It struck me on my latest birthday that I’ve now reached the same age at which my father left this life, much too soon. He was a physician who specialised in obstetrics, a five-foot-tall “baby doctor” in more ways than one. He was revered by his staff and colleagues, and absolutely adored by his patients. To this day, I run into people who, upon learning that his last name and mine are not mere coincidence, scream with delight, “Oh, my God. He delivered my children!” or occasionally “He delivered me!”

Not that my father was without faults, by any means. He was a driven over-achiever in everything he did, which meant getting the best grades in school, baiting a fishhook just so and running out a grounder on the baseball diamond at full speed. He was a true perfectionist, an early-day obsessive-compulsive.

He was, in a word, a Jaywalker.

﻿Joseph Teller was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from law school, he spent three years working undercover for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. For the next thirty-five years he was a criminal defence lawyer. Not too long ago he decided to “run from the law” and began writing fiction. The Tenth Case, his first novel for MIRA Books, will be followed by further Jaywalker titles.

Also by Joseph Teller

The Tenth Case

Bronx Justice

Depraved Indifference

Overkill

The

Tenth Case

Joseph Teller

www.mirabooks.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to my editor Leslie Wainger and executive editor Margaret O’Neill Marbury, as well as assistant editor Adam Wilson, for their faith in me and their excitement over my alter ego, Jaywalker. I am grateful to my literary agent and friend Bob Diforio for having been smart enough to put us together.

My wife, Sandy, deserves credit for nearly gagging when I told her about a terrific idea I had for a book, and making me trash it and write this one instead.

And to my friends and former colleagues down at 100 Centre Street, many of whom I still hear from, I thank you for the camaraderie you showed me in the trenches, and for the stories you shared with me over the years, some of which may even have crept into these pages.

1

A SPONTANEOUS ACT OF GRATITUDE

“We turn now to the issue of what constitutes an appropriate punishment for your various infractions,” said the judge in the middle, the gray-haired one whose name Jaywalker always had trouble remembering. “Disbarment certainly occurred to us, and would no doubt be fully deserved, were it not for your long years of service to the bar, your quite obvious devotion to your clients, as well as your considerable legal skills, reflected in your current string of, what was it you told us? Ten consecutive acquittals?”

“Eleven, actually,” said Jaywalker.

“Eleven. Very impressive. That said, a substantial period of suspension is still in order. A very substantial period. Your transgressions are simply too numerous, and too serious, to warrant anything less. Bringing in a lookalike for a defendant in order to confuse a witness, for example. Impersonating a judge to trick a police officer into turning over his notes. Breaking into the evidence room in order to have your own chemist analyze some narcotics. Referring to a judge, on the record, as—and I shall paraphrase here—a small portion of excrement. And finally, though by no means least of all, receiving, shall we say, a ‘sexual favor’ from a client in the stairwell of the courthouse—”

“It wasn’t a sexual favor, Your Honor.”

“Please don’t interrupt me.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“And you can deny it all you want, but my colleagues and I have been forced to watch the videotape from the surveillance camera several times through—complete, I might add, with what appears to be you moaning. Now I don’t know what you would call it, but—”

“It was nothing but a spontaneous act of gratitude, Your Honor, from an overly appreciative client. She’d just been acquitted of a trumped-up prostitution charge. And if only there’d been a sound track, you’d know I wasn’t moaning at all. I was saying, ‘No! No! No!’”

Actually, there was some truth to that.

“Are you a married man, Mr. Jaywalker?”

“I’m a widower, sir. As a matter of fact, I’d been distraught over my wife’s death.”

“I see.” That seemed to give the judge pause, though only briefly. “When did she die?”

“It was a Thursday. June ninth, I believe.”

“This year?”

“Uh, no, sir.”

“Last year?”

“No.”

There was an awkward silence.

“This millennium?”

“Not exactly.”

“I see,” said the judge.

Sternbridge, that was his name. Should have been easy enough for Jaywalker to have remembered.

“The court,” Sternbridge was saying now, “hereby suspends you from the practice of law for a period of three years, following which you shall be required to reapply to the Committee on Character and Fitness.” He raised his gavel. But Jaywalker, who’d been to an auction or two with his late wife, back in the previous millennium, beat him to it just before he could bring the thing down.

“If it please the court?”

Sternbridge peered at him over his reading glasses, momentarily disarmed by Jaywalker’s rare lapse into court-speak. Jaywalker took that as an invitation to continue.

“In spite of the fact that I knew this day of reckoning was coming, Your Honor, I find I still have a number of pending cases. Many involve clients in extremely precarious situations. These are people who’ve put their lives in my hands. While I’m fully prepared to accept the court’s punishment, I beg you to let me see these matters through to completion. Please, please, don’t take out your dissatisfaction with me on these helpless people. Add a year to my suspension, if you like. Add two. But let me finish helping them.”

The three judges mumbled to each other, then swiveled around on their chairs and huddled, their black-robed backs to the courtroom. When they swung back a minute later, it was the one on the right, the woman named Ellerbee, who addressed Jaywalker.

“You will be permitted to complete five cases,” she said. “Provide us with a list of those you choose to retain by the end of court business tomorrow, complete with a docket or indictment number, the judge to which each case is assigned, and the next scheduled court date. The remainder of your clients will be reassigned to other counsel. As for the five cases you’ll be keeping, you’ll be required to appear before us the first Friday of every month, so that you can give us a detailed progress report on your efforts to dispose of them.”

Dispose of them. Didn’t she understand that these weren’t diapers or toilet paper or plastic razors? They were people.

“Understood?” Judge Ellerbee was asking him.

“Understood,” said Jaywalker. “And—”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

* * *

That night, working in his cramped, poorly lit office well past midnight, Jaywalker did his best to pare the list down. But it was like having to choose which people to throw out of a life raft. How could he abandon a fourteen-year-old kid who’d trusted him enough to accept a yearlong commitment to a residential drug program? Or an illegal alien facing deportation to the Sudan for the unforgivable crime of selling ladies’ handbags with an expired vendor’s permit? Or a homeless woman fighting for the right to visit her two small children in a shelter once a month? How did he tell a former gang member that the lawyer it had taken him two years to open up to and confide in was suddenly going to be replaced by a name chosen at random off a computer-generated list? How would he write to a completely innocent inmate doing fifteen-to-life in Sing Sing to say that he wouldn’t be getting an attorney’s visit any longer, come the first Saturday of the month? Or a retarded janitor’s helper that his next lawyer might not be willing to hold his hand and squeeze it tightly each time they stood before the judge, so the poor man wouldn’t have to shake uncontrollably and wet his pants in front of a courtroom of laughing strangers?

In the end, with a great deal of difficulty, Jaywalker managed to get the list down to a pretty manageable seventeen names. He printed it out and submitted it to the judges the following afternoon, along with a lengthy apology that it was the best he could possibly do, followed by a fervent appeal to their understanding. A week later, a letter arrived from the court, informing him that the court had trimmed the list down to ten, and warning him not to drag out any of the cases unnecessarily.

2

JAYWALKER

His name wasn’t really Jaywalker, of course. Once it had been Harrison J. Walker. But he hated Harrison, which had struck him as overly pretentious and WASPy, for as long as he could remember being aware of such things. And he hated Harry even more, associating it with a bald head, a potbelly and the stub of a day-old cigar. So, long ago, he’d taken to calling himself Jay Walker, and somewhere along the line someone had blurred that into Jaywalker. Which had been all right with him; the truth was, he’d never had the patience to stand on a curb waiting for a light without a pair of eyes of its own to tell him whether it was safe to cross or not, or the discipline to walk from midblock to corner to midblock again, all in order to end up directly across from where he’d started out in the first place. He answered his office phone (his soon-to-be former office phone) “Jaywalker,” responded unthinkingly to “Mr. Jaywalker,” and when asked on some form or other to supply a surname or a given name (for the life of him, he’d never been able to figure out which was which), he simply wrote “Jaywalker” in both blanks, resulting in a small but not insignificant portion of his mail arriving addressed to “Mr. Jaywalker Jaywalker.” It was sort of like being Major Major, he decided, or Woolly Woolly. Names, he’d come to believe, were vastly overrated.

His office wasn’t really an office at all. What it was, was a room in a suite of offices that surrounded a center hallway, which in turn served as a combination conference room, library and lunchroom. The arrangement, which was repeated throughout the building and a dozen others in the area, enabled sole practitioners such as himself to practice on a shoestring. For five hundred dollars the first of the month, he got a place to put a desk, a couple of chairs, a secondhand couch, a clothes tree, and some cardboard boxes that he liked to think of as portable file cabinets. On top of the desk went his phone, his answering machine, his computer, various piles of paper and faded photos of his departed wife and semi-estranged daughter. For no extra charge, he got the use of not only the aforementioned conference/ library/lunchroom, but a modest waiting room, a receptionist, a copier and a fax machine, all circa 1995, except for the receptionist, who was considerably older.

There was no restroom in the suite, only a MEN’S and a WOMEN’S down the hall and past the elevator bank. On nights when Jaywalker ended up sleeping on the sofa—and since there was nobody back at his apartment to go home to, those nights were more than occasional, especially when he was in the midst of a trial—the men’s room was where he brushed his teeth, washed his face and shaved. It was only the absence of a shower, in fact, that forced him to go home as often as he did.

