The Tenth Case

13

Looking back on the case afterward, Jaywalker would never fail to remember that phone call, in which Tom Burke had broken the news of the life insurance policy to him, as the moment he gave up on Samara Tannenbaum.

It had long been Jaywalker's belief that if you were to pull any ten criminal cases out of a hat, one of those ten could be won by the very worst of defense lawyers. A vital prosecution witness would die or disappear, the arresting officer would get indicted as part of a car-theft ring, or something else would happen, causing the case against the defendant to disintegrate in front of the jury. At the opposite end of the spectrum would be the tenth case, one that even the best of defense lawyers couldn't possibly win. The D.A. would not only have the proverbial smoking gun, but would be prepared to back it up with a videotape of the de fendant committing the crime, a DNA match, fingerprints and a signed confession. In between those two extremes lay eight cases that were up for grabs. With prosecuting offices reporting conviction percentages anywhere from the mid-sixties all the way up to the high nineties, it followed that many defenders won none of the remaining eight-ever. Average lawyers won two, maybe three. It was only the exceptional lawyer who could win half.

Jaywalker won them all.

He knew, because he kept track.

He hadn't always done so. He'd begun after one particu larly satisfying acquittal on a double-murder case, when it dawned on him that it made six in a row. Ever since, he'd kept tabs. Not on paper-that would have been far too vain. He kept tabs in his head, the way he'd secretly kept track of his batting average in Little League, comparing himself to Rod Carew or Wade Boggs, or whoever hap pened to be leading the major leagues at the time. In a business where most of his colleagues were struggling to win a third of their cases, Jaywalker's success rate topped ninety percent. It was the same success rate that the disci plinary committee had taken note of, even as they'd handed down his three-year suspension.

Now he'd learned that barely a month before her hus band's murder, Samara had secretly bet twenty-seven thou sand dollars on a thousand-to-one shot that Barry would be dead before the year was out. Secretly, because accord ing to Burke, she'd taken out the policy on her own, au thorizing in writing the payment of the premium from her own bank account, apparently without Barry's even know ing about it. And before the year was out, because it was a term policy, the term being six months, without so much as a standard renewability clause.

With that knowledge, Jaywalker had mentally taken Samara's case and moved it from the up-for-grabs stack over to the can't-be-won pile. It wasn't just the insurance policy itself, even with its pregnant timing and damning clauses. No, it was more than that. It was the way that Samara had hidden its existence from him, just as she'd hidden it from Barry. And the way that, when confronted about it, she continued to deny knowing anything about it. Jaywalker was forced to obtain from Burke one of the original duplicate application forms, so that he could have Samara examine her signature, her address, her date of birth, her Social Security number and her designation of herself as sole beneficiary.

"It sure looks like my writing," she admitted. "But maybe we should get one of those handwriting expert guys, just to make sure."

"Don't worry," Jaywalker told her. "Burke's already doing that."

He spent Thanksgiving at his daughter's, in New Jersey. Both she and her husband remarked about how tired he looked and asked him if it was the suspension that was getting him down.

"Not really," he said. "I was working too hard on a murder case, I guess."

"How'd it turn out?" his son-in-law asked.

"It's still going on."

Though they said nothing, he gathered from their stares that there'd been something strange about the way he'd said I was working, as though the case was indeed over.

November gave way to December, and Jaywalker turned his attention to other cases on his list of ten, by now down to seven. He rented a car and drove two hours up to Rhinebeck to visit his fourteen-year-old client in drug rehab, bringing a smile to the kid's face that lit up the whole rec room. He obtained an S visa for his Sudanese umbrella salesman, saving him from almost certain deportation. And he held the hand of his janitor's helper, making it three straight court appearances that the man hadn't wet his pants while standing in front of the judge.

As the holidays approached, business at 10 °Centre Street slowed to a crawl, and Samara's case was adjourned into January. There were developments, none of which were particularly good. The only difference was that, having given up on her, Jaywalker no longer took them per sonally, no longer winced at each disappointment, no longer cringed at each setback. She'd murdered her hus band; he now knew that for sure. Let her handle the pain herself. She deserved it, and then some.

