The Tenth Case

24

"The defense calls Samara Tannenbaum."

With those words, Jaywalker began the day by breaking at least two of his own rules. First, he much preferred to call his client as his final witness. Not only would doing that have allowed him to build up the drama surrounding her appearance, it also would have permitted Samara to hear the testimony of any other defense witnesses before having to take the stand herself. The rule that requires wit nesses to remain outside the courtroom before testifying doesn't apply to defendants, for obvious reasons. Second, Jaywalker liked to let the jury know when they should expect no additional witnesses. It was an easy enough thing to do: all he had to do was say, "The defense calls its only witness, Samara Tannenbaum," or "its final witness, Sa mara Tannenbaum."

But the truth was, Jaywalker still wasn't sure whether or not he was going to put on anyone besides Samara. And that was because he hadn't yet decided whether to ask Samara about the discovery of the Seconal in her spice cabinet. He thought he believed her about that, but he couldn't be sure. And if the jurors were skeptical, the story would backfire and do more harm than good. Jaywalker had his investigator, Nicolo LeGrosso, standing by. Nicky had subpoenaed the records from the pharmacy that had filled the prescription. The order had been called in by a physician who, it turned out, didn't appear to exist. It had been picked up by someone who'd simply scrawled Samara's initials on the registry. The pharmacy was very nervous about having anyone testify, since under federal law they shouldn't have honored a phoned-in prescription for a controlled substance in the first place, let alone one from a nonexistent physician. And there was always the chance that if they sent the employee who'd collected the money and handed over the drugs, he or she might identify Samara as the recipient, rightly or wrongly. Were that to happen, there wouldn't be a hole in the floor big enough for Samara and Jaywalker to disappear into. So he was still on the fence about the whole Seconal thing and had been forced to break his own rule this time.

Even without a gradual buildup or an announcement that there will be nothing more to follow, the moment when a defendant rises and walks to the witness stand is a dramatic one. And if the charge happens to be murder, and the victim the husband of the accused, the word dramatic falls short of adequately describing it. Awesome comes closer; pivotal is no overstatement. Because this is the moment everyone's been waiting for. The lawyers, the judge, the court personnel, the media, the spectators and the jurors. Especially the jurors. Something about human na ture leads ordinary people who are fully capable of making a wide variety and staggering number of errors on the simplest of assignments to believe with iron-clad certainty that all they'll have to do is look at and listen to a defen dant, and they'll know in a heartbeat if they're hearing the truth or not.

What these jurors saw, as Samara raised her right hand and dutifully swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, was a woman who looked small, nervous and alone. A stunningly pretty woman, to be sure, but Jaywalker's own mental jury was still very much out on the question of whether that prettiness, in the end, would contribute to her salvation or prove to be her undoing.

She took her seat, not quite on the edge of the chair, but not so far back as to look relaxed. Just as Jaywalker had had her practice. She put her hands in her lap, out of sight and away from her face.

THE CLERK: Would you give your first name and last, and spell them for the record.

MS. TANNENBAUM: My name is Samara M. Tannenbaum. S-A-M-A-R-A T-A-N-N-E-N-B-A-U-M.

THE CLERK: What is your county of resi dence?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Manhattan.

THE COURT: You may inquire, Mr. Jay Walker.

MR. JAYWALKER: Thank you. How old are you,Samara?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm twenty-eight.

MR. JAYWALKER: Are you currently employed?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No.

MR. JAYWALKER: Have you been employed in the past?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, starting when I was four teen.

These were softballs, grounders. They were only partly aimed to elicit information. Their real purpose was to warm Samara up, to give her a chance to find her voice and develop something of a rhythm. Jaywalker himself had been on the witness stand a fair amount back in his DEA days, and even a couple of times since. He knew it wasn't a particularly comfortable chair to sit in, as chairs went.

He also wanted the jurors to get to know Samara. Not just the Samara they'd read about, the dark-haired tabloid beauty with the checkered past, the Las Vegas gold digger who'd hit the jackpot, the spoiled trophy wife. He wanted them to know her as he knew her, and-if she could somehow work her magic with them the same way she'd worked it with him-to come to like her as he liked her. If a jury likes a defendant, especially a female defendant, they may end up convicting her, but they're going to have an awfully hard time doing so. On the other hand, if they take a dislike to her, it'll be easy, particularly for the women on the jury. Find that hard to believe? Ask Martha Stewart, why don't you?

