to a pretrial hearing on its admissibility. If, on the other hand, she were to say “a dozen or more,” that fact would play nicely into Jeremy’s claim of constant, continued harassment at the hands of the Raiders.
Ms. Darcy’s hesitation to answer suggested she recognized the trap. “I don’t know the precise number,” she said.
“Perhaps,” said Wexler, “you could give us a ballpark figure. Like more than five, ten to twenty, less than a thousand.”
“Less than a thousand,” she said, apparently taking the judge literally.
“She likes to play things close to the breast.” As soon as the words were out of Jaywalker’s mouth, he knew they didn’t sound quite right. He hoped the other two had missed it. But Harold Wexler never missed anything.
“I believe,” he said, “that the expression is close to the vest.”
“That, too.”
“Once again, Ms. Darcy, you’ll have to forgive Mr. Jaywalker. If only a small fraction of recent rumors are to be credited, his competence before the court is rivaled only by his legendary exploits between the sheets.”
Jaywalker could only wince, while Katherine Darcy actually blushed, something Jaywalker thought had gone extinct around 1940, along with fainting couches and lace handkerchiefs.
“Listen,” said the judge. “Can’t we resolve this case? Is there still no offer here?”
“As a matter of fact, there is an offer,” said Ms. Darcy, happy to move on. “I’ve told counsel that Mr. Estrada can have the first-degree manslaughter plea if he wants it.”
“With twenty-five years,” added Jaywalker.
“Fair enough,” said Wexler. “Mr. Jaywalker?”
“We’re not even close. He’d take five, maybe six or seven, though I’d probably have to break his arm. But twenty-five? That’s way—”
“Let me make my own position clear,” said the judge. “I’m strongly inclined to agree with Ms. Darcy’s assessment of this case. The first shot doesn’t disturb me too much. But the second one, the one at point-blank range between the eyes, as the victim lies on the ground begging for his life? I think execution is an appropriate description of that. So the defendant can have the twenty-five years and be out in twenty. Or he can go to trial, get convicted of murder, and have the exact same twenty-five years, but as his minimum, with life as his maximum. His choice. I could care less. Next case.”
If you happen to be a devotee of old black-and-white Westerns, as Jaywalker had been in his youth, you soon learn that long before the arrival of Technicolor, things were already pretty much color-coded. The good guy almost invariably sported a white hat and rode a white horse, or perhaps a palomino, if white horses happened to be in short supply. The bad guys just as uniformly wore black and rode black.
Just three weeks ago, Katherine Darcy had been the villain in Part 55 for the sin of refusing to offer a manslaughter plea. She’d quickly discovered it was a role she didn’t enjoy playing. So she’d done something about it. She’d offered Jeremy Estrada the plea, but only on the condition that he accept the maximum allowable sentence of twenty-five years. Now the judge had not only agreed with her and adopted her position as his own, he’d threatened to impose the maximum sentence for murder if the defendant rejected the offer and the jury were to convict him of the top count.
Or, put another way, in the short space of three weeks, Jaywalker had gone from good guy to bad guy. He would ride into trial wearing the black hat, astride the black horse. The judge would do everything in his power to make sure there was a guilty verdict on the murder count. Not that he would be obvious about it. Harold Wexler was much too smart to be heavy-handed in dispensing biased justice. No, he’d do it in small and subtle ways, all but unnoticeable to both a jury and an appellate court reviewing a transcript. But the cumulative effect would be absolutely devastating.
Welcome to Tombstone.
7
BRICKS AND BOOKS
Exempt as they are from New York’s speedy trial rules, murder trials tend to travel through the system more slowly than other cases. Jeremy Estrada had been arrested only seven weeks ago, a fact that normally would have put him at the very end of the line. But in court time, Jeremy’s case had actually begun with his indictment seven months earlier and was therefore now approaching its first birthday. That fact alone immediately caused it to jump half the cases ahead of it. By Jaywalker’s calculation—and he considered it his business to be able to predict such things with accuracy—they were looking at a trial sometime around the middle of next year.
That might have seemed like an awful lot of time to somebody else, but not to Jaywalker. He was firmly convinced that of the acquittals he’d gotten—and he got more acquittals than most lawyers allow themselves to dream of—a good half of them were won before the trial had ever begun. Other lawyers prepared for trial. Jaywalker over-prepared; he ultra-super-hyper-over-prepared. He organized, interviewed, investigated, interrogated, subpoenaed, photographed, recorded and visited the crime scene. And then he did all those things over again, three or four times. He totally obsessed over every single case, no matter the simplicity or complexity of the charges, or the length of the potential sentence, and he did it to a degree that was arguably pathological. His therapist had suggested that he was engaged in a struggle to the death with his father, in order to win his mother’s affection.
“They’re both dead,” Jaywalker had commented dryly from the couch. Okay, the big leather chair.
“Ahaaa!”
Make that his former therapist.
So the time clock Jaywalker now envisioned in Jeremy Estrada’s case was anything but a generous one. In Jeremy he had a defendant who gave up information only grudgingly, and who would take endless hours to prepare. Then there were the other witnesses to hunt down and interview. There was research to conduct, cases to read on justification, deadly force and extreme emotional disturbance. There was the autopsy report to reread, break down and comb for clues. There were the ballistics report and the crime-scene sketch. Not only did the list go on, the list of lists went on. And as Jaywalker thought about it, the sheer amount of work that lay ahead of him was enough to trigger a migraine.
Nor did he have the usual comfort of knowing that his adversary would be in pretty much the same bind. Katherine Darcy had been working on the case from day one, or at least day two or three, when it had first been assigned to her. That fact had given her a significant head start, a head start that no matter how hard he worked, Jaywalker would never be able to erase.
So it was time to get down to work. And work would begin with hitting the bricks.
The first thing he wanted to do was to locate and nail down defense witnesses. Jeremy’s mother and twin sister could testify to the changes they’d observed in Jeremy as a result of his torment at the hands of the Raiders. But their value as witnesses would be limited. For one thing, they hadn’t actually seen any of the gang members or directly observed any of the events that had occurred. And even if they had, their relationship with Jeremy, and their understandable loyalty toward him, would immediately render their testimony suspect. But the good news was that neither Carmen nor Julie was going anywhere. They’d be right there for Jaywalker to interview indepth and prepare to testify, whenever he got around to it.
He was much
