Guilty as Sin (13 page)

It was something Jaywalker himself had wondered about. But he hadn't wanted to risk offending Kenny, who, after all, had been doing him a favor.

SMITH: I didn't want to freak him out or nothing.

SHAUGHNESSEY: So instead you're telling us he disappeared before you could serve him.

SMITH: I'm not
telling
you—it's what happened. See, if I was gonna lie about it, I'd say I served him and
then
he ran away, wouldn't I?

He actually had a pretty good point there.

 

Kenny Smith hadn't been the best witness in the history of the world, but he hadn't been the worst, either. Still, Jaywalker was acutely aware that even if the jurors were to believe every word of Smith's testimony—that it had taken him a full two weeks to find Clarence Hightower, and that when he finally had, the guy had pulled a disappearing act—that by no means established that Hightower had been working as an informer. That gap in the testimony was still there, and as long as it remained, Jaywalker was going to have a hard time arguing entrapment. As things stood, he was going to be forced to ask the jurors to make a huge leap of faith with him, to conclude that despite the denials of law enforcement and the absence of any real proof, the only way the case made sense was if Stump had been working for the Man.

Because the fact was, Jaywalker was now down to his final witness. And that witness, no matter how persuasive he might turn out to be, wasn't going to be able to shed any light on the issue. Then again, he was the witness the jurors had been waiting to hear from for a week now, ever since Jaywalker had promised them during jury selection that they would. The name of the witness, of course, was Alonzo Barnett, and the time had finally come for him to rise from his seat at the defense table and make his way to the witness stand.

But not quite yet.

The argument over whether Kenny Smith should be permitted to testify in the first place, followed by his
actual direct and cross-examinations, had taken most of the morning. Rather than begin with a new and no doubt lengthy witness, only to have to stop fifteen minutes into testimony, Judge Levine broke for lunch.

“But please be back here promptly at two o'clock,” she told the jurors, and waited until she heard a chorus of yesses. Then, turning to the tables where the lawyers sat, she added, “That means you, too.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Alonzo Barnett. They were the first two words the jurors had heard from him, and they reacted with good-natured laughter. Under the rules, they really weren't supposed to know he was a guest of the city. But of course they did. Jurors always do.

May the rest of what he has to say go over half as well as his first two words, prayed Jaywalker the atheist.

Somebody showed up

“T
he defense calls Alonzo Barnett.”

And with those five words, the man who for a week now had done pretty much nothing but sit quietly at a table rose and made his way slowly but purposefully to the witness box. Slowly, because he'd been warned by the court officers to refrain from making any sudden movements. Purposefully, because the fact was, he'd been waiting for this moment for nearly two years.

As Jaywalker watched Alonzo Barnett mount the single step that led to the witness chair before turning to face the court clerk, he had little doubt that Barnett would make a good witness, perhaps even a compelling one. By this time the two of them had spent something like fifty hours going over the facts, plumbing for the tiny details that would attest to Barnett's truthfulness, and searching for the visual images and precise wording that would stay with the jurors into their deliberations. Together they'd run through half a dozen mock direct examinations and twice as many crosses. If those numbers sound excessive, they are, and there are lawyers who would scoff at them as either absurdly inflated or totally unnecessary. But even back then, Jaywalker knew only one way to try a case.
And that way compelled him to overprepare as though his very life depended on the outcome. He might not have been able to win all of his cases, but on the increasingly rare occasion when he lost one, no one was ever going to accuse him of giving it less than a thousand percent.

Not that he wouldn't blame himself anyway.

Now, as he watched Alonzo Barnett raise his right hand as instructed and place his left upon a book that had no place in his particular religion, Jaywalker sensed the enormity of the task in front of both of them. Until this moment, the trial had pretty much followed the familiar script of all sale cases. A midlevel law enforcement official—in this instance Lieutenant Dino Pascarella—had set the table for the jurors, describing the receipt of an anonymous phone tip about a man dealing drugs. Surveillance of the man had proved of limited value. A veteran undercover officer had been brought in from out of state. That undercover officer, Agent Trevor St. James, had described his success in gaining the unwitting confidence of an associate of the suspect, a man known to him only as “Stump.” Following an introduction to the suspect, Agent St. James had ordered heroin from the target three times, each time in dramatically escalating amounts. Twice the deals had been completed. On the third occasion the target had been arrested just prior to making delivery. On his person had been not only the drugs, but some of the prerecorded money St. James had given him earlier.

Three additional witnesses had been called by the prosecution. Two members of the backup team, Agent Angel Cruz and Investigator Lance Bucknell, had described their roles in the surveillance and arrest of the defendant. And a chemist, Olga Kasmirov, had certified that on each of the
three occasions, the drugs sold or seized had contained heroin.