So he went back to the beginning, Jaywalker did, back to when Samara Moss had been a child growing up outside of Prairie Creek, Indiana. Back to a time before she'd had a penny to her name. Back to before she'd ever dreamed that there was a world beyond the Midwest, a world with out cornfields and trailer parks and rusted-out pickup trucks. Back to before she'd ever even heard of Las Vegas or Barry Tannenbaum or New York City.

MR. JAYWALKER: Who raised you, Samara?

MS. TANNENBAUM: My mother, sort of.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you know your father?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, I never met him.

MR. JAYWALKER: What was your home like?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It was a half trailer that somebody had abandoned. It had no water or elec tric hookup. And it was missing the half with the bed room and bathroom.

MR. JAYWALKER: What did you use for a bath room?

MS. TANNENBAUM: In nice weather, we used the field out back. When it was too cold, a stove pot. It was my job to empty it each morning.

MR. JAYWALKER: What did you and your mother do for food?

MS. TANNENBAUM: When there was money, we bought it, like everyone else. When there wasn't, my mother used to have me beg for groceries outside the Kroger's, the nearest supermarket. Sometimes she'd give me a boost so I could climb up into the Dump ster they kept out back, see what I could find. Some times neighbors left food by the door of our trailer. There was a black family that lived up the road and did that whenever they could, even though they were dirt-poor themselves. Then, after a while, they moved away, and my mother started taking in men, over night guests. And they would give her money, five or ten dollars at a time.

MR. JAYWALKER: Where did they sleep?

MS. TANNENBAUM: On the sofa, with my mother.

MR. JAYWALKER: In the same room as you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: There was only one room. If the weather was okay, my mother would send me out in the field. If it was cold or rainy or snowy, she'd put me to bed on the floor, in the corner. Cover me up with a blanket and make me face the other way, so I couldn't see.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you know what was going on?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I had ears. I could hear.

MR. JAYWALKER: How old were you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Ten, eleven.

MR. JAYWALKER: How did these men treat you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Some of them were nice to me. Some of them weren't.

MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about some of the ones who weren't.

MS. TANNENBAUM: They…they did things to me.

MR. JAYWALKER: What kinds of things?

MS. TANNENBAUM: You know.

MR. JAYWALKER: No, we don't know. Not un less you tell us.

MS. TANNENBAUM: They'd kiss me, touch me under my clothes, in places where they weren't supposed to. Make me touch them. Put their thing in my mouth, or on my front, or between my legs.

MR. JAYWALKER: Their thing?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Their penis.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever tell your mother?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes.

MR. JAYWALKER: And?

MS. TANNENBAUM: She'd slap me, say she didn't believe me. But I know she did. She knew.

MR. BURKE: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained. Strike the part about what her mother knew. The jury will disregard it.

MR. JAYWALKER: What else, if anything, did she do or say?

MS. TANNENBAUM: She'd tell me not to lie, not to complain, that we needed the money for food. If I cried, she'd hit me.

MR. JAYWALKER: So what did you do?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'd close my eyes and pre tend I wasn't there, that I was someplace else alto gether. I put up with it as long as I could. And when I couldn't put up with it anymore, I ran away.

MR. JAYWALKER: How old were you when you ran away?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Fourteen years and one day.

MR. JAYWALKER: How is it that you remem ber that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I remember that because I

MR. JAYWALKER: And what did you get?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Nothing.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever see your

MS. TANNENBAUM: No. waited to see what I'd get for my birthday. mother again?

It wasn't just the squalor and the sexual abuse and the separation Jaywalker wanted the jurors to hear, although their transfixed silence spoke loudly enough about the impact those things were having upon them. But beyond that, he was laying out a pattern for them, a template of a mother not only willing to barter sex for food, but equally willing to enlist her only child as an accomplice to the practice. How surprising would it be that within a year or two of her flight from home, Samara herself would be imi tating her mother's survival strategy and adopting it as her own? Would the jurors excuse her behavior? Perhaps not. But at least they'd be able to understand her actions, and hopefully empathize with her. And empathy, Jaywalker firmly believed, lay at the doorstep to forgiveness.

He had Samara talk about how she'd hitchhiked her way west, careful to catch rides at truck stops, lest the police pick her up and send her back home. She described reaching Nevada, and finally Las Vegas itself, with high hopes of becoming a model or a showgirl.

MR. JAYWALKER: What happened to those hopes?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They didn't last very long.

MR. JAYWALKER: Why not?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I couldn't sing or dance. I was too young and too short. My legs weren't long enough. My breasts weren't big enough, and I didn't have any money to have them made bigger.

MR. JAYWALKER: So what did you do?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I tried lying about my age, but they check a lot out there. I'd bus tables, wash dishes, whatever I could. Usually I'd get fired after a week or two, when they'd find out that the Social Security number I'd given them didn't match up.

