Instead, he took a deep breath, told himself to be nice, and put in a call to Alan Fudderman, the civil lawyer whod stood up for Jeremy at his arraignment. The guy whod helped Carmen when theyd turned off her electricity, and then tried to plead Jeremy guilty to murder, hoping for probation.
They met at Fuddermans office, a cramped cubbyhole in a high-rise on lower Broadway. The walls were stained and peeling, and there was so much paper on top of the desk that separated them that Jaywalker had to sit up straight just to see over it. But Fudderman himself turned out to be as affable in person as hed been adrift in criminal court. He didnt bother making copies of the documents in his file; he simply turned over all the originals to Jaywalker.
Im glad theyve found someone who seems to know what hes doing, he said. I was a little out of my element.
Happens to the best of us, said Jaywalker. Though it never happened to him. But that was because he wouldnt have been caught dead in civil court, or housing court, or before the Taxi and Limousine Commission. He didnt write wills, handle divorces or do closings. There were even criminal cases he wouldnt touch, because they required some specialized knowledge he lacked. The list included prosecutions involving securities, wire fraud, stock transfers, money laundering and the like. Just about anything calling for a knowledge of how money worked. Money, Jaywalker had come to realize long ago, was something he was no good at, whether that meant understanding it, earning it, investing it or simply keeping it from evaporating into thin air.
He seems like a real nice kid, said Fudderman.
Yeah, Jaywalker agreed. He does.
I hope you can do something for him.
Me, too.
Jaywalker thanked him for his time. At the door, Fudderman extended his hand. Jaywalker had to shift the file from one arm to the other in order to shake with him.
Let me know, said Fudderman, if theres anything else I can ever do for you.
Thanks, said Jaywalker.
Come to think of it, he was two months behind with his electric bill.
That night, Jaywalker passed up watching a Yankee game. It actually wasnt that much of a sacrifice, as he thought about it. They were already so far out of contention for a playoff spot that hed given up on them and was instead already looking forward to football season and the Giants.
His wife had accused him of being a fair-weather fan, and there was some truth to it. Shed never understood how he could turn off a game just because his team was a couple of runs or touchdowns behind, but could stay up past midnight to catch the final out of a blowout victory. Hed tried to explain to her that it was all about enjoyment; if it looked like his guys were going to win, every minute of it was fun, if it didnt, why would he want to torture himself?
He seems like a real nice kid, said Fudderman.
Yeah, Jaywalker agreed. He does.
I hope you can do something for him.
Me, too.
Jaywalker thanked him for his time. At the door, Fudderman extended his hand. Jaywalker had to shift the file from one arm to the other in order to shake with him.
Let me know, said Fudderman, if theres anything else I can ever do for you.
Thanks, said Jaywalker.
Come to think of it, he was two months behind with his electric bill.
That night, Jaywalker passed up watching a Yankee game. It actually wasnt that much of a sacrifice, as he thought about it. They were already so far out of contention for a playoff spot that hed given up on them and was instead already looking forward to football season and the Giants.
His wife had accused him of being a fair-weather fan, and there was some truth to it. Shed never understood how he could turn off a game just because his team was a couple of runs or touchdowns behind, but could stay up past midnight to catch the final out of a blowout victory. Hed tried to explain to her that it was all about enjoyment; if it looked like his guys were going to win, every minute of it was fun, if it didnt, why would he want to torture himself?
But suppose they make a comeback? shed asked him more than once.
From fourteen down?
It could happen, she would say.
God, how he missed her. More than a decade had passed now since her death, and he still reached out for her in the dark of night.
Enough, he said out loud.
He did that from time to time. Talked to himself in the privacy of his studio apartment. Hed worried about it at first, wondering if it was an early symptom of dementia. But then hed convinced himself that it really wasnt so different from whistling in an empty elevator, or singing to himself in his car on the rare occasions when he drove it.
Enough, he said again. And walked over to his desk/dining room table/laundry sorter/ironing board, where hed placed the accordion file Alan Fudderman had given him that afternoon.
He untied the little stringy thing that kept it closed and dumped the contents onto the table. There wasnt much. A copy of the indictment; a warrant issued long ago for Jeremys arrest; his rap sheet, showing one prior for marijuana possession but no disposition for it; a paper copy of what must have been a morgue photo of Victor Quinones, too grainy to really show what hed looked like; a sketch of the crime scene, indicating where the fistfight had taken place and where Quinones had been found by the first responders; the autopsy report and death certificate; a police property voucher for two shell casings from a 9-mm pistol and a small piece of deformed lead; and a few other miscellaneous documents, none of which promised to give up any secrets.