Jaywalker’s suitemates (a word he’d grown especially fond of, ever since the spellcheck feature on his computer had tried to correct it to sodomites) included two P.I. lawyers (the initials standing for personal injury, a considerably more polite designation than the also-used A.C. for ambulance chaser); an immigration practitioner named Herman Greenberg, who, in a stroke of marketing genius, had had his business cards printed on green card stock, forever earning himself the aka Herman Greencard; a bankruptcy specialist known in-house as “Fuck-the-Creditors” Feinblatt; an older guy who did nothing but chain-smoke, cough, read the Law Journal and handle real estate closings; and a woman who didn’t seem to do much of anything at all but wait for her next Big Case to walk through the door, her last Big Case having walked out the door fifteen years ago.

Jaywalker was the only criminal defense lawyer in the suite. For one reason or another, criminal defense lawyers have always been pretty much solo practitioners, and those who’ve attempted to organize them into groups or associations, or even gather them under a single roof, have tended to come away from the experience feeling as though they’ve been trying to line up snakes single file.

But flying solo had always suited Jaywalker just fine. He’d spent two years at the Legal Aid Society, where he’d found quite enough collegiality, and nearly enough bedmates, to last him a lifetime. There he’d also learned how to try a case—or, more precisely, how not to.

Once he’d cut the cord and gone out into private practice, Jaywalker had gradually retaught himself. Over the next twenty years, he earned a reputation as a renegade among renegades. It was almost as though he was determined to give new meaning to the term unorthodox. He broke every rule in the book, defied all the axioms ever preached about how to try a case, and in the process managed to infuriate at least a score of seasoned prosecutors and otherwise unflappable judges. But he also built a record unlike anything ever seen outside Hollywood or television land. In a business where district attorneys’ offices routinely boasted of conviction rates of anywhere from sixty-five to ninety-five percent, and where many defense lawyers heard the words Not guilty only at an arraignment, Jaywalker achieved an acquittal rate of just over ninety percent.

How did he do it?

If asked, he probably couldn’t have explained it nearly as well as he did it. But those who watched him work on a regular basis—and there was a large and growing number who did—invariably pointed to a single phenomenon. By the time a Jaywalker jury retired to deliberate on a case, they’d come to understand, truly understand, that it wasn’t their job to figure out whether or not the defendant had committed the crime. Rather, it was their job to figure out whether, based upon the evidence produced in the courtroom, or the lack of such evidence, the prosecution had succeeded in proving that the defendant had committed the crime, and whether it had done so beyond all reasonable doubt.

The difference proved to be staggering.

By the time he stood before the three judges who would deliver his punishment, Jaywalker had become something of a legend in his own time at 100 Centre Street. But his success hadn’t come without a price. For one thing, he drove himself relentlessly, demanding of himself that he come into court not only better prepared than his adversary but ten times better prepared, fifty times better prepared. He slept almost not at all when he was on trial, and when he did, it was with pen and paper within reach, so that he could jot down random thoughts in the dark and try to decipher them come morning. He planned for every conceivable contingency, agonized over every detail, and organized with the fanaticism of the obsessive-compulsive he was. Walking out of the courthouse after yet another acquittal, he would look upward and utter thanks to a god he didn’t believe in, followed by a prayer that he might never have to go through the ordeal another time.

But, of course, there always was another time.

His remarkable record, even as it earned him the admiration of his colleagues in the criminal defense bar, also created a problem for them, in much the same way that the acquittal of a former football star and minor celebrity, three thousand miles away and a decade earlier, had created a problem for them. “If he can do it,” their clients demanded to know, “why can’t you?” It was perhaps no surprise, therefore, that many of those who’d attended Jaywalker’s punishment hearing, almost all of whom admired him on a professional level, liked him personally and in most respects truly wished him well, also secretly rejoiced at the thought of being rid of him, if only for a while.

But even to the most relieved of them, three years had seemed like a rather stiff suspension for blowing off a few rules and succumbing to something that didn’t sound so different, when you got right down to it.

All of that had been back in September.

It had taken Jaywalker until the following June, and the ninth first-Friday-of-the-month appearance before the three-judge panel, to report that he’d succeeded in disposing of virtually all of his remaining clients.

The fourteen-year-old kid in the drug program was now fifteen, drug-free and in aftercare. The Sudanese handbag salesman had been granted permanent residence status, thanks to a little help from Herman Greencard. The homeless woman had an apartment of her own, a job and custody of her two children. The former gang member had relapsed, jumped bail and fled to southern California, from where he sent Jaywalker postcards picturing scantily-clad (or nonclad) sunbathers. The Sing Sing inmate’s appeal had been heard, and a decision was expected shortly. The pants-wetter’s case had been dismissed. A drunk driver had pleaded guilty to operating a motor vehicle while impaired. A minor drug dealer had settled for a sentence of probation. And a three-card-monte player had been acquitted once Jaywalker had convinced a jury that the man’s skill in conning his victims was so consummate that it completely negated the “game of chance” element required by the language of the statute.

Nine months, nine cases, nine clients, nine pretty good results.

Leaving exactly one.

Samara Moss.

3

SAMARA

Her name was Samara Moss, and she was a gold digger. At least that had been the universal consensus of the tabloids, ever since she’d set her sights on Barrington Tannenbaum. That had been nine years earlier, when Tannenbaum had been sixty-one. He’d made his fortune buying and selling oil and gas leases, than made it multiply several times over in the shipping business. Among the things he’d shipped were munitions, body armor and jet fighter planes. He had a short list of clients, but most of them had titles like “Sultan” or “His Excellence” before their names. Tannenbaum’s net worth had once been estimated at somewhere in the range of ten to twenty billion dollars.

Samara’s net worth, at the time she married Tannenbaum, had been somewhere in the range of ten to twenty dollars.

She’d grown up in a third-rate trailer park in Indiana, where she’d become so accustomed to hearing the phrase trailer trash that she no longer considered it an insult, much the way ghetto blacks think little of calling each other nigger. She was raised by a single mother who alternately waited tables, bartended and lap-danced at night, leaving Sam—as everyone had called her for as long as she could remember—in the care of a string of boyfriends. Some of those boyfriends ignored her; others taught her how to drink beer, curse and do drugs. By the time she was ten, Sam could roll a perfect joint, using either gummed or ungummed paper. At twelve, she was smoking the joints she rolled. To hear Sam tell it, several of those same boyfriends molested her on occasion, although the extent is unknown and the certainty remains unestablished to this day. Two things are clear, though. She was pretty enough to make her junior high school cheerleading squad at age twelve (no mean feat), and undisciplined enough to be kicked off it two months later.

She ran away from home the day after her fourteenth birthday, landing first in Ely, Nevada, then in Reno and finally in Las Vegas, with dreams of becoming a showgirl and eventually a Hollywood star. She became, instead, a cocktail waitress and sometime prostitute, though she would have been quick to deny the latter description, insisting that she went to bed only with nice men to whom she was attracted. Who was she to complain when some of them chose to express their admiration in the form of gifts, including the occasional monetary one?

It was in Las Vegas that Barrington Tannenbaum spied her, in the cocktail lounge at Caesars Palace, at three o’clock one Sunday morning. Barry was newly divorced at the time, a three-time loser at love. Although he was absurdly rich, he was also lonely, bored and as much in need of a project as Samara was in need of a sugar daddy. And one thing about Barry Tannenbaum—if you listened to his business associates or bitter rivals, most of whom counted themselves in both columns—was that once he got involved in a project, he never did so halfheartedly. From the moment he and Samara met, he was as determined to save her as she appeared determined to snare him. If it wasn’t quite a match made in heaven, it certainly had an otherworldly ring to it.

It has been said that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, and recent history had amply demonstrated that Barry Tannenbaum was the marrying kind. The truth is that for all of his new money, Barry was an old-fashioned sort of guy. He’d grown up in an age when, if you loved the girl, you married her, had kids and lived happily ever after—even if ever after was something of a relative term. It’s therefore not all that surprising that, in spite of his dismal track record, Barry felt compelled to make an honest woman of Sam, in the most old-fashioned sense of the expression. Eight months to the day after he’d first set eyes on her in the neon glow of Caesars Palace, he married her. By that time, he was sixty-two.

Samara was still not quite nineteen.

If the tabloids had had fun with the forty-two years and fifteen billion dollars that separated the couple, they weren’t the only ones. It seems that gold diggers tend to arouse feelings of ambivalence in most of us. The hooker-turned-heroine played by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman earns our unabashed cheers when she lands the wealthy Richard Gere character, but only because the script took care to make it clear that she didn’t set out to do so from the start. Anna Nicole Smith, the Playmate of the Year and self-described “blond bombshell” who at twenty-six married an eighty-nine-year-old Texas billionaire, won considerably less public support. Still, there was an audible “You go, girl!” sentiment expressed by many when it appeared that Anna Nicole’s stepson—himself old enough to be her grandfather—might have overreached in manipulating her out of his father’s will. In a poll taken as the case headed toward the Supreme Court (polls having pretty much been established as the operative method of governance by the dawn of the twenty-first century), nearly forty percent of Americans with an opinion on the matter responded that Smith deserved all or most of the $474 million she sued for when her husband happened to die a year into their marriage.

Chances are Samara wouldn’t have fared as well in the court of public opinion. For one thing, there was the fact that she lived with Tannenbaum for only the first of their eight years of marriage, quickly setting up residence in a town house just off Park Avenue, which she’d persuaded Barry to buy her because she’d never had a place of her own. The price tag had been $4.5 million. Small change, to be sure. But a wee bit unseemly, perhaps.