MR. JAYWALKER: Where did you live?

MS. TANNENBAUM: There are some very bad boardinghouses off the strip, places none of the tour ists ever get to see.

MR. JAYWALKER: How did you pay the rent?

MS. TANNENBAUM: With whatever money I could make working. And when that ran out

Her voice broke off, midsentence. They hadn't re hearsed it that way, or planned it. It just happened. Which was how the best stuff almost always came from the witness stand. You didn't script it. Instead, you tried to impart to the witness just what it was you were seeking to accomplish, the feeling you were striving to create. And every once in a while a witness would get it, and the result would be pure magic. Samara, by doing nothing more than stopping midsentence, showed Jaywalker that she'd gotten it, at least this one time, and worked a little bit of magic.

MR. JAYWALKER: And when the money ran out?

MS. TANNENBAUM: And when the money ran out, I did what my mother had done. I took men home, or let them take me home. And when they of fered me gifts or money afterwards, I kept it.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you consider yourself a prostitute?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Not at the time, I didn't.

MR. JAYWALKER: And now that you look back on it?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I'd have to say I was a prostitute.

MR. JAYWALKER: How do you feel about that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I certainly don't feel good about it. I mean, I'm not going to brag about it or any thing like that. But I'm not ashamed of it, either, and

I'm certainly not going to lie about it. It's what I did.

It's part of my life. It's how I survived.

She'd been telling her story for nearly an hour now, and Jaywalker sensed that it had been long enough. As re ceptive as the jurors had seemed throughout it, he didn't want to risk overstaying his welcome. The same was true of Judge Sobel. To abuse the considerable leeway he'd shown would be a mistake. The last thing Jaywalker wanted to hear was, "Let's move along, counselor." So with a single question, he yanked Samara, and with her the trial itself, back to the business at hand.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did there come a time, Samara, when you met an individual named Barry Tannenbaum?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, there did.

THE COURT: Forgive me, Mr. Jaywalker, but perhaps this would be as good a time as any to take our mid-morning recess.

MR. JAYWALKER: That would be fine, Your Honor.

There's a rule, which may be invoked by either side, that once a witness has begun testifying, there may be no dis cussion between the witness and the lawyer who's put the witness on the stand. When the witness happens to be the defendant, however, that rule gets trumped by a higher constitutional rule: the right to consult with counsel. At the moment the conflict provided something of a conundrum for Jaywalker, who'd never met a rule he didn't want to break. So in Samara's case, he ended up breaking both rules, first by telling her how well she was doing, and then by turning his back and walking away from her. Just in case Burke took the chance of asking Samara on cross-examina tion if she'd discussed her answers with her lawyer during recess, Jaywalker wanted her to be able to answer truth fully that she hadn't.

And there was another reason for his caution. Just as jurors watch the defendant like hawks in the courtroom, looking for some telltale sign of guilt or innocence, so do they continue to look for clues out in the corridor, in the elevator and down on the street. As grateful as Jaywalker was for having Samara out on bail, rather than locked up on Rikers Island, he was aware of the risks. The well-known defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, after winning a murder acquittal for Carl Coppalino in New Jersey, had made the mistake of allowing his client to be photographed cavorting on the beach with his lover in Florida, while he awaited a second murder trial. To Jaywalker's thinking, Bailey had lost the second case right then and there, before the trial had even begun.

So he would let the jurors see Samara heading to the ladies' room, talking with the court officers or standing alone with her thoughts by the elevator bank. What they weren't going to see, or think they were seeing, was her lawyer whispering in her ear and coaching her, telling her what to say and how to say it, when to smile demurely, and when to allow a tear to well up and roll down her cheek.

Besides, there was no need for him to tell her any of those things. He'd already done so, a hundred times over.

After the recess, Jaywalker picked up precisely where he'd left off.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did there come a time when you met a man named Barry Tannenbaum?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, there did.

MR. JAYWALKER: When and where was that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I was eighteen, so it would have been in 1997, I think. I'd just become legal, so I could work at the hotels. You didn't have to be twenty-one back then. So I was working in one of the cocktail lounges at Caesars Palace. That's where I first saw Barry.

MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about that first meet ing.

MS. TANNENBAUM: I saw this man sitting alone at a table in the corner. He was smallish, not too much bigger than I am. He was already sixty-one, old enough to have been my grandfather, as a lot of peo ple have pointed out since. He was pale, and his hair was thinning, though I didn't know that right away, because he was wearing a wig, a wig and sunglasses. So nobody would recognize him, he told me later.

