The Tenth Case

25

Samara had pretty much regained control of herself by the time the afternoon session began, but from Jaywalker's per spective, her doing so proved a mixed blessing. While she was able to respond to his questions without outburst or interruption, there was something missing from her answers. Gone was her willingness to elaborate, to speculate into her own motives and to question her own actions in retrospect. Gone, too, was her vulnerability, which, even as it had been her undoing in the morning session, had also stamped her tes timony with the unmistakable imprimatur of genuineness. Jaywalker strongly suspected that she was not only aware that she was closing up, but that she'd even made a conscious choice to do so. It was as though she'd resolved to make a tradeoff, so determined was she to keep hold of her emotional equilibrium, even if doing so came at the expense of her cred ibility with the jury. And while Jaywalker could understand and even appreciate her decision, he didn't let it stop him from trying to draw her out whenever an opportunity pre sented itself, even as she dug her heels in and resisted.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did the relationship con tinue, after that first morn ing?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, it did.

MR. JAYWALKER: Would you describe its progress for us, please.

MS. TANNENBAUM: The only way I can describe it is to say that Barry courted me. I know that's kind of a foolish, old-fashioned word, but that's what he did, he courted me.

MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us what you mean by that.

MS. TANNENBAUM: I mean that we dated. We went to movies. He bought me flowers. We held hands. We talked for hours on end. Again, nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

MR. JAYWALKER: Was there a sexual compo nent to the relationship?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Not at first, no. The truth was, I never found Barry terribly attractive. Not only was he a lot older than I was, but, well, he wasn't the best looking guy in the world. So there was an attrac tion, but it wasn't a sexual one. It was more like holding hands, kissing, saying nice things to each other. It was about tenderness, I guess.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you like that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Like it? I absolutely loved it. I'd never known there was such a thing.

She described how the relationship had progressed from those first days. Barry had been called back to New York on business, but he phoned her each day, sent her cards, had flowers delivered. Not gaudy displays, but small, tasteful bouquets. She remembered a half dozen yellow roses, for example, arriving on the sixth day after they'd met. Still, she never suspected he had money, not until a fellow cocktail waitress made a comment about her sugar daddy. When Samara looked puzzled by the reference, the other waitress dismissed her with a "Yeah, right." But the next day the waitress showed up with a recent issue of People magazine, featuring a story about the ten richest bachelors in America. Barry was number one. Samara had stared at his photograph for a full five minutes, trying to make the connection between the man she was falling in love with and the one staring out from the pages.

Whatever lingering doubts she had disappeared a few weeks later, when Barry, forced to cancel a return trip to Vegas for business reasons, asked Samara to come to New York instead. She explained that even were she willing to risk almost certainly losing her job by doing so, she didn't have enough money to buy a bus ticket. He told her that wouldn't be necessary, he'd send one of his planes for her.

One of his planes.

For Samara, being in New York City was like being Cinderella at the ball. Barry bought her clothes and jewelry, wined and dined her, took her to the theater, a concert, the ballet and the opera. She hadn't even known there was such a thing as the opera. They went to bed, finally, but even that was nothing like she'd ever experienced. They did it on silk sheets in his penthouse apartment, overlooking the twinkling lights of Manhattan. And instead of it being all about his satisfaction, it was all about hers. Instead of seeking to possess her, all he seemed to want was to please her. Unlike all of her prior Wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am experiences, with Barry it wasn't over just because he was done. It wasn't over until they lay in each other's arms, marveling over their good fortune at having met. In a word, it was love, something that Samara had never come close to tasting in all of her eighteen years. Not as an infant, not as an adolescent, not as a teenager, not as the adult she'd become long before she should have.

MR. JAYWALKER: What was your reaction to all this?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I was overwhelmed. Who wouldn't be? I was in heav en. And yet

MR. JAYWALKER: And yet?

MS. TANNENBAUM: And yet I kept waiting for the clock to strike midnight. I kept waiting to wake up and find out it was over. Every time Barry would open his mouth, I'd hold my breath, figuring he was about to ask me to take my things and leave.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did he ever ask you to leave?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No. He asked me to marry him.

They were married six months later, in a small civil ceremony in Scarsdale, where Barry had a home, or, as Samara put it, a mansion straight out of Gone with the Wind. She'd signed a bunch of papers beforehand, which Barry's lawyers and accountants had put in front of her, in cluding a prenuptial agreement that, as it was explained to her, would leave her out on the street were she ever to file for divorce. She couldn't have cared less. She'd been out on the street for eighteen years, one way or another, and had had her fill of it. And the thought of her ever divorcing Barry seemed about as likely as her walking on the moon.

