The Tenth Case

“I didn’t do it,” she said.

He nodded. Earlier that morning, he had phoned the lawyer who’d been assigned to stand up for her at her first court appearance. They’d talked for ten minutes, long enough for Jaywalker to learn that the charge was murder, that the detectives had executed a search warrant at Samara’s town house and come up with a veritable shitload of evidence, including a knife with what looked like dried blood on it, and that Samara was so far denying her guilt.

That was okay. A lot of Jaywalker’s clients claimed they were innocent early on in the game. It was only after they’d gotten to know him for a while that they dared to trust him with the truth. He understood that, and knew that it was part of his job to gain that trust. Also that it was a process, one that didn’t always come easily. Sometimes it didn’t come at all. When that happened, Jaywalker considered the failure his, not his client’s.

With Samara, he was pretty sure, the trust and the truth would come. But not now, not here. Not through reinforced bulletproof glass, with a corrections officer seated fifteen feet away and, Jaywalker had to assume, a microphone hidden somewhere even closer. So every time Samara started talking about the case, he steered her away from it, assuring her that she’d have plenty of time to tell her story.

The truth was, Jaywalker was there not to win the case at that point but just to get it. In that sense, he knew, he was no better than the P.I. lawyers in his suite, the ambulance chasers. They made hospital calls and home visits in order to sign up clients before the competition beat them to it. He was doing the same thing. The only difference was that it wasn’t some bedside he was visiting. That and the fact that his client had arrived here not by ambulance, but chained to the seat of a Department of Corrections bus.

“Will you take my case?”

It was the exact same question she’d asked him six years ago. There wasn’t much he’d forgotten about her over that time, he realized. He gave her the same answer now that he’d given her then.

“Yes.”

She smiled.

“About the fee,” he said.

He hated that part. But it was what he did for a living, after all, how he paid his bills. And he was already in trouble with the disciplinary committee, with the very real possibility of a lengthy suspension looming on the horizon. Jaywalker was no stranger to pro bono work, having done his share and then some over the years. But with unemployment in his future, now was no time to be handing out freebies. Not on a murder case, anyway, especially one where the defendant was claiming to be innocent and might well insist on going to trial.

“I’ll be worth a zillion dollars,” said Samara, “once Barry’s estate gets prorated.”

He didn’t bother correcting her word choice. Still, he knew that it would be months, probably years, before there would be a distribution of assets. Moreover, if Samara were to be convicted of killing her husband, the law would bar her from inheriting a cent. He didn’t tell her that, either, of course. Instead, he simply asked, “And in the meantime?”

She shrugged a little-girl shrug.

“Should I get in touch with Robert?” Jaywalker asked her.

“Robert’s gone,” she said. “Barry discovered he was stealing.”

“Is there a new Robert?”

“There’s a new chauffeur, although…” Her voice trailed off. “But,” she suddenly brightened, “I have a bank account of my own now, sort of.”

The “sort of” struck Jaywalker as a strange qualifier, but at least it represented progress. He remembered the twenty-year-old who hadn’t been permitted to deal with money matters.

“With how much in it?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know. A couple hundred—”

“That’s it?”

“—thousand.”

“Oh.”

He got the name of the bank and explained that he would bring her papers to sign to withdraw enough for a retainer. Then he described what would be happening over the next week or two, how the evidence against her would be presented to a grand jury, and how she would almost certainly be indicted. He told her that she had a right to testify before the grand jury, but that in her case it would be a very bad idea.

“Why?”

“The D.A. knows much more about the facts than we do at this point,” he explained. “You’d end up getting indicted anyway, and then they’d have your testimony to use against you at trial.” When she looked at him quizzically, he said, “Trust me.”

“Okay,” she said.

He was grateful for that. What he didn’t want to have to tell her at this point was that if she went into the grand jury and denied having had anything to do with Barry’s death, it would make it hard to claim self-defense later on, or argue that she hadn’t been mentally responsible at the time, or that she’d killed her husband while under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance. Those were all defenses, complete or partial, that Jaywalker wanted to keep open, needed to keep open.

Finally he told her the most important part. “Keep your mouth shut. This place is crawling with snitches. Yours is a newspaper case. That means every woman in this place knows what you’re here for. Anything you tell one of them becomes her ticket to cut a deal on her own case and get her out of here. Understand?”

“Yup.”

“Promise me you’ll shut up?”

“I promise,” she said, drawing a thumb and index finger across her mouth in an exaggerated zipping motion.

“Good,” said Jaywalker.

It was only once he was outside the visitors’ gate, heading for the bus that would take him back to Manhattan, that Jaywalker recalled that in terms of promises kept, Samara was so far 0 for 1.

By the time Jaywalker made it back to Manhattan, it was too late to go to Samara’s bank to find out what he’d need to do to get money out of her account. He knew he could phone them and ask to speak to the manager or somebody in the legal department, but he’d learned from past experiences that such matters were better handled in person. He had been told often enough that he had an honest face and a disarming way about him that he’d come to accept that there must be something to it. Juries believed him; judges trusted him; even tight-assed prosecutors tended to open up to him. The truth was, he was a bit of a con man. “Show me a good criminal defense lawyer,” he’d told friends more than once, “and I’ll show you a master manipulator.” Then he would hasten to defend the skill, pointing out that establishing his own credibility and trustworthiness was not only his stock-in-trade, but was often absolutely critical to getting an innocent defendant off.

He talked less about the guilty ones he also got off, but he didn’t lose sleep over them. He believed passionately in the system that entitled the accused—any accused, no matter how despicable the individual, how heinous the crime, or how overwhelming the proof against him—to one person in his corner who would fight as hard and as well as he possibly could for him. That left it to the city’s thirty thousand cops, two thousand prosecutors and five hundred judges (the great majority of whom were former prosecutors, tough-on-crime politicians, or both) to fight just as hard and just as well to put the guy away forever. That made for pretty fair odds, as far as Jaywalker was concerned, and if he succeeded in overcoming them—as he’d been doing on a pretty regular basis lately—he felt no need to apologize. It all came down to a simple choice, he’d realized long ago. You fought like hell, trying your hardest to win—yes, win—or you regarded it as nothing but a job, and you simply went through the motions. Jaywalker knew a lot of lawyers who did just that. When they lost—and they lost every bit as often as Jaywalker won—they shrugged it off and said things like, “The scumbag was guilty,” “The idiot self-destructed on the witness stand,” or “Justice was done.” Jaywalker had a term for them. He called them whores.

Tolerance had never been one of his virtues.

He phoned Tom Burke, the assistant D.A. who was prosecuting Samara Tannenbaum. He’d seen Burke’s name in the Times article, and had confirmed that it was his case during the conversation he’d had with the lawyer who’d handled Samara’s initial court appearance.

“Burke,” said a deep voice.

“Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?” Jaywalker asked.

“Who is this?”

“What’s the matter, doesn’t the old man spring for caller ID?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I never kid.”

“Jaywalker?”

“Very good.”

Jaywalker liked Burke. They’d had a couple of cases together in the past, though none of them had ended up going to trial. Burke was no legal scholar, but he was a hardworking, straight-shooting, seat-of-the-pants lawyer.

“How the fuck are you?” he asked.

“Not bad,” said Jaywalker.