The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  He asked the detective if he'd conducted some further investigation on the case the previous Friday, just three days ago. Bonfiglio replied that he had. He'd located Anthony Mazzini, the super at Barry Tannenbaum's build ing; Alan Manheim, until recently one of Mr. Tannen baum's lawyers; and William Smythe, Mr. Tannenbaum's personal accountant. With the consent of each of them, he'd taken a full set of their fingerprints. Kenneth Redding, the president of the building's co-op board, had been out of town. But because Redding was a former navy SEAL and had once gone through a security clearance investiga tion, his prints were on file with the Pentagon, and Bon figlio had been able to obtain a copy of them. He'd then delivered all four sets of prints to Roger Ramseyer, the CID detective who'd testified on Thursday.

  At that point Jaywalker managed to get Burke's attention, and the two of them huddled for a moment off to the side.

  "You want a stipulation?" Jaywalker asked.

  "No, thanks."

  Burke's reply was quick enough—and decisive enough— to tell Jaywalker that it was more than a matter of prose cutorial stubbornness. Burke intended to bring Detective Ramseyer back to the stand, so he could squeeze a bit of drama out of the fact that in spite of Jaywalker's earlier in sinuations, there'd been no matches between any of the "suspects" Jaywalker had asked Ramseyer about, once their known prints had been compared with the remaining unknowns found at the crime scene.

  He who opens doors sometimes gets his fingers slammed.

  Jaywalker didn't really have much to cross-examine Bonfiglio about, and with the wind pretty much gone out of the defense's sails, he barely felt up to the task. But the detective had hurt Samara too much to be ignored. Besides which, his testimony had been so central to the case that there was a good chance the jury might want all or part of it read back to them during their deliberations. There was no way Jaywalker could let such a read-back contain noth ing but direct examination. With that in mind, he decided to begin where Burke had left off.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Tell me, detective. Does the failure to find an individual's fingerprints at a crime scene rule him out as a suspect?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Not necessarily.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Is that the same as "No"?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah, I guess so.

  MR. JAYWALKER: So it doesn't rule him out.

  Correct?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Correct.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Can you tell us some of the rea

  sons why it doesn't?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: He mighta been wearin'gloves. He mighta not touched nothin'. He mighta wiped his prints off whaddeva he did touch.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Or Crime Scene might have

  missed his prints?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Maybe.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Or he might have touched only

  surfaces that prints don't ad

  here to?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Maybe.

  MR. JAYWALKER: So right there, in about a minute's time, we've come up with, let's see, five possibilities to explain why someone might have been at the crime scene the evening of the murder, yet his prints weren't found the following day. Correct?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: If you say so.

  MR. JAYWALKER: I just did say so. My question

  is, do you agree?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: I dunno. I forget the question.

  THE COURT: Please read the question back.

  (Court reporter rereads previous question)

  MR. JAYWALKER: Correct, or not correct?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Correct.

  It wasn't much, but it did accomplish at least two things. It brought back Jaywalker's "suspects" from the dead, even if they were now no better than on life support. And it cast the detective in the light of a partisan who was only grudgingly willing to make the most minuscule concession to the defense.

  But with his halting responses and I-forget-the-question interruption, Bonfiglio had succeeded, whether intention ally or inadvertently, in depriving Jaywalker of any flow in his cross-examination. Already the jurors were begin ning to squirm in their seats, look around the courtroom and roll their eyes.

  Jaywalker spent a few minutes, but only a few, on Samara's initial lies to Bonfiglio and his partner. No, at that point they hadn't yet told her that her husband had been murdered. Couldn't her response that she'd last seen him about a week ago be nothing but the equivalent of "It's none of your business"? Bonfiglio replied that he hadn't seen it that way. And hadn't Samara denied fighting, as opposed to arguing? Perhaps. And once she'd realized the serious ness of the detectives' inquiry, hadn't she almost immedi ately told the truth, both in terms of her presence at Barry's apartment the previous evening, and that they'd had an argument? Yes, agreed Bonfiglio, though it hadn't been until they'd confronted her with evidence that she was lying.

