Joseph Teller - Guilty As Sin

And now she was going to do just that, with her rebuttal witnesses.

“Idiot.”

“Who, me?”

For a moment he mistook the voice for his client’s and imagined they were talking together in the pen adjoining the courtroom. Though he couldn’t explain the surrounding darkness. Then he realized that he was lying in bed and the voice had been his wife’s, thick with sleep.

“Who’s an idiot?” she asked again.

“My client.” And he proceeded to describe Alonzo Barnett’s exchange with the prosecutor.

Jaywalker had fully expected his wife to agree with him; she usually did. But she surprised him this time. Instead of sharing his annoyance over the impertinence of Barnett’s comment, she seemed far more interested in what had led to it. “So why did they lie about that?” she wanted to know.

“You’re missing the point,” Jaywalker told her.

Or was she?

The thought would keep him awake another hour. In his annoyance at his client for botching the extra-credit question and ending up with a score of only 100 instead of 105, was it possible that Jaywalker himself had missed the point? Was the reason Investigator Bucknell had lied about the twelfth floor business more complicated than Jaywalker had figured?

He’d learned a lifetime ago that cops lied. Hell, he’d been one of them, only on the federal payroll, so he knew it firsthand. But they didn’t lie indiscriminately. They lied selectively, to cover their own asses or those of their partners or team, to make an arrest stand up here or a search pass muster there. In other words, they lied only when there was something to be gained by lying-or something to be hidden.

So what could they possibly be gaining by specifying that Alonzo Barnett had ridden the elevator to the twelfth floor, when he swore he hadn’t and they had no knowledge of where he’d actually gone? And what could they possibly be hiding by denying that he’d gone to the eighth floor instead, as he insisted he had?

“The People call Thomas Egan,” Miki Shaughnessey announced once the trial resumed Wednesday morning.

For once, Jaywalker-whose organizational skills fell somewhere between extremely compulsive and certifiably insane-found himself at a total loss. He had no subfile for a Thomas Egan, no entry in his master index, no report of any sort. He’d never even heard of Thomas Egan.

“May we approach?” he asked Judge Levine.

Up at the bench, he took a page straight out of the Prosecutor’s Primer and asked for an offer of proof. Only he did it slightly less formally than Shaughnessey had with Kenny Smith.

“Who the f-is this guy?” he asked. Actually said it that way, the F standing on its own, just in case Shirley Levine might have been in a rare testy mood.

Shaughnessey was more than happy to comply. “Captain Egan happens to be the commanding officer of the Manhattan Narcotics Division,” she explained. “Just as he was in the fall of 1984, when this case was made. As such, he not only oversees all field operations but is the police department’s official custodian of all records pertaining to confidential drug informers. Mr. Jaywalker has suggested through his questioning that Clarence Hightower may have been acting as an informer.”

“ May have been?” Jaywalker interjected, before Levine silenced him with a withering stare.

“He’s also insinuated,” Shaughnessey continued, “that the task force was remiss in failing to make a serious effort to identify the defendant’s source of supply. Captain Egan’s testimony will put both of those notions to rest once and for all.”

“Mr. Jaywalker?” said the judge.

Jaywalker could do nothing but stand there and shrug helplessly. The truth was, he’d never held out much hope that the whole twelfth-floor/eighth-floor business would fly with the jury, or that Hightower had truly been acting as an informer. But with nothing else to talk about, he’d been reduced to probing those possibilities. After all, the way the burden of proof operated, it wasn’t up to him to convince the jurors about anything on these points; it was up to the prosecution to dispel any lingering doubts as to the defendant’s guilt. Now Miki Shaughnessey was about to do just that, apparently, and in very impressive fashion.

It didn’t hurt that Captain Egan was an extremely good-looking man with a thick mane of silver hair and a pair of piercing Paul Newman blue eyes. Or that he was well-spoken, with an economy to his words, no trace of an outer-borough accent, and none of the usual cop-speak that infected the testimony of so many of his fellow officers.

Shaughnessey began her direct examination with a run-through of Captain Egan’s background and responsibilities within the police department. It was hard to tell which was more impressive. At one time Egan had aspired to be a priest, but the violent murder of a younger brother had steered him toward law enforcement. There he’d risen steadily through the ranks to his present position, accumulating a long list of medals, awards and commendations along the way.

Only when he sensed that Shaughnessey was done with the preliminaries and about to get down to business did Jaywalker pick up his pen and get ready to do some serious note-taking. By sitting back during the resume portion and trying to look mildly bemused, it had been his hope to suggest to any jurors looking his way that this was nothing but window dressing that had no real relevance to the case. The problem was that no jurors had been looking his way. All eyes were glued to Thomas Egan’s silver hair and blue eyes, just as all ears were attuned to his rich baritone voice.

Then, just when Jaywalker was prepared for the worst, Miki Shaughnessey surprised him again. “At this point,” she told the judge, “I think it might be best if we were to approach the bench.”

“Come up,” said Levine.

Once both lawyers and the court reporter had formed a semicircle in front of the judge, Shaughnessey explained that she had an application to make. “Captain Egan is about to name and discuss a highly valued confidential informer of the NYPD. In order to protect that informer from public exposure and possible retaliation, the People ask that the courtroom be cleared and the door locked for the balance of the witness’s testimony.”

Jaywalker was about to oppose the application, but Levine silenced him with a raised hand. Then she stood back and addressed the jury.

“I’m sorry,” she told them, saying the words as though she truly meant them. “But something has come up that requires me to confer with the lawyers at some length. I know it’s still early, but I’m going to have to excuse you for twenty minutes or so. Go have a cup of coffee, or take a walk around the block. Don’t discuss the case. Don’t speculate as to what we’re talking about. Just be back by eleven o’clock. Okay?”

She was answered with a chorus of sixteen “Okays” from the twelve regular jurors and the four alternates. Jaywalker forced back a smile. If all judges treated people the way Shirley Levine did, jury duty might cease to be thought of as a pair of four-letter words.

As he pivoted to walk back to his seat, Jaywalker got another surprise. During the colloquy at the bench, someone had quietly slid into Miki Shaughnessey’s chair at the prosecution table. It took Jaywalker a second to recognize him, but recognize him he did. Staring back at him was Daniel Pulaski, the assistant district attorney who’d had the case originally, before handing it off to Shaughnessey. Jaywalker, never a fan, gave Pulaski a perfunctory nod. As far as he was concerned, the man was a lowlife, a rarity in an office pretty much filled with decent people. Not only that, but he was nowhere near as good to look at as Miki Shaughnessey was.