cases. “Maybe he just tires lawyers out,” she suggested. “Want to give it a try?”
Jaywalker thought about it for a good second or two. Lawyers didn’t tend to tire out all that easily, especially when they were working on the clock. If anything, they were far more likely to be the ones that tired other people out. So chances were there had to be
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
As Lorraine read off the particulars of the case to him, he jotted down the indictment number, the courtroom and the adjourned date. “Let me know how it turns out,” she said.
He promised he would.
Most lawyers who take assignments wait until the day the case appears in court to start working on it. Whether consciously or not, they’re immediately relegating the court-appointed client to a status inferior to that of the retained one. Jaywalker was different, even back then. Although he was trying hard to develop a private practice and would eventually succeed, he never would differentiate between the defendants who could afford to pay him and the ones who couldn’t. Those who noticed-and they included not only colleagues but prosecutors and judges, as well-were by turns impressed with his dedication and astounded by his stupidity. The object of being a lawyer, they all understood, was to make money.
But Jaywalker and money have always had something of an uneasy relationship, and he knew even then, even back in the ’80s, that he’d never be a big earner. So already he’d begun to measure success not in terms of dollars and cents, but by other, vaguer yardsticks, such as the appreciation of those he worked for and the respect of those he worked in front of, against or alongside. To his way of thinking, this difference in how he looked at things didn’t deserve medals or accolades. The truth was, he’d simply dropped out of the money chase because he was genetically ill-suited to compete in it. Sort of like how a dog might concentrate on fetching a stick instead of trying to drive a car. Focusing on getting the best possible results for his clients, regardless of their means, and along the way treating them more like family than freeloaders, didn’t necessarily make Jaywalker a better person than his colleagues.
But it did tend to make him a better lawyer.
Not the lawyer he’d eventually become, winning ninety percent of his cases in a business where he wasn’t supposed to win half that many. But already, even back then, he was doing things no other lawyers were doing, and the results had begun to show.
So even though Alonzo Barnett wasn’t scheduled to be back in court for another week and a half, on the day following his conversation with Lorraine Wilson, Jaywalker made a trip to Part 91, the courtroom on the fifteenth floor of 10 °Centre Street where Barnett’s case was pending, right up to and including a trial, if there was to be one. There he found a friendly clerk and traded a notice of appearance for a look at the file.
To Jaywalker’s way of thinking, reading through a file before meeting the defendant had to be something like a doctor’s studying a patient’s workup before the actual exam. You weren’t going to learn everything, but you were going to get a pretty good idea of just how good or bad things were going to be. You’d learn the person’s name, as well as any other names he might be known by, his sex and his age. There’d be a printout of his past history, always important to factor in. Next there’d be a bunch of numbers, totally indecipherable to a layman but immediately telling to the trained eye. Finally, there’d be a little narrative of sorts, a paragraph or two describing just what it was that had brought the person in-whether the “in” happened to be to the office, the emergency room or, as was the case in Alonzo Barnett’s situation, the criminal justice system. But it didn’t much matter, the point being that from studying the reading materials, you were generally going to get a pretty good idea of what you were looking at and how bad it was.
For Alonzo Barnett, the news wasn’t good.
To begin with, his past history was absolutely terrible. It took Jaywalker a good five minutes just to read and decipher the NYSIS sheet, the computer printout of Barnett’s prior arrest record. By the time he’d finished jotting down the relevant highlights, he was able to count no less than five felony convictions amassed over the past thirty years. Almost all of them were for drugs, either sale or possession. In addition to the felonies, there was a scattering of misdemeanor convictions, somewhere between eight and twelve of them. And while incomplete sentencing data made it impossible to determine exactly how much time Barnett had actually served, it was apparent that he’d been behind bars for well over half of his fifty years. Make that fifty-one, since the printout was by this time more than a year old.
There was no dearth of names, either. In addition to Alonzo Barnett, the name the defendant had given at this latest arrest, he’d also been know at various times of his adult life as Alonzo Brown, Alvin Brown, Alonzo Black, Alonzo Bell and AB. Simply from the repeated recurrence of the first name, Jaywalker guessed that at least the Alonzo part was correct. The true last name was anyone’s guess. Not that it mattered. With only one name himself, Jaywalker had always made it a habit to address his clients using their first names, and he always would.
Next there were the numbers. The ones that stood out were 2, 4, 220.43 and 220.21. Again, not much to a lay-person, except perhaps one interested in playing them in some combination, whether on the street or in some Lotto game. But to Jaywalker, they immediately told a story, and once again, it wasn’t a good one. The 2 was for the number of ounces of a narcotic drug that Barnett-or whatever his name was-was charged with selling; the 4 was for the ounces he was accused of possessing. And the fancier numbers, the 220.43 and the 220.21, were the particular sections of the New York State Penal Law that he’d allegedly violated in the process of doing so, the first representing Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance in the First Degree, the second Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance in the First Degree. Both charges were A-1 felonies, indistinguishable from murder in terms of the sentences they carried. Thanks to a long-ago governor named Rockefeller and a never-ending succession of lawmakers panicked at the notion of being branded soft on crime, each charge carried a maximum sentence of twenty-five years to life, the absolute
Finally, there was the narrative. Jaywalker knew better than to look for it in the indictment. That was merely the instrument drawn up by some computer in the D.A.’s office and rubber-stamped by a grand jury. It would be couched in legalese and contain the formal accusations, but little in the way of helpful detail. So he looked instead at the Criminal Court complaint, a single sheet of yellow paper typed out the old-fashioned way the day or night Barnett had been brought to 10 °Centre Street to make the first of a long series of appearances before one judge or another.
It was in affidavit form, the named deponent being the detective who’d sworn to its truth and accuracy a year and a half ago.
The defendant, Alonzo Barnett, on or about the 5th day of October, 1984, at 1830 hours, in the vicinity of 127th Street and Broadway, in the County of New York, State of New York, did unlawfully sell to a law enforcement officer known to deponent a quantity of heroin in excess of 2 ounces, and did unlawfully possess a quantity of heroin in excess of 4 ounces.
In other words, Alonzo Barnett was looking at a direct sale to an undercover cop. That said, the phrase “law enforcement officer” caused Jaywalker to pause for just a moment. The usually language was “a police officer.” But then he looked back at the deponent’s command and noticed for the first time the initials “JCSFTF.” Although he’d never before heard of such a unit, Jaywalker felt he was on pretty safe ground translating it as “Joint City, State and Federal Task Force.” Which would explain the “law enforcement officer” bit. The undercover cop hadn’t necessarily been a cop at all; he might just as easily have been a state trooper or a federal agent on loan from the New York State Police, the DEA or the FBI, called in to work on a major investigation.
Your tax dollars at work.
There was still one more item in the file that caught Jaywalker’s attention. It was a small color photo of the defendant, no larger than the ones they stick on passports. Not your traditional mug shot with a pair of images-one full face and one in profile-above a series of numbers. No, this one was a single exposure, a shot of the defendant looking directly into the camera, taken hours after his arrest. He was dark-skinned, but not so dark that Jaywalker didn’t have to check his race under the pedigree section, where he found it listed as “black,” “African-American” not really being in vogue yet in law enforcement circles. Barnett was described as five-foot-seven inches and one hundred and sixty pounds. His graying hair made him look every bit of his fifty-one years and then some. Staring out at Jaywalker, as he’d stared at the camera a year and a half earlier, he looked neither belligerent nor defiant, the way a younger man might have. If anything, he looked sad. If he was angry, he was angry only at himself.
Before returning the file, Jaywalker jotted down the A.D.A.’s name and number. He took a look at the earlier
