Joseph Teller - Overkill

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After sitting through his warning from Judge Wexler, Jaywalker retreated to the pens to spend one last hour preparing Jeremy for his testimony the following day. Had this been a court-appointed case, Jaywalker would have been expected to keep track of his time and how he’d spent it. But even in those situations, he’d ended up seriously under-reporting when it had come time to enter a number alongside Trial Preparation. While most of his colleagues padded their hours, some flagrantly, Jaywalker had known better than to submit an honest accounting of the sessions he’d devoted to readying his witnesses. How, for example, could he submit a voucher asserting that he’d spent over a hundred hours with Jeremy alone, when he knew lawyers who routinely put their clients on the stand after interviewing them for forty-five minutes? So he always ended up cutting his hours by more than half, fully expecting trial judges to do the same again before signing off on them.

The unreimbursed hours? He’d tended to think of them as taxes withheld by the government, and he liked to think he’d compensated for the lost income by cheating on his 1040 Form as much as he possibly could. But even if he hadn’t, he still would have gone into the pens to spend one last hour getting his client ready. He told himself it was for Jeremy, because of how much he liked the kid and what a raw deal life had given him. But that was only part of the story, of course. The rest was that he was Jaywalker, and being Jaywalker, he simply couldn’t help himself.

18

THE WITNESS IN THE HALLWAY

Thursday. Jeremy’s day.

Jaywalker had characteristically slept little. To him, the day had long loomed as no less nerve-wracking than a summation day or an argument before the Court of Appeals in Albany. Perhaps Jeremy’s case was unwinnable, one of those one-in-ten trials that no matter what he were to do, an outright acquittal would remain forever out of reach. But Jaywalker wasn’t ready to admit that. Not yet, anyway. What he did understand, what was absolutely clear, was that for them to win it, Jeremy would have to come off as a near-perfect witness. He would have to be able to describe his first-and perhaps last-encounter with love in a way that would make the jurors ache with memories of their own. He would have to be willing to go into the painful details of his torment at the hands of the Raiders, and describe the effects that torment had had on his body and his psyche. And he would somehow have to convince twelve strangers that in shooting another young man between the eyes from a distance of no more than five inches, he’d acted not as an executioner but as a blinded man trying to save his own life. And all the while, he would have to make those jurors like him-indeed, love him-enough to want to forgive him and set him free.

It was a tall order, made even taller by Jeremy’s lifelong shyness and natural reticence to talk about himself, by his limited education and intellect, and by a lot of extremely inconvenient facts. Still, Jaywalker felt that if ever he himself would be prepared to tackle the challenge, it was now. He could only hope that Jeremy was ready, too.

But as ready as he was, Jaywalker was about to discover that the vagaries that invariably accompany a trial had one of their surprises in store for him that morning. The messenger in this particular instance wore a court officer’s blue uniform and approached Jaywalker just seconds before the jurors were about to enter the courtroom.

“You’ve got a witness waiting for you,” the officer told him. “Out in the hallway.”

And since Jeremy was his only remaining witness, Jaywalker’s knee-jerk reaction was that his client had somehow managed to escape or post bail. But there was no bail; Jeremy had been held in remand status since his surrender a year ago, and not even Jaywalker had deluded himself into thinking some judge might set bail. And if his client had escaped, why wasn’t the court officer out in the hallway himself, trying to wrestle Jeremy to the floor and handcuff him?

The bewildered expression on Jaywalker’s face was enough to prompt a bit of information from the officer. “It’s a young woman,” he said. “Pretty. Eighteen, nineteen.”

Miranda.

This could be disastrous, Jaywalker realized. Here he’d taken pains to make sure she was nowhere around, knowing that the statement she’d written out for the detectives hurt Jeremy far more than her testimony could possibly help him. And now she’d shown up on her own? What was he supposed to do? Put her on the stand at Jeremy’s peril? Turn her over to the prosecution? Or accept a missing witness charge that her testimony would have conflicted with the rest of his case’s? Whichever one of those three doors he chose to open promised nothing but disaster.

He got Judge Wexler’s permission to step outside for a moment and fell in behind the court officer, who led Jaywalker up the aisle, pushed against the courtroom door and held it open for him. As Jaywalker stepped out into the hallway, he was still trying to figure out what he would say to Miranda. Could he tell her to get lost, to dart into the nearest stairwell and disappear? Would the court officer give him up, or support his claim that by the time they got out there, Miranda was nowhere to be found?

Which actually seemed to be the case.

Because as he looked all around him, Jaywalker saw absolutely no sign of her. Not her auburn hair, not her almost-too-thin body, not her arresting brown eyes.

“I’m here,” she said, standing right in front of him, so close he almost jumped.

Once, as a young boy, Jaywalker-back then Harrison J. Walker-had sneaked out to the kitchen late one night to raid the refrigerator. But even before he’d opened it, he’d noticed a generous dollop of chocolate sauce on the countertop. He’d gleefully scooped it up with his index finger and deposited it onto the tip of his tongue, savoring its forbidden richness. And the truth was that for a second or two, it really had tasted like chocolate. Then his senses had registered the fact that it wasn’t. It had actually been thick grease that had dripped from the electric meter directly above the counter.

It was that way now. So convinced had Jaywalker been that he would encounter Miranda in the hallway, that even as he stood in front of the young woman, his mind continued to compel him to believe that she’d not only dyed her hair blonde, but had put on fifteen or twenty pounds, as well, and somehow changed the color of her eyes from brown to blue-gray. And had she not spoken her name aloud at that point, he no doubt would have persisted in trying to reconcile the discrepancies between how he remembered her and how she looked today, just four months later.

“Julie,” she said.

But it didn’t register.

“Julie,” she repeated, before adding, “Jeremy’s sister?” Her voice rising on the last word, the way teenagers can turn a simple declaratory statement into a question.

“Julie!” Jaywalker half shouted, loudly enough to turn heads in the hallway. “You’re supposed to be hiding out in, in-”

“The Bronx.”

“Right,” said Jaywalker, before realizing that some of the turning heads might be attached to the jurors back in the courtroom. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he herded her into the nearest stairwell and closed the door behind them. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m going to testify,” she said.

“What?”

Not a incredulous “What?” as in “What, are you crazy?” More like the “What?” of a middle-aged man with mediocre hearing, two descriptives that actually fit Jaywalker pretty well. But it wasn’t just that. The truth was, he’d been so busy looking around for surveillance cameras that he’d allowed his attention to wander, and if he’d heard Julie’s answer, it hadn’t quite registered.

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