will,” she promised.
5
RIKERS ISLAND
Promises being what they are, they occasionally go unkept.
Six years later, Jaywalker had been looking over the front page of the New York Times Metropolitan section when he spotted an item well below the center fold. Apparently the Times considered the news fit to print, but only barely.
WIFE HELD IN KILLING OF WEALTHY FINANCIER
it said. He might have read no farther, having little empathy for financiers on the best of days, let alone wealthy financiers. In fact, he was trying to figure out if the phrase was redundant when his eyes, drifting down the fine print, came to rest on the name Samara Moss Tannenbaum, and stopped right there. It was as though he were suddenly seeing her again, sitting across his office desk, utterly powerless to take his eyes off her, just as now he was powerless to take them off her printed name.
He forced himself to blink, once, then twice, just so he could look away. Then he lowered himself into his chair—the same chair he’d sat in six years earlier, behind the same desk—and, folding the paper in half, began to read.
A 26-year-old woman was arrested early this morning in connection with the death of her husband, a financier described by Forbes magazine as having a net worth in excess of ten billion dollars.
According to a source close to the investigation, who insisted upon anonymity because he is unauthorized to speak publicly for the police department, Samara Moss Tannenbaum was accused of stabbing her husband, Barrington Tannenbaum, 70, once in the chest. The wound was deep enough to perforate the victim’s heart and cause him to bleed to death, said the source.
(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 business suit and tie who, Jaywalker knew, had to be the victim. 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 scheduled 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 sentencing 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 something 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 considered 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 get 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 unemployment 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 Samara 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