Overkill. Joseph Teller
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then he had a sudden inspiration. Plan C, Variation 2, he would have called it, had he been talking to himself at that moment. Instead of simply serving the D.A.’s office by dropping a copy off at their seventh-floor reception desk and having them time-stamp the others, he decided he might as well peek in on his good friend Katherine Darcy and personally deliver her a courtesy copy. Just that morning there’d been an article in the Times on global warming. The polar ice caps, it seemed, were melting at an accelerated rate, far more rapidly than computer models had predicted just two years ago. So who was to say? Could the icy Ms. Darcy, too, have thawed just a bit over the past few days?
Apparently not.
“You could have just left this at the reception desk, you know.”
Perhaps it was something he’d said or done, or not said or done. Maybe it was his faded jeans and work shirt, or the fact that he hadn’t shaved in two days. Or his showing up without an appointment, announced only by a voice over the intercom at the front desk. But Jaywalker had the distinct feeling it was none of those things.
Back when he’d left the Legal Aid Society and gone into practice for himself, law schools were only beginning to turn out women graduates in significant numbers. As a result, women filled only a tiny minority of slots in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. The early arrivals, or at least those whom Jaywalker encountered, struck him as uniformly young, bright and attractive. They also tended to be extremely guarded, as though afraid some slightly older male defense lawyer was going to somehow take advantage of them.
It took some doing, but over time Jaywalker managed to overcome that obstacle. It helped considerably that he soon developed a reputation as a good lawyer who could be trusted. But he learned some things along the way, too. Accustomed to calling male prosecutors by their first names without giving it a second thought, he discovered that if he did the same thing right off the bat with a female prosecutor, she was likely to take offense, thinking he was hitting on her. Or, worse yet, hitting on her to gain some edge in the courtroom. So he got smarter about that, and more careful in general.
As the ranks of women prosecutors gradually grew from a small minority to a virtual majority, the problem largely disappeared. It might simply have been a matter of Jaywalker’s getting older and no longer being perceived as on the prowl. Because right around the same time, he’d noticed that the checkout girls at the supermarket had stopped smiling at him seductively; they were by that time much more interested in the young managers or the boys bagging groceries.
Katherine Darcy was no checkout girl, and no recent law-school graduate. At forty, or whatever she was, she had nothing to fear from the twenty-five and thirty-year-old defense lawyers. Them she could treat as schoolboys. But Jaywalker had turned fifty not too long ago. When he straightened up, he was an even six feet. He’d kept his hair, even though it was currently working its way from gray to white. And enough women had told him he was good-looking, at least in a craggy sort of a way, that he’d come to accept it as a fact. Was it possible that in Katherine Darcy’s mind he posed a threat, much the same way he had to a younger generation of her officemates, twenty years ago? Was she perhaps afraid Jaywalker was approaching her not as a fellow lawyer sharing a case with her, albeit on opposite sides, but as a predator seeking to take advantage of her because he equated being a woman with weakness? Or, more simply put, maybe she thought he was trying to get into her pants so he could get into her files.
As if.
“That’s how it’s usually done,” she was telling him now.
“How what’s usually done?” Getting into her pants?
“Serving papers. At the reception desk.”
“Right,” said Jaywalker. “It’s just that I had a couple of questions and thought if you weren’t too busy…” He let the thought hang there, inviting her to say that of course she wasn’t too busy.
“What kind of questions?” she asked, making a point of looking first at her watch and then at the clock on the wall.
“Well,” he said, “for one thing, have you by any chance heard of the Raiders?”
“Aren’t they a baseball team?”
“Close,” he said without bothering to correct her. His wife had had the same problem. Football, baseball, basketball. To her, they’d all been “sports,” and pretty much interchangeable. In her mind, and perhaps in Katherine Darcy’s, too, each fall the players put their bats and gloves in storage and replaced them with helmets and shoulder pads. In wintertime, when the cold chased them indoors, they simply stripped down to shorts and undershirts. They were still the same players and teams; only the uniforms and equipment had changed.
“The Raiders are also a group of young thugs,” said Jaywalker. “A loosely organized gang who made it their business to target my client.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Why don’t you ask Teresa Morales about them?” he suggested.
“What makes you think she’s heard of them?”
“Because if my client’s telling the truth, and I think he is, she was one of them.”
“You’re trying to tell me it was a coed gang?”
“Hey,” said Jaywalker. “Welcome to the twenty-first century. No more stay-at-home moms or glass ceilings. If Mother Teresa were still with us, she might’ve traded in her rosary long ago and be packing a Ruger.”
And in spite of herself, Katherine Darcy actually broke into something vaguely resembling a smile before quickly regaining control. “You said you had a couple of questions,” she reminded Jaywalker. “What’s the next one?”
“I see you gave Mr. Fudderman a copy of the autopsy protocol,” he said. “But I didn’t notice a serology or toxicology report.” Both would show the presence of drugs or alcohol in Victor Quinones’s system at the time of his death, the former in his blood, the latter in tissue samples removed from his body.
“Those take a little longer to come back.”
“It’s been eight months,” said Jaywalker. He knew from experience that “a little longer to come back” generally meant two to three weeks at most.
“I’ll look into it,” said Katherine Darcy. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Has the name Sandro come up at all? Or Alesandro?”
“Not that I can recall. Why?”
“Because,” said Jaywalker, “he seems to have been the leader of the gang.”
She shrugged.
“How about Shorty? Or Diego? Or Mousey?”
Three more shrugs.
“How about Man One and five years?”
That brought a real smile from Katherine Darcy. “You don’t quit trying, do you?” she asked with what Jaywalker took to be a hint of grudging admiration.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “And what’s more, before this case is over, I’m going to get you to like me, or at least to realize I’m not out to hurt you. And I’m going to get an offer out of you, too. Because as you begin to look into some of these questions, I think you’re going to come to see that this isn’t really a murder case after all.”
“I like you just fine,” she said, though it came out sounding like Barack Obama telling Hillary Clinton that she was likeable enough. “But you’re never going to get an offer out of me. Never.”
Two days later, Jeremy’s mother met Jaywalker at the information booth of the courthouse. He would have preferred having her come to his office, but there was that little impediment of not having an office for her to come to. And he seriously doubted that she could survive climbing the three flights of stairs to his apartment.
“This is Julie,” she said of a pretty young