For another thing, there were the affairs Samara carried on, some with discretion, but others with an openness that bordered on outright flaunting. Not an issue of the National Enquirer hit the stands without an account of SAM’S LATEST FLING, more often than not accompanied by a photo of the cheating couple entering or exiting some trendy club, complete with an overabundance of calf or cleavage.

And finally, there was the small but not-to-be-overlooked detail of Samara’s having taken an eight-inch steak knife and plunged it into her husband’s chest, “piercing the left ventricle of his heart and causing his death,” as recounted by the New York County District Attorney, and followed up in short order with a murder indictment handed down by a grand jury of Samara’s peers.

Which was right about where Jaywalker had come in.

4

A SLIGHT MISCALCULATION

Not that Jaywalker was a total stranger to Samara Moss by any means. They’d met six years earlier, when she’d shown up at his office, delivered there by her chauffeur. Or Barry Tannenbaum’s chauffeur, to be more precise. The thing was, Samara wasn’t driving herself anywhere right then. Two weeks earlier she’d borrowed one of Barry’s favorite toys, a $400,000 Lamborghini. And borrowed might be a stretch, seeing as she’d simply found the keys one evening, gone down to the twelve-car garage beneath Barry’s Scarsdale mansion and taken off for Manhattan. She’d made it all the way to Park Avenue and 66th Street, when she realized she was a bit too far downtown and attempted a U-turn. Normally, one would execute that maneuver between the raised islands that separate the avenue’s southbound lanes from its northbound ones. Samara, however, had attempted it mid-island, a slight miscalculation. The result had been a one-car, $400,000 accident, and an arrest for driving while intoxicated, reckless driving, refusal to submit to a blood-alcohol test, driving without a license, and a little-known and seldom-used Administrative Code violation entitled “Failure to Yield to a Stationary Object.”

To woefully understate the fact, Barry had been mightily pissed off. He’d posted Samara’s bail, then assigned his chauffeur the task of finding her a criminal lawyer who was good enough to keep her off death row, but not so good that she’d walk away scot-free. The chauffeur spent a couple of days asking around. The name that kept coming up, it seems, was Jaywalker’s.

They’d talked for an hour and a half, with Jaywalker almost literally unable to take his eyes off her the entire time. He was already widowed back then, and over the course of his life he’d seen a dozen prettier women up close, and slept with half of them (not that he hadn’t tried with the remaining half). But there was something captivating about Samara, something—he would decide later—absolutely arresting. She was small, not only of height and build, but of facial feature. Her hair was dark and straight, whether naturally or with help. Only her lower lip was standard issue, making it too large by far for the rest of her face and giving her a perpetual pout. But it was her eyes that held him most. They were so dark that he would have had to call them black. They had a slightly glassy look to them, suggesting that she might have been wearing contacts too long, or was on the verge of crying. And they seemed totally impenetrable, taking in everything while letting out absolutely nothing.

The things she said made little or no sense. She’d taken the car because she’d felt like it. She’d drunk a large glass of Scotch before she’d set out because she’d been nervous about working the Lamborghini’s standard transmission, which was something of a mystery to her. No, she had no driver’s license, never had. She’d meant to end up at 72nd Street but had kept going past it by mistake. She’d been trying to downshift and turn left when the median island suddenly rose up in front of her and hit her head-on. She was sorry about the accident, but not overly so. “Barry has lots of cars,” she explained.

Jaywalker told her that given her lack of a previous record, he was all but certain he could keep her out of jail. What he didn’t tell her was that no judge with eyeballs was going to send her to Rikers Island. No male judge, anyway. That said, there were going to be some pretty stiff fines to pay. That was okay, she said. “Barry has lots of money, too.”

“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 KILLING OF 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.

“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.

“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-five grand to cop her out on a DWI, and now I’m going to be earning 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?”

“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.

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.”

Jaywalker tried picturing prettier than Samara, but didn’t know where to start.

“She wasn’t home much. Always working or whatever.” Leaving the whatever to hang in the air for a few beats. “I remember being left with babysitters a lot. Guys, mostly.”

“How did that go?”

Another shrug. “I learned a lot.”

“Like what?”

“How to do shots of beer. How to roll joints.”

“Anything else?”

Samara broke off eye contact, looked downward. She tried to shrug again, but this attempt didn’t come off with the same Who-the-fuck-cares? as the two previous ones. It seemed to Jaywalker that her lower lip was pouting more than ever, but maybe it was only the tilt of her head.

“Is it important?” she asked him.

“It might be.”

She seemed to ponder that for a moment before looking up again. When she did, Jaywalker locked eyes with her. Trust me, he told her, without speaking the words out loud.

“Yeah,” she said, cocking her head slightly, but not looking away. “I learned how to give hand jobs and blow jobs, and how to thigh fuck.”

“Thigh fuck?” A new one for Jaywalker. He underlined CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, then underlined it a second time.

“Yeah, you know. Letting the guy stick it in between my legs. All the way up there, but not inside. I was too small for inside. Then, with my legs tight around the guy, I’d let him fuck away until—”

“Okay,” said Jaywalker, pretty much getting the picture.

“Get me out and I’ll show you.” Smiling now.

“How’d you do in school?” he asked her.

She laughed, whether at his abrupt change of subject or at the thought of her academic career. “How do drunk, stoned, fucked-up kids usually do?” she asked.

He took it as an answer.

“How far did you go?”

“I stuck around till the day after my fourteenth birthday. I wanted to see if I got any good presents.” Apparently she hadn’t. “I caught a bus to Terre Haute, then hitchhiked my way west, to Nevada. I wanted to be a showgirl or an actress, something like that. But you know what they told me? Too short. Too short. Now if I’d’a been too fat, or too thin, or too something-else-like-that, I could’a done something about it. But too short? What the fuck was I supposed to do about that?”

“So?”

“So I tended bar and waited tables, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“And supplemented my income every now and then.”

“By doing what?”

“By doing what I would have done anyway. Only thing I did was when a guy wanted to give me something after, I took it.”

“And that something included money?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ever get arrested? Other than this and that DWI thing?” Her criminal record printout showed nothing else, but Jaywalker knew that there might be out-of-state cases, or arrests that hadn’t led to convictions that often wouldn’t show up.

“No.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

A pause, then, “Maybe there was this one time in Reno for attempted soliciting. It was pure bullshit. I was standing in front of a club, smoking a cigarette. Some vice cop decided that meant I had to be hooking.”

Underneath CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, Jaywalker wrote WORK ON GETTING HER TO TELL THE TRUTH, and underlined it three times. “What happened to the case?” he asked.

“It was dismissed.”

“How much of a fine did you pay?”

“Fifty dollars.”

When a case was dismissed, there was no fine to pay. Jaywalker added an exclamation point to his latest reminder.

“Other arrests?”

“No.”

“Absolutely sure?”

“Yes!” she snapped. Then, “Sorry.”

“How did you meet Barry?”

She’d been working for tips off a phony driver’s license in Vegas, serving drinks to the rollers in one of the lounges in Caesars Palace. She was eighteen at the time. “It was like three o’clock in the morning, going into Sunday, and the crowd was beginning to thin out. I see this guy staring at me, I mean really staring. I bring him a drink, a Diet Coke. He tells me I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Not the most beautiful person, the most beautiful thing. Shit, I should’a known right then. But being eighteen and dumb, I think it’s pure poetry. Know what I mean?”

Jaywalker nodded. He’d come up with worse lines in his day, though not by all that much.

“I go up to his room after I get off, and we talk. Talk. For like five hours I’m carrying on a conversation with a man who’s been to college, knows about politics and world affairs and wine and all sorts of other stuff. But he wants to know about me. Where I grew up, what it was like, why I ran away, what my hopes and dreams are. Hopes and dreams. And I’m telling him shit I wouldn’t tell my best friend, if I had one. Like I’m opening my heart to him.

“Eleven o’clock comes, and he’s got to go to a meeting. Asks me if he can kiss me. I say, ‘Sure.’ With that he touches me, barely touches me, with both hands on the sides of my face, and gives me the gentlest kiss in the world. No tongue, no open mouth, no grabbing. I gotta tell you, I felt like Madonna.”

Jaywalker was pretty sure he knew which one she was referring to.

“Anyway, he leaves, goes back to New York. But he keeps calling me, like every day, and sending me flowers. Next he asks me to come east to visit him. I tell him right, like I’ve got money for a bus ticket. He tells me that won’t be necessary, he’ll send one of his planes to get me. One of his planes. So I go to New York, and we get married eight months later.”

To Jaywalker, the segue seemed natural enough.

The fact that the marriage had survived for eight years was hardly testimony to its success. The place Samara had persuaded Barry to buy her before the first year was over was the four-story brownstone in the lower Seventies, between Park and Lexington. The city’s inflated real estate had driven up the asking price to close to five million dollars, but if Barry complained, it was to deaf ears. “He used to tip that much in a year,” according to Samara.

Within a few months she had basically set up residence in the town house. She continued to appear in public with Barry but made no secret of the fact that theirs had become an “open marriage,” a throwback phrase from an earlier generation. Still, there was no talk of divorce. Barry had been there and done that three times already, and apparently had no taste for a fourth go-round.

“But according to your statement to the police,” Jaywalker pointed out, “you admitted having fights, the two of you.”

“That was their word,” said Samara. “Fights.”

“And your word?”

“Arguments.”

“What did you argue about?”

“You name it, we argued about it. Money, sex, my driving, my clothes, my drinking, my language. Whatever couples argue about, I guess.”

