The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  "Samara," said a recorded female voice, followed by a male one, "is calling collect from a correctional facility. If you wish to accept the charges, please press one now."

  Jaywalker pressed one.

  He met with her the following day, at the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island. Met with being some thing of a stretch, since their conversation was in actuality conducted through a five-inch circular hole cut out of the center of a wire-reinforced, bulletproof pane of glass.

  "You look terrible," he told her.

  "Thanks."

  It was true, in a way, the same way Natalie Wood might have looked terrible after four days in jail, or a young Elizabeth Taylor. Samara's hair was a tangle of knots (so much for its being naturally straight), her eyes were puffy and bloodshot and her skin had an artificial, fluorescent cast to it. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit that had to be three sizes too big for her. Yet once again, Jaywalker found it impossible to take his eyes off her.

  "I didn't do it," she said.

  He nodded. Earlier that morning, he had phoned the lawyer who'd been assigned to stand up for her at her first court appearance. They'd talked for ten minutes, long enough for Jaywalker to learn that the charge was murder, that the detectives had executed a search warrant at Samara's town house and come up with a veritable shitload of evidence, including a knife with what looked like dried blood on it, and that Samara was so far denying her guilt.

  That was okay. A lot of Jaywalker's clients claimed they were innocent early on in the game. It was only after they'd gotten to know him for a while that they dared to trust him with the truth. He understood that, and knew that it was part of his job to gain that trust. Also that it was a process, one that didn't always come easily. Sometimes it didn't come at all. When that happened, Jaywalker consid ered the failure his, not his client's.

  With Samara, he was pretty sure, the trust and the truth would come. But not now, not here. Not through reinforced bulletproof glass, with a corrections officer seated fifteen feet away and, Jaywalker had to assume, a microphone hidden somewhere even closer. So every time Samara started talking about the case, he steered her away from it, assuring her that she'd have plenty of time to tell her story.

  The truth was, Jaywalker was there not to win the case at that point but just to get it. In that sense, he knew, he was no better than the P.I. lawyers in his suite, the ambulance chasers. They made hospital calls and home visits in order to sign up clients before the competition beat them to it. He was doing the same thing. The only difference was that it wasn't some bedside he was visiting. That and the fact that his client had arrived here not by ambulance, but chained to the seat of a Department of Corrections bus.

  "Will you take my case?"

  It was the exact same question she'd asked him six years ago. There wasn't much he'd forgotten about her over that time, he realized. He gave her the same answer now that he'd given her then.

  "Yes."

  She smiled.

  "About the fee," he said.

  He hated that part. But it was what he did for a living, after all, how he paid his bills. And he was already in trouble with the disciplinary committee, with the very real possibility of a lengthy suspension looming on the horizon. Jaywalker was no stranger to pro bono work, having done his share and then some over the years. But with unemploy ment in his future, now was no time to be handing out freebies. Not on a murder case, anyway, especially one where the defendant was claiming to be innocent and might well insist on going to trial.

  "I'll be worth a zillion dollars," said Samara, "once Barry's estate gets prorated."

  He didn't bother correcting her word choice. Still, he knew that it would be months, probably years, before there would be a distribution of assets. Moreover, if Sa mara were to be convicted of killing her husband, the law would bar her from inheriting a cent. He didn't tell her that, either, of course. Instead, he simply asked, "And in the meantime?"

  She shrugged a little-girl shrug.

  "Should I get in touch with Robert?" Jaywalker asked her.

  "Robert's gone," she said. "Barry discovered he was stealing."

  "Is there a new Robert?"

  "There's a new chauffeur, although…" Her voice trailed off. "But," she suddenly brightened, "I have a bank account of my own now, sort of."

  The "sort of" struck Jaywalker as a strange qualifier, but at least it represented progress. He remembered the twenty-year-old who hadn't been permitted to deal with money matters.

  "With how much in it?"

  Another shrug. "I don't know. A couple hundred—"

  "That's it?"

  "—thousand."

  "Oh."

  He got the name of the bank and explained that he would bring her papers to sign to withdraw enough for a retainer. Then he described what would be happening over the next week or two, how the evidence against her would be pre sented to a grand jury, and how she would almost certainly be indicted. He told her that she had a right to testify before the grand jury, but that in her case it would be a very bad idea.

  "Why?"

  "The D.A. knows much more about the facts than we do at this point," he explained. "You'd end up getting indicted anyway, and then they'd have your testimony to use against you at trial." When she looked at him quizzi cally, he said, "Trust me."

  "Okay," she said.

