told him I needed to talk to him for five minutes.
JAYWALKER: What did he say?
SMITH: First he said he wasn’t Clarence Hightower. But I told him I knew who he was. Then he agreed to talk with me, but said he had to use the men’s room. Although that’s not exactly how he put it. He’d been drinking beers, he said, and a lot of them. And I guess all them beers ran right through-
THE COURT: Yes, I think we get the picture, Mr. Smith. What happened next?
SMITH: I said okay, but I waited, like, right outside the door for him. After about five minutes, when he hadn’t come out, I went in. The men’s room was completely empty, and the window was wide-open. Seems he’d ducked out before I could give him the suspeena.
SHAUGHNESSEY: Objection. Move to strike the last part.
SMITH: Suspayna.
THE COURT: Sustained. Stricken.
SMITH: Suspen-
THE COURT: It’s not your pronunciation, Mr. Smith. It’s that you’re not allowed to give us your conclusion. You told us the men’s room was empty and the window was open. That’s all you know for a fact.
SMITH: Oh, no, ma’am. I checked the stalls. I know for a fact he had to have gone out that-
The rest of his answer was drowned out by Miki Shaughnessey’s objections and Shirley Levine’s gavel. But it hardly mattered. Just as Kenny Smith had man aged to put two and two together, so could the jurors.
Not that Shaughnessey didn’t do her best to undermine Smith’s testimony on cross-examination. First she spent a full half hour going over the details of his prior criminal record. If the jurors ended up convinced that for many years Smith had been a career criminal, they also learned that his assertion that he’d been arrest-free for the past eight and a half years was true. And by candidly owning up to his past crimes without trying to minimize them, Kenny was able to offset much of the damage. Then Shaughnessey brought out that Smith had never had-or even
SHAUGHNESSEY: Anyway, why didn’t you give him the subpoena as soon as you saw him?
It was something Jaywalker himself had wondered about. But he hadn’t wanted to risk offending Kenny, who, after all, had been doing him a favor.
SMITH: I didn’t want to freak him out or nothing.
SHAUGHNESSEY: So instead you’re telling us he disappeared before you could serve him.
SMITH: I’m not
He actually had a pretty good point there.
Kenny Smith hadn’t been the best witness in the history of the world, but he hadn’t been the worst, either. Still, Jaywalker was acutely aware that even if the jurors were to believe every word of Smith’s testimony-that it had taken him a full two weeks to find Clarence Hightower, and that when he finally had, the guy had pulled a disappearing act-that by no means established that Hightower had been working as an informer. That gap in the testimony was still there, and as long as it remained, Jaywalker was going to have a hard time arguing entrapment. As things stood, he was going to be forced to ask the jurors to make a huge leap of faith with him, to conclude that despite the denials of law enforcement and the absence of any real proof, the only way the case made sense was if Stump had been working for the Man.
Because the fact was, Jaywalker was now down to his final witness. And that witness, no matter how persuasive he might turn out to be, wasn’t going to be able to shed any light on the issue. Then again, he was the witness the jurors had been waiting to hear from for a week now, ever since Jaywalker had promised them during jury selection that they would. The name of the witness, of course, was Alonzo Barnett, and the time had finally come for him to rise from his seat at the defense table and make his way to the witness stand.
But not quite yet.
The argument over whether Kenny Smith should be permitted to testify in the first place, followed by his actual direct and cross-examinations, had taken most of the morning. Rather than begin with a new and no doubt lengthy witness, only to have to stop fifteen minutes into testimony, Judge Levine broke for lunch.
“But please be back here promptly at two o’clock,” she told the jurors, and waited until she heard a chorus of yesses. Then, turning to the tables where the lawyers sat, she added, “That means you, too.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Alonzo Barnett. They were the first two words the jurors had heard from him, and they reacted with good-natured laughter. Under the rules, they really weren’t supposed to know he was a guest of the city. But of course they did. Jurors always do.
May the rest of what he has to say go over half as well as his first two words, prayed Jaywalker the atheist.
14
“The defense calls Alonzo Barnett.”
And with those five words, the man who for a week now had done pretty much nothing but sit quietly at a table rose and made his way slowly but purposefully to the witness box. Slowly, because he’d been warned by the court officers to refrain from making any sudden movements. Purposefully, because the fact was, he’d been waiting for this moment for nearly two years.
As Jaywalker watched Alonzo Barnett mount the single step that led to the witness chair before turning to face the court clerk, he had little doubt that Barnett would make a good witness, perhaps even a compelling one. By this time the two of them had spent something like fifty hours going over the facts, plumbing for the tiny details that would attest to Barnett’s truthfulness, and searching for the visual images and precise wording that would stay with the jurors into their deliberations. Together they’d run through half a dozen mock direct examinations and twice as many crosses. If those numbers sound excessive, they are, and there are lawyers who would scoff at them as either absurdly inflated or totally unnecessary. But even back then, Jaywalker knew only one way to try a case. And that way compelled him to overprepare as though his very life depended on the outcome. He might not have been able to win all of his cases, but on the increasingly rare occasion when he lost one, no one was ever going to accuse him of giving it less than a thousand percent.
Not that he wouldn’t blame himself anyway.
Now, as he watched Alonzo Barnett raise his right hand as instructed and place his left upon a book that had no place in his particular religion, Jaywalker sensed the enormity of the task in front of both of them. Until this moment, the trial had pretty much followed the familiar script of all sale cases. A midlevel law enforcement official- in this instance Lieutenant Dino Pascarella-had set the table for the jurors, describing the receipt of an anonymous phone tip about a man dealing drugs. Surveillance of the man had proved of limited value. A veteran undercover officer had been brought in from out of state. That undercover officer, Agent Trevor St. James, had described his success in gaining the unwitting confidence of an associate of the suspect, a man known to him only as “Stump.” Following an introduction to the suspect, Agent St. James had ordered heroin from the target three times, each time in dramatically escalating amounts. Twice the deals had been completed. On the third occasion the target had been arrested just prior to making delivery. On his person had been not only the drugs, but some of the prerecorded money St. James had given him earlier.
Three additional witnesses had been called by the prosecution. Two members of the backup team, Agent Angel Cruz and Investigator Lance Bucknell, had described their roles in the surveillance and arrest of the defendant. And a chemist, Olga Kasmirov, had certified that on each of the three occasions, the drugs sold or seized had contained heroin.
So it was all there, neatly laid out, wrapped up and tied with a bow. An