  Not much headway there.

  Jaywalker moved on to the execution of the search warrant, and the discovery of the knife, the blouse and the towel.

  MR. JAYWALKER: That was a large town house

  you and your fellow officers had

  to search, wouldn't you say?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Depends on whatcha mean by

  large.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Well, how many officers and de

  tectives took part in the search,

  in total?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Countin' me?

  MR. JAYWALKER: Yes.

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Lemme see. Six, eight, ten.

  About ten.

  MR. JAYWALKER: And how long were you there?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Searchin' the place?

  MR. JAYWALKER: Well, were you doing anything

  else while you were there?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: No.

  MR. JAYWALKER: So how long did it take?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Uh, from twenty-two-hunnerd to oh-one-one-five the next mornin'. Adds up to three hours an' fifteen minutes.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Pretty large town house?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah, pretty large.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Fourteen rooms?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: I dunno, sumpin' like that.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Lots of hiding places?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: I'd say so.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Yet the things you found, the towel, the blouse and the knife, they were almost in plain view, weren't they?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: No. They was behind the toilet

  tank.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Well, did you have to move

  anything to see them?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: No.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Lift anything?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: No.

  MR. JAYWALKER: They weren't, for example,

  hidden inside the toilet tank,

  were they?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Inside it? No.

  MR. JAYWALKER: If they had been, you'd have

  had to lift off the top of the tank

  in order to see them, right?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

  MR. JAYWALKER: And you might have missed

  them.

  DET. BONFIGLIO: I don't think so.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Then again, if they'd been in

  side the tank, instead of behind

  it, they'd have gotten wet, right?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

  MR. JAYWALKER: And some or all of the blood might have washed off, right?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: I s'pose so.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Making it harder, if not alto gether impossible, to identify Barry Tannenbaum's blood on them?

  MR. BURKE: Objection.

  THE COURT: Sustained. He's not qualified

  to answer that.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Well, would you agree, detec tive, that if the items had been unwrapped and dropped into the toilet tank itself, any blood on them would have at least become diluted by the water in the tank?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Diluted? Yeah, I guess so.

  MR. JAYWALKER: But in any event, they weren't inside the tank at all, were they?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: No. />
  MR. JAYWALKER: They were behind it.

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Nice and dry.

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Neatly wrapped up.

  DET. BONFIGLIO: They was wrapped up.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Almost as though somebody had put them there, nice and neat, nice and dry, con fident that they'd be found.

  MR. BURKE: Objection.

  THE COURT: Sustained.

  Figuring that he wasn't going to get much more out of the detective, Jaywalker decided it was as good a place as any to quit.

  Burke had one more thing he wanted to do before the judge broke for the day, and that was, as Jaywalker had an ticipated, to recall Roger Ramseyer, the CID detective. Ramseyer testified that the previous Friday evening he'd been provided by Detective Bonfiglio with four known sets of prints, belonging to Anthony Mazzini, Alan Man heim, William Smythe and Kenneth Redding. Ramseyer had gone in to work on Saturday, his R.D.O., to compare the prints to those lifted from Barry Tannenbaum's apart ment, but still classified as unknown.

  MR. BURKE: What's an R.D.O., by the way?

  DET. RAMSEYER: A regular day off.

  MR. BURKE: I see. And did any of the prints

  on the four new cards match

  any of the remaining unknown

  prints?

  DET. RAMSEYER: No, they did not.

  As tempted as Jaywalker was to ask Ramseyer if he got paid for working on his day off—chances were he not only got paid, but got paid at overtime rates—he refrained from doing so. There was nothing significant to be gained by making the point, while the risk was that by showing off his knowledge, Jaywalker might come off as a wiseass. Samara was already in enough trouble with the jurors, he figured. She didn't need them disliking her lawyer on top of everything else.

  With Jaywalker's "No questions," they broke for the day. As always, Judge Sobel cautioned the jurors not to discuss the case among themselves, not to come to any con clusions before the evidence was in, and to avoid going to any of the places mentioned in the testimony. Just in case any of them were planning on sneaking past the doorman that night, cutting the crime scene tape, breaking the seal and kicking in the door to Barry Tannenbaum's apartment.

