(Continued on page 36)
Jaywalker unfolded the paper and thumbed his way through the section until he found page 36. He spread it open in front of him, fully intending to read the balance of the article. But it would turn out to be hours before he did. What stopped him was a pair of photographs, typical black-and-white newspaper portraits arranged side by side. The one to the left was of a slight balding man in a busi ness suit and tie who, Jaywalker knew, had to be the vic tim. But he never so much as read the caption beneath it. It was the other photo, the one to the right, that captured him. Staring directly at him was Samara Tannenbaum, her eyes narrowly set and black as coals, her lower lip curled into what either was or could easily have been mistaken for a pout. Jaywalker would stare at the photograph for what seemed like hours, as utterly unable to look away as he had been the day she'd first walked into his office six years earlier.
For two full days he thought of no one and nothing else. He thought about her lying in bed at night. He dreamed about her. He awoke thinking about her. He had to beg a judge for an adjournment of a trial long sched uled to begin, feigning conjunctivitis when the real problem was concentration. He ate little, slept less and lost six pounds.
Just before two o'clock in the afternoon of the third day, as he was getting ready to go back to court for a sentenc ing on a marijuana case, the phone rang. Jaywalker was going to let the answering machine get it, but at the last moment he decided to pick up.
"Jaywalker," he said.
"Samara," said a recorded female voice, followed by a male one, "is calling collect from a correctional facility. If you wish to accept the charges, please press one now."
Jaywalker pressed one.
He met with her the following day, at the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island. Met with being some thing of a stretch, since their conversation was in actuality conducted through a five-inch circular hole cut out of the center of a wire-reinforced, bulletproof pane of glass.
"You look terrible," he told her.
"Thanks."
It was true, in a way, the same way Natalie Wood might have looked terrible after four days in jail, or a young Elizabeth Taylor. Samara's hair was a tangle of knots (so much for its being naturally straight), her eyes were puffy and bloodshot and her skin had an artificial, fluorescent cast to it. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit that had to be three sizes too big for her. Yet once again, Jaywalker found it impossible to take his eyes off her.
"I didn't do it," she said.
He nodded. Earlier that morning, he had phoned the lawyer who'd been assigned to stand up for her at her first court appearance. They'd talked for ten minutes, long enough for Jaywalker to learn that the charge was murder, that the detectives had executed a search warrant at Samara's town house and come up with a veritable shitload of evidence, including a knife with what looked like dried blood on it, and that Samara was so far denying her guilt.
That was okay. A lot of Jaywalker's clients claimed they were innocent early on in the game. It was only after they'd gotten to know him for a while that they dared to trust him with the truth. He understood that, and knew that it was part of his job to gain that trust. Also that it was a process, one that didn't always come easily. Sometimes it didn't come at all. When that happened, Jaywalker consid ered the failure his, not his client's.
With Samara, he was pretty sure, the trust and the truth would come. But not now, not here. Not through reinforced bulletproof glass, with a corrections officer seated fifteen feet away and, Jaywalker had to assume, a microphone hidden somewhere even closer. So every time Samara started talking about the case, he steered her away from it, assuring her that she'd have plenty of time to tell her story.
The truth was, Jaywalker was there not to win the case at that point but just to g et it. In that sense, he knew, he was no better than the P.I. lawyers in his suite, the ambulance chasers. They made hospital calls and home visits in order to sign up clients before the competition beat them to it. He was doing the same thing. The only difference was that it wasn't some bedside he was visiting. That and the fact that his client had arrived here not by ambulance, but chained to the seat of a Department of Corrections bus.
"Will you take my case?"
It was the exact same question she'd asked him six years ago. There wasn't much he'd forgotten about her over that time, he realized. He gave her the same answer now that he'd given her then.
"Yes."
She smiled.
"About the fee," he said.
He hated that part. But it was what he did for a living, after all, how he paid his bills. And he was already in trouble with the disciplinary committee, with the very real possibility of a lengthy suspension looming on the horizon. Jaywalker was no stranger to pro bono work, having done his share and then some over the years. But with unemploy ment in his future, now was no time to be handing out freebies. Not on a murder case, anyway, especially one where the defendant was claiming to be innocent and might well insist on going to trial.
"I'll be worth a zillion dollars," said Samara, "once Barry's estate gets prorated."
He didn't bother correcting her word choice. Still, he knew that it would be months, probably years, before there would be a distribution of assets. Moreover, if Sa mara were to be convicted of killing her husband, the law would bar her from inheriting a cent. He didn't tell her that, either, of course. Instead, he simply asked, "And in the meantime?"
She shrugged a little-girl shrug.
"Should I get in touch with Robert?" Jaywalker asked her.
"Robert's gone," she said. "Barry discovered he was stealing."
"Is there a new Robert?"
"There's a new chauffeur, although…" Her voice trailed off. "But," she suddenly brightened, "I have a bank account of my own now, sort of."
The "sort of" struck Jaywalker as a strange qualifier, but at least it represented progress. He remembered the twenty-year-old who hadn't been permitted to deal with money matters.
"With how much in it?"
Another 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 pre sented 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 quizzi cally, 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 in fluence 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?"