The Tenth Case

“Let me guess. Samara Tannenbaum?”

“Bingo.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Then, “Oh, yeah. You represented her on that DWI thing.”

“I see you’ve been doing your homework.”

“You assigned?” Burke asked.

“No,” said Jaywalker. “I weaned myself off the public tit some time ago, just in time to miss the rate hike.” It was the truth. Fresh out of Legal Aid, Jaywalker had been happy to take all the court-appointed cases he could get, even at twenty-five dollars an hour for out-of-court work and forty an hour for in-court. He’d been putting his daughter through law school at the time, and needed every cent to do it. Once she’d graduated and had found a job, he’d stopped taking assignments, except for an occasional favor to a judge, or when New York briefly restored the death penalty. A few years ago, under pressure from a lawsuit, they’d finally gotten around to raising the rates to seventy-five an hour, in-court and out. But Jaywalker hadn’t been tempted. By that time he had enough private work to keep him busy, and his expenses were low enough that he didn’t need the extra money. Getting rich had never been high on his list of priorities.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Burke, “who’s retained you?”

“Samara. Or at least she’s in the process.”

“It’s not going to work.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve gotten an order freezing all of Barry Tannenbaum’s assets,” said Burke. “Including a bank account in Samara’s name.”

“Shit,” was all Jaywalker could think to say.

Tom Burke had only been doing his job, of course. He’d been able to trace the deposits to Samara’s account and demonstrate to a judge that every dollar—and there were currently nearly two hundred thousand of them—had come from her husband. Under the law, if Samara were to be convicted of killing him, she would lose her right to the money, as well as to any other of Barry’s assets. Next, Burke had informed the judge that he’d already presented his case to a grand jury, which had voted a “true bill.” That meant an indictment, which amounted to an official finding of probable cause that Samara had in fact committed a crime resulting in Barry’s death. Based upon that, the judge, a pretty reasonable woman named Carolyn Berman, had had little choice but to freeze all of Barry Tannenbaum’s assets, the bank account included.

Even if Burke and Berman had only been doing their jobs, the result certainly added up to a major headache for Jaywalker. The good news was that he could now skip going to the bank. But that consolation was more than offset by the fact that instead he had to spend two days drawing up papers so that he and Burke could go before the judge and argue about the fairness of the ruling.

They did that on a Friday afternoon, convening at Part 30, on the 11th floor of 100 Centre Street, the Criminal Court Building. Jaywalker’s home court, as he liked to think of it.

“The defendant has a constitutional right to the counsel of her choice,” he argued.

“True enough,” Burke conceded, “but it’s a limited right. When you’re indigent and can’t afford a lawyer, the court assigns you one. Only you don’t get to choose who it is.”

“But she’s not indigent, and she can afford a lawyer,” Jaywalker pointed out. “At least she could have, until you two decided that instead of her paying for counsel, the taxpayers should get stuck footing the bill.”

It was a fairly sleazy argument, he knew, but there were a half-dozen reporters taking notes in the front row of the courtroom, and Jaywalker knew that the judge didn’t want to wake up tomorrow morning to headlines like JUDGE RULES TAXPAYERS SHOULD PAY FOR BILLION-AIRESS’S DEFENSE.

In the end, Judge Berman hammered out a compromise of sorts, as judges generally try to do. She authorized a limited invasion of the bank account for legal fees and necessary related expenses. But she set Jaywalker’s fee at the same seventy-five dollars an hour that it would have been had Samara been indigent and eligible for assigned counsel.

Great, thought Jaywalker. Here I got paid thirty-fivegrand to cop her out on a DWI, and now I’m going to beearning ditch-digger wages for trying a murder case.

“Thank you,” was what he actually said to Judge Berman.

With that he walked over to the clerk of the court and filled out a notice of appearance, formally declaring that he was the new attorney for Samara Moss Tannenbaum. And was handed a 45-pound cardboard box by Tom Burke, containing copies of the evidence against his client. So far.

Nothing like a little weekend reading.

6

A LITTLE WEEKEND READING

It turned out to be a horror story.

