Joseph Teller - Overkill

CAMPANELLA: Yes, I did.

DARCY: What was that?

CAMPANELLA: I went to the city morgue and identified the body of Mr. Quinones.

Jaywalker asked the officer no questions. Campanella had been a good witness. He’d managed to avoid lapsing into copspeak, a strange dialect that for some reason compels its ranks to favor “At that point in time I did proceed to take exit of my vehicle” over “Then I got out of my car.” He’d been clear, concise and direct. That said, he hadn’t really said anything that hurt Jeremy, and Jaywalker saw no particular reason to give him a chance. Multiple shots had in fact been fired from a semiautomatic weapon. Victor Quinones had been shot, and had died of his wounds not too long afterward. Ballistics evidence and a sweatshirt had been recovered at the scene.

Jaywalker was a lot of things, but one thing he wasn’t was a showman. He never questioned witnesses for the sake of questioning them, or to show off his cross-examination skills. And for the life of him, he failed to understand why so many of his colleagues seemed compelled to do so.

Although it was only eleven o’clock, Judge Wexler decided to take his midmorning recess early, and he excused the jurors for fifteen minutes. The reason soon became apparent: the arrival of a dignitary of sorts, a justice from the appellate division.

Jaywalker couldn’t quite place the man at first, though he looked very familiar. And then it came to him. He was Miles Sternbridge, the presiding member of the three-judge disciplinary committee that had suspended Jaywalker from practice some years back. Sternbridge had actually treated Jaywalker fairly, first by grudgingly allowing him to finish up ten of his pending cases before the suspension had kicked in, and later by terminating it early in order to appease a Rockland County judge anxious to move along the case of a defendant who wanted to hire Jaywalker. Still, Jaywalker found it hard to feel all warm and fuzzy about the man. To begin with, what kind of a guy went around calling himself Miles Sternbridge? Not that he’d named himself, of course. But had Jaywalker been tagged with a handle like that, he would have done something about it, just as he had with Harrison J. Walker. Then there’d been the bit about that “sexual gratuity” Jaywalker had been accused of accepting. Sternbridge had to have known that hadn’t been his idea, and the stairwell security video had even backed him up, showing him trying to resist the efforts of his overly appreciative client. But in the absence of a sound track of any sort, Sternbridge had claimed to be able to divine that Jaywalker’s opening-and-closing of his mouth signified moaning, rather than protestations of “No, no!”

Okay, so maybe it had been a combination of the two. But even if it had been, was it really so different from accepting the twenty-dollar bill from the insistent guy you’d just won an acquittal for? Wouldn’t both clients have been equally offended by outright rejection of their expressions of gratitude?

“Come up, Mr. Jaywalker.” It was Harold Wexler’s voice, summoning Jaywalker up to the bench, where the two judges had been huddling for several minutes.

Jaywalker approached cautiously, wondering what it was he’d done this time. Going to trial instead of taking a plea couldn’t possibly be grounds for disciplinary action, could it? He looked around the courtroom, wondering if he was going to need a lawyer, but didn’t see anyone he would be interested in hiring even if he’d had the money.

“Nice to see you again,” said Sternbridge.

“Likewise, I’m sure.” He’d heard John Malkovich say that once in a movie, one of those things where everyone was wearing powdered wigs and pirate shirts.

“Harold here tells me you’ve been behaving yourself.” Said with obvious astonishment, and perhaps even a tinge of disappointment.

“I’ve been trying,” said Jaywalker.

“Good,” said Sternbridge. “Good.”

Jaywalker said nothing.

“Well, then,” said Sternbridge, “carry on, gentlemen.” And shaking hands with Wexler-and only Wexler-he turned and left.

“Friend of yours?” Wexler asked with a smile, once Sternbridge was out the door.

“Oh, yeah,” said Jaywalker, and they exchanged smiles. Wexler knew all about Jaywalker’s run-in with the committee; everyone did. Now he motioned Katherine Darcy to come up and join them at the bench. Once she had, he assured her that they hadn’t been discussing the case, only Jaywalker’s criminal record. Darcy answered with a knowing smile.

“So,” Wexler asked her, “have you talked to your bureau chief?”

“I have.”

“And are you authorized to agree to twenty years on a manslaughter plea?”

“Yes.”

Even before the judge turned his way, Jaywalker was shaking his head from side to side. “He doesn’t want it,” he explained.

“Big mistake,” was all Wexler would say, his jaw set tightly. Then he stood up and walked out of the room, leaving the two lawyers standing there. He could be like that, Jaywalker knew. Putting in a good word for you one minute, then turning on you the next. But the thing of it was, come sentencing time, it wouldn’t be the smiling Harold Wexler who’d be sentencing Jeremy Estrada. It would be the other one, the angry, vindictive Harold Wexler.

Just one more example of how the words I told you so always seemed to come into play down at 10 °Centre Street.

Katherine Darcy called Detective Regina Fortune. A member of the Crime Scene Unit, Detective Fortune would succeed in demonstrating, by the time she stepped down from the witness stand, that her name was far and away the best thing about her.

Darcy began her examination by asking about the duties of her unit.

FORTUNE: CSU responds to certain crimes within the five boroughs. All homicides, assaults where a person is likely to die, sex crimes-rape, sodomy, child abuse-and what we call pattern robberies or pattern burglaries. We respond in order to preserve the crime scene, and we do that through taking photos, making notes and drawing sketches and diagrams. And when we recover any type of evidence at a scene, we photograph it and note it in our sketches and diagrams.

Darcy drew Detective Fortune’s attention to September 6th. Referring to her notes, she testified that she’d arrived at 113th Street and Third Avenue shortly after four o’clock that afternoon. She’d found the scene already secured and evidence preserved by uniformed patrol officers who’d arrived earlier. She’d noted a sweatshirt, two.380 shell casings and a spent round, which she more accurately described as “a piece of deformed lead.” She’d made notes, taken measurements and photographs, and drawn a rough sketch of the area. Back at her office, she’d created a large diagram of the scene, drawn to scale and showing the relative location of the various items she’d spotted. Without objection from Jaywalker-he had no interest in making it seem worth fighting over-the diagram was received in evidence and published to the jurors. For some reason that Jaywalker had never understood, lawyers seem to prefer using words like publish when mundane ones like show would do just fine.

Up to that point, Regina Fortune had been a model witness, and perhaps it was that fact that led Katherine Darcy to get greedy. As Harold Wexler might have put it, it was a big mistake. But prosecutors are lawyers, too, and they occasionally succumb to the temptation to ask too many questions of a witness.

DARCY: You mentioned a.380 shell.

FORTUNE: Yes.

DARCY: What is a.380 shell?

FORTUNE: The number signifies the size of the caliber. Guns come in all sizes-.38s, 9 mms, 45s. A.380 is a middle-range gun. It’s bigger than a.38, smaller than a 9 mm, much smaller than a.45. Those are all caliber sizes.