Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

Court dates.

By mid-July it was clear to Jaywalker that Samara's case wouldn't go to trial until fall, at the very earliest. Like therapists, judges tend to take their vacations in August. So do prosecutors, defense lawyers, clerks, court officers, ste nographers and even jurors. A handful of trials are held, but by and large they involve long-term detainees. Bail cases that make it through July almost always make it through August, as well. Samara's would be no exception; it was adjourned until right after Labor Day. This adjourn ment was slightly different from the previous ones, how ever. For the first time, in announcing the new date, Judge Sobel added the words "for hearing and trial."

But even that phrase was a misnomer, Jaywalker knew. All it meant was that there was nothing left but the hearing and the trial. There still remained other cases ahead of theirs, some older, some younger but involving jailed de fendants. By Jaywalker's calculation, a September trial was unlikely, with October or November no better than even money. And once you got into December, there were the holidays looming, and you were safe until January.

With his law practice whittled down to a single case, it would have been vintage Jaywalker to throw all his con siderable energy into preparing for it. He'd won trials in the past by walking into court not only better prepared than his adversary but infinitely better prepared. He would visit and revisit crime scenes, interview witnesses to the point of exhaustion, all but commit reports to memory, and organize his case file into subfiles and sub-subfiles that would enable him to locate the most obscure document on a moment's notice, without having to shuffle papers and fumble around for it.

Now, as summer stretched into fall, he did none of that. Instead he spent mornings sleeping in, and afternoons taking long walks by the river or sunning himself on a park bench. Evenings he propped himself in front of the TV, half watching a Yankee game or an old movie, a tumbler of Kahlua on the table beside him.

And when winter came, the only concessions he made were to sleep in even later in the morning, to bundle up and walk more briskly in the afternoon, and to switch from baseball to football or basketball in the evening.

Just because he was going to have to lose the last trial of his career, that didn't mean he had to spend an entire year doing it.

Would he have kept it up, this totally uncharacteristic avoidance of responsibility? Would he have gone into trial no better prepared-and indeed, considerably less prepared- than the prosecution? Or would he have awakened on his own from his self-inflicted paralysis in time to pull himself together, put in the long hours that had become his trade mark, and-even if he were destined to lose-try the case of his life, as he had every other time out?

The answer is, there's simply no way of knowing for sure. Because before Jaywalker could awake on his own, if ever he was going to, the phone woke him. It rang on a Thursday night in mid-December. He picked up on the sixth ring, or maybe the seventh. He'd been asleep at the time, so he had no way of knowing. And he'd disconnected his answering machine months earlier, shortly after his list of remaining cases had dwindled down to one.

He mumbled "Jaywalker" into the phone, his voice thick with Kahlua and sleep. He found the remote and muted the TV set, half noticing that an old M*A*S*H episode was on. Hawkeye and Radar were planning some trick on Frank Burns.

"Are you awake?" It was a woman's voice, a vaguely familiar one. For an instant he thought it might be his wife. Then he remembered. His wife was dead. She'd died almost a dozen years ago.

"Sorta," he said. "Who is this?"

"Sam."

"What time is it?"

"Eleven," she said. "Five after eleven."

"Jesus."

"Jaywalker?"

"Yeah?"

"I need you to come over."

"Now?" he asked.

"Now."

"Why?"

"Because I've found something."

Samara met his cab in front of her town house and ushered him in. She took his overcoat, a threadbare thing he'd owned forever, and hung it up in a closet, unnecessarily dignifying it, as far as Jaywalker was concerned. He would have preferred to toss it on a chair, or, better yet, to keep it on for warmth. What time had she said it was?

"You're freezing," she said. She left the room, and when she reappeared, she was carrying a wool blanket. Without so much as asking him, she pushed him down onto a chair, straddled him and wrapped the blanket around him, tuck ing the corners underneath him. She could be a real Nurse Ratched when she wanted to be.

He tried to tell her that, and to explain that he was fine without it, but a sudden lump in his throat kept the words from coming out. Once, when he and his wife had been hiking too late in the year in the Canadian Rockies, they'd made it back to their cabin in the early stages of hypother mia, shivering uncontrollably. They'd stripped off their clothes, pulled the blankets off the bed, swaddled them selves together in them, and spent the rest of the day laughing and loving themselves warm.

"I'm okay," he said, not because he was, but because he needed to hear the sound of his own voice to bring him back from where he'd gone.

"You're not okay," she told him. "You're freezing. Keep it on. I don't want to be responsible when you get pneu monia and die."

Even as he succumbed and kept the blanket wrapped around him, he was aware that there was something about the way she'd said it that bothered him. Not the part about her ordering him around; that felt strangely comforting. No, it was the other part. Shouldn't she have said, " if you get pneumonia and die," rather than "when"? He decided it was a thought best kept to himself.

"Okay," he said. "Tell me what you found."

"Come," she said.

He and the blanket followed her up a flight of stairs and into a kitchen that looked spotless. Either Samara was an extremely neat housekeeper or a woman in the same mold as her late husband, who'd never cooked. He was pretty sure where he would lay his money on that one.

She walked past the stove and opened a narrow cabinet. Inside were little jars of herbs and spices, the expensive organic ones.

"Look," she said.

He looked. He saw basil, oregano, parsley, tarragon, cumin and a dozen others. "Look at what?" he asked. He found it hard to believe that she'd called him to come over in the middle of the night because she'd suddenly discov ered she had spices.

"In the back row," she said.

He looked in the back row. There, among the little jars, was an amber-colored plastic container with a white top, the kind prescription drugs came in. He reached in and lifted it out by the ribbed top, being careful not to touch the smoother surface of the container itself. He read the label, saw that it was in Samara's name, had been pre scribed by a Dr. Samuel Musgrove, and had been filled a year ago August. That would have been less than a month before Barry's murder. It was for Seconal, twenty-five pills. He held the bottle up to the light. Inside were three or four whole pills and a powder of ground-up ones. All told, the bottle was about a quarter of the way full. He guessed that at least half the pills had been removed.

It was, Jaywalker instantly knew, a piece of evidence every bit as incriminating as that twenty-five-million-dollar insurance policy Samara had taken out on Barry's life right around the same time and had since conveniently forgot ten about. Only this time she'd dodged a bullet; in search ing the house, the police somehow hadn't noticed the pills.

"Tell me about this," he said.

"There's nothing to tell," said Samara, punctuating her remark with one of her trademark shrugs. "I've never seen it before. I don't know anything about it."