So it was all there, neatly laid out, wrapped up and tied with a bow. An
absolute lock,
in the jargon of prosecutors. A
dead-bang loser,
any defense lawyer would have called it. And were you to take those two polar opposites and try to reconcile them, you'd end up with a third phrase. A
guilty plea,
it was called, and it was how such differences were invariably settled.

Only not in this case.

In the matter of
The People of the State of New York versus Alonzo Barnett,
the rule had been broken, the script tossed aside. There'd been no guilty plea. Instead there'd been a trial, a trial that had finally come down to its last witness.

Now, as Jaywalker sat and listened as his client swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he knew how powerless he was to change the story the prosecution witnesses had recounted. This wasn't one of those cases, after all, where there were two competing versions of the facts. Just about everything Pascarella and St. James and Cruz and Bucknell and Kasmirov had testified to was true. Alonzo Barnett had indeed sold heroin twice and been caught in the act of doing it a third time. Now he was about to confirm that, waiving his constitutional right to silence so that he could admit it under oath in open court. He was going to tell the jurors, in other words, that he was guilty, exactly as charged.

Why?

It was a question Jaywalker had been asking for several months now, first of Barnett and eventually of himself. A question that had occurred to him even before the two of them had met, way back when Lorraine Wilson had called him with the assignment, and he'd read the charges
and examined the court file. A question that had nagged at him when he'd realized early on that only two things were likely to result from a trial. First, Barnett would end up serving substantially more time than if he had taken a plea. Second, Jaywalker would lose. Now, a week into the trial, those two things seemed as inevitable as they ever had.

Yet a few things
had
changed.

For starters, the way the investigation had been conducted had raised more questions for Jaywalker than it answered. Had there really been an anonymous phone call, or was that a fabrication? Had the case truly been made without the use of a confidential informer? Why had Stump, now known to be Clarence Hightower, been treated with such unusual deference? And why hadn't more of an effort been made to identify, arrest and prosecute Barnett's source of supply?

But it wasn't just the answers to these questions that eluded and intrigued Jaywalker. It was the way each question interlocked with the next one. Was it merely coincidental that they had all arisen in the same case? Or was there a pattern to them, a pattern that Jaywalker was for some reason unable to discern? Was he onto something that lay just out of sight? Or was his searching for it just the latest example of his penchant for tilting at windmills? A comment came back to him, something uttered by a client of his long ago, as he'd sat on a secure psychiatric ward in Bellevue Hospital. The guy's name had been Simberg, William Simberg, and he'd been locked up—again—this time for accusing the police commissioner of watching his every move or the mayor of monitoring his thought waves. Something along those lines.

“Just because I happen to be a diagnosed paranoid
schizophrenic,” Simberg had whispered to Jaywalker, “doesn't mean I'm not being followed.”

So maybe Jaywalker was just being his usual obsessive self, asking questions for which there were no answers, searching for patterns where there were none to be found. But then again…

Something else had changed, too.

Over the weeks since Jaywalker had accepted the assignment and agreed to represent a defendant who'd already been through several other lawyers, he'd gotten to know the man behind the name. The charges and the court papers and the rap sheet had promised a hard case, a career criminal who'd spent half his life in prison without ever learning a thing from it. And when Alonzo Barnett had predictably insisted on a trial in spite of his admitted and demonstrable guilt, Jaywalker had resigned himself to a menu of extremely limited choices. Talk him out of it or go down with him.

But the Alonzo Barnett who'd gradually emerged from the file had surprised him. Here was a man who'd come from absolutely nothing, been through terrible adversity, and finally managed to turn things around completely. And then, just when he'd been firmly on the road to redemption, a tragic flaw had tripped him up, a misguided sense that he still owed a debt he'd incurred long ago. Yet even when things had imploded and he'd landed back in jail, he hadn't rued repaying that debt, railed against the fates or whined over his predicament. He'd simply asked for a chance to tell his story, to speak and to be heard. And Jaywalker?

Jaywalker had been drawn to this defendant as he'd been drawn to few others in his career. There was a nobility to Alonzo Barnett, a calm, quiet grace that Jaywalker had never quite encountered before in a client, whether
through the bars of a jailhouse or across the desk in his office. In spite of Barnett's long and serious criminal record, in spite of the horribly self-destructive life choices he'd made, in spite of his ultimate willingness to trade heroin for money, Jaywalker had come to feel a unique connection to this particular man. By the time he rose from his seat and stepped to the podium to ask his first question on direct examination, he'd gotten to know and like Alonzo Barnett in a way he would have had great difficulty describing to a stranger. Hell, he'd had great difficulty describing it to his
wife,
who'd accused him of getting soft and mushy in his old age, and over an admitted heroin dealer, of all people.

