The Tenth Case

“I need you to get me out of here,” she said in a steady voice. “I don’t care how. I’ll do whatever I have to on my end, and I’ll do it well. I’ll have a heart attack, or a stroke. I’ll go into an epileptic seizure. I don’t care what it takes, I’ll do it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts,” she said. “Promise me you’ll think about it and come up with a plan.” Her voice didn’t rise at the end of the sentence. It wasn’t a question so much as a demand.

As he replayed her words in his mind, he rationalized that technically, all she was really asking was that he think about it and try to come up with something. That much he could promise her, so he had. And with any other client, it would have ended right there and been forgotten. But Samara Tannenbaum wasn’t any other client, and in the weeks that followed, Jaywalker would obsess over what she’d said and how she’d said it. There were defendants you knew almost instinctively not to trust. If you made a suggestion to them about the best way to phrase something on the witness stand, and they followed it and it didn’t come out right, they would think nothing of saying, “My lawyer told me to say it that way.” But there were other clients, too, clients you could count on to go down in flames before they would ever give you up. By telling Jaywalker that she’d do whatever it might take on her end, Samara Tannenbaum had announced that she was from that second, stand-up group as surely as she could have. What was more, she’d displayed an almost uncanny ability to locate and push the right button. Begging a lonely widower closing in on fifty to do whatever he could to fulfill his half of the bargain was sheer genius on her part. Could she possibly know the magnitude of the effect she had on him? Did she already comprehend, as he was only now beginning to, the lengths to which he would go to please her?

He suspected she did.

The realization sent an unexpected chill up the length of his back, causing him to shudder. And for the first time, he could suddenly picture Samara lifting that knife in her small clenched fist and sliding it between her husband’s ribs.

Friday came, and with it Jaywalker’s appearance before the disciplinary committee judges, their imposition of the three-year suspension, and his plea that they allow him to complete his pending cases. At the end of the following week he had ten cases remaining on his calendar.

Including, of course, the one numbered Indictment 1846/05 and entitled The People of the State of New Yorkversus Samara Tannenbaum.

Even with suspension looming and Jaywalker working hard to please the three-judge panel by disposing of as many of his remaining cases as possible, he still managed to find time each day to spend an hour locked up across from Samara in the twelfth-floor counsel visit room, and to remember each afternoon to request that she be brought back over again the following day.

Each day she asked him if he’d come up with any ideas to get her out, and each day she reaffirmed her willingness to do whatever it would take on her end. Each day he told her he was thinking about it, working on it, and that he’d come up with some ideas that he was playing around with in his mind. At the beginning of the week, these were lies, meant simply to placate her and put her off. But as the week wore on, Jaywalker found that his assurances were beginning to take on a life of their own, and he spent his evenings trying to concoct some scheme or plan that might just convince some judge to set bail. And by week’s end, he’d actually come up with the seeds of an idea, however preliminary and far-fetched.

In the meantime, the case against Samara continued to mount.

* * *

On Monday, Nicolo LeGrosso had called to tell Jaywalker that he’d succeeded in interviewing both Barry Tannenbaum’s next-door neighbor and the doorman who’d been on duty the evening of the murder. Both of them reiterated the accounts they’d given the detectives. The neighbor was as certain as she could be that it had been Barry and his wife “Sam” she’d heard arguing, and that after Sam had left there’d been no more voices. And although the doorman no longer had the logbook to show LeGrosso (the NYPD detectives having taken it), he was absolutely positive that Mr. Tannenbaum’s only guest that evening had been his wife.

Nicky also reported that he’d struck out on trying to identify and interview the cabby who’d driven Samara home from Barry’s the night of the murder. His subpoena to the Taxi and Limousine Commission had come back “no record.” Either Samara had lied about taking a cab directly back to her place, or the cabby had taken her off the meter, pocketing the fare for himself. Other than Samara’s word, there was no way of knowing.

On Wednesday, Tom Burke had phoned. “You owe me ten bucks,” he announced.

“What for?” Jaywalker had forgotten what they’d bet on, but he was pretty sure from Burke’s smug tone that it was Samara who was going to turn out to be the big loser.

“The knife,” said Burke. “The one found behind the toilet tank at her place?”

“Right.”

“Preliminary DNA tests show it’s got Barry’s blood on it. Ditto the blouse and the towel.”

“You got the report already?”

“Not yet,” said Burke. “They’re way backed up over there. I got a phone call this morning, though, and I thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks,” said Jaywalker. “You’ve made my day.”

“Come on, don’t tell me you’re surprised.”

“No, I’m not surprised.”

“And, Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry about the suspension thing.”

“Thanks, Tom. I’ll be okay.”

“They going to let you wind down your cases?”

“Seems like it. Some of them, anyway.”

“Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep this one, if you can. God knows she’s going to need you.”

Burke had called again the following day. “I still don’t have the DNA report,” he said. “But they phoned to tell me they’ve quantified the odds of its being anyone else’s blood on the stuff besides Barry’s.”

“I can hardly wait,” said Jaywalker. In the old days, back when all they could do was type blood by group, such as A Positive, AB Negative or O Positive, the best they could typically tell you was that fifty or sixty percent of the population could be excluded as suspects. Then, with the advent of HLA testing, the figure jumped, reaching the nineties. But DNA was a different story altogether. Now the numbers suddenly lifted off and soared into the stratosphere. And it was those numbers, typically described as “astronomical,” that had completely revolutionized the science of identification.

“You ready?” asked Burke.

“Sure. Lay it on me.”

“The odds that it’s not Barry’s blood are precisely one in twelve billion, six hundred and fifty-two million, one hundred and eighty-nine thousand, four hundred and twelve.”

Although Burke had read off the numbers deliberately enough for Jaywalker to copy them down, he hadn’t bothered. He knew his DNA, and as soon as he’d heard the twelve billion part, it had been enough for him.

There weren’t that many people on the planet.

By Friday Jaywalker had been told that he could keep enough cases to know that Samara’s would be among them. He broke the news to her through the wire mesh of the twelfth-floor counsel visit room.

“That’s terrific,” she said. “Have you come up with a plan to get me out?”

“Let me ask you a question first.”

“Okay.”

“Remember that stuff they say they found behind the toilet tank at your place?” He was careful to include the words “they say.” Omitting them would have told her that he was willing to accept the detectives’ version as true.

“Yes,” she said. “The knife, the blouse and…”

“The towel.”

“Right. What about them?”

“You told me you didn’t know anything about them, right?”

“Right.”