Jaywalker began his reading that night, lying in bed. The cardboard box Burke had given him contained police reports, diagrams and photographs of the crime scene, the search warrant for Samara’s town house, a “return,” or list of items seized there, a typewritten summary of what Samara had said to the detective who first questioned her, requests for scientific tests to be conducted on various bits of physical evidence, and a bunch of other paperwork.

It was a lot more than the prosecution was required to turn over at this early stage of the proceedings. A lot of assistants would have stonewalled, waiting for the defense to make a written demand to produce, followed up with formal motion papers and a judge’s order. Tom Burke didn’t play games like that, a fact that Jaywalker was grateful for.

At least until he began reading.

From the police reports, Jaywalker learned that when Barry Tannenbaum hadn’t shown up at his office one morning and his secretary had been unable to reach him either at his mansion in Scarsdale or his penthouse apartment on Central Park South, she’d called 9-1-1. The Scarsdale police had kicked in the door, searched the mansion, and found nobody there and nothing out of order. The NYPD had been luckier, if you chose to look at it that way. Let into the apartment by the building superintendent, they’d found Barry lying facedown on his kitchen floor, in what the crime scene technician described as “a pool of dried blood.” If the terminology was slightly oxymoronic, the meaning was clear enough.

There’d been no weapon present, and none found in the garbage, which hadn’t been picked up yet, on the rooftop, or in the vicinity of the building. Officers went so far as to check nearby trash cans and storm drains, with, in police-speak, “negative results.”

There was no sign of forced entry, and no indication from the security company that protected the apartment that any alarms had gone off. The apartment was dusted for fingerprints, and a number of latent prints were lifted or photographed. Blood, hair and fiber samples were collected.

The medical examiner’s office was summoned, and the Chief Medical Officer himself, not all that averse to publicity, responded. On gross examination of the body, he found a single deep puncture wound to the chest, just left of the midline and in the area of the heart. There appeared to be no other wounds, and no signs of a struggle. The M.E. took a rectal temperature of the body. Based on the amount of heat it had lost, as well as the progression of lividity and rigor mortis, he was able to make a preliminary estimate that death had occurred the previous evening, sometime between six o’clock and midnight.

The building was canvassed to determine if anyone had heard or seen anything unusual the night before. Only one person reported that she had, a woman in her late seventies or early eighties, living alone in the adjoining penthouse apartment. She’d heard a loud argument between a man and a woman, shortly after watching Wheel of Fortune. She recognized both voices. The man’s was Barry Tannenbaum, whom she knew well. The woman’s, she was just as certain, was his wife, known to her as Sam.

According to TV Guide, Wheel of Fortune had aired that evening at seven-thirty Eastern Standard Time, and had ended at eight.

The doorman who’d been on duty the previous evening was located and called in. He distinctly recalled that Barry Tannenbaum had had a guest over for dinner. As he did with every non-tenant, the doorman had entered the guest’s name in the logbook upon arrival and again upon departure. Although in this particular case he hadn’t required her to sign herself in. The reason, he explained, was that he knew her personally.

Her name was Samara Tannenbaum.

At that point a pair of detectives had been dispatched to Samara’s town house. They had to buzz her from the downstairs intercom and phone her unlisted number repeatedly for a full fifteen minutes before she finally cracked the door open, leaving the security chain in place. They told her they wanted to come in and ask her a few questions.

“About what?” she asked.

“Your husband,” they said.

“Why don’t you ask him yourselves?”

The two detectives exchanged glances. Then one of them said, “Please, it’ll only take a few minutes.”

At that point Samara unchained the door and “did knowingly and voluntarily grant them consent to affect entry of the premises.” Jaywalker would go to his grave in awe over how cops abused the English language. It was as though, in order to receive their guns and shields, they were first required to surrender their ability to spell correctly, to follow the most basic rules of grammar, and to write anything even remotely resembling a simple sentence.

Samara had seemed nervous, they would later write in their report. Her hair “appeared unkept,” her clothes were “dishelved,” and she “did proceed to light, puff and distinguish” a number of cigarettes.

They asked her when she’d last seen her husband.

“About a week ago,” she replied.

“Are you certain?”

“Am I certain I saw him a week ago?”

“No, ma’am. Are you certain you haven’t seen him since?”