Guilty as Sin (23 page)

Doyle's pub

T
he fact that it was barely one o'clock when the courtroom emptied out for the last time didn't stop fourteen of the sixteen jurors from bodily grabbing Jaywalker in the hallway and spiriting him off to Doyle's Pub, a local watering hole and restaurant behind the courthouse. Twice he tried to break free before giving up. Not only was he seriously outnumbered, but he soon realized that as kidnappings go, this was going to be a pretty benign one.

Standing around a hastily set table of food and drinks—none of which Jaywalker would be allowed to contribute a penny toward—the jurors took turns peppering him with questions. Where were Alonzo Barnett's daughters? Would Lieutenant Pascarella be prosecuted? What would become of poor Lance Bucknell? Why hadn't Jaywalker argued agency, when they would have acquitted Barnett just as quickly under that theory? How had Kenny Smith managed to drag Clarence Hightower down to court? What had happened to cute little Miki Shaughnessey? Why was Daniel Pulaski such a pompous prick? And why hadn't Jaywalker realized they were about to acquit Barnett, rather than convict him?

He did his best to answer the questions he could and
deflect the ones he couldn't. He lost track of how many Bloody Marys he downed, and he actually ate lunch. Not Cheez-Its or Wheat Thins, but fresh seeded rye bread covered with real chicken salad, or maybe it was tuna. And then, just when he thought the time might be ripe for him to thank his hosts and make his getaway, there was a tumultuous roar at the doorway, and the two missing jurors showed up, flanking a beaming Alonzo Barnett. They'd stationed themselves outside the Tombs, they explained, and had pounced on him the moment he'd been released.

 

To this day, Jaywalker can't tell you how long the celebration lasted or how much he had to drink before the jurors finally let him leave. He remembers being surprised to find it was dark outside when he emerged, and that he was totally disoriented, having no idea which way to walk. A friendly cabdriver not only drove him home but walked him into his building and brought him upstairs to his apartment, where his wife first sympathized with his need to drown his sadness, and then, upon learning the actual outcome of the case, put him to bed and applied some smothering of her own.

He awoke a day and a half later with a serious headache, a terrible taste in his mouth and an ear-to-ear grin that wouldn't go away for a week. That said, he did find enough time to wipe it off and put in a call to Lorraine Wilson, the clerk who'd assigned him the case more than two months earlier, just as he'd promised he would. But he needn't have bothered. She'd already heard. A lot of people had, it seemed.

 

The party at Doyle's was by no means the last Jaywalker saw or heard of Alonzo Barnett. Three weeks
after the trial, Barnett called to report on his efforts to reestablish contact with his daughters.

The news wasn't good.

Early on during Barnett's twenty-month confinement, it turned out the girls had been placed with a foster family. The Bureau of Child Welfare had been lucky enough to find a childless couple willing to take them both, no small thing. The placement had gone well enough that the couple now wanted to formally adopt the girls. Under the law, that could happen only if their father's paternal rights were first legally terminated.

A social worker for BCW confided to Barnett that the couple had been reluctant to begin proceedings to do that. Apparently they felt that would be a hurtful thing, not only for Barnett but the girls themselves. There was no mother to worry about, Barnett's wife having died years earlier, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. So BCW itself had submitted a petition, setting forth their reasons to believe that it would be in the best interest of the girls to end their relationship with their father and let the adoptions proceed.

“What do you want to do?” Jaywalker asked Barnett.

“I want to fight to get my daughters back. Will you help me?”

Jaywalker had learned a half a dozen years earlier that a case didn't end when you lost it. Now he was about to learn a corollary to that rule. A case didn't end just because you won it, either. He called a friend, a young woman he'd known at Legal Aid who'd left to practice family law. Over lunch he told her the story of Alonzo Barnett and begged her to help Barnett get his daughters back.

“I'll pay your fee,” he said, forgetting that he had nothing to pay it with.

“There won't be a fee,” she told him. “But here's the deal. You're going to be my first witness at the hearing.”

“What could I possibly contribute?” he asked. “I never even met the girls. I've never once seen Barnett interact with them.”

“That may be,” she agreed. “But you can contribute something equally important. You can testify to how he's turned his life around.”

 

And so it was that two months later Jaywalker found himself in a cramped makeshift courtroom on the eighth floor of Manhattan Family Court.

The eighth floor.

There was no jury present, and no spectators in sight. The foster parents had already testified on a previous date. Not even the girls themselves were there. In the criminal courts, the Constitution guarantees every defendant the right to a public trial. In family court, privacy reigns supreme.

Jaywalker wasn't three minutes into his testimony when he broke down. He was there to tell the judge what a changed man Alonzo Barnett was, how he'd single-handedly kicked his addiction and turned his life around, and that his arrest two years earlier was no evidence of a relapse. But the story overwhelmed him, and the notion that the state could now step in and take away the man's children left him all but unable to continue. But continue he did, and somehow he got through it. And afterward, outside the courtroom, his friend told him that he'd been terrific, that the judge had been deeply moved, and that it was highly likely that the petition to terminate Alonzo Barnett's paternal rights would be denied.

So it came as a total surprise when Barnett came to see
Jaywalker two weeks later to tell him that he'd decided not to contest the petition after all.

