The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  hearsed it that way, or planned it. It just happened. Which

  was how the best stuff almost always came from the

  witness stand. You didn't script it. Instead, you tried to

  impart to the witness just what it was you were seeking to

  accomplish, the feeling you were striving to create. And

  every once in a while a witness would get it, and the result

  would be pure magic. Samara, by doing nothing more than

  stopping midsentence, showed Jaywalker that she'd gotten

  it, at least this one time, and worked a little bit of magic.

  MR. JAYWALKER: And when the money ran

  out?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: And when the money ran out, I did what my mother had done. I took men home, or let them take me home. And when they of fered me gifts or money afterwards, I kept it.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Did you consider yourself a

  prostitute?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Not at the time, I didn't.

  MR. JAYWALKER: And now that you look back

  on it?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I'd have to say I was a

  prostitute.

  MR. JAYWALKER: How do you feel about that?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: I certainly don't feel good

  about it. I mean, I'm not going to brag about it or any

  thing like that. But I'm not ashamed of it, either, and

  I'm certainly not going to lie about it. It's what I did.

  It's part of my life. It's how I survived.

  She'd been telling her story for nearly an hour now,

  and Jaywalker sensed that it had been long enough. As re

  ceptive as the jurors had seemed throughout it, he didn't

  want to risk overstaying his welcome. The same was true

  of Judge Sobel. To abuse the considerable leeway he'd

  shown would be a mistake. The last thing Jaywalker

  wanted to hear was, "Let's move along, counselor." So

  with a single question, he yanked Samara, and with her the

  trial itself, back to the business at hand.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Did there come a time,

  Samara, when you met an

  individual named Barry

  Tannenbaum?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, there did.

  THE COURT: Forgive me, Mr. Jaywalker,

  but perhaps this would be as good a time as any to

  take our mid-morning recess.

  MR. JAYWALKER: That would be fine, Your

  Honor.

  * * *

  There's a rule, which may be invoked by either side, that once a witness has begun testifying, there may be no dis cussion between the witness and the lawyer who's put the witness on the stand. When the witness happens to be the defendant, however, that rule gets trumped by a higher constitutional rule: the right to consult with counsel. At the moment the conflict provided something of a conundrum for Jaywalker, who'd never met a rule he didn't want to break. So in Samara's case, he ended up breaking both rules, first by telling her how well she was doing, and then by turning his back and walking away from her. Just in case Burke took the chance of asking Samara on cross-examina tion if she'd discussed her answers with her lawyer during recess, Jaywalker wanted her to be able to answer truth fully that she hadn't.

  And there was another reason for his caution. Just as jurors watch the defendant like hawks in the courtroom, looking for some telltale sign of guilt or innocence, so do they continue to look for clues out in the corridor, in the elevator and down on the street. As grateful as Jaywalker was for having Samara out on bail, rather than locked up on Rikers Island, he was aware of the risks. The well-known defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, after winning a murder acquittal for Carl Coppalino in New Jersey, had made the mistake of allowing his client to be photographed cavorting on the beach with his lover in Florida, while he awaited a second murder trial. To Jaywalker's thinking, Bailey had lost the second case right then and there, before the trial had even begun.

  So he would let the jurors see Samara heading to the ladies' room, talking with the court officers or standing alone with her thoughts by the elevator bank. What they weren't going to see, or think they were seeing, was her lawyer whispering in her ear and coaching her, telling her what to say and how to say it, when to smile demurely, and when to allow a tear to well up and roll down her cheek.

  Besides, there was no need for him to tell her any of those things. He'd already done so, a hundred times over.

  After the recess, Jaywalker picked up precisely where he'd left off.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Did there come a time when

  you met a man named Barry

  Tannenbaum?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, there did.

  MR. JAYWALKER: When and where was that?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: I was eighteen, so it would have been in 1997, I think. I'd just become legal, so I could work at the hotels. You didn't have to be twenty-one back then. So I was working in one of the cocktail lounges at Caesars Palace. That's where I first saw Barry.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about that first meet

  ing.