A corrections officer came into the lawyers’ section of the room and asked for everyone’s attention. “Anyone who wants to make the one o’clock bus back,” he announced, “wind it up. You got ezzackly five minutes.”

Jaywalker looked at Samara. If she missed the one o’clock, it meant she’d be stuck in the building till after five, which could mean not getting back to Rikers before ten or eleven, and having to settle for a bologna or cheese sandwich instead of what passed for a hot meal. But Samara gave one of her patented shrugs. Jaywalker took it as a good sign that she was willing to make personal sacrifices in order to finish telling him her story.

He should have known better.

There was a lot of rustling in the room as other inmates rose to leave, and other lawyers gathered their papers and snapped their briefcases shut.

“Tell me about the month or so before Barry’s death,” he said.

“What about it?”

“What was going on? Any new arguments? Anything out of the ordinary?”

Samara seemed to think back for a moment. “Not really,” she said. “Barry was sick, and—”

“Sick?”

“He had the flu.” The way she spat out the word suggested that she’d had little sympathy for him. “He thought I should be around more. You know, to take care of him. I told him that’s what doctors are for, and hospitals. I mean, it’s not like he couldn’t afford it. Still, I did see a little more of him than usual.”

“Where?”

“His place, mostly. Mine, once or twice. Out, a couple of times. I don’t know.”

“And how did the two of you get along on those occasions?”

Two shrugs.

“What does that mean?” Jaywalker asked.

“We got along the same as always,” she said. “When we were apart, fine. When we were together, Barry always found a way to pick a fight.”

“A fight?”

“An argument. Jesus, you’re as bad as the cops.”

“Sorry,” said Jaywalker. “Tell me about the evening before you found out Barry had been killed. Your statement says you first denied seeing him, then admitted you’d gone to his place. Is that true?”

“Is what true?”

Objection sustained. Jaywalker gave Samara a smile, then broke it down to a series of single questions. “Did you go there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you deny it to the detectives at first?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t think it was any of their goddamned business.”

That was a pretty good answer, actually, if you took away the goddamned part. If believed, it showed that Samara hadn’t known about Barry’s murder. If believed. He made a note of it on his yellow pad.

“What caused you to change your story,” he asked, “and admit you’d been there?”

“They said they already knew. The old bat next door heard us arguing.”

“Were you?”

“Yeah.”

“What about?”

“Who remembers? Barry was still pissed off that I’d walked out of some opera a few nights earlier, leaving him sitting there. Maybe that was it.”

“Why had you done that?”

“Why? Why? Have you ever sat through five hours of some three-hundred-pound woman wearing a helmet, sweating like a pig and singing in German? Next to someone with the flu?”

“No,” Jaywalker had to admit.

“Try it sometime.”

“Tell me everything you remember about that last evening at Barry’s,” said Jaywalker. “What prompted you to go there in the first place?”

“Barry asked me to,” Samara said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have. He said he wanted to talk to me about something, but it turned out to be some bullshit, something about how much I’d spent at Bloomingdale’s or something like that. Who remembers?”

“What else?”

“Nothing much. He’d ordered Chinese food, and we ate. I ate, anyway. He said he couldn’t taste anything, on account of being all clogged up, so he barely touched it. I remember that,’ cause I asked him if he was poisoning me.”

Jaywalker raised an eyebrow.

“It was a joke,” said Samara. “You know, like if I pour us each a glass of wine and tell you to drink up, but meanwhile I don’t touch mine?”

“What did Barry say to that?”

“He laughed. He knew it was a joke.”

“What else happened?”

“I don’t know,” Samara said. “He asked me if I wanted to make love. It was his expression for fucking. I said no, I didn’t want to catch whatever he had, thank you very much. I said I was tired and was leaving. He said, ‘Just like the other night at the opera?’ And that did it. I told him what he could with his fucking opera, and he told me I was a dumb something-or-other, and we went at it pretty good.”

“But just words?”

“Yeah, just words. Loud ones, but just words.”

“And then?”

“And then I left.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“What time was it?”

“Who knows?” said Samara. “Eight? Eight-thirty?”

“Where’d you go?”

“Home.”

“Straight home?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Cab.”

Jaywalker made a note to subpoena the Taxi and Limousine Commission records, see if they could come up with the cabdriver. If they found him and he remembered the fare, he might be able to remember whether Samara had seemed agitated or acted normally.

“Did anyone see you?” he asked. “Other than the doorman and the cabby?”

“Not that I know of.”

“What did you do when you got home?”

“You really want to know?”

Jaywalker nodded. His guess would’ve been that she’d run a load of laundry and taken a shower. You stabbed somebody in the heart, chances were you were going to get some blood on you.

“I really need to know,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, her eyes never leaving his. “I jerked off.”

Okay, not exactly what he’d expected to hear. Then again, the literature was full of accounts of serial killers describing how their crimes aroused them sexually and prompted them to masturbate, either right there at the scene or at home, shortly afterward. True, all of them were men, as far as Jaywalker could recall. But, hey, this was the twenty-first century, and having long held himself out as a supporter of equal rights for women, who was he to renege now?

“Do you have any idea,” he asked Samara, “who killed your husband?”

“No.”

“Can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted him out of the way?” As soon as he’d said the words, he regretted them. They sounded like something out of an old black-and-white movie from the forties.

“You don’t make billions of dollars,” said Samara, “without making enemies along the way.”

Come to think of it, she belonged in an old black-and-white movie from the forties.

“I only know one thing,” she added.

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t do it. You gotta believe me.”

“I do,” Jaywalker lied.

9

NICKY LEGS

That had been ten months ago, that first sit-down in which Samara had protested her innocence and Jaywalker had mumbled his “I do” with all the conviction of a shotgun groom. It had been two weeks before his appearance before the judges of the disciplinary committee, when he’d learned of his three-year suspension and begged to be permitted to complete work on his pending cases. He’d countered their offer to let him “dispose of” five with a list of seventeen, which they’d then pared down to ten.

Now, in June, with nine of those ten disposed of, Jaywalker found himself in the strangest of all positions, a criminal defense lawyer with only one criminal left to defend.

Why had he included Samara Tannenbaum in his must-keep list, when her case was barely two weeks old at that point and he had dozens of others in which he’d invested far more time, effort and emotion? To put it into the vernacular of modern mallspeak, it had been a no-brainer. First off, Samara’s was a murder case. Jaywalker had once heard a colleague refer to a murder charge as nothing but an assault case in which you knew the complainant wasn’t going to show up in court to testify against your client. Either the lawyer was joking, or he was a total jerk. Murder was like no other crime. There were longer trials, to be sure, and more complicated ones, and ones with lots more witnesses and paper and hearings and tape recordings and exhibits. There were crimes that carried equally severe sentences. Arson, for example, or kidnapping, or selling a couple of ounces of heroin or cocaine. Still, murder stood apart. Judges knew that, juries knew that and Jaywalker knew that. A life had been taken, the most important of the holy commandments had been broken, and the passion play that followed was almost biblical in its proportions. If for no other reason than that it was a murder charge, Samara’s case deserved to be on Jaywalker’s short list.

But there’d been other reasons, too.

By holding on to the case, Jaywalker knew that he would be able to keep the wolf from the door for as long as possible. With Samara insisting on her innocence, however ludicrously, came the promise of months of investigation, motions and preparation, followed by a trial and then, if she was convicted, a sentencing. If he strung it all out, it might even be long enough for his final act. He was tired, Jaywalker was. Twenty years of defending criminals might not seem like much to an outsider, but to Jaywalker, it had felt like an eternity. The thing about it was, you were always fighting. You fought prosecutors, cops and witnesses. You fought judges. You fought court officers and corrections officers. You fought your own clients, and your clients’ family and friends. And if you had your own family and friends—which Jaywalker, perhaps tellingly, had precious few of—you got around to fighting them, too, sooner or later.

There’d been a time when he’d laughed at the word burnout. Like when his daughter had called from college two months into her freshman year to report that she was burned out from all the stress and needed plane fare to come home over Thanksgiving. He’d sent her a check, of course, but he’d had a good laugh at her complaint. Now, after twenty years of almost ceaseless fighting, Jaywalker knew there was indeed such a thing as burnout.

If he played his cards right, he figured, he could ride this hand for a year or more, maybe even two or three, before they began his actual suspension. That would be enough. No reapplying, no promises to the Character and Fitness Committee to behave himself better next time around. They could pull his ticket and do whatever they wanted to with it at that point. He’d get a job, write a book, drive a cab, go on welfare, get food stamps, rob a bank. Whatever. So simply in terms of forestalling the inevitable for as long as possible, Samara’s case, coupled with her denial of her guilt, was an ideal one.

But if Jaywalker really wanted to be honest with himself, he knew there was more to it even than that. There was Samara herself.

From the moment he’d first seen her six years ago, when she’d come in on that drunk driving charge, he’d been swallowed whole by her dark eyes and pouting lower lip. Even as he’d fought to play the mature, steady defender to her reckless, impulsive child, from the beginning it had been she who’d owned him. Owned him in the sense that, try as he might, he could never take his eyes off her when he was in her presence. He’d dreamed of her at night and fantasized about her by day. Sexual fantasies, to be sure. But life-altering ones, as well. In one of his darker reveries, it had been the sudden, unexplained death of Samara’s older husband that had driven her headlong into Jaywalker’s comforting arms. So real and so elaborate had that particular scenario been that years later, when he first heard that Samara had been arrested for Barry’s murder, Jaywalker had been forced to wonder if he himself weren’t somehow complicit in the crime.

