The Tenth Case
Page 25
And even then, he wouldn't know.
When she reappeared in her bathrobe, he realized he hadn't been aware that she'd left.
"You promised," he reminded her.
"And I won't," she assured him, settling onto the sofa across from his chair. "But why haven't we? I mean, I heard about that stairwell thing. Is it me? Do I turn you off?"
"God, no."
"What, then?"
"First of all, that stairwell thing was overblown."
They laughed as one, Samara because she thought it was a clever joke, Jaywalker because it hadn't been. "Let me try that again," he said. "No, you don't turn me off. You turn me on more than you can possibly imagine. Even if I am old enough to be your father."
"Barry was old enough to be my grandfather."
The devil on Jaywalker's left shoulder wanted to say, Yeah, and look what you did to him. But the angel on his right shoulder quickly slapped a hand over his mouth and changed it into a more relevant, "Yeah, but Barry didn't happen to be defending you on a murder charge."
"So?"
"So it would be like the worst kind of conflict of interest. Don't you see? Here I am, knocking my brains out, trying to keep you from spending the rest of your life in prison. I don't sleep. I don't eat. I can't afford to be taking time out to worry about whether I've got bad breath or my dick's not big enough, or if I'm not being attentive enough to your, um, needs."
"Your breath's fine. I don't care how big your dick is. And I'm an adult. I can worry about my needs enough for both of us."
"Sorry," said Jaywalker. "I just can't do it."
Samara pouted. He'd forgotten that pout, forgotten the effect it always had on him, since the very first day he'd set eyes on her.
"How about after?" she was asking him.
"After what?"
"After the trial."
"Sure," he said. "After will be just fine."
"Promise?"
And, so help him, he promised her. How could he not have? How could he have told her, fifteen hours before she was about to take the witness stand, that the moment the jury convicted her, the judge would exonerate her bail and remand her on the spot? Maybe the two of them would get a chance to hug before the court officers slipped the cuffs on her and dragged her off. If they were lucky.
So he promised her. And they even shook pinkies on it, like a couple of ten-year-olds. And then he said good-night to her and took a cab home.
24
FINDING HER FATHER
"The defense calls Samara Tannenbaum."
With those words, Jaywalker began the day by breaking at least two of his own rules. First, he much preferred to call his client as his final witness. Not only would doing that have allowed him to build up the drama surrounding her appearance, it also would have permitted Samara to hear the testimony of any other defense witnesses before having to take the stand herself. The rule that requires wit nesses to remain outside the courtroom before testifying doesn't apply to defendants, for obvious reasons. Second, Jaywalker liked to let the jury know when they should expect no additional witnesses. It was an easy enough thing to do: all he had to do was say, "The defense calls its only witness, Samara Tannenbaum," or "its final witness, Sa mara Tannenbaum."
But the truth was, Jaywalker still wasn't sure whether or not he was going to put on anyone besides Samara. And that was because he hadn't yet decided whether to ask Samara about the discovery of the Seconal in her spice cabinet. He thought he believed her about that, but he couldn't be sure. And if the jurors were skeptical, the story would backfire and do more harm than good. Jaywalker had his investigator, Nicolo LeGrosso, standing by. Nicky had subpoenaed the records from the pharmacy that had filled the prescription. The order had been called in by a physician who, it turned out, didn't appear to exist. It had been picked up by someone who'd simply scrawled Samara's initials on the registry. The pharmacy was very nervous about having anyone testify, since under federal law they shouldn't have honored a phoned-in prescription for a controlled substance in the first place, let alone one from a nonexistent physician. And there was always the chance that if they sent the employee who'd collected the money and handed over the drugs, he or she might identify Samara as the recipient, rightly or wrongly. Were that to happen, there wouldn't be a hole in the floor big enough for Samara and Jaywalker to disappear into. So he was still on the fence about the whole Seconal thing and had been forced to break his own rule this time.
Even without a gradual buildup or an announcement that there will be nothing more to follow, the moment when a defendant rises and walks to the witness stand is a dramatic one. And if the charge happens to be murder, and the victim the husband of the accused, the word dramatic falls short of adequately describing it. Awesome comes closer; pivotal is no overstatement. Because this is the moment everyone's been waiting for. The lawyers, the judge, the court personnel, the media, the spectators and the jurors. Especially the jurors. Something about human na ture leads ordinary people who are fully capable of making a wide variety and staggering number of errors on the simplest of assignments to believe with iron-clad certainty that all they'll have to do is look at and listen to a defen dant, and they'll know in a heartbeat if they're hearing the truth or not.
What these jurors saw, as Samara raised her right hand and dutifully swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, was a woman who looked small, nervous and alone. A stunningly pretty woman, to be sure, but Jaywalker's own mental jury was still very much out on the question of whether that prettiness, in the end, would contribute to her salvation or prove to be her undoing.
She took her seat, not quite on the edge of the chair, but not so far back as to look relaxed. Just as Jaywalker had had her practice. She put her hands in her lap, out of sight and away from her face.
THE CLERK: Would you give your first
name and last, and spell
them for the record.
MS. TANNENBAUM: My name is Samara M.
Tannenbaum. S-A-M-A-R-A
T-A-N-N-E-N-B-A-U-M.
THE CLERK: What is your county of resi
dence?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Manhattan.
THE COURT: You may inquire, Mr. Jay
walker.
MR. JAYWALKER: Thank you. How old are
MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm twenty-eight.
MR. JAYWALKER: Are you currently em
MS. TANNENBAUM: No.
you, Samara?
ployed?
MR. JAYWALKER: Have you been employed in
the past?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, starting when I was four
teen.
These were softballs, grounders. They were only partly aimed to elicit information. Their real purpose was to warm Samara up, to give her a chance to find her voice and develop something of a rhythm. Jaywalker himself had been on the witness stand a fair amount back in his DEA days, and even a couple of times since. He knew it wasn't a particularly comfortable chair to sit in, as chairs went.
He also wanted the jurors to get to know Samara. Not just the Samara they'd read about, the dark-haired tabloid beauty with the checkered past, the Las Vegas gold digger who'd hit the jackpot, the spoiled trophy wife. He wanted them to know her as he knew her, and—if she could somehow work her magic with them the same way she'd worked it with him—to come to like her as he liked her. If a jury likes a defendant, especially a female defendant, they may end up convicting her, but they're going to have an awfully hard time doing so. On the other hand, if they take a dislike to her, it'll be easy, particularly for the women on the jury. Find that hard to believe? Ask Martha Stewart, why don't you?
So he went back to the beginning, Jaywalker did, back to when Samara Moss had been a child growing up outside of Prairie Creek, Indiana. Back to a time before she'd had a penny to her name. Back to before she'd ever dreamed that there was a world beyond the Midwest, a world with out cornfields and trailer parks and rusted-out pickup trucks. Back to before she'd ever eve
n heard of Las Vegas or Barry Tannenbaum or New York City.
MR. JAYWALKER: Who raised you, Samara?
MS. TANNENBAUM: My mother, sort of.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you know your father?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No, I never met him.
MR. JAYWALKER: What was your home like?
MS. TANNENBAUM: It was a half trailer that somebody had abandoned. It had no water or elec tric hookup. And it was missing the half with the bed room and bathroom.
MR. JAYWALKER: What did you use for a bath
room?
MS. TANNENBAUM: In nice weather, we used the field out back. When it was too cold, a stove pot. It was my job to empty it each morning.
MR. JAYWALKER: What did you and your
mother do for food?
MS. TANNENBAUM: When there was money, we bought it, like everyone else. When there wasn't, my mother used to have me beg for groceries outside the Kroger's, the nearest supermarket. Sometimes she'd give me a boost so I could climb up into the Dump ster they kept out back, see what I could find. Some times neighbors left food by the door of our trailer. There was a black family that lived up the road and did that whenever they could, even though they were dirt-poor themselves. Then, after a while, they moved away, and my mother started taking in men, over night guests. And they would give her money, five or ten dollars at a time.
