The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller
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one of them.
“So what?”
“So we’d like to know if it’s true, that’s all.”
“So what if it is?”
“Is it?”
Samara seemed to think for a moment before answering. Then she said, “Yeah, sure. We had dinner together.”
“At a restaurant, or at your husband’s apartment?”
“His apartment.”
“Did he cook?”
“Barry? Cook?” She laughed. “The man couldn’t boil water. He told me the first thing he did when he bought the apartment was to have the stove ripped out to make room for a bigger table.”
“What did you eat?”
“Chinks.”
Being detectives, they didn’t have to ask her what she meant. Besides, the crime scene guys had found half-empty containers of Chinese takeout on the counter and in the garbage, when they’d been looking for a weapon.
“Are we done here?” she asked. “Or maybe you’d like to know how many steamed dumplings I ate.”
“Did you have a fight?” they asked.
“No.”
“We’ve got people who tell us they heard a fight.”
“So? Big deal. We always fight.”
“Who hit who first?”
“Nobody hit nobody.”
Jaywalker wondered if maybe Samara might not have made a pretty good cop.
“So what kind of a fight was it?”
“A word fight. An argument, I believe they call it.”
“About what?”
“Who the fuck remembers? Stupid stuff. He started it.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know. I told him he could go fuck himself, and I left. Now maybe you’d like to tell me what this is all about?”
“Sure. It’s about your husband’s murder.”
“Barry? Murdered? You’re shitting me.”
They said they weren’t shitting her.
“Wait a minute,” she said, the light finally going on. “You think I killed Barry?”
They said nothing.
“I want a lawyer,” said Samara.
The magic word having been uttered, the interview was effectively over. Nonetheless, the detectives weren’t quite done. “Would it be okay if we had a quick look around?” they asked her.
“You got a warrant?”
“We can get one,” they said. “Or you can save us all a lot of time and trouble.”
She looked them in the eye and said, “I ain’t saving you shit.”
With that, they “did handcuff her, pat her down, administrated her Miranda rights, exited the premises, and transported her to the precinct for fingerprinting, processing and mug shooting.”
God bless.
Whatever time and trouble it had cost them, that afternoon the detectives did indeed apply for and obtain a search warrant for Samara’s town house, aimed at finding “a weapon or other instrument, as well as other physical evidence relating directly or indirectly to the murder of Barrington Tannenbaum.”
Apparently Tom Burke had taken over the writing.
The warrant was executed the same evening. The return listed more than two dozen items that had been seized. It was hard at that point for Jaywalker to appreciate the significance of most of them, but at least three were pretty easy to understand.
6. One silver-handled, steel-bladed steak knife, 9 inches long overall, with a sharply pointed tip and a blade 5 inches long by three-quarters of an inch wide by one-sixteenth of an inch thick, on which there appears to be a dried, dark-red stain.
9. One blue towel, with an irregular dark-red stain measuring approximately 1" x 3".
17. One ladies’ blouse, size S, with a dark-red splatter pattern on the front, approximately 3" in diameter.
If the nature of the items was troubling to Jaywalker, the location where they’d been discovered was just as damning. All three had been found rolled up together and wedged behind the toilet tank of a top-floor guest bathroom.
Those items, along with a number of others removed from the crime scene, were currently being tested for the presence of DNA. Fingerprint comparisons were awaited. In addition, a full autopsy had been conducted on Barry’s body, and a report was expected in a few weeks, as well as serology and toxicology findings. Hair and fiber analyses were being done, too.
Yet as bad as things looked for Samara at the moment, Jaywalker had every confidence that given a little time, they would look a lot worse.
He turned off the light and lay on his back in the darkness. Samara Tannenbaum’s face appeared at the foot of his bed, her eyes darker even than the room, her lower lip pouting.
“I didn’t do it,” she said.
Right.
7
180.80 DAY
Monday was Samara’s “One-eighty-eighty” day, a reference to the section of the Criminal Procedure Law that entitles a defendant to be released unless the prosecution has obtained an indictment or is ready to go forward with a preliminary hearing. A lot of defendants do get released: complaining witnesses disappear, cops screw up and assistant D.A.s occasionally get overextended, and have to pick and choose which cases to treat as priorities and which to let slide. Some defendants are lucky enough to slip into the cracks that are inevitable in a system that processes many thousands of cases a year.
Barry Tannenbaum having disappeared in the most literal sense imaginable, the complaining witness in Samara’s case was now The People of the State of New York, and they weren’t going anywhere. As far as Jaywalker knew, no cops had screwed up, so long as spelling and grammar didn’t count. Tom Burke was certainly treating the case as his top priority, if not his career-maker. Given all that, the chances of Samara’s case slipping into some crack, necessitating her release from jail, were absolutely zero.
Jaywalker explained all this to her before they went before the judge, during a five-minute conversation in the “feeder pen” adjoining the courtroom. The term, no doubt, had come from the fact that the small lockup “feeds” defendants into the courtroom, one by one. But every time he heard it, Jaywalker couldn’t help but picture bait fish being served up to frenzied sharks, or small rodents to ravenous wolves.
“After the court appearance,” he told Samara, “we’ll sit down in the counsel visit room and talk as much as we need. Okay?”
She nodded, looking appropriately worried.
He described what would happen when they appeared before the judge: in a word, nothing. Once an indictment was announced, the only remaining bit of business would be the setting of an adjourned date.
“Can you make a bail application?” Samara asked.
Apparently she’d been getting some jailhouse advice, a commodity never in short supply on Rikers Island. Inmates devour every word of it, never pausing to notice that the dispensers of the advice have one thing in common: every last one of them is still sitting in jail.
“I can,” he told her, “but it’ll only