Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

MR. JAYWALKER: Or he might have touched only surfaces that prints don't ad here to?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Maybe.

MR. JAYWALKER: So right there, in about a minute's time, we've come up with, let's see, five possibilities to explain why someone might have been at the crime scene the evening of the murder, yet his prints weren't found the following day. Correct?

DET. BONFIGLIO: If you say so.

MR. JAYWALKER: I just did say so. My question is, do you agree?

DET. BONFIGLIO: I dunno. I forget the question.

THE COURT: Please read the question back. (Court reporter rereads previous question)

MR. JAYWALKER: Correct, or not correct?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Correct.

It wasn't much, but it did accomplish at least two things. It brought back Jaywalker's "suspects" from the dead, even if they were now no better than on life support. And it cast the detective in the light of a partisan who was only grudgingly willing to make the most minuscule concession to the defense.

But with his halting responses and I-forget-the-question interruption, Bonfiglio had succeeded, whether intention ally or inadvertently, in depriving Jaywalker of any flow in his cross-examination. Already the jurors were begin ning to squirm in their seats, look around the courtroom and roll their eyes.

Jaywalker spent a few minutes, but only a few, on Samara's initial lies to Bonfiglio and his partner. No, at that point they hadn't yet told her that her husband had been murdered. Couldn't her response that she'd last seen him about a week ago be nothing but the equivalent of "It's none of your business"? Bonfiglio replied that he hadn't seen it that way. And hadn't Samara denied f ighting, as opposed to arguing? Perhaps. And once she'd realized the serious ness of the detectives' inquiry, hadn't she almost immedi ately told the truth, both in terms of her presence at Barry's apartment the previous evening, and that they'd had an argument? Yes, agreed Bonfiglio, though it hadn't been until they'd confronted her with evidence that she was lying.

Not much headway there.

Jaywalker moved on to the execution of the search warrant, and the discovery of the knife, the blouse and the towel.

MR. JAYWALKER: That was a large town house you and your fellow officers had to search, wouldn't you say?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Depends on whatcha mean by large.

MR. JAYWALKER: Well, how many officers and de tectives took part in the search, in total?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Countin' me?

MR. JAYWALKER: Yes.

DET. BONFIGLIO: Lemme see. Six, eight, ten. About ten.

MR. JAYWALKER: And how long were you there?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Searchin' the place? MR. JAYWALKER: Well, were you doing anything else while you were there?

DET. BONFIGLIO: No.

MR. JAYWALKER: So how long did it take?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Uh, from twenty-two-hunnerd to oh-one-one-five the next mornin'. Adds up to three hours an' fifteen minutes.

MR. JAYWALKER: Pretty large town house?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Yeah, pretty large.

MR. JAYWALKER: Fourteen rooms?

DET. BONFIGLIO: I dunno, sumpin' like that.

MR. JAYWALKER: Lots of hiding places?

DET. BONFIGLIO: I'd say so.

MR. JAYWALKER: Yet the things you found, the towel, the blouse and the knife, they were almost in plain view, weren't they?

DET. BONFIGLIO: No. They was behind the toilet tank.

MR. JAYWALKER: Well, did you have to move anything to see them?

DET. BONFIGLIO: No.

MR. JAYWALKER: Lift anything?

DET. BONFIGLIO: No.

MR. JAYWALKER: They weren't, for example, hidden inside the toilet tank, were they?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Inside it? No.

MR. JAYWALKER: If they had been, you'd have had to lift off the top of the tank in order to see them, right?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

MR. JAYWALKER: And you might have missed them.

DET. BONFIGLIO: I don't think so.

MR. JAYWALKER: Then again, if they'd been in side the tank, instead of behind it, they'd have gotten wet, right?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

MR. JAYWALKER: And some or all of the blood might have washed off, right?

DET. BONFIGLIO: I s'pose so.

MR. JAYWALKER: Making it harder, if not alto gether impossible, to identify Barry Tannenbaum's blood on them?

MR. BURKE: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained. He's not qualified to answer that.

MR. JAYWALKER: Well, would you agree, detec tive, that if the items had been unwrapped and dropped into the toilet tank itself, any blood on them would have at least become diluted by the water in the tank?

DET. BONFIGLIO: Diluted? Yeah, I guess so.

MR. JAYWALKER: But in any event, they weren't inside the tank at all, were they?

DET. BONFIGLIO: No.

MR. JAYWALKER: They were behind it.

DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

MR. JAYWALKER: Nice and dry.

DET. BONFIGLIO: Right.

MR. JAYWALKER: Neatly wrapped up.

DET. BONFIGLIO: They was wrapped up.

MR. JAYWALKER: Almost as though somebody had put them there, nice and neat, nice and dry, con fident that they'd be found.

MR. BURKE: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

Figuring that he wasn't going to get much more out of the detective, Jaywalker decided it was as good a place as any to quit.

Burke had one more thing he wanted to do before the judge broke for the day, and that was, as Jaywalker had an ticipated, to recall Roger Ramseyer, the CID detective. Ramseyer testified that the previous Friday evening he'd been provided by Detective Bonfiglio with four known sets of prints, belonging to Anthony Mazzini, Alan Man heim, William Smythe and Kenneth Redding. Ramseyer had gone in to work on Saturday, his R.D.O., to compare the prints to those lifted from Barry Tannenbaum's apart ment, but still classified as unknown.

MR. BURKE: What's an R.D.O., by the way?

DET. RAMSEYER: A regular day off.

MR. BURKE: I see. And did any of the prints on the four new cards match any of the remaining unknown prints?

DET. RAMSEYER: No, they did not.

As tempted as Jaywalker was to ask Ramseyer if he got paid for working on his day off-chances were he not only got paid, but got paid at overtime rates-he refrained from doing so. There was nothing significant to be gained by making the point, while the risk was that by showing off his knowledge, Jaywalker might come off as a wiseass. Samara was already in enough trouble with the jurors, he figured. She didn't need them disliking her lawyer on top of everything else.

With Jaywalker's "No questions," they broke for the day. As always, Judge Sobel cautioned the jurors not to discuss the case among themselves, not to come to any con clusions before the evidence was in, and to avoid going to any of the places mentioned in the testimony. Just in case any of them were planning on sneaking past the doorman that night, cutting the crime scene tape, breaking the seal and kicking in the door to Barry Tannenbaum's apartment.

But rules were rules.

Even Jaywalker, who'd quietly or not so quietly broken just about all of them at one time or another, knew that. But the knowledge did little to soothe him right now. In a trial that suddenly seemed to have as much to do with toilets and toilet tanks as anything else, it was by now pretty clear exactly where his client was headed. And as much as he hated the thought of losing his last trial, he knew that to think of defeat in personal terms was absurdly selfish. Sure, he'd be bummed out for six months or a year. But he'd deal. He'd buy himself a case of Kahlua, and he'd get over it. But for Samara, defeat wouldn't be about a batting average or a wounded ego. It would be about spending fifteen years to life in state prison. And that was the minimum.

He wondered what he could do, what rule he could break, what stunt he could pull off, to change that outcome. What had he missed? What hadn't he thought of? Or was this trial, as he'd suspected for so long, simply that one case in ten that, try as he might, there was nothing he could do about?