The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  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 in vestigator, 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 re quired, 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 wit nesses 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. Wit nesses 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 indistin guishable 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 agen cies 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 un canny ability to navigate the bowels of the most impene trable bureaucracy.

  If it was Jaywalker's theory that someone other than Samara had killed Barry Tannenbaum—and for the mo ment 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 ex hilaration 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 figura tively), 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, spend ing 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 under ground 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 gr
adually de stroying 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 fouro'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 arti ficial 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 scream ing 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 lis tening 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 ap plication, and that strategically it was essential that they pick the right one. There would be the judge in the ar raignment 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 Ap pellate 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 Jay walker 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.