The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  So five minutes later there's another buzz, another onset of fibrillation and another note.

  Dear Judge Sobel:

  We the jury are disappointed in your an swer, but will abide by it. At this point, we are extremely close to reaching a unani mous verdict. We request that you allow us to continue our deliberations until 8:00 p.m., to give us a chance to resolve our differences. If we are unable to do it by then, we would like to stop for the eve ning.

  Stanley Merkel Foreman

  With both lawyers in agreement, Judge Sobel com poses a note of his own and has it delivered to the jury room. Essentially, it informs the jurors that their request will be granted.

  7:00.

  One hour to get through.

  By now it's absolutely clear to Jaywalker that the jury stands eleven-to-one for conviction, or at best ten-to two. From her glassy eyes, he guesses that Carmelita Rosado is his holdout. If there's another, he'll put his money on Juror Number 10, Angelina Olivetti, the actress waiting tables between casting calls. Two young women, both on the quiet side. Jaywalker thought about chal lenging both of them, but ended up having to save his per emptories for other jurors he feared more. While neither Rosado nor Olivetti struck him as particularly defense oriented, he was at least able to take comfort from the fact that they seemed weak. In other words, while they might go along with the majority, they weren't leaders. They weren't the kind of jurors likely to organize a stampede to convict Samara.

  Now that same weakness has suddenly turned into a li ability. Will the two of them, or one of them, if that's what it's already down to, have the strength to withstand the pressure now being applied by the rest of the jurors?

  "Where were you during the testimony, on another planet or something?"

  "Weren't you listening?"

  "Are you saying the rest of us are all wrong?"

  "What part of 'Guilty' don't you get?"

  "You know you're the only thing that's standing be tween us and going home, don't you?"

  "As long as you know you're the one who's locking us up in some godforsaken, flea-bag motel."

  "I don't want to say anything, but I've got an eighty-six year-old mother at home, waiting for me to give her her insulin shot and put her to bed. But I'm sure you couldn't care less."

  7:30.

  Halfway there.

  According to one court officer, there have been a few raised voices in the jury room but no outright shouting. Shouting would be good, a suggestion that someone has dug in and is being stubborn. Raised voices are harder to read.

  7:46.

  The same court officer reports to Jaywalker that he's heard some crying from what sounds like a woman juror. Crying is bad. Crying can only mean despair at having to convict, coupled with frustration over not being able to force the judge to be lenient. Crying is very bad.

  7:48.

  Has the clock stopped moving? Has someone been tam pering with it?

  7:50.

  Jaywalker can no longer sit still. His bladder has been calling to him for a half an hour now, but he's afraid to leave the courtroom, afraid that as soon as he does, the buzzer will sound twice, afraid that his leaving the court room will cause that to happen. So he paces the floor, out of nervousness, and to keep from wetting his pants. If he can just hold out for another ten minutes, he figures, so can Carmelita Rosado or Angelina Olivetti.

  Or so his magical thinking goes.

  7:57.

  Judge Sobel reappears and takes the bench. Jaywalker and Samara resume their places at the defense table, Burke at the prosecution's. Jaywalker's legs are crossed tightly, his knees knocking together almost audibly. Let them think it's nerves, he tells himself. He remembers his former client, the one who used to wet himself every time he had to stand before the judge unless Jaywalker was there to hold his hand and squeeze it tightly.

  "It's not eight o'clock yet," says Burke.

  "Bring in the jury," says the judge.

  "Would the foreman please rise."

  Mr. Merkel stands.

  "Mr. Foreman, in the case of The People of the State of New York versus Samara Tannenbaum, has the jury reached a verdict?"

  "No, not yet."

  Jaywalker exhales.

  As soon as the jurors had been led out to a late dinner and an even later overnight stay, Tom Burke rose and renewed his application to have Samara remanded. "It's obvious to all of us that the jury is on the verge of—"

  "Excuse me," said Jaywalker, also rising, "but I'm on the verge of wetting my pants. I need a three-minute break. Then I'll be happy to come back and talk about this for as long as you like."

  "There's nothing to talk about," said Judge Sobel. "Mr. Burke, if you're afraid the defendant is going to flee, station your detectives outside her building tonight, front and back. Mrs. Tannenbaum, I trust you'll be here promptly at nine-thirty tomorrow morning?"

  "Yes, Your Honor."

  "Mr. Jaywalker. Mr. Jaywalker?"

  But Jaywalker was already halfway down the aisle. Magical thinking or not, his strategy seemed to have worked. Now if only the janitorial crew hadn't already locked the door to the men's room, it would be an unmiti gated triumph.

