Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

He was, in other words, a Jaywalker defendant.

Finally Shaughnessey turned her attention to the one area Jaywalker expected his client to have real difficulty with. She asked him who’d sold him the drugs.

Not that Jaywalker hadn’t anticipated the question; he had. Still, asking a man to name and identify his drug connection is pretty much the same as asking him to become a snitch. And the problem is only heightened when the man being asked has done time and spent years living under a code that reduces snitches to the lowest of the low. In prison you have your general population, comprised of inmates who are free to mingle with each other. Free to mingle is something of a misnomer in this case, of course, and is generally limited to mealtimes and yard time, with an extra hour thrown in now and then.

Then you have younger inmates, those below twenty-one or maybe nineteen, who are almost always separately housed for a variety of reasons, including preventing them from expanding their knowledge as apprentices of hardened criminals. After them come homosexuals-prison administrators will no doubt get around to adopting the word gay eventually, but seem in no particular rush to do so-psychiatric cases, the very old, the very weak, sex offenders, and anyone else who might be considered a likely target of violence. A corrupt cop or public official, say, or a transgendered individual. And finally, way down at the bottom of the barrel where the scum settles, the snitches.

Alonzo Barnett had no interest in being labeled a snitch, certainly not while he was in jail, and not now, when the overwhelming odds were that he’d soon be shipped back to prison. He’d told Jaywalker that, and Jaywalker hadn’t needed to ask him why. His suggestion to Barnett had been to make up a name and an apartment number on the twelfth floor of 345 West 127th Street, where Investigator Lance Bucknell claimed he’d gone during the third transaction. After all, according to Barnett, Bucknell had been lying; the apartment Barnett had actually gone to was on the eighth floor. In either event, almost two years had passed, and even were Barnett to now pinpoint a particular apartment, no judge in his right mind was going to sign a search warrant on information that stale. Which narrowed it down to the handful of judges who would.

Barnett had initially balked at the suggestion. He didn’t like the idea of supplying a name and identifying an apartment, even if the name was fictitious and the apartment wasn’t the one he’d gone to. But over the weeks they’d talked about it, he’d been forced to agree that if asked, he had to come up with something; he couldn’t refuse to answer the question. There was the doctor-patient privilege, the priest-penitent privilege, the husband-wife privilege, and lately the president-advisor privilege. But no one had gone so far as to argue the existence of a dealer-supplier privilege. Not even Jaywalker.

But even as Alonzo Barnett had acknowledged that he’d have to answer the question if it were put to him, he never had told Jaywalker what his answer might be. Eventually Jaywalker had stopped pressing him, figuring that if and when the time came, Barnett would deal with it as best as he could. Though to Jaywalker’s way of thinking, it had always been a matter of when, rather than if.

And now they were there.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Did you indeed go to 345 West 127th Street on each of the three occasions?

BARNETT: Yes, I did.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Exactly as Investigator Bucknell testified?

BARNETT: Yes, ma’am.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And did you go to that building to obtain heroin from your connection?

BARNETT: I went there to obtain heroin. I have a bit of problem with your use of the term connection. I went to the person who I’d agreed to introduce Mr. Hightower and his friend to. When he refused to meet with either of them, I agreed to take the money and get the drugs for them. But if you want to call him my connection, I’m willing to use your term.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Thank you. And did you in fact go to the twelfth floor, as Investigator Bucknell testified you did?

BARNETT: No, ma’am, I did not.

SHAUGHNESSEY: You did hear Bucknell say that?

BARNETT: Yes, I did. Absolutely.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Are you telling us he lied when he said that?

BARNETT: I honestly don’t know why he said that. He may have been lying. He may have been mistaken. He may have made it up to cover for the fact that he wasn’t able to see where I went. All I can tell you is the truth. And the truth is, I didn’t go to the twelfth floor.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Ever?

BARNETT: Ever.

SHAUGHNESSEY: So when Investigator Bucknell testified that he rode in the elevator with you and saw you press the button for the twelfth floor, that never happened?

BARNETT: That’s right. That never happened. If that man had gotten onto the elevator with me, I would have immediately stepped off and walked out of the building. He has cop written all over him.

SHAUGHNESSEY: So where did you go?

BARNETT: To the eighth floor.

SHAUGHNESSEY: What apartment?

BARNETT: Eight-oh-five.

SHAUGHNESSEY: Whose apartment was that?

BARNETT: A man they use to call “One-Eyed Jack.” Got the nickname because he’d lost an eye in a shoot-out. I never did know his real name. But not too long after my arrest, the word got around that he was a snitch, an informer for the police. So he left town in a hurry.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And just how do you happen to know all that?

BARNETT: I’ve been on Rikers Island going on two years now. Guys don’t have much to do out there except talk about other guys. And One-Eyed Jack was one of the guys they talked about.

SHAUGHNESSEY: And you expect me to believe that?

BARNETT: Most respectfully, ma’am, I don’t care too much what you believe. What I care is what these folks sitting over here believe. [Points to jury] And I suspect they can recognize the truth when they hear it.

To her credit, Miki Shaughnessey plunged on without taking time out to wipe the egg off her face. She got Barnett to admit that with the exception of the twelfth-floor/eighth-floor business, just about everything else her witnesses had testified to was true.

“So why should they lie about that?” she asked him.

“I have no idea,” said Barnett. “Maybe you should ask them.”

His response marked the only time in a lengthy cross-examination when he verged on testiness. But with that single exception, Alonzo Barnett had been that rarest of witnesses who somehow managed to exceed even Jaywalker’s expectations. Without once raising his voice or losing his composure, he’d taken just about everything a talented cross-examiner had thrown at him and turned it to his advantage. When Miki Shaughnessey finally gave up a few minutes later, Jaywalker resisted the temptation to conduct a redirect examination aimed at rehabilitating his witness.

There was simply nothing to rehabilitate.

“The defense rests,” he announced.

“And the People?” asked Judge Levine.

“The People intend to call rebuttal witnesses,” said Shaughnessey.

Just as Jaywalker had expected her to.

That night Jaywalker replayed the day’s events in his mind, as he always did when he was on trial. They’d ended with an early recess, with Shirley Levine granting Miki Shaughnessey’s request to go over to Wednesday to give her a chance to assemble her rebuttal witnesses. But Shaughnessey’s long cross-examination of Alonzo Barnett had clearly been a high-water mark for the defense.

If only Barnett hadn’t taken the bait and stepped out of character at the very end, thought Jaywalker. Until then, he’d done everything right. Not content with simply stating that he had no idea why the prosecution’s witnesses would choose to lie about something so minor and tangential as which floor in a building he’d gone to, he’d let himself slip and add “Maybe you should ask them” to his answer.