Joseph Teller - Overkill

Beyond that, the delay made it all but certain that Jeremy wouldn’t be taking the stand until Thursday morning. That was good for several reasons. It would give Jaywalker an opportunity to reconcile Jeremy’s version of the facts with anything unexpected his mother or Frankie might say. And it would mean that in all likelihood Jeremy’s testimony would begin and end on a single day, rather than being broken up and spread out over two days. Not only would that enhance his story, at the same time it would deprive Katherine Darcy of the luxury of an overnight between Jaywalker’s direct examination and her cross.

It was little things like that, Jaywalker knew, that could affect the outcome of a close case. What worried him right now, however, were those last three words: a close case . Because as prepared as his witnesses were, not one of them was going to be able to tell the jury much of anything about the fatal shot. Carmen and Frankie because they hadn’t been there, and Jeremy because even though he had been and didn’t dispute the fact that he’d fired it, it seemed he had no real recollection of doing so.

Carmen Estrada didn’t so much walk to the witness stand as waddle. She promised to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in a voice so low and gravelly that Jaywalker abandoned the lectern in favor of standing back by the wooden rail that separated the front of the courtroom from the spectator section. Years of experience had taught him that the farther he stood from the witness, the more that witness would be forced to raise his or her voice. If that didn’t work, he’d try cupping a hand behind one ear, in an exaggerated parody of deafness. And if all else failed, he’d badger and bully his witness into speaking more loudly. That last technique usually did the trick and often created an extra measure of sympathy for the poor witness.

Little things.

JAYWALKER: Do you know the defendant, Jeremy Estrada?

CARMEN: Sure, I know him. He’s my son.

Jaywalker took her back two years. She’d been living on the Upper East Side with Jeremy and his twin sister, Julie, their father having left some ten years earlier. That May, Jeremy had been seventeen. He’d been attending Catholic school at All Hallows High. But Carmen had reached a point where she could no longer afford the tuition, so Jeremy had transferred to public school and was by that time attending Park East, on 105th Street between Second and Third Avenues.

JAYWALKER: In addition to going to school, was Jeremy doing anything else?

CARMEN: Yes, sure. After school and on weekends he was working.

JAYWALKER: Where was he working?

CARMEN: At a bodega, and a dry-cleaning store, and later a hardware store. Lots of places.

JAYWALKER: Did something happen, some change with respect to Jeremy, that May or June, that you became aware of?

CARMEN: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Tell us about it, please.

CARMEN: Well, before he was normal, regular. You know, like any other seventeen-year-old boy.

JAYWALKER: And then?

CARMEN: After a while he became very nervous-like. I see him walking back and forth in the house, looking out the window through the venetian blinds. He stop eating, stop talking. I ask him what happen to him. He say, “Nothing.” He don’t want to tell me.

JAYWALKER: Anything else you remember?

CARMEN: Sometime he be shaking or crying in the nighttime, while he’s sleeping. I try to wake him up. I say, “What happen, what’s the matter?” And he say, “Nothing, nothing.” Finally, one day in June, a letter had arrived from school.

JAYWALKER: Did you open the letter?

CARMEN: Yes.

JAYWALKER: What did it say?

CARMEN: That he was absent from school.

JAYWALKER: After you read the letter, did you do anything?

CARMEN: Yeah, sure. I spoke with Jeremy.

JAYWALKER: And what did he say?

CARMEN: In the beginning, he don’t want to say anything. But I make him tell me what the problem is. He say he’s afraid to go to school because they follow him and threat him.

JAYWALKER: They?

CARMEN: These guys. This gang.

JAYWALKER: What did you say?

CARMEN: I say, “We gotta go to the police.” He say no, he was scared for his life. A gang was following him, and they was going to kill him.

Carmen described how she’d pulled Jeremy out of school at that point. By that time it was too late to put him in another school, so he’d just stopped going. Her son’s life, she said, was more important than anything they could teach him at school.

Jaywalker tried to draw Carmen out as to the changes she’d noticed in Jeremy, but despite all his hours of preparation, she used conclusive words when descriptive ones would have been more compelling. He was “panic,” she recalled, “nervous,” “hysteric.” But she did manage to say that he’d lost one job after another because he was scared he was being followed.

Jaywalker moved to the very end of August and the day of the barbershop incident.

JAYWALKER: Do you know a man by the name of Francisco Zapata?

CARMEN: That’s Frankie, the man from the barbershop.

JAYWALKER: Did there come a time when something happened just before Labor Day, involving Frankie?

CARMEN: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: Tell us what you remember.

CARMEN: I was in my kitchen cooking when they knocked on the door. It was about six-o’clock. When I opened the door I get scared. I see my son all white, like pale.

JAYWALKER: Was anyone with him?

CARMEN: The girl, Miranda. And Frankie from the barbershop.

JAYWALKER: How was Jeremy acting?

CARMEN: He was very nervous. He can’t even talk. He was panic, crying. I asked him what happened, he can’t answer me. The man, Frankie, he told me to keep him home, don’t let him go downstairs.

JAYWALKER: Did Frankie say why?

CARMEN: No. But I could tell it must have been very, very bad.

It was time to bring Carmen to the day of the shooting.

JAYWALKER: Do you remember a day about five or six days later, in the very beginning of September? Do you remember something happening then?

CARMEN: You mean the accident?

There it was again: the accident . Jaywalker had warned her at least a dozen times not to use the term. He realized now she simply couldn’t help herself, that she would go to her grave thinking of it as just that.

JAYWALKER: The shooting. Tell us the first thing you remember about that day.

CARMEN: I remember when Jeremy came home.

JAYWALKER: Was he alone, or was he with someone else?

CARMEN: He was with the girl, Miranda.

JAYWALKER: What did you see when they came in?

CARMEN: I see Jeremy very, very nervous, walking back and forth. He can’t talk. There was blood on his face, his mouth. And his shirt was all like burn, with like a little hole in it. And under it, right under it, his skin was red.

She found a spot on her own midsection, and began rubbing it. Even as she answered the next few questions, recalling that Jeremy had been so nervous he couldn’t talk, she continued to massage her belly.

It had finally fallen to Miranda to describe what had happened.

JAYWALKER: After that conversation, did you do something with Jeremy?

CARMEN: Yeah. I took him and Miranda out of the apartment.

JAYWALKER: Why did you do that?

CARMEN: Because when he could talk again, he told me he was too scared to stay there.

JAYWALKER: Did he say who he was scared of?

CARMEN: Yeah. He told me that the gang, the gang was going to kill him.

JAYWALKER: Where did you take him?

CARMEN: I took them to the Bronx.

JAYWALKER: What was in the Bronx?

CARMEN: My sister.

JAYWALKER: Did Jeremy stay in the Bronx for a long time?

CARMEN: No, just one night.