Joseph Teller - Overkill

So she certainly had a point. They were being stubborn and self-destructive. Jaywalker won more of his trials than anyone he knew, but even he was human, and he lost from time to time. On the occasions when he did, the experience was excruciatingly painful. And if he were to lose this one-as it was looking more and more certain he would-it would be in large part because he’d allowed his client to insist upon going to trial in a case they couldn’t possibly win.

It was thoughts like that that kept Jaywalker awake, leaving his average night’s sleep hovering somewhere between three and four hours. And that was on weekends, when he tried to catch up.

Stubborn. Stubborn and self-destructive.

Damn Katherine Darcy.

Damn her for being right.

First thing Monday morning, Katherine Darcy called her star witness to the stand. It was a move that even Jaywalker, who considered tactics and strategy key components in his trial arsenal, had to admit deserved a solid 10. Sure, she’d given Jaywalker all weekend to prepare his cross-examination, but that was something he’d done weeks ago, months ago. As Darcy no doubt knew. But by calling her most important witness-and clearly her most vulnerable one-at ten o’clock in the morning of a brand-new week, she could be assured of not only getting through her own direct examination by eleven or eleven-thirty, but of forcing Jaywalker to begin his cross without the benefit of a lunch break, and to complete it in the afternoon, without going overnight. It was little things like that, Jaywalker knew only too well, that could make the difference in a closely contested trial.

When Teresa Morales walked into the courtroom, it marked Jaywalker’s first glimpse of her. He’d had Jeremy describe her, but as was so often the case, Jeremy’s words had painted something less than a complete picture. He’d used adjectives like dark-haired, attractive and kind of pretty . And to be fair to Jeremy, none of those characterizations had been wrong, Jaywalker realized now, at least not in a technical sense. There was, for example, no disputing that Teresa had dark hair. And he would have been hard-pressed to deny that there was something attractive about her. Kind of pretty, however, was a stretch, and a rather long one if your idea of prettiness was Jeremy’s twin sister, Julie, or even Jeremy himself, if you were secure enough to attach the word to a young man. If, on the other hand, you wanted to use Miranda Raven as your gold standard, Teresa was immediately disqualified. Then again, so was just about everyone else on the planet.

The problem was that, to Jaywalker at least, there was something tough about Teresa. Or if not quite tough, then certainly hard, in the sense that she appeared just a bit too streetwise. Maybe he was being unfair, Jaywalker conceded. Maybe he knew too much about her. Where the jurors were seeing her white blouse, dark gray skirt and inch-and-a-half black heels, he was picturing her in a black leather Raiders jacket, skin-tight jeans and motorcycle boots. Where they were thinking manicured, he was remembering menacing .

All of these thoughts, understand, flashed through Jaywalker’s semiconscious mind during the five seconds or so it took Teresa to walk the thirty feet from the side door to the witness stand. And at the same time he was processing them, he was also busy arranging the contents of his cross-examination file on the table in front of him, locating a pad of paper on which to take notes, testing a couple of pens to see which of them wrote more fluidly, and leaning his body toward Jeremy’s to signal how comfortable he was with him, all the while projecting an air of quiet confidence that when his turn came he’d be able to expose this witness as something entirely different than what she might seem.

Trying cases was like that. At least, trying them the Jaywalker way was. Which was funny, because in any other venue he was a perfect example of the guy who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Stick him in front of a TV set, for example, and he’d have trouble eating a sandwich, let alone talking on the phone, reading a newspaper or conducting a conversation. But toss him into a courtroom with a thousand little things going on at once, and he suddenly became a world-class multitasker. Go figure.

Katherine Darcy began her direct examination by bringing out the fact that Teresa Morales was now married. A couple of months ago she’d become Teresa Rodriguez, or Teresa Rodriguez Morales, if you wanted to arrange the names the way Latinos do. Jaywalker wondered if the marriage had had something to do with his investigator’s inability to locate her and try to interview her prior to trial. That thought was quickly replaced with his marveling at Teresa’s resilience. She had, after all, been Victor Quinones’s girlfriend just over a year and a half ago. But if Victor’s parents, sitting silently in the second row of the audience, were destined to spend the rest of their lives grieving over the loss of their son, Teresa’s period of mourning had apparently been somewhat briefer.

From Teresa’s marriage, Darcy jumped unexpectedly to the day of the shooting. Unexpectedly, because Jaywalker found it hard to believe that she’d leave it to him to go into Teresa’s-and the rest of the Raiders’-past contacts with Jeremy. Was it possible he’d overestimated his adversary’s trial skills? He sure hoped so.

DARCY: Do you remember the day Victor died?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Were you there?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Did you see the man who shot him?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Would you recognize him if you saw him today?

TERESA: Yes.

DARCY: Would you look around the courtroom and tell us if you see him?

And, of course, Teresa pointed directly at Jeremy.

At that point, Katherine Darcy surprised Jaywalker again. Rather than going into the details of the shooting, she backed up. But not to the fistfight that had immediately preceded the gunfire, nor to the first of the series of encounters Teresa and her friends had had with Jeremy. Instead she took her witness back a week, to the day of the barbershop incident, and had her describe how Victor and several others had stood in front of the shop, calling Jeremy to come out.

DARCY: How many people were telling him to come out?

TERESA: Just Victor and his friends.

DARCY: Do you know the names of his friends? Any of them?

TERESA: One was Sandro. Shorty. Diego, maybe. But I don’t remember everybody’s name.

DARCY: What happened outside the barbershop?

TERESA: The guys were calling him out and, you know, playing with their fingers, going like this to him [indicating], trying to get him to come out. But he wouldn’t.

Jaywalker jumped to his feet. Teresa had formed her fingers into the shape of a gun, complete with a trigger-pulling motion. He wanted the gesture made part of the record, lest some appellate court judge two years down the line tried to fob it off as a harmless wave.

JAYWALKER: Could we describe the motion?

THE COURT: Yes, describe it.

Darcy tried her best to put a neutral spin on it.

DARCY: For the record, indicating like a finger pointing.

But for once Judge Wexler came to the rescue of the defense. He, too, had seen the motion.

THE COURT: She has a thumb up and the index finger fully extended, and the index finger keeps moving back and forth.

Jaywalker sat down. He couldn’t have described it any better if he’d wanted to.

Teresa went on to describe how Victor and his friends had tried to get Jeremy to come out and fight, until finally an older man from the barbershop had come out and gotten the group to leave. From there Darcy returned to the day of the shooting. This struck Jaywalker as something of a mistake on her part. He’d been the one who’d told her about the barbershop incident in the first place. Obviously Darcy had questioned Teresa about it, and when Teresa had confirmed that it had taken place, Darcy had preemptively made it part of her direct examination, trying her best to play it down. But at the same time she’d apparently chosen to ignore the other occasions-and over coffee she’d stated that there’d been at least a dozen of them-on which Teresa, and presumably her friends, had encountered Jeremy.