The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  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, in sisting 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 ex pression. 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 hookerturned-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 mar ried an eighty-nine-year-old Texas billionaire, won consid erably 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-over looked 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 re counted by the New York County District Attorney, and fol lowed 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. Sa mara, however, had attempted it mid-island, a slight mis calculation. The result had been a one-car, $400,000 accident, and an arrest for driving while intoxicated, reck less driving, refusal to submit to a blood-alcohol test, driving without a license, and a little-known and seldomused 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 capti vating 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 con tacts 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 direc tion of the waiting room. "I'm not allowed to deal with money matters."

  Robert was summoned. He was actually we
aring 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 Jay walker, 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 concen tration. 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 thirtyfive 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 dis barred for life for charging a fee that worked out to some thing 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 con cerned, was that his infatuation with Samara never pro gressed 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 repre sentation. 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. Ap

  parently 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 fi

  nanciers. 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 pow

  erless to take his eyes off her, just as now he was power

  less 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 morn ing 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 unau thorized to speak publicly for the police depart ment, 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 busi ness suit and tie who, Jaywalker knew, had to be the vic tim. 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 sched uled 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 sentenc ing 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.