Joseph Teller - Overkill

JAYWALKER: Mr. Zapata, where do you live?

ZAPATA: I live in Baldaria, Puerto Rico.

JAYWALKER: What are you doing here in New York?

ZAPATA: I’m here because you asked me to come, to describe some things that happened a while ago.

JAYWALKER: Who paid for your trip?

ZAPATA: Me. I paid for it.

JAYWALKER: Do you work?

ZAPATA: Yes, I cut hair. I am a barber.

Jaywalker took him back to the end of August, nearly two years ago. Zapata had been living in Queens at the time, and working at a barbershop in Manhattan, at 112th Street, between Second and Third Avenue.

JAYWALKER: What was the name of that barbershop?

ZAPATA: Frankie and Friends.

JAYWALKER: And who was Frankie?

ZAPATA: Me. I’m Frankie.

Jaywalker walked over to the defense table, where Jeremy sat. Standing behind him, he placed his hands on his client’s shoulders.

JAYWALKER: Do you know this young man here?

ZAPATA: Yes. He was a customer of mine. I used to cut his hair, ever since he was a small boy.

JAYWALKER: What do you call him?

ZAPATA: I call him Jerry.

JAYWALKER: Do you know his last name?

ZAPATA: No, I’m afraid I don’t. Sorry.

Jaywalker directed Frankie’s attention back to the very last day of that August, and asked him if he remembered an incident that had occurred at his shop. He replied that he did. Jerry had come in around five o’clock in the afternoon, and asked if he could wait there for his girlfriend.

JAYWALKER: And what did you say?

ZAPATA: I teased him at first. I still thought of him as a boy, and here he was telling me he had a girlfriend. But then I told him sure, he could wait there.

JAYWALKER: What happened next?

ZAPATA: When the girlfriend came, Jerry opened the door for her, and she came in. He said, “Close the door!” because some guys behind her wanted to come in and get him.

JAYWALKER: Who were these guys?

ZAPATA: I don’t know their names, but I had seen them hanging around on the street all the time. I’m pretty sure they were drug dealers.

DARCY: Objection. Move to strike.

THE COURT: Yes. The last part of the answer, what the witness thought, is stricken. The jury will disregard it.

Although the admonition was meant for the jurors, it was Jaywalker whom Wexler glared at while delivering it. Both men knew full well that despite the judge’s words, disregarding the suggestion that the Raiders were drug dealers was impossible. In fact, when Frankie had mentioned it to him months ago, down in Puerto Rico, Jaywalker had explained that the judge probably wouldn’t let him ask about it. “Then again,” Jaywalker had said at the time, “if you happen to say it without my asking you…” And Frankie, as quick a study as Carmen was a slow one, had picked it up, tucked it away, and now come out with it at the perfect moment.

Once the witness was off the stand and the jury excused, Harold Wexler would castigate Jaywalker, accusing him of planting the objectionable testimony. Jaywalker would deny it, naturally, and there would be little the judge could do beyond issue a stern warning. But stern warnings scared Jaywalker about the same way that sharp cliffs scared mountain goats. The jury had heard that the Raiders were drug dealers; there was simply nothing Wexler could do to unring that bell. And in Jaywalker’s book, that was precisely as it should be. Sometimes the rules of evidence worked just fine. But occasionally you had to fine-tune them on the fly.

JAYWALKER: Did the guys come inside?

ZAPATA: No. I locked the door. But they kept shouting through the window and threatening Jerry.

JAYWALKER: What did you see?

His answer was to point his index finger to his temple, his thumb pointed upward. Jaywalker described the demonstration for the record. Then he asked the witness if he’d been able to hear any of the things the guys had shouted.

ZAPATA: They were saying they were going to get him, to kill him. They were saying bad things, using bad language, in English and in Spanish. Very bad.

JAYWALKER: Please tell us exactly what they said.

ZAPATA: They called him a son of a bitch.

JAYWALKER: Was that the worst?

Frankie smiled nervously and looked down at his feet. Just two hours earlier, he’d told Jaywalker much worse. But now he was clearly too embarrassed to repeat the words in open court.

JAYWALKER: Would your honor direct the witness to answer.

THE COURT: Yes. Use the actual language you heard.

Frankie leaned over to the court reporter and repeated the words. But the courtroom had grown stone-cold quiet, and despite his whispering, no one could have missed his answer.

ZAPATA: They called him maricon. That’s how we say faggot in Spanish. They called him pussy and…

JAYWALKER: And?

ZAPATA: And cunt-face.

JAYWALKER: How many of them were there?

ZAPATA: Six or seven. I’m not sure.

JAYWALKER: How old did they look?

ZAPATA: A few years older than Jerry. Nineteen, twenty. Something like that.

JAYWALKER: Were they all guys?

ZAPATA: There was one girl.

Frankie described how finally he’d gone outside, shutting the door behind him, and tried to talk to them. They’d quieted down after a minute or two and assured the barber they had no problem with him. “But we’re going to get him,” they’d said, pointing.

JAYWALKER: Who did they point at?

ZAPATA: At Jerry.

JAYWALKER: Did there come a time when they left?

ZAPATA: Finally. I had a van parked around the corner. I went and got it, and pulled in front of the shop. I put Jerry and his girlfriend in my van, and I took them to his house.

JAYWALKER: How did Jerry seem on the way to his house?

ZAPATA: He was very, very nervous, shaking. His face was white. His eyes, he was like he wanted to cry. But I guess he was ashamed to cry in front of his girlfriend.

THE COURT: The part about what the witness guesses is stricken. The jury will disregard it.

JAYWALKER: Mr. Zapata, you can only tell us what you saw, what you heard and what you did. Okay?

ZAPATA: Okay. Sorry.

The remark hadn’t been for the witness, of course. It had been for the contempt citation, in case Harold Wexler were to decide that Jaywalker had planted that little nugget of objectionable testimony, too. Although that one Wexler would forget.

JAYWALKER: When you got to Jerry’s building, did you leave him and his girlfriend downstairs?

ZAPATA: No, I was too scared for Jerry. I took them upstairs, and I told his mother to keep him there in the house, not let him go out.

Katherine Darcy spent only a few minutes cross-examining Zapata. Jaywalker sensed that she knew his testimony had been truthful, and that probing for inconsistencies or more detail could only get her into trouble. Or perhaps she was trying to take a page from Jaywalker’s playbook and send a message to the jurors that Zapata really hadn’t hurt her case.

DARCY: Did you see any guns that day?

ZAPATA: Real guns?

DARCY: Yes, real guns.

ZAPATA: No.

DARCY: Any knives?

ZAPATA: No.

DARCY: Did the shop have a large storefront window?

ZAPATA: Not so large.

DARCY: Did they break it?

ZAPATA: No.

DARCY: Did they try?

ZAPATA: No.

DARCY: When you went outside to talk to them, did they harm you?

ZAPATA: No.

DARCY: And they left, didn’t they?

ZAPATA: Not right away.

DARCY: But after a few minutes?

ZAPATA: Yes. After a few minutes, they left.

Francisco Zapata stepped down from the stand, and Judge Wexler excused the jury for the day. The following morning, Frankie the Barber would board a plane and fly back to Puerto Rico. Although he’d been able to testify to less than an hour of Jeremy Estrada’s torment, Jaywalker felt that Zapata’s had been a powerful presence at the trial. The simple fact was that he’d traveled some fifteen hundred miles at his own expense in order to answer questions about an incident that had taken place some twenty months earlier, involving a young man whose last name he didn’t even know. To Jaywalker, that said an awful lot about Frankie right there. Perhaps, to the jurors, it might say something about Jeremy, too.