The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  There was no sign of forced entry, and no indication from the security company that protected the apartment that any alarms had gone off. The apartment was dusted for fin gerprints, and a number of latent prints were lifted or pho tographed. Blood, hair and fiber samples were collected.

  The medical examiner's office was summoned, and the Chief Medical Officer himself, not all that averse to pub licity, responded. On gross examination of the body, he found a single deep puncture wound to the chest, just left of the midline and in the area of the heart. There appeared to be no other wounds, and no signs of a struggle. The M.E. took a rectal temperature of the body. Based on the amount of heat it had lost, as well as the progression of lividity and rigor mortis, he was able to make a preliminary estimate that death had occurred the previous evening, sometime between six o'clock and midnight.

  The building was canvassed to determine if anyone had heard or seen anything unusual the night before. Only one person reported that she had, a woman in her late seven ties or early eighties, living alone in the adjoining pent house apartment. She'd heard a loud argument between a man and a woman, shortly after watching Wheel of For tune. She recognized both voices. The man's was Barry Tannenbaum, whom she knew well. The woman's, she was just as certain, was his wife, known to her as Sam.

  According to TV Guide, Wheel of Fortune had aired that evening at seven-thirty Eastern Standard Time, and had ended at eight.

  The doorman who'd been on duty the previous evening was located and called in. He distinctly recalled that Barry Tannenbaum had had a guest over for dinner. As he did with every non-tenant, the doorman had entered the guest's name in the logbook upon arrival and again upon depar ture. Although in this particular case he hadn't required her to sign herself in. The reason, he explained, was that he knew her personally.

  Her name was Samara Tannenbaum.

  At that point a pair of detectives had been dispatched to Samara's town house. They had to buzz her from the down stairs intercom and phone her unlisted number repeatedly for a full fifteen minutes before she finally cracked the door open, leaving the security chain in place. They told her they wanted to come in and ask her a few questions.

  "About what?" she asked.

  "Your husband," they said.

  "Why don't you ask him yourselves?"

  The two detectives exchanged glances. Then one of them said, "Please, it'll only take a few minutes."

  At that point Samara unchained the door and "did know ingly and voluntarily grant them consent to affect entry of the premises." Jaywalker would go to his grave in awe over how cops abused the English language. It was as though, in order to receive their guns and shields, they were first required to surrender their ability to spell correctly, to follow the most basic rules of grammar, and to write any thing even remotely resembling a simple sentence.

  Samara had seemed nervous, they would later write in their report. Her hair "appeared unkept," her clothes were "dishelved," and she "did proceed to light, puff and distin guish" a number of cigarettes.

  They asked her when she'd last seen her husband.

  "About a week ago," she replied.

  "Are you certain?"

  "Am I certain I saw him a week ago?"

  "No, ma'am.Are you certain you haven't seen him since?"

  "Why?" she asked. Jaywalker could picture her ner vously lighting, puffing and "distinguishing" a cigarette at that point. "What's this all about?"

  "It's just routine," they assured her. "We only got a few more questions."

  "Well, if you don't want to tell me what this is about," Samara told them, "you can just routine yourselves right out the door."

  Again the detectives exchanged glances. "We have people who place you at your husband's apartment last night," said one of them.

  "So what?"

  "So we'd like to know if it's true, that's all."

  "So what if it is?"

  "Is it?"

  Samara seemed to think for a moment before answer ing. Then she said, "Yeah, sure. We had dinner together."

  "At a restaurant, or at your husband's apartment?"

  "His apartment."

  "Did he cook?"

  "Barry? Cook?" She laughed. "The man couldn't boil water. He told me the first thing he did when he bought the apartment was to have the stove ripped out to make room for a bigger table."

  "What did you eat?"

  "Chinks."

  Being detectives, they didn't have to ask her what she meant. Besides, the crime scene guys had found half-empty containers of Chinese takeout on the counter and in the garbage, when they'd been looking for a weapon.

  "Are we done here?" she asked. "Or maybe you'd like to know how many steamed dumplings I ate."

  "Did you have a fight?" they asked.

  "No."

  "We've got people who tell us they heard a fight."

  "So? Big deal. We always fight."

  "Who hit who first?"

  "Nobody hit nobody."

  Jaywalker wondered if maybe Samara might not have made a pretty good cop.

  "So what kind of a fight was it?"

  "A word fight. An argument, I believe they call it."

  "About what?"

  "Who the fuck remembers? Stupid stuff. He started it."

  "Then what happened?"

  "I don't know. I told him he could go fuck himself, and I left. Now maybe you'd like to tell me what this is all about?"

