The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller
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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.
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“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