скачать книгу бесплатно
Because in the ten months since he’d first sat down across from Samara in the counsel room to hear her say she hadn’t killed her husband, things had indeed gone as Jaywalker had suspected they would—from bad to worse to downright dreadful.
The progression had begun almost immediately. From the twelfth-floor counsel visit room, Jaywalker had ridden the elevator down to the seventh floor, where he’d paid a visit to Tom Burke.
“Hey, Jay. Howyadoon?”
A lot of people called him Jay. Not having a first name kind of limited their options.
“Okay, I guess,” said Jaywalker. “I’ve just spent the last three hours with Samara Tannenbaum.” It was true. After Samara’s denial of her guilt and his own assurance that he believed her, they’d talked for another hour and a half. If he’d been impressed with her willingness to miss the one o’clock bus back to Rikers, he was somewhat troubled by her evident need to keep the meeting going as long as possible.
“From what I hear,” said Burke, “people have paid good money to spend thirty minutes with her. But I’ll say this. She sure is good to look at.”
“That she is,” Jaywalker agreed.
“It’s a shame she’s a cold-blooded killer.”
Jaywalker said nothing. He was there to listen and, hopefully, to learn a thing or two, not to posture about his client’s innocence. Particularly when he himself was having trouble buying it.
“Did you read the stuff I gave you Friday?” Burke asked him.
“Yeah. And I appreciate your generosity.” Jaywalker wasn’t being facetious. They both knew Burke had handed over much more than the law required at such an early stage of the proceedings.
“Hey,” said Burke. “I got nothing to hide on this one. In my office, it’s what we call a slam dunk.”
“Why?”
“Why? I’ve got witnesses who put her there and have her arguing with the deceased at the time of death. I’ve got her false exculpatory statements, first that she wasn’t there, then that they didn’t fight. I’ve got the murder weapon hidden in her home. And I’ve got ten bucks that says that little dark-red stain on it is going to turn out to be a perfect DNA match with Barry’s blood.”
“No,” said Jaywalker. “I didn’t mean, Why is it a slamdunk? I meant, Why did she do it?”
Burke gave an exaggerated shrug. Jaywalker decided he could use a lesson or two on the art from Samara. “Hey,” said Burke, “why do seventy percent of murders happen? Two people who know each other get into an argument about some trivial piece of bullshit. They start swearing and calling each other names. Maybe they’ve been drinking, or smoking something. One thing leads to another. If there happens to be a gun around, or a knife…” He extended his arms, elbows bent slightly, palms turned upward, as if to say that in such situations, murder was all but inevitable, a part of the human condition.
“That’s it?”
“What are you looking for?” Burke asked. “A motive?”
“God forbid,” said Jaywalker. The prosecution was never required to come up with a motive; the most they were ever asked to prove was intent. They taught you the difference in law school. You shot or stabbed or clubbed someone to death with the intent to kill them. Whether your motive behind that intent happened to be greed, say, as opposed to revenge or sadism, didn’t matter.
Only it did matter, Jaywalker knew. Because if a crime didn’t make sense to him, it might not make sense to a jury, either.
“Tell you what,” said Burke, reading Jaywalker’s mind. “Give me two weeks, I bet I’ll have a motive for you. Want to go double or nothing on that ten bucks?”
“Sure,” said Jaywalker. “You’re on.”
It was less than two weeks later that Jaywalker found himself standing before the three disciplinary committee judges. So if now he needed yet another reason to include Samara’s name on his list, he had it: he had twenty bucks riding on the outcome.
With Samara indicted but yet to appear in Supreme Court for her arraignment, the case fell into a legal limbo of sorts. In terms of formal proceedings, nothing would happen for the time being. No written motions could be filed yet, no hearings could be asked for, no plea could even be entered. Before any of those things could take place, the case would first have to travel from the fourth floor of 100 Centre Street to the eleventh. In real time, such a journey might be expected to take two minutes, three if the elevators were out of order, a fairly regular occurrence. But in courthouse time, it took three weeks.
“Sorry, counselor,” the lower court judge would always say. “If I give you an earlier date, the papers won’t make it upstairs in time.”
“Give ’em to me,” Jaywalker had pleaded over the years. “I’ll have ’em up there before you can unzip your robe.” But all it ever got him were unamused stares and even longer adjournments. To paraphrase an old saying, judges don’t get mad, they get even.
That said, the fact that Samara’s case was stalled in traffic for the next three weeks didn’t mean it was time for Jaywalker to sit on his hands or catch up on old issues of The New Yorker. Quite the opposite.
Perhaps the single most overlooked job of the criminal defense lawyer—overlooked by not only the general public but by too many defense lawyers themselves—is investigation. To far too many lawyers, investigation meant reading the reports turned over by the prosecution and, in the rare case that the defendant screamed loudly enough and often enough that he had an alibi, going through the motions of checking it out.
In Samara’s case, Jaywalker had read, reread and all but memorized every word in the materials supplied by Tom Burke. He’d picked his client’s brain and probed the recesses of her memory for a solid three hours, more time than a lot of lawyers spent talking with their clients over the life of a case. As far as any alibi defense was concerned, he’d ruled that out in the first five minutes. Samara, after initially lying to the detectives, now freely admitted that she’d been at Barry’s apartment right around the time of his murder and had gone straight home from there, spending the rest of the evening alone.
Still, one of the first things Jaywalker did was to subpoena the records for both her home phone and her cell. There’d been a time when all you could get were records of outgoing long distance calls. Nowadays, with everything done by computer, there was a record of every call. MUDDs and LUDDs, they called them, for Multiple Usage Direct Dialed and Local Usage Direct Dialed. Who knew what might turn up? Suppose she’d phoned Barry right after getting home and had since forgotten that she’d done so. If he’d picked up, that fact would show up on her records, proving that he’d been alive, or at least that someone who was alive had been there. Either way, it would mean that Samara was innocent.
Innocent.
Funny word, thought Jaywalker. To him, it had an almost religious mystique. For in criminal law, the word all but disappeared. You pleaded guilty or not guilty, and the jury was instructed to decide if your guilt had been proven or not, and told to return a verdict of guilty or not guilty. The only time the words innocent or innocence were even uttered during the course of a trial occurred when the judge charged the jury to remember that in the eyes of the law, the defendant was presumed innocent. After that, it was all about guilty or not guilty; rarely was the word innocent ever heard again.
Which was just as well, particularly in Samara’s case. For despite her insistence that she hadn’t done it, Jaywalker knew it was just a matter of the passage of time and the building up of trust until she told him otherwise. Murder cases fell into two categories, he’d come to understand. There were the whodunnits and the whyithappeneds. If the evidence demonstrating that your client was the killer was shaky, you turned the trial into a whodunnit, raising what was sometimes referred to as the SODDI defense, for SomeOther Dude Did It. On the other hand, if the evidence that your client did it was overwhelming, you looked around for things like self-defense, insanity or extreme emotional disturbance. In other words, you conceded that it was your client who committed the act that resulted in the victim’s death, and focused instead on the circumstances, particularly the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the incident.
What you never did was try to cover all bases. You didn’t tell the jury, “My client didn’t do it. And if he did, it was self-defense. And if it wasn’t self-defense, he was insane.” There was a name for lawyers who hedged their bets like that.
Losers.
Jaywalker was confident that Samara’s case was going to turn into a whyithappened. When, sooner or later, she got around to admitting that she’d killed Barry, they would talk about the why. Her husband had done something to provoke her, no doubt. Perhaps he’d tormented her or threatened her, or come at her with something that, in her desire to conceal her presence at his apartment, she’d hidden or taken with her. Whatever it was, there had to be a reason. Samara wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, Jaywalker was pretty sure. Something had happened that night, something significant enough to cause her to pick up a knife and plunge it into her husband’s chest. Getting Samara to let go of the truth might prove to be a slow and painful process, but it would happen.
Only it hadn’t happened yet. Which meant that, for the time being at least, Jaywalker had to proceed as though his client were, well, innocent. As though indeed, some other dude (or dame) had done it. In other words, it was time for some investigation.
One of the things that set Jaywalker apart from his colleagues was that he did a lot of his own investigation. He came by it naturally enough. Before he’d passed the bar and landed his first lawyering job with Legal Aid, he’d put in four years as an undercover agent with the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration. There they’d taught him how to bug a room, tap a phone, pick a lock, lift a print, tail a car, run a license plate and locate the subscriber of an unlisted phone number. He’d learned how to shoot a gun, too, and, for that matter, how to break a nose, crush a larynx and deliver a knee to the balls with astonishing efficiency, though those particular skills had pretty much atrophied over the years. Most of all, he’d learned how to pass, how to blend in. How to wear the clothes, walk the walk and talk the talk of the street like one who’d grown up on it. So once he’d made the move from apprehender to defender, whenever a case called for some investigation—and to Jaywalker’s thinking, all cases called for investigation—he liked nothing better than to assign the task to himself.
