The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  "What do you want to hear?" Samara was asking him.

  "Everything."

  "From the beginning?"

  "From the beginning."

  8

  PRAIRIE CREEK

  "I was born in Indiana," Samara said. "Prairie Creek. Nice name for a town, huh?"

  Jaywalker nodded.

  "It was a shithole."

  He made a written note on the yellow legal pad in front of him. It didn't say Indiana, though, or Prairie Creek.

  CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, it said.

  "I never knew my father," she said. "I grew up with my mother in a trailer, an old rusty thing set up on cinder blocks. My mom, well, she worked her ass off, I'll say that much for her."

  "Is she still alive?"

  That got a shrug, telling him that Samara either didn't know or didn't much care.

  "I think she also sold her ass off, though I don't know for sure. She was pretty, prettier'n me."

  Jaywalker tried picturing prettier than Samara, but didn't know where to start.

  "She wasn't home much. Always working or whatever." Leaving the whatever to hang in the air for a few beats. "I remember being left with babysitters a lot. Guys, mostly."

  "How did that go?"

  Another shrug. "I learned a lot."

  "Like what?"

  "How to do shots of beer. How to roll joints."

  "Anything else?"

  Samara broke off eye contact, looked downward. She tried to shrug again, but this attempt didn't come off with the same Who-the-fuck-cares? as the two previous ones. It seemed to Jaywalker that her lower lip was pouting more than ever, but maybe it was only the tilt of her head.

  "Is it important?" she asked him.

  "It might be."

  She seemed to ponder that for a moment before looking up again. When she did, Jaywalker locked eyes with her. Trust me, he told her, without speaking the words out loud.

  "Yeah," she said, cocking her head slightly, but not looking away. "I learned how to give hand jobs and blow jobs, and how to thigh fuck."

  "Thigh fuck?" A new one for Jaywalker. He underlined CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, then underlined it a second time.

  "Yeah, you know. Letting the guy stick it in between my legs. All the way up there, but not inside. I was too small for inside. Then, with my legs tight around the guy, I'd let him fuck away until—"

  "Okay," said Jaywalker, pretty much getting the picture.

  "Get me out and I'll show you." Smiling now.

  "How'd you do in school?" he asked her.

  She laughed, whether at his abrupt change of subject or at the thought of her academic career. "How do drunk, stoned, fucked-up kids usually do?" she asked.

  He took it as an answer.

  "How far did you go?"

  "I stuck around till the day after my fourteenth birthday. I wanted to see if I got any good presents." Apparently she hadn't. "I caught a bus to Terre Haute, then hitchhiked my way west, to Nevada. I wanted to be a showgirl or an actress, something like that. But you know what they told me? Too short. Too short. Now if I'd'a been too fat, or too thin, or too something-else-like-that, I could'a done some thing about it. But too short? What the fuck was I supposed to do about that?"

  "So?"

  "So I tended bar and waited tables, mostly."

  "Mostly?"

  "And supplemented my income every now and then."

  "By doing what?"

  "By doing what I would have done anyway. Only thing I did was when a guy wanted to give me something after, I took it."

  "And that something included money?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Ever get arrested? Other than this and that DWI thing?" Her criminal record printout showed nothing else, but Jay walker knew that there might be out-of-state cases, or arrests that hadn't led to convictions that often wouldn't show up.

  "No."

  "Are you absolutely sure?"

  A pause, then, "Maybe there was this one time in Reno for attempted soliciting. It was pure bullshit. I was standing in front of a club, smoking a cigarette. Some vice cop decided that meant I had to be hooking."

  Underneath CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, Jaywalker wrote WORK ON GETTING HER TO TELL THE TRUTH, and underlined it three times. "What happened to the case?" he asked.

  "It was dismissed."

  "How much of a fine did you pay?"

  "Fifty dollars."

  When a case was dismissed, there was no fine to pay. Jaywalker added an exclamation point to his latest reminder.

  "Other arrests?"

  "No."

  "Absolutely sure?"