So the reasons were many why he’d hung on to her case, even at seventy-five dollars an hour. And now, as June gave way to July, it was all he had left, the only thing that stood between practicing his craft and being put out to pasture. And it represented his one last grand chance to overcome the impossible odds, slay the dragon, and win the dark-haired, dark-eyed princess of his dreams.

Why impossible odds?

Because in the ten months since he’d first sat down across from Samara in the counsel room to hear her say she hadn’t killed her husband, things had indeed gone as Jaywalker had suspected they would—from bad to worse to downright dreadful.

The progression had begun almost immediately. From the twelfth-floor counsel visit room, Jaywalker had ridden the elevator down to the seventh floor, where he’d paid a visit to Tom Burke.

“Hey, Jay. Howyadoon?”

A lot of people called him Jay. Not having a first name kind of limited their options.

“Okay, I guess,” said Jaywalker. “I’ve just spent the last three hours with Samara Tannenbaum.” It was true. After Samara’s denial of her guilt and his own assurance that he believed her, they’d talked for another hour and a half. If he’d been impressed with her willingness to miss the one o’clock bus back to Rikers, he was somewhat troubled by her evident need to keep the meeting going as long as possible.

“From what I hear,” said Burke, “people have paid good money to spend thirty minutes with her. But I’ll say this. She sure is good to look at.”

“That she is,” Jaywalker agreed.

“It’s a shame she’s a cold-blooded killer.”

Jaywalker said nothing. He was there to listen and, hopefully, to learn a thing or two, not to posture about his client’s innocence. Particularly when he himself was having trouble buying it.

“Did you read the stuff I gave you Friday?” Burke asked him.

“Yeah. And I appreciate your generosity.” Jaywalker wasn’t being facetious. They both knew Burke had handed over much more than the law required at such an early stage of the proceedings.

“Hey,” said Burke. “I got nothing to hide on this one. In my office, it’s what we call a slam dunk.”

“Why?”

“Why? I’ve got witnesses who put her there and have her arguing with the deceased at the time of death. I’ve got her false exculpatory statements, first that she wasn’t there, then that they didn’t fight. I’ve got the murder weapon hidden in her home. And I’ve got ten bucks that says that little dark-red stain on it is going to turn out to be a perfect DNA match with Barry’s blood.”

“No,” said Jaywalker. “I didn’t mean, Why is it a slam dunk? I meant, Why did she do it?”

Burke gave an exaggerated shrug. Jaywalker decided he could use a lesson or two on the art from Samara. “Hey,” said Burke, “why do seventy percent of murders happen? Two people who know each other get into an argument about some trivial piece of bullshit. They start swearing and calling each other names. Maybe they’ve been drinking, or smoking something. One thing leads to another. If there happens to be a gun around, or a knife…” He extended his arms, elbows bent slightly, palms turned upward, as if to say that in such situations, murder was all but inevitable, a part of the human condition.

“That’s it?”

“What are you looking for?” Burke asked. “A motive?”

“God forbid,” said Jaywalker. The prosecution was never required to come up with a motive; the most they were ever asked to prove was intent. They taught you the difference in law school. You shot or stabbed or clubbed someone to death with the intent to kill them. Whether your motive behind that intent happened to be greed, say, as opposed to revenge or sadism, didn’t matter.

Only it did matter, Jaywalker knew. Because if a crime didn’t make sense to him, it might not make sense to a jury, either.

“Tell you what,” said Burke, reading Jaywalker’s mind. “Give me two weeks, I bet I’ll have a motive for you. Want to go double or nothing on that ten bucks?”

“Sure,” said Jaywalker. “You’re on.”

It was less than two weeks later that Jaywalker found himself standing before the three disciplinary committee judges. So if now he needed yet another reason to include Samara’s name on his list, he had it: he had twenty bucks riding on the outcome.

With Samara indicted but yet to appear in Supreme Court for her arraignment, the case fell into a legal limbo of sorts. In terms of formal proceedings, nothing would happen for the time being. No written motions could be filed yet, no hearings could be asked for, no plea could even be entered. Before any of those things could take place, the case would first have to travel from the fourth floor of 100 Centre Street to the eleventh. In real time, such a journey might be expected to take two minutes, three if the elevators were out of order, a fairly regular occurrence. But in courthouse time, it took three weeks.

“Sorry, counselor,” the lower court judge would always say. “If I give you an earlier date, the papers won’t make it upstairs in time.”

“Give ’em to me,” Jaywalker had pleaded over the years. “I’ll have ’em up there before you can unzip your robe.” But all it ever got him were unamused stares and even longer adjournments. To paraphrase an old saying, judges don’t get mad, they get even.

That said, the fact that Samara’s case was stalled in traffic for the next three weeks didn’t mean it was time for Jaywalker to sit on his hands or catch up on old issues of The New Yorker. Quite the opposite.

Perhaps the single most overlooked job of the criminal defense lawyer—overlooked by not only the general public but by too many defense lawyers themselves—is investigation. To far too many lawyers, investigation meant reading the reports turned over by the prosecution and, in the rare case that the defendant screamed loudly enough and often enough that he had an alibi, going through the motions of checking it out.

In Samara’s case, Jaywalker had read, reread and all but memorized every word in the materials supplied by Tom Burke. He’d picked his client’s brain and probed the recesses of her memory for a solid three hours, more time than a lot of lawyers spent talking with their clients over the life of a case. As far as any alibi defense was concerned, he’d ruled that out in the first five minutes. Samara, after initially lying to the detectives, now freely admitted that she’d been at Barry’s apartment right around the time of his murder and had gone straight home from there, spending the rest of the evening alone.

Still, one of the first things Jaywalker did was to subpoena the records for both her home phone and her cell. There’d been a time when all you could get were records of outgoing long distance calls. Nowadays, with everything done by computer, there was a record of every call. MUDDs and LUDDs, they called them, for Multiple Usage Direct Dialed and Local Usage Direct Dialed. Who knew what might turn up? Suppose she’d phoned Barry right after getting home and had since forgotten that she’d done so. If he’d picked up, that fact would show up on her records, proving that he’d been alive, or at least that someone who was alive had been there. Either way, it would mean that Samara was innocent.

Innocent.

Funny word, thought Jaywalker. To him, it had an almost religious mystique. For in criminal law, the word all but disappeared. You pleaded guilty or not guilty, and the jury was instructed to decide if your guilt had been proven or not, and told to return a verdict of guilty or not guilty. The only time the words innocent or innocence were even uttered during the course of a trial occurred when the judge charged the jury to remember that in the eyes of the law, the defendant was presumed innocent. After that, it was all about guilty or not guilty; rarely was the word innocent ever heard again.

Which was just as well, particularly in Samara’s case. For despite her insistence that she hadn’t done it, Jaywalker knew it was just a matter of the passage of time and the building up of trust until she told him otherwise. Murder cases fell into two categories, he’d come to understand. There were the whodunnits and the whyithappeneds. If the evidence demonstrating that your client was the killer was shaky, you turned the trial into a whodunnit, raising what was sometimes referred to as the SODDI defense, for Some Other Dude Did It. On the other hand, if the evidence that your client did it was overwhelming, you looked around for things like self-defense, insanity or extreme emotional disturbance. In other words, you conceded that it was your client who committed the act that resulted in the victim’s death, and focused instead on the circumstances, particularly the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the incident.

What you never did was try to cover all bases. You didn’t tell the jury, “My client didn’t do it. And if he did, it was self-defense. And if it wasn’t self-defense, he was insane.” There was a name for lawyers who hedged their bets like that.

Losers.

Jaywalker was confident that Samara’s case was going to turn into a whyithappened. When, sooner or later, she got around to admitting that she’d killed Barry, they would talk about the why. Her husband had done something to provoke her, no doubt. Perhaps he’d tormented her or threatened her, or come at her with something that, in her desire to conceal her presence at his apartment, she’d hidden or taken with her. Whatever it was, there had to be a reason. Samara wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, Jaywalker was pretty sure. Something had happened that night, something significant enough to cause her to pick up a knife and plunge it into her husband’s chest. Getting Samara to let go of the truth might prove to be a slow and painful process, but it would happen.

Only it hadn’t happened yet. Which meant that, for the time being at least, Jaywalker had to proceed as though his client were, well, innocent. As though indeed, some other dude (or dame) had done it. In other words, it was time for some investigation.

One of the things that set Jaywalker apart from his colleagues was that he did a lot of his own investigation. He came by it naturally enough. Before he’d passed the bar and landed his first lawyering job with Legal Aid, he’d put in four years as an undercover agent with the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration. There they’d taught him how to bug a room, tap a phone, pick a lock, lift a print, tail a car, run a license plate and locate the subscriber of an unlisted phone number. He’d learned how to shoot a gun, too, and, for that matter, how to break a nose, crush a larynx and deliver a knee to the balls with astonishing efficiency, though those particular skills had pretty much atrophied over the years. Most of all, he’d learned how to pass, how to blend in. How to wear the clothes, walk the walk and talk the talk of the street like one who’d grown up on it. So once he’d made the move from apprehender to defender, whenever a case called for some investigation—and to Jaywalker’s thinking, all cases called for investigation—he liked nothing better than to assign the task to himself.

