The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  "Don't you see?" said Samara. "Someone's framing me."

  So much for hints.

  "Right," said Jaywalker. "A month before Barry's murder, someone goes and gets a prescription filled with your name on it. He takes half of it and slips it into Barry's coffee before stabbing him to death. Then he takes the trouble, and the risk, of sneaking in here, so he can hide the bottle in the back of your spice cabinet. And tonight, through the miracle of telekinesis, he's gotten you to put your fingerprints all over it. I'll tell you what, Samara."

  "What?"

  "I'm going home."

  "You can't."

  "Why not?"

  "You're wearing a blanket."

  "I don't care."

  It took Jaywalker fifteen minutes just to get a cab to stop for him. Several empty ones slowed down before speeding up and passing him by. You could get away with almost anything in the city, but wearing a blanket for an outer garment was presumptive evidence that you were either broke or dangerous.

  By the time he got home, he was shivering all over again. He turned the heat up and poured himself an inch of Kahlúa.

  He must be dealing with a complete idiot in Samara, he decided. A beautiful one, to be sure, but an idiot all the same. Why else would she have called him and made him rush over in the middle of a winter night, just so he could see yet another devastating piece of evidence against her? Where did she get this insatiable need to punish herself? Was her guilt over what she'd done so enormous that it drove her to do everything she possibly could to guaran tee that they would lock her up for the rest of her life? Did she really want to go to prison that much?

  But she'd hated prison. She'd literally begged him to get her out of jail and all but offered her body to him in exchange. She'd made him bring her over for daily counsel visits on three hours of sleep. She'd gone without showers, starved herself, cut herself, pulled out tufts of her hair and blackened an eye. It sure didn't seem like she wanted to go back.

  Why, then, this bizarre need to incriminate herself at every opportunity? Why show him the Seconal, instead of simply throwing it away?

  There was simply no answer.

  He drained the last of the Kahlúa, took off his shoes, turned off the light and lay down on the sofa. His clock, the one with the alarm that had gone unused for months now, glowed green in the dark, telling him that it was just after two in the morning. He was exhausted. He remem bered how, when he couldn't fall asleep as a boy, his mother had told him it was because he was too tired to sleep. He'd had no idea what she'd meant, of course. Years later, when the concept finally made some sense to him, he'd told his wife about it, and it had become their private joke. Whenever they were lying in bed and he wanted to make love with her, instead of saying so, he would tell her he was too tired to sleep. And she'd laugh and roll toward him, and they'd make love. And afterward, almost always, he fell right asleep.

  Where was she when he needed her?

  Something was nagging at him, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. He tried to picture his wife, but the only image he could summon was of her lying in a hospital bed, wasting away. He tried reaching back over the years, tried conjuring up a younger woman, but all he could come up with was Samara.

  "Why?" he asked himself, the sound of his own voice surprising him in the darkness. He had the sudden sensa tion that the room had filled with water, black impene trable water, and he was floating on top of it. Why would she have done what she'd done tonight? There had to be an answer. But if there was, it was buried so deeply that he couldn't begin to fathom it. It was as though the answer lay beneath the water, way down at the bottom, beneath the ocean floor itself.

  He was drowning, spinning slowly in a whirlpool of black water. He wasn't naked, as he was in most of his dreams. This time he was wearing nothing but a blanket. But it had become so waterlogged that it was dragging him down from its sheer weight. His shoulders were under now, then his neck, and finally his head. There was a gurgling sound, and bubbles were rising all around him. Some of them were getting underneath the blanket and filling it, inflating it like a parachute, lifting him back up toward the surface. He opened his mouth to gulp for air but swallowed only water. Choking, coughing, he clawed with his hands and strained to reach his head higher, broke the surface, took another gulp and somehow found air.

  * * *

  He was sitting up on his sofa, in the dark, choking and coughing. It seemed to happen whenever he fell asleep on his back instead of on his side. The saliva would collect in the back of his throat and try to get down his windpipe.

  The clock read four-twenty. He'd been dreaming. About water, and about something gurgling up from the depths of the ocean.

  Samara's showing him the bottle of Seconal had com pletely confounded him. Its presence did nothing but tie her all the more tightly to her husband's murder. The missing pills, together with the ones that had been ground up into a powder, were truly devastating pieces of evidence against her, and she had to have known that. Yet as much as she hated the thought of going back to prison, she'd woken him in the middle of the night just so she could show him what was bound to send her there. No matter how you looked at it, it made absolutely no sense at all.

  Unless.

  Unless she truly was innocent.

  Unless somebody really was trying to frame her.

  16

  A DATE CERTAIN

  Not that it made any more sense to him in the morning than it had the night before.

