The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller
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