  To think about it, all that had really happened was that Samara wouldn't be convicted tonight. Tomorrow, of course, would be another story. Right now, that tiniest of victories felt like pure nirvana to Jaywalker. It felt almost as good, in fact, as it did when a turn of the knob succeeded in opening the men's room door.

  30

  AFTER

  Washing his hands in the men's room sink, Jaywalker happened to look up and catch his reflection in the mirror. Neither the full-length crack in the glass nor the accumu lation of city grime and cigarette tar could diminish the breadth of the grin on his face. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and silently thanked his I-know-there's-noGod-but-just-in-case-I'm-wrong for having granted the night's reprieve. Anyone who thought you spelled relief with the brand name of an antacid had it all wrong. Relief was making it to eight o'clock without a conviction. Relief was making it to the men's room without a catastrophe.

  When Jaywalker opened his eyes, the grin was still there. It was still there as he checked the paper towel dis penser, with, as Detective Bonfiglio might have put it, negative results. It was still there as he shook his hands dry, or at least tried his best to. It was still there when he opened the door, stepped out into the hallway and found himself face-to-face with Samara.

  "What's so funny?" she wanted to know.

  "Nothing," he said. "Everything. We're alive. We're coming back tomorrow. Somebody in that jury room still believes in you."

  "And you?" she asked, looking up into his eyes, cutting off all escape routes, leaving him no place to hide. "Do you still believe in me?"

  "Yes," he said, "I still believe in you."

  "Do you mean that? I mean really, really mean it?"

  "Of course I do."

  Could there possibly have been another answer?

  Still her eyes wouldn't let go of his. It was as though she was testing him, challenging his faith in her innocence. He readied himself for whatever might come next. Would she ask him to take an oath, perhaps, or to repeat Samara didn't do it twenty times over?

  What she actually did say took him by surprise. "Then come home with me." And the way she said it, it wasn't quite a command, yet it wasn't simply a question, either. It was something halfway in between. It was a request, he decided, a request with the please left out, lest it sound too much like begging. And, as before, there could be only one possible answer.

  "Yes," said Jaywalker, "I'll come home with you."

  It was raining out on Centre Street, an icy rain that turned to sleet even as they stood there, waiting for a cab.

  "C'mon," Jaywalker said to Samara, and they bent into the sleet and began walking uptown, arms locked together. At Canal Street, a little old Korean woman was huddled in a doorway, hawking umbrellas. "Faw dolla, faw dolla."

  Jaywalker reached
into his side pocket for four singles. It was a New York thing, knowing never to carry your money in your wallet. Walking up to the woman, he asked, "Is there any chance this one's going to last longer than the one you sold me two weeks ago?"

  "Three dolla."

  "Deal."

  The sleet was coming down even harder, and by now the pavement had a coating of slush on it. Even huddled tightly together underneath their three-dolla special, Samara and Jaywalker were getting pelted. And still there were no cabs in sight. Another New York thing.

  So they ducked down into the subway and rode the Lex ington Avenue local uptown, the about-to-be-convicted "billionheiress" and her about-to-be-suspended lawyer.

  By the time they emerged at Sixty-eighth Street, the sleet had changed over again, this time to snow. It was a wet, heavy snow, lit up by the streetlamps like soggy corn flakes, but it was better than what had preceded it. Jay walker wrapped one arm around Samara's shoulders, leav ing the other to carry both his briefcase and the umbrella, an easy enough task if it had had two hands attached to it. He pondered the situation for a moment. The trial was all but over, he knew, and with one day left on his ticket, chances were he would have no more use for the briefcase. Then again, life could be funny, and one of the best parts about it was that you never knew for sure. So, at the next corner, he tossed the umbrella into a wire trash can.

  "Hey," said Samara, "you paid good money for that thing. I could've carried it."

  "No point," Jaywalker explained. "Once they get wet, they're no good anymore. That's the whole idea. That woman back there on Canal Street? She's their vice presi dent in charge of market research. In two years she'll have enough money to buy Manhattan, dismantle it and ship it back home."

  Samara laughed at the thought, a hearty laugh, totally free of self-consciousness. Like her tears on the witness stand, her frequent lapses into locker-room language and just about everything else about her, there was nothing re strained about her laughter, nothing contrived or con trolled. The tabloid writers who'd been so quick to tag her as a gold digger had gotten it all wrong. The truth was, she operated without a plan, Samara did. If something struck her as funny, she laughed at it like a child. If it struck her as sad, she bawled. And if it struck her as absurd, she came right out and said so, without measuring her words or both ering to pretty them up.

