Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

MR. JAYWALKER: And how did that work out?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It worked out okay, for a while. He bought me a town house in Midtown and set up a joint bank account so I could furnish it. It gave me something to do, something I found out I was good at. At least I think I was. It also gave me space. I know that's a dumb California word, but it's how I felt.

MR. JAYWALKER: You say it worked out okay for a while.

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes. But the tabloids and the gossip columns are like sharks. They get a taste of blood, and they keep coming around for more. I know it was my own fault, for having started it all in the first place. But they'd stake out my home, follow me whenever I went out, snap my picture on the street corner, in the supermarket, wherever they could. If I squatted down to pick up a tissue, the next day there'd be a shot up my skirt. If I bent over instead, it would be of my butt. One time, they got me coming out of a women's health clinic, where I'd gone to have a breast exam, 'cause I thought I'd felt a lump. The photo made all the front pages, and the headlines made it sound like I had AIDS or herpes, or had just gotten an abortion. Somebody sent copies to Barry, and he went absolutely nuts. I don't blame him, re ally. I would've, too, if I'd been in his shoes.

Samara had tried to rein in her behavior, spending less time at her place and more at Barry's penthouse apart ment, or their home in Scarsdale. But with Barry con sumed by work and often absent for days at a time, she would eventually gravitate back to her own place, her own life and her own friends. Even as she could see the humiliation her behavior brought him, she felt powerless to change her behavior.

Occasionally there would be flare-ups, intense shout ing arguments filled with threats and ultimatums. Never was there physical force, yet never was there resolution, either. Instead a stalemate of sorts set in, with Samara able to continue defying Barry because by that time she had too much on him. Even as he held firm to the purse strings to her life, she would threaten to go public with his fears, his foibles, his anxieties and his sexual neuroses. If theirs was a love-hate relationship, it was sorely out of balance, with precious little love and more than enough anger to go around. Barry hated Samara for continually humiliating him and victimizing him, while Samara hated Barry for keeping her trapped in a prison without walls.

MR. JAYWALKER: How long did this stalemate continue?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Forever. I mean, we made some adjustments, some accommodations over the years. We continued to see each other and appear to gether in public when some occasion called for it. But privately, we led our own lives. I stayed at my place, and Barry at either of his. He hated it, but that's the way it was.

MR. JAYWALKER: How about your finances? Who looked after them?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Barry had lawyers and ac countants who pretty much took care of everything. If something needed to be signed, one of them would call and come over, have me sign. But mostly they took care of things without me. Barry had met me when I was eighteen and didn't know anything. By the time he…he died, I was twenty-six and had learned some stuff. But to Barry, it was like I was fro zen in time. I'd always be the eighteen-year-old cock tail waitress who couldn't be trusted to write a check. That was a big part of the problem right there.

MR. JAYWALKER: Let's go forward to August, August of a year and a half ago, the month Barry died. How did things stand between the two of you by that time?

MS. TANNENBAUM: They were pretty much the same, I guess. I was no longer a favorite of the tab loids, but every once in a while I'd do something stu pid, and there would be my photo, with my hair messed up or a nipple showing, or something like that. And Barry would get humiliated all over again and go ballistic, and we'd have a good scream over it.

At which point Judge Sobel interrupted, politely as always, and asked if it might be a good time for the midafternoon break. Some judges fall asleep during testi mony; others try to take down every word on a laptop; still others work on shopping lists, bill paying, check book balancing and Little League lineups. Matthew Sobel listened. And from listening, he knew that Jay walker had reached the moment when he was about to have Samara describe the evening of the murder, and he decided that the jurors should be as fresh and alert as possible for her account.

"It would be a perfect time," said Jaywalker.

The day had gone reasonably well, he felt. If, in the afternoon session, Samara had been guarded emotion ally, and surely she had been, at least she hadn't allowed her reticence to cut her answers short. Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by a lawyer in examining his own client is that the defendant will invariably try to summarize the facts instead of elaborating on them. Good lawyers will therefore devote hours of practice sessions to drawing out the minute details of events, re peatedly explaining to the witness the need to convey those details to the jury. Jaywalker, as he did with most things, took it a step further.

"You're going to get nervous on the witness stand," he'd told Samara more than once. "You're going to look out from where you're sitting and see hundreds of strangers. You're going to see reporters and sketch artists and gawkers. It's going to freak you out, trust me. And when that happens, your natural impulse is going to be to sum marize, to cut things short. Everybody does it. What I need is for you to fight that impulse as hard as you possibly can. And the best way to fight it is to slow down and give me as much detail as you can come up with."

It had worked.

Had Samara testified simply that Barry had been a hypo chondriac preoccupied with his health, the jurors would have heard her, but it would have been only her intellec tual conclusion that they heard. When she went on to describe how, having come across an item about mice on the Internet, Barry had become afraid to ejaculate, lest it shorten his life span by a month, they got it. So, too, when she'd complained about how the tabloid photographers wouldn't let her alone. Words. Only when she described the health clinic episode and the headline suggesting she had AIDS or herpes or was coming from an abortion, or when she talked about the photo revealing her nipple, did she give them something to truly picture and remember and take home with them that night. The difference lay in the fact that they hadn't been forced to accept her conclusions. Instead they'd taken her details and drawn their own con clusions from them.

What Jaywalker was less happy about was the way Samara had been so ready to acknowledge the depth of her anger at Barry. Where had that come from? He couldn't remember her bringing it up in any of their sessions. Had she done so, he almost certainly would have worked with her to tone it down. As it stood, that anger, especially when coupled with the life insurance policy, could have provided her with enough motivation to kill Barry a dozen times over. And Tom Burke certainly hadn't missed it. Jaywalker had noticed him out of the corner of his eye, scribbling away on his notepad, as soon as the words were out of Sa mara's mouth.

Not that Jaywalker himself wouldn't do his best to patch things up before Burke got a chance to exploit them. Still, the anger was there, and it didn't help matters.

With the jurors settled back in their seats following the recess, Jaywalker wasted no time in getting to the part of Samara's testimony that they'd been waiting for all day. Waiting for, as a matter of fact, for a week and a half now.

MR. JAYWALKER: Do you recall the very last time you saw Barry?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I do.

MR. JAYWALKER: When was that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: The evening everