The Tenth Case

15

Samara met his cab in front of her town house and ushered him in. She took his overcoat, a threadbare thing he'd owned forever, and hung it up in a closet, unnecessarily dignifying it, as far as Jaywalker was concerned. He would have preferred to toss it on a chair, or, better yet, to keep it on for warmth. What time had she said it was?

"You're freezing," she said. She left the room, and when she reappeared, she was carrying a wool blanket. Without so much as asking him, she pushed him down onto a chair, straddled him and wrapped the blanket around him, tuck ing the corners underneath him. She could be a real Nurse Ratched when she wanted to be.

He tried to tell her that, and to explain that he was fine without it, but a sudden lump in his throat kept the words from coming out. Once, when he and his wife had been hiking too late in the year in the Canadian Rockies, they'd made it back to their cabin in the early stages of hypother mia, shivering uncontrollably. They'd stripped off their clothes, pulled the blankets off the bed, swaddled them selves together in them, and spent the rest of the day laughing and loving themselves warm.

"I'm okay," he said, not because he was, but because he needed to hear the sound of his own voice to bring him back from where he'd gone.

"You're not okay," she told him. "You're freezing. Keep it on. I don't want to be responsible when you get pneu monia and die."

Even as he succumbed and kept the blanket wrapped around him, he was aware that there was something about the way she'd said it that bothered him. Not the part about her ordering him around; that felt strangely comforting. No, it was the other part. Shouldn't she have said, " if you get pneumonia and die," rather than "when"? He decided it was a thought best kept to himself.

"Okay," he said. "Tell me what you found."

"Come," she said.

He and the blanket followed her up a flight of stairs and into a kitchen that looked spotless. Either Samara was an extremely neat housekeeper or a woman in the same mold as her late husband, who'd never cooked. He was pretty sure where he would lay his money on that one.

She walked past the stove and opened a narrow cabinet. Inside were little jars of herbs and spices, the expensive organic ones.

"Look," she said.

He looked. He saw basil, oregano, parsley, tarragon, cumin and a dozen others. "Look at what?" he asked. He found it hard to believe that she'd called him to come over in the middle of the night because she'd suddenly discov ered she had spices.

"In the back row," she said.

He looked in the back row. There, among the little jars, was an amber-colored plastic container with a white top, the kind prescription drugs came in. He reached in and lifted it out by the ribbed top, being careful not to touch the smoother surface of the container itself. He read the label, saw that it was in Samara's name, had been pre scribed by a Dr. Samuel Musgrove, and had been filled a year ago August. That would have been less than a month before Barry's murder. It was for Seconal, twenty-five pills. He held the bottle up to the light. Inside were three or four whole pills and a powder of ground-up ones. All told, the bottle was about a quarter of the way full. He guessed that at least half the pills had been removed.

It was, Jaywalker instantly knew, a piece of evidence every bit as incriminating as that twenty-five-million-dollar insurance policy Samara had taken out on Barry's life right around the same time and had since conveniently forgot ten about. Only this time she'd dodged a bullet; in search ing the house, the police somehow hadn't noticed the pills.

"Tell me about this," he said.

"There's nothing to tell," said Samara, punctuating her remark with one of her trademark shrugs. "I've never seen it before. I don't know anything about it."

Vintage Samara.

"So why were you in such a hurry to show it to me?"

"I was looking for the chocolate syrup," she said. "I had an urge for an ice cream sundae. And I saw this. I read the label and saw it was for Seconal. I remembered you said that was one of the things they found in Barry's blood."

"So you picked up the bottle?"

"No," she said. "I have no idea who ordered it, who picked it up, or who put it in there."

"No, no," said Jaywalker, uninterested in yet another of her absurd denials. "What I mean is, you picked it up in your hands tonight, before calling me."

She nodded.

So much for his careful handling of it. Now, he knew, it would have her fingerprints on it, even if she'd been smart enough to wipe them off more than a year ago. He wondered if the law imposed an obligation upon him to turn the bottle over to Tom Burke or to the court. He knew that as a so-called "officer of the court," whatever that was supposed to mean, he couldn't very well throw evidence away or destroy it; doing so would amount to obstruction of justice, or criminal tampering. But did he have to come forward with it, and in the process bury his own client even deeper than she was already buried? He decided not. Any law that required him to do that was a law he had no interest in obeying.

"I'll tell you what," he said to Samara. "Why don't we just forget tonight happened, make this whole thing our little secret?"

"You mean you're not going to do anything about it?"

"Do anything about what?"

"About the Seconal."