There were times, however, when that didn’t work. Chief among them was when it was reasonable to believe that somewhere down the line, Jaywalker the lawyer might have to call Jaywalker the investigator to testify at trial. Woody Allen had actually given it a pretty good try in Take the Money and Run, alternately posing questions from the lectern and then racing to the witness stand to answer them. But it was pulling stunts just like that that had landed Jaywalker in hot water with the disciplinary committee, and he knew this was a particularly inopportune time to stage a retrospective of his antics. He decided that the investigation needed at the moment in Samara’s case might indeed become the subject of trial testimony. It was, therefore, time to call someone else.

Unlike a few big earners he knew, Jaywalker didn’t have his own private in-house investigator. Instead he had to rely on a handful of independents, from whom he cherry-picked, depending on the particular circumstances of the case at hand. If he wanted a Spanish-speaking investigator, for example, he reached out to Esteban Morales. If the assignment was in Harlem or Bed-Stuy, he’d call on Leroy “Big Cat” Lyons. If accounting expertise was required, there was Morty Slutsky, a CPA. If a woman’s touch was indicated, Maggie McGuire had spent eight years as a rape crisis counselor.

But Jaywalker passed over all those names now, settling instead on Nicolo LeGrosso. LeGrosso, better known as “Nicky Legs,” was a retired NYPD detective who’d put in his papers the day he had his “25 and 50,” twenty-five years on the job and fifty years on the planet. “The job’s changed,” he’d told Jaywalker more than once. “In the old days, nobody messed with the Man. They might not’a liked you, but they left you alone. Nowadays, you walk down the block, they’d just as soon put a bullet in your ass as say hello to you.”

Even at fifty-five, LeGrosso still had cop written all over him. His hair had grayed over the years, and his gut had grown, but there was no mistaking the instant impression that beneath his sports jacket, which he continued to wear on the hottest days of July, was a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson.38 detective special. None of the fancy new 14-round, 9 mm semiautomatic Glocks for Nicky Legs. If the revolver had been good enough for him and his brother, and his father before them, it was good enough for him still.

It was precisely because of LeGrosso’s old-school looks and ways that Jaywalker reached out to him now. At this stage, Samara’s case called for the reinterviewing of witnesses at Barry Tannenbaum’s building, specifically the old woman in the adjoining apartment, and the doorman who’d seen Samara come and go the evening of the murder. Witnesses tended to get annoyed at having to repeat their stories over and over, Jaywalker knew. Still, they got less annoyed if the questioner presented himself as a father figure and one of the good guys. LeGrosso had a way of flashing his shield and announcing “Private detective” with so much emphasis on the second word that people tended to miss the private part altogether, even swore later on that they thought they’d been talking to a cop. And when called to testify in court, LeGrosso’s demeanor was indistinguishable from that of real detectives, a quality that put him on equal footing with the prosecution’s witnesses.

But there was even more. Twenty years on the job had taught LeGrosso how to deal with both government agencies and private companies. If there were two things he was universally known for, at least in the universe of New York City law enforcement, they were foul cigars and an uncanny ability to navigate the bowels of the most impenetrable bureaucracy.

If it was Jaywalker’s theory that someone other than Samara had killed Barry Tannenbaum—and for the moment that had to be his theory, for lack of another—he needed a list of likely suspects. Samara had hinted in her statement to the police that Barry had made enemies on the way to amassing his fortune. Jaywalker wanted to know who those enemies were and if any of their grudges might have survived to the time of Barry’s death, might even have figured in it.

Did he hope to solve the crime that way? Hardly. He was still pretty certain that it had been Samara herself who’d plunged the knife into her husband’s chest, and almost as certain that over time she’d get around to admitting it and explaining why.

But suppose she didn’t.

Some defendants never learned to trust their lawyers with their guilt, fearful that as soon as their secret had been shared, the passion would go out of their lawyer as surely as air goes out of a punctured balloon. And who could really blame them for feeling that way, given the fact that, as a group, lawyers had managed to earn themselves the reputation of being little more than suits filled with hot air?

Jaywalker liked to think that he was different, and that one of the things that made him different was that his clients learned to trust that he would fight as hard for them if he knew they’d committed the crime as he would if he believed they hadn’t. But Samara might turn out to be one of the few who clung to her claim of innocence to the end. Should that turn out to be the case, finding Barry’s enemies might not solve the crime, but it might be enough to cast doubt on Samara’s guilt. And in a system that required the prosecution to prove her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, that could mean the ball game.

He dialed Nicky Legs’s number.

That same night, Jaywalker got a phone call from Samara. So far as he knew, he was the only criminal defense lawyer on the face of the earth who regularly gave out his home number to his clients. But he regarded it as nothing more than a necessary corollary of his also being the only lawyer who didn’t own a cell phone. He hated the things, hated everything about them, and swore he’d go to his grave before he’d buy one. So what were his clients supposed to do when they desperately needed to reach him once he’d left his office? Talk to his answering machine?

“You’re there,” she said.

“I’m here.” It seemed obvious enough, but he let it go. “What time is it?” he asked instead. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa, no doubt aided by a tumbler half full of Kahlúa.

“Five of ten,” she said. “Listen, I need to see you. Can you have me brought over tomorrow for another visit?”

“I just saw you today,” he reminded her. “For three hours. Besides, it’s too late. I have to let them know by three o’clock.”

“Shit,” she said. “How about the day after?”

“Okay, sure.”

They talked for another minute before he heard a C.O. telling her to wind it up. Evidently ten o’clock was cutoff time for the phones.

He got up from the sofa and tried to straighten up, but his back was having none of it; an ancient tennis injury saw to that. A lot of juniors on the tour got hurt, blowing out shoulders, elbows or knees on a fairly regular basis. Leave it to Jaywalker to have been different. In a moment of exhilaration following a straight-set upset of a highly ranked opponent, he’d made the mistake of jumping over the net in celebration. Most of him had cleared it, but the heel of his right sneaker had caught the very top of the tape. The result was an extremely red face (both literally and figuratively), three cracked vertebrae, and the sudden end to a promising career.

Maybe Samara was ready to trust him with the real story of Barry’s death. That would be helpful. He jotted down a note to order her over for a counsel visit the day after tomorrow. Then he drained the last sip of Kahlúa from his tumbler. It was an absurd choice of drink, and he knew it, but he was way past apologizing for it. After his wife’s death, he’d been completely unable to sleep, spending the hours twisting and turning, rearranging the covers, flipping the pillows, and reaching out for the warm body that was no longer his to find. The pills they prescribed for him left him feeling thick and groggy during the daytime, and unable to get any work done. Never much of a drinker, he gave it a try out of pure desperation and discovered that a glass of Scotch in the evening would buy him a couple hours of fitful sleep. Only thing was, it was like downing paregoric, or cod-liver oil. He tried bourbon, gin and vodka. He tried wine, beer, even hard cider. But everything tasted bitter and medicinal. Finally he followed his sweet tooth toward brandy, Amaretto and Grand Marnier, and found them drinkable, but barely. Then he came across an old, nearly empty bottle of Kahlúa in the very back of the bar cabinet. His wife had brought it back from Mexico and used it on special occasions, in place of sugar, to sweeten her coffee. Jaywalker took a swallow directly from the bottle and winced. It was almost like drinking maple syrup. But a sip or two later, he decided that once he got past the initial sweetness, he actually liked the taste of it.

Big mistake.

Huge mistake.

Still, he decided, there were probably worse things than being a nighttime alcoholic. He no longer drove, having long ago traded in his car and its $300-a-month reserved underground parking spot for a lifetime’s worth of bus and subway MetroCards. He drank alone and only at home, so as not to make a fool of himself in public. And if he was gradually destroying his liver from the alcohol and wrecking his pancreas from the sugar, well, there were probably worse ways to die, too. You could amass a fortune, for example, only to end up with the business end of a steak knife in your heart.

He turned off the light and lay back down on the sofa. The good news was that he wouldn’t have to make the bed in the morning.

10

12,652,189,412 TO 1

“So what’s up?”

“Nothing much,” said Samara.

It was two days later, and they were sitting, as before, across from one another in the twelfth-floor counsel visit room. Samara looked tired, more tired than even the four-o’clock wake-up call should have made her look. Her hair was stringy, dark semicircles had begun to appear beneath her eyes, and her skin had taken on even more of that artificial fluorescent hue to it. Yet with all that, and the added distortion of the metal screen that separated the two of them, Jaywalker still couldn’t pry his eyes off of her.

“You wanted to see me,” he said. “You made it sound important.”

“I can’t stand it over there,” she said. “All you do is sit around all day and listen to women cursing and screaming and fighting. From wakeup till lights-out, I spend every minute trying to keep from being beaten up or stabbed or worse.”

He didn’t need to ask her about worse.

“So I’d rather you have me pulled out every day and brought over here. If you don’t mind.”

It was Jaywalker’s turn to shrug. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Except this Friday won’t work.”

She cocked her head, as though to ask why.

“I’ve got a little date with the disciplinary committee judges. It seems they want to take away my license to practice for a while.”

Her eyes widened in panic. “But who’s going to—”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m pretty sure they’ll let me finish up my pending cases.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

He smiled. “Want to know the best one?” he asked her, not quite sure why he was going there, but sure he was.

She nodded through the screen, and leaned forward conspiratorially. He guessed that if you spent your days listening to cursing and screaming and fighting, and trying to keep from being beaten up, stabbed or worse, a little naughty-lawyer gossip was a welcome change.

“It seems,” he said, “that they’ve got a witness who says I, uh, got a blow job on the fifth-floor stairway landing.”

“Hah!” she erupted with nothing less than glee.

It was the first time he’d heard her laugh out loud, or even seen her break out in a real smile. It barely mattered that her mirth had come at his expense; it was worth it.

“Did you?” she wanted to know.

“Well, it depends on what you mean by did.” Hey, if it had worked in the White House, why not in the Big House?

They spoke for a little over an hour, long enough for her to miss the one o’clock bus. They talked about a lot of things, including the meaning of did, his long-dead wife, and her recently dead husband. But not once did she come close to admitting that she’d killed Barry. Nor did he press her on the subject. Sometimes these things took time, he knew.

Before Jaywalker left, Samara made him promise to order her over for the following day, and for every day the next week. “And good luck on Friday,” she added, “you stud, you.”

He whistled his way back to the office that afternoon and the whole way home that evening, mercifully drowned out by the roar of the Number 3 train.

You stud, you.

“When can you get me out of here?” Samara asked him the following afternoon. “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three days, stuck over there.”

“You’ll make it,” he said. For a smart man, he was fully capable of saying truly stupid things. “It’ll be another two weeks before I can even ask for bail, and…” He let his voice trail off, hoping she’d missed the and.

“And what?” Apparently not.

He explained to her that once they got to Supreme Court, they would have three chances to make a bail application, and that strategically it was essential that they pick the right one. There would be the judge in the arraignment part, the judge they would be sent to in the trial part, and—if he felt that both of those were disinclined to set bail—as a last resort, there were the judges of the Appellate Division. What he didn’t have the heart to tell her was how poor their chances were, no matter which door they picked.

So she asked him, damn her.

“It’s a long shot,” was the most he was willing to tell her. The thing was, she looked so fragile. Her hair was better today, but the shadows beneath her eyes were darker than they’d been the day before, and her skin had even more of that pasty, fluorescent cast to it.

“I need you to promise me something,” she said. Even through the wire mesh, he could tell she was looking at him intently.

Anything, he wanted to say. Instead, he simply stared back at her, waiting to hear what impossible demand she was going to make of him.

“I need you to get me out of here,” she said in a steady voice. “I don’t care how. I’ll do whatever I have to on my end, and I’ll do it well. I’ll have a heart attack, or a stroke. I’ll go into an epileptic seizure. I don’t care what it takes, I’ll do it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts,” she said. “Promise me you’ll think about it and come up with a plan.” Her voice didn’t rise at the end of the sentence. It wasn’t a question so much as a demand.

As he replayed her words in his mind, he rationalized that technically, all she was really asking was that he think about it and try to come up with something. That much he could promise her, so he had. And with any other client, it would have ended right there and been forgotten. But Samara Tannenbaum wasn’t any other client, and in the weeks that followed, Jaywalker would obsess over what she’d said and how she’d said it. There were defendants you knew almost instinctively not to trust. If you made a suggestion to them about the best way to phrase something on the witness stand, and they followed it and it didn’t come out right, they would think nothing of saying, “My lawyer told me to say it that way.” But there were other clients, too, clients you could count on to go down in flames before they would ever give you up. By telling Jaywalker that she’d do whatever it might take on her end, Samara Tannenbaum had announced that she was from that second, stand-up group as surely as she could have. What was more, she’d displayed an almost uncanny ability to locate and push the right button. Begging a lonely widower closing in on fifty to do whatever he could to fulfill his half of the bargain was sheer genius on her part. Could she possibly know the magnitude of the effect she had on him? Did she already comprehend, as he was only now beginning to, the lengths to which he would go to please her?

He suspected she did.

The realization sent an unexpected chill up the length of his back, causing him to shudder. And for the first time, he could suddenly picture Samara lifting that knife in her small clenched fist and sliding it between her husband’s ribs.

Friday came, and with it Jaywalker’s appearance before the disciplinary committee judges, their imposition of the three-year suspension, and his plea that they allow him to complete his pending cases. At the end of the following week he had ten cases remaining on his calendar.

Including, of course, the one numbered Indictment 1846/05 and entitled The People of the State of New York versus Samara Tannenbaum.

Even with suspension looming and Jaywalker working hard to please the three-judge panel by disposing of as many of his remaining cases as possible, he still managed to find time each day to spend an hour locked up across from Samara in the twelfth-floor counsel visit room, and to remember each afternoon to request that she be brought back over again the following day.

Each day she asked him if he’d come up with any ideas to get her out, and each day she reaffirmed her willingness to do whatever it would take on her end. Each day he told her he was thinking about it, working on it, and that he’d come up with some ideas that he was playing around with in his mind. At the beginning of the week, these were lies, meant simply to placate her and put her off. But as the week wore on, Jaywalker found that his assurances were beginning to take on a life of their own, and he spent his evenings trying to concoct some scheme or plan that might just convince some judge to set bail. And by week’s end, he’d actually come up with the seeds of an idea, however preliminary and far-fetched.

In the meantime, the case against Samara continued to mount.

* * *

On Monday, Nicolo LeGrosso had called to tell Jaywalker that he’d succeeded in interviewing both Barry Tannenbaum’s next-door neighbor and the doorman who’d been on duty the evening of the murder. Both of them reiterated the accounts they’d given the detectives. The neighbor was as certain as she could be that it had been Barry and his wife “Sam” she’d heard arguing, and that after Sam had left there’d been no more voices. And although the doorman no longer had the logbook to show LeGrosso (the NYPD detectives having taken it), he was absolutely positive that Mr. Tannenbaum’s only guest that evening had been his wife.

Nicky also reported that he’d struck out on trying to identify and interview the cabby who’d driven Samara home from Barry’s the night of the murder. His subpoena to the Taxi and Limousine Commission had come back “no record.” Either Samara had lied about taking a cab directly back to her place, or the cabby had taken her off the meter, pocketing the fare for himself. Other than Samara’s word, there was no way of knowing.

On Wednesday, Tom Burke had phoned. “You owe me ten bucks,” he announced.

“What for?” Jaywalker had forgotten what they’d bet on, but he was pretty sure from Burke’s smug tone that it was Samara who was going to turn out to be the big loser.

“The knife,” said Burke. “The one found behind the toilet tank at her place?”

“Right.”

“Preliminary DNA tests show it’s got Barry’s blood on it. Ditto the blouse and the towel.”

“You got the report already?”

“Not yet,” said Burke. “They’re way backed up over there. I got a phone call this morning, though, and I thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks,” said Jaywalker. “You’ve made my day.”

“Come on, don’t tell me you’re surprised.”

“No, I’m not surprised.”

“And, Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry about the suspension thing.”

“Thanks, Tom. I’ll be okay.”

“They going to let you wind down your cases?”

“Seems like it. Some of them, anyway.”

“Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep this one, if you can. God knows she’s going to need you.”

Burke had called again the following day. “I still don’t have the DNA report,” he said. “But they phoned to tell me they’ve quantified the odds of its being anyone else’s blood on the stuff besides Barry’s.”

“I can hardly wait,” said Jaywalker. In the old days, back when all they could do was type blood by group, such as A Positive, AB Negative or O Positive, the best they could typically tell you was that fifty or sixty percent of the population could be excluded as suspects. Then, with the advent of HLA testing, the figure jumped, reaching the nineties. But DNA was a different story altogether. Now the numbers suddenly lifted off and soared into the stratosphere. And it was those numbers, typically described as “astronomical,” that had completely revolutionized the science of identification.

“You ready?” asked Burke.

“Sure. Lay it on me.”

“The odds that it’s not Barry’s blood are precisely one in twelve billion, six hundred and fifty-two million, one hundred and eighty-nine thousand, four hundred and twelve.”

Although Burke had read off the numbers deliberately enough for Jaywalker to copy them down, he hadn’t bothered. He knew his DNA, and as soon as he’d heard the twelve billion part, it had been enough for him.

There weren’t that many people on the planet.

By Friday Jaywalker had been told that he could keep enough cases to know that Samara’s would be among them. He broke the news to her through the wire mesh of the twelfth-floor counsel visit room.

“That’s terrific,” she said. “Have you come up with a plan to get me out?”

“Let me ask you a question first.”

“Okay.”

“Remember that stuff they say they found behind the toilet tank at your place?” He was careful to include the words “they say.” Omitting them would have told her that he was willing to accept the detectives’ version as true.

“Yes,” she said. “The knife, the blouse and…”

“The towel.”

“Right. What about them?”

“You told me you didn’t know anything about them, right?”

“Right.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why?”

“They’ve found Barry’s blood on them.”

Shrug time.

“Who could have put them there?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Whoever killed Barry and wanted to make it look like I did it?”

“From the time you got home after leaving Barry’s, until the police showed up and arrested you, was there anyone else in your place, besides you? Think carefully.”

She seemed to do just that for a moment. What Jaywalker had no way of knowing was whether she was genuinely trying to reach back three weeks earlier and remember. Or had it suddenly dawned on her what a terrible trap she’d put herself into? Half of him expected her to break down right then and there and confess. The other half, knowing Samara, knew better.

Liars tended to stick to their lies, however absurdly. Years ago, after he’d informed a client that a full set of his prints had been found on a demand note left behind at a bank robbery, the man had looked Jaywalker squarely in the eye and said, “Hey, what can I tell you? Somebody must be using my fingerprints.”

“No,” said Samara. “No one else was there.”

“So how could those things have gotten there?”

“I have no idea,” said Samara, this time without hesitation. “I guess the cops must’ve put them there.”

Somebody must be using my fingerprints.

“So, have you come up with a plan?” she pressed.

“Sort of,” said Jaywalker, amazed that she could recover quickly enough to change the subject without missing a beat.