He spent the next two hours reading, rereading, making notes and organizing the material into subfiles. Then he made a list of things that werent there, that Katherine Darcy had notably declined to turn over to Alan Fudderman, and that shed no doubt resist turning over to Jaywalker. By the time he was finished, the list dwarfed the items shed actually supplied.
He walked over to the TV set, turned it on and found the Yankee game. A graphic at the top of the screen told him they were down 73 in the bottom of the eighth. He watched Derek Jeter strike out on a nasty slider in the dirt, clicked it off and went to bed. Bed being a pullout sofa that he hadnt bothered pulling out in three months, or whenever the last time was that hed had company of the sleepover variety.
The next morning, when other lawyers were taking cabs downtown to their offices, corporate clients or courthouses, Jaywalker took three subways to the Upper East Side. Not the Upper East Side of uniformed doormen, handsomely groomed poodles and multimillion dollar apartments, but the Upper East Side of housing projects, bodegas and car repair shops. The upper Upper East Side.
He could have hired a private investigator to do it, but there wasnt room in his fifty-eight dollar retainer to do that. Besides, Jaywalker had long been his own investigator. His background as a DEA agent equipped him for the task, and though he no longer carried a gun-it was somewhere in the bottom of his closet, probably, but hed had no reason to dig it out for years now, and would no doubt shoot himself in the foot as soon as he did-he was no stranger to bad neighborhoods, having spent half his life in them. The secret was to dress the part, and then look and sound like you belonged, all talents that came easily to him.
Using the crime-scene sketch as a road map, he got off the train at 110th Street and walked east to Third Avenue. There he turned left and headed north. It was a little after eight oclock, early afternoon by Jaywalker standards, and the sun was just beginning to clear the buildings to his right. He kept to the west side of the avenue, where he could feel its warmth. By afternoon, he knew, hed be looking for shade.
He walked three blocks before crossing over and turning into the courtyard that would take him into the little pocket park carved out of the redbrick buildings of the housing project. He found the benches drawn in the sketch and marking the site of the fistfight, where back in September two young men had squared off. One of them had thought it was going to be a fair fight. The other had come packing, strapped for the occasion, as they said on the street. From there, Jaywalker paced off the distance to the spot where Victor Quinones had found death in the form of a 9-mm bullet.
If thered been blood on the pavement, or the chalked outline of a human body, it was long gone, washed clean by a hundred rains. If thered been witnesses other than the ones Katherine Darcy promised were around and available, they werent showing their heads this morning. Jaywalker straightened up and looked around in all directions. It was almost as though he was hoping the crime scene would speak to him, reward him for his pilgrimage. All he needed was some clue, some tiny nugget that might help him understand just what had driven Jeremy Estrada to take the life of another young man. Something he could take away with him and bring to the office of a tough prosecutor who, when she looked at the case, saw only an execution. Or to a jury, if all else failed.
But there were no clues in sight this morning, no tiny nuggets.
The park was saying nothing.
He met again with Carmen Estrada, Jeremys mother. She came to his office that afternoon. Or, technically, the office of a colleague, Jaywalker having given up his own space in the building back at the time of his suspension, some five years ago.
About the killing and the events that had led up to it, Carmen was short on specifics but long on loyalty.
It wasnt Jeremys fault, Mr. Johnnywalker. It was all on account of the problem he had with those guys, she explained. On account of the girl, Miranda. The guys, they made him do it. Its all their fault, the accident that happened.
Over the weeks and months to follow, he wouldnt get much more than that out of her. It was easy to see where Jeremy had learned the habit of summarizing instead of going into factual detail. To Carmen, the harassment her son had been subjected to would always be the problem, just as the deadly culmination of that problem would always be the accident.
Before leaving, she reached down the front of her dress, and for a frightening moment Jaywalker thought she might be about to undress. Not that it would have been a first for him. But hed already decided that Jeremy must have gotten his good looks from his fathers side of the family. And loyalty, while surely a virtue, was hardly what Jaywalker looked for in a bed partner.
But when Carmens hand reappeared from between her breasts, it was clutching an envelope, folded in half. Here, she said. Its for jew.