Outside of storybooks, of course, nothing lasts forever, all things come to an end, and it's rare indeed that the prince and princess ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after. It was certainly no accident that Barry had left a trail of three failed marriages in his wake prior to meeting Samara, no small thing that he was forty-four years older than she, and not to be overlooked that they came from backgrounds so divergent that they might as well have been from different planets altogether. The two-week hon eymoon in Paris was interrupted hourly by mergers and ac quisitions, by IPOs and CFOs, by board meetings and boards of inquiry. A month into the marriage, Samara woke up to the reality that for Barry, business came first, second and third. There was a good reason why he'd risen through the ranks of the wealthiest bachelors in America to the top spot, an honor relinquished now only on something of a mere technicality, at least to Barry's way of thinking. And that reason was his single-minded, almost pathological dedication to maintaining his financial empire. It was as though, on the heels of his third divorce, Barry had flown out to Las Vegas to re-up, to find himself a replacement wife. He'd found her, taken a brief sabbatical, just long enough to consolidate her (what Samara had described as courting) and marry her. Once that had been checked off the agenda, it was back to business as usual.

With Barry's attention turned from the lines of his wife's bottom to the bottom line, the marriage never had a chance. Samara found herself alone in a city so alien to her that she was literally afraid to go out. She had no friends; there were no clubs for gold diggers, no meetings of Former Trailer Trash Anonymous, no chapter of Prairie Creek, Indiana, junior-high-school dropouts. She begged Barry to find her a job, any kind of job. But he refused, insisting that no wife of his would ever embarrass him by working. A family was out of the question: Barry already had five children and twelve grandchildren from his previous marriages, and though his alimony and support payments cost him only a negligible fraction of his wealth, he was pretty much es tranged from all his progeny, and infuriated by the idea of paying them anything or potentially increasing their num bers. Even lovemaking became an extremely rare event.

MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about that.

MS. TANNENBAUM: At first I thought Barry's being so gentle in bed was all about tenderness. Soon I realized that wasn't it at all. He was a hypochondriac, one of those people who are convinced they're dying but are afraid to go the doctor because they might find out that they're right. Or that they're wrong and are just flat-out crazy. He'd had a heart attack some years back and was afraid that exerting himself during sex with someone much younger than him might give him an other one and kill him. And he'd read somewhere on his computer-that's where he got all his medical ad vice from-that there'd been this experiment that showed that producing sperm takes a lot out of mice, and they live shorter lives as a result. Barry figured the same had to be true with humans. So he tried not to come-you know, to ejaculate-because he was afraid that every time he did, it meant there went an other month off his life span.

With no friends, no social life, no sex life, no job and no hope of raising a family, it didn't take long for Samara to become resentful of Barry and rebel against him. Her rebellion took the form of overcoming her fears and ven turing outside. But not during the day, to shop or sightsee or pamper herself, as Barry encouraged her to. Instead, she waited for cover of darkness, and sought out clubs that opened late and stayed open later. She'd worked the night owl shift in Las Vegas, after all, and the sight of the sun coming up as she emerged from some smoke-filled sub terranean lounge was nothing new to her. And as far as gaining entree to some of the city's more trendy spots, that proved no problem at all. Barry had already provided Samara with identification asserting that she was twentytwo, not so much to get her into places or served drinks as to protect himself from charges of cradle robbing. And on the rare occasion when Samara's fake ID or good looks alone failed to get her through the door, her last name more than sufficed.

But Manhattan proved to be no Vegas, where what hap pened there stayed there. It wasn't long before the tabloids picked up on Samara's late-night outings, and word got back to Barry. At first he put up with it, figuring she would get it out of her system. But soon the rumors got uglier, linking Samara to men, and backing up words with photos.

MR. JAYWALKER: Were the rumors true?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Do you mean, was I seeing other men?

MR. JAYWALKER: Yes.

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I was.

MR. JAYWALKER: And were you sleeping with them?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Some of them.

MR. JAYWALKER: How did that come about?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I allowed it to. I was bored, I had no life. It was like Barry had turned this switch on in me, showed me what lovemaking was, and what intimacy was about. And then he'd tried to turn the switch off, just like that. I was eighteen, nineteen by then, I guess. I'd had sex, but I'd never made love before. I wanted more of it.

