The Tenth Case

16

Not that it made any more sense to him in the morning than it had the night before.

For one thing, how had the police managed to find the things hidden behind the toilet tank-the knife, the blouse and the towel-but miss the bottle of Seconal in the spice cabinet? Well, Jaywalker himself had missed it, hadn't he? Even after Samara had pointed him right to it. But he'd had plenty of excuses. He'd been tired, for one thing, and cold, for another. Besides, he was seriously out of practice. Back in his DEA days, he never would have missed it. Other than the refrigerator and the freezer, the spice cabinet was one of the first places he used to look. Dealers were always hiding stuff there, cramming their marijuana into the oregano jar, or stashing their heroin or cocaine into the flour canister. Not the sugar bowl, though; too many ex pensive and even deadly accidents happened that way.

But the cops who'd searched Samara's place had had excuses, too. They hadn't been looking for drugs. The in formation about the Seconal in Barry Tannenbaum's system hadn't come out until weeks later, after the autopsy had been done, and the serology and toxicology results had come in. They'd been looking for a knife, and you didn't hide a knife in between little bottles of spices. You hid it-well, you hid it behind an upstairs toilet tank, for example. It was a clever enough spot, but not so clever that it would have eluded the police during the course of a thorough search.

So that part of it made sense.

The only part that didn't was why Samara had been so eager to show him what she claimed she'd just found, and how she thought it proved that someone was framing her. Jaywalker wasn't ready to buy that, not by a long shot. Still, the incident had had its effect on him. Until last night, he'd succeeded in burying Samara's case. He'd ignored it, blocked it out of his thoughts, pretended it no longer existed. Why? Because he was so wrapped up with his own ego, and so afraid he was going to lose his last trial.

Shame on him.

No matter how guilty she might be, Samara Tannen baum still deserved the best effort he could possibly give her. Wasn't that exactly what he'd preached his entire career, the pompous lecture he delivered whenever people asked him how he could represent people he knew were guilty? It was his job to go to war for them, he would in sist, his solemn duty. No less so than if he knew they were innocent. That was what separated him from the hacks, the guys who were in it only for the money, the guys who went through the motions. If a lawyer pulled one punch or held back the tiniest bit because he thought-or even knew — that his client had committed the crime, he was worthless.

Samara deserved better.

Samara deserved nothing less than a warrior.

It was time for Jaywalker to stop sulking in his tent. It was time to drag his armor out of the back of his closet, dust it off and suit up. He had a trial date on a murder case. He might have a guilty client with a ton of evidence stacked against her, but that was no excuse, and now was no time to desert her.

He picked up the phone and punched in Nicolo Le Grosso's number but had to settle for the answering ma chine. "Nicky," he said after identifying himself, "I want you to get to work on Barry Tannenbaum's enemies. Con centrate on anyone who had access to Barry's apartment, and cross-reference that against any of them who might have had access to Samara's place, as well. I know it's a long shot, but it's the only shot we've got at the moment."

Then he called Samara and told her he was coming over.

"What time is it?" she asked groggily.

He laughed and hung up.

She met him at the door wearing nothing, so far as he could tell, but a short white bathrobe and her ankle bracelet. Yet he could see she'd found time to shower, wash her hair and put on her makeup. Samara's days of jailhouse depri vation were clearly behind her, at least for the time being.

Jaywalker extended the blanket she'd lent him the night before, the one he'd worn home like an idiot.

"It's not like you had to make a special trip," she said.

"I didn't. I came over because I want to talk some more."

She let him in, and he followed her as she climbed a flight of stairs, furtively peeking upward like a schoolboy. They ended up in a room he hadn't been in before. She walked to one of two facing club chairs and motioned for him to sit in the other. As she lowered herself and went to tuck her legs beneath her, the bottom of her robe came open, and he looked away, causing her to smile once again at his embarrassment.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For looking? Or for not looking?"

"Neither," he said. "For last night."

"I'm the one who woke you up, remember?"

"I do," he said, "and now we're even. But I still owe you an apology."

She raised one eyebrow, a considerable talent in Jay walker's book. As a boy, he'd spent an hour in front of a mirror one afternoon, trying unsuccessfully to master the art. He'd finally concluded it was a girls-only thing.

"What for?" she asked.

"For not taking your case seriously enough."

She seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, "Okay, apology accepted."

"So did you throw out the Seconal?"

"Of course not," she said. "I'm the one who knows I didn't put it there, remember?"

He smiled. She was good, he had to give her that much. She was also awfully good to look at, especially in her bathrobe. He stood up, figuring he might not be able to do so if he waited much longer. "Listen," he said, "I want to have a look around, see what else the cops might have missed when they were here."

They started on the top floor and worked their way down. The search took the better part of an hour, and though it turned up nothing as earthshaking as the Seconal, there were a couple of interesting finds. There was a copy of Samara and Barry's prenuptial agreement, for example, which basically would have left her without a dime if she'd divorced him. There was a drawer full of the skimpiest, sexiest underwear Jaywalker had ever set eyes on.

"Thongs," explained Samara, stretching the string of one. It was so thin it could have been dental floss. She smiled wickedly as he averted his eyes.

There was a freezer dedicated to nothing but quarts and quarts of ice cream, most of them in designer flavors like Kiwi Mango Moment. And in a kitchen drawer were half a dozen stainless steel steak knives with sharp tips and ser rated cutting edges that, when compared to a photograph Jaywalker had pulled from his file and brought along, looked absolutely identical to the murder weapon, the one found behind the upstairs toilet tank, the one with Barry's blood on it.

He pulled out a second photo, one showing the blood stained blouse. "What's the story with that?" he asked Samara.

"Mine," she acknowledged.

"Did you wear it that last evening you spent with Barry?"

She shrugged. "Who remembers?"

"Well, if you weren't wearing it, where would it have been?"

"In my dresser, I guess, or hanging up in my clothes closet."

"And this?" he asked, showing her the third and last photo, depicting the bloodstained towel.

"Looks like one of mine."

He let her talk him into staying for breakfast, or, more properly by that hour, brunch. She had French Vanilla with Ginger Root, topped with chocolate fudge sauce. Where she put the calories, he had no idea. He opted for the Double Dutch Chocolate, with a side of Mango Chutney Sorbet. They ate directly out of the containers, trading oohs and aahs with every shared spoonful. It was fun. It was the first time Jaywalker could remember having fun in…well, in a very long time.

He spent the next two weeks feverishly playing catch up. He read, reread and re-reread every scrap of paper in his file, which by this time had grown into three large card board boxes. He drew maps and charts, and had photo graphs blown up and mounted. He organized everything into subfiles, making extra copies of documents that related to more than one witness, so that at trial he wouldn't have to rummage around for something he needed to put his finger on.

He made notes and outlines for cross-examination. He prepared questions for jury selection. He worked on an opening statement and on a summation. He prepared for the pretrial hearing. He wrote out requests for the judge to include in his charge to the jury.

He bugged Nicky Legs to redouble his efforts on inves tigating Barry Tannenbaum's enemies. And while between them they were able to come up with a handful who'd hated Barry enough to have wished him dead, including two or three who might have had keys to Barry's apartment, none of them had access to Samara's, and none seemed likely candidates to have taken their fantasies and trans lated them into deeds.

He took a couple of suits and a handful of shirts to the cleaners. He shined two pairs of shoes and coordinated them with matching belts. He even uncharacteristically picked out three or four ties, enough to stretch out over what he guessed would be a two- or three-week trial.

Mostly, he spent time with Samara. Convinced that it would be a must for her to take the stand and deny any in volvement in Barry's death, he began preparing her for direct examination and running her through a series of mock cross-examinations. He would sit her on a straightbacked chair in his office-not in her home, where she might feel more at ease-and fire questions at her in his best Tom Burke impersonation, grilling her on her where abouts the evening of the murder, her initial lies to the de tectives, her extramarital affairs and her signature on the life insurance policy.

And she got good, if good can be defined as able to answer questions in such a way as to inflict as little damage to herself as possible. But good wasn't going to do the trick, Jaywalker knew. The evidence against her was so devastating that no matter what she said and how well she said it, it was going to take nothing short of a miracle to walk her out of court. But that was his job, Jaywalker knew. Doctors are expected to deliver babies, preachers to deliver sermons, newsboys to deliver papers. Criminal defense lawyers are expected to deliver miracles. Nothing more, nothing less. And Jaywalker had delivered so many of them over the past few years that even he had begun to wonder if he might not be able to walk on water. But walking on water could be a tricky proposition, he knew, and almost everyone who'd tried had sooner or later ended up soaking wet.

