Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

THE COURT: And do you still work for him?

SMITH: From time to time I do, whenever he asks me.

And as long as it don’t conflicate with my other job.

THE COURT: I see. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Sorry for the interruption, Mr. Jaywalker.

Any other lawyer would have been beaming at the inadvertent endorsement of his largesse. Jaywalker, who was unlike any other lawyer, had no need of endorsements and didn’t normally appreciate being interrupted during his examination of a witness. But even he had to suppress a grin at how nicely things had just worked out.

Pretty much as he’d planned.

JAYWALKER: And did there come a time, Mr. Smith, when I asked you to do something in connection with this case?

SMITH: Yes, there did.

JAYWALKER: When and what was that?

SMITH: About two weeks ago. You asked me to try to find a man named Clarence Hightower.

JAYWALKER: And did you try to find him?

SMITH: Yes.

JAYWALKER: And?

Smith described the places he’d gone and the things he’d done over a two-week period of searching for Hightower. Jaywalker had given him a crash course in the rules of evidence that morning, and Kenny was a pretty quick study. Understanding that whatever he’d heard on the street would be hearsay, he omitted the business about the weekly cash allowance Hightower was rumored to be getting. And having been warned that he couldn’t speculate or offer his opinion about anything, Smith refrained from suggesting that the money was supposedly coming from an uncle who didn’t exist. Still, Kenny was permitted to describe the one-and-only meeting he’d had with Hightower. That was neither hearsay nor opinion.

JAYWALKER: When did that occur?

SMITH: Two nights ago. Just after midnight Saturday. So I guess that was more like very early Sunday morning.

JAYWALKER: Where was that?

SMITH: I finally tracked him down in a bar on 125th Street called the Red Rose Tavern. I cornered him and 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 seen, for that matter-a photograph of Hightower. Next, that Smith’s imposing size could very easily have frightened Hightower-if indeed it had been Hightower-into fleeing out of a natural fear that he was about to be harmed.

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 telling you-it’s what happened. See, if I was gonna lie about it, I’d say I served him and then he ran away, wouldn’t I?

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.

“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.