Guilty As Sin

But the other half of him was dead serious. If he and Alonzo Barnett were going down, then they might as well go down in flames. There was no way Jaywalker was going to let Captain Egan’s denial be the last word of the trial. No way he was going to wake up the morning after the conviction wondering what else he could have done. He lost cases from time to time, Jaywalker did, but never because he hadn’t bothered doing something.

“Very well,” said the judge. “Who’s your witness?”

“Lieutenant Dino Pascarella.”

17

The Asp

Jaywalker’s announcement that he intended to recall Lieutenant Pascarella in rebuttal essentially ended Thursday’s court session. Pascarella, as it turned out, had called in sick that morning with a stomach ailment and, when finally reached by phone at home, said he didn’t think he’d be feeling well enough to come back to court until the next day. Which actually solved a problem Jaywalker had been worried about. Had the evidence been completed on Thursday, he would have been required to sum up on Friday, followed immediately by Shaughnessey or Pulaski. That would have put the defense at a huge disadvantage, inasmuch as it would have meant sending the jurors off for the weekend with the prosecution’s summation still ringing in their ears. Now, with more testimony scheduled for Friday, Jaywalker knew he’d be able to convince Levine to defer summations until Monday morning, putting both sides on a more even footing.

But even as Pascarella’s stomach had solved one problem for Jaywalker, it had created another. “Tomorrow happens to be a holy day in the Islamic calendar,” he’d told the judge once the jury had left the courtroom. “Normally, my client would ask that he not be required to come to court at all. But under the circumstances he’s perfectly willing to, so long as Your Honor can see to it that he’s allowed ten minutes to pray in the morning, and another ten minutes in the afternoon.”

Even as he’d heard Daniel Pulaski muttering “Who cares?” under his breath and Judge Levine saying that it should pose no problem, Jaywalker had felt Barnett tugging at his sleeve, reminding him not to forget his second request.

“One other thing,” Jaywalker had added. “Mr. Barnett would like your permission to wear his prayer garb over his clothes. It consists of a robe and a- What do you call that thing again?”

“Just tell her it looks like a yarmulke,” Barnett had whispered.

“And something that looks like a yarmulke.”

“Excuse me?”

It was a new voice, belonging to the court reporter, a young woman with blue eyes and straight blond hair. “How am I supposed to spell that?”

Levine and Jaywalker had taken turns trying, without too much success. They’d been able to agree that there was supposed to be an L in there somewhere, but neither of them had known exactly where it belonged. Shaughnessey and Pulaski had been no help at all.

A few months later Jaywalker would get around to reading the official transcript of the entire trial. Win or lose, he made a habit of doing that, figuring he was bound to learn a thing or two in the process. This particular time it would turn out to be a new word to add to his vocabulary. Today he can still picture the dictionary entry in his mind, just as he did twenty-five years ago.

Yamika (ya’ma·keh), n. 1. a brand name of motorized scooters. 2. a famous maker of concert pianos. 3. A small skullcap favored by the Chinese.

God bless the gentiles.

It was only late that night, long after Jaywalker and his wife had finished dinner and he’d kissed her goodnight and retreated to their spare bedroom/den/office/laundry-sorting room, that he was forced to ask himself exactly why he’d told Shirley Levine that he intended to recall Dino Pascarella as a rebuttal witness. The simple answer, once again, was that he’d been angry. Angry and frustrated and unwilling to quit while he was behind. And since Pascarella’s name had happened to be the one on his tongue at the moment, he’d spat it out without giving it serious thought.

That was then.

Now he had to figure out what to do about it.

He spent an hour reviewing every shred of paper he had with Pascarella’s name on it. Documents, reports, photocopies of the prosecution’s exhibits, notes Jaywalker had scribbled to himself during the testimony. Nothing jumped out at him. Yet he wasn’t ready to admit that his instincts had been wrong. He kept coming back to the nagging feeling that the guy was holding something back.

He called Kenny Smith, who’d come so close to interviewing Clarence Hightower, only to lose him out a restroom window.

“Any luck?” Jaywalker asked him.

“No, man,” said Smith. “The guy’s disappeared, with a capital D. Gone. Vanished off the face of the earth.”

Jaywalker spent another hour flipping through the rest of the reports. His head was throbbing, and he was beginning to see two of every word on the pages in front of him.

Still nothing.

He made himself a pot of strong coffee. Downed two cups black and sweet and hot enough to burn his tongue. The combination of caffeine and sugar made his heart race, but did nothing for his headache and double vision.

He pulled out his own exhibits. The way it worked was that each side was responsible for the custody of whatever items it had put into evidence. The drugs and lab reports and the money that had been seized from Alonzo Barnett all belonged to the prosecution, People’s 1 through 7. All the defense had contributed were two measly photographs. Defendant’s A was the double mug shot of Jackson Davis, showing his glass eye. Jaywalker had introduced it to show that Barnett had been telling the truth about having obtained the heroin from “One-Eyed Jack.” Defendant’s B was the single Polaroid photo of Hightower. About the only reason Jaywalker’d had for putting that in was to show the jury how ugly the guy was.

He looked at it again now, forcing his eyes to focus on the face. “Talk to me,” he told it. “Say something. Anything. Give me a fucking clue, will you?”

But the face wasn’t talking. Not the thick lips, not the broad nose, not the crooked teeth or the short gray hair. Not the double chin or the thick neck. Not the dirty gray sweatshirt or the navy T-shirt peeking out from underneath it at the collar.

Nothing.

He turned the photo over, just as he’d done in the courtroom after Captain Egan had dug it out and handed it to him. The word asp was still there, still a perfect descriptive for the man who’d set this whole case in motion some twenty months ago by insisting that another man repay an old favor. But at such a terrible price. For in a few days, for all practical purposes Alonzo Barnett’s life would be over. Already over fifty, he was pretty much guaranteed to spend the next fifteen to twenty-five years sitting in state prison. Damn near a death sentence, when you thought about it.

And the guy who’d called in the favor, who’d set the whole thing in motion? The asp? He was in the wind, nowhere to be found.

Just as he had in the courtroom, Jaywalker turned the photo back over and studied the image once more. There had to be something more to the story. There had to be. But he had absolutely no idea what it might be, what he was missing.

“The defense calls Dino Pascarella in rebuttal,” Jaywalker announced when the trial reconvened Friday