MR. JAYWALKER: What was Barry's reaction?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm sure he was embar rassed, horrified, whatever. I guess the word I'm looking for is humiliated. It was very important for Barry to be in control of absolutely everything. And here I was, six months into our marriage, running around like a tramp. I'm sure it was very hard on him, to suddenly feel out of control, like a victim.

MR. JAYWALKER: You used the word tramp. Were you taking money from these men, or gifts, as you'd done back in Las Vegas?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, it was nothing like that. Barry gave me all the money I needed. I didn't want his money, I wanted a life.

It didn't take too long for things to come to a head. Within months, Samara's photo had made the front page of every tabloid, many times over, as often as not with a generous helping of leg or cleavage, as she dodged the cameras on the arm of some minor celebrity. It didn't help matters that the men were uniformly young and good-looking. Barry cornered her one afternoon, literally cornered her, in the living room of his Scarsdale man sion, grabbing her by the arms and demanding an end to her behavior.

MR. JAYWALKER: And?

MS. TANNENBAUM: And I threatened to call the police.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you agree to his de mands?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, not unless he'd let me get a job or get pregnant. And he wouldn't. So I told him I was moving out, that I had friends with money who'd take care of me. In order to stop me from doing that and humiliating him even more, he agreed to get me my own place in the city. All he asked was that I be more discreet about what I did and who I did it with, and that I continue to act like his wife in public, when he needed me to. Appearance was very important to Barry.

MR. JAYWALKER: And how did that work out?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It worked out okay, for a while. He bought me a town house in Midtown and set up a joint bank account so I could furnish it. It gave me something to do, something I found out I was good at. At least I think I was. It also gave me space. I know that's a dumb California word, but it's how I felt.

MR. JAYWALKER: You say it worked out okay for a while.

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes. But the tabloids and the gossip columns are like sharks. They get a taste of blood, and they keep coming around for more. I know it was my own fault, for having started it all in the first place. But they'd stake out my home, follow me whenever I went out, snap my picture on the street corner, in the supermarket, wherever they could. If I squatted down to pick up a tissue, the next day there'd be a shot up my skirt. If I bent over instead, it would be of my butt. One time, they got me coming out of a women's health clinic, where I'd gone to have a breast exam, 'cause I thought I'd felt a lump. The photo made all the front pages, and the headlines made it sound like I had AIDS or herpes, or had just gotten an abortion. Somebody sent copies to Barry, and he went absolutely nuts. I don't blame him, re ally. I would've, too, if I'd been in his shoes.

Samara had tried to rein in her behavior, spending less time at her place and more at Barry's penthouse apart ment, or their home in Scarsdale. But with Barry con sumed by work and often absent for days at a time, she would eventually gravitate back to her own place, her own life and her own friends. Even as she could see the humiliation her behavior brought him, she felt powerless to change her behavior.

Occasionally there would be flare-ups, intense shout ing arguments filled with threats and ultimatums. Never was there physical force, yet never was there resolution, either. Instead a stalemate of sorts set in, with Samara able to continue defying Barry because by that time she had too much on him. Even as he held firm to the purse strings to her life, she would threaten to go public with his fears, his foibles, his anxieties and his sexual neuroses. If theirs was a love-hate relationship, it was sorely out of balance, with precious little love and more than enough anger to go around. Barry hated Samara for continually humiliating him and victimizing him, while Samara hated Barry for keeping her trapped in a prison without walls.

MR. JAYWALKER: How long did this stalemate continue?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Forever. I mean, we made some adjustments, some accommodations over the years. We continued to see each other and appear to gether in public when some occasion called for it. But privately, we led our own lives. I stayed at my place, and Barry at either of his. He hated it, but that's the way it was.

MR. JAYWALKER: How about your finances? Who looked after them?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Barry had lawyers and ac countants who pretty much took care of everything. If something needed to be signed, one of them would call and come over, have me sign. But mostly they took care of things without me. Barry had met me when I was eighteen and didn't know anything. By the time he…he died, I was twenty-six and had learned some stuff. But to Barry, it was like I was fro zen in time. I'd always be the eighteen-year-old cock tail waitress who couldn't be trusted to write a check. That was a big part of the problem right there.

