MR. JAYWALKER: What was your reaction to
all this?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I was overwhelmed. Who
wouldn't be? I was in heav
en. And yet—
MR. JAYWALKER: And yet?
MS. TANNENBAUM: And yet I kept waiting for the clock to strike midnight. I kept waiting to wake up and find out it was over. Every time Barry would open his mouth, I'd hold my breath, figuring he was about to ask me to take my things and leave.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did he ever ask you to leave?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No. He asked me to marry
him.
They were married six months later, in a small civil ceremony in Scarsdale, where Barry had a home, or, as Samara put it, a mansion straight out of Gone with the Wind. She'd signed a bunch of papers beforehand, which Barry's lawyers and accountants had put in front of her, in cluding a prenuptial agreement that, as it was explained to her, would leave her out on the street were she ever to file for divorce. She couldn't have cared less. She'd been out on the street for eighteen years, one way or another, and had had her fill of it. And the thought of her ever divorcing Barry seemed about as likely as her walking on the moon.
Outside of storybooks, of course, nothing lasts forever, all things come to an end, and it's rare indeed that the prince and princess ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after. It was certainly no accident that Barry had left a trail of three failed marriages in his wake prior to meeting Samara, no small thing that he was forty-four years older than she, and not to be overlooked that they came from backgrounds so divergent that they might as well have been from different planets altogether. The two-week hon eymoon in Paris was interrupted hourly by mergers and ac quisitions, by IPOs and CFOs, by board meetings and boards of inquiry. A month into the marriage, Samara woke up to the reality that for Barry, business came first, second and third. There was a good reason why he'd risen through the ranks of the wealthiest bachelors in America to the top spot, an honor relinquished now only on something of a mere technicality, at least to Barry's way of thinking. And that reason was his single-minded, almost pathological dedication to maintaining his financial empire. It was as though, on the heels of his third divorce, Barry had flown out to Las Vegas to re-up, to find himself a replacement wife. He'd found her, taken a brief sabbatical, just long enough to consolidate her (what Samara had described as courting) and marry her. Once that had been checked off the agenda, it was back to business as usual.
With Barry's attention turned from the lines of his wife's bottom to the bottom line, the marriage never had a chance. Samara found herself alone in a city so alien to her that she was literally afraid to go out. She had no friends; there were no clubs for gold diggers, no meetings of Former Trailer Trash Anonymous, no chapter of Prairie Creek, Indiana, junior-high-school dropouts. She begged Barry to find her a job, any kind of job. But he refused, insisting that no wife of his would ever embarrass him by working. A family was out of the question: Barry already had five children and twelve grandchildren from his previous marriages, and though his alimony and support payments cost him only a negligible fraction of his wealth, he was pretty much es tranged from all his progeny, and infuriated by the idea of paying them anything or potentially increasing their num bers. Even lovemaking became an extremely rare event.
MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about that.
MS. TANNENBAUM: At first I thought Barry's being so gentle in bed was all about tenderness. Soon I realized that wasn't it at all. He was a hypochondriac, one of those people who are convinced they're dying but are afraid to go the doctor because they might find out that they're right. Or that they're wrong and are just flat-out crazy. He'd had a heart attack some years back and was afraid that exerting himself during sex with someone much younger than him might give him an other one and kill him. And he'd read somewhere on his computer—that's where he got all his medical ad vice from—that there'd been this experiment that showed that producing sperm takes a lot out of mice, and they live shorter lives as a result. Barry figured the same had to be true with humans. So he tried not to come—you know, to ejaculate—because he was afraid that every time he did, it meant there went an other month off his life span.
With no friends, no social life, no sex life, no job and no hope of raising a family, it didn't take long for Samara to become resentful of Barry and rebel against him. Her rebellion took the form of overcoming her fears and ven turing outside. But not during the day, to shop or sightsee or pamper herself, as Barry encouraged her to. Instead, she waited for cover of darkness, and sought out clubs that opened late and stayed open later. She'd worked the night owl shift in Las Vegas, after all, and the sight of the sun coming up as she emerged from some smoke-filled sub terranean lounge was nothing new to her. And as far as gaining entree to some of the city's more trendy spots, that proved no problem at all. Barry had already provided Samara with identification asserting that she was twentytwo, not so much to get her into places or served drinks as to protect himself from charges of cradle robbing. And on the rare occasion when Samara's fake ID or good looks alone failed to get her through the door, her last name more than sufficed.