  "Yes!" she snapped. Then, "Sorry."

  "How did you meet Barry?"

  She'd been working for tips off a phony driver's license in Vegas, serving drinks to the rollers in one of the lounges in Caesars Palace. She was eighteen at the time. "It was like three o'clock in the morning, going into Sunday, and the crowd was beginning to thin out. I see this guy staring at me, I mean really staring. I bring him a drink, a Diet Coke. He tells me I'm the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. Not the most beautiful person, the most beautiful thing. Shit, I should'a known right then. But being eighteen and dumb, I think it's pure poetry. Know what I mean?"

  Jaywalker nodded. He'd come up with worse lines in his day, though not by all that much.

  "I go up to his room after I get off, and we talk. Talk. For like five hours I'm carrying on a conversation with a man who's been to college, knows about politics and world affairs and wine and all sorts of other stuff. But he wants to know about me. Where I grew up, what it was like, why I ran away, what my hopes and dreams are. Hopes and dreams. And I'm telling him shit I wouldn't tell my best friend, if I had one. Like I'm opening my heart to him.

  "Eleven o'clock comes, and he's got to go to a meeting. Asks me if he can kiss me. I say, 'Sure.' With that he touches me, barely touches me, with both hands on the sides of my face, and gives me the gentlest kiss in the world. No tongue, no open mouth, no grabbing. I gotta tell you, I felt like Madonna."

  Jaywalker was pretty sure he knew which one she was referring to.

  "Anyway, he leaves, goes back to New York. But he keeps calling me, like every day, and sending me flowers. Next he asks me to come east to visit him. I tell him right, like I've got money for a bus ticket. He tells me that won't be necessary, he'll send one of his planes to get me. One of his planes. So I go to New York, and we get married eight months later."

  To Jaywalker, the segue seemed natural enough.

  The fact that the marriage had survived for eight years was hardly testimony to its success. The place Samara had persuaded Barry to buy her before the first year was over was the four-story brownstone in the lower Seventies, between Park and Lexington. The city's inflated real estate had driven up the asking price to close to five million dollars, but if Barry complained, it was to deaf ears. "He used to tip that much in a year," according to Samara.

  Within a few months she had basically set up residence in the town house. She continued to appear in public with Barry but made no secret of the fact that theirs had become an "open marriage," a throwback phrase from an earlier generation. Still, there was no talk of divorce. Barry had been there and done that three times already, and appar ently had no taste for a fourth go-round.

  "But according to your statement to the police," Jaywalker pointed out, "you admitted having fights, the two of you."

  "That was their word," said Samara. "Fights."

  "And your word?"

  "Arguments."

  "What did you argue about?"

  "You name it, we argued about it. Money, sex, my driving, my clothes, my drinking, my language. Whatever couples argue about, I guess."

  A corrections officer came into the lawyers' section of the room and asked for everyone's attention. "Anyone who wants to make the one o'clock bus back," he announced, "wind it up. You got ezzackly five minutes."

  Jaywalker looked at Samara. If she missed the one o'clock, it meant she'd be stuck in the b
uilding till after five, which could mean not getting back to Rikers before ten or eleven, and having to settle for a bologna or cheese sandwich instead of what passed for a hot meal. But Samara gave one of her patented shrugs. Jaywalker took it as a good sign that she was willing to make personal sac rifices in order to finish telling him her story.

  He should have known better.

  There was a lot of rustling in the room as other inmates rose to leave, and other lawyers gathered their papers and snapped their briefcases shut.

  "Tell me about the month or so before Barry's death," he said.

  "What about it?"

  "What was going on? Any new arguments? Anything out of the ordinary?"

  Samara seemed to think back for a moment. "Not really," she said. "Barry was sick, and—"

  "Sick?"

  "He had the flu." The way she spat out the word sug gested that she'd had little sympathy for him. "He thought I should be around more. You know, to take care of him. I told him that's what doctors are for, and hospitals. I mean, it's not like he couldn't afford it. Still, I did see a little more of him than usual."

  "Where?"

