Guilty As Sin

would have called it. And were you to take those two polar opposites and try to reconcile them, you’d end up with a third phrase. A guilty plea, it was called, and it was how such differences were invariably settled.

Only not in this case.

In the matter of The People of the State of New York versus Alonzo Barnett, the rule had been broken, the script tossed aside. There’d been no guilty plea. Instead there’d been a trial, a trial that had finally come down to its last witness.

Now, as Jaywalker sat and listened as his client swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he knew how powerless he was to change the story the prosecution witnesses had recounted. This wasn’t one of those cases, after all, where there were two competing versions of the facts. Just about everything Pascarella and St. James and Cruz and Bucknell and Kasmirov had testified to was true. Alonzo Barnett had indeed sold heroin twice and been caught in the act of doing it a third time. Now he was about to confirm that, waiving his constitutional right to silence so that he could admit it under oath in open court. He was going to tell the jurors, in other words, that he was guilty, exactly as charged.

Why?

It was a question Jaywalker had been asking for several months now, first of Barnett and eventually of himself. A question that had occurred to him even before the two of them had met, way back when Lorraine Wilson had called him with the assignment, and he’d read the charges and examined the court file. A question that had nagged at him when he’d realized early on that only two things were likely to result from a trial. First, Barnett would end up serving substantially more time than if he had taken a plea. Second, Jaywalker would lose. Now, a week into the trial, those two things seemed as inevitable as they ever had.

Yet a few things had changed.

For starters, the way the investigation had been conducted had raised more questions for Jaywalker than it answered. Had there really been an anonymous phone call, or was that a fabrication? Had the case truly been made without the use of a confidential informer? Why had Stump, now known to be Clarence Hightower, been treated with such unusual deference? And why hadn’t more of an effort been made to identify, arrest and prosecute Barnett’s source of supply?

But it wasn’t just the answers to these questions that eluded and intrigued Jaywalker. It was the way each question interlocked with the next one. Was it merely coincidental that they had all arisen in the same case? Or was there a pattern to them, a pattern that Jaywalker was for some reason unable to discern? Was he onto something that lay just out of sight? Or was his searching for it just the latest example of his penchant for tilting at windmills? A comment came back to him, something uttered by a client of his long ago, as he’d sat on a secure psychiatric ward in Bellevue Hospital. The guy’s name had been Simberg, William Simberg, and he’d been locked up-again-this time for accusing the police commissioner of watching his every move or the mayor of monitoring his thought waves. Something along those lines.

“Just because I happen to be a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,” Simberg had whispered to Jaywalker, “doesn’t mean I’m not being followed.”

So maybe Jaywalker was just being his usual obsessive self, asking questions for which there were no answers, searching for patterns where there were none to be found. But then again…

Something else had changed, too.

Over the weeks since Jaywalker had accepted the assignment and agreed to represent a defendant who’d already been through several other lawyers, he’d gotten to know the man behind the name. The charges and the court papers and the rap sheet had promised a hard case, a career criminal who’d spent half his life in prison without ever learning a thing from it. And when Alonzo Barnett had predictably insisted on a trial in spite of his admitted and demonstrable guilt, Jaywalker had resigned himself to a menu of extremely limited choices. Talk him out of it or go down with him.

But the Alonzo Barnett who’d gradually emerged from the file had surprised him. Here was a man who’d come from absolutely nothing, been through terrible adversity, and finally managed to turn things around completely. And then, just when he’d been firmly on the road to redemption, a tragic flaw had tripped him up, a misguided sense that he still owed a debt he’d incurred long ago. Yet even when things had imploded and he’d landed back in jail, he hadn’t rued repaying that debt, railed against the fates or whined over his predicament. He’d simply asked for a chance to tell his story, to speak and to be heard. And Jaywalker?

Jaywalker had been drawn to this defendant as he’d been drawn to few others in his career. There was a nobility to Alonzo Barnett, a calm, quiet grace that Jaywalker had never quite encountered before in a client, whether through the bars of a jailhouse or across the desk in his office. In spite of Barnett’s long and serious criminal record, in spite of the horribly self-destructive life choices he’d made, in spite of his ultimate willingness to trade heroin for money, Jaywalker had come to feel a unique connection to this particular man. By the time he rose from his seat and stepped to the podium to ask his first question on direct examination, he’d gotten to know and like Alonzo Barnett in a way he would have had great difficulty describing to a stranger. Hell, he’d had great difficulty describing it to his wife, who’d accused him of getting soft and mushy in his old age, and over an admitted heroin dealer, of all people.

So the question people would be forever asking Jaywalker would turn out to be the wrong one after all. It shouldn’t be “How can you possibly represent someone you know is guilty?” The answer to that one was easy. It was because it was his job, so he did it the same way he would have done any other job, the best way he knew how. The far more interesting question, at least in this particular case, had become “How do you go about representing a defendant who admits his guilt, but whose conviction would bring about an infinitely greater injustice than his acquittal would?”

And the only answer Jaywalker had to that question was the same as he had to the first one. He would do his damnedest. He would spend the next day and a half trying to get twelve strangers to know Alonzo Barnett as well as he himself had gotten to know him. He would show them the man behind the criminal record, the man who’d somehow broken free of the revolving door of justice and finally made something of his life, only to be tripped up because, in a moment of blindness, he’d decided that no matter what the possible cost, honoring a debt was the right thing to do.

And while Jaywalker was busy trying to show all those things and more through the strange choreography of questions coupled with answers, maybe-just maybe-some clue would shake loose from the story, some pattern would emerge from the shadows, and he’d figure out how to win what until this moment looked like an absolutely unwinnable case.

JAYWALKER: How old are you, Mr. Barnett?

BARNETT: I’m fifty-one.

JAYWALKER: Where were you born?

BARNETT: I was born on a farm outside Forked Creek, Alabama.

JAYWALKER: How far did you go in school?

BARNETT: Not very far. About the middle of fourth grade, I guess. I was nine when they put me to work tending hogs.

It had always been Jaywalker’s belief that life stories count almost as much as facts do. Sure, he’d won acquittals for defendants whose backgrounds and demeanor combined to make them less than likable, but those acquittals had come hard, after long uphill battles. In Alonzo Barnett, he had a lot of raw material to work with. Here was a man who was good to look at, for starters. Even as he’d sat silently at the defense table, he’d projected an inner calmness, a quiet dignity. Once he’d begun speaking in a resonant baritone that hinted ever so slightly at a distant West Indian heritage, those qualities had been not only confirmed but reinforced. Add to all that a backstory about an impoverished, exploited childhood on a Southern farm and you had the whole package: a defendant fully capable of winning the jurors’ hearts.

Which was good, Jaywalker knew, but could get you only so far. Empathy was a great place to start, but it wasn’t enough to get you across the finish line. On the way, there were the facts to trip you up. Including the nastiest of them all, that Alonzo Barnett had indeed sold heroin to an undercover agent not once, not twice, but three times. So winning the jurors’ hearts wasn’t going to be good enough. If Jaywalker wanted to win their votes, as well, he was first going to have to draw them a road map showing them how to get there. And here he was, three questions into direct examination, and he still had no idea how to do that.

Then again, he couldn’t let a little thing like that stop him from trying, could he?