Darcy, “that a plea to disorderly conduct is pretty much out of the question.”
“I’m glad you find the case so amusing,” she said. But on the middle syllable of amusing, her voice broke just the tiniest bit. Jaywalker caught it, and raised both eyebrows—he’d tried to master raising just one at a time, but had given up some time ago—to let her know he hadn’t missed it. But she refused to acknowledge his look, choosing instead to pretend that nothing had happened. And maybe nothing had. Maybe the poor woman had a speech defect, for all Jaywalker knew, or polyps in her throat, or a cold. He let it go.
“I try to find something amusing in all of my cases,” he told her. “If I didn’t, I’d have blown my brains out a long time ago.”
She said nothing.
“So tell me,” Jaywalker asked her. “What would you need on a Man One?” Unlike murder, on a plea to first-degree manslaughter a judge would have a broad sentencing range, from as much as twenty-five years all the way down to as little as five.
But Katherine Darcy wasn’t biting. “Let me make myself clear,” she said. “There’s not going to be an offer in this case, not to Man One or anything else. I’ve run it by my bureau chief and presented it at a weekly meeting. Nobody gets too excited about the first shot. Heat of the moment, no serious injury, not such a big deal. But as soon as they hear about the last shot, the coup de grace, everyone agrees that’s a deal-breaker. Or, like I said a little while ago, an execution. So it’s a murder case, and it’s going to stay a murder case. If some judge wants to give your guy the minimum on a plea to the charge, so be it. I have no control over that.”
Not that she needed any control over that. The minimum sentence on murder was fifteen to life. “Sounds like you want to try the case,” said Jaywalker.
She shrugged her shoulders. “If I don’t try this one, I’ll try another one. It honestly makes no difference to me.”
Jaywalker stood up. It seemed as good a time as any to leave, before he started getting really pissed off at her. In his book, it was okay for a prosecutor to be tough, as long as he or she was reasonable about it and willing to be flexible when the situation called for it. It was quite another thing to treat all cases as fungible commodities, and to act as though defendants were readily interchangeable. They weren’t interchangeable, at least not to Jaywalker’s way of thinking. Each one was a human being, however imperfect and flawed. Each one was different, and the facts and circumstances of each case were different. It might not always seem that way from a distance, but if you got close enough, you could see it was true.
“How many murders have you tried?” he asked her, trying to make the question sound innocent and born out of nothing but idle curiosity. Small talk.
She hesitated for a moment, and he thought she might be counting in her head. But it turned out she wasn’t. “This will actually be my first,” she said. “But I’ve been in the appeals bureau for eight and a half years, and I bet I’ve briefed and argued at least fifteen or twenty.”
“It’s not quite the same,” he suggested.
“I’m sure it’s not,” she said with what he took for a condescending smile. “But I’ll manage. And in the process, it’ll be a great honor to learn from the very best. I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Jaywalker, and—”
“Jay.”
“—and I’m very much looking forward to the experience. I really am.”
Riding down the elevator, Jaywalker told himself to breathe deeply, calm down and not take Ms. Darcy’s attitude personally. Working in the appeals bureau was something like practicing in a law library. You dealt with statutes crafted in legalese, abstract principles of law and cold rules of evidence. You spent your time reading transcripts of trials hundreds of pages long, sometimes thousands. They might contain each word spoken from the witness stand and every comment made on the record. But what they didn’t have, what they left out, was just as important: the stammering and sweating of the witnesses, their inability to make and maintain eye contact, the repetition of phrases or mispronunciations that, in real time and place, spoke volumes, volumes that never showed up on the printed page. The transcripts said nothing about the young man or broken woman sitting shaking in the defendant’s chair, nothing about the mother sobbing softly back in the third row. To the appellate lawyer, sentences were numbers, governed by statutory minimums and maximums and measured against statistical means and averages. They told you nothing about the filthy cells those sentences would have to be served in, nothing about the rapes that would be almost as regular as the meals, nothing about the toddlers back home who’d be growing up without fathers or mothers, or sometimes both.
But even as he told himself these things and tried to excuse Katherine Darcy’s ignorance as nothing more than the product of her cloistered career, Jaywalker wasn’t quite ready to forgive her. He’d been around long enough to know how things worked in the D.A.’s office. When an assistant was ready to handle her first homicide case, they’d hand her an absolute winner, an open-and-shut felony murder, or a case with ten eyewitnesses and a full videotaped confession. Something along those lines. Evidently they considered Jeremy Estrada’s case a perfect example. But instead of approaching it with a sense of humility over the fact that one young man was dead and another likely to grow old in prison, she was looking at it as a numbers game, in which she was determined to rack up as high a score as possible. To her, that meant no lesser plea. And if it went to trial, so much the better. Along the way, she might pick up a thing or two and hone her courtroom skills. If not, the next one would go to trial, or the one after that.
And Jaywalker’s reaction to that?
As much as he hated rolling the dice with somebody’s freedom at stake, already there was a part of him that wanted to try the case, just so to he could beat her, watch her face drop as she listened to some jury foreperson read off the words Not guilty. See if that didn’t knock that smug little smile off her face, along with those library-issue glasses of hers. And not just because he wanted to see how pretty she might be without them, either.
Though that was surely part of it.
He had his first real sit-down meeting with Jeremy Estrada two days later, in an attorney visit room on the thirteenth floor. A lot of buildings don’t even have thirteenth floors; they’re generally considered bad luck and therefore undesirable. At 100 Centre Street, just about everyone had had bad luck and was considered an undesirable, so somebody must have decided that the number made no difference.
Jeremy showed up looking tired and wearing an orange jumpsuit, courtesy of the Department of Corrections, and a pair of old sneakers. Jaywalker, who had no cases of his own on this day, was decked out in his casual Friday finest, faded jeans and a denim work shirt with a frayed collar. It also served as his casual rest-of-the-week finest. A lot of things were important to Jaywalker, but clothes weren’t one of them.
“What time did they wake you up?” he asked Jeremy, once they’d taken seats across from one another, separated by a wire-mesh partition.
Jeremy smiled. “About three o’clock,” he said.
“Sorry.” He knew the drill. Up at three, to be herded into the dayroom at four to wait a few hours. Onto the bus at seven or seven-fifteen. At the courthouse by eight, eight-thirty. Up to the pens at nine. After that, it all depended on when your lawyer showed up. That could mean as early as nine-thirty if you were lucky enough to have a Jaywalker, or as late as four in the afternoon if you weren’t. If your case got called in the morning session, you made the one-o’clock bus and were back on Rikers by three. If you missed the one o’clock, you had