He also spent time with Samara because he'd grown to genuinely like her. She never hid from her checkered past, never denied having married for money, never apologized for having cheated on her husband. And there was some thing real about her, something honest in the way she re sponded to a question without first repeating the question aloud while she calculated the consequences of her answer. It was as though she had no agenda, no more interest in hiding the facts than she had in censoring her emotions. And despite Jaywalker's constant efforts to "clean up her mouth," as he put it, Samara continued to be every bit as quick with a bit of foul language as she was with a laugh. There seemed to be no guile to her. Her lower lip could curl into a pout in one moment, only to soften into a smile the next. For Jaywalker, that openness represented at once both a significant asset and a serious liability, depending upon how you chose to look at it. A juror could easily fall in love with Samara-as he himself realized he was doing, on some level-or just as easily come to loathe her, inter preting her unapologetic indifference as arrogance.

And never did she retreat one inch from her insistence on her innocence. Not when Jaywalker cornered her repeat edly during his mock cross-examinations, not when he confronted her with some new damning piece of evidence, not when he lied to her one day and told her that Tom Burke was willing to let her serve as little as four years if only she would plead guilty to manslaughter, not even when he proposed that she take a lie detector test. In fact, she readily agreed to the suggestion, and it was Jaywalker who vetoed the idea. Polygraph examinations, he'd learned long ago, were useful tools. But their value pretty much began and ended with finding out who was willing, or even eager, to take one and who was afraid to, a test Samara had passed. In terms of their actual scientific validity, well, he was fond of saying there was a reason polygraphs weren't ad missible in court.

There were times when Samara's denials moved him close to the point of believing her. But then he would refocus on the evidence and on the two questions for which he had absolutely no answers: If Samara hadn't murdered Barry, who had? And how had they managed to leave things in such a way that everything pointed at her?

Having begun with her arrest two Augusts ago, Sa mara's case was now about to enter its third calendar year, a considerable span for a criminal case but not all that unusual for a murder prosecution involving a defendant out on bail. Yet when they went back to court in the second week of December, it was clear that Judge Sobel was under pressure to move the case to trial. Whether that pressure was the result of the simple passage of time, came from the urging of Tom Burke, or was a response to a renewed interest on the part of the media was unclear. Jaywalker secretly suspected that the disciplinary committee judges, their patience tested over the length of his suspended sus pension, might have had a hand in it. But after sixteen months of delays, he was hardly in a position to complain.

"January fifth," said the judge, "for hearing and trial. And, counsel?"

"Yes?" said Jaywalker and Burke in unison.

"Clear your calendars, because that's a date certain."

It was how judges warned lawyers to set aside all other business and be ready to start without fail. If the admoni tion posed any sort of logistical problem for Burke, he offered no complaint. Assistant district attorneys are, in a very real sense, associates in a large law firm. When or dered to trial, they simply pass their other business on to other assistants, other associates in the firm. Jaywalker, all of whose other business had long ago been set aside or passed on, made a note of the date in his otherwise spotless pocket calendar and circled it.

"I can do that," he said.

With the trial less than a month away, Jaywalker really got down to business. He met half a dozen times with Nicky Legs, and together they interviewed several of the people on Barry Tannenbaum's enemies list. The co-op board presi dent, a beady-eyed retired navy SEAL, readily admitted that he'd feuded with Barry but laughed at the suggestion that he'd murdered him. The building's super, an earnestlooking Puerto Rican, was shocked at the thought. " Me? Kill Tannenbaum? I no killer. I change lightbulbs, wash windows, fix locks, clean ovens. I no kill Tannenbaum."

But the two individuals who interested Jaywalker the most, Barry's accountant and his former lawyer, refused to be interviewed. "You want me to testify," said the lawyer, "you serve me with a subpoena. Otherwise, don't bother me." The accountant said pretty much the same thing, albeit more politely. "Whatever I have to say," he told Jay walker, "I'd prefer to say in court," leading Jaywalker to suspect that the two might have talked the matter over together, and to wonder if Burke might be planning on calling one or both of them as witnesses.

