The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  But as slowly and as deliberately as the average murder case proceeds, the pace drops to an absolute crawl if the de fendant happens to be fortunate enough to be released on bail. Once a murder defendant is out of jail, his case moves to the very back of the line, behind misdemeanors, felonies, or ever newer murder cases involving defendants in jail. One thing about murder defendants who aren't in jail: they're in no hurry to get anything but another postponement.

  By late winter it had begun to dawn on Jaywalker that being on the slow track with Samara was going to turn out to be a very mixed blessing. Back in September, when he'd first listed her case among those he desperately needed to keep, he'd done so because he recognized its potential to be a long-distance runner. (Okay, there was also the fact that his middle-aged testosterone troops were lobbying fever ishly for its inclusion.) That potential had been enhanced twice since: first when she stubbornly and unreasonably insisted on her innocence, and again when they'd suc ceeded in getting her out on bail. The combination of those three ingredients—murder, stubbornness and bail—all but guaranteed that the case would far outlive all the others on his list. It would stretch to the limit what he'd come to think of as "the suspension of his suspension." It would carry him off into the twilight. It would be his swan song.

  Which was a problem.

  Because by now he knew full well that no matter what he did, he was going to lose Samara's trial. It had turned into a case that not even the best defense lawyer in the world, on his best day ever, could possibly win. It had become that tenth case at the far end of the spectrum.

  Jaywalker would go out a loser.

  Did the realization bother him, this man who liked to think of himself as totally without an ego? Who thought so little of his personal appearance that he'd been known to arrive in court in the mismatched jacket and pants of two altogether different suits, or to wear the same necktie for two weeks in a row? Who considered vanity the moral equivalent of any three other deadly sins combined? Who routinely broke more rules, conventions and mores in a month than most people did in a lifetime?

  You bet it did.

  Not because he loved winning so much. To Jaywalker, winning was great, but not just for its own sake, or even that of the client, who might or might not "deserve" to be acquitted in a perfect universe. No, winning at its essence was a means to achieve an end, an end that was far more important, that was nothing short of essential, in fact. An end that justified the twenty-two-hour days he put in during the course of a trial, the blotting out of everything else, be it sleep, food, health or human contact. An end that drove him, that absolutely consumed him. But an end that at the same time made him among the very best in the business, and by far the most burned out.

  And what was that end?

  Not losing.

  If you or one close to you should ever suffer the misfor tune of being accused of a crime, whether justly or unjustly, and find yourself shopping around for a lawyer, do yourself a favor. Don't look for the one with the best reputation or the most impressive client list, the biggest office or the finest suits, or the best hair or the smoothest speaking voice. Look for the one who hates to lose the most.

  Look for a Jaywalker.

  So yes, the thought of losing Samara's trial, still months away, was already plunging Jaywalker into depression. He could find it in his heart to forgive her for having killed her husband. He could forgive her for not getting rid of the murder weapon and her bloody blouse, and the towel she'd wrapped them in. He could forgive her for lying to the de tectives. He could even forgive her for handing Tom Burke the perfect motive to put the icing on his cake. The one thing he couldn't forgive her for was insisting upon a trial that couldn't be won, and, in the process, taking him down in flames with her.

  Week by week, winter grudgingly loosened its grip on the city. The days became noticeably longer, and the after noons warmer. Jaywalker put away his threadbare over coat, then his wrinkled trench coat, and finally the wool sweater vest he wore under his suit jacket.

  One by one, he finished up the outstanding cases on his list. He found an apartment for the homeless mother and succeeded in reuniting her with her two small children. On the basis of a DNA mismatch, he won the release of the Sing Sing inmate who'd been wrongly imprisoned for the past eight years for a murder committed by a police informer. And he rented another car and drove up to Rhinebeck again, so that he could cry his eyes out at the graduation from rehab of his fourteen-year-old drug addict, who'd somehow transformed himself into a fifteen-year-old young man.

  By June he'd crossed off nine of the cases from the list of ten that the disciplinary committee had allowed him to keep. The only name that remained was Samara Tannenbaum's.

  By that time, Jaywalker and Samara had become virtual strangers. They checked in with each other by phone on a fairly regular basis but saw each other only when the case appeared in court, which, now that Samara was out on bail, meant only once a month or so. On those occasions, they greeted each other warmly enough, the way first cousins might greet each other at family gatherings during the holidays. Each time he saw her, Jaywalker was struck anew by how terrific she looked, and he would think about her for days afterward, even dream of her at night. But then she would gradually fade from his thoughts and his dreams, and he would lose her face, only to be surprised all over again on the next of their court dates.