  He was grateful for that. What he didn't want to have to tell her at this point was that if she went into the grand jury and denied having had anything to do with Barry's death, it would make it hard to claim self-defense later on, or argue that she hadn't been mentally responsible at the time, or that she'd killed her husband while under the in fluence of extreme emotional disturbance. Those were all defenses, complete or partial, that Jaywalker wanted to keep open, needed to keep open.

  Finally he told her the most important part. "Keep your mouth shut. This place is crawling with snitches. Yours is a newspaper case. That means every woman in this place knows what you're here for. Anything you tell one of them becomes her ticket to cut a deal on her own case and get her out of here. Understand?"

  "Yup."

  "Promise me you'll shut up?"

  "I promise," she said, drawing a thumb and index finger across her mouth in an exaggerated zipping motion.

  "Good," said Jaywalker.

  It was only once he was outside the visitors' gate, heading for the bus that would take him back to Manhat tan, that Jaywalker recalled that in terms of promises kept, Samara was so far 0 for 1.

  By the time Jaywalker made it back to Manhattan, it was too late to go to Samara's bank to find out what he'd need to do to get money out of her account. He knew he could phone them and ask to speak to the manager or somebody in the legal department, but he'd learned from past experi ences that such matters were better handled in person. He had been told often enough that he had an honest face and a disarming way about him that he'd come to accept that there must be something to it. Juries believed him; judges trusted him; even tight-assed prosecutors tended to open up to him. The truth was, he was a bit of a con man. "Show me a good criminal defense lawyer," he'd told friends more than once, "and I'll show you a master manipulator." Then he would hasten to defend the skill, pointing out that es tablishing his own credibility and trustworthiness was not only his stock-in-trade, but was often absolutely critical to getting an innocent defendant off.

  He talked less about the guilty ones he also got off, but he didn't lose sleep over them. He believed passionately in the system that entitled the accused—any accused, no matter how despicable the individual, how heinous the crime, or how overwhelming the proof against him—to one person in his corner who would fight as hard and as well as he possibly could for him. That left it to the city's thirty thousand cops, two thousand prosecutors and five hundred judges (the great majority of whom were former prosecu tors, tough-on-crime politicians, or both) to fight just as hard and just as well to put the guy away forever. That made for pretty fair odds, as far as Jaywal
ker was con cerned, and if he succeeded in overcoming them—as he'd been doing on a pretty regular basis lately—he felt no need to apologize. It all came down to a simple choice, he'd realized long ago. You fought like hell, trying your hardest to win—yes, win—or you regarded it as nothing but a job, and you simply went through the motions. Jaywalker knew a lot of lawyers who did just that. When they lost—and they lost every bit as often as Jaywalker won—they shrugged it off and said things like, "The scumbag was guilty," "The idiot self-destructed on the witness stand," or "Justice was done." Jaywalker had a term for them. He called them whores.

  Tolerance had never been one of his virtues.

  He phoned Tom Burke, the assistant D.A. who was prosecuting Samara Tannenbaum. He'd seen Burke's name in the Times article, and had confirmed that it was his case during the conversation he'd had with the lawyer who'd handled Samara's initial court appearance.

  "Burke," said a deep voice.

  "Why don't you pick on somebody your own size?" Jay walker asked.

  "Who is this?"

  "What's the matter, doesn't the old man spring for caller ID?"

  "Are you kidding?"

  "I never kid."

  "Jaywalker?"

  "Very good."

  Jaywalker liked Burke. They'd had a couple of cases together in the past, though none of them had ended up going to trial. Burke was no legal scholar, but he was a hardworking, straight-shooting, seat-of-the-pants lawyer.

  "How the fuck are you?" he asked.

  "Not bad," said Jaywalker.

  "Let me guess. Samara Tannenbaum?"

  "Bingo."

  "Why am I not surprised?" Then, "Oh, yeah. You rep resented her on that DWI thing."

  "I see you've been doing your homework."

  "You assigned?" Burke asked.

  "No," said Jaywalker. "I weaned myself off the public tit some time ago, just in time to miss the rate hike." It was the truth. Fresh out of Legal Aid, Jaywalker had been happy to take all the court-appointed cases he could get, even at twenty-five dollars an hour for out-of-court work and forty an hour for in-court. He'd been putting his daughter through law school at the time, and needed every cent to do it. Once she'd graduated and had found a job, he'd stopped taking assignments, except for an occasional favor to a judge, or when New York briefly restored the death penalty. A few years ago, under pressure from a lawsuit, they'd finally gotten around to raising the rates to seventyfive an hour, in-court and out. But Jaywalker hadn't been tempted. By that time he had enough private work to keep him busy, and his expenses were low enough that he didn't need the extra money. Getting rich had never been high on his list of priorities.