MR. JAYWALKER: Let's go forward to August, August of a year and a half ago, the month Barry died. How did things stand between the two of you by that time?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They were pretty much the same, I guess. I was no longer a favorite of the tab loids, but every once in a while I'd do something stu pid, and there would be my photo, with my hair messed up or a nipple showing, or something like that. And Barry would get humiliated all over again and go ballistic, and we'd have a good scream over it.

At which point Judge Sobel interrupted, politely as always, and asked if it might be a good time for the midafternoon break. Some judges fall asleep during testi mony; others try to take down every word on a laptop; still others work on shopping lists, bill paying, check book balancing and Little League lineups. Matthew Sobel listened. And from listening, he knew that Jay walker had reached the moment when he was about to have Samara describe the evening of the murder, and he decided that the jurors should be as fresh and alert as possible for her account.

"It would be a perfect time," said Jaywalker.

The day had gone reasonably well, he felt. If, in the afternoon session, Samara had been guarded emotion ally, and surely she had been, at least she hadn't allowed her reticence to cut her answers short. Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by a lawyer in examining his own client is that the defendant will invariably try to summarize the facts instead of elaborating on them. Good lawyers will therefore devote hours of practice sessions to drawing out the minute details of events, re peatedly explaining to the witness the need to convey those details to the jury. Jaywalker, as he did with most things, took it a step further.

"You're going to get nervous on the witness stand," he'd told Samara more than once. "You're going to look out from where you're sitting and see hundreds of strangers. You're going to see reporters and sketch artists and gawkers. It's going to freak you out, trust me. And when that happens, your natural impulse is going to be to sum marize, to cut things short. Everybody does it. What I need is for you to fight that impulse as hard as you possibly can. And the best way to fight it is to slow down and give me as much detail as you can come up with."

It had worked.

Had Samara testified simply that Barry had been a hypo chondriac preoccupied with his health, the jurors would have heard her, but it would have been only her intellec tual conclusion that they heard. When she went on to describe how, having come across an item about mice on the Internet, Barry had become afraid to ejaculate, lest it shorten his life span by a month, they got it. So, too, when she'd complained about how the tabloid photographers wouldn't let her alone. Words. Only when she described the health clinic episode and the headline suggesting she had AIDS or herpes or was coming from an abortion, or when she talked about the photo revealing her nipple, did she give them something to truly picture and remember and take home with them that night. The difference lay in the fact that they hadn't been forced to accept her conclusions. Instead they'd taken her details and drawn their own con clusions from them.

What Jaywalker was less happy about was the way Samara had been so ready to acknowledge the depth of her anger at Barry. Where had that come from? He couldn't remember her bringing it up in any of their sessions. Had she done so, he almost certainly would have worked with her to tone it down. As it stood, that anger, especially when coupled with the life insurance policy, could have provided her with enough motivation to kill Barry a dozen times over. And Tom Burke certainly hadn't missed it. Jaywalker had noticed him out of the corner of his eye, scribbling away on his notepad, as soon as the words were out of Sa mara's mouth.

Not that Jaywalker himself wouldn't do his best to patch things up before Burke got a chance to exploit them. Still, the anger was there, and it didn't help matters.

With the jurors settled back in their seats following the recess, Jaywalker wasted no time in getting to the part of Samara's testimony that they'd been waiting for all day. Waiting for, as a matter of fact, for a week and a half now.

MR. JAYWALKER: Do you recall the very last time you saw Barry?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I do.

MR. JAYWALKER: When was that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: The evening everyone says he was murdered.

Joseph Teller

The Tenth Case

MR. JAYWALKER: And where was it you saw him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: At his apartment.

She described how she'd gone there at Barry's invita tion to discuss something he'd said was important but which she could no longer remember. It had been around dinnertime when she'd arrived, and he'd ordered Chinese food, which they'd eaten straight from the takeout cartons. Barry hadn't eaten much, she recalled. He'd com plained he had a cold, or the flu, or something like that.

Typical Barry.

Within twenty minutes they'd found themselves arguing over whatever it was Barry had wanted to talk about.

Perhaps it had been his humiliation over her latest antic, or perhaps she was just saying that to fill in the blank in her memory, she couldn't be sure. In any event, the argument quickly turned nasty and loud, and ended when

Samara called Barry a name she knew he hated and stormed out.

MR. JAYWALKER: Do you remember the name you called him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I do.

