Guilty as Sin (18 page)

Jaywalker turned the photo back over. He'd never seen Clarence Hightower in person, but he'd seen another photo of him back when he'd checked his court file, not too long after being appointed to represent Alonzo Barnett. His reaction now was pretty much the same as it had been then. Clarence Hightower was one ugly dude. Not menacing or deformed or anything like that. Just ugly. Still, the photo certainly wasn't important enough to circulate among the jurors, as the one of Jackson Davis had been, showing as it did the bad eye and hence the nickname. But come summation time, Jaywalker might nonetheless want to hold up Hightower's photo for the jury to see, as a way of putting a face—and an ugly one at that—on the guy who'd gotten Barnett into all this trouble. Would it have an impact on the verdict? Probably not. But then again, who was to say? Jaywalker had won cases before on things as unlikely as ugliness. So he offered the photo into evidence as Defendant's B. And with Daniel Pulaski shrugging his shoulders and raising no objection, it was received.

Up to this point, as surprising as Thomas Egan's testimony had been—one cop admitting that another cop had lied under oath—nothing he'd said had really helped Alonzo Barnett. Sure, it showed Barnett had been telling the truth when he said he'd gone to Apartment 805 and gotten the heroin from One-Eyed Jack. And that Lance Bucknell had made up the business about the twelfth floor. And maybe it made the task force witnesses look bad for protecting an informer at the expense of the truth. Beyond that, however, any advantage gained by the defense was minimal. Now, if Captain Egan had said Clarence Hightower had been acting as an informer instead
of Jackson Davis, that would have been a different story. It would have meant something in terms of an entrapment defense. But now Egan had all but slammed the door on that possibility.

JAYWALKER: Does the nickname “Asp” by any chance mean anything to you?

EGAN: “Asp”? No.

JAYWALKER: Would you check your cross-index?

EGAN:
[Complies]

EGAN: Sorry. Nothing for “Asp.”

Still, Jaywalker decided to give it one last shot. After all, wasn't that what you were supposed to do when you were down to a single bullet? Did any gunslinger ever dream of being buried with a live round still left in his six-shooter?

JAYWALKER: Tell me, Captain Egan. Did you yourself ever work narcotics?

EGAN: Yes, I did. For about eleven years, actually.

JAYWALKER: Made a number of drug arrests?

EGAN: More than I can count.

JAYWALKER: What does it mean to “flip” someone, or “turn” someone?

EGAN: Those terms refer to convincing someone to cooperate, in the hope that he'll be treated more leniently.

JAYWALKER: You've done that?

EGAN: Many times.

JAYWALKER: When in the course of a case would you try to do that?

EGAN: Any time after the arrest.

JAYWALKER: Sometimes right away?

EGAN: Sometimes.

JAYWALKER: Would there be any advantage to doing it right away?

EGAN: Sure, I suppose so.

JAYWALKER: What sort of advantage?

EGAN: I'm not sure what you're driving at, Counselor.

Jaywalker loved it whenever a witness said something like that on cross-examination. He took it as a golden opportunity to testify, no oath required.

JAYWALKER: Here's what I'm driving at. You make an arrest. Right there on the spot, you flip the guy, convince him to cooperate in order to stay out of prison. Then, before the word gets out that the guy's been arrested, you have him introduce an undercover to
his supplier to make a buy. The supplier doesn't suspect anything because he doesn't even know the guy got busted. Anything like that ever happen in your experience?

EGAN: Yes, I suppose so.

JAYWALKER: You suppose so, or you know so?

EGAN: It's happened.

JAYWALKER: More than once?

EGAN: Probably.

So far, so good. But that had been the easy part, baiting the hook. Getting the fish to bite was another thing altogether.

JAYWALKER: And isn't that in fact precisely what happened between Detective Pascarella and Clarence Hightower? Sometime in early September, say, Pascarella arrested Hightower, a man with an extremely long record who happened to be on parole. They both knew what that meant for Hightower. Pascarella offered him a deal, right on the spot. “Help us out by introducing an undercover to your man, and we'll help you out.” Hightower, knowing full well that the alternative meant going back upstate, very possibly for the rest of his life, agreed. In other words, Pascarella flipped him right then and there. And Hightower delivered. It took him a lot of time and a lot of arm-twisting, but he delivered. He delivered Alonzo Barnett, didn't he?