MR. JAYWALKER: Where did they sleep?
MS. TANNENBAUM: On the sofa, with my mother.
MR. JAYWALKER: In the same room as you?
MS. TANNENBAUM: There was only one room. If
the weather was okay, my mother would send me out
in the field. If it was cold or rainy or snowy, she'd
put me to bed on the floor, in the corner. Cover me
up with a blanket and make me face the other way,
so I couldn't see.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you know what was
going on?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I had ears. I could hear.
MR. JAYWALKER: How old were you?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Ten, eleven.
MR. JAYWALKER: How did these men treat you?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Some of them were nice to
me. Some of them weren't.
MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about some of the
ones who weren't.
MS. TANNENBAUM: They…they did things to
me.
MR. JAYWALKER: What kinds of things?
MS. TANNENBAUM: You know.
MR. JAYWALKER: No, we don't know. Not un
less you tell us.
MS. TANNENBAUM: They'd kiss me, touch me under my clothes, in places where they weren't sup posed to. Make me touch them. Put their thing in my mouth, or on my front, or between my legs.
MR. JAYWALKER: Their thing?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Their penis.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever tell your
mother?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes.
MR. JAYWALKER: And?
MS. TANNENBAUM: She'd slap me, say she didn't
believe me. But I know she
did. She knew.
MR. BURKE: Objection.
THE COURT: Sustained. Strike the part
about what her mother knew.
The jury will disregard it.
MR. JAYWALKER: What else, if anything, did
she do or say?
MS. TANNENBAUM: She'd tell me not to lie, not
to complain, that we needed
the money for food. If I
cried, she'd hit me.
MR. JAYWALKER: So what did you do?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I'd close my eyes and pre tend I wasn't there, that I was someplace else alto gether. I put up with it as long as I could. And when I couldn't put up with it anymore, I ran away.
MR. JAYWALKER: How old were you when
you ran away?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Fourteen years and one day.
MR. JAYWALKER: How is it that you remem
ber that?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I remember that because I
MR. JAYWALKER: And what did you get?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Nothing.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever see your
MS. TANNENBAUM: No.
waited to see what I'd get for my birthday.
mother again?
It wasn't just the squalor and the sexual abuse and the separation Jaywalker wanted the jurors to hear, although their transfixed silence spoke loudly enough about the impact those things were having upon them. But beyond that, he was laying out a pattern for them, a template of a mother not only willing to barter sex for food, but equally willing to enlist her only child as an accomplice to the practice. How surprising would it be that within a year or two of her flight from home, Samara herself would be imi tating her mother's survival strategy and adopting it as her own? Would the jurors excuse her behavior? Perhaps not. But at least they'd be able to understand her actions, and hopefully empathize with her. And empathy, Jaywalker firmly believed, lay at the doorstep to forgiveness.
He had Samara talk about how she'd hitchhiked her way west, careful to catch rides at truck stops, lest the police pick her up and send her back home. She described reaching Nevada, and finally Las Vegas itself, with high hopes of becoming a model or a showgirl.
MR. JAYWALKER: What happened to those hopes?
MS. TANNENBAUM: They didn't last very long.
MR. JAYWALKER: Why not?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I couldn't sing or dance. I was too young and too short. My legs weren't long enough. My breasts weren't big enough, and I didn't have any money to have them made bigger.
MR. JAYWALKER: So what did you do?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I tried lying about my age, but they check a lot out there. I'd bus tables, wash dishes, whatever I could. Usually I'd get fired after a week or two, when they'd find out that the Social Security number I'd given them didn't match up.
MR. JAYWALKER: Where did you live?
MS. TANNENBAUM: There are some very bad
boardinghouses off the strip, places none of the tour ists ever get to see.
MR. JAYWALKER: How did you pay the rent?
MS. TANNENBAUM: With whatever money I
could make working. And
when that ran out—
Her voice broke off, midsentence. They hadn't re