The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller
shrug. “I don’t know. A couple hundred—”
“That’s it?”
“—thousand.”
“Oh.”
He got the name of the bank and explained that he would bring her papers to sign to withdraw enough for a retainer. Then he described what would be happening over the next week or two, how the evidence against her would be presented to a grand jury, and how she would almost certainly be indicted. He told her that she had a right to testify before the grand jury, but that in her case it would be a very bad idea.
“Why?”
“The D.A. knows much more about the facts than we do at this point,” he explained. “You’d end up getting indicted anyway, and then they’d have your testimony to use against you at trial.” When she looked at him quizzically, he said, “Trust me.”
“Okay,” she said.
He was grateful for that. What he didn’t want to have to tell her at this point was that if she went into the grand jury and denied having had anything to do with Barry’s death, it would make it hard to claim self-defense later on, or argue that she hadn’t been mentally responsible at the time, or that she’d killed her husband while under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance. Those were all defenses, complete or partial, that Jaywalker wanted to keep open, needed to keep open.
Finally he told her the most important part. “Keep your mouth shut. This place is crawling with snitches. Yours is a newspaper case. That means every woman in this place knows what you’re here for. Anything you tell one of them becomes her ticket to cut a deal on her own case and get her out of here. Understand?”
“Yup.”
“Promise me you’ll shut up?”
“I promise,” she said, drawing a thumb and index finger across her mouth in an exaggerated zipping motion.
“Good,” said Jaywalker.
It was only once he was outside the visitors’ gate, heading for the bus that would take him back to Manhattan, that Jaywalker recalled that in terms of promises kept, Samara was so far 0 for 1.
By the time Jaywalker made it back to Manhattan, it was too late to go to Samara’s bank to find out what he’d need to do to get money out of her account. He knew he could phone them and ask to speak to the manager or somebody in the legal department, but he’d learned from past experiences that such matters were better handled in person. He had been told often enough that he had an honest face and a disarming way about him that he’d come to accept that there must be something to it. Juries believed him; judges trusted him; even tight-assed prosecutors tended to open up to him. The truth was, he was a bit of a con man. “Show me a good criminal defense lawyer,” he’d told friends more than once, “and I’ll show you a master manipulator.” Then he would hasten to defend the skill, pointing out that establishing his own credibility and trustworthiness was not only his stock-in-trade, but was often absolutely critical to getting an innocent defendant off.
He talked less about the guilty ones he also got off, but he didn’t lose sleep over them. He believed passionately in the system that entitled the accused—any accused, no matter how despicable the individual, how heinous the crime, or how overwhelming the proof against him—to one person in his corner who would fight as hard and as well as he possibly could for him. That left it to the city’s thirty thousand cops, two thousand prosecutors and five hundred judges (the great majority of whom were former prosecutors, tough-on-crime politicians, or both) to fight just as hard and just as well to put the guy away forever. That made for pretty fair odds, as far as Jaywalker was concerned, and if he succeeded in overcoming them—as he’d been doing on a pretty regular basis lately—he felt no need to apologize. It all came down to a simple choice, he’d realized long ago. You fought like hell, trying your hardest to win—yes, win—or you regarded it as nothing but a job, and you simply went through the motions. Jaywalker knew a lot of lawyers who did just that. When they lost—and they lost every bit as often as Jaywalker won—they shrugged it off and said things like, “The scumbag was guilty,” “The idiot self-destructed on the witness stand,” or “Justice was done.” Jaywalker had a term for them. He called them whores.
Tolerance had never been one of his virtues.
He phoned Tom Burke, the assistant D.A. who was prosecuting Samara Tannenbaum. He’d seen Burke’s name in the Times article, and had confirmed that it was his case during the conversation he’d had with the lawyer who’d handled Samara’s initial court appearance.
“Burke,” said a deep voice.
“Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?” Jaywalker asked.
“Who is this?”
“What’s the matter, doesn’t the old man spring for caller ID?”
“Are you kidding?”
“I never kid.”
“Jaywalker?”
“Very good.”
Jaywalker liked Burke. They’d had a couple of cases together in the past, though none of them had ended up going to trial. Burke was no legal scholar, but he was a hardworking, straight-shooting, seat-of-the-pants lawyer.
“How the fuck are you?” he asked.
“Not bad,” said Jaywalker.
“Let me guess. Samara Tannenbaum?”
“Bingo.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Then, “Oh, yeah. You represented her on that DWI thing.”
“I see you’ve been doing your homework.”
“You assigned?” Burke asked.
“No,” said Jaywalker. “I weaned myself off the public tit some time ago, just in time to miss the rate hike.” It was the truth. Fresh out of Legal Aid, Jaywalker had been happy to take all the court-appointed cases he could get, even at twenty-five dollars an hour for out-of-court work and forty an hour for in-court. He’d been putting his daughter through law school at the time, and needed every cent to do it. Once she’d graduated and had found a job, he’d stopped taking assignments, except for an occasional favor to a judge, or when New York briefly restored the death penalty. A few years ago, under pressure from a lawsuit, they’d finally gotten around to raising the rates to seventy-five an hour, in-court and out. But Jaywalker hadn’t been tempted. By that time he had enough private work to keep him busy, and his expenses were low enough that he didn’t need the extra money. Getting rich had never been high on his list of priorities.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Burke, “who’s retained you?”
“Samara. Or at least she’s in the process.”
“It’s not going to work.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve gotten an order freezing all of Barry Tannenbaum’s assets,” said Burke. “Including a bank account in Samara’s name.”
“Shit,” was all Jaywalker could think to say.
Tom Burke had only been doing his job, of course. He’d been able to trace the deposits to Samara’s account and demonstrate to a judge that every dollar—and there were currently nearly two hundred thousand of them—had come from her husband. Under the law, if Samara were to be convicted of killing him, she would lose her right to the money, as well as to any other of Barry’s assets. Next, Burke had informed the judge that he’d already presented his case to a grand jury, which had voted a “true bill.” That meant an indictment, which amounted to an official finding of probable cause that Samara had in fact committed a crime resulting in Barry’s death. Based upon that, the judge, a pretty reasonable woman named Carolyn Berman, had had little choice but to freeze all of Barry