The Tenth Case

“Will you take my case, then?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

She stood up to leave. She couldn’t have been more than five-three, he guessed, and she was wearing serious heels.

“We have to talk about my fee,” said Jaywalker.

“Talk to Robert,” she said, waving vaguely in the direction of the waiting room. “I’m not allowed to deal with money matters.”

Robert was summoned. He was actually wearing a uniform, complete with a chauffeur’s cap. He reminded Jaywalker of those limo drivers who met people at airports, holding stenciled signs against their chests. He produced a check from an inner pocket and sat down across from Jaywalker, in the seat Samara had vacated. Jaywalker could see that the check was signed, but that the dollar amount had been left blank. Robert picked up a pen from the top of the desk—there were a half dozen of them strewn around, a few of which worked—and looked at Jaywalker expectantly.

“I’ll need a retainer to start work—”

Robert held up a hand. “If it’s all right,” he said, “Mr. Tannenbaum prefers to pay the full amount in advance.”

Jaywalker shrugged. In his business, which was dealing with criminals, you tried to get a half or a third up front, knowing that collecting the balance would be a process similar to dental extraction. If you were lucky, you got twenty percent. Paying the full amount in advance didn’t happen.

Jaywalker stroked his chin as though in deep concentration. In fact, he was fighting hard to recover from his shock and come up with a fair number. He drew a complete blank.

“If there’s no trial…” he began, trying to buy time.

“No ifs,” said Robert. “Give me the bottom line. I don’t want to have to go through this next time, and the time after that.”

“Fair enough,” said Jaywalker, before lapsing back into chin-stroking. His normal fee for a drunk driving case was $2,500, with another $2,500 due if the case couldn’t be worked out with a guilty plea and had to go to trial. He’d gotten more once or twice, but only where there’d been some complicating factor, such as a prior DWI conviction, or the fact that the case was outside of the city and meant travel time.

Still, there was the Lamborghini factor, the chauffeur, and that comment that was still reverberating in his ears: “Barry has lots of money.”

Fuck it, he decided. Why not go for it?

“The total fee,” he said, in as steady a voice as he could muster, “will be ten thousand dollars.”

“No way,” said Robert.

“Excuse me?” Jaywalker said, feigning surprise, but knowing immediately that he’d blown it. Greed will get you every time.

“Mr. Tannenbaum will never go for it,” he heard Robert saying. “Not in a million years. Anything less than thirty-five grand and he’ll think he’s getting second-rate service.” He proceeded to fill out the amount in the blank space.

Two hours after they’d left, Jaywalker was still pulling the check out of his pocket every fifteen minutes to stare at it, counting the zeroes one by one to make sure it said what he thought it did.

Thirty-five thousand dollars.

He’d gotten less on murder cases.

A lot less.

The matter had been resolved with what Jaywalker liked to think of as mixed results. Samara ended up pleading guilty to driving while impaired and operating a motor vehicle without a license. She entered her plea on her third court appearance, Jaywalker having obtained two earlier postponements for no reason other than fear of being disbarred for life for charging a fee that worked out to something in the neighborhood of $17,500 an hour.

Grand larceny, by any measure.

Samara paid—or rather, Robert paid on her behalf—a fine of $350, plus another hundred or so in court costs. She was compelled to take a one-day safe-driving course (no doubt she elected Lamborghini Navigation 101) and attend a three-hour substance abuse seminar, and was prohibited from applying for a learner’s permit or driver’s license for a period of eighteen months.

That was the good news.

The bad news, at least so far as Jaywalker was concerned, was that his infatuation with Samara never progressed beyond the staring point. Robert was always around. And the truth was, as even Jaywalker would have had to admit in his more reflective moments, had Robert not been around, things would have been no different. Not once did Samara ever indicate that she was the least bit interested in anything from Jaywalker besides legal representation. When the case ended and he went to embrace her (something he’d done with men and women, killers and rapists, he rationalized), she turned her head at the very last second, so that his kiss landed dryly on her cheek.

“Stay out of trouble,” he told her.

“I will,” she promised.

5

RIKERS ISLAND

Promises being what they are, they occasionally go unkept.

Six years later, Jaywalker had been looking over the front page of the New York Times Metropolitan section when he spotted an item well below the center fold. Apparently the Times considered the news fit to print, but only barely.

WIFE HELD IN KILLINGOF WEALTHY FINANCIER

it said. He might have read no farther, having little empathy for financiers on the best of days, let alone wealthy financiers. In fact, he was trying to figure out if the phrase was redundant when his eyes, drifting down the fine print, came to rest on the name Samara Moss Tannenbaum, and stopped right there. It was as though he were suddenly seeing her again, sitting across his office desk, utterly powerless to take his eyes off her, just as now he was powerless to take them off her printed name.

He forced himself to blink, once, then twice, just so he could look away. Then he lowered himself into his chair—the same chair he’d sat in six years earlier, behind the same desk—and, folding the paper in half, began to read.

A 26-year-old woman was arrested early this morning in connection with the death of her husband, a financier described by Forbes magazine as having a net worth in excess of ten billion dollars.

According to a source close to the investigation, who insisted upon anonymity because he is unauthorized to speak publicly for the police department, Samara Moss Tannenbaum was accused of stabbing her husband, Barrington Tannenbaum, 70, once in the chest. The wound was deep enough to perforate the victim’s heart and cause him to bleed to death, said the source.

(Continued on page 36)

Jaywalker unfolded the paper and thumbed his way through the section until he found page 36. He spread it open in front of him, fully intending to read the balance of the article. But it would turn out to be hours before he did. What stopped him was a pair of photographs, typical black-and-white newspaper portraits arranged side by side. The one to the left was of a slight balding man in a business suit and tie who, Jaywalker knew, had to be the victim. But he never so much as read the caption beneath it. It was the other photo, the one to the right, that captured him. Staring directly at him was Samara Tannenbaum, her eyes narrowly set and black as coals, her lower lip curled into what either was or could easily have been mistaken for a pout. Jaywalker would stare at the photograph for what seemed like hours, as utterly unable to look away as he had been the day she’d first walked into his office six years earlier.

For two full days he thought of no one and nothing else. He thought about her lying in bed at night. He dreamed about her. He awoke thinking about her. He had to beg a judge for an adjournment of a trial long scheduled to begin, feigning conjunctivitis when the real problem was concentration. He ate little, slept less and lost six pounds.

Just before two o’clock in the afternoon of the third day, as he was getting ready to go back to court for a sentencing on a marijuana case, the phone rang. Jaywalker was going to let the answering machine get it, but at the last moment he decided to pick up.

“Jaywalker,” he said.

“Samara,” said a recorded female voice, followed by a male one, “is calling collect from a correctional facility. If you wish to accept the charges, please press one now.”

Jaywalker pressed one.

He met with her the following day, at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island. Met with being something of a stretch, since their conversation was in actuality conducted through a five-inch circular hole cut out of the center of a wire-reinforced, bulletproof pane of glass.

“You look terrible,” he told her.

“Thanks.”

It was true, in a way, the same way Natalie Wood might have looked terrible after four days in jail, or a young Elizabeth Taylor. Samara’s hair was a tangle of knots (so much for its being naturally straight), her eyes were puffy and bloodshot and her skin had an artificial, fluorescent cast to it. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit that had to be three sizes too big for her. Yet once again, Jaywalker found it impossible to take his eyes off her.