Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

But having only one prosecution witness remaining created something of a logistical problem for Jaywalker. As ready as he was to put Alonzo Barnett on the stand, he didn’t want to begin with him on a Friday afternoon, only to have his testimony broken up by the weekend. Worse yet, doing so would give Miki Shaughnessey two full days to refine her cross-examination.

“I’m afraid I won’t be prepared to go forward with the defense case until Monday morning,” he said.

The judge shot him a look. In all the years she’d dealt with Jaywalker, he’d never once been unprepared to do anything. Overprepared? Yes. Absurdly overprepared? To a fault. Like the time he’d convinced her he was fluent in Swahili because he’d corrected an interpreter’s translation of a witness’s answer. All he’d done, of course, had been to memorize what the witness had said at an earlier hearing in response to the identical question. But the word had quickly gotten around the courthouse that Jaywalker wasn’t to be fooled, not in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Creole, Patois, Hindi, Farsi, Mandarin, or any of a dozen other languages and dialects. While it was as far from the truth as it could have been, Jaywalker wasn’t about to deny the rumor.

“Monday it shall be,” said the judge, evidently knowing that, were she to push Jaywalker to begin earlier, he’d no doubt come down with a migraine, set off a fire alarm or pull some other stunt to get what he wanted. So she turned to the jurors and told them they’d be working only a half day on Friday.

From their reactions, you would have thought they’d been given a reprieve from a death sentence.

That night, long after his wife had kissed him goodnight and headed to bed, Jaywalker pored over his file on the chemist. Very few defense lawyers insisted that the chemist be brought in to testify. The vast majority were more than willing to concede that the drugs were heroin or cocaine or angel dust, or whatever the lab report said they were. Indeed, Jaywalker himself often stipulated to the same thing, especially in cases where he had a viable defense of some sort to focus on. But in this case he had no defense, viable or otherwise. So whether out of mounting frustration or mere stubbornness, he’d told Miki Shaughnessey some time ago that he wanted the chemist brought in to testify.

“Why?” she’d asked, the surprise evident in her raised eyebrows.

“Because,” was all the answer he’d been able to give her.

Now, as he reviewed and re-reviewed lab reports he’d already reviewed a dozen times before, he tried his hardest to find a legitimate reason that, at least in hindsight, might justify his refusal to stipulate as something other than mere childish petulance.

It took him until nearly three o’clock in the morning to find one, but he did. The problem was that by that time he was so exhausted that he had no way of knowing whether it was a meaningful point or not. He finally fell asleep, but not before wondering if all those other defense lawyers didn’t have the right idea. Instead of driving themselves relentlessly over every little thing, they conserved their energy so they’d be ready to recognize a real opportunity if one came along, then pounce on it. Jaywalker was too tired to recognize anything anymore, let alone pounce on it.

Miki Shaughnessey’s direct examination of the chemist was as basic as it could be. The previous afternoon she’d asked Jaywalker what he hoped to accomplish with the witness, and Jaywalker had answered that he honestly had no idea. It had been a truthful response at the time he’d made it. Shaughnessey had then volunteered that she’d checked and found that most of her colleagues had never once had to call a chemist at trial, having relied each time upon the defense lawyer’s willingness to stipulate as to what the chemist would have said if put on the witness stand.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jaywalker had told her. “I’m just frustrated with your cops and agents. I want the jurors to hear what a truthful witness sounds like.”

“You don’t believe the cops have been truthful?”

“About the basics, sure. But,” he’d added, “not about some of the little things. Though I’m honestly not sure why.”

“What kind of little things?” she’d wanted to know.

Either she’d been genuinely curious about why her witnesses might have done a bit of fudging here or there, or she’d been looking to gain a tactical advantage from whatever Jaywalker might tell her. But she was young and cute, and Jaywalker, though happily married, had always been a sucker for the combination. So he’d decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh, the business about the anonymous caller,” he’d started with. “That just doesn’t ring true. My client wasn’t dealing out in the open on his stoop. In fact, he wasn’t dealing at all until Clarence Hightower came along and twisted his arm. Next, the fact that Hightower was never charged with sale, even though he introduced St. James to Barnett for the express purpose of buying drugs. Finally, the fact that no real attempt was ever made to get to Barnett’s connection. That should have been the ultimate goal of the operation. Instead they send some overgrown Boy Scout to do the job, and then tie his hands to make sure he doesn’t find out anything.”

“So what does all that have to do with the chemist?” Shaughnessey had asked.

“Nothing,” Jaywalker had admitted. “Like I said, I’m frustrated, and I don’t know what else to do.”

That had been then.

Now it was Friday morning, and Miki Shaughnessey rose to announce that the People were prepared to call their fourth and final witness, Olga Kasmirov.

Just as not all doctors are lucky enough to be on staff at the Mayo Clinic or the National Institutes of Health, so too are there chemists in this world who don’t pull down fat six-figure salaries at DuPont or Eli Lily. Scan down the rolls of the psychiatrists who perform the half hour court-ordered evaluations for the criminal justice system, or the technicians who spend their days peering through old-fashioned microscopes at drugs bought or seized on the streets of the city, and in no time you’ll think you’ve stumbled upon a veritable roster of United Nations delegates. Except that the pay isn’t nearly as good.

So the name Olga Kasmirov barely registered on Jaywalker’s radar, any more than did her explanation two minutes into her testimony that while she’d once been a leading expert in polymer conductivity in the former Soviet Union, these days she made her living analyzing samples of white powder or green vegetation at the New York City office of the United States Chemist.

Shaughnessey’s direct examination was just that-direct and to the point. She spent a few minutes asking the witness about her education and experience, but she needn’t have bothered; Jaywalker quickly rose and offered to stipulate that the witness qualified as an expert in the analysis of controlled substances. Thanking Jaywalker for the concession, Shaughnessey moved on to the drugs bought and seized from Alonzo Barnett.

SHAUGHNESSEY: With respect to the substance from the first buy, what did you do?

KASMIROV: I emptied the powder onto a scale and determined its net weight to be 1.01 grams. We use the metric system. That comes out to about one twenty-eighth of an ounce. Then I conducted several tests for the presence of heroin hydrochloride, and the results were consistently and conclusively positive.

SHAUGHNESSEY: How about with respect to the second buy?

KASMIROV: For the second buy, I found the weight to be 26.02 grams. That’s a little less than one ounce. As before, tests for the presence of heroin hydrochloride proved positive.