PULASKI: Objection.

THE COURT: On what basis?

PULASKI: This is all purely speculative.

THE COURT: Overruled. You may answer if you know, Captain.

EGAN: No, that didn't happen.

JAYWALKER: How do you know?

EGAN: Several reasons. First of all, Hightower would have had to be registered as an informer. He never was. He's not in the index. Second of all, I've spoken with Detective Pascarella, and he told me for a fact that it never happened.

JAYWALKER: So you suspected it, too.

EGAN: Now you're putting words in my mouth, Counselor. What I mean is, we discussed the case in full. Detective Pascarella told me it began with an anonymous phone tip, that there was no informer involved. And I believe Detective Pascarella.

JAYWALKER: Is that the same Detective Pascarella who directed Investigator Bucknell to leave out the business about the eighth floor and change it to the twelfth floor?

EGAN:
[No response]

JAYWALKER: The same Detective Pascarella who orchestrated a witness lying under oath in this trial in order to protect an informer who lived on the eighth floor?

EGAN:
[No response]

JAYWALKER: Tell us, Captain Egan. Do you think Detective Pascarella would lie, or have someone else lie, in order to shield the identity of an informer?

EGAN: Yes. No. Maybe. I don't know.

JAYWALKER: Well, isn't that exactly what he did with respect to Jackson Davis and the eighth floor business?

EGAN: Only if you choose to look at it that way.

JAYWALKER: And how do you choose to look at it?

EGAN: Jackson Davis was and continues to be an extremely valuable confidential informer. Certain necessary steps were taken to protect him. Steps that in no way jeopardized your client's right to a fair trial.

JAYWALKER: Suppose Clarence Hightower was an extremely valuable confidential informer. Might it not be equally reasonable to believe that Detective Pascarella would have taken certain necessary steps to protect him, too?

EGAN: Hightower was never an informer.

JAYWALKER: How can we possibly know that, if Pascarella lies to protect his informers?

EGAN: I don't know how to answer that question, Counselor.

JAYWALKER: Well, maybe the jury will.

It was, as Judge Levine was quick to point out, a comment that was totally uncalled for, and she instructed the jurors to disregard it. But Jaywalker hadn't been able to help himself. If Hightower, like Davis, had indeed been working with the task force while trying to get Alonzo Barnett back into the drug business, then Jaywalker had a beauty of an entrapment defense. But with Egan adamant that there was no truth to the suggestion, what was left for Jaywalker to do but rant? The whole thing reminded him of a paradox he'd heard as a young boy, back before he had any idea what a paradox was.

 

All Cretans are liars.

I am a Cretan.

Am I really?

 

Daniel Pulaski spent ten minutes on redirect, during which he elicited from Captain Egan his assurances that there was a big difference between protecting a highly valued informer like Jackson Davis and an absolute nobody like Clarence Hightower. Besides, Egan insisted, Pascarella never would have made up the stuff about the anonymous caller to shield Hightower. Why not? Because there'd been no reason to.
And
it would have been wrong. “Also,” Egan added, “that's the kind of thing you can get into real trouble for.”

“No further questions,” said Pulaski.

“Any re-cross?” the judge asked.

“No,” said Jaywalker. He'd given up trying to crack Captain Egan. He'd even considered the possibility that Egan was telling the truth, that as far as he knew, Hightower hadn't been an informer. Which narrowed things down to one remaining possibility.

As soon as Egan had left the courtroom, Pulaski stood and announced that the People were resting, having concluded their rebuttal case with a single witness. “Mr. Jaywalker?”

Meaning,
does the defense rest, too?

“No,” said Jaywalker, rising to his feet. “The defense has a surrebuttal witness.” He loved that word,
surrebuttal.
It sounded devious and underhanded, kind of like
surreptitious.
He half wondered if he'd decided to drag the case out further just so he could hear himself say it.

But the other half of him was dead serious. If he and Alonzo Barnett were going down, then they might as well go down in flames. There was no way Jaywalker was going to let Captain Egan's denial be the last word of the trial. No way he was going to wake up the morning after the conviction wondering what else he could have done. He lost cases from time to time, Jaywalker did, but never because he hadn't bothered doing something.

