The Tenth Case

Yet as bad as things looked for Samara at the moment, Jaywalker had every confidence that given a little time, they would look a lot worse.

He turned off the light and lay on his back in the darkness. Samara Tannenbaum’s face appeared at the foot of his bed, her eyes darker even than the room, her lower lip pouting.

“I didn’t do it,” she said.

Right.

7

180.80 DAY

Monday was Samara’s “One-eighty-eighty” day, a reference to the section of the Criminal Procedure Law that entitles a defendant to be released unless the prosecution has obtained an indictment or is ready to go forward with a preliminary hearing. A lot of defendants do get released: complaining witnesses disappear, cops screw up and assistant D.A.s occasionally get overextended, and have to pick and choose which cases to treat as priorities and which to let slide. Some defendants are lucky enough to slip into the cracks that are inevitable in a system that processes many thousands of cases a year.

Barry Tannenbaum having disappeared in the most literal sense imaginable, the complaining witness in Samara’s case was now The People of the State of New York, and they weren’t going anywhere. As far as Jaywalker knew, no cops had screwed up, so long as spelling and grammar didn’t count. Tom Burke was certainly treating the case as his top priority, if not his career-maker. Given all that, the chances of Samara’s case slipping into some crack, necessitating her release from jail, were absolutely zero.

Jaywalker explained all this to her before they went before the judge, during a five-minute conversation in the “feeder pen” adjoining the courtroom. The term, no doubt, had come from the fact that the small lockup “feeds” defendants into the courtroom, one by one. But every time he heard it, Jaywalker couldn’t help but picture bait fish being served up to frenzied sharks, or small rodents to ravenous wolves.

“After the court appearance,” he told Samara, “we’ll sit down in the counsel visit room and talk as much as we need. Okay?”

She nodded, looking appropriately worried.

He described what would happen when they appeared before the judge: in a word, nothing. Once an indictment was announced, the only remaining bit of business would be the setting of an adjourned date.

“Can you make a bail application?” Samara asked.

Apparently she’d been getting some jailhouse advice, a commodity never in short supply on Rikers Island. Inmates devour every word of it, never pausing to notice that the dispensers of the advice have one thing in common: every last one of them is still sitting in jail.

“I can,” he told her, “but it’ll only be denied. You’re going to have to wait until we get to Supreme Court.”

“They say that can take years.”

“Different Supreme Court,” said Jaywalker, not helped all that much by a system in which some Einsteins had gotten together and decided to call the lowest felony court in the city supreme. But Jaywalker spared Samara the explanation. What he did tell her was that asking for bail was not only pointless, but might actually hurt their chances later on. Bail was almost never granted in murder cases, and on the rare occasion when it was, it was usually set prohibitively high. In this case, that wouldn’t take much. With her bank account frozen and no other assets to her name, even were a modest bail to be set, Samara had nothing to post it with. So while there might come a time when it made sense to ask for bail, it certainly wasn’t now.

Finally, Jaywalker warned Samara that the press would be in the courtroom. The American public, denied a throne by the founding fathers, makes do with celebrity and wealth in lieu of royalty. How else to explain such curious heroes as Bill Gates, Jack Welch or Paris Hilton? Barry Tannenbaum had been rich. If not quite Bill Gates rich, certainly Donald Trump rich. He’d married a reformed hooker (some commentators, inclined to reserve judgment, preferred the term “former hooker”), forty-two years his junior. Now she’d stabbed him to death.

The press would definitely be in the courtroom.

“Your appearance, please, counselor,” said the bridge-man, once the case had been called.

As always, Jaywalker was tempted to say, “Five-eleven, a hundred and seventy pounds, graying hair…” Instead, he controlled himself, stating his name and office address for the court reporter to take down.

True to form, Tom Burke announced that he’d obtained an indictment against Samara. The judge set a date for arraignment in Supreme Court.

And that was it.