“My girls are becoming teenagers,” he said. “They're growing up, getting their periods, having boyfriends, going through issues at school. I don't know anything about that stuff. I grew up in prison. I don't know about periods and boyfriends and school. My lawyer tells me the girls say they're happy where they are, and that they've learned to rely on their foster parents. That's something they could never do with me. Every time they tried to rely on me, I let them down.”

“But you're their father,” said Jaywalker.

“I know that,” said Barnett. “But I have to understand that this isn't about me. This has to be about them.”

Jaywalker said nothing. All he could do was think about his own daughter, and what he'd do if anyone ever tried to take her away from him and his wife. But it wasn't the same.

“Do I dream of them?” Barnett asked no one in particular. “Every night. But in my dreams, my girls have become doctors and lawyers, grown women with husbands who go off to work, and children of their own. And they're happy, truly happy. Does it absolutely kill me to let go of them? Sure it does, it tears my guts out. But I've come to understand that it's something I owe them, something I have to do for them.”

Right before leaving, Barnett fulfilled a promise made months earlier by handing Jaywalker a sealed manila envelope with what felt like a thin booklet inside it. Opening it twenty minutes later, Jaywalker discovered a collection of handwritten poems, neatly stapled together along the left-hand margin. The poet was identified only by the initials “AB.” And though the punctuation was imperfect and the spelling erratic, the sentiments expressed were
surprisingly moving. Together they described a man's lifelong struggle to reclaim his soul. The title of the slender volume was lifted from the last word in the last line of the last poem.

“Redemption,”
it was called.

 

Shirley Levine died two years later. She had no family, and Jaywalker was one of the few who visited her in her hospital room. She was down to seventy pounds by then but still had a sparkle in her eyes. They traded war stories, Levine at last talking about the wartime exploits she'd never before shared with anyone. Jaywalker tried to match her with some stories from his undercover days at the DEA, but they were pale stuff in comparison.

Daniel Pulaski left the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor a year after the trial to run for Congress. He lost, getting twelve per cent of the vote in the Republican primary.

Miki Shaughnessey left, too, disillusioned with the job. She had a brief career doing courtroom commentary, first for Court TV and then for one of the networks, before picking up and moving out to the West Coast.

Clarence Hightower was never heard from again.

None of the detectives, agents or investigators who'd testified at the trial were ever prosecuted or disciplined in any way for being less than honest in their reports and testimony.

 

A week after the trial, Jaywalker and Kenny Smith got together over cheeseburgers and Coke, and had a good laugh over the stunt they'd managed to pull off.

“How could you be so sure the judge wouldn't let you reopen the evidence and put him on?” Smith wanted to know. “What would you have done then?”

“I'd researched the case law,” Jaywalker told him.
“That's why I told you to make certain you waited until I'd begun my summation before you came into the courtroom pretending you had Hightower with you.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Smith, standing up and coming around to Jaywalker's side of the booth. There they exchanged high fives and hugs, Jaywalker stretching on his tiptoes.

 

To this day Jaywalker continues to defend men and women charged with crimes. Even the ones who tell him they did exactly what they had been accused of doing. Even the ones he knows are guilty as sin.

Even the Alonzo Barnetts of the world.

 

And Barnett? In the twenty-five years that he lived following the trial, he stayed completely drug-free and out of trouble. He eventually retired from the restaurant he'd worked at, and toward the end got by on his modest savings and his Social Security check. And up to the very end he volunteered three days a week at a drug rehabilitation facility in the Bronx, and he mentored teenage boys in trouble. He never stopped writing poetry and living in the same apartment in the same building as before. His daughters came to visit him there on a regular basis, having found their way to him with a little help from Jaywalker. Not too long ago the younger one got married, and at her urging and with her adoptive parents' blessing, both her fathers walked her down the aisle, one on either side of her. Jaywalker knows that for a fact, because he was there to witness it. When he mentioned to Barnett how touched he was that Barnett had helped give his daughter away, Barnett replied with a smile that it was something he certainly ought to be good at.

“After all,” he explained, “I've had practice.”

 

So next time you're feeling cynical about the criminal justice system and find yourself tempted to ask some defense lawyer how he can possibly represent somebody he knows is guilty, stop for just a moment and think of Jaywalker.

Better yet, think of Alonzo Barnett.

Think of redemption.

The story you've just read is drawn from an actual case I myself tried some years ago. Thus there really was an Alonzo Barnett, a Clarence Hightower, a Trevor St. James, a Kenny Smith, and a Shirley Levine. There was even a gathering at Doyle's Pub. That said, I've changed a few things, including the names of the participants from the real-life drama, just as I've substituted Jaywalker's identity for my own.

Best of all, there really was a bunch of jurors who somehow had the collective wisdom to know what to do with a case in which the defendant readily admitted that he'd done exactly what he'd been accused of doing, but nonetheless didn't deserve to be convicted. So if you're looking to find any heroes in the story, look no further than them.

As always, I find myself deeply indebted to my fabulous editor Leslie Wainger, and to my longtime good friend and literary agent Bob Diforio. Between the two of them, they pretty much leave me alone to tell my stories, by far the easiest part of the equation.

I'm equally indebted to you, the reader of these pages, without whom I'd have no one to share my stories with. So I thank each one of you, too, and hope to see you again next time.

I live and write in a truly magical place. My wife,
Sandy, continues to be my first reader, my harshest critic and my biggest fan. My children are never far behind, and these days my grandchildren are getting into the act, too.

What more could I ask of life?