Joseph Teller - Overkill

So she repeated it.

“I’m going to testify,” she said, looking Jaywalker squarely in the eye.

“But your mother-”

“I don’t care about my mother,” she said. “Jeremy is my twin brother. I’ll spend the rest of my life blaming myself if I hide out somewhere and they find him guilty. I can’t do that.”

Jaywalker thought about it for a moment, but only a moment. Had he himself had a twin brother or sister facing a murder charge, he would no doubt have spoken pretty much the same words as Julie had, and he wouldn’t have let anyone talk him out of it. Still, Carmen was Jeremy and Julie’s mother. She’d hired Jaywalker, at least after a fashion, and was paying his fee, slowly if not so surely. Over a year’s time, she’d given him a little over two thousand dollars. If she were to continue making payments at that rate-a statistical rarity, given that, win or lose, the end of a trial almost always brought with it the end of payments-she would have the balance paid off sometime around 2025.

But none of that mattered.

It wasn’t Carmen’s case any more than it was Jaywalker’s. It was Jeremy’s case. Julie was nineteen, old enough to vote and enlist and get married without her mother’s permission. If she wanted to testify, it was going to be her decision, hers and her brother’s.

Jaywalker had her wait in the stairwell while he headed back into the courtroom to deal with a confused client, an impatient judge and a mother he at least owed an explanation. Then again, what could she do about it? Threaten to cut off his fee payments a few days early? Stop bringing him lunch, please God?

In the end, she did neither of those things, and Jaywalker thought he even detected a bit of motherly pride over her daughter’s decision. As for Jeremy, he was willing, if Jaywalker thought it might help. And Harold Wexler displayed both his generosity and its limits by granting Jaywalker ten minutes to prepare what would now be his next-to-last witness.

It would be enough.

JAYWALKER: The defense calls Julie Estrada.

The jurors watched intently as she made her way forward to the witness stand. If she wasn’t quite as pretty as Jeremy was handsome, she was still good to look at, with the same surprising blond hair and blue-gray eyes as her brother. And there was a hint of defiance in the way she walked and held herself, a hint that Jaywalker hoped wasn’t lost on the jurors, or misread by them.

JAYWALKER: Are you related to the defendant?

JULIE: Yes. He’s my brother.

JAYWALKER: Are you older than he is, or younger?

JULIE: I’m older, by about five minutes.

Jaywalker’s peripheral vision picked up a handful of smiles and nods in the jury box. This was going to work, he told himself. It better, came the response.

He had Julie describe the brother she’d once had, back before the summer of Miranda and the Raiders. Jeremy had been almost perfect, she recalled. He’d never been the smartest kid at school. He was, well, a little slow, according to his teachers. And he was shy. But he was polite and considerate, and he worked to bring home money to help his mother. And he was always fun to be around.

JAYWALKER: Anything else?

JULIE: [Inaudible.]

JAYWALKER: I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that.

JULIE: Nothing.

JAYWALKER: What was it you said?

JULIE: I said, “I want him back.”

As the tears ran down her face, she made no attempt to hide them. And Jaywalker, who knew how to be a gentleman and where they kept the tissues for just such moments, didn’t go to her rescue. Instead, he moved forward into June and July, and asked her if she’d begun to observe a different Jeremy.

JULIE: Yes, very different.

JAYWALKER: In what ways?

JULIE: He started seeming afraid of everything all the time. He thought he was being followed. He couldn’t sleep. He stopped eating. He’d move the food around on his plate, but he wouldn’t eat it. He jumped at loud noises. He couldn’t look me in the eye anymore. He began to stutter, and he developed these funny movements in the muscles of his face, uh-

JAYWALKER: Tics?

JULIE: Yes, tics.

JAYWALKER: As the weeks went on, did he seem to get better, or worse?

JULIE: Worse, much worse.

JAYWALKER: How so?

JULIE: He lost weight. He got these dark circles around his eyes. He would cry for no reason, or at least no reason he would talk about. And he, he-

JAYWALKER: What?

JULIE: He began…he began to wet his bed. He didn’t think we knew, my mother and I. And we pretended we didn’t. But we did, we knew.

Jaywalker let that one hang there for a few beats. He tried to imagine something more devastating to a seventeen-year-old boy than regressing into bed-wetting. The only thing he could come up with was having his mother and twin sister aware of it. And as Jaywalker opened his mouth to ask his next question, he heard a muffled sound behind him. When he turned to look, he saw that Jeremy had slumped forward and laid his head on the defense table. For a horrified second, Jaywalker thought the young man might have passed out or, worse yet, fallen asleep. But then the heaving of Jeremy’s shoulders gave him away, and Jaywalker could tell he was sobbing. And he realized that until that moment, the poor kid had thought he’d gotten away with stripping the wet sheets off, secretly washing and drying them, and then remaking his bed before nightfall. Even as Jaywalker winced at having added yet another layer of humiliation to his own client’s anguish, he caught himself wondering if the jurors had understood what had just happened, and found himself hoping they had.

Judge Wexler declared a brief recess.

Jaywalker had fully intended to ask Julie about how she’d been chased and threatened by a group of the Raiders five or six days ago. He knew he would be on shaky ground, because technically, that incident had no relevance to the murder charge against her brother. But if he could get it in, it at least showed that there had been, and still was, a bunch of thugs who went around wearing Oakland Raiders jackets and intimidating people.

But Julie’s testimony, and her brother’s reaction to it, had created a powerful moment right before the recess, a moment in which the depth of Jeremy’s suffering had been revealed in full measure. Jaywalker had no desire to water that down now with a new line of questions that had more to do with Julie than with Jeremy. He also secretly hoped that Katherine Darcy, in cross-examining Julie, would blunder into opening the door to the recent incident. So when they resumed and the jury was brought back in, with the witness once again on the stand, Jaywalker rose and announced he had no further questions of her.

Which, he knew, created a dilemma for Darcy.

He watched her closely now as she stood and walked slowly to the lectern, saw from her hesitation that she recognized immediately the trap Jaywalker had set for her. And as she began her examination, he grudgingly gave her credit for not falling into it, as much as he would have liked her to. Still, he wondered if at some point she might not get careless.

DARCY: You are the defendant’s sister, aren’t you?

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: His twin sister, in fact.

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: Is it fair to say you love your brother?

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: Very much?

JULIE: Yes.

DARCY: If he were in serious trouble, would you help him out if you could?

JULIE: Of course.

DARCY: Would you lie for him?

It was one of those questions prosecutors loved to death. If the witness were to say no, the jury would disbelieve her. What sister wouldn’t lie for a brother in serious trouble? Yet if the witness were to say yes, that she would lie, then her own answer would brand her as a perjurer unworthy of belief on the rest of her testimony. In other words, for the questioner it was one of those absolutely irresistible win-win questions, and the problem for the witness was that there seemed no way out of it.