Joseph Teller - Overkill

Either way, as one might readily imagine, the recipe was pretty much guaranteed to make for a very lost weekend indeed.

Monday.

Told to be in court by ten o’clock, Jaywalker showed up at nine-fifteen and had to be let in a side door by a sympathetic court officer, the captain in charge of the part. Although he was as ready to sum up as he would ever be, that fact provided Jaywalker with not an ounce of comfort. He found it impossible to sit, excruciating to make small talk with the court personnel. He walked out of the courtroom, visited the pay phone down the hall, the men’s room, the windowsill by the elevator bank.

His old friends the butterflies were back.

Another lawyer, a good one, wandered over and was about to say something. Noticing Jaywalker’s blue suit, ironed white shirt and unwillingness to make eye contact, he caught himself, mumbled, “Good luck,” and walked off. Having been there himself, he could tell, just like that.

Back in the courtroom, Jaywalker forced himself to sit down at the defense table and arrange his notes, notes he would never so much as glance at once he began. Jeremy was brought in and seated next to him, and they hugged. Katherine Darcy showed up, and spectators-many of them Jaywalker groupies-began filling up the front rows of the audience section. A Jaywalker summation had come to be regarded as something of an event at 10 °Centre Street, something not to be missed.

Without fanfare, Harold Wexler entered by a side door and took the bench. “Are you ready, counsel?” he asked.

Darcy and Jaywalker answered that they were. The butterflies added their agreement by increasing the beating of their wings to a level somewhere beyond excruciating.

“Bring in the jury,” Wexler told the captain.

They entered a moment later, the twelve regular jurors and four alternates. Earlier they’d stowed their travel bags in the jury room, just in case their deliberations should go overnight, and given their lunch orders to a court officer. Despite the fact that those with young children, old parents or needy pets had had a full weekend to make arrangements, they looked worried to Jaywalker. No doubt the thought of a night in “jail” was weighing heavily on their minds. Then again, Jeremy Estrada had by that time spent something like the past three hundred and eighty nights in a real jail, and was likely to spend the next twenty-five years in state prison. Even as the judge was telling the jurors they were about to hear the lawyers’ summations and explaining that summations weren’t evidence, Jaywalker found himself idiotically trying to do the math, twenty-five times three hundred and sixty-five, when he became aware of a disturbance coming from the audience section of the courtroom, behind him. He turned around in time to see a court officer talking with a group of five or six young men standing in the aisle and trying to find seats.

Harold Wexler was on his feet, banging his gavel and ordering other officers to remove the jurors from the courtroom. But the officers, evidently mishearing or misunderstanding him, must have thought he meant for them to remove the young men instead. As a result, two officers rushed to join their colleague, one of them dramatically vaulting over the wooden rail that separated the front of the room from the audience section. And sixteen jurors, quite naturally, turned as one to see what was going on.

What they saw were three uniformed court officers trying their best to usher half a dozen uniformed young men out the door. Uniformed, to the extent that every one of the young men wore either a black jacket, sweatshirt or T-shirt with an identical motif. Specifically, the menacing one-eyed, crossed-sword likeness of an Oakland Raider. Nor were the young men leaving willingly, with several of them loudly and pointedly objecting that it was a public courtroom and they had every right to be there. One of them added, “What? You gonna throw us out just ’cause we’re Latino?”

Judge Wexler finally succeeded in getting the jury removed and the Raiders brought before him in handcuffs. He had each of them identify himself by name and nickname, under threat of an immediate thirty-day contempt citation.

“Alesandro Comacho,” said the first. “They call me Sandro.”

“Esteban Izquierdo. Shorty.”

“Diego Herrera. I don’t got no nickname.”

“Wilfredo Rivera. Me neetha.”

“Jorge Santana. Just Santana.”

“Who put you up to this?” Wexler demanded to know.

“Nobody put us up to nussing,” said Just Santana.

“Do you know this man here?” the judge asked, pointing at Jaywalker.

“No.”

“Ever seen him before?”

“No.”

“Spoken to him?”

“No.”

To the court clerk, Wexler said, “Get me Judge Sternbridge.” Then, turning back to the five in handcuffs, he asked them what they thought they were doing there.

“Exercisin’ our constitutional right to assemblify,” said Shorty. “Jus’ like cops do when wunna them gets murdered. Nobody stops them from showin’ up at the trial, do they?”

He actually had a point there.

“Showin’ support for a fallen brotha,” chimed in Sandro.

“Get them out of here,” Wexler ordered the captain. “Now.”

“Maricon,” muttered one of the Raiders, but no one could say exactly which one.

Too bad the jurors missed that, thought Jaywalker, smiling ever so slightly, but apparently not so slightly that Wexler missed it. “Mr. Jaywalker!” boomed the judge. “If I find out you had anything to do with this, anything at all, you’ll think that three-year suspension of yours was nothing but a hiccup. We’ll be in recess for fifteen minutes.”

And all Jaywalker could think was that somehow, in all the excitement, the butterflies had vanished. Well, that and one other thought.

Johnny Cantalupo.

“It is twenty months ago,” Jaywalker told the jurors once they’d reassembled in the courtroom. “September. Labor Day, in fact. You and I are waking up to a beautiful morning with temperatures promised in the low eighties. Perhaps it’s a family gathering we’re looking forward to this day, a picnic or a barbecue.

“Up on 115th Street, in the tiny apartment he shares with his mother and twin sister, Jeremy Estrada wakes up, too. Has it been one of those nights of little or no sleep, of vivid nightmares? Has he been up with stomach cramps or diarrhea? Is it one of those mornings when he has to take his sheets, roll them into a ball and hide them in the bottom of his closet because he’s wet his bed and doesn’t want his mother and sister to know? Even though you and I now understand that they did know, and were just too kind to let on.”

The image of Jeremy and his urine-drenched sheets blindsided Jaywalker for a moment, just as, during his opening statement a week and a half ago, the first encounter between Jeremy and Miranda had blindsided him. But this time Jaywalker refused to let it stop him, and he managed to continue without interruption. Still, he could tell that the jurors hadn’t missed it, could sense that they were every bit as affected by Jeremy’s plight as he himself was.

He reminded them how it had been six days since the barbershop incident, six days during which Jeremy hadn’t once left the apartment. And there would no doubt have been a seventh such day, and more to follow, had not Miranda called to say she was taking her little sister and niece to the carnival.

“And Jeremy? Jeremy dares to think that in the midst of the carnival there’ll be safety. With all those hundreds of people, with dozens of police officers mingling with the crowd, what can possibly go wrong?