The Tenth Case

“Why?” she asked. Jaywalker could picture her nervously lighting, puffing and “distinguishing” a cigarette at that point. “What’s this all about?”

“It’s just routine,” they assured her. “We only got a few more questions.”

“Well, if you don’t want to tell me what this is about,” Samara told them, “you can just routine yourselves right out the door.”

Again the detectives exchanged glances. “We have people who place you at your husband’s apartment last night,” said one of them.

“So what?”

“So we’d like to know if it’s true, that’s all.”

“So what if it is?”

“Is it?”

Samara seemed to think for a moment before answering. Then she said, “Yeah, sure. We had dinner together.”

“At a restaurant, or at your husband’s apartment?”

“His apartment.”

“Did he cook?”

“Barry? Cook?” She laughed. “The man couldn’t boil water. He told me the first thing he did when he bought the apartment was to have the stove ripped out to make room for a bigger table.”

“What did you eat?”

“Chinks.”

Being detectives, they didn’t have to ask her what she meant. Besides, the crime scene guys had found half-empty containers of Chinese takeout on the counter and in the garbage, when they’d been looking for a weapon.

“Are we done here?” she asked. “Or maybe you’d like to know how many steamed dumplings I ate.”

“Did you have a fight?” they asked.

“No.”

“We’ve got people who tell us they heard a fight.”

“So? Big deal. We always fight.”

“Who hit who first?”

“Nobody hit nobody.”

Jaywalker wondered if maybe Samara might not have made a pretty good cop.

“So what kind of a fight was it?”

“A word fight. An argument, I believe they call it.”

“About what?”

“Who the fuck remembers? Stupid stuff. He started it.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know. I told him he could go fuck himself, and I left. Now maybe you’d like to tell me what this is all about?”

“Sure. It’s about your husband’s murder.”

“Barry? Murdered? You’re shitting me.”

They said they weren’t shitting her.

“Wait a minute,” she said, the light finally going on. “You think I killed Barry?”

They said nothing.

“I want a lawyer,” said Samara.

The magic word having been uttered, the interview was effectively over. Nonetheless, the detectives weren’t quite done. “Would it be okay if we had a quick look around?” they asked her.

“You got a warrant?”

“We can get one,” they said. “Or you can save us all a lot of time and trouble.”

She looked them in the eye and said, “I ain’t saving you shit.”

With that, they “did handcuff her, pat her down, administrated her Miranda rights, exited the premises, and transported her to the precinct for fingerprinting, processing and mug shooting.”

God bless.

Whatever time and trouble it had cost them, that afternoon the detectives did indeed apply for and obtain a search warrant for Samara’s town house, aimed at finding “a weapon or other instrument, as well as other physical evidence relating directly or indirectly to the murder of Barrington Tannenbaum.”

Apparently Tom Burke had taken over the writing.

The warrant was executed the same evening. The return listed more than two dozen items that had been seized. It was hard at that point for Jaywalker to appreciate the significance of most of them, but at least three were pretty easy to understand.

6. One silver-handled, steel-bladed steak knife, 9 inches long overall, with a sharply pointed tip and a blade 5 inches long by three-quarters of an inch wide by one-sixteenth of an inch thick, on which there appears to be a dried, dark-red stain.

9. One blue towel, with an irregular dark-red stain measuring approximately 1" x 3".

17. One ladies’ blouse, size S, with a dark-red splatter pattern on the front, approximately 3" in diameter.

If the nature of the items was troubling to Jaywalker, the location where they’d been discovered was just as damning. All three had been found rolled up together and wedged behind the toilet tank of a top-floor guest bathroom.

Those items, along with a number of others removed from the crime scene, were currently being tested for the presence of DNA. Fingerprint comparisons were awaited. In addition, a full autopsy had been conducted on Barry’s body, and a report was expected in a few weeks, as well as serology and toxicology findings. Hair and fiber analyses were being done, too.