As seamlessly as he could, Jaywalker gently steered the conversation toward the current charges. Unsure if, GED or no GED, Barnett could read-Jaywalker had made that mistake once with a client, and like most mistakes he made, he would never repeat it-he read the complaint aloud and then summarized the ten counts of the indictment.
“Funny,” said Barnett. “You’re my fourth lawyer on this case. But you’re the first one who’s bothered to read me the charges. Thank you.”
Jaywalker nodded but resisted commenting. He didn’t make criticizing other lawyers a habit, not unless he recognized their names and knew they were $750-an-hour blowhards. None of the ones listed on the previous notices of appearance came close to fitting into that category. So he simply said, “What can you tell me about them?”
“The lawyers?”
“No, the charges.”
He half expected Barnett to deny them, to say he was being framed, that he was the wrong guy, that he had an alibi, that he hadn’t known it was heroin. Once a client of Jaywalker’s had explained that he had diplomatic immunity. The guy was an American citizen, born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, who worked as a pipe fitter and had never once been out of the country. But he’d taken a few correspondence courses from an outfit he’d seen advertised on a matchbook, after which they’d mailed him a piece of paper with the word
Kind of like fries, he’d explained.
Alonzo Barnett wasn’t asserting diplomatic immunity. Nor was he claiming frame, ignorance, alibi or mistaken identity. Without missing a beat, he looked Jaywalker squarely in the eye and said, “The charges are true. Every word of them.”
3
“So there you have it in a nutshell,” Jaywalker would tell his listener. “Here was a five-time loser, a man who’d spent the better part of his life in state prison, charged this time with selling a pretty hefty amount of heroin, freely and unequivocally admitting that he’d done exactly that.”
To make matters worse, what Barnett had been accused of went far beyond the single sale and possession spelled out in the Criminal Court complaint. If you were to read the indictment-as Jaywalker had read it first to himself and then aloud to Alonzo Barnett-you soon realized that the case involved more than the October 5 sale and possession. In addition to those crimes, the grand jury had signed off on two earlier heroin sales made to the same “law enforcement official,” although both of those had been for amounts smaller than the two ounces required to turn them into A-1 felonies.
Jaywalker hated drug cases back then and does to this day. Which isn’t the same as saying he hates the defendants themselves. Not by any means. In fact, he’s always found it far easier to empathize with a drug defendant than he has with the vast majority of the muggers, burglars, drunk drivers and con men who come his way. Those sorts deliberately prey on their victims, or by their conduct place others in grave danger. The drug defendant’s biggest victim turns out to be himself. Sure, the politicians will tell you otherwise. They’ll tell you that drug dealers disseminate poison and destroy not only their own lives but those of their customers and their customers’ families, and that they end up costing society billions of dollars annually in health care and social services. To Jaywalker, those words pretty much describe what the tobacco and liquor companies do, year in and year out. The only difference, so far as he can tell, is that they happen to have lobbyists. And whatever you do, don’t get him started talking about the gun manufacturers.
Jaywalker’s years as a DEA agent, especially on those occasions when he was working undercover, had brought him face-to-face with enough small-time, midlevel and even major dealers to know that they were pretty much like other people, just trying to get by. If one dealer got caught-whether by Jaywalker, or some other agent or cop-there was always another one waiting in line right behind him to take his place. No, it wasn’t the dealers who were the problem, either individually or as a group. It was the system itself that perpetuated the charade. By pouring so much money into interdiction, enforcement and imprisonment, and so little into education, treatment and rehabilitation, all the lawmakers ever succeeded in doing was driving up the price of the product until it was literally worth more than gold itself. That in turn insured that people would risk everything-their health, their freedom and their very lives-to grow it, import it, distribute it and even look the other way when it was worth their while to. So no, he didn’t hate the dealers. Most of them were beaten-down users themselves, and almost all of the ones he encountered were getting worse than they deserved. If not this time, then surely the next.
What he hated were the cases.
He hated them because they made him sad. Sad in their testimony to human frailty and human suffering. Sad in their needless futility and ultimate folly. Sad in their dreary same-old, same-old familiarity. There were the direct sale, the observation sale, the buy-and-bust, and the cash-and-stash uncovered in some roach-infested tenement apartment during the execution of a search warrant. It was almost like ordering from one of those old Chinese take-out menus. Choose one from Column A, one from Column B, one from Column C. But it made no difference. You could forget about the names of the different generals and whether you wanted white rice or brown rice. Whatever you ordered was going to taste pretty much like everything else, and would come with the same stale fortune cookie. And whether they got you for possession or sale, direct or observation, you were going to end up with a one-way ticket to state prison.
They talked some more that day, Jaywalker and Barnett, but not all that much more. It was already apparent to Jaywalker that, like most cases, this one wasn’t going to trial. It couldn’t. Sooner or later Alonzo Barnett was going to have to plead guilty, even if it meant copping to an A-2 felony and accepting a minimum sentence of eight years to life. And since there was little likelihood that a parole board was going to give him yet another chance, Barnett might not die in prison, but he was going to be one very old man by the time he came out the other end of the meat grinder.
But that realization by no means ended Jaywalker’s job. Just as he’d been the first of four lawyers to bother to read the charges to Barnett, so would he be the first to listen to the rest of the man’s story, and to come to know him as an individual and not just a defendant. He would make it his business to draw Barnett out and make him talk, make him explain just why an intelligent-sounding man who had to have known better had succumbed yet again to the lure of easy money. Jaywalker would describe in detail the trial process itself, since despite all Barnett’s arrests and convictions he’d never been through a trial, having pleaded guilty each time. Jaywalker would point out the futility of changing that pattern now, and the dire consequences of being convicted after trial, when all bets were off.
In a word, he would become a friend.
Only not now.
Having resisted taking a plea for a year and a half, Barnett evidently had his reasons, whatever they were and however foolish they might be, for wanting to go to trial this time. For Jaywalker to begin that conversation now, at the very first meeting between lawyer and client, would have been totally counterproductive. It would have marked Lawyer Number 4 as no different from Numbers 1, 2 and 3. It would have undermined the very foundation of something Jaywalker needed to build between himself and his client.
Something called trust.
So they talked some more, but about other things. Jaywalker learned that Barnett had two young daughters who were somewhere in foster care. That he’d been a heroin addict beginning at age fifteen, but had been clean for almost eight years now. That, like Jaywalker, he was a Yankees fan. That not only had he taught himself how to read and write, but that he’d begun composing poems, a sample of which he agreed to show Jaywalker sometime.
They didn’t teach you in law school to ask about that kind of stuff. You didn’t need it in order to pass the bar