“Very well,” said the judge. “Who's your witness?”

“Lieutenant Dino Pascarella.”

The Asp

J
aywalker's announcement that he intended to recall Lieutenant Pascarella in rebuttal essentially ended Thursday's court session. Pascarella, as it turned out, had called in sick that morning with a stomach ailment and, when finally reached by phone at home, said he didn't think he'd be feeling well enough to come back to court until the next day. Which actually solved a problem Jaywalker had been worried about. Had the evidence been completed on Thursday, he would have been required to sum up on Friday, followed immediately by Shaughnessey or Pulaski. That would have put the defense at a huge disadvantage, inasmuch as it would have meant sending the jurors off for the weekend with the prosecution's summation still ringing in their ears. Now, with more testimony scheduled for Friday, Jaywalker knew he'd be able to convince Levine to defer summations until Monday morning, putting both sides on a more even footing.

But even as Pascarella's stomach had solved one problem for Jaywalker, it had created another. “Tomorrow happens to be a holy day in the Islamic calendar,” he'd told the judge once the jury had left the courtroom. “Normally,
my client would ask that he not be required to come to court at all. But under the circumstances he's perfectly willing to, so long as Your Honor can see to it that he's allowed ten minutes to pray in the morning, and another ten minutes in the afternoon.”

Even as he'd heard Daniel Pulaski muttering “Who cares?” under his breath and Judge Levine saying that it should pose no problem, Jaywalker had felt Barnett tugging at his sleeve, reminding him not to forget his second request.

“One other thing,” Jaywalker had added. “Mr. Barnett would like your permission to wear his prayer garb over his clothes. It consists of a robe and a— What do you call that thing again?”

“Just tell her it looks like a yarmulke,” Barnett had whispered.

“And something that looks like a yarmulke.”

“Excuse me?”

It was a new voice, belonging to the court reporter, a young woman with blue eyes and straight blond hair. “How am I supposed to spell that?”

Levine and Jaywalker had taken turns trying, without too much success. They'd been able to agree that there was supposed to be an
L
in there somewhere, but neither of them had known exactly where it belonged. Shaughnessey and Pulaski had been no help at all.

A few months later Jaywalker would get around to reading the official transcript of the entire trial. Win or lose, he made a habit of doing that, figuring he was bound to learn a thing or two in the process. This particular time it would turn out to be a new word to add to his vocabulary. Today he can still picture the dictionary entry in his mind, just as he did twenty-five years ago.

 

Yamika (yä'ma·keh), n. 1. a brand name of motorized scooters. 2. a famous maker of concert pianos. 3. A small skullcap favored by the Chinese.

 

God bless the gentiles.

 

It was only late that night, long after Jaywalker and his wife had finished dinner and he'd kissed her goodnight and retreated to their spare bedroom/den/office/laundry-sorting room, that he was forced to ask himself exactly why he'd told Shirley Levine that he intended to recall Dino Pascarella as a rebuttal witness. The simple answer, once again, was that he'd been angry. Angry and frustrated and unwilling to quit while he was behind. And since Pascarella's name had happened to be the one on his tongue at the moment, he'd spat it out without giving it serious thought.

That was then.

Now he had to figure out what to do about it.

He spent an hour reviewing every shred of paper he had with Pascarella's name on it. Documents, reports, photocopies of the prosecution's exhibits, notes Jaywalker had scribbled to himself during the testimony. Nothing jumped out at him. Yet he wasn't ready to admit that his instincts had been wrong. He kept coming back to the nagging feeling that the guy was holding something back.

He called Kenny Smith, who'd come so close to interviewing Clarence Hightower, only to lose him out a restroom window.

“Any luck?” Jaywalker asked him.

“No, man,” said Smith. “The guy's disappeared, with a capital
D.
Gone. Vanished off the face of the earth.”

Jaywalker spent another hour flipping through the rest
of the reports. His head was throbbing, and he was beginning to see two of every word on the pages in front of him.

Still nothing.

He made himself a pot of strong coffee. Downed two cups black and sweet and hot enough to burn his tongue. The combination of caffeine and sugar made his heart race, but did nothing for his headache and double vision.

