The Tenth Case

That same night, Jaywalker got a phone call from Samara. So far as he knew, he was the only criminal defense lawyer on the face of the earth who regularly gave out his home number to his clients. But he regarded it as nothing more than a necessary corollary of his also being the only lawyer who didn’t own a cell phone. He hated the things, hated everything about them, and swore he’d go to his grave before he’d buy one. So what were his clients supposed to do when they desperately needed to reach him once he’d left his office? Talk to his answering machine?

“You’re there,” she said.

“I’m here.” It seemed obvious enough, but he let it go. “What time is it?” he asked instead. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa, no doubt aided by a tumbler half full of Kahlúa.

“Five of ten,” she said. “Listen, I need to see you. Can you have me brought over tomorrow for another visit?”

“I just saw you today,” he reminded her. “For three hours. Besides, it’s too late. I have to let them know by three o’clock.”

“Shit,” she said. “How about the day after?”

“Okay, sure.”

They talked for another minute before he heard a C.O. telling her to wind it up. Evidently ten o’clock was cutoff time for the phones.

He got up from the sofa and tried to straighten up, but his back was having none of it; an ancient tennis injury saw to that. A lot of juniors on the tour got hurt, blowing out shoulders, elbows or knees on a fairly regular basis. Leave it to Jaywalker to have been different. In a moment of exhilaration following a straight-set upset of a highly ranked opponent, he’d made the mistake of jumping over the net in celebration. Most of him had cleared it, but the heel of his right sneaker had caught the very top of the tape. The result was an extremely red face (both literally and figuratively), three cracked vertebrae, and the sudden end to a promising career.

Maybe Samara was ready to trust him with the real story of Barry’s death. That would be helpful. He jotted down a note to order her over for a counsel visit the day after tomorrow. Then he drained the last sip of Kahlúa from his tumbler. It was an absurd choice of drink, and he knew it, but he was way past apologizing for it. After his wife’s death, he’d been completely unable to sleep, spending the hours twisting and turning, rearranging the covers, flipping the pillows, and reaching out for the warm body that was no longer his to find. The pills they prescribed for him left him feeling thick and groggy during the daytime, and unable to get any work done. Never much of a drinker, he gave it a try out of pure desperation and discovered that a glass of Scotch in the evening would buy him a couple hours of fitful sleep. Only thing was, it was like downing paregoric, or cod-liver oil. He tried bourbon, gin and vodka. He tried wine, beer, even hard cider. But everything tasted bitter and medicinal. Finally he followed his sweet tooth toward brandy, Amaretto and Grand Marnier, and found them drinkable, but barely. Then he came across an old, nearly empty bottle of Kahlúa in the very back of the bar cabinet. His wife had brought it back from Mexico and used it on special occasions, in place of sugar, to sweeten her coffee. Jaywalker took a swallow directly from the bottle and winced. It was almost like drinking maple syrup. But a sip or two later, he decided that once he got past the initial sweetness, he actually liked the taste of it.

Big mistake.

Huge mistake.

Still, he decided, there were probably worse things than being a nighttime alcoholic. He no longer drove, having long ago traded in his car and its $300-a-month reserved underground parking spot for a lifetime’s worth of bus and subway MetroCards. He drank alone and only at home, so as not to make a fool of himself in public. And if he was gradually destroying his liver from the alcohol and wrecking his pancreas from the sugar, well, there were probably worse ways to die, too. You could amass a fortune, for example, only to end up with the business end of a steak knife in your heart.

He turned off the light and lay back down on the sofa. The good news was that he wouldn’t have to make the bed in the morning.

10

12,652,189,412 TO 1

“So what’s up?”

“Nothing much,” said Samara.

It was two days later, and they were sitting, as before, across from one another in the twelfth-floor counsel visit room. Samara looked tired, more tired than even the four-o’clock wake-up call should have made her look. Her hair was stringy, dark semicircles had begun to appear beneath her eyes, and her skin had taken on even more of that artificial fluorescent hue to it. Yet with all that, and the added distortion of the metal screen that separated the two of them, Jaywalker still couldn’t pry his eyes off of her.

“You wanted to see me,” he said. “You made it sound important.”

“I can’t stand it over there,” she said. “All you do is sit around all day and listen to women cursing and screaming and fighting. From wakeup till lights-out, I spend every minute trying to keep from being beaten up or stabbed or worse.”

He didn’t need to ask her about worse.

“So I’d rather you have me pulled out every day and brought over here. If you don’t mind.”

It was Jaywalker’s turn to shrug. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Except this Friday won’t work.”

She cocked her head, as though to ask why.

“I’ve got a little date with the disciplinary committee judges. It seems they want to take away my license to practice for a while.”

Her eyes widened in panic. “But who’s going to—”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m pretty sure they’ll let me finish up my pending cases.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

He smiled. “Want to know the best one?” he asked her, not quite sure why he was going there, but sure he was.

She nodded through the screen, and leaned forward conspiratorially. He guessed that if you spent your days listening to cursing and screaming and fighting, and trying to keep from being beaten up, stabbed or worse, a little naughty-lawyer gossip was a welcome change.

“It seems,” he said, “that they’ve got a witness who says I, uh, got a blow job on the fifth-floor stairway landing.”

“Hah!” she erupted with nothing less than glee.

It was the first time he’d heard her laugh out loud, or even seen her break out in a real smile. It barely mattered that her mirth had come at his expense; it was worth it.

“Did you?” she wanted to know.

“Well, it depends on what you mean by did.” Hey, if it had worked in the White House, why not in the Big House?

They spoke for a little over an hour, long enough for her to miss the one o’clock bus. They talked about a lot of things, including the meaning of did, his long-dead wife, and her recently dead husband. But not once did she come close to admitting that she’d killed Barry. Nor did he press her on the subject. Sometimes these things took time, he knew.

Before Jaywalker left, Samara made him promise to order her over for the following day, and for every day the next week. “And good luck on Friday,” she added, “you stud, you.”

He whistled his way back to the office that afternoon and the whole way home that evening, mercifully drowned out by the roar of the Number 3 train.

You stud, you.

“When can you get me out of here?” Samara asked him the following afternoon. “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three days, stuck over there.”

“You’ll make it,” he said. For a smart man, he was fully capable of saying truly stupid things. “It’ll be another two weeks before I can even ask for bail, and…” He let his voice trail off, hoping she’d missed the and.

“And what?” Apparently not.

He explained to her that once they got to Supreme Court, they would have three chances to make a bail application, and that strategically it was essential that they pick the right one. There would be the judge in the arraignment part, the judge they would be sent to in the trial part, and—if he felt that both of those were disinclined to set bail—as a last resort, there were the judges of the Appellate Division. What he didn’t have the heart to tell her was how poor their chances were, no matter which door they picked.

So she asked him, damn her.

“It’s a long shot,” was the most he was willing to tell her. The thing was, she looked so fragile. Her hair was better today, but the shadows beneath her eyes were darker than they’d been the day before, and her skin had even more of that pasty, fluorescent cast to it.

“I need you to promise me something,” she said. Even through the wire mesh, he could tell she was looking at him intently.

Anything, he wanted to say. Instead, he simply stared back at her, waiting to hear what impossible demand she was going to make of him.