  MS. TANNENBAUM: I saw this man sitting alone at a table in the corner. He was smallish, not too much bigger than I am. He was already sixty-one, old enough to have been my grandfather, as a lot of peo ple have pointed out since. He was pale, and his hair was thinning, though I didn't know that right away, because he was wearing a wig, a wig and sunglasses. So nobody would recognize him, he told me later.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Would you have recognized

  him?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Me? I'd never heard of him. In fact, I figured he had to be gay. You know, the wig, the shades. I figured he was scoping out guys.

  MR. JAYWALKER: So it wasn't your intention

  to hit on him?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: No. I was legit by then. I

  didn't have to do that any

  more.

  Gay or straight, the man had looked so alone and so sad that Samara had walked over to his table, even though it wasn't part of her station, and asked him if he was okay. He'd replied that he wasn't sure. She could see that he was drinking Diet Coke—she knew from the lemon slice he'd removed from the rim of the glass but hadn't used—so on her next trip by, she'd brought him another one, no charge. He'd seemed terribly grateful for the gesture, she recalled. And when she got off her shift, at three in the morning, he was waiting for her, just outside the door. At his invitation, they'd gone to his room upstairs, where he'd taken off the wig and the sunglasses, but no more. And for the next five hours, they'd talked.

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Talked. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I'd never talked to anyone in my whole life, not for more than a minute or two. And then it would be about the weather, or to say, "Please pass the salt," or "Do you know what time it is?" or "Your place or mine?"

  MR. JAYWALKER: What did you talk about?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: All sorts of stuff. Where we'd grown up, what we liked, what we hated, whether we cried when we were sad or when we were happy—

  MR. JAYWALKER: How did that come up?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: It's going to sound silly.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Try us.

  MS. TANNENBAUM: At some point, I started cry ing, just like that. And Barry asked me what was the matter. And I told him nothing was the matter. When he asked me again, I felt I had to tell him the truth. So I told him I was crying because I'd never been so happy in my life.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Did you go to bed with

  Barry that night? Did you

  have sex with him?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: No, not that night. Not for a month, maybe two. I still thought he was gay. Any way, it wasn't about sex. I'd had enough sex by then to last me a lifetime. Two or three lifetimes.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Was it about money?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: (Laughs) I'd bought him Diet Cokes all night, out of my own paycheck, be cause I figured he couldn't afford to spring for a real drink. I didn't thin
k he had a dollar to his name, to be honest.

  MR. JAYWALKER: But he had a room at Caesars Palace, didn't he?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Back then, the big hotels would comp just about anybody, at least once. I don't know if they still do it. But in those days, all you had to do was ask. You have no idea how many flat broke guys there were back then, hanging on by their teeth, waiting for their luck to turn.

  MR. JAYWALKER: So if it wasn't about sex and

  it wasn't about money, what

  was it about?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: To tell you the truth, I had absolutely no idea. Love, I probably would have said at the time. Now that I'm older, and maybe just a tiny bit smarter, I guess maybe it was about finding my father. You know, the father I never had.

  And right there, she lost it. No solitary tear welled up and trickled slowly down her cheek. No practiced feminine sob begged for the audience's attention. Without warning, Samara doubled over as though shot through the gut with a cannonball, her face contorted in pain, her hands knotted into fists, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably, her body heaving for breath. Strange, low animal noises rose from somewhere deep inside her. There was nothing in the least bit attractive about it, nothing charming, nothing to make some Hollywood director envious. But it was real.

  For a full minute she stayed contorted like that, showing no sign that she was the least bit capable of reclaiming herself from whatever demons had so suddenly and so un expectedly seized possession of her. Jaywalker stood by helplessly, hugging the sides of the lectern with both hands to hold himself back from rushing to her. They hadn't re hearsed this. They hadn't talked about it. They had contin gency plans for just about anything that might happen while she was on the stand, right down to sneezing fits and bladder issues. But they had no plan in place for a total meltdown. There was no adjustment for something like this in Jaywalker's mental playbook. All he knew was that his client was in a place way beyond where the offering of a tissue or the extending of a glass of water made any sense, light-years past the point of asking her if she could use a few minutes to compose herself before continuing.

  "I think," said Judge Sobel, "that we're going to take our lunch break a little early today."