MR. JAYWALKER: What name?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I called him an asshole. I'd called him lots of things at one time or another, but that was the only one he really hated. He'd told me it made me sound like a slut, like the trailer trash I was. I'd told him I didn't care. If I was trailer trash,

I was trailer trash. Whatever. Anyway, that's what I called him that night, just to push his button. That's how angry I was.

MR. JAYWALKER: And yet you don't remem ber what it was you were angry about?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Exactly. I mean, how stupid is that? But that's how it was with the two of us.

From Barry's, she'd caught a cab and gone straight home. She hadn't bathed or showered, washed her hair or her clothes, or done anything else out of the ordinary. She no longer recalled what time she'd gone to bed or fallen asleep. Only that sometime the next afternoon two detectives had come and rung her doorbell, asking to talk with her, and she'd let them in. When she'd asked them what it was about, they'd refused to tell her, which had annoyed her.

MR. JAYWALKER: What did they ask you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They wanted to know when was the last time I'd seen my husband.

MR. JAYWALKER: What did you answer?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I asked them why, or what business it was of theirs. Something like that. They still wouldn't answer me. So I said about a week ago.

MR. JAYWALKER: Was that the truth?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, it was a lie.

MR. JAYWALKER: Why did you lie to them?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I don't know. Like I said, they were piss-they were annoying me, telling me I had to answer their questions but refusing to answer any of mine. Maybe that's why I lied, to get even. I'm honestly not sure.

MR. JAYWALKER: What happened next?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They told me I was lying. They told me they had a witness who could put me in Barry's apartment the night before. So I said yes, I'd been there, so what?

MR. JAYWALKER: What happened then?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They asked me if we'd had a fight, Barry and me. I didn't think it was any of their business, what went on between my husband and me, and I think I told them that.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever say yes or no about having had a fight the previous evening?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I said no. We hadn't had a fight. To me, a fight is when two people hit each other, throw things, stuff like that. What we'd had was an argument.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you volunteer that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I wasn't volunteering any thing. As far as I was concerned, I'd let these guys into my home, and they didn't have the decency to tell me why they were there and what it was all about. I was just supposed to listen up and answer whatever they asked me, like some five-year-old.

MR. JAYWALKER: What happened next?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They told me I was lying again, that they had another witness who'd heard us fighting. I told them again that we hadn't been fight ing. They said how about arguing? And that's when I said sure, we argued, we argued all the time.

MR. JAYWALKER: What's the next thing you recall happening?

MS. TANNENBAUM: One of them, the one who testified here the other day MR. JAYWALKER: Detective Bonfiglio?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yeah, Bonfiglio, the nasty one. He told me my husband was dead, that somebody had killed him. He said it just like that, to hurt me. Jaywalker knew he had to tiptoe here, in order to avoid revealing that at that point Samara had asked to call her lawyer, triggering an end to the questioning.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did there come a time, a minute or so later, when something happened?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes.

MR. JAYWALKER: What happened?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They put handcuffs on me, behind my back, real tight. And they told me I was under arrest for murdering my husband.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you murder your hus band, Samara?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Absolutely not.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you do anything to him physically that evening?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No.

MR. JAYWALKER: At any time while you were in Barry's apartment, did you have a knife in your hand?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Never.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you stab him in the chest with a knife or any other sharp instrument?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, absolutely not.

MR. JAYWALKER: Have you told us everything about that evening that you can recall?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, except for what the fight-the argument was about. I still can't remem ber that.

Jaywalker was aware of the salty taste before realizing he'd bitten the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood. Had she really said f ight, instead of argument, before correcting herself? Shit, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Burke would have a field day with that slip, he knew. Even a couple of the jurors could be heard mumbling over it. So into the breach he went.

MR. JAYWALKER: I noticed you used the word fight.

MS. TANNENBAUM: Fight, argument, whatever you want to call it. I've heard those two words so many times since that day that I'm dizzy. All I know is, I didn't touch Barry that night. And I certainly didn't stick a knife into him or anything like that. That I'd remember, I'm pretty damn sure.

For an impromptu recovery, it wasn't bad, and Jay walker left it at that. He walked over to Burke then and asked to borrow several of his exhibits. The first one he showed Samara was the towel.

MR. JAYWALKER: Do you recognize this?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm not sure. It looks like the towels I have, but there's no way for me to know for sure if it's mine or not. It might be. That's the best I can say.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever wrap a blouse and a knife in it, and stick it behind the toilet tank in your upstairs guest bathroom?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Absolutely not.