"Seconal? What Seconal?" And with that he walked over to her trash can. It was one of those fancy ones, all shiny chrome with a foot pedal that activated the lid. He gave the pedal a tap, then another one, figuring Samara might get the hint. After all, she w asn't an officer of the court.

"Don't you see?" said Samara. "Someone's framing me."

So much for hints.

"Right," said Jaywalker. "A month before Barry's murder, someone goes and gets a prescription filled with your name on it. He takes half of it and slips it into Barry's coffee before stabbing him to death. Then he takes the trouble, and the risk, of sneaking in here, so he can hide the bottle in the back of your spice cabinet. And tonight, through the miracle of telekinesis, he's gotten you to put your fingerprints all over it. I'll tell you what, Samara."

"What?"

"I'm going home."

"You can't."

"Why not?"

"You're wearing a blanket."

"I don't care."

It took Jaywalker fifteen minutes just to get a cab to stop for him. Several empty ones slowed down before speeding up and passing him by. You could get away with almost anything in the city, but wearing a blanket for an outer garment was presumptive evidence that you were either broke or dangerous.

By the time he got home, he was shivering all over again. He turned the heat up and poured himself an inch of Kahlua.

He must be dealing with a complete idiot in Samara, he decided. A beautiful one, to be sure, but an idiot all the same. Why else would she have called him and made him rush over in the middle of a winter night, just so he could see yet another devastating piece of evidence against her? Where did she get this insatiable need to punish herself? Was her guilt over what she'd done so enormous that it drove her to do everything she possibly could to guaran tee that they would lock her up for the rest of her life? Did she really want to go to prison that much?

But she'd hated prison. She'd literally begged him to get her out of jail and all but offered her body to him in exchange. She'd made him bring her over for daily counsel visits on three hours of sleep. She'd gone without showers, starved herself, cut herself, pulled out tufts of her hair and blackened an eye. It sure didn't seem like she wanted to go back.

Why, then, this bizarre need to incriminate herself at every opportunity? Why show him the Seconal, instead of simply throwing it away?

There was simply no answer.

He drained the last of the Kahlua, took off his shoes, turned off the light and lay down on the sofa. His clock, the one with the alarm that had gone unused for months now, glowed green in the dark, telling him that it was just after two in the morning. He was exhausted. He remem bered how, when he couldn't fall asleep as a boy, his mother had told him it was because he was too tired to sleep. He'd had no idea what she'd meant, of course. Years later, when the concept finally made some sense to him, he'd told his wife about it, and it had become their private joke. Whenever they were lying in bed and he wanted to make love with her, instead of saying so, he would tell her he was too tired to sleep. And she'd laugh and roll toward him, and they'd make love. And afterward, almost always, he fell right asleep.

Where was she when he needed her?

Something was nagging at him, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. He tried to picture his wife, but the only image he could summon was of her lying in a hospital bed, wasting away. He tried reaching back over the years, tried conjuring up a younger woman, but all he could come up with was Samara.

"Why?" he asked himself, the sound of his own voice surprising him in the darkness. He had the sudden sensa tion that the room had filled with water, black impene trable water, and he was floating on top of it. Why would she have done what she'd done tonight? There had to be an answer. But if there was, it was buried so deeply that he couldn't begin to fathom it. It was as though the answer lay beneath the water, way down at the bottom, beneath the ocean floor itself.

He was drowning, spinning slowly in a whirlpool of black water. He wasn't naked, as he was in most of his dreams. This time he was wearing nothing but a blanket. But it had become so waterlogged that it was dragging him down from its sheer weight. His shoulders were under now, then his neck, and finally his head. There was a gurgling sound, and bubbles were rising all around him. Some of them were getting underneath the blanket and filling it, inflating it like a parachute, lifting him back up toward the surface. He opened his mouth to gulp for air but swallowed only water. Choking, coughing, he clawed with his hands and strained to reach his head higher, broke the surface, took another gulp and somehow found air.

He was sitting up on his sofa, in the dark, choking and coughing. It seemed to happen whenever he fell asleep on his back instead of on his side. The saliva would collect in the back of his throat and try to get down his windpipe.

The clock read four-twenty. He'd been dreaming. About water, and about something gurgling up from the depths of the ocean.

Samara's showing him the bottle of Seconal had com pletely confounded him. Its presence did nothing but tie her all the more tightly to her husband's murder. The missing pills, together with the ones that had been ground up into a powder, were truly devastating pieces of evidence against her, and she had to have known that. Yet as much as she hated the thought of going back to prison, she'd woken him in the middle of the night just so she could show him what was bound to send her there. No matter how you looked at it, it made absolutely no sense at all.

Unless.

Unless she truly was innocent.

Unless somebody really was trying to frame her.