The Tenth Case

31

It was quite a morning in Part 51.

The jurors, having arrived earlier only to be told to suspend their deliberations, were led into the courtroom and seated in the jury box. The media filled the first three benches of the spectator section, on both sides of the center aisle. The rest of the rows were packed, leaving a good fifty people standing along the back and side walls.

Word gets around fast in a courthouse.

With Samara and Jaywalker sitting at the defense table, Tom Burke rose slowly to his feet. "Pursuant to our earlier conversation, with respect to the case of The People versus Samara Moss Tannenbaum, true name Samantha Musgrove, The People hereby move for a mistrial."

"You understand the full implications of that," said Judge Sobel. "As I'm sure you know, when the defense ob tains a mistrial, the case can be retried in front of another jury. But when a mistrial is granted on the prosecution's motion, jeopardy attaches, and the case is over forever."

"Yes," said Burke.

"And I understand your office will be filing a written statement setting forth the reasons for your motion."

"That's correct."

"Mr. Jaywalker?"

"I don't believe we have any objection." "The motion is granted," said Judge Sobel. Just like that.

The media went absolutely nuts. Broadcasts were inter rupted, specials were hastily put together, and headlines were reset. Before he could get out of the courthouse, Jay walker was besieged for interviews with Oprah, Katie Couric, Larry King, Court TV and all the late-night hosts. Characteristically, he turned them all down, although he was thinking about Jon Stewart's offer when he caught somebody referring to him as the new "celebrity lawyer." At that point, he broke into a run and disappeared from view.

Samara was only a little less bashful. She faced the lights and microphones for about twelve seconds, just long enough to say how happy she was, and to thank Burke, Bonfiglio, the judge, the jury and Jaywalker. If there happened to be any future Oscar winners or Miss Americas within earshot, they might have learned a thing or two. Though probably not.

It turned out that the jurors had indeed stood at elevento-one for conviction. But the holdout had been neither Carmelita Rosado, the kindergarten teacher, nor Angelina Olivetti, the actress and waitress. It had been Juror Number 12, George Stetson, the ramrod-straight retired marine colonel Jaywalker had been unable to knock off because he'd run out of challenges. "They would have had to carry me out in a body bag," Stetson was quoted as saying later, "before I'd have surrendered." Several of his fellow jurors shared a somewhat different recollection, that Stetson had in fact been prepared to change his vote to guilty earlier that morning, which would have made it unanimous, when they'd suddenly been directed to cease their deliberations.

That Friday afternoon Jaywalker was officially sus pended from the practice of law for three years, effective immediately. A petition started making the rounds, asking the disciplinary committee judges to reconsider their sen tence in light of Jaywalker's latest success, but he quickly put an end to it. Three years was actually sounding pretty damn good to him at that point. Not too long ago, in fact, a client of his, a career burglar facing twelve-and-a-half to twenty-five, had heard about the suspension.

"Three years?" he'd said incredulously. "They wanna give you a trey? Muthafucka, I wish they'd offa that kinda time to me. Sheeet, I could do me a trey standin' on my dick."

After the previous night, Jaywalker wouldn't have been able to do much of anything standing on his dick. Still, he figured he could do the three years, one way or another.

Jaywalker's love affair with Samara lasted longer than he thought it would. They went out for the better part of six months, if you were willing to adopt Samara's trialtestimony definition of going out as having sex on a regular basis. Indeed, with a little luck, their relationship might have turned out to be one of those rarest things of all, a love affair complete with a storybook ending. Samara was getting her inheritance after all, and Jaywalker his longanticipated sabbatical. In a word, they were both free.

But evidently it wasn't meant to be.

When it unraveled, it unraveled in a hurry. They were sitting in front of the fireplace one night, the same fireplace they'd first made love in front of. But it was July, and the only fire this time was at the far end of a generous joint Samara had expertly rolled for the two of them. They were talking about the trial. They did that infrequently, but they did it. It had been Jaywalker's last trial, after all, and Samara's first and last. A watershed event for both of them.

"How did you figure out there had to be another knife in the dishwasher?" she asked him, her eyes watery from the smoke but as arresting as ever.

"It had to be there somewhere," said Jaywalker. "The dishwasher seemed a logical enough place. The refrigera tor or the freezer would have destroyed any fingerprints, but the blood would have been preserved. So I figured the dishwasher was a good bet." For some reason, he realized, he'd shied away from telling her about the dream he'd had. That would remain his secret, his and his wife's.

"Pretty clever of us, huh?"

"Us?"

"Yeah," said Samara, with a mischievous grin. "You deserve credit for figuring it out."

"And you?"

"Is my case really over?"

"Yup."

"They can never try me again, no matter what?"

"No matter what. It'd be double jeopardy."

"And we're both adults?"

"I certainly am."

She smiled, and for a moment Jaywalker thought she was reacting to his clever reply. But her smile was just a bit too smug and stayed on her face just a moment too long for it to be simply that. It was a smile of satisfaction, a smile of triumph over having pulled something off despite over whelming odds. But Jaywalker had absolutely no clue what it really meant.

So he asked her. "What?" he said.

"Nothing."

"C'mon," he said. "You can trust me."

She smiled again and took a long hit from the joint. "You don't really think it was Barry who put that knife in the dishwasher, do you?"

Jaywalker said nothing. He probably couldn't have if he'd wanted to. All he was aware of was a rushing noise in his ears, so deafening as to drown out everything else. Her words, his thoughts, everything.

And that was it, the end of the conversation. What was more, she would never, ever go there again, no matter how hard he pushed her. It was as though smoking the joint had loosened her tongue for a moment, but only for a moment.

So it was never as though he really knew one way or the other. But that was the problem, right there. It would have been okay if he'd known she was guilty. Hell, he'd repre sented enough guilty people in his day, and had gotten his share of them off and then some. He could have lived with knowing she was guilty.

It was the not knowing that proved to be intolerable, the notion that she might have been playing him all along. And every time he would confront her and ask her, she would deflect his questions and dodge his accusations. She'd say something meant to sound funny, like, "You always said it didn't matter to you one way or the other," or "You're not my lawyer anymore, so our conversations aren't privi leged, are they?" Only her comments never sounded funny to Jaywalker.

So he was left to wonder.

He would fall asleep wondering, and he'd wake up won dering. He'd wonder while they were making love. Was the woman in his arms the innocent victim of a sinister frameup that had come perilously close to working? Or was she a serial stabber who emerged, locustlike, every twelve or fourteen years to strike again? And when he caught himself the third time-or perhaps it was even the fourth or fifth- counting the steak knives left in Samara's kitchen drawer before going upstairs and climbing into bed with her, just to make sure they were all present and accounted for, he decided it was just too much.

Tom Burke had begun his summation by saying, "Sometimes things aren't what they seem to be. But some times they are." When you came right down to it, maybe the reason why Samara had seemed so guilty for so long was because she was.

Years and years ago, when Jaywalker's daughter had been a toddler of two, she'd picked up an expression, latched on to it, and used it whenever she was asked a yesor-no question. "Yes, no, maybe so," she would chant in a lilting, singsong voice. As cute as it was, it meant abso lutely nothing, of course. All it did was list the possibili ties. But in her two-year-old wisdom, his daughter had been smarter than Tom Burke, smarter than Anthony Bon figlio, smarter by far than Jaywalker. Truth could be a slip pery thing, far more elusive and hard to get your hands around than a simple black-or-white, up-or-down concept like guilty or not guilty.

Sometimes things aren't what they seem to be.

Sometimes they are.

And sometimes, you just don't know.