  For one thing, how had the police managed to find the things hidden behind the toilet tank—the knife, the blouse and the towel—but miss the bottle of Seconal in the spice cabinet? Well, Jaywalker himself had missed it, hadn't he? Even after Samara had pointed him right to it. But he'd had plenty of excuses. He'd been tired, for one thing, and cold, for another. Besides, he was seriously out of practice. Back in his DEA days, he never would have missed it. Other than the refrigerator and the freezer, the spice cabinet was one of the first places he used to look. Dealers were always hiding stuff there, cramming their marijuana into the oregano jar, or stashing their heroin or cocaine into the flour canister. Not the sugar bowl, though; too many ex pensive and even deadly accidents happened that way.

  But the cops who'd searched Samara's place had had excuses, too. They hadn't been looking for drugs. The in formation about the Seconal in Barry Tannenbaum's system hadn't come out until weeks later, after the autopsy had been done, and the serology and toxicology results had come in. They'd been looking for a knife, and you didn't hide a knife in between little bottles of spices. You hid it—well, you hid it behind an upstairs toilet tank, for example. It was a clever enough spot, but not so clever that it would have eluded the police during the course of a thorough search.

  So that part of it made sense.

  The only part that didn't was why Samara had been so eager to show him what she claimed she'd just found, and how she thought it proved that someone was framing her. Jaywalker wasn't ready to buy that, not by a long shot. Still, the incident had had its effect on him. Until last night, he'd succeeded in burying Samara's case. He'd ignored it, blocked it out of his thoughts, pretended it no longer existed. Why? Because he was so wrapped up with his own ego, and so afraid he was going to lose his last trial.

  Shame on him.

  No matter how guilty she might be, Samara Tannen baum still deserved the best effort he could possibly give her. Wasn't that exactly what he'd preached his entire career, the pompous lecture he delivered whenever people asked him how he could represent people he knew were guilty? It was his job to go to war for them, he would in sist, his solemn duty. No less so than if he knew they were innocent. That was what separated him from the hacks, the guys who were in it only for the money, the guys who went through the motions. If a lawyer pulled one punch or held back the tiniest bit because he thought—or even knew— that his client had committed the crime, he was worthless.

  Samara deserved better.

  Samara deserved
nothing less than a warrior.

  It was time for Jaywalker to stop sulking in his tent. It was time to drag his armor out of the back of his closet, dust it off and suit up. He had a trial date on a murder case. He might have a guilty client with a ton of evidence stacked against her, but that was no excuse, and now was no time to desert her.

  He picked up the phone and punched in Nicolo Le Grosso's number but had to settle for the answering ma chine. "Nicky," he said after identifying himself, "I want you to get to work on Barry Tannenbaum's enemies. Con centrate on anyone who had access to Barry's apartment, and cross-reference that against any of them who might have had access to Samara's place, as well. I know it's a long shot, but it's the only shot we've got at the moment."

  Then he called Samara and told her he was coming over.

  "What time is it?" she asked groggily.

  He laughed and hung up.

  She met him at the door wearing nothing, so far as he could tell, but a short white bathrobe and her ankle bracelet. Yet he could see she'd found time to shower, wash her hair and put on her makeup. Samara's days of jailhouse depri vation were clearly behind her, at least for the time being.

  Jaywalker extended the blanket she'd lent him the night before, the one he'd worn home like an idiot.

  "It's not like you had to make a special trip," she said.

  "I didn't. I came over because I want to talk some more."

  She let him in, and he followed her as she climbed a flight of stairs, furtively peeking upward like a schoolboy. They ended up in a room he hadn't been in before. She walked to one of two facing club chairs and motioned for him to sit in the other. As she lowered herself and went to tuck her legs beneath her, the bottom of her robe came open, and he looked away, causing her to smile once again at his embarrassment.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "For looking? Or for not looking?"

  "Neither," he said. "For last night."

  "I'm the one who woke you up, remember?"

  "I do," he said, "and now we're even. But I still owe you an apology."

  She raised one eyebrow, a considerable talent in Jay walker's book. As a boy, he'd spent an hour in front of a mirror one afternoon, trying unsuccessfully to master the art. He'd finally concluded it was a girls-only thing.

  "What for?" she asked.

  "For not taking your case seriously enough."

  She seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, "Okay, apology accepted."

  "So did you throw out the Seconal?"

  "Of course not," she said. "I'm the one who knows I didn't put it there, remember?"

  He smiled. She was good, he had to give her that much. She was also awfully good to look at, especially in her bathrobe. He stood up, figuring he might not be able to do so if he waited much longer. "Listen," he said, "I want to have a look around, see what else the cops might have missed when they were here."

  They started on the top floor and worked their way down. The search took the better part of an hour, and though it turned up nothing as earthshaking as the Seconal, there were a couple of interesting finds. There was a copy of Samara and Barry's prenuptial agreement, for example, which basically would have left her without a dime if she'd divorced him. There was a drawer full of the skimpiest, sexiest underwear Jaywalker had ever set eyes on.

