The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller
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. Samara, however, had attempted it mid-island, a slight miscalculation. The result had been a one-car, $400,000 accident, and an arrest for driving while intoxicated, reckless driving, refusal to submit to a blood-alcohol test, driving without a license, and a little-known and seldom-used 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 captivating 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 contacts 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 direction of the waiting room. “I’m not allowed to deal with money matters.”
Robert was summoned. He was actually wearing 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 Jaywalker, 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 concentration. 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 thirty-five 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 disbarred for life for charging a fee that worked out to something 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 concerned, was that his infatuation with Samara never progressed 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 representation. 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