The Tenth Case

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why?”

“They’ve found Barry’s blood on them.”

Shrug time.

“Who could have put them there?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Whoever killed Barry and wanted to make it look like I did it?”

“From the time you got home after leaving Barry’s, until the police showed up and arrested you, was there anyone else in your place, besides you? Think carefully.”

She seemed to do just that for a moment. What Jaywalker had no way of knowing was whether she was genuinely trying to reach back three weeks earlier and remember. Or had it suddenly dawned on her what a terrible trap she’d put herself into? Half of him expected her to break down right then and there and confess. The other half, knowing Samara, knew better.

Liars tended to stick to their lies, however absurdly. Years ago, after he’d informed a client that a full set of his prints had been found on a demand note left behind at a bank robbery, the man had looked Jaywalker squarely in the eye and said, “Hey, what can I tell you? Somebody must be using my fingerprints.”

“No,” said Samara. “No one else was there.”

“So how could those things have gotten there?”

“I have no idea,” said Samara, this time without hesitation. “I guess the cops must’ve put them there.”

Somebody must be using my fingerprints.

“So, have you come up with a plan?” she pressed.

“Sort of,” said Jaywalker, amazed that she could recover quickly enough to change the subject without missing a beat.

She leaned forward.

“Not now,” he said, looking around. “Not here.” Although his words and glances were meant to convey that there were too many eyes and ears nearby, the truth was that Jaywalker’s sort of plan suddenly seemed foolish and unworkable. On top of that, Samara’s cavalier attitude, in the face of a truly damning piece of evidence, upset him more than he was willing to admit. If she wasn’t willing to level with him and trust him with the truth, how could he possibly become a co-conspirator in a scheme to get her bailed out on false pretenses?

“When?” she asked him.

“Monday,” he said. “We’re due in court for your arraignment. We’ll talk then.”

She sat back in her chair, crossed her arms in front of her breasts and pouted, but it was only a little pout. Monday was only three days away, after all, and even in the world that Samara Tannenbaum inhabited, where there was no past and no future, and everything was about imminent peril and instant gratification, three days was evidently something she could handle.

11

DID YOU SAY BAIL?

“Samara Tannenbaum,” read the clerk, “you have been indicted for the crime of murder, and other crimes. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” said Samara.

This was the moment when Jaywalker would normally ask the judge for bail. But they were in front of Carolyn Berman again. She was the one who’d frozen Samara’s bank account last month, then modified it only to the extent of allowing her to retain counsel at the rate of seventy-five dollars an hour. Besides, she was a woman, and experience had taught Jaywalker that, as a rule, women judges were tougher on women defendants than male judges were. It was a rule that took on even more meaning when the defendant happened to be not only a woman, but a young, pretty woman, and one of immense privilege.

So Jaywalker said nothing.

He liked saying nothing, another fact that set him apart from every other lawyer he knew. He especially liked saying nothing at a time like this, when the media were assembled in the audience behind him—the print reporters, the gossip columnists, the entertainment-show beauties and the sketch artists peering over their pads in their bifocals. Afterward, outside the courtroom, when they would follow him, train their floodlights on him and poke their microphones in his face, he would elaborate on saying nothing and tell them, “No comment.”

“Part 51,” said the clerk. “Judge Sobel.”

At last they’d caught a break of sorts. Matthew Sobel was a gentle person, a judge who wore his robe with modesty, and treated lawyers and defendants with respect. While he was no “Cut-’em-loose” Bruce Wright, or Murray “Why-are-you-bringing-me-this-piece-of-shit-case?” Mogel from the old days, you could count on getting a fair trial in front of him, and ending up with a reasonable sentence even if you lost. What’s more, he was open-minded on the issue of bail. And he was a man.

“Judge Sobel asks that you pick a Tuesday,” said Judge Berman.

“How’s tomorrow?” Jaywalker asked.

“Too soon.”

Again that old problem of papers having to make their way from one courtroom to another, in this case from the eleventh floor all the way up to the thirteenth.

“A week from tomorrow?”

“Fine,” said Judge Berman. “Next case.”

Afterward Jaywalker met with Samara. This time, however, they enjoyed the semiprivacy of a holding pen, a close cousin of a feeder pen. Since Samara was the only woman who’d been brought down for court so far that morning, she had the pen to herself, and they spoke through the bars, close enough to touch—a fact that Jaywalker was acutely aware of.

After hearing the conditions of his suspension, the weekend had rejuvenated him somewhat. It had also given him a chance to get over his annoyance at Samara’s apparent lack of concern over Barry’s blood having been found on the items hidden in her town house. He leaned forward against the bars and spoke to her in hushed tones. She, the better part of a foot shorter than he, listened intently, her face turned upward, her eyes meeting his, her lips silently mouthing his words as if to commit them to memory.

They spoke for twenty minutes like that, until a corrections officer interrupted them to explain that he had to bring Samara back upstairs, so they could use the holding pen for an “obso,” a mental case, someone who had to be segregated from the general population and kept under observation.

Riding down the elevator and walking out into the mid-morning daylight, all Jaywalker could think of was Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who’d made news by getting caught on tape and sent off to federal prison for things she’d said to her client during a jailhouse visit.

What am I doing? he asked himself.

Talk about an obso.

A week went by. Jaywalker managed to dispose of the first case on his list of ten and dutifully reported the fact to the disciplinary committee judge monitoring his progress. Outdoors, there was a noticeable chill in the air each morning, prompting him to put away his two summer suits for warmer ones, and the October evenings seemed to settle in earlier and earlier with each passing day. At home alone in his apartment, Jaywalker found he was filling his tumbler of Kahlúa a little fuller each night, and draining it a little more quickly.

A copy of the DNA report arrived in the mail from Tom Burke, confirming the fact that the blood found on the knife, the blouse and the towel found in Samara Tannenbaum’s town house had indeed been her late husband’s, to a certainty factor of 12,652,189,412 to 1.

Samara continued to be brought over from Rikers Island each morning and returned each evening. In between her bus trips, Jaywalker saw her each day in the twelfth-floor counsel visit room. They talked very little about her case, even less about her chances of being granted bail on her next appearance. But he could see she was doing her homework, holding up her end of the bargain. The shadows beneath her eyes had darkened and widened into deep hollows. Her hair had taken on an unwashed, dead quality. Her lips had dried and cracked, and the lower one had shrunk visibly, until it was now almost normal in size.

She was, in a word, wasting, wasting away before his eyes, like some third-world refugee from a famine or a plague.

“Perfect,” he told her.

They made their first appearance before Judge Sobel the following Tuesday. The media was barely in evidence this time. Jaywalker’s strategy of keeping their courtroom sessions as brief as possible and saying nothing quotable afterward had evidently had its desired effect. And by delaying his arrival to the late afternoon, daring those who’d showed up early to wait around all day, he’d managed to thin their ranks even more.

A judge’s courage tends to grow, Jaywalker had learned, in inverse proportion to the size of his audience. Fill a courtroom with spectators and press, and even the best judge, even a Matthew Sobel, will posture and play to them, however subtly and even unconsciously. Wait until the end of the day, when the rows of benches have emptied, and your chances of getting what you need for your client multiply almost exponentially.

“Is your client all right?”

Those were literally the first words out of the judge’s mouth, upon seeing Samara brought into the courtroom.