  "Sure. It's about your husband's murder."

  "Barry? Murdered? You're shitting me."

  They said they weren't shitting her.

  "Wait a minute," she said, the light finally going on. "You think I killed Barry?"

  They said nothing.

  "I want a lawyer," said Samara.

  The magic word having been uttered, the interview was effectively over. Nonetheless, the detectives weren't quite done. "Would it be okay if we had a quick look around?" they asked her.

  "You got a warrant?"

  "We can get one," they said. "Or you can save us all a lot of time and trouble."

  She looked them in the eye and said, "I ain't saving you shit."

  With that, they "did handcuff her, pat her down, admin istrated her Miranda rights, exited the premises, and trans ported her to the precinct for fingerprinting, processing and mug shooting."

  God bless.

  Whatever time and trouble it had cost them, that after noon the detectives did indeed apply for and obtain a search warrant for Samara's town house, aimed at finding "a weapon or other instrument, as well as other physical evidence relating directly or indirectly to the murder of Barrington Tannenbaum."

  Apparently Tom Burke had taken over the writing.

  The warrant was executed the same evening. The return listed more than two dozen items that had been seized. It was hard at that point for Jaywalker to appreciate the sig nificance of most of them, but at least three were pretty easy to understand.

  6. One silver-handled, steel-bladed steak knife, 9 inches long overall, with a sharply pointed tip and a blade 5 inches long by three-quarters of an inch wide by one-sixteenth of an inch thick, on which there appears to be a dried, dark-red stain.

  9. One blue towel, with an irregular dark-red stain measuring approximately 1" x 3".

  17. One ladies' blouse, size S, with a dark-red splat ter pattern on the front, approximately 3" in diame ter.

  If the nature of the items was troubling to Jaywalker, the location where they'd been discovered was just as damning. All three had been found rolled up together and wedged behind the toilet tank of a top-floor guest bathroom.

  Those items, along with a number of others removed from the crime scene, were currently being tested for the presence of DNA. Fingerprint comparisons were awaited. In addition, a full autopsy had been conducted on Barry's body, and a report was expected in a few weeks, as well as serology and toxicology findings. Hair and fiber analyses were being done, too.

  Yet as bad as things looked for Samara at the moment,
Jaywalker had every confidence that given a little time, they would look a lot worse.

  He turned off the light and lay on his back in the dark ness. Samara Tannenbaum's face appeared at the foot of his bed, her eyes darker even than the room, her lower lip pouting.

  "I didn't do it," she said.

  Right.

  7

  180.80 DAY

  Monday was Samara's "One-eighty-eighty" day, a refer ence to the section of the Criminal Procedure Law that entitles a defendant to be released unless the prosecution has obtained an indictment or is ready to go forward with a preliminary hearing. A lot of defendants do get released: complaining witnesses disappear, cops screw up and assis tant D.A.s occasionally get overextended, and have to pick and choose which cases to treat as priorities and which to let slide. Some defendants are lucky enough to slip into the cracks that are inevitable in a system that processes many thousands of cases a year.

  Barry Tannenbaum having disappeared in the most lit eral sense imaginable, the complaining witness in Samara's case was now The People of the State of New York, and they weren't going anywhere. As far as Jaywalker knew, no cops had screwed up, so long as spelling and grammar didn't count. Tom Burke was certainly treating the case as his top priority, if not his career-maker. Given all that, the chances of Samara's case slipping into some crack, neces sitating her release from jail, were absolutely zero.

  Jaywalker explained all this to her before they went before the judge, during a five-minute conversation in the "feeder pen" adjoining the courtroom. The term, no doubt, had come from the fact that the small lockup "feeds" de fendants into the courtroom, one by one. But every time he heard it, Jaywalker couldn't help but picture bait fish being served up to frenzied sharks, or small rodents to ravenous wolves.

  "After the court appearance," he told Samara, "we'll sit down in the counsel visit room and talk as much as we need. Okay?"

  She nodded, looking appropriately worried.

  He described what would happen when they appeared before the judge: in a word, nothing. Once an indictment was announced, the only remaining bit of business would be the setting of an adjourned date.

  "Can you make a bail application?" Samara asked.

  Apparently she'd been getting some jailhouse advice, a commodity never in short supply on Rikers Island. Inmates devour every word of it, never pausing to notice that the dispensers of the advice have one thing in common: every last one of them is still sitting in jail.

  "I can," he told her, "but it'll only be denied. You're going to have to wait until we get to Supreme Court."

  "They say that can take years."