  But rules were rules.

  Even Jaywalker, who'd quietly or not so quietly broken just about all of them at one time or another, knew that. But the knowledge did little to soothe him right now. In a trial that suddenly seemed to have as much to do with toilets and toilet tanks as anything else, it was by now pretty clear exactly where his client was headed. And as much as he hated the thought of losing his last trial, he knew that to think of defeat in personal terms was absurdly selfish. Sure, he'd be bummed out for six months or a year. But he'd deal. He'd buy himself a case of Kahlúa, and he'd get over it. But for Samara, defeat wouldn't be about a batting average or a wounded ego. It would be about spending fifteen years to life in state prison. And that was the minimum.

  He wondered what he could do, what rule he could break, what stunt he could pull off, to change that outcome. What had he missed? What hadn't he thought of ? Or was this trial, as he'd suspected for so long, simply that one case in ten that, try as he might, there was nothing he could do about?

  It certainly seemed so.

  22

  THANK YOU, JESUS

  Tom Burke devoted Tuesday morning's session to preempting Jaywalker's some-other-dude-did-it defense. First he recalled the superintendent of Barry Tannenbaum's building, Anthony Mazzini, and asked him point-blank if it had been he who had killed Tannenbaum. Mazzini's as tonished "Me?" came out so heartfelt and unrehearsed that Jaywalker realized immediately what Burke had done. He'd put the super back on the stand without ever telling him that he was going to pop that question to him. It was a brilliant tactic, and it worked. The jurors' reaction to Mazzini's gen uineness was evident from their own smiles and nods, and even one or two hard glares in Jaywalker's direction.

  On cross, Jaywalker could do little but get Mazzini to admit he'd had, and still had access to, a key to Tannen baum's apartment, and that he'd been vaguely aware of a disagreement between Tannenbaum and the president of the co-op, Kenneth Redding. When Mazzini denied that he'd sided with Redding in the dispute, there was little Jay walker could do. On redirect examination, Burke asked his witness if he was sure he hadn't had some reason to want to kill Tannenbaum.

  MR. MAZZINI: Kill him? The man used to tip

  me two grand at Christmastime.

  Why would I want to kill him?

  Even Jaywalker had to admit it was a pretty good question. He toyed with the idea of asking Mazzini if he knew what the asking price for Penthouse A was, and how much there might have been in it for him if he could have gotten Tannenbaum thrown out of the building for causing water damage to Redding's apartment. But all he had to go on was Samara's suggestion that Mazzini and Redding had shared a common interest, and faced with the witness's denials, his pursuit of that line of questioning would only have led him into a dead end and further antagonized the jurors.

  So Jaywalker settled for getting the super to admit that he'd remained in the apartment for half an hour after the discovery of the body, that he'd walked around some, and that sure, he'd probably touched some things.

  Not much, certainly, but—coupled with the fact that his fingerprints hadn't been found there—at least something for Jaywalker to talk about on summation.

  Next Burke called Kenneth Redding, who'd flown in from Aruba the night before, cutting short a vacation, a fact that he seemed none too happy about. Yes, he'd had a dispute with Tannenbaum, Redding admitted, but that came with the job of being president of the co-op board. It was a tightly run building, and at one time or another he'd had issues with just about every one of its owners and tenants. The point of contention between Redding and Tan nenbaum had involved an unpaid bill of about thirteen thousand dollars, representing the cost of damage to Red ding's apartment not covered by Tannenbaum's insurance. Redding had demanded payment, and Tannenbaum had refused, claiming that Redding had taken advantage by upgrading his kitchen at Tannenbaum's expense. Redding denied that he'd done so.

  MR. BURKE: In any event, given your fi nances and those of Mr. Tannenbaum, as you under stand them to have been, would you call the amount in dispute a lot of money?

  MR. REDDING: Personally, I'd call it chump

  change.

  MR. BURKE: Enough to kill someone over?

  MR. REDDING: (Laughing) It'd take a helluva

  lot more than that to get me to

  kill someone.