The Tenth Case

by Joseph Teller

  MR. JAYWALKER: I see. Might you care to esti mate how many other knives in the city could have caused the wound, just as easily?

  MR. BURKE: Objection.

  THE COURT: Overruled.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Dozens?

  DR. HIRSCH: Sure.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Hundreds?

  DR. HIRSCH: Yes.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Thousands?

  DR. HIRSCH: I'd say so.

  MR. JAYWALKER: And this depression you de scribed, this stamp you believe was created by the hilt of whatever knife was used. Would I be right in con cluding that if you're correct about its origin, it tells us that considerable force was used in plunging the knife into the body?

  MR. BURKE: Objection to "considerable."

  THE COURT: Overruled. You may answer.

  DR. HIRSCH: I would agree with "consid erable force." We would have had a better idea of just how much if the blade had struck a rib. Then some thing would have had to give. Either the rib would have fractured or splintered, or the blade would have bent, broken or stopped moving forward. But as I said earlier, the blade missed the ribs.

  MR. JAYWALKER: So we'll never know for sure.

  DR. HIRSCH: Exactly.

  MR. JAYWALKER: And we'll have to settle for

  "considerable force."

  DR. HIRSCH: Right.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Suggesting that a rather powerful person was responsible for the thrust of that knife, and that he plunged it home with an awful lot of muscle behind it.

  This time, Burke's objection was sustained. But Jay walker had made his point. And he knew that when it came time for summations, he would be allowed to argue it, and to ask the jurors to take a good look at Samara and ask themselves if she seemed capable of wielding a weapon with such brutal strength.

  It wasn't much, but it was enough to send the jury out to lunch on.

  By two o'clock Burke's detective was still unavailable, and rather than scurry around trying to find other witnesses to call out of turn, Burke asked to go over to Monday. That sort of thing occurs in just about every case that gets tried, and is a good reason never to believe a judge when he tells prospective jurors how long he expects a trial to last. To paraphrase a not-so-old expression, stuff happens.

  "All right," said Judge Sobel, "we'll give the jury a long weekend. But make sure you have your detective here first thing Monday morning, or—"

  "Or you'll dismiss the case?" suggested Jaywalker.

  "In your dreams," said the judge. "In your dreams." Ap parently he'd been taking a peek at the rest of the evidence.

  "You'll probably get to testify sometime around the middle of next week," Jaywalker told Samara, once they'd walked up to Canal Street and were safely out of earshot of the jurors. "We'll need to spend some time getting you ready."

  Spend some time. Not spend some more time, given the fact that they'd already had a dozen such sessions, spanning twice that number of hours. Though Jaywalker lived in dread that his witnesses might come off as rehearsed and memorized, he clung to his belief that there was no such thing as overpreparation. He would continue to work with Samara right up until the day she took the stand. The day? More like the minute.

  "Want to come over this evening?" she asked. "I'd say now, but I'm going to enjoy my afternoon off, right up to curfew time. After that, though, I could be all yours."

  Jaywalker looked at her, trying to figure out if she'd intended the double entendre, or if it existed only in his mind. "Let's make it nine o'clock tomorrow morning," he said. "At my office. There'll be fewer distractions there."

  The way she somehow managed to pout and smile simul taneously told him no, it hadn't been just in his mind. And once again, as he turned from her and headed for the entrance to the subway, the words that came to mind were, You moron.

  21

  THE EYE-TALIAN DETECTIVE

  By Monday morning Tom Burke had his detective ready to testify. He also had some additional paperwork for Jaywalker, in the form of a two-page typewritten report. In the Age of the Computer, with three-year-olds routinely exchanging e-mails with their octogenarian grandparents, and second graders being encouraged to hand in assignments created on word processors, the NYPD had apparently bought up the entire stock of the world's discarded typewriters, the old manual ones with misaligned keystrikers and dried-out ribbons, and taught its personnel how to use them with their thumbs, perhaps, or their elbows, with the additional require ment that they misspell every third word and ignore the rules of grammar at every conceivable opportunity.