MR. JAYWALKER: Would you have recognized him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Me? I'd never heard of him. In fact, I figured he had to be gay. You know, the wig, the shades. I figured he was scoping out guys.

MR. JAYWALKER: So it wasn't your intention to hit on him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No. I was legit by then. I didn't have to do that any more.

Gay or straight, the man had looked so alone and so sad that Samara had walked over to his table, even though it wasn't part of her station, and asked him if he was okay. He'd replied that he wasn't sure. She could see that he was drinking Diet Coke-she knew from the lemon slice he'd removed from the rim of the glass but hadn't used-so on her next trip by, she'd brought him another one, no charge. He'd seemed terribly grateful for the gesture, she recalled. And when she got off her shift, at three in the morning, he was waiting for her, just outside the door. At his invitation, they'd gone to his room upstairs, where he'd taken off the wig and the sunglasses, but no more. And for the next five hours, they'd talked.

MS. TANNENBAUM: Talked. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I'd never talked to anyone in my whole life, not for more than a minute or two. And then it would be about the weather, or to say, "Please pass the salt," or "Do you know what time it is?" or "Your place or mine?"

MR. JAYWALKER: What did you talk about?

MS. TANNENBAUM: All sorts of stuff. Where we'd grown up, what we liked, what we hated, whether we cried when we were sad or when we were happy

MR. JAYWALKER: How did that come up?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It's going to sound silly.

MR. JAYWALKER: Try us.

MS. TANNENBAUM: At some point, I started cry ing, just like that. And Barry asked me what was the matter. And I told him nothing was the matter. When he asked me again, I felt I had to tell him the truth. So I told him I was crying because I'd never been so happy in my life.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you go to bed with Barry that night? Did you have sex with him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, not that night. Not for a month, maybe two. I still thought he was gay. Any way, it wasn't about sex. I'd had enough sex by then to last me a lifetime. Two or three lifetimes.

MR. JAYWALKER: Was it about money?

MS. TANNENBAUM: (Laughs) I'd bought him Diet Cokes all night, out of my own paycheck, be cause I figured he couldn't afford to spring for a real drink. I didn't think he had a dollar to his name, to be honest.

MR. JAYWALKER: But he had a room at Caesars Palace, didn't he?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Back then, the big hotels would comp just about anybody, at least once. I don't know if they still do it. But in those days, all you had to do was ask. You have no idea how many flat broke guys there were back then, hanging on by their teeth, waiting for their luck to turn.

MR. JAYWALKER: So if it wasn't about sex and it wasn't about money, what was it about?

MS. TANNENBAUM: To tell you the truth, I had absolutely no idea. Love, I probably would have said at the time. Now that I'm older, and maybe just a tiny bit smarter, I guess maybe it was about finding my father. You know, the father I never had.

And right there, she lost it. No solitary tear welled up and trickled slowly down her cheek. No practiced feminine sob begged for the audience's attention. Without warning, Samara doubled over as though shot through the gut with a cannonball, her face contorted in pain, her hands knotted into fists, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably, her body heaving for breath. Strange, low animal noises rose from somewhere deep inside her. There was nothing in the least bit attractive about it, nothing charming, nothing to make some Hollywood director envious. But it was r eal.

For a full minute she stayed contorted like that, showing no sign that she was the least bit capable of reclaiming herself from whatever demons had so suddenly and so un expectedly seized possession of her. Jaywalker stood by helplessly, hugging the sides of the lectern with both hands to hold himself back from rushing to her. They hadn't re hearsed this. They hadn't talked about it. They had contin gency plans for just about anything that might happen while she was on the stand, right down to sneezing fits and bladder issues. But they had no plan in place for a total meltdown. There was no adjustment for something like this in Jaywalker's mental playbook. All he knew was that his client was in a place way beyond where the offering of a tissue or the extending of a glass of water made any sense, light-years past the point of asking her if she could use a few minutes to compose herself before continuing.

"I think," said Judge Sobel, "that we're going to take our lunch break a little early today."

And all Jaywalker could do was to say thank-you, walk to the defense table and take his seat, and do what everyone else in the courtroom was doing: watch and listen, and try to not w atch and listen, as Samara continued to writhe in the agonizing memory of her lost childhood. Only when the jurors had been led out, the judge had left the bench and the last of the spectators had filed out of the room in silence, could he then make his way to her and collect her from where she crouched, by then on one knee, on the bare floor of the witness stand. Only then could he take her in his arms and hold her and rock her, until finally he felt the first subtle signals that her body was beginning to unclench and soften, and he could at last allow himself to believe that she was on her way back from whatever long-ago and far away place her story had carried her off to.