Joseph Teller - Overkill

Wanna get away?

Most arriving visitors to the island make their first stop whatever hotel they’re staying at. A few melanomaphiles head directly to the beach. Still, others make a detour into Old San Juan for a picturesque lunch or dinner, depending on the time of day, or a bit of shopping.

Jaywalker, unsurprisingly enough, did none of those things. Instead, he took a cab downtown to the large white government building that housed the Commonwealth’s division of the United States Department of Education, which he knew from his Internet search had jurisdiction over the licensing of barbers and cosmeticians. According to Jeremy’s best estimate, Frankie the Barber was in his fifties. And having once been given a ride home by Frankie, Jeremy distinctly remembered the vehicle, a beat-up old minivan. Even allowing for a significant margin of error in the age-guessing game, those two pieces of information suggested to Jaywalker that Francisco Zapata was too young to retire and spend the rest of his days sitting by the pool. And if he had to keep working to support himself and perhaps a family, as well, what better place was there for him to have started than the one where they issued barbers’ licenses?

So Jaywalker started there, too.

And immediately hit pay dirt.

An hour later he had the name of a shop opened just two months earlier, a street address, the number of a provisional license, and a high level of confidence that he was hot on the trail of the very same Francisco Zapata he’d come looking for. The name of the shop? Frankie y Amigos.

By seven-thirty that evening, he’d found Frankie, interviewed him, handed him a subpoena of dubious legitimacy and extracted from him a solemn promise to honor it. From there Jaywalker took a cab to his hotel, checked in and made it down to the beach. To be sure, it was getting seriously dark by that time, and all of the turistas had long since departed for happy hour, dinner, dancing or other activities. The only remaining signs of life were the seagulls, the sand crabs, a toothless old man drinking cerveza out of a bottle and from time to time casting a line into the surf, and a couple of giggling teenagers making out furiously under a blanket.

Perfect.

Jaywalker arrived back home four days later, a bit more rested, a trifle tanner and considerably poorer than before. It was a good thing that Frankie the Barber had decided to move no farther away than Puerto Rico. The low coach airfare had made the trip financially possible, if only barely, and not needing a passport had proven critical, seeing as he’d let his expire years ago, following his wife’s death. His days of transatlantic travel were behind him, he figured, unless they should suddenly decide to reinstate the draft and begin recalling guys in their fifties.

Anyway, if Frankie proved true to his word, it meant Jaywalker had lined up his first witness, not counting Jeremy and his immediate family.

A week later, the second one phoned him.

“Mr. Jaywalker?” said a voice so hesitant and childlike that for a moment Jaywalker thought it might be his six-year-old granddaughter, playing a joke on him. But he was just uncertain enough to say “Yes?”

“This is Miranda. Miranda Raven.”

Jaywalker bolted upright and tried to say, “Hello,” “Thanks for calling” and “Where are you?” all at once. Then he caught himself and slowed down, but just a little.

“I’m in Baltimore,” said Miranda. She sounded more grown-up now, at least twelve. How old had Jeremy said she was? Sixteen? Seventeen? Or hadn’t he said at all?

“Carmen told me you’re coming to New York,” he said. “Is that right?” He realized he was overenunciating, the way one might speak to a foreigner or a hearing-impaired person or, yes, a small child.

“That’s right,” she said. “We’ll be there a week from today.”

“I need to see you,” said Jaywalker. “It’s very, very important for Jeremy.”

“My mother’s afraid for me.”

“Tell her not to be,” said Jaywalker, before realizing how stupid that sounded. “It’ll be okay.” As though that was any better.

“How’s Jeremy?” Miranda asked.

“He’s okay. He misses you.”

“Can I see him?”

He wanted to say yes, sure. But already a warning light was flashing. If Katherine Darcy really had a written statement from Miranda putting her account of the shooting at odds with Jeremy’s-and Jaywalker had no reason to doubt Darcy’s word on that-it meant Miranda was already a compromised witness. Allowing her to go out to Rikers Island to talk with Jeremy, and having her story suddenly line up with his, would smack of collusion. But he was afraid to tell Miranda that, afraid that suggesting she couldn’t see Jeremy might keep her away altogether.

“Yes,” he heard himself telling her. “Yes, you can see him. But only after you and I meet. That way, it won’t look like you and Jeremy got together and decided what you should say.”

Was it a lie? Maybe. He’d have to see how things shaped up. But all that could wait. As grateful as he was for Miranda’s having called him, his loyalty didn’t belong to her; it belonged to Jeremy. The defense lawyer’s path was full of conflicts of interest, laid out like land mines along the way. Over the years Jaywalker had developed a pretty simple way of looking at the problem. He worked for one person and one person only, and that person was his client. Not that client’s parents, not his boss, not his friends, and certainly not his witnesses. If Jaywalker had just lied to Miranda Raven, so be it. She was a big girl, and she’d get over it. Come on, she had to be at least sixteen. Didn’t she?

The next day, Katherine Darcy phoned.

“So how was Puerto Rico?” she asked.

“Fine,” said Jaywalker, trying his hardest not to miss a beat. How on earth did she know he’d been there? Was he on some kind of combined terrorist-and-defense-lawyer watch list? But as much as he wanted to know, he’d be damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of asking.

“Did you find her?” she asked.

“Her.”

“Miranda.”

“No,” said Jaywalker. “No, actually I didn’t. But I’m working on-”

“That’s because she’s in Maryland.”

“Is that so?”

“Yup.”

Jaywalker said nothing. He could be pretty good at playing dumb when he wanted to. And sometimes even when he didn’t.

“Don’t you want to know how I knew you were in Puerto Rico?” she asked.

“Only if you want to tell me.”

He read her silence as disappointment over his reaction. “I’ve got some more photos,” she said after a moment. “And some additional discovery material. Reports and stuff.”

“Want to send me copies?”

“I could,” she said. “But I’ve also got something you might want to see in person.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“We think we may have found the murder weapon.”

He made it to her office a little after four o’clock. The first thing he noticed, being Jaywalker, was that she looked different-and terrific. The second thing was that she wasn’t wearing her glasses.

“Where’d they go?” he asked her.

“Where did who go?”

“The prop.” By way of clarification, he raised an index finger to the outer corner of his eye.

“Oh,” she said. “I had a birthday.”

It didn’t strike him as much of an explanation, but he said “Happy birthday” anyway, and then followed up with “Can I buy you a drink?”

“No, thanks,” she said. “It was a big one,” she added with exaggerated gloominess.

“Thirty?” He’d been around women long enough to know you took your lowest guess and then subtracted at least ten years. Fifteen, if you really wanted to play it safe.