MR. JAYWALKER: How about this blouse?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It's mine.

MR. JAYWALKER: How do you know?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I just do.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you wear it to Barry's apartment that last evening you saw him? Or have it with you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, definitely not.

MR. JAYWALKER: You say definitely not. How can you be so certain?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It's part of a set I own, a blouse and a pair of slacks Barry bought me. Same pattern, same colors. I only wore them as an ensem ble. You know, together. Also, look at the material. It's silk, too heavy to wear in the summer.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever wrap this blouse, along with a knife, in the towel I just showed you and hide it behind a toilet tank?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, never.

MR. JAYWALKER: And this knife? Do you recognize it?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I do.

MR. JAYWALKER: How do you recognize it?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It's identical to a set of steak knives I own. It's the same size and shape and every thing else, as the others in my kitchen drawer.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you have it with you at Barry's apartment the last time you were there?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I did not.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you hide it behind your toilet tank?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I did not.

Jaywalker asked her if she could explain the dark stains on each of the three items. Samara replied that she had no idea how they'd gotten there. Yes, she'd heard Detective Ramseyer testify that they were bloodstains, specifically Barry Tannenbaum's. No, she hadn't stabbed Barry or cut him with that knife, any other knife, or anything else. Nor could she explain how the three items had ended up behind the toilet tank. Obviously someone had put them there, she said, but it definitely hadn't been her.

From his own exhibits, Jaywalker showed Samara the life insurance application and had her identify her signature. She had absolutely no recollection of having signed it, however, and she'd never sought to take out a policy on Barry's life or anyone else's. She often signed papers that were presented to her by Barry's accountant or lawyer, and rarely took the trouble to read them, instead trusting their as surances that it was in her interest to sign them. Shown the cancelled check that had paid for the six-month premium, she agreed with the testimony of William Smythe that it didn't bear her signature and denied that she'd ever seen it, either before or after it had been deposited by the insurance company. Nor had she noticed the significant dent it made in her account. She rarely if ever opened her bank statements or balanced her checkbook, leaving those tasks to others.

Jaywalker took a deep breath. It was four-thirty, and he was down to one or two remaining topics on his notes. The first of those involved Samara's discovery of the Seconal. Even though she adamantly denied any prior knowledge of it and claimed never to have heard of the phantom pre scribing physician, Jaywalker was afraid the whole thing looked too suspicious. Asking the jurors to believe that whoever had murdered Barry and framed Samara had also been diabolical enough to plant the Seconal in her spice cabinet, hoping the police would find it, was a stretch of immense proportions. Even to Jaywalker, it seemed much more likely that Samara herself had phoned in the prescrip tion, posing as someone from a doctor's office, had been surprised when the pharmacy had asked for the doctor's name, and in her haste had made up a name on the spot, a name that just happened to have the same initials as her own. What were the odds of that? He tried multiplying twenty-six by twenty-six in his head, but couldn't. But he was able to remember that twenty-five squared was six hundred and something. He took his pen and crossed the word Seconal off his list.

It was time to wrap it up.

MR. JAYWALKER: Samara, you've told us there were times you got angry at Barry, very angry. Is that correct?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I did.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever, in all of your eight years of marriage, get angry enough to want to harm him physically?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, never.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever strike him, ei ther with part of your body or with something else?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Only once. One time, about five years ago, I threw a soda bottle at him. It hit him on the shoulder, I think.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did it break?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Break? It was one of those plastic ones that you can't break even if you try.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did it appear to injure him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, it just bounced off him. It was empty. It wouldn't have injured a mouse. We had a good laugh over it.

MR. JAYWALKER: Other than that incident, did you ever physically harm your husband, or attempt to?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, never.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you love him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm honestly not sure. I know I thought I did, at first. But Barry was hard to love, the way he was obsessed with his businesses. And I've never been good at loving. I think I learned early on in my life to close up, to not give of myself. So maybe love was hard for both of us.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you want to get out of the relationship?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Only when we were ar guing, or fighting, as some people call it. Other than those times, no. I was Mrs. Barry Tannenbaum. Plus I had my own place, my own friends, my own life. As they say in Vegas, it might not have been black jack, but it was good enough to stick with.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you murder Barry?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, I did not.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you take this knife, or anything else, and plunge it through his chest and into his heart?

