Joseph Teller - Overkill

JAYWALKER: Where did he go from there?

CARMEN: I send him to Puerto Rico.

Jaywalker paused. He figured seven months was certainly worth a pause.

JAYWALKER: Did there come a time when Jeremy came back to New York?

CARMEN: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Did you and he go somewhere then?

CARMEN: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Where did you go?

CARMEN: To a lawyer.

JAYWALKER: And did you and the lawyer and Jeremy do something?

CARMEN: Yeah.

JAYWALKER: What did you do?

CARMEN: We took him to the police.

JAYWALKER: And did Jeremy give himself up?

CARMEN: Yeah.

Jaywalker thanked Carmen and sat down. Despite hours of preparation, she’d earned no better than a C in his book. Her nervousness had caused her to leave out most of the details she’d been able to recall at the office, her home, and even in the courthouse as recently as an hour before she’d taken the stand. And whose fault was that? Jaywalker’s, of course. Because Carmen was his witness, he’d been barred from asking her leading questions in which he could have suggested the answers to her, such as “Did Jeremy suffer from nightmares?” Nor could he have asked her to repeat conversations she’d had with Miranda; those would have been hearsay. Still, he knew, when a witness underperformed, as Jeremy’s mother had, it was rarely the fault of the witness and almost always that of the examiner. Whatever shortcomings Carmen had, it had been Jaywalker’s job to identify them and overcome them. In failing to do so, he’d failed her and, more importantly, Jeremy.

And that had only been on direct. With cross-examination about to begin, Jaywalker shuddered at the thought of Carmen trying to answer questions she was even less prepared for. And it didn’t take long for his fears to be realized.

Katherine Darcy began by getting Carmen to concede that she herself had never been a witness to anyone following her son, chasing him or threatening him. That she’d never seen a weapon of any sort either displayed or mimicked. And that she’d never encountered a gang member, and knew nothing about the Oakland Raiders or the jackets their fans wore. Then she asked about Jeremy’s attendance record at All Hallows High School, before he’d ever met Miranda. It had been very good back then, Carmen assured him.

But Darcy had done her homework. She’d subpoenaed records from All Hallows, and now she handed them to the witness.

CARMEN: I don’t have my glasses.

DARCY: Do you have them in the courthouse?

CARMEN: No.

THE COURT: Here, try mine. They’re reading glasses, magnifiers.

CARMEN: Thank you. [Puts on glasses.] No, these are no good. I don’t see this. I got, what you call it, a stigmatoid.

THE COURT: And you never thought to bring your reading glasses with you?

CARMEN: I thought I was going to have to talk, not read.

She did have a point there.

Darcy moved on, evidently figuring she’d have a crack at Jeremy on the subject of his attendance, once he took the stand. And perhaps unconsciously, Jeremy took that moment to take off his glasses and slip them into his shirt pocket.

Darcy wanted to know about Miranda’s current whereabouts. Jaywalker had long anticipated her interest in the matter. If she could show that Carmen knew where Miranda was, she could suggest that the defense had deliberately decided against calling her as a witness, and might even succeed in getting the judge to give a missing witness charge, an instruction to the jury that they could infer that Miranda’s testimony would not have supported the rest of the defense’s case.

DARCY: When was the last time you saw her?

CARMEN: Miranda?

DARCY: Yes.

CARMEN: Last time I saw her was exactly the day I brought her to Mr. Jackwalker’s office.

DARCY: A few months ago?

CARMEN: Yeah. She disappear after that.

Darcy moved on to Carmen’s contacts with the police while Jeremy had been in Puerto Rico. The detectives’ reports strongly suggested that she’d withheld her son’s whereabouts from them, and Jaywalker had told her it was absolutely essential that she admit she’d lied to them.

DARCY: Did the police come visit you shortly after the shooting?

CARMEN: Yes.

DARCY: Did they ask you where Jeremy was?

CARMEN: Yes.

DARCY: Did you tell them you didn’t know where he was?

CARMEN: Yeah. I lied to the police.

For once, Carmen came through perfectly.

DARCY: Did you tell them you’d try to find out where Jeremy was, and let them know?

CARMEN: Yeah. That was a lie. I lied to the police. I did.

Apparently she was determined to admit it every chance she got.

DARCY: In fact, you knew at the time that he was in Puerto Rico. Didn’t you?

CARMEN: Of course I know. I send him to Puerto Rico because he told me his life is in danger because of the gang, the same gang.

DARCY: And because the police were looking for him, right?

CARMEN: No, not right. He wasn’t scared of the police. He was scared of the guys from the gang. They said he go to jail, they was going to kill him in jail.

Darcy asked her about the last job Jeremy had held, at a hardware store. Jaywalker noticed that again she was working from a document in her hand.

DARCY: Isn’t it a fact that your son only worked there for two weeks?

CARMEN: Yes. He stopped working there.

DARCY: He was fired. Isn’t that correct?

CARMEN: They fired him because he had to stop going. Because the guys, they followed him there.

Katherine Darcy gave up at that point. Carmen Estrada had proved to be a difficult witness for both sides. If anything, Jaywalker felt she’d helped her son more on cross-examination than on direct. Still, he needed to clarify one point.

JAYWALKER: Miss Darcy asked you when it was that you brought Miranda to my office.

CARMEN: Yes.

JAYWALKER: How many times did that happen?

CARMEN: Just one time.

JAYWALKER: Do you remember exactly when that one time was?

Of course she didn’t. But Jaywalker had brought his last year’s calendar book with him. It was the kind of thing you did when you were driven to prepare for every conceivable contingency. He asked permission to approach the witness, intending to show her the entry he’d made of the meeting, in order to refresh her recollection of the date. Then he remembered that without her glasses, Carmen wouldn’t be able to see it. He caught himself halfway to the witness stand, pivoted and showed the book instead to Katherine Darcy, who agreed to stipulate that the meeting had taken place on January 26th.

Four months ago.

JAYWALKER: Have you seen Miranda since that day?

CARMEN: No.

JAYWALKER: Spoken with her?

CARMEN: No.

JAYWALKER: Do you know where she is?

CARMEN: No.

He thanked her and sat down.

Later that afternoon, when they would break for the day, Carmen would come up to Jaywalker and ask him how she’d done. The truth was, she’d made up some ground on cross-examination and then redirect, to offset her disappointing performance on direct. To Jaywalker, she’d ended up as an okay witness. The problem was, Jeremy didn’t need okay witnesses; he needed nothing less than dynamite witnesses.

“You were terrific,” he would tell her, just as he would have had she been unable to remember her son’s name on the stand, or her own. What was he supposed to say, that because of her testimony Jeremy was more likely than ever to go to prison?

Jaywalker called Francisco Zapata to the stand. Zapata was a good-looking man in his mid-fifties, with a thick head of black hair turning gray at the temples. A full mustache failed to hide his ready smile. Jaywalker had spent far less time with him than he had with Carmen, and only a small fraction of the many hours he’d devoted to preparing Jeremy. Still, there was something about the man that inspired confidence and prompted Jaywalker to feel the jurors would not only like him but would believe what he had to say. It had been Zapata, after all, who’d stood up to the Raiders that day outside his barbershop, with nothing but his words and his wits.