  Still, it took Jaywalker only a glance to see that the de tective's unavailability on Friday had been the result of neither a conflicting court appearance nor a family emer gency. He'd been busy working, working in connection with the trial. More specifically, he'd been running around collecting fingerprints, in some cases by retrieving existing cards from BCI files, in others by actually going out, locating individuals and, with their consent, taking inked impressions of their hands. Now Jaywalker all but groaned as he read the names of the individuals. Anthony Mazzini. Alan Manheim. William Smythe. Kenneth Redding. Burke had handed his detective a list of the people whose names Jaywalker had proposed to Roger Ramseyer, the CID de tective who'd testified on Thursday, as additional suspects whose prints should have been checked against the unknown ones found in Barry Tannenbaum's apartment. Now the jurors were going to hear that none of their prints—not even Mazzini's, who'd hung around the apart ment for a good half an hour—matched any of the unknown ones. Jaywalker looked over at Burke, just in time to catch him trying to suppress a grin. "Nice work," he said.

  "Hey," said Burke, "didn't anyone ever tell you how to catch red herrings?"

  Jaywalker answered with a blank expression.

  "You spear 'em."

  Anthony Bonfiglio was a New Yorker through and through. He was a caricature right out of Little Italy, or maybe Pleasant Avenue. He could have played a wise guy on The Sopranos, or a mobbed-up cousin from one of The Godfather movies. He could have been a bookie or a loanshark or an enforcer, the kind of guy who keeps a baseball bat within arm's reach on the car seat next to him, not for hitting fungoes, but for busting kneecaps.

  Instead, Bonfiglio had become a cop. And now, twenty years later, he was a detective, first grade, working homi cides. Jaywalker knew him, having had to cross-examine him a couple of times over the years, and had little use for him. He strongly suspected that Bonfiglio was on the take, though he couldn't prove it. But jurors loved the tough cop image and positively ate the guy up.

  Burke had Bonfiglio describe how he'd "caught" the homicide of Barry Tannenbaum just about a year and a half ago.

  MR. BURKE: Was that because of some spe

  cial expertise on your part, or

  some particular familiarity

  with the victim?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Nah. It was my toin, was all.

  The jurors laughed. They were in love with him already.

  MR. BURKE: Can you tell us what you did

  after being assigned to the

  case?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Me and my partner, Eddie Torres, we went to the apartment where the body got found. The first officers were there. They'd estab lished a crime scene. CSU was there, dustin' an' liftin' prints, takin' photos, an' doin' some other stuff.

  Bonfiglio had examined the body and satisfied himself that he was looking at a murder victim, stabbed in the chest and, judging from the amount of blood, through the heart. He'd conferred with the various other officers and detectives on the scene, who told him they'd recovered no weapon. He pro ceeded to conduct his own search, being careful to not touch or disturb anything unnecessarily. He found no knife or other implement that he believed had been used in the crime.

  Generally, the apartment was neat and orderly. There were some Chinese food containers on the kitchen counter, with leftovers that were cold, but not yet spoiled. There were no signs of a forced break-in, a ransacking, or any kind of a struggle.

&
nbsp; MR. BURKE: What did you do next?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: I conducted a canvass of the surrounding apartments. Specifickly, I interviewed a Mrs. Benita Gristede, in Penthouse B, a Mr. Charles Robbins, in Penthouse C, and two occupants of the apartment directly beneath Mr. Tannenbaum. Lemme see, yeah. Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin, Chester and Lois.

  MR. BURKE: Were any of those individuals

  able to tell you anything you

  considered significant?

  Jaywalker resisted the urge to object, even though the question called for hearsay testimony. He knew from the detective's reports that only Benita Gristede had had anything to offer, and she was on Burke's witness list, anyway. So he let it go.

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah. Ms. Gristede did.

  MR. BURKE: What did you do once you'd

  completed your canvass of the

  neighboring apartments?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Me an' my partner, we went back downstairs to the lobby, and we conversed with the doorman and the super. And I ast them to call the doorman who'd been on duty the night before an' have him come in. An' they did that.

  MR. BURKE: And did there come a time

  when he arrived?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah.

  MR. BURKE: Do you recall his name?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Jussaminit. (Reviews notes)

  Yeah, José Lugo.

  MR. BURKE: And did you have a conversa

  tion with Mr. Lugo?

  DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah.

  MR. BURKE: Your Honor, may we ap

  proach?

  THE COURT: Yes, come up.

  Up at the bench, Burke explained that at this point he wanted to interrupt the witness's testimony in order to take that of the two individuals who'd supplied him with infor mation, first Ms. Gristede, and then Mr. Lugo. Jaywalker objected but gave no reason. If pressed, he would have had to say that anything that was good for Burke had to be bad for him and his client, and that, furthermore, he was still pissed off at Burke for having lied about Detective Bon figlio's unavailability on Friday.

