“I hope you find the perp. And, Detective?”
“Yes?”
“This conversation never happened.”
Which was just fine with Jaywalker.
Not that Ralph Anunziatta turned out to be all that much help. “Yeah,” he said, “I remember the guy. Sorta. I wanted to revoke him, but before I could do anything about it, they’d let him cop out to a disorderly conduct. Not even a crime. So the most I could do was to write him up for a technical violation and continue him on parole. Then, next thing I know, someone upstairs cuts him loose, fuckin’ terminates him.”
“Isn’t that unusual?”
“A little,” acknowledged Anunziatta. “But they say they gotta cut the numbers. Anyway, one less case for me.”
What had been one less case for Parole Officer Anunziatta was the source of one more concern for defense lawyer Jaywalker. His wife caught him staring off into space that evening at the dinner table. Not that Jaywalker was any stranger to staring off into space. But his wife had an uncanny way of knowing just how many galaxies away he was at any particular moment and asked him what the problem was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m representing this guy on a drug sale-several sales, in fact. And I don’t know, I’ve just got a funny feeling…”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve got another innocent defendant,” his wife begged. Not too many years back, she’d lived through one of those with him. Or if not exactly with him, under the same roof. Jaywalker’s obsession with trying to extricate a young man mistakenly accused of a series of knifepoint rapes had taken a tremendous toll on their marriage, their daughter and their bank account.
“No,” he said. “Actually, he’s as guilty as sin. But still…”
His wife said nothing. They’d been married long enough by that time for her to stay away from the
But still…
Later that night, his wife and daughter tucked into bed, Jaywalker sat at the kitchen table, scribbling thoughts on the back of an envelope. By the time he was finished, it might not have been the Gettysburg Address he’d composed, but he was looking at a fairly impressive list of pretty unusual developments in the way in which the criminal justice system had chosen to deal with Clarence Hightower.
First there was the fact that Hightower had never been charged in connection with the sales Alonzo Barnett had ended up making. According to Barnett, the guy he’d introduced Hightower to would deal with Hightower and his customer only through Barnett. This was hardly unusual. After all, the guy knew Barnett, not them, and this had been his way of insulating himself. But the acting-in-concert law being as broad as it was, surely Hightower could have been accused of sale, too. Only all they’d charged him with had been possession. Then again, he hadn’t actually been present at the sales, and perhaps the cops hadn’t known the full extent of his involvement. Maybe he’d just been lucky, was all.
Then there’d been the fact that despite his having been on parole, Hightower hadn’t had a detainer lodged against him following his arrest. But stuff like that happened all the time, Jaywalker knew. It was a big system, and people messed up.
Next was the fact that they’d let him plead down from a misdemeanor to a violation. Not that Jaywalker himself didn’t get dispositions like that for his own clients every day. But usually not for those with horrendous records who owed parole time. Still, Jaywalker’s conversations with the two assistant district attorneys who’d been involved had been unremarkable and hadn’t left him with the feeling that either of them had singled Hightower out for special treatment. Maybe the stars had just aligned favorably for Clarence Hightower in court.
A bit more interesting was the fact that Hightower had never had his parole revoked for the possession arrest. True, he’d ended up pleading guilty to a violation, and a nondrug one at that. Which was exactly the sort of disposition Jaywalker would have tried to get him, had he been the lawyer. So once again, nothing too out of the ordinary.
But what about the early termination of Hightower’s parole? Sure, Ralph Anunziatta had been happy to have one less guy to supervise. But hadn’t he said he’d
Why did any and all of this matter to Jaywalker? Well, back in his DEA days, there’d been a couple of times when he and his team had arrested a midlevel dealer known to have an upper-level source of drugs. So what they’d done was offer the guy a deal right on the spot. “You promise to cooperate with us and give us your connection,” they’d tell him, “and we’ll cut you loose right now.” If he agreed, they’d
Had the cops done just that with Clarence Hightower? Arrested him, “flipped” him and let him stay out on the street so he could help them make a case against Alonzo Barnett? And had they then added the wrinkle of arresting him for possession later on, in order to cover their tracks? It could explain everything. The lenient treatment in court, the early termination of parole, even the disappearance.
And it mattered. It mattered tremendously.
Because if Clarence Hightower had indeed been working as an informant when he prevailed upon Alonzo Barnett to hook him up with somebody, Jaywalker had at least the makings of a theoretical defense for Barnett. He could claim entrapment, arguing that but for Hightower’s overbearing persistence, Barnett never would have committed the crimes he’d been arrested for. Criminals twist each other’s arms all the time, trying to get accomplices for some illegal venture or other. But unless the twisting rises to the level of real physical force or a credible threat to use it, the
Not that entrapment defenses ever really succeed. And the reason is pretty simple. In suggesting that a jury should acquit on entrapment, the defense lawyer is conceding guilt while asking for an acquittal based upon something that sounds very much like a technicality. He’s essentially telling the jury, “Sure, my client did exactly what the prosecutor claims. But he did it only because the cops asked him really hard to do it.” Might as well blame the Tooth Fairy, or claim “The Devil made me do it.” In all the years he’d practiced and would continue to practice, Jaywalker would read of exactly one entrapment acquittal. It involved a money-laundering case made against a man named John Z. DeLorean, perhaps best known for supplying the wheels Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd used to drive back to the future.
When a man’s drowning, he’s desperate enough to grab at any straw that comes drifting his way, however unlikely it is to keep him afloat. So as much as he hated to do it, the following day Jaywalker made it his business to pay another call on Daniel Pulaski, the assistant district attorney on Barnett’s case. He did so unannounced, to make sure Pulaski wouldn’t have time to prepare himself for whatever it was Jaywalker wanted. It was the same reason he went there in person, rather than making his request over the phone. He wanted to see Pulaski’s reaction when he popped the question.
Pulaski rewarded him by making him wait forty-five minutes before seeing him. “So,” he said, after they’d exchanged semipleasantries. “What can I do for you?”
“You can tell me,” said Jaywalker, “what you know about Clarence Hightower.”
“Who?”
If it wasn’t a genuine expression of complete ignorance of the name, it sure came off as a damned good imitation of one.
“Clarence Hightower,” Jaywalker repeated. “He was arrested at the same time and place as Alonzo Barnett,