There were times, however, when that didn’t work. Chief among them was when it was reasonable to believe that somewhere down the line, Jaywalker the lawyer might have to call Jaywalker the investigator to testify at trial. Woody Allen had actually given it a pretty good try in Take the Money and Run, alternately posing questions from the lectern and then racing to the witness stand to answer them. But it was pulling stunts just like that that had landed Jaywalker in hot water with the disciplinary committee, and he knew this was a particularly inopportune time to stage a retrospective of his antics. He decided that the investigation needed at the moment in Samara’s case might indeed become the subject of trial testimony. It was, therefore, time to call someone else.
Unlike a few big earners he knew, Jaywalker didn’t have his own private in-house investigator. Instead he had to rely on a handful of independents, from whom he cherry-picked, depending on the particular circumstances of the case at hand. If he wanted a Spanish-speaking investigator, for example, he reached out to Esteban Morales. If the assignment was in Harlem or Bed-Stuy, he’d call on Leroy “Big Cat” Lyons. If accounting expertise was required, there was Morty Slutsky, a CPA. If a woman’s touch was indicated, Maggie McGuire had spent eight years as a rape crisis counselor.
But Jaywalker passed over all those names now, settling instead on Nicolo LeGrosso. LeGrosso, better known as “Nicky Legs,” was a retired NYPD detective who’d put in his papers the day he had his “25 and 50,” twenty-five years on the job and fifty years on the planet. “The job’s changed,” he’d told Jaywalker more than once. “In the old days, nobody messed with the Man. They might not’a liked you, but they left you alone. Nowadays, you walk down the block, they’d just as soon put a bullet in your ass as say hello to you.”
Even at fifty-five, LeGrosso still had cop written all over him. His hair had grayed over the years, and his gut had grown, but there was no mistaking the instant impression that beneath his sports jacket, which he continued to wear on the hottest days of July, was a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson.38 detective special. None of the fancy new 14-round, 9 mm semiautomatic Glocks for Nicky Legs. If the revolver had been good enough for him and his brother, and his father before them, it was good enough for him still.
It was precisely because of LeGrosso’s old-school looks and ways that Jaywalker reached out to him now. At this stage, Samara’s case called for the reinterviewing of witnesses at Barry Tannenbaum’s building, specifically the old woman in the adjoining apartment, and the doorman who’d seen Samara come and go the evening of the murder. Witnesses tended to get annoyed at having to repeat their stories over and over, Jaywalker knew. Still, they got less annoyed if the questioner presented himself as a father figure and one of the good guys. LeGrosso had a way of flashing his shield and announcing “Private detective” with so much emphasis on the second word that people tended to miss the private part altogether, even swore later on that they thought they’d been talking to a cop. And when called to testify in court, LeGrosso’s demeanor was indistinguishable from that of real detectives, a quality that put him on equal footing with the prosecution’s witnesses.
But there was even more. Twenty years on the job had taught LeGrosso how to deal with both government agencies and private companies. If there were two things he was universally known for, at least in the universe of New York City law enforcement, they were foul cigars and an uncanny ability to navigate the bowels of the most impenetrable bureaucracy.
If it was Jaywalker’s theory that someone other than Samara had killed Barry Tannenbaum—and for the moment that had to be his theory, for lack of another—he needed a list of likely suspects. Samara had hinted in her statement to the police that Barry had made enemies on the way to amassing his fortune. Jaywalker wanted to know who those enemies were and if any of their grudges might have survived to the time of Barry’s death, might even have figured in it.
Did he hope to solve the crime that way? Hardly. He was still pretty certain that it had been Samara herself who’d plunged the knife into her husband’s chest, and almost as certain that over time she’d get around to admitting it and explaining why.
But suppose she didn’t.
Some defendants never learned to trust their lawyers with their guilt, fearful that as soon as their secret had been shared, the passion would go out of their lawyer as surely as air goes out of a punctured balloon. And who could really blame them for feeling that way, given the fact that, as a group, lawyers had managed to earn themselves the reputation of being little more than suits filled with hot air?
