Guilty As Sin

years. He’d lined up a bed in a halfway house and a job washing dishes in a restaurant, the New York Department of State having informed him that despite the qualifications spelled out in his written request, his felony convictions disqualified him from obtaining a barber’s license. In his plan for parole, he’d listed among his goals reestablishing contact with his daughters and eventually getting them back from foster care.

His parole officer told him to get real.

Still, by the time of his release Barnett had won the trust of the brothers, earned his GED and kicked his heroin habit for good. He hadn’t realized it at the time he’d signed up, but practicing Muslims didn’t do drugs, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes or curse their god. Had the Koran only thought to prohibit flying airplanes into buildings, it might be a different world we live in today. But this was 1981, a full two decades before that particular loss of innocence.

On the day of Barnett’s release, Clarence Hightower was the last one in line to high-five him and wish him success on the outside. Hightower himself was doing a ten-to-twenty bit for aggravated assault and wouldn’t be getting out for another three years. There was no mention of favors done or favors owed.

There’d be time for that later.

Barnett and Jaywalker were interrupted by a corrections officer, an old-timer known to Jaywalker by face, though not by name. Which was no surprise. Jaywalker had always been good at faces, while names and phone numbers eluded him. So the exchange of greetings became something of a guy thing.

“Hello, Counselor.”

“Hey, big guy. Howya doon?”

Big Guy reached one hand through the bars and handed Barnett a couple of sandwiches wrapped in paper, and a cardboard cup. Then, without asking, he did the same for Jaywalker. The COs all knew Jaywalker, knew he spent more time in the pens talking with his clients than all the other lawyers combined. Knew he worked straight through the lunch hour. And knew he never turned down a day-old cheese sandwich or a lukewarm cup of something that passed for coffee. They considered him one of their own, and they looked after him and, by extension, his clients.

“Thank you,” Barnett and Jaywalker said as one.

“You got it,” said Big Guy, moving on to the next pen.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, lawyer and defendant, separated by a dozen thick iron bars and the fact that one of them would be going home when the visit was over, while the other was already home, in a manner of speaking.

“So,” said Jaywalker once they’d finished eating, “what happened next?”

As he always did, Barnett waited a few seconds before answering. And this time he took additional time to count on his fingers-backward, it would turn out. “Summer of 1984,” he said after a while. “I’ve been out three years. Drug free. Have an apartment to call my own. Not much to brag about, but still…I’m working as a grill man at a different restaurant, a better one. Got visitation with my daughters. Haven’t missed a single reporting date with my parole officer. Life is good.”

Jaywalker nodded. These were significant accomplishments for anyone. For a recovering heroin addict and five-time felon, they defied all the odds.

“So who do you think shows up?”

Jaywalker didn’t bother answering. He knew Barnett’s question was a rhetorical one. They’d both known who was going to show up.

“Catches me as I’m sitting on my stoop at the end of the day, minding my own business. Says he’s been out a month and can’t catch a break. Can I help him out?”

Jaywalker could only wince. He knew where this was going.

“So I reach into my pocket,” said Barnett, “fish out whatever I’ve got on me and offer it to him. I think it was maybe eighteen dollars, something like that.”

Reminded Jaywalker of some of his fees.

“‘I don’t want no charity,’ Hightower tells me.

“I ask him what he does want.

“‘You know,’ he says. ‘I been outa action all this time, I don’ know who’s doin’ what, who to see, who to go to.’

“I ask him, ‘For what?’

“‘To get hooked up,’ he tells me. ‘I need to get back in the business.’ The bidness, he called it. Which is right when I tell him he’s got the wrong guy. I give him the eighteen dollars or whatever it was. I wish him luck. I stand up and I go inside. Lock the door behind me.”

Oh, thought Jaywalker, what a wonderful ending to the story that would have been. An act of charity toward an old friend, a debt repaid. But of course it wasn’t the end of the story. Jaywalker knew that every bit as well as Barnett did. Had it been the end of the story, the two of them wouldn’t be sitting where they were today, talking through the bars.

No, Clarence Hightower would keep coming back. He’d come back five times, six times, each time with a slightly different story. Only they all had the same ending. “He needed to find a connection,” Barnett explained. “He understood that I was finished with that stuff, and he said he was okay with that. But he also knew that I knew who was still around, who was still doing.”

Doing.

“He kept saying that all he wanted was for me to hook him up, to put him together with someone who was in action. He had this customer, he said, a real live one who was looking to buy weight. Had all sorts of cash money. All I’d have to do was find somebody to cut him into. Once I’d done that, I could walk away from it. Keep a piece of the pie if I wanted to, turn it down if I didn’t.”

“And?”

“And I kept saying no.”

“Until…” said Jaywalker.

“Until the seventh time, when he started crying like a baby and threatening to kill himself and all that. Until he played his hole card, and reminded me how he’d saved my life when no one else was going to. And telling me that because of that I owed him now. And you know what?”

“What?”

“He was right,” said Barnett. “He had saved my life, and I did owe him. When it came right down to it, that was the truth. And it was a truth that no matter how hard I tried to look away from it, it kept looking me in the face.”

“So…?”

“So I said okay. The next day I made a few phone calls and found out who was doing what. It wasn’t hard. And I paid off the favor, just like he asked. Just like he told me I owed him.”

They talked for another forty-five minutes about what had followed. Jaywalker jotted down some details on a yellow pad. But he hardly needed to. He knew the story. He’d known it before he’d become a lawyer ten years earlier. He’d known it from his undercover days as a DEA agent. Unbeknownst to both Clarence Hightower and Alonzo Barnett, the customer-the “real live one” with all sorts of cash money, the one looking to buy weight-was the Man. And the story wouldn’t end until both men had been arrested, Hightower for possession and Barnett for sale.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Replaying the story in his mind that night, Jaywalker was struck by the almost tragic aspect of it. Here was a guy who’d done everything right. Given up drugs, found a job and a place of his own, kept his nose clean, even reestablished contact with his daughters. And then along comes his past to catch up with him. He says no half a dozen times, only to be told he has a debt to repay, a favor owed. So he does it. And as a result, his whole world comes crashing down.

Jaywalker could recite the various defenses to crimes laid out in the Penal Law, as well as others mandated by the Constitution, remembered from law school, or grounded in case law or common law. He knew which were complete defenses and which were partial ones, which were primary defenses and which were affirmative ones.