  Court dates.

  That was what he'd come to think of them as.

  They would hug in the hallway upon recognizing one another, and catch up on whatever was new in their lives, which was never much—in Jaywalker's case because he had no life to speak of, and in Samara's because her ankle bracelet, curfew and other restrictions pretty much assured that she didn't, either. Then they would sit side by side in the courtroom, Jaywalker forsaking the "lawyers only" front two rows for the general admissions section, waiting for the case to be called. Sometimes he would purposefully delay signing them in, just so he could prolong the time he would get to sit next to Samara. He would feel the touch of her shoulder against his, smell the scent of whatever perfume she was wearing that day, and listen to the rise and fall of her breath. Once the case was called, they would walk together up the aisle to the defense table, where they stood as one for a minute or two, rarely longer, as the judge inquired about the progress of the case, looked at his calendar and announced the next of their court dates.

  Court dates.

  By mid-July it was clear to Jaywalker that Samara's case wouldn't go to trial until fall, at the very earliest. Like therapists, judges tend to take their vacations in August. So do prosecutors, defense lawyers, clerks, court officers, ste nographers and even jurors. A handful of trials are held, but by and large they involve long-term detainees. Bail cases that make it through July almost always make it through August, as well. Samara's would be no exception; it was adjourned until right after Labor Day. This adjourn ment was slightly different from the previous ones, how ever. For the first time, in announcing the new date, Judge Sobel added the words "for hearing and trial."

  But even that phrase was a misnomer, Jaywalker knew. All it meant was that there was nothing left but the hearing and the trial. There still remained other cases ahead of theirs, some older, some younger but involving jailed de fendants. By Jaywalker's calculation, a September trial was unlikely, with October or November no better than even money. And once you got into December, there were the holidays looming, and you were safe until January.

  With his law practice whittled down to a single case, it would have been vintage Jaywalker to throw all his con siderable energy into preparing for it. He'd won trials in the past by walking into court not only better prepared than his adversary but infinitely better prepared. He would visit and revisit crime scenes, interview witnesses to the point of exhaustion, all but commit reports to memory, and organize his case file into subfiles and sub-subfiles that would enable him to locate the most obscure document on a moment's notice, without having to shuffle papers an
d fumble around for it.

  Now, as summer stretched into fall, he did none of that. Instead he spent mornings sleeping in, and afternoons taking long walks by the river or sunning himself on a park bench. Evenings he propped himself in front of the TV, half watching a Yankee game or an old movie, a tumbler of Kahlúa on the table beside him.

  And when winter came, the only concessions he made were to sleep in even later in the morning, to bundle up and walk more briskly in the afternoon, and to switch from baseball to football or basketball in the evening.

  Just because he was going to have to lose the last trial of his career, that didn't mean he had to spend an entire year doing it.

  Would he have kept it up, this totally uncharacteristic avoidance of responsibility? Would he have gone into trial no better prepared—and indeed, considerably less prepared— than the prosecution? Or would he have awakened on his own from his self-inflicted paralysis in time to pull himself together, put in the long hours that had become his trade mark, and—even if he were destined to lose—try the case of his life, as he had every other time out?

  The answer is, there's simply no way of knowing for sure. Because before Jaywalker could awake on his own, if ever he was going to, the phone woke him. It rang on a Thursday night in mid-December. He picked up on the sixth ring, or maybe the seventh. He'd been asleep at the time, so he had no way of knowing. And he'd disconnected his answering machine months earlier, shortly after his list of remaining cases had dwindled down to one.

  He mumbled "Jaywalker" into the phone, his voice thick with Kahlúa and sleep. He found the remote and muted the TV set, half noticing that an old M*A*S*H episode was on. Hawkeye and Radar were planning some trick on Frank Burns.

  "Are you awake?" It was a woman's voice, a vaguely familiar one. For an instant he thought it might be his wife. Then he remembered. His wife was dead. She'd died almost a dozen years ago.

  "Sorta," he said. "Who is this?"

  "Sam."

  "What time is it?"

  "Eleven," she said. "Five after eleven."

  "Jesus."

  "Jaywalker?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I need you to come over."

  "Now?" he asked.

  "Now."

  "Why?"

  "Because I've found something."

  15

  IN THE SPICE CABINET

  Samara met his cab in front of her town house and ushered him in. She took his overcoat, a threadbare thing he'd owned forever, and hung it up in a closet, unnecessarily dignifying it, as far as Jaywalker was concerned. He would have preferred to toss it on a chair, or, better yet, to keep it on for warmth. What time had she said it was?

