“I suggest you don’t show up late.”
She didn’t call him until the following afternoon. He was sitting at his computer at the time, trying to write. He’d been trying to write for several years now, trying being the operative word. Still, he had this fantasy of getting out, of running from the law and becoming a bestselling author, the next John Grisham or Scott Turow. Because the thing was, he had all these incredible stories from his years in the trenches, and he thought he knew how to write well enough to tell them. Hell, he’d been an English major once. Which was why he’d had to go off to law school after college, to learn a trade. But he really could write, no small feat for a lawyer. The problem seemed to lie elsewhere. His old therapist had suggested that perhaps Jaywalker didn’t want to get out at all, that in fact he preferred to spend the rest of his days down at 100 Centre Street, trying cases until they carried him out in a box.
He answered the phone on the third ring with his customary, “Jaywalker.”
“Hi,” said a woman’s voice he didn’t recognize. “This is Katie Darcy. From the D.A.’s office. Jeremy Estrada’s case?”
“Sure,” said Jaywalker. “Right.” His silence wasn’t the result of his not knowing who she was, or who employed her, or what case they had together. It was the first name that had caught him. Just when had she ceased to be Katherine and become Katie? And whenever it had been, wasn’t it, as Martha Stuart might have put it, a good thing?
“Is this a bad time?” she asked.
“No, no. It’s a fine time.”
For a moment neither of them said anything. As curious as he was about the reason for her call, Jaywalker wasn’t about to ask. As they used to say back in the old days, before double-digit inflation, it was her dime.
“I truly believe,” she finally said, “that Judge Wexler is dead wrong. I think the case is a murder case. But I’ve got to tell you. After spending fifteen minutes with him, I have no desire to be his punching bag for two weeks. If your client wants the Man One, he can have it.”
“With five years?”
“No,” she laughed. Actually laughed. “With twenty-five years, and not a day less.”
If the “it” wasn’t quite ice in the wintertime, it was pretty close. Nonetheless, Jaywalker didn’t want to be rude. Not when Katherine had become Katie and made them an offer of any sort, all in one conversation. “I’ll talk to Jeremy,” he said. He could have said “my client,” but he preferred to personalize him. He wanted to begin the process of getting Katie to think of Jeremy Estrada as a kid, instead of as a case.
Obviously that Katherine-to-Katie switch had gotten to him. So much so that it seemed silly to ignore it. “So,” he asked her, “when did you become Katie?”
“I’ve always been Katie,” she deadpanned. “My middle initial is T. So I’m really K. T. Darcy.”
“What’s the T stand for?”
“Ahhh,” she said. “That’s for me to know.”
He had Jeremy brought over two days later for a counsel visit. The two trips to Rikers Island had worn Jaywalker out. He figured it was Jeremy’s turn to travel.
“What’s up?” Jeremy asked, his eyes puffy from the 3:00 a.m. wake-up.
“The D.A.’s willing to give you a manslaughter plea,” Jaywalker told him. “But only if we agree to a twenty-five year sentence.”
“How much do I do on that?”
“Around twenty.” A dozen years back, truth-in-labeling had come to sentencing. Gone were the days when a judge could sentence a defendant to a public-pleasing thirty-year prison term, confident the parole board would quietly let him go home in six months.
“Do I have to take it?” Jeremy asked.
“Of course not.”
“Will you be mad at me if I don’t?”
“Jeremy, this isn’t my case. It’s yours.”
“And you’ll still fight your hardest for me, even if I don’t take it?”
“Absolutely.”
Jeremy’s mother was somewhat more empathetic.
“That’s too much time, Mr. Walkerjay. He was only a boy. They made him do it.”
Jaywalker tried to explain that he was simply the messenger. But the distinction seemed totally lost on Carmen Estrada. “Jew gotta do better for him,” she insisted. “I’m paying jew a lotta money here. Jew gotta get him less time, a lot less.” And she handed him another envelope, this one with seventy-five dollars in it.
A lotta money indeed.
They went back before Judge Wexler in mid-October. He ruled on Jaywalker’s motions, predictably refusing to dismiss the murder charge or reduce it to manslaughter. He postponed until just before trial any decision on whether the prosecution would be entitled to ask Jeremy Estrada about his prior arrest if he were to take the stand. When it came to the issue of the fairness of the lineup at which Teresa Morales had picked Jeremy out, the judge turned to Ms. Darcy.
“You’re saying the identification was purely confirmatory?”
“That’s correct.”
“They knew each other?” the judge asked.
“So to speak.”
“What she’s trying to tell you,” said Jaywalker, “is that Teresa Morales is one of the gang members who stalked the defendant for three months.”
“Gang members?” said Wexler and Darcy in unison.
Jaywalker let out a snort, a hybrid somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. The existence of gangs in the five boroughs had long been one of the city’s dirty little secrets. Gangs were a phenomenon supposedly restricted to other places, like the Watts area of Los Angeles, the South Side of Chicago, and pretty much all of Newark and Camden, New Jersey. New York City might have a colorful history of Irish Westies and Italian Mafiosi, but when it came to modern counterparts with names like Bloods and Crips and Latin Kings, the official word of the day was denial. So Jaywalker’s use of the term had bordered on burn-him-at-the-stake heresy.
“Please forgive me,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is to disparage the emperor’s new clothes.”
“You’ll have to excuse Mr. Jaywalker,” said Wexler to Ms. Darcy. “From time to time he mistakes my constant smile and jovial good humor as an invitation to make bad jokes.”
“Let me withdraw the term gang,” said Jaywalker. “How about marauding band of drug-dealing thugs?”
“How about instead we get to the point?” suggested the judge. “How many times, Ms. Darcy, had your witness encountered the defendant prior to the incident?”
Which, of course, was precisely what Jaywalker