  Her laughter now was infectious, downright contag ious. In spite of himself, or perhaps because of what the two of them had been through over the last couple of hours, Jaywalker found himself letting go and laughing right along with her. They laughed at his dumb remark, at the fact that they were laughing at it, at their dripping hair and their soaking clothes. They laughed because they were together. This time tomorrow she would be in jail and he'd no longer be a lawyer, but right now they were together, heading to her place for the night, and that was enough.

  Or, as Samara would have so eloquently stated, fuck tomorrow.

  When they reached her town house, Jaywalker noticed a gray Ford Crown Victoria idling across the street. There were two overfed white guys sitting in it, and the wind shield was fogged up where coffee containers sat on the dashboard. Tom Burke had evidently taken to heart Judge Sobel's suggestion of stationing detectives outside Samara's building. If Samara noticed them, she said noth ing. It took a cop to spot a cop, Jaywalker knew from his DEA days. Then again, Samara had done her share of flirting with the law, and not much got past her. Maybe she'd noticed them and just didn't care.

  He let go of her just long enough for her to open the door to her town house. Once inside, they looked at each other in the light and began laughing all over again. They were completely covered with snow, both of them. Their cloth ing, their hair, their eyebrows, their eyelashes.

  "You're going to look great when you're old and gray," said Jaywalker. He'd meant it as a compliment; he'd always loved the contrast of a young face, whether male or female, against a shock of gray hair. But all it earned from Samara was a sharp jab to the ribs. He caught her by the wrist, and found the other one, as well. They were tiny, so tiny he could completely circle his fingers around them. Drawing them against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her.All he'd meant to do was to immobilize her, to tie her hands up and prevent them from inflicting further damage. Or maybe not. But if he'd expected her to struggle, she surprised him once again. He felt her body go soft in his arms, and his reaction was to look down at her, at the precise moment she'd chosen to look up at him. Their eyes locked, and Jay walker found himself experiencing the same sensation he'd felt the very first time he'd seen her, and then the first time he'd seen her all over again, six years later. Only this time they weren't sitting across a desk in his office or squinting through wire-reinforced glass in a visiting room on Rikers Island. This time she was in his arms.

  They peeled off each other's snow-caked clothes, drop ping them in a heap on the hallway floor. Almost as if there'd been preset ground rules, Samara stopped when she got to his boxer shorts, Jaywalker at her bra, her dentalfloss thong, and her electronic ankle bracelet. He didn't actually know it was a thong until she turned away from him and motioned him to follow as she began climbing the stairs. God, he thought, looking upward at her, whoever invented those things deserves a Nobel prize. And for the first time in his life, he was prepared to forgive Bill for having been rendered totally helpless in front of Monica. Well, perhaps not exactly in front of her.

  They ended up in the den, or perhaps it was the study; Jaywalker couldn't remember. It was a modest-sized room, dominated by a huge fireplace, which in turn was sur rounded by an equally oversize U-shaped sectional sofa. There were logs laid in the fireplace, and he looked around for a book of matches. But she picked up what looked like a TV remote, pointed and clicked, and just like that, fire happened. It might not have been Jaywalker's weapon of choice, but it did the trick.

  "So," she said, standing there in the firelight. "Is it after yet?"

  "It's close enough," said Jaywalker.

  Even as extended foreplay goes, seven and a half years is an awfully long time. With a buildup of that length, it would have been entirely understandable, indeed all but inevitable, that the reality would fall far short of the anticipation.

  It didn't.

  Finally going to bed with Samara turned out to exceed everything Jaywalker had imagined, hoped for and dreamed about in his wildest and most X-rated fantasies. If her bethonged backside had driven him crazy, so now did the rest of her. But there was more. Not only was she physi cally exquisite, she was, well, talented. So much so, in fact, that once or twice Jaywalker caught himself remembering the details of her past. But each time his hesitation proved to be only fleeting and soon evaporated. And if Samara didn't try to make him feel as though he were her first ever (a tall order if ever there'd been one), she somehow man aged to succeed in making him feel that he was her best ever, smothering any self-doubts he might have had with an unending barrage of kisses, touches, caresses, moans and all sorts of other stuff that in the end would leave him breathlessly begging for less. Totally forgotten were any concerns over the freshness of his breath, the size of his personal endowment or the satisfaction of Samara's needs; all three of those areas seemed to work out just fine, thank you. Suffice it to say that in spite of however great the an ticipation might have been, the experience itself proved to be anything but anticlimactic, both figuratively and literally. In fact, at one such moment, Samara was heard to remark, "That's three months off your life expectancy so far."

  "Me?" Jaywalker gasped. "Then you've lost years."

  "It's not the same, silly. Don't you know anything?"

  This from a woman twenty years his junior, sitting astride him totally naked, her small breasts framing a pair of out rageously pointed nipples. And already she was busy at work trying to deprive him of yet another month of his life.