Guilty As Sin

Even as Jaywalker struggled to jot all that down in his own cryptic version of shorthand, he could feel his client nudging his elbow to get his attention. Jaywalker put him off for a moment, afraid he might miss something. Other lawyers solved the problem by instructing their clients to pass them notes whenever necessary. Jaywalker discouraged the practice, fearful that a note-taking defendant might be perceived by the jurors as a jailhouse lawyer, a smart-ass who thought he knew better than his lawyer. So only when he’d finished his note-taking did Jaywalker lean his head toward his client and ask him what he wanted.

“He’s lying,” Barnett whispered. “I went to the eighth floor. And I’ve never seen this guy in my life. Believe me, I’d remember.”

Interesting.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Did you stay there on the twelfth floor, Investigator Bucknell, in order to see which apartment Mr. Barnett came out of?

BUCKNELL: No, ma’am. I was afraid it would look too suspicious for me to still be there. Also, I could see the apartment doors had peepholes, and I was afraid I’d be visible standing there. So I left and went back downstairs and out of the building.

Shaughnessey left it there, concluding her questioning of the witness. She evidently figured that the jurors would understand that the obstacles Investigator Bucknell had run into would have stymied any member of the backup team.

As Jaywalker rose to cross-examine Bucknell, he knew better.

He knew better because on at least half a dozen occasions in his DEA days he’d encountered the same problem, or a pretty close cousin of it. Once he and another agent had gotten hold of a couple of elevator repairman uniforms and a bunch of cast-iron test weights, just so they could see what floor a dealer was heading to. On the next buy they’d hidden in a utility closet on that floor, cracking the door ajar just enough to see which apartment the guy entered. During another investigation, knowing it would be only a matter of time until they zeroed in on a particular apartment in a ten-floor building, Jaywalker had been confident enough to set up an office pool, copying the names from the tenant board onto slips of paper, putting them in a hat and charging five bucks a pick against a chance to win $250. Stymied? Stymied was nothing but a state of mind, a seeing-the- glass-half-empty sense of defeatism.

JAYWALKER: Have you ever made any undercover buys, Investigator Bucknell?

BUCKNELL: Yes, sir. I have.

JAYWALKER: Where was that?

BUCKNELL: It was at a NASCAR event in Watkins Glen.

JAYWALKER: Where’s Watkins Glen?

BUCKNELL: It’s in Schuyler County, New York. That’s over in the Finger Lakes region.

JAYWALKER: And what kind of drugs did you buy there?

BUCKNELL: It wasn’t drugs, sir. I bought a beer from a vendor when I was still a probationary trooper and not yet twenty-one years old. So it was illegal for him to sell alcohol to me.

JAYWALKER: I see. Anything else?

BUCKNELL: No, sir.

JAYWALKER: Any idea why not?

BUCKNELL: Why not what?

JAYWALKER: Why you haven’t been given more undercover assignments?

BUCKNELL: They keep telling me I’m too clean-cut looking for undercover work. I’m working on it, though.

[Laughter]

JAYWALKER: And the disguise you mentioned earlier. Was that part of your working on it?

BUCKNELL: Yes, sir. Exactly.

JAYWALKER: May I ask what you disguised yourself as?

He expected to hear “a black man” or “a kid stoned on crack,” or something like that. Maybe even a meter reader from Con Ed, or a cable TV installer, both of which Jaywalker had impersonated in his DEA days.

BUCKNELL: An encyclopedia salesman.

JAYWALKER: Excuse me? You went in there carrying a set of encyclopedias?

BUCKNELL: Not exactly. I did carry a briefcase, though. And it was definitely big enough to hold several volumes.

JAYWALKER: Sell any of them?

It was a dumb question, and Jaywalker was sorry he’d asked it as soon as it came out of his mouth. The last thing he wanted was to make fun of the witness and get the jurors feeling sorry for him. So when Miki Shaughnessey stood up, Jaywalker hastily apologized and withdrew the question even before the judge could sustain the objection.

Still, it was frustrating. There’d been a time early on in his involvement in the case when Jaywalker had hoped to learn that Clarence Hightower had been acting as a government informer when he’d prevailed upon Alonzo Barnett to bring him to somebody who was dealing weight. Had that been the case, Jaywalker would have had a viable entrapment defense for Barnett. But those hopes had been dashed by the disclosure about the anonymous caller and the form Daniel Pulaski had shown him indicating that no CI had been used in the case. Even so, it continued to look as though the task force had gone to great lengths to keep Hightower out of the case, rather than tie him to it, as might have been expected.

Now the same thing was happening at the other end. Both the undercover agent and the backup team should have been doing everything they possibly could have not only to find out who Barnett had gotten the drugs from but to make a case against that guy, as well. Surely they had black officers who could have gone into the building without arousing suspicion. Even Angel Cruz could have done the job. So what had they done? They’d gone and picked a guy whose white-bread WASPy looks all but guaranteed that he’d fail. And that “disguise” business of his? That had been nothing but a joke, a joke so lame that Jaywalker had succumbed to sarcasm.

But it got even worse. If Alonzo Barnett was telling the truth-and Jaywalker had no reason to believe he wasn’t-then Investigator Bucknell had never even made it upstairs after he’d followed Barnett inside the building. He was making up the whole twelfth-floor business in order to give himself an excuse for not having been able to see which floor Barnett had ridden the elevator to and which apartment he’d entered.

But how did you prove that? How did you show the jury that this innocent-looking, fresh-faced kid from upstate was deliberately lying through his teeth?

JAYWALKER: Tell me, Investigator Bucknell. Did you attend the team meeting prior to the third and final transaction?

BUCKNELL: Yes, sir.

JAYWALKER: And was it made clear at that meeting that Mr. Barnett was to be taken down-I’m sorry, arrested-once he was seen emerging from the building and walking back toward Agent St. James’s Cadillac?

BUCKNELL: Yes, sir. That was made clear.

JAYWALKER: So you knew this was going to be your very last opportunity to see which apartment in the building he was going to in order to get the drugs?

BUCKNELL: I suppose so.

JAYWALKER: Well, was there any question about that in your mind?

BUCKNELL: I guess not.

JAYWALKER: It was now or never, wasn’t it?

BUCKNELL: I guess.

JAYWALKER: Time to take a chance.

BUCKNELL: [No response]

JAYWALKER: And yet you chose to play it safe, didn’t you?

BUCKNELL: I’m not sure what you mean.

JAYWALKER: I mean the team already had two solid buys against Mr. Barnett at that point, two hand-to- hand sales of heroin. So what if the third buy didn’t go down exactly according to plan? You were primarily interested in the connection at that point, the source of supply. Weren’t you?

BUCKNELL: I was only doing what I’d been told to do, sir.