He increased his sessions with Samara, both in fre quency and duration, gradually polishing the rough edges off her. Her locker-room language gave way to an accept able version of plain English. Her denials took on more plausibility. Her eye contact, never a problem, expanded to take in the imaginary jurors, as well as her questioner. But Jaywalker also knew when to quit. He didn't want her to come off as rehearsed. Memorizing a few key phrases was good, but not at the expense of spontaneity. By the end of the month, she was good enough that he called a halt to their sessions. It was a hard thing for him to do, but he knew it was time. Samara would be a good enough witness. Under different circumstances, she might even have been a great one. But the problem had never been her. From day one, the problem had always been the facts.

And two days before the year ended, when other New Yorkers were returning presents, recovering from over eating and readying themselves for yet another round of parties, Jaywalker convinced Tom Burke to take him on a tour of Barry Tannenbaum's penthouse apartment. Jay walker was surprised to see the yellow-and-black crime scene tape still in place. But Barry had lived alone and on the top floor, and evidently its presence hadn't bothered anyone enough to remove it. Now a detective who had ac companied them lifted the tape above their heads, broke the seal, unlocked the door and let them in.

It struck Jaywalker as a modest enough pied-a-terre, by billionaire standards. A thirty-foot living room, formal dining room, den, library, study, kitchen, pantry, three bed rooms, and four and a half bathrooms. And Samara had been right about the kitchen: there was no oven or range in sight, only a small microwave on the countertop. The room was at one end of the apartment, meaning it shared a common wall with the adjacent penthouse, no doubt kitchen-to-kitchen. The woman next door probably had a TV set in her kitchen, where she'd no doubt been when she'd heard Samara and Barry arguing the evening of his murder.

Jaywalker walked to the window. As did most of the windows, it faced north, providing a commanding view of Central Park. Off to the east and west were the roofs of other, lower buildings. You were high above everything else here. Whoever had murdered Barry hadn't had to worry about being seen doing it, not unless there'd been a Peeping Tom at work that night in a helicopter, with a Hubble quality telescope trained on the penthouse windows.

On the quarry tile kitchen floor was the outline of a body, just like you saw on TV shows. A large area of tile, toward the midsection of the outline, was stained almost black. People tended to think of blood as red, Jaywalker knew. But dried, it darkened and became almost unrecog nizably black. He'd discovered that the hard way. It had been after his wife's surgery, after the chemotherapy and the radiation, after the last of the time-buying transfusions. It had been after he'd signed her out of the hospital against medical advice and brought her home to die. Each morning there would be blackened clots on her pillowcase, a few more than the morning before. Each day he would throw the pillowcase away and replace it with a fresh one. Then, after a week, the stains began to be smaller, and he dared to hope for a miracle, one last remission. But the truth was, she'd simply been running out of blood.

"This is where it happened," said the detective.

"No shit," said Burke.

It did seem pretty obvious, but Jaywalker had long ago learned not to trust the obvious. "How do you know?" he asked.

"No other blood," said the detective.

"Unless the killer cleaned it up."

"Ever try getting blood outa this kinda tile?"

"No," said Jaywalker, who'd never tried to get blood out of any kind of tile, at least so far as he could recall. "And everything's exactly the way it was?"

"Yup. The first officer on the scene secured it right away. We haven't even let the maid in, or the real estate brokers in to get a look at it. And I've got to tell you, we could've made a bundle by giving one or two of 'em a sneak preview. Had to tell them sorry, no peeking until after the conviction."

"Suppose there is no conviction?"

The detective laughed politely, to let Jaywalker know that he'd gotten his joke. But when they left a few minutes later, he was back to all-business, locking the apartment door, replacing the broken seal with a new one and restring ing the crime scene tape.

Jaywalker celebrated New Year's Eve home alone, having turned down an offer from Samara to come over. Some things didn't change, he guessed. He was still a moron. But the professional in him, or at least what was left of the professional in him, knew that no matter how much you wanted to, you didn't sleep with your client. Not till after the case was over, anyway. By which time, of course, it would be too late. Last he'd checked, they weren't allowing conjugal visits on Rikers Island.

He made it to midnight this time, draining the final drops from his last bottle of Kahlua. There would be no place in his life for alcohol once the trial began, he knew. And as far as sleep was concerned, well, there would pretty much be no place for that, either.