  "You're freezing," she said. She left the room, and when she reappeared, she was carrying a wool blanket. Without so much as asking him, she pushed him down onto a chair, straddled him and wrapped the blanket around him, tuck ing the corners underneath him. She could be a real Nurse Ratched when she wanted to be.

  He tried to tell her that, and to explain that he was fine without it, but a sudden lump in his throat kept the words from coming out. Once, when he and his wife had been hiking too late in the year in the Canadian Rockies, they'd made it back to their cabin in the early stages of hypother mia, shivering uncontrollably. They'd stripped off their clothes, pulled the blankets off the bed, swaddled them selves together in them, and spent the rest of the day laughing and loving themselves warm.

  "I'm okay," he said, not because he was, but because he needed to hear the sound of his own voice to bring him back from where he'd gone.

  "You're not okay," she told him. "You're freezing. Keep it on. I don't want to be responsible when you get pneu monia and die."

  Even as he succumbed and kept the blanket wrapped around him, he was aware that there was something about the way she'd said it that bothered him. Not the part about her ordering him around; that felt strangely comforting. No, it was the other part. Shouldn't she have said, "if you get pneumonia and die," rather than "when"? He decided it was a thought best kept to himself.

  "Okay," he said. "Tell me what you found."

  "Come," she said.

  He and the blanket followed her up a flight of stairs and into a kitchen that looked spotless. Either Samara was an extremely neat housekeeper or a woman in the same mold as her late husband, who'd never cooked. He was pretty sure where he would lay his money on that one.

  She walked past the stove and opened a narrow cabinet. Inside were little jars of herbs and spices, the expensive organic ones.

  "Look," she said.

  He looked. He saw basil, oregano, parsley, tarragon, cumin and a dozen others. "Look at what?" he asked. He found it hard to believe that she'd called him to come over in the middle of the night because she'd suddenly discov ered she had spices.

  "In the back row," she said.

  He looked in the back row. There, among the little jars, was an amber-colored plastic container with a white top, the kind prescription drugs came in. He reached in and lifted it out by the ribbed top, being careful not to touch the smoother surface of the container itself. He read the label, saw that it was in Samara's name, had been pre scribed by a Dr. Samuel Musgrove, and had been filled a year ago August. That would have been less than a month before Barry's murder. It was for Seconal, twenty-five pills. He held the bottle up to the light. Inside were three or four whole pills and a powder of ground-up ones. All told, the bottle was about a quarter of the way full. He guessed that at least half the pills had been removed.

  It was, Jaywalker instantly knew, a piece of evidence every bit as incriminating as that twenty-five-million-dollar insurance policy Samara had taken out on Barry's life right around the same time and had since conveniently forgot ten about. Only this time she'd dodged a bullet; in search ing the house, the police somehow hadn't noticed the pills.

  "Tell me about this," he said.

  "There's nothing to tell," said Samara, punctuating her remark with one of her trademark shrugs. "I've never seen it before. I don't know anything about it."

  Vintage Samara.

  "So why were you in such a hurry to show it to me?"

  "I was looking for the chocolate syrup," she said. "I had an urge for an ice cream sundae. And I saw this. I read the label and saw it was for Seconal. I remembered you said that was one of the things they found in Barry's blood."

  "So you picked up the bottle?"

  "No," she said. "I have no idea who ordered it, who picked it up, or who put it in there."

  "No, no," said Jaywalker, uninterested in yet another of her absurd denials. "What I mean is, you picked it up in your hands tonight, before calling me."

  She nodded.

  So much for his careful handling of it. Now, he knew, it would have her fingerprints on it, even if she'd been smart enough to wipe them off more than a year ago. He wondered if the law imposed an obligation upon him to turn the bottle over to Tom Burke or to the court. He knew that as a so-called "officer of the court," whatever that was supposed to mean, he couldn't very well throw evidence away or destroy it; doing so would amount to obstruction of justice, or criminal tampering. But did he have to come forward with it, and in the process bury his own client even deeper than she was already buried? He decided not. Any law that required him to do that was a law he had no interest in obeying.

  "I'll tell you what," he said to Samara. "Why don't we just forget tonight happened, make this whole thing our little secret?"

  "You mean you're not going to do anything about it?"

  "Do anything about what?"

  "About the Seconal."

  "Seconal? What Seconal?" And with that he walked over to her trash can. It was one of those fancy ones, all shiny chrome with a foot pedal that activated the lid. He gave the pedal a tap, then another one, figuring Samara might get the hint. After all, she wasn't an officer of the court.