He pulled out his own exhibits. The way it worked was that each side was responsible for the custody of whatever items it had put into evidence. The drugs and lab reports and the money that had been seized from Alonzo Barnett all belonged to the prosecution, People's 1 through 7. All the defense had contributed were two measly photographs. Defendant's A was the double mug shot of Jackson Davis, showing his glass eye. Jaywalker had introduced it to show that Barnett had been telling the truth about having obtained the heroin from “One-Eyed Jack.” Defendant's B was the single Polaroid photo of Hightower. About the only reason Jaywalker'd had for putting that in was to show the jury how ugly the guy was.

He looked at it again now, forcing his eyes to focus on the face. “Talk to me,” he told it. “Say something.
Anything.
Give me a fucking clue, will you?”

But the face wasn't talking. Not the thick lips, not the broad nose, not the crooked teeth or the short gray hair. Not the double chin or the thick neck. Not the dirty gray sweatshirt or the navy T-shirt peeking out from underneath it at the collar.

Nothing.

He turned the photo over, just as he'd done in the courtroom after Captain Egan had dug it out and handed it to him. The word
asp
was still there, still a perfect
descriptive for the man who'd set this whole case in motion some twenty months ago by insisting that another man repay an old favor. But at such a terrible price. For in a few days, for all practical purposes Alonzo Barnett's life would be over. Already over fifty, he was pretty much guaranteed to spend the next fifteen to twenty-five years sitting in state prison. Damn near a death sentence, when you thought about it.

And the guy who'd called in the favor, who'd set the whole thing in motion? The asp? He was in the wind, nowhere to be found.

Just as he had in the courtroom, Jaywalker turned the photo back over and studied the image once more. There had to be something more to the story. There
had
to be. But he had absolutely no idea what it might be, what he was missing.

 

“The defense calls Dino Pascarella in rebuttal,” Jaywalker announced when the trial reconvened Friday morning.

Although there had been no spectators in the audience when they'd recessed on Thursday, there were a handful now. Asked by Judge Levine if his examination of Pascarella would reveal the identity of any confidential informers, Jaywalker had replied, “I sure hope so,” and she'd cleared the courtroom again.

Again Jaywalker found himself double-teamed by Daniel Pulaski and Miki Shaughnessey. Though from the sullen expression on her face, Jaywalker guessed that Shaughnessey wasn't happy about reprising her new role as a nonspeaking extra.

One more thing bears mentioning.

The average lawyer wouldn't even dream of putting a witness on the stand without having spoken to him in advance. Jaywalker, of course, was about as far from average
as possible in just about everything he did. So he'd called witnesses “cold” several times in his career and would continue to do so whenever the situation warranted it. But almost invariably those witnesses were minor players. An interpreter to testify to some nuance in translation from Spanish to English, a court clerk to read from a file, a corrections officer to describe a defendant as a model prisoner. Never before had he called a central figure in the trial without so much as a run-through of the questions he'd be asking and the answers he'd be expecting.

Lawyers have been suspended or even disbarred for such omissions, convictions overturned for ineffective assistance of counsel. Not to mention that no lawyer in his right mind would risk getting clobbered by a hostile witness he hadn't taken the trouble to interview in advance.

Then again, no one had ever accused Jaywalker of being in his right mind. He paid attention to conventional wisdom about as much as he did to the daily horoscopes in the supermarket tabloids. His thinking on the subject tended to be simple and straightforward. If you're winning, play it safe. If you're not, what do you have to lose?

JAYWALKER: So who's the asp?

PASCARELLA: The asp?

JAYWALKER: Yeah, you know. Asp,
A-S-P.
Like snake?

PASCARELLA: I have no idea what you're talking about.

JAYWALKER: The word means nothing to you?

PASCARELLA: Nothing at all.

Jaywalker pulled a photo out of his pocket and handed it to the witness.

JAYWALKER: I show you Defendant's Exhibit B in evidence. Do you know who that is?

PASCARELLA: I'm not sure. It looks like Clarence Hightower.

JAYWALKER: Very good. Have you ever seen that photo before?