  "If you don't mind my asking," said Burke, "who's retained you?"

  "Samara. Or at least she's in the process."

  "It's not going to work."

  "Oh?"

  "I've gotten an order freezing all of Barry Tannen baum's assets," said Burke. "Including a bank account in Samara's name."

  "Shit," was all Jaywalker could think to say.

  Tom Burke had only been doing his job, of course. He'd been able to trace the deposits to Samara's account and demonstrate to a judge that every dollar—and there were currently nearly two hundred thousand of them—had come from her husband. Under the law, if Samara were to be con victed of killing him, she would lose her right to the money, as well as to any other of Barry's assets. Next, Burke had informed the judge that he'd already presented his case to a grand jury, which had voted a "true bill." That meant an indictment, which amounted to an official finding of probable cause that Samara had in fact committed a crime resulting in Barry's death. Based upon that, the judge, a pretty reasonable woman named Carolyn Berman, had had little choice but to freeze all of Barry Tannenbaum's assets, the bank account included.

  Even if Burke and Berman had only been doing their jobs, the result certainly added up to a major headache for Jaywalker. The good news was that he could now skip going to the bank. But that consolation was more than offset by the fact that instead he had to spend two days drawing up papers so that he and Burke could go before the judge and argue about the fairness of the ruling.

  They did that on a Friday afternoon, convening at Part 30, on the 11th floor of 100 Centre Street, the Criminal Court Building. Jaywalker's home court, as he liked to think of it.

  "The defendant has a constitutional right to the counsel of her choice," he argued.

  "True enough," Burke conceded, "but it's a limited right. When you're indigent and can't afford a lawyer, the court assigns you one. Only you don't get to choose who it is."

  "But she's not indigent, and she can afford a lawyer," Jaywalker pointed out. "At least she could have, until you two decided that instead of her paying for counsel, the tax payers should get stuck footing the bill."

  It was a fairly sleazy argument, he knew, but there were a half-dozen reporters taking notes in the front row of the courtroom, and Jaywalker knew that the judge didn't want to wake up tomorrow morning to headlines like JUDGE RULES TAXPAYERS SHOULD PAY FOR BILLION AIRESS'S DEFENSE.

  In the end, Judge Berman hammered out a compromise of sorts, as judges generally try to do. She authorized a limited invasion of the bank account for legal fees and nec essary related expenses. But she set Jaywalker's fee at the same seventy-five dollars an hour that it would have been had Samara been indigent and eligible for assigned counsel.

  Great, thought Jaywalker. Here I got paid thirty-five grand to cop her out on a DWI, and now I'm going to be earning ditch-digger wages for trying a murder case.

  "Thank you," was what he actually said to Judge Berman.

  With that he walked over to the clerk of the court and filled out a notice of appearance, formally declaring that he was the new attorney for Samara Moss Tannenbaum. And was handed a 45-pound cardboard box by Tom Burke, containing copies of the evidence against his client. So far.

  Nothing like a little weekend reading.

  6

  A LITTLE WEEKEND READING

  It turned out to be a horror story.

  Jaywalker began his reading that night, lying in bed. The cardboard box Burke had given him contained police reports, diagrams and photographs of the crime scene, the search warrant for Samara's town house, a "return," or list of items seized there, a typewritten summary of what Samara had said to the detective who first questioned her, requests for scientific tests to be conducted on various bits of physical evidence, and a bunch of other paperwork.

  It was a lot more than the prosecution was required to turn over at this early stage of the proceedings. A lot of as sistants would have stonewalled, waiting for the defense to make a written demand to produce, followed up with formal motion papers and a judge's order. Tom Burke didn't play games like that, a fact that Jaywalker was grateful for.

  At least until he began reading.

  From the police reports, Jaywalker learned that when Barry Tannenbaum hadn't shown up at his office one morning and his secretary had been unable to reach him either at his mansion in Scarsdale or his penthouse apart ment on Central Park South, she'd called 9-1-1. The Scars dale police had kicked in the door, searched the mansion, and found nobody there and nothing out of order. The NYPD had been luckier, if you chose to look at it that way. Let into the apartment by the building superintendent, they'd found Barry lying facedown on his kitchen floor, in what the crime scene technician described as "a pool of dried blood." If the terminology was slightly oxymoronic, the meaning was clear enough.

  There'd been no weapon present, and none found in the garbage, which hadn't been picked up yet, on the rooftop, or in the vicinity of the building. Officers went so far as to check nearby trash cans and storm drains, with, in policespeak, "negative results."