Jaywalker liked to think that he was different, and that one of the things that made him different was that his clients learned to trust that he would fight as hard for them if he knew they’d committed the crime as he would if he believed they hadn’t. But Samara might turn out to be one of the few who clung to her claim of innocence to the end. Should that turn out to be the case, finding Barry’s enemies might not solve the crime, but it might be enough to cast doubt on Samara’s guilt. And in a system that required the prosecution to prove her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, that could mean the ball game.
He dialed Nicky Legs’s number.
That same night, Jaywalker got a phone call from Samara. So far as he knew, he was the only criminal defense lawyer on the face of the earth who regularly gave out his home number to his clients. But he regarded it as nothing more than a necessary corollary of his also being the only lawyer who didn’t own a cell phone. He hated the things, hated everything about them, and swore he’d go to his grave before he’d buy one. So what were his clients supposed to do when they desperately needed to reach him once he’d left his office? Talk to his answering machine?
“You’re there,” she said.
“I’m here.” It seemed obvious enough, but he let it go. “What time is it?” he asked instead. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa, no doubt aided by a tumbler half full of Kahlúa.
“Five of ten,” she said. “Listen, I need to see you. Can you have me brought over tomorrow for another visit?”
“I just saw you today,” he reminded her. “For three hours. Besides, it’s too late. I have to let them know by three o’clock.”
“Shit,” she said. “How about the day after?”
“Okay, sure.”
They talked for another minute before he heard a C.O. telling her to wind it up. Evidently ten o’clock was cutoff time for the phones.
He got up from the sofa and tried to straighten up, but his back was having none of it; an ancient tennis injury saw to that. A lot of juniors on the tour got hurt, blowing out shoulders, elbows or knees on a fairly regular basis. Leave it to Jaywalker to have been different. In a moment of exhilaration following a straight-set upset of a highly ranked opponent, he’d made the mistake of jumping over the net in celebration. Most of him had cleared it, but the heel of his right sneaker had caught the very top of the tape. The result was an extremely red face (both literally and figuratively), three cracked vertebrae, and the sudden end to a promising career.
Maybe Samara was ready to trust him with the real story of Barry’s death. That would be helpful. He jotted down a note to order her over for a counsel visit the day after tomorrow. Then he drained the last sip of Kahlúa from his tumbler. It was an absurd choice of drink, and he knew it, but he was way past apologizing for it. After his wife’s death, he’d been completely unable to sleep, spending the hours twisting and turning, rearranging the covers, flipping the pillows, and reaching out for the warm body that was no longer his to find. The pills they prescribed for him left him feeling thick and groggy during the daytime, and unable to get any work done. Never much of a drinker, he gave it a try out of pure desperation and discovered that a glass of Scotch in the evening would buy him a couple hours of fitful sleep. Only thing was, it was like downing paregoric, or cod-liver oil. He tried bourbon, gin and vodka. He tried wine, beer, even hard cider. But everything tasted bitter and medicinal. Finally he followed his sweet tooth toward brandy, Amaretto and Grand Marnier, and found them drinkable, but barely. Then he came across an old, nearly empty bottle of Kahlúa in the very back of the bar cabinet. His wife had brought it back from Mexico and used it on special occasions, in place of sugar, to sweeten her coffee. Jaywalker took a swallow directly from the bottle and winced. It was almost like drinking maple syrup. But a sip or two later, he decided that once he got past the initial sweetness, he actually liked the taste of it.
Big mistake.
Huge mistake.
Still, he decided, there were probably worse things than being a nighttime alcoholic. He no longer drove, having long ago traded in his car and its $300-a-month reserved underground parking spot for a lifetime’s worth of bus and subway MetroCards. He drank alone and only at home, so as not to make a fool of himself in public. And if he was gradually destroying his liver from the alcohol and wrecking his pancreas from the sugar, well, there were probably worse ways to die, too. You could amass a fortune, for example, only to end up with the business end of a steak knife in your heart.
He turned off the light and lay back down on the sofa. The good news was that he wouldn’t have to make the bed in the morning.
10
12,652,189,412 TO 1
“So what’s up?”
“Nothing much,” said Samara.
It was two days later, and they were sitting, as before, across from one another in the twelfth-floor counsel visit room. Samara looked tired, more tired than even the four-o’clock wake-up call should have made her look. Her hair was stringy, dark semicircles had begun to appear beneath her eyes, and her skin had taken on even more of that artificial fluorescent hue to it. 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.