Jaywalker watched as Pascarella turned it over, just as he himself had. Only where he'd seen writing on the back of it, he knew Pascarella wouldn't. Jaywalker had seen to that.

PASCARELLA: No, not that I know of.

JAYWALKER: Yet you were able to recognize Mr. Hightower, weren't you?

PASCARELLA: Yes.

JAYWALKER: From where and when?

PASCARELLA: From arresting him the same day we arrested Mr. Barnett. And from processing him later that day at the precinct house.

JAYWALKER: Anything else?

PASCARELLA: Like what?

JAYWALKER: Well, was that the only day you saw him? The day of his arrest?

PASCARELLA: Yes.

Jaywalker pulled out another photo. This one he'd retrieved earlier that morning, with the help of the same friendly court clerk who'd helped him early on in his investigation of the case. He had it marked now as Defendant's C for identification and handed it to the witness.

JAYWALKER: How about this one? Recognize it?

PASCARELLA: I'm pretty sure that's Hightower, too.

JAYWALKER: I offer it in evidence.

THE COURT: Mr. Pulaski? Or is it Ms. Shaughnessey today?

PULASKI: No objection.

THE COURT: Received in evidence as Defendant's C.

JAYWALKER: What can you tell us about this photo, Detective?

PASCARELLA: Like I said, I'm pretty sure it's Clarence Hightower. It looks like it's his official arrest photo, taken at Central Booking, right downstairs in this building. You must have gotten it from his court file.

JAYWALKER: I'll stipulate that the witness is correct. I did.

THE COURT: Mr. Pulaski?

PULASKI: So stipulated.

JAYWALKER: Let's go back to Defendant's B, the other photo of Mr. Hightower. What can you tell us about that one?

Pascarella put down C and picked up B again. Once more he turned it over and checked the back, almost as if he'd expected writing to have magically appeared since he'd last looked at it. Much the same way the Polaroid image on the front of it must have gradually appeared twenty-some months earlier. But no writing had appeared. Jaywalker watched as the witness seemed to struggle to absorb that fact, as if he was wondering if he could rely upon the blank piece of cardboard in front of him.

JAYWALKER: I'm sorry. We couldn't hear your answer.

PASCARELLA: I'm afraid I can't help you, Counselor. Like I said, I can't remember ever seeing this photo here.

JAYWALKER: Ever?

PASCARELLA: Ever.

Well, thought Jaywalker, that was about as much as he was going to be able to pin Pascarella down on that point. Before moving on to his next area of questioning, he paused and drew a deep breath. This was going to be it, he knew,
his
last chance and Alonzo Barnett's last hope. Jaywalker had a hunch, an idea that had come to
him about four o'clock that morning. If it turned out he was wrong about it, the Fat Lady would have sung, and the case would pretty much be over. So here went nothing.

JAYWALKER: Detective, do you by any chance have a middle name?

PULASKI: Objection. Totally irrelevant.

THE COURT: Mr. Jaywalker?

JAYWALKER: Give me a minute and I'll connect it.

THE COURT: You've got half a minute. We'll take it subject to connection. You may answer the question, Detective.

PASCARELLA: Yeah, I have a middle name.

JAYWALKER: What is it?

PASCARELLA: Salvatore.

Jaywalker exhaled a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. He was two-thirds of the way there, but it was the easy two-thirds. The final third was going to be a serious leap.

JAYWALKER: And your first name?

PASCARELLA: Dino.

JAYWALKER: Isn't that short for something?

PULASKI: Objection.

THE COURT: Overruled.

PASCARELLA: Everyone calls me Dino. I've been Dino for as long as I can remember.

JAYWALKER: So it's not a nickname?

PASCARELLA: No.

JAYWALKER: It's the name that's on your birth certificate?

PASCARELLA: You mean officially like?

JAYWALKER: Yeah, officially like.

PASCARELLA: No, it's not on my birth certificate.

JAYWALKER: So what's the first name on your birth certificate?

PASCARELLA: On my birth certificate?

JAYWALKER: Yes, on your birth certificate.

And as he waited for an answer, Jaywalker held up a piece of paper for the witness to see. It may have been old and yellowed around the edges, but it was a genuine New York City Department of Health birth certificate, right down to its Old English type font, its official inked-in signature and its circular raised seal.