  "Your objection is overruled," said Judge Sobel. "I'll give you the option of cross-examining the witness now on what he's said so far, or reserving it all for later."

  "Later," said Jaywalker, still in sulk mode.

  The judge explained to the jurors what they were going to do, excused the witness and declared a fifteen-minute recess. Once the jurors had been escorted out of the room, he called the lawyers back up to the bench.

  "Has there been an offer in this case?" he asked.

  So it was starting. Matthew Sobel wasn't a meddler. Unlike some judges, he allowed lawyers to try their cases and pretty much refrained from attempting to bludgeon plea bargains out of them. But his question now, as gentle and as deferential as it was, spoke volumes compared to what others might have said—and had.

  Why are we trying this case?

  Can't you guys work something out here?

  Doesn't your client know she's looking at twenty-five to life?

  And Jaywalker's personal favorite, the impartial, And you can tell her I said she's going to get every last day of it after the jury convicts her.

  Now, even Matthew Sobel was beginning to wonder. Jaywalker might have succeeded in throwing some sand in the jurors' eyes with his This-case-is-so-strong-my-client must-be-innocent opening statement, but he hadn't fooled the judge, not for a minute. And the worst part was that the truly damaging evidence was yet to come. Wait until Sobel heard the testimony about Samara's lies, the stuff found in her apartment, and the timing and the amount of that little life insurance policy.

  "My client is innocent," said Jaywalker. Not only did his words sound foolish even to himself, they also violated one of his cardinal principles. It was okay to say that his client says she's innocent, or maintains her innocence, or even insists she's innocent. But as soon as you said that she was innocent, stating it as a fact, you were vouching for her. And not having been in Barry Tannenbaum's apartment that evening a year and a half ago, Jaywalker was certainly in no position to be vouching for Samara.

  Burke raised his palms upward, his way of explaining that Jaywalker's comment had said it all. Even if he'd con sidered offering Samara something less than murder, how could he, given her continuing claim of innocence?

  Unpersuaded by such logic, Judge Sobel pressed on. "Would you consider a Man One," he asked Burke, "with a substantial sentence? I mean, I'd have a range of up to twenty-five years."

  Jaywalker spoke up before Burke could answer. "My client is innocent," he said again, trying to make it sound a little more convincing this time.

  But it didn't.

  * * *

  Benita Gristede was a small woman in her seventies or eighties, who looked as though she might have come over on the Mayflower. Having outlived her husband, she was the sole occupant of Penthouse B, the apartment that shared a common wall with Penthouse A, Barry Tannenbaum's apart ment. On the evening of Barry's death, Mrs. Gristede had heard the sounds of an argument between a man and a woman in the adjoining apartment. She'd recognized the man's voice as that of her neighbor, Mr. Tannenbaum. The woman's voice, she was every bit as certain, had been that of his wife, known to Mrs. Gristede as Sam. The argument had occurred shortly before eight o'clock, toward the very end of that evening's episode of the game show Wheel of Fortune.

  MR. BURKE: How is it that you recall that?

  MRS. GRISTEDE: I recall that because the arguing

  was so loud, I had to turn the

  volume up in order to hear the TV.

  MR. BURKE: Were you able to hear what the

  argument was about?

  MRS. GRISTEDE: You mean the words?

  MR. BURKE: Yes, the words.

  MRS. GRISTEDE: No. Just that they were very loud.

  MR. BURKE: The following day, did a detec

  tive come by and ask you some

  questions?

  MRS. GRISTEDE: You mean the eye-talian one?

  MR. BURKE: Yes.

  MRS. GRISTEDE: Yes, he did. And I told him exactly what I'm telling you.

  On cross-examination, Jaywalker purposefully mum bled his first question to Mrs. Gristede, so she'd have to say she couldn't hear him. Burke objected, and Judge Sobel had to make a record of it, adding that he'd had trouble hearing it, as well. He asked the court reporter to read it back.

  COURT REPORTER: Sorry, I didn't get it, either.

  It had been stunts like that that had landed Jaywalker in

  front of the disciplinary committee. Well, like that and a lot

  worse. Still, he wasn't quite ready to let the hearing thing go.

  MR. JAYWALKER: You do wear a hearing aid,

  though?

  MRS. GRISTEDE: I most certainly do not.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Would you say your hearing's

  quite good, in fact?

  MRS. GRISTEDE: I certainly would. Probably

  better than yours.

  Laughter from the jury box, at his expense. Never a

  good omen.

  MR. JAYWALKER: Yet you never heard a scream