Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

MR. BURKE: Can you describe her general demeanor?

DET. BONFIGLIO: She was real nervous like, she

MR. JAYWALKER: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

MR. JAYWALKER: Move to strike.

THE COURT: Yes, the answer is stricken, and the jury will disregard it.

Fat chance, Jaywalker knew. Still, even though he couldn't expect the jurors to unhear it, he'd had to keep it out; otherwise Burke would be permitted to refer to it in his summation. But Burke was determined to get it in.

MR. BURKE: Detective, did you have a chance to observe Mrs. Tannenbaum while you questioned her?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Yes, I did.

MR. BURKE: Tell us some of the things you observed.

DET. BONFIGLIO: Observed? I dunno, I observed her face, her arms, her legs, her

MR. BURKE: I mean regarding her demeanor.

DET. BONFIGLIO: Oh. She was pespirin' a lot. You know, sweating. And her hands was like shaking. And she'd look away from me, every time I tried to make eye contack wid her.

MR. BURKE: Did there eventually come a time when you took some po lice action with respect to her?

Jaywalker, who'd been about to rise, eased back in his chair. Burke, to his credit, had skipped the part about Samara's saying she wanted to call her lawyer, as well as her refusal to consent to a search of her apartment without a warrant. Eliciting either of those facts would have been improper, since they represented nothing but Samara's in vocation of her constitutional rights-in this case her right to counsel, her right to silence and her right to be free from unreasonable searches-and no inferences adverse to her could properly have been drawn by the jury. Still, there were plenty of prosecutors who would have tried, whether out of ignorance or arrogance. Jaywalker was only half sorry Burke hadn't; if he had, at least Samara would have had something to argue on appeal.

DET. BONFIGLIO: 'Scuse me? I don't unnastand.

Burke shot a look over at Jaywalker, who gave him a nod, meaning, Go ahead, lead the witness; I won't object. Although the two of them had never gotten far enough to try a case against each other before this one, they were un failingly on the same page.

MR. BURKE: Did there come a time when you placed Mrs. Tannenbaum under arrest?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah.

MR. BURKE: And what did you arrest her for?

DET. BONFIGLIO: For the murder of her husband.

MR. BURKE: Thank you. Detective, I now draw your attention to later that same day. Did there come a time when you and other members of the de partment executed a search warrant in connection with this investigation?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah.

MR. BURKE: Where did that take place?

DET. BONFIGLIO: At Mrs. Tannenbaum's town house.

MR. BURKE: When did that take place?

DET. BONFIGLIO: That same night, at twenty-two hunnerd hours. Ten o'clock, to you.

MR. BURKE: Would you tell the jurors what you found, and where you found it?

DET. BONFIGLIO: There was a buncha stuff found. But me, personally, what I found was wedged in be tween a toilet tank and the wall in a upstairs bath room. It was three things, ackshully. First, a blue bathroom towel, with some dark red stains on it. In side it was a lady's shirt, same kinda stains. An' in side that was a knife, like a steak knife. It had stains, too.

One by one, Burke had a court officer hand the items to the witness, so that he could identify them. Although the stains on them were small-far smaller, for example, than the stain on the sweater the jurors had seen in the photo graph of Barry Tannenbaum's body-they were nonethe less visible. With no objection from Jaywalker, the items were received in evidence. Burke asked permission to publish them to the jury, and Judge Sobel agreed.

This time the procedure was a little different. Before handing the items to the jurors, a court officer supplied each of them with a pair of latex gloves. The handling of bloodstained items had changed drastically since the dawning of the age of AIDS.

Jaywalker watched the jurors out of the corner of his eye as they passed the exhibits among them. As far as he could tell, neither the towel nor the blouse caused too much of a reaction. But when it came to the knife, there were jurors who recoiled from it and refused to touch it, even through gloves, and others who took the opportunity to stare at Samara with cold, hard looks. Even from where Jaywalker sat, a good twenty feet from the jury box, there was no missing the serrated edge, the sharply-tipped point and the pronounced hilt.

For Jaywalker and his client, this was an exceedingly uncomfortable moment, the kind of moment that made him want to crawl underneath the defense table and out of sight. But being a defense lawyer meant he couldn't do that. So instead he just sat there, pretending to review some notes and trying to look as nonchalant as possible, despite the fact that he felt as though he'd just been hit with a sledgehammer. Even when the jurors had finally com pleted their inspection of the knife, a process that had seemed to take hours, Jaywalker's agony wasn't over. Burke wanted more out of Bonfiglio.

He asked the detective if he'd conducted some further investigation on the case the previous Friday, just three days ago. Bonfiglio replied that he had. He'd located Anthony Mazzini, the super at Barry Tannenbaum's build ing; Alan Manheim, until recently one of Mr. Tannen baum's lawyers; and William Smythe, Mr. Tannenbaum's personal accountant. With the consent of each of them, he'd taken a full set of their fingerprints. Kenneth Redding, the president of the building's co-op board, had been out of town. But because Redding was a former navy SEAL and had once gone through a security clearance investiga tion, his prints were on file with the Pentagon, and Bon figlio had been able to obtain a copy of them. He'd then delivered all four sets of prints to Roger Ramseyer, the CID detective who'd testified on Thursday.

At that point Jaywalker managed to get Burke's attention, and the two of them huddled for a moment off to the side.

"You want a stipulation?" Jaywalker asked.

"No, thanks."

Burke's reply was quick enough-and decisive enough- to tell Jaywalker that it was more than a matter of prose cutorial stubbornness. Burke intended to bring Detective Ramseyer back to the stand, so he could squeeze a bit of drama out of the fact that in spite of Jaywalker's earlier in sinuations, there'd been no matches between any of the "suspects" Jaywalker had asked Ramseyer about, once their known prints had been compared with the remaining unknowns found at the crime scene.

He who opens doors sometimes gets his fingers slammed.

Jaywalker didn't really have much to cross-examine Bonfiglio about, and with the wind pretty much gone out of the defense's sails, he barely felt up to the task. But the detective had hurt Samara too much to be ignored. Besides which, his testimony had been so central to the case that there was a good chance the jury might want all or part of it read back to them during their deliberations. There was no way Jaywalker could let such a read-back contain noth ing but direct examination. With that in mind, he decided to begin where Burke had left off.

MR. JAYWALKER: Tell me, detective. Does the failure to find an individual's fingerprints at a crime scene rule him out as a suspect?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Not necessarily.

MR. JAYWALKER: Is that the same as "No"?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah, I guess so.

MR. JAYWALKER: So it doesn't rule him out. Correct?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Correct.

MR. JAYWALKER: Can you tell us some of the rea sons why it doesn't?

DET. BONFIGLIO: He mighta been wearin'gloves. He mighta not touched nothin'. He mighta wiped his prints off whaddeva he did touch.

MR. JAYWALKER: Or Crime Scene might have missed his prints?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Maybe.