MS. TANNENBAUM: God, no.

With her denial, Jaywalker walked back to the defense table and took his seat. On a scale of one to ten, he would have given her a solid nine, deducting half a point for too much emotional control down the home stretch and another half for the argument-fight slip. Though he had to give her credit for patching that up a second time, entirely un prompted, near the very end of her testimony.

The only problem was that, given the sheer weight of the evidence against her, he knew a nine wasn't going to be good enough. Hell, a perfect ten might not even do it.

Then again, there was still cross-examination. Jaywalker had learned over the years that jurors subconsciously deducted points on their own during a witness's direct examination. The reason was simple. Direct examination, they intuitively understood, was spoon-fed. It could be re hearsed, re-rehearsed and re-re-rehearsed until it flowed from the witness's mouth with something approaching per fection. Cross-examination was different. On cross, the witness was suddenly confronted with unexpected ques tions and forced to come up with unrehearsed answers.

Most lawyers, if they were aware of the difference at all, regarded it as nothing more than an accepted fact of the trial process. To Jaywalker, it was an opportunity. If he spent twenty hours preparing a defendant for his own questions, and he did, he spent forty preparing that same witness for the prosecutor's questions. What they might include, how to pause reflectively before answering, what the absolute best answer was, and precisely how that answer should be delivered. The result was that, unlike most witnesses, who tend to come off well enough on direct but not so well on cross, Jaywalker's witnesses-and especially Jaywalker's defendants-did even better on cross than they did on direct. And the same jurors who'd deducted points during direct without ever realizing they were doing so were equally prone to give extra credit on cross. So it was entirely conceivable that Samara's best might still be yet to come.

But not now.

Even before Tom Burke rose and asked to approach the bench, Jaywalker knew he would. Rather than start his cross-examination now, at quarter of five, he asked Judge Sobel's permission to go over to the morning.

"Not the morning," said the judge. "I've got my calendar call then. But, yes, you can begin with her tomorrow af ternoon." Then he proceeded to explain to the jurors that they wouldn't have to show up until two o'clock the fol lowing day. To those who had jobs, children, parents or even pets to look after, the five-hour respite seemed to come as the best news in the world. Press people into in voluntary servitude for a couple of weeks, and they'll rejoice over a slice of stale bread.

"Great job," Burke said to Jaywalker, once the jurors had filed out of the courtroom.

"I'm sure you'll blow her away in the first five minutes," said Jaywalker.

If the exchange represented mind games played by op ponents, and surely it did, at the same time it reflected hard earned respect and genuine affection between two men who were not only among the very best at what they did for a living, but who also might have been the best of friends, had only Jaywalker allowed himself that sort of indulgence.

Jaywalker walked Samara up to Canal Street. "You did great," he told her. "Do half as well tomorrow, and I'll take care of the rest."

"Do you want to go over cross-examination?" she asked. "One last time?"

"No," he said, "you're ready." Which was his way of saying, If you're not now, you never will be. He hailed her a cab and opened the door for her to get in.

"You sure?" she asked. "I mean, we have until tomorrow afternoon. To get me even readier, I mean."

He smiled at the transparency of her invitation. "Re member what we said," he reminded her.

"After," she said.

"After," he echoed.

At home that evening, Jaywalker pondered the trial schedule. Tomorrow was Thursday. Burke could easily take all afternoon cross-examining Samara. Add on re direct and recross, and she might even be back on the stand Friday morning. Having steered clear of the Seconal issue, Jaywalker had no other witnesses to call, and he doubted that Burke would feel the need to put on a rebuttal case. But even if Samara were to finish up tomorrow, that still left the charge conference with the judge, which would take an hour, and the two summations, figure a couple of hours each. Judge Sobel wouldn't charge the jury and give them the case on Friday afternoon, not with the weekend coming. It was one thing to bring a deliberating jury back on a Saturday and then waste Sunday when you had no choice, but quite another to do it deliberately. Particularly in winter, when it meant having to heat the courtroom and the jury room.

So whenever Samara finished, whether it was tomorrow afternoon or sometime Friday, summations wouldn't take place until Monday, at the earliest. Which meant that Tom Burke was the only one who had to stay up late tonight, working on his cross-examination of Samara. Well, too bad for him. For once in his life, Jaywalker could afford to relax and forget about a case he was in the midst of trying.

As if.