Anyone expecting to find the twelfth-floor counsel visit area to be the functional equivalent of a private hospital room would have been seriously disappointed. But Jaywalker had been there a thousand times before and knew better. The area was laid out more like a ward or, if you wanted to be extremely charitable about it, a semiprivate room.

After being ushered through the middle one of three steel-barred outer doors, he entered the lawyers’ area, a row of bolted-down chairs that extended to the far wall on either side. Each chair had a small writing surface in front of it, with wooden partitions rising on either side. Above the writing surfaces was a metal-screened window. If one squinted sufficiently, he could see that on the other side of the screen was another writing surface, and behind it another bolted-down chair, facing his own.

The inmates were led in through the other doors, one side for men and one for women. That way, segregation was maintained for the three groups—lawyers, male prisoners and female prisoners. Someone had apparently decided that it was safe to permit lawyers of both sexes to mingle.

The arrangement was an imperfect one, because unless you talked in a whisper with your client or resorted to sign language, you ran the risk of being overheard by lawyers on either side of you, and inmates on either side of your client. Still, it was better than talking over some staticky telephone hookup, or through a hole in reinforced glass, so Jaywalker wasn’t about to complain.

You picked your battles.

He spent the better part of twenty minutes reviewing his file on Samara’s case, already two inches thick. He knew it would take a while for them to bring her up from the fourth-floor feeder pen.

When she came in and took her seat across from him, he was struck again by how tiny she seemed, and how vulnerable. He’d stood alongside her in the courtroom half an hour ago, but his attention had been focused elsewhere then—on the judge, the prosecutor, the court reporter, even the media. Now he had only Samara to look at, and what he saw was a young woman on the verge of tears. He wondered if he’d missed that downstairs, when he’d been all business.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“No, I’m not okay,” she said, using the heels of her hands to blot her eyes. So much for the verge of tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it, both about her obvious distress and the fact that his dumb question had triggered her meltdown.

She took a deep breath, fighting to compose herself. “Listen,” she said, “you’ve got to get me out of here.”

“I’ll do my best,” Jaywalker promised. It was only half a lie. He would certainly do his best, that much was true. The lie part was that even his best wouldn’t be enough to get her out of jail. But he knew she wasn’t ready to hear that, not yet. “We need to talk about the case,” he told her instead, “so we can figure out our best chance of getting you out.” His father, long dead, had been a doctor, the old-fashioned kind. He’d never told his patients that they had a bellyful of inoperable cancer and were going to die from it. He told them they had “suspicious cells,” and that the radiation or chemotherapy he was sending them for was simply a “precautionary measure.” That was what he was doing with Samara now, he recognized. There were times when being a criminal defense lawyer turned you into something you weren’t in a hurry to write home about, he’d realized some years ago, before gradually coming to terms with the fact. Sometimes you donned the white hat and rode the white horse. But there were other times, times when, without quite breaking the rules, you bent them a little and adapted them to the situation. In the long run, you did what you had to do. Did he blame his father for having lied to his patients? He certainly had at the time, back when he was young and idealistic and had all the answers. Now, battle-tested and closing in on fifty himself, he knew enough to look at things a little differently.

“What do you want to hear?” Samara was asking him.

“Everything.”

“From the beginning?”

“From the beginning.”

8

PRAIRIE CREEK

“I was born in Indiana,” Samara said. “Prairie Creek. Nice name for a town, huh?”

Jaywalker nodded.

“It was a shithole.”

He made a written note on the yellow legal pad in front of him. It didn’t say Indiana, though, or Prairie Creek.

CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, it said.

“I never knew my father,” she said. “I grew up with my mother in a trailer, an old rusty thing set up on cinder blocks. My mom, well, she worked her ass off, I’ll say that much for her.”

“Is she still alive?”

That got a shrug, telling him that Samara either didn’t know or didn’t much care.

“I think she also sold her ass off, though I don’t know for sure. She was pretty, prettier’n me.”