  And all Jaywalker could do was to say thank-you, walk to the defense table and take his seat, and do what everyone else in the courtroom was doing: watch and listen, and try to not watch and listen, as Samara continued to writhe in the agonizing memory of her lost childhood. Only when the jurors had been led out, the judge had left the bench and the last of the spectators had filed out of the room in silence, could he then make his way to her and collect her from where she crouched, by then on one knee, on the bare floor of the witness stand. Only then could he take her in his arms and hold her and rock her, until finally he felt the first subtle signals that her body was beginning to unclench and soften, and he could at last allow himself to believe that she was on her way back from whatever long-ago and far away place her story had carried her off to.

  25

  FROZEN IN TIME

  Samara had pretty much regained control of herself by the time the afternoon session began, but from Jaywalker's per spective, her doing so proved a mixed blessing. While she was able to respond to his questions without outburst or interruption, there was something missing from her answers. Gone was her willingness to elaborate, to speculate into her own motives and to question her own actions in retrospect. Gone, too, was her vulnerability, which, even as it had been her undoing in the morning session, had also stamped her tes timony with the unmistakable imprimatur of genuineness. Jaywalker strongly suspected that she was not only aware that she was closing up, but that she'd even made a conscious choice to do so. It was as though she'd resolved to make a tradeoff, so determined was she to keep hold of her emotional equilibrium, even if doing so came at the expense of her cred ibility with the jury. And while Jaywalker could understand and even appreciate her decision, he didn't let it stop him from trying to draw her out whenever an opportunity pre sented itself, even as she dug her heels in and resisted.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Did the relationship con

  tinue, after that first morn

  ing?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, it did.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Would you describe its

  progress for us, please.

  MS. TANNENBAUM: The only way I can describe it is to say that Barry courted me. I know that's kind of a foolish, old-fashioned word, but that's what he did, he courted me.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us what you mean by

  that.

  MS. TANNENBAUM: I mean that we dated. We went to movies. He bought me flowers. We held hands. We talked for hours on end. Again, nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Was there a sexual compo nent to the relationship?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Not at first, no. The truth was, I never found Barry terribly attractive. Not only was he a lot older than I was, but, well, he wasn't the best looking guy in the world. So there was an attrac tion, but it wasn't a sexual one. It was more like holding hands, kissing, saying nice things to each other. It was about tenderness, I guess.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Did you like that?

  MS. TANNENBAUM: Like it? I absolutely loved

  it. I'd never known there

  was such a thing.

  She described how the relationship had progressed from

  those first days. Barry had been called back to New York on business, but he phoned her each day, sent her cards, had flowers delivered. Not gaudy displays, but small, tasteful bouquets. She remembered a half dozen yellow roses, for example, arriving on the sixth day after they'd met. Still, she never suspected he had money, not until a fellow cocktail waitress made a comment about her sugar daddy. When Samara looked puzzled by the reference, the other waitress dismissed her with a "Yeah, right." But the next day the waitress showed up with a recent issue of People magazine, featuring a story about the ten richest bachelors in America. Barry was number one. Samara had stared at his photograph for a full five minutes, trying to make the connection between the man she was falling in love with and the one staring out from the pages.

  Whatever lingering doubts she had disappeared a few weeks later, when Barry, forced to cancel a return trip to Vegas for business reasons, asked Samara to come to New York instead. She explained that even were she willing to risk almost certainly losing her job by doing so, she didn't have enough money to buy a bus ticket. He told her that wouldn't be necessary, he'd send one of his planes for her.

  One of his planes.

  For Samara, being in New York City was like being Cinderella at the ball. Barry bought her clothes and jewelry, wined and dined her, took her to the theater, a concert, the ballet and the opera. She hadn't even known there was such a thing as the opera. They went to bed, finally, but even that was nothing like she'd ever experienced. They did it on silk sheets in his penthouse apartment, overlooking the twinkling lights of Manhattan. And instead of it being all about his satisfaction, it was all about hers. Instead of seeking to possess her, all he seemed to want was to please her. Unlike all of her prior Wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am experiences, with Barry it wasn't over just because he was done. It wasn't over until they lay in each other's arms, marveling over their good fortune at having met. In a word, it was love, something that Samara had never come close to tasting in all of her eighteen years. Not as an infant, not as an adolescent, not as a teenager, not as the adult she'd become long before she should have.