But Manhattan proved to be no Vegas, where what hap pened there stayed there. It wasn't long before the tabloids picked up on Samara's late-night outings, and word got back to Barry. At first he put up with it, figuring she would get it out of her system. But soon the rumors got uglier, linking Samara to men, and backing up words with photos.
MR. JAYWALKER: Were the rumors true?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Do you mean, was I seeing
other men?
MR. JAYWALKER: Yes.
MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I was.
MR. JAYWALKER: And were you sleeping with
them?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Some of them.
MR. JAYWALKER: How did that come about?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I allowed it to. I was bored, I had no life. It was like Barry had turned this switch on in me, showed me what lovemaking was, and what intimacy was about. And then he'd tried to turn the switch off, just like that. I was eighteen, nineteen by then, I guess. I'd had sex, but I'd never made love before. I wanted more of it.
MR. JAYWALKER: What was Barry's reaction?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm sure he was embar rassed, horrified, whatever. I guess the word I'm looking for is humiliated. It was very important for Barry to be in control of absolutely everything. And here I was, six months into our marriage, running around like a tramp. I'm sure it was very hard on him, to suddenly feel out of control, like a victim.
MR. JAYWALKER: You used the word tramp. Were you taking money from these men, or gifts, as you'd done back in Las Vegas?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No, it was nothing like that. Barry gave me all the money I needed. I didn't want his money, I wanted a life.
It didn't take too long for things to come to a head. Within months, Samara's photo had made the front page of every tabloid, many times over, as often as not with a generous helping of leg or cleavage, as she dodged the cameras on the arm of some minor celebrity. It didn't help matters that the men were uniformly young and good-looking. Barry cornered her one afternoon, literally cornered her, in the living room of his Scarsdale man sion, grabbing her by the arms and demanding an end to her behavior.
MR. JAYWALKER: And?
MS. TANNENBAUM: And I threatened to call the
police.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you agree to his de
mands?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No, not unless he'd let me get a job or get pregnant. And he wouldn't. So I told him I was moving out, that I had friends with money who'd take care of me. In order to stop me from doing that and humiliating him even more, he agreed to get me my own place in the city. All he asked was that I be more discreet about what I did and who I did it with, and that I continue to act like his wife in public, when he needed me to. Appearance was very important to Barry.
MR. JAYWALKER: And how did that work out?
MS. TANNENBAUM:
It worked out okay, for a while. He bought me a town house in Midtown and set up a joint bank account so I could furnish it. It gave me something to do, something I found out I was good at. At least I think I was. It also gave me space. I know that's a dumb California word, but it's how I felt.
MR. JAYWALKER: You say it worked out okay
for a while.
MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes. But the tabloids and the gossip columns are like sharks. They get a taste of blood, and they keep coming around for more. I know it was my own fault, for having started it all in the first place. But they'd stake out my home, follow me whenever I went out, snap my picture on the street corner, in the supermarket, wherever they could. If I squatted down to pick up a tissue, the next day there'd be a shot up my skirt. If I bent over instead, it would be of my butt. One time, they got me coming out of a women's health clinic, where I'd gone to have a breast exam, 'cause I thought I'd felt a lump. The photo made all the front pages, and the headlines made it sound like I had AIDS or herpes, or had just gotten an abortion. Somebody sent copies to Barry, and he went absolutely nuts. I don't blame him, re ally. I would've, too, if I'd been in his shoes.
Samara had tried to rein in her behavior, spending less time at her place and more at Barry's penthouse apart ment, or their home in Scarsdale. But with Barry con sumed by work and often absent for days at a time, she would eventually gravitate back to her own place, her own life and her own friends. Even as she could see the humiliation her behavior brought him, she felt powerless to change her behavior.
Occasionally there would be flare-ups, intense shout ing arguments filled with threats and ultimatums. Never was there physical force, yet never was there resolution, either. Instead a stalemate of sorts set in, with Samara able to continue defying Barry because by that time she had too much on him. Even as he held firm to the purse strings to her life, she would threaten to go public with his fears, his foibles, his anxieties and his sexual neuroses. If theirs was a love-hate relationship, it was sorely out of balance, with precious little love and more than enough anger to go around. Barry hated Samara for continually humiliating him and victimizing him, while Samara hated Barry for keeping her trapped in a prison without walls.
MR. JAYWALKER: How long did this stalemate
continue?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Forever. I mean, we made some adjustments, some accommodations over the years. We continued to see each other and appear to gether in public when some occasion called for it. But privately, we led our own lives. I stayed at my place, and Barry at either of his. He hated it, but that's the way it was.
MR. JAYWALKER: How about your finances?
Who looked after them?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Barry had lawyers and ac countants who pretty much took care of everything. If something needed to be signed, one of them would call and come over, have me sign. But mostly they took care of things without me. Barry had met me when I was eighteen and didn't know anything. By the time he…he died, I was twenty-six and had learned some stuff. But to Barry, it was like I was fro zen in time. I'd always be the eighteen-year-old cock tail waitress who couldn't be trusted to write a check. That was a big part of the problem right there.
MR. JAYWALKER: Let's go forward to August, August of a year and a half ago, the month Barry died. How did things stand between the two of you by that time?
MS. TANNENBAUM: They were pretty much the same, I guess. I was no longer a favorite of the tab loids, but every once in a while I'd do something stu pid, and there would be my photo, with my hair messed up or a nipple showing, or something like that. And Barry would get humiliated all over again and go ballistic, and we'd have a good scream over it.
At which point Judge Sobel interrupted, politely as always, and asked if it might be a good time for the midafternoon break. Some judges fall asleep during testi mony; others try to take down every word on a laptop; still others work on shopping lists, bill paying, check book balancing and Little League lineups. Matthew Sobel listened. And from listening, he knew that Jay walker had reached the moment when he was about to have Samara describe the evening of the murder, and he decided that the jurors should be as fresh and alert as possible for her account.
"It would be a perfect time," said Jaywalker.
The day had gone reasonably well, he felt. If, in the afternoon session, Samara had been guarded emotion ally, and surely she had been, at least she hadn't allowed her reticence to cut her answers short. Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by a lawyer in examining his own client is that the defendant will invariably try to summarize the facts instead of elaborating on them. Good lawyers will therefore devote hours of practice sessions to drawing out the minute details of events, re peatedly explaining to the witness the need to convey those details to the jury. Jaywalker, as he did with most things, took it a step further.
"You're going to get nervous on the witness stand," he'd told Samara more than once. "You're going to look out from where you're sitting and see hundreds of strangers. You're going to see reporters and sketch artists and gawkers. It's going to freak you out, trust me. And when that happens, your natural impulse is going to be to sum marize, to cut things short. Everybody does it. What I need is for you to fight that impulse as hard as you possibly can. And the best way to fight it is to slow down and give me as much detail as you can come up with."
It had worked.
Had Samara testified simply that Barry had been a hypo chondriac preoccupied with his health, the jurors would have heard her, but it would have been only her intellec tual conclusion that they heard. When she went on to describe how, having come across an item about mice on the Internet, Barry had become afraid to ejaculate, lest it shorten his life span by a month, they got it. So, too, when she'd complained about how the tabloid photographers wouldn't let her alone. Words. Only when she described the health clinic episode and the headline suggesting she had AIDS or herpes or was coming from an abortion, or when she talked about the photo revealing her nipple, did she give them something to truly picture and remember and take home with them that night. The difference lay in the fact that they hadn't been forced to accept her conclusions. Instead they'd taken her details and drawn their own con clusions from them.
What Jaywalker was less happy about was the way Samara had been so ready to acknowledge the depth of her anger at Barry. Where had that come from? He couldn't remember her bringing it up in any of their sessions. Had she done so, he almost certainly would have worked with her to tone it down. As it stood, that anger, especially when coupled with the life insurance policy, could have provided her with enough motivation to kill Barry a dozen times over. And Tom Burke certainly hadn't missed it. Jaywalker had noticed him out of the corner of his eye, scribbling away on his notepad, as soon as the words were out of Sa mara's mouth.
Not that Jaywalker himself wouldn't do his best to patch things up before Burke got a chance to exploit them. Still, the anger was there, and it didn't help matters.
With the jurors settled back in their seats following the recess, Jaywalker wasted no time in getting to the part of Samara's testimony that they'd been waiting for all day. Waiting for, as a matter of fact, for a week and a half now.
MR. JAYWALKER: Do you recall the very last
time you saw Barry?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I do.
MR. JAYWALKER: When was that?
MS. TANNENBAUM: The evening everyone says
he was murdered.
MR. JAYWALKER: And where was it you saw
him?
MS. TANNENBAUM: At his apartment.
She described how she'd gone there at Barry's invita
tion to discuss something he'd said was important but
which she could no longer remember. It had been around
dinnertime when she'd arrived, and he'd ordered Chinese
food, which they'd eaten straight from the takeout
The Tenth Case Page 27