So the question people would be forever asking Jaywalker would turn out to be the wrong one after all. It shouldn't be “How can you possibly represent someone you know is guilty?” The answer to that one was easy. It was because it was his job, so he did it the same way he would have done any other job, the best way he knew how. The far more interesting question, at least in this particular case, had become “How do you go about representing a defendant who admits his guilt, but whose conviction would bring about an infinitely greater injustice than his acquittal would?”

And the only answer Jaywalker had to that question was the same as he had to the first one. He would do his damnedest. He would spend the next day and a half trying to get twelve strangers to know Alonzo Barnett as well as he himself had gotten to know him. He would show them the man behind the criminal record, the man who'd somehow broken free of the revolving door of justice and finally made something of his life, only to be tripped up because, in a moment of blindness, he'd decided that no
matter what the possible cost, honoring a debt was the right thing to do.

And while Jaywalker was busy trying to show all those things and more through the strange choreography of questions coupled with answers, maybe—just maybe—some clue would shake loose from the story, some pattern would emerge from the shadows, and he'd figure out how to win what until this moment looked like an absolutely unwinnable case.

JAYWALKER: How old are you, Mr. Barnett?

BARNETT: I'm fifty-one.

JAYWALKER: Where were you born?

BARNETT: I was born on a farm outside Forked Creek, Alabama.

JAYWALKER: How far did you go in school?

BARNETT: Not very far. About the middle of fourth grade, I guess. I was nine when they put me to work tending hogs.

It had always been Jaywalker's belief that life stories count almost as much as facts do. Sure, he'd won acquittals for defendants whose backgrounds and demeanor combined to make them less than likable, but those acquittals had come hard, after long uphill battles. In Alonzo Barnett, he had a lot of raw material to work with. Here was a man who was good to look at, for starters. Even as he'd sat silently at the defense table, he'd projected an inner calmness, a quiet dignity. Once he'd
begun speaking in a resonant baritone that hinted ever so slightly at a distant West Indian heritage, those qualities had been not only confirmed but reinforced. Add to all that a backstory about an impoverished, exploited childhood on a Southern farm and you had the whole package: a defendant fully capable of winning the jurors' hearts.

Which was good, Jaywalker knew, but could get you only so far. Empathy was a great place to start, but it wasn't enough to get you across the finish line. On the way, there were the facts to trip you up. Including the nastiest of them all, that Alonzo Barnett had indeed sold heroin to an undercover agent not once, not twice, but three times. So winning the jurors' hearts wasn't going to be good enough. If Jaywalker wanted to win their votes, as well, he was first going to have to draw them a road map showing them how to get there. And here he was, three questions into direct examination, and he still had no idea how to do that.

Then again, he couldn't let a little thing like that stop him from trying, could he?

JAYWALKER: Had you learned how to read and write by the time you left Alabama?

BARNETT: No, I hadn't.

JAYWALKER: Did you ever?

BARNETT: Yes, in my forties. In prison.

JAYWALKER: How old were you when you came to New York?

BARNETT: I was fourteen.

JAYWALKER: Who did you come with?

BARNETT: Myself. I came alone.

JAYWALKER: Who took care of you?

BARNETT: I took care of myself.

JAYWALKER: Where did you live?

BARNETT: Days, I lived on the street. Nights, I slept in a shooting gallery.

JAYWALKER: What's a shooting gallery?

BARNETT: It's where drug addicts congregate to shoot up heroin or smoke crack, and then sleep it off.

JAYWALKER: How did you support yourself?

BARNETT: Any way I could. When you're fourteen, they don't let you work legally, on the books. So you hustle, you do anything you can for a meal or a buck. Some kids, they steal or sell their bodies. Me, I swept the place up, cleaned the toilets, washed up the vomit, ran errands, whatever I could.

JAYWALKER: And did any of those errands you ran get you into trouble?

BARNETT: Yes, they did.

Jaywalker ran him through his rap sheet, beginning with his first arrest ten days after his fifteenth birthday and culminating in the charges he was on trial for. The
jurors had known about Barnett's record ever since jury selection, when Jaywalker had made a point of warning them about it. Still, he went into greater detail now, for a couple of reasons. The first was preemptive. He knew if he didn't do it, Miki Shaughnessey would. The second was a little more counterintuitive. By having Barnett go into the particulars of his criminal past, Jaywalker hoped to demonstrate his client's honesty through his willingness to let them know the bad stuff. A guy who's going to level with you about having repeatedly broken the law is a guy you're going to be likely to trust to tell you the truth—about everything. Finally, Barnett's record, as long as it was, was the record of a drug seller. Almost all his arrests and convictions were for sale or possession. There were a few property crimes mixed in, but they were minor things. Nothing a Manhattan juror couldn't take in stride.