Guilty As Sin

and by the same cops.”

“Never heard of him,” said Pulaski.

“Do me a favor and check your file.”

Pulaski looked at him as though he’d been asked for a personal loan. Jaywalker readied himself to hear “No,” or some more profane form of it. But Pulaski surprised him. “Only for you, Jaywalker,” he said. And got up, walked across the room and pulled a file out from under a stack of others.

“Why? Because I’m such a prince?”

“No,” said Pulaski. “Because you’re such a pain in the ass. And I know if I don’t do it, you’ll go over my head to my boss, or to the judge, or to the fucking mayor.”

Which Jaywalker took as a compliment, or at least as much of a compliment as the man was capable of delivering. He sat and waited while Pulaski thumbed through the contents of the file.

“Okay, here we are,” he said after a moment. “You’re right.” Then, reading from the file, “‘Hightower, Clarence. Companion case. Misdemeanor possession of heroin.’ No disposition shown.”

“Pled to a discon,” Jaywalker told him. “Time served. Never violated on his parole. Terminated early, in fact. And now he seems to have disappeared.”

“So?”

“So I want to know if he’s a CI,” said Jaywalker. “Or was on this case.” Purposely using the same initials that cops and prosecutors did for a confidential informer.

Pulaski searched the file further, until he found a pink sheet of paper. He pulled it out and studied it. Then he said, “Nope.” And when Jaywalker said nothing, Pulaski slid the sheet across the desk that separated them.

Jaywalker looked at it. There was a heading, a case number and the names of the officers involved, some of them detectives, others federal agents or state police investigators. Halfway down the page was a printed item that read “Confidential Informant,” followed by a blank. The blank had been filled in in ink, in capital letters: NONE.

So much for grasping at straws.

If Hightower hadn’t been an informant, linking his high-pressure tactics to law enforcement, then Alonzo Barnett’s entrapment defense had just gone down the toilet.

6

The red-faced, two-fisted Irishman

With Alonzo Barnett stripped of his only plausible defense, Jaywalker could easily have considered himself off the hook. Here was a defendant, after all, who continued to insist upon a trial in spite of the overwhelming odds against him. And the irony of the situation was hardly lost on Jaywalker. Last time out he’d brushed aside a client’s hesitation at rolling the dice, only to come up snake eyes. This time it was the client who was being reckless, not Jaywalker.

And the way the system was set up to work, it was Barnett’s decision to make, not Jaywalker’s. Every defendant, no matter how demonstrably guilty he may be, has an absolute right to a trial, guaranteed by the constitutions of both the United States and the State of New York. And Alonzo Barnett had made it clear that he intended to avail himself of that right. But it would be a trial in name only, an exercise in going through the motions. A charade of a trial. Over in civil court they actually have a term for it that they use when the defense literally doesn’t show up and the plaintiff’s case is permitted to come in unopposed.

An inquest, they call it.

Which is pretty much what Barnett’s trial would have been, had Jaywalker not been the lawyer for the defense. Because going through the motions was something he simply didn’t know how to do. In his world, there were no charades, no inquests. He would continue to treat Barnett’s case as an absolutely must-win trial. The actual chances of winning were irrelevant. Even the fact that there was no chance of winning was irrelevant.

“Why?” his dumbfounded listener would ask him. “Why knock yourself out on behalf of some career criminal who’s admitted his guilt, has absolutely no defense, but wants to go through with a trial out of nothing but sheer stubbornness?”

By way of an answer, Jaywalker would point out that the listener’s problem wasn’t really with the defendant’s right to a trial, however doomed. “If he insisted on exercising that right, you wouldn’t criticize me for sitting next to him and going through the motions, would you? After all, somebody’s got to do it. So to fault me for being the one to sit there growing hair like some kind of Chia Pet would be the equivalent of blaming the Washington Generals just for showing up to be the designated losers to the Harlem Globetrotters, something they do night in and night out.

“You see,” Jaywalker would explain, “it’s only when I stop simply going through the motions and start to take my job seriously that you begin to have a problem. It’s not until I really try my hardest to win that you begin asking me how can I possibly represent someone I know is guilty. And my answer to you is simple.

“How can I not?”

What he wouldn’t say, and what he wouldn’t even admit to himself at the time, was that in fighting his hardest to win Alonzo Barnett’s case, Jaywalker was hoping to beat back some personal demons. The sting of that recent conviction still smarted, still kept him up at night. Suppose he could follow up losing a case he should have won-or better yet, should never have tried in the first place-by winning a dead-bang loser? Wouldn’t pulling off something like that go a long way toward evening the score? Wouldn’t it at least buy him some small measure of redemption?

All that said, without an entrapment defense, Alonzo Barnett was pretty much left with no defense at all. Jaywalker would have to settle for attacking the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses and combing their reports-once he finally got them from Pulaski-for inconsistencies. He’d have a sample of the drugs tested by an independent chemist to make sure it was really heroin. He’d even try to line up character witnesses for Barnett, although putting them on the stand would open them up to all sorts of damaging cross-examinations.

“Tell me. Is your opinion of the defendant’s reputation affected in any way by the fact that he’s been selling heroin for the past twenty years? Or that he has five felony convictions?”

Okay, maybe no character witnesses.

But how about Barnett’s boss, the restaurant owner he’d been working for at the time of his arrest? But Pulaski would no doubt use Barnett’s employment to show he hadn’t needed to deal in drugs but had made a conscious choice born out of greed. Maybe there was some way to put the defendant’s two daughters on the stand, to show what a loving father he was?

“I see,” Pulaski would say. “And perhaps you can tell us, young lady, just why it was that your sister and you were removed from your home and placed in foster care, even before your father’s latest arrest?”

It seemed that every idea Jaywalker came up with had a downside to it, a downside that far outweighed its upside. Well, he decided, there was still Clarence Hightower. Put on the witness stand by the defense, he might be able to show the jury how reluctant Barnett had been to get back into the business of dealing. While that might have no true legal significance, it was at least something. Yet Jaywalker had already struck out trying to find Hightower. And since it turned out that the man hadn’t been working as a CI, it meant law enforcement wasn’t responsible for knowing his whereabouts or duty-bound to make him available to the defense.

Although Jaywalker prided himself on doing his own investigative work, he also recognized that there were limitations to the practice. The first was when he needed to call an investigator to the stand as a witness. The second was when he needed someone who could go to a neighborhood and blend in better than he himself could.

Jaywalker was white. Alonzo Barnett and Clarence Hightower were both black. Yes, today they’d be African- American, but this was 1986, and back then they were black. So Jaywalker picked up the phone and dialed Kenny Smith’s number.