She leaned forward.

“Not now,” he said, looking around. “Not here.” Although his words and glances were meant to convey that there were too many eyes and ears nearby, the truth was that Jaywalker’s sort of plan suddenly seemed foolish and unworkable. On top of that, Samara’s cavalier attitude, in the face of a truly damning piece of evidence, upset him more than he was willing to admit. If she wasn’t willing to level with him and trust him with the truth, how could he possibly become a co-conspirator in a scheme to get her bailed out on false pretenses?

“When?” she asked him.

“Monday,” he said. “We’re due in court for your arraignment. We’ll talk then.”

She sat back in her chair, crossed her arms in front of her breasts and pouted, but it was only a little pout. Monday was only three days away, after all, and even in the world that Samara Tannenbaum inhabited, where there was no past and no future, and everything was about imminent peril and instant gratification, three days was evidently something she could handle.

11

DID YOU SAY BAIL?

“Samara Tannenbaum,” read the clerk, “you have been indicted for the crime of murder, and other crimes. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” said Samara.

This was the moment when Jaywalker would normally ask the judge for bail. But they were in front of Carolyn Berman again. She was the one who’d frozen Samara’s bank account last month, then modified it only to the extent of allowing her to retain counsel at the rate of seventy-five dollars an hour. Besides, she was a woman, and experience had taught Jaywalker that, as a rule, women judges were tougher on women defendants than male judges were. It was a rule that took on even more meaning when the defendant happened to be not only a woman, but a young, pretty woman, and one of immense privilege.

So Jaywalker said nothing.

He liked saying nothing, another fact that set him apart from every other lawyer he knew. He especially liked saying nothing at a time like this, when the media were assembled in the audience behind him—the print reporters, the gossip columnists, the entertainment-show beauties and the sketch artists peering over their pads in their bifocals. Afterward, outside the courtroom, when they would follow him, train their floodlights on him and poke their microphones in his face, he would elaborate on saying nothing and tell them, “No comment.”

“Part 51,” said the clerk. “Judge Sobel.”

At last they’d caught a break of sorts. Matthew Sobel was a gentle person, a judge who wore his robe with modesty, and treated lawyers and defendants with respect. While he was no “Cut-’em-loose” Bruce Wright, or Murray “Why-are-you-bringing-me-this-piece-of-shit-case?” Mogel from the old days, you could count on getting a fair trial in front of him, and ending up with a reasonable sentence even if you lost. What’s more, he was open-minded on the issue of bail. And he was a man.

“Judge Sobel asks that you pick a Tuesday,” said Judge Berman.

“How’s tomorrow?” Jaywalker asked.

“Too soon.”

Again that old problem of papers having to make their way from one courtroom to another, in this case from the eleventh floor all the way up to the thirteenth.

“A week from tomorrow?”

“Fine,” said Judge Berman. “Next case.”

Afterward Jaywalker met with Samara. This time, however, they enjoyed the semiprivacy of a holding pen, a close cousin of a feeder pen. Since Samara was the only woman who’d been brought down for court so far that morning, she had the pen to herself, and they spoke through the bars, close enough to touch—a fact that Jaywalker was acutely aware of.

After hearing the conditions of his suspension, the weekend had rejuvenated him somewhat. It had also given him a chance to get over his annoyance at Samara’s apparent lack of concern over Barry’s blood having been found on the items hidden in her town house. He leaned forward against the bars and spoke to her in hushed tones. She, the better part of a foot shorter than he, listened intently, her face turned upward, her eyes meeting his, her lips silently mouthing his words as if to commit them to memory.

They spoke for twenty minutes like that, until a corrections officer interrupted them to explain that he had to bring Samara back upstairs, so they could use the holding pen for an “obso,” a mental case, someone who had to be segregated from the general population and kept under observation.

Riding down the elevator and walking out into the mid-morning daylight, all Jaywalker could think of was Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who’d made news by getting caught on tape and sent off to federal prison for things she’d said to her client during a jailhouse visit.

What am I doing? he asked himself.

Talk about an obso.

A week went by. Jaywalker managed to dispose of the first case on his list of ten and dutifully reported the fact to the disciplinary committee judge monitoring his progress. Outdoors, there was a noticeable chill in the air each morning, prompting him to put away his two summer suits for warmer ones, and the October evenings seemed to settle in earlier and earlier with each passing day. At home alone in his apartment, Jaywalker found he was filling his tumbler of Kahlúa a little fuller each night, and draining it a little more quickly.

A copy of the DNA report arrived in the mail from Tom Burke, confirming the fact that the blood found on the knife, the blouse and the towel found in Samara Tannenbaum’s town house had indeed been her late husband’s, to a certainty factor of 12,652,189,412 to 1.

Samara continued to be brought over from Rikers Island each morning and returned each evening. In between her bus trips, Jaywalker saw her each day in the twelfth-floor counsel visit room. They talked very little about her case, even less about her chances of being granted bail on her next appearance. But he could see she was doing her homework, holding up her end of the bargain. The shadows beneath her eyes had darkened and widened into deep hollows. Her hair had taken on an unwashed, dead quality. Her lips had dried and cracked, and the lower one had shrunk visibly, until it was now almost normal in size.

She was, in a word, wasting, wasting away before his eyes, like some third-world refugee from a famine or a plague.

“Perfect,” he told her.

They made their first appearance before Judge Sobel the following Tuesday. The media was barely in evidence this time. Jaywalker’s strategy of keeping their courtroom sessions as brief as possible and saying nothing quotable afterward had evidently had its desired effect. And by delaying his arrival to the late afternoon, daring those who’d showed up early to wait around all day, he’d managed to thin their ranks even more.

A judge’s courage tends to grow, Jaywalker had learned, in inverse proportion to the size of his audience. Fill a courtroom with spectators and press, and even the best judge, even a Matthew Sobel, will posture and play to them, however subtly and even unconsciously. Wait until the end of the day, when the rows of benches have emptied, and your chances of getting what you need for your client multiply almost exponentially.

“Is your client all right?”

Those were literally the first words out of the judge’s mouth, upon seeing Samara brought into the courtroom.

“No,” said Jaywalker. “Actually, she’s not.”

Samara was permitted to sit at the defense table, facing the judge. Sobel had no doubt seen photographs of her; everyone had. But the photographs unfailingly depicted a stunningly beautiful woman, a diminutive version of the trophy wife in every respect except for her hair, which was dark and straight, instead of the expected bimbo blond.

The woman Judge Sobel was staring at now looked like an advanced-stage AIDS patient who’d survived a train wreck. In addition to the wasted look she’d developed over the month of her incarceration, she sported a gash across her forehead and a black left eye, noticeable not so much because of its discoloration, which blended almost seamlessly into the dark hollow beneath it, but because the eye itself was swollen nearly shut and tearing visibly. Tufts of her hair appeared to have been pulled out, and she reached for the side of her head repeatedly, a gesture that only served to draw attention to the large white bandage that covered her hand.

“Is this in honor of Halloween?” Tom Burke asked, perhaps in the hope that a bit of levity might break the silence that had enveloped the courtroom.

Jaywalker turned in Burke’s direction, fixing him with a hard stare but saying nothing, choosing instead to let the remark twist in the air.

Judge Sobel finally found his voice. “Come up,” he motioned the lawyers, “and tell me what’s going on.”

At the bench, with the court reporter taking down every word but the spectators unable to hear, Jaywalker spoke softly. “Not surprisingly,” he explained, “my client immediately became a target on Rikers Island. She’s white, she’s rich, she’s small and she’s pretty. Was pretty, at least. Anyway, she tried to be a trooper, putting up with the harassment as long as she could. The breaking point came when she was sexually assaulted. That’s when she finally reached out for help. The problem was, she didn’t know whom to reach out to. Instead of calling me or asking to see a captain, she phoned the corrections commission.”

“Those clowns?” said Burke.

It was true. The commissioners belonged to an oversight group, separate and apart from the corrections department, and were loathed as meddlers by everyone in the prison hierarchy.

“How was she supposed to know?” asked Jaywalker. “Anyway, they began investigating. I’ve got one of the commissioners here in court, if you want verification. They interviewed officers, lieutenants, even a captain or two. Or at least tried to. Needless to say, that only made things worse. Now my client gets attacked by inmates on an hourly basis, and the C.O.s not only look the other way, they write her up for instigating. She’s been put in an impossible position.”

“She’s put herself in it,” said Burke.

Sobel ignored the remark. “Okay,” he said, “the first thing she needs is medical attention.”

“With all due respect,” said Jaywalker, sensing his opening, “the first thing she needs is to get out of there.”

“Maybe my office could get her transferred to Bedford Hills,” said Burke. “Or a federal prison.”

“There’s a problem with that,” said Sobel. “As soon as I do it with one, I set a precedent. Next thing you know, we’ll have busloads of inmates showing up with self-inflicted wounds, looking to get transferred out.”

Jaywalker bit down on the inside of his cheek, willing any thoughts of self-inflicted wounds to evaporate from the judge’s mind. “Is there any chance you’d consider some kind of bail?” he asked. “I’m afraid that if she doesn’t get out, we’re going to have another death on our hands.”

“Did you say bail?” yelped Burke. For someone who should have seen where this was going, he seemed incredulous. “This is a murder case.”

Sobel held up his hand, but Jaywalker decided it wasn’t meant for him. “Look,” he said, “she’s not going anywhere. Take her passport, strap an ankle bracelet on her, lock her up in her house.”

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