Burke responded to Jaywalker's motions, and Judge Sobel ruled that the search warrant had been properly issued and executed. He ordered a hearing on the issue of whether Samara's false exculpatory statements to the de tectives would be admissible at trial. But it hardly mattered, Jaywalker knew; Samara's lies were the least of the evidence against her.

Nicky Legs phoned to say that he'd narrowed Barry's enemy list down from eight to four. Out of the original eight, two had airtight alibis, one turned out to be a para plegic, and another had died a few months before the murder. The four that were left included one of Barry's former lawyers, who'd left over an accusation of embezzle ment; an accountant who'd wielded tremendous power over Barry's personal finances; the president of the co-op board, who wanted Barry to pay for water damage to his own apartment directly beneath Barry's, caused by a leak from an unauthorized washing machine; and the building's super, who'd sided with the president on the issue and had once been overheard calling Barry "a worthless Jew billionaire."

And Tom Burke called with the results of the handwrit ing analysis performed on the insurance policy application. An expert who'd compared the writing on the application with known exemplars of Samara's handwriting had found the two to be identical, to a certainty factor of ninety-nine percent. Not quite the astronomical numbers you got with DNA comparisons, to be sure, but good enough to amount to yet another body blow in an already one-sided fight.

A copy of the autopsy protocol arrived in the mail, along with the serology and toxicology reports. Jaywalker skimmed over the preliminaries-height, weight, clothing, old scars, general health, evidence of disease and stomach contents-and zeroed in on the important stuff. As sus pected, Barry Tannenbaum had died of a single puncture wound to the left ventricle of his heart, inflicted by a blade at least five inches in length by about three-quarters of an inch wide, serrated on the cutting edge and smooth on the opposite edge. The case had been ruled a homicide and the official cause of death listed as "cardiac arrest following exsanguination." In plain English, that meant Barry had bled to death. Samples of blood, brain and liver had been taken at the post mortem examination and sent for labora tory analysis, which subsequently revealed the presence of a small amount-. 03 %-of ethanol and an indeterminate amount of Seconal, a fairly strong barbiturate. Apparently Barry had had a drink sometime that afternoon or evening, and he'd probably taken a sleeping pill sometime during the twenty-four hours preceding his death. Then again, maybe Samara had slipped something into his egg drop soup or his fried rice before stabbing him. It might explain the absence of any signs of a struggle.

As was his habit, Jaywalker dutifully reported each new discovery to Samara. He knew a lot of lawyers who kept things from their clients, the way a lot of doctors kept things from their patients. Jaywalker was a firm believer in sharing things. Sharing, he believed, was an essential building block in the construction of attorney-client trust, even if it had so far failed to inspire Samara to reciprocate. By telling his clients about every development, both the good ones and the bad, he sent them the message that he wasn't going to censor anything or slip a rose-colored filter over it. That way, when he broke some piece of news to them, they would know they were hearing it straight, and that it was really as good-or as bad-as he was making it out to be. Moreover, on an ethical level, he felt he had no right to withhold information from a client in the name of protectionism or paternalism. It wasn't his case he was working on, after all; it was the client's case.

But there was yet another reason behind Jaywalker's sharing each new development with Samara. The news that kept coming in was so consistently bad that he figured that sooner or later the cumulative effect of it would have to overwhelm her resistance and force her to admit her guilt.

He figured wrong.

Every time he presented her with some new damning piece of evidence that Tom Burke or Nicky Legs had un covered, she would deflect it, deny any role in it, or insist that she had no recollection of it. An extremely stubborn man himself, Jaywalker had to marvel at her intransigence, even as he despaired at her self-destructiveness.

At his daughter's insistence, Jaywalker spent Christ mas Eve and the following day in New Jersey. But with New Year's Eve approaching, he begged out of making a return trip, citing a mild case of the flu. He dozed off in front of the television set well before midnight, spared Dick Clark and the dropping ball, an almost empty tumbler of Kahlua by his side.