  "His place, mostly. Mine, once or twice. Out, a couple of times. I don't know."

  "And how did the two of you get along on those occa sions?"

  Two shrugs.

  "What does that mean?" Jaywalker asked.

  "We got along the same as always," she said. "When we were apart, fine. When we were together, Barry always found a way to pick a fight."

  "A fight?"

  "An argument. Jesus, you're as bad as the cops."

  "Sorry," said Jaywalker. "Tell me about the evening

  before you found out Barry had been killed. Your statement says you first denied seeing him, then admitted you'd gone to his place. Is that true?"

  "Is what true?"

  Objection sustained. Jaywalker gave Samara a smile, then broke it down to a series of single questions. "Did you go there?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Did you deny it to the detectives at first?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "I didn't think it was any of their goddamned business."

  That was a pretty good answer, actually, if you took away the goddamned part. If believed, it showed that Samara hadn't known about Barry's murder. If believed. He made a note of it on his yellow pad.

  "What caused you to change your story," he asked, "and admit you'd been there?"

  "They said they already knew. The old bat next door heard us arguing."

  "Were you?"

  "Yeah."

  "What about?"

  "Who remembers? Barry was still pissed off that I'd walked out of some opera a few nights earlier, leaving him sitting there. Maybe that was it."

  "Why had you done that?"

  "Why? Why? Have you ever sat through five hours of some three-hundred-pound woman wearing a helmet, sweating like a pig and singing in German? Next to some one with the flu?"

  "No," Jaywalker had to admit.

  "Try it sometime."

  "Tell me everything you remember about that last evening at Barry's," said Jaywalker. "What prompted you to go there in the first place?"

  "Barry asked me to," Samara said. "Otherwise I wouldn't have. He said he wanted to talk to me about something, but it turned out to be some bullshit, something about how much I'd spent at Bloomingdale's or something like that. Who remembers?"

  "What else?"

  "Nothing much. He'd ordered Chinese food, and we ate. I ate, anyway. He said he couldn't taste anything, on account of being all clogged up, so he barely touched it. I remember that, 'cause I asked him if he was poisoning me."

  Jaywalker raised an eyebrow.

  "It was a joke," said Samara. "You know, like if I pour us each a glass of wine and tell you to drink up, but mean while I don't touch mine?"

  "What did Barry say to that?"

  "He laughed. He knew it was a joke."

  "What else happened?"

  "I don't know," Samara said. "He asked me if I wanted to make love. It was his expression for fucking. I said no, I didn't want to catch whatever he had, thank you very much. I said I was tired and was leaving. He said, 'Just like the other night at the opera?'And that did it. I told him what he could with his fucking opera, and he told me I was a dumb something-or-other, and we went at it pretty good."

  "But just words?"

  "Yeah, just words. Loud ones, but just words."

  "And then?"

  "And then I left."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it."

  "What time was it?"

  "Who knows?" said Samara. "Eight? Eight-thirty?"

  "Where'd you go?"

  "Home."

  "Straight home?"

  "Yeah."

  "How?"

  "Cab."

  Jaywalker made a note to subpoena the Taxi and Limou sine Commission records, see if they could come up with the cabdriver. If they found him and he remembered the fare, he might be able to remember whether Samara had seemed agitated or acted normally.

  "Did anyone see you?" he asked. "Other than the doorman and the cabby?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "What did you do when you got home?"

  "You really want to know?"

  Jaywalker nodded. His guess would've been that she'd run a load of laundry and taken a shower. You stabbed somebody in the heart, chances were you were going to get some blood on you.

  "I really need to know," he said.

  "Fine," she said, her eyes never leaving his. "I jerked off."

  Okay, not exactly what he'd expected to hear. Then again, the literature was full of accounts of serial killers de scribing how their crimes aroused them sexually and prompted them to masturbate, either right there at the scene or at home, shortly afterward. True, all of them were men, as far as Jaywalker could recall. But, hey, this was the twenty-first century, and having long held himself out as a supporter of equal rights for women, who was he to renege now?