  "Different Supreme Court," said Jaywalker, not helped all that much by a system in which some Einsteins had gotten together and decided to call the lowest felony court in the city supreme. But Jaywalker spared Samara the ex planation. What he did tell her was that asking for bail was not only pointless, but might actually hurt their chances later on. Bail was almost never granted in murder cases, and on the rare occasion when it was, it was usually set pro hibitively high. In this case, that wouldn't take much. With her bank account frozen and no other assets to her name, even were a modest bail to be set, Samara had nothing to post it with. So while there might come a time when it made sense to ask for bail, it certainly wasn't now.

  Finally, Jaywalker warned Samara that the press

  would be in the courtroom. The American public, denied a throne by the founding fathers, makes do with celeb rity and wealth in lieu of royalty. How else to explain such curious heroes as Bill Gates, Jack Welch or Paris Hilton? Barry Tannenbaum had been rich. If not quite Bill Gates rich, certainly Donald Trump rich. He'd mar ried a reformed hooker (some commentators, inclined to reserve judgment, preferred the term "former hooker"), forty-two years his junior. Now she'd stabbed him to death.

  The press would definitely be in the courtroom.

  "Your appearance, please, counselor," said the bridgeman, once the case had been called.

  As always, Jaywalker was tempted to say, "Five-eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds, graying hair…" Instead, he controlled himself, stating his name and office address for the court reporter to take down.

  True to form, Tom Burke announced that he'd obtained an indictment against Samara. The judge set a date for ar raignment in Supreme Court.

  And that was it.

  Anyone expecting to find the twelfth-floor counsel visit area to be the functional equivalent of a private hospital room would have been seriously disappointed. But Jaywalker had been there a thousand times before and knew better. The area was laid out more like a ward or, if you wanted to be ex tremely charitable about it, a semiprivate room.

  After being ushered through the middle one of three steel-barred outer doors, he entered the lawyers'area, a row of bolted-down chairs that extended to the far wall on either side. Each chair had a small writing surface in front of it, with wooden partitions rising on either side. Above the writing surfaces was a metal-screened window. If one squinted sufficiently, he could see that on the other side of the screen was another writing surface, and behind it another bolted-down chair, facing his own.

  The inmates were led in through the other doors, one side for men and one for women. That way, segregation was maintained for the three groups—lawyers, male prisoners and female prisoners. Someone had apparently decided that it was safe to permit lawyers of both sexes to mingle.

  The arrangement was an imperfect one, because unless you talked in a whisper with your client or resorted to sign language, you ran the risk of being overheard by lawyers on either side of you, and inmates on either side of your client. Still, it was better than talking over some staticky telephone hookup, or through a hole in reinforced glass, so Jaywalker wasn't about to complain.

  You picked your battles.

  He spent the better part of twenty minutes reviewing his file on Samara's case, already two inches thick. He knew it would take a while for them to bring her up from the fourth-floor feeder pen.

  When she came in and took her seat across from him, he was struck again by how tiny she seemed, and how vul nerable. He'd stood alongside her in the courtroom half an hour ago, but his attention had been focused elsewhere then—on the judge, the prosecutor, the court reporter, even the media. Now he had only Samara to look at, and what he saw was a young woman on the verge of tears. He wondered if he'd missed that downstairs, when he'd been all business.

  "Are you okay?" he asked her.

  "No, I'm not okay," she said, using the heels of her hands to blot her eyes. So much for the verge of tears.

  "I'm sorry," he said. He meant it, both about her obvious distress and the fact that his dumb question had triggered her meltdown.

  She took a deep breath, fighting to compose herself. "Listen," she said, "you've got to get me out of here."

  "I'll do my best," Jaywalker promised. It was only half a lie. He would certainly do his best, that much was true. The lie part was that even his best wouldn't be enough to get her out of jail. But he knew she wasn't ready to hear that, not yet. "We need to talk about the case," he told her instead, "so we can figure out our best chance of getting you out." His father, long dead, had been a doctor, the oldfashioned kind. He'd never told his patients that they had a bellyful of inoperable cancer and were going to die from it. He told them they had "suspicious cells," and that the radiation or chemotherapy he was sending them for was simply a "precautionary measure." That was what he was doing with Samara now, he recognized. There were times when being a criminal defense lawyer turned you into something you weren't in a hurry to write home about, he'd realized some years ago, before gradually coming to terms with the fact. Sometimes you donned the white hat and rode the white horse. But there were other times, times when, without quite breaking the rules, you bent them a little and adapted them to the situation. In the long run, you did what you had to do. Did he blame his father for having lied to his patients? He certainly had at the time, back when he was young and idealisti
c and had all the answers. Now, battle-tested and closing in on fifty himself, he knew enough to look at things a little differently.