  "Thongs," explained Samara, stretching the string of one. It was so thin it could have been dental floss. She smiled wickedly as he averted his eyes.

  There was a freezer dedicated to nothing but quarts and quarts of ice cream, most of them in designer flavors like Kiwi Mango Moment. And in a kitchen drawer were half a dozen stainless steel steak knives with sharp tips and ser rated cutting edges that, when compared to a photograph Jaywalker had pulled from his file and brought along, looked absolutely identical to the murder weapon, the one found behind the upstairs toilet tank, the one with Barry's blood on it.

  He pulled out a second photo, one showing the blood stained blouse. "What's the story with that?" he asked Samara.

  "Mine," she acknowledged.

  "Did you wear it that last evening you spent with Barry?"

  She shrugged. "Who remembers?"

  "Well, if you weren't wearing it, where would it have been?"

  "In my dresser, I guess, or hanging up in my clothes closet."

  "And this?" he asked, showing her the third and last photo, depicting the bloodstained towel.

  "Looks like one of mine."

  He let her talk him into staying for breakfast, or, more properly by that hour, brunch. She had French Vanilla with Ginger Root, topped with chocolate fudge sauce. Where she put the calories, he had no idea. He opted for the Double Dutch Chocolate, with a side of Mango Chutney Sorbet. They ate directly out of the containers, trading oohs and aahs with every shared spoonful. It was fun. It was the first time Jaywalker could remember having fun in…well, in a very long time.

  He spent the next two weeks feverishly playing catch up. He read, reread and re-reread every scrap of paper in his file, which by this time had grown into three large card board boxes. He drew maps and charts, and had photo graphs blown up and mounted. He organized everything into subfiles, making extra copies of documents that related to more than one witness, so that at trial he wouldn't have to rummage around for something he needed to put his finger on.

  He made notes and outlines for cross-examination. He prepared questions for jury selection. He worked on an opening statement and on a summation. He prepared for the pretrial hearing. He wrote out requests for the judge to include in his charge to the jury.

  He bugged Nicky Legs to redouble his efforts on inves tigating Barry Tannenbaum's enemies. And while between them they were able to come up with a handful who'd hated Barry enough to have wished him dead, including two or three who might have had keys to Barry's apartment, none of them had access to Samara's, and none seemed likely candidates to have taken their fantasies and trans lated them into deeds.

  He took a couple of suits and a handful of shirts to the cleaners. He shined two pairs of shoes and coordinated them with matching belts. He even uncharacteristically picked out three or four ties, enough to stretch out over what he guessed would be a two- or three-week trial.

  Mostly, he spent time with Samara. Convinced that it would be a must for her to take the stand and deny any in volvement in Barry's death, he began preparing her for direct examination and running her through a series of mock cross-examinations. He would sit her on a straightbacked chair in his office—not in her home, where she might feel more at ease—and fire questions at her in his best Tom Burke impersonation, grilling her on her where abouts the evening of the murder, her initial lies to the de tectives, her extramarital affairs and her signature on the life insurance policy.

  And she got good, if good can be defined as able to answer questions in such a way as to inflict as little damage to herself as possible. But good wasn't going to do the trick, Jaywalker knew. The evidence against her was so devastating that no matter what she said and how well she said it, it was going to take nothing short of a miracle to walk her out of court. But that was his job, Jaywalker knew. Doctors are expected to deliver babies, preachers to deliver sermons, newsboys to deliver papers. Criminal defense lawyers are expected to deliver miracles. Nothing more, nothing less. And Jaywalker had delivered so many of them over the past few years that even he had begun to wonder if he might not be able to walk on water. But walking on water could be a tricky proposition, he knew, and almost everyone who'd tried had sooner or later ended up soaking wet.

  He also spent time with Samara because he'd grown to genuinely like her. She never hid from her checkered past, never denied having married for money, never apologized for having cheated on her husband. And there was some thing real about her, something honest in the way she re sponded to a question without first repeating the question aloud while she calculated the consequences of her answer. It was as though she had no agenda, no more interest in hiding the facts than she had in cens
oring her emotions. And despite Jaywalker's constant efforts to "clean up her mouth," as he put it, Samara continued to be every bit as quick with a bit of foul language as she was with a laugh. There seemed to be no guile to her. Her lower lip could curl into a pout in one moment, only to soften into a smile the next. For Jaywalker, that openness represented at once both a significant asset and a serious liability, depending upon how you chose to look at it. A juror could easily fall in love with Samara—as he himself realized he was doing, on some level—or just as easily come to loathe her, inter preting her unapologetic indifference as arrogance.