard the lock click. He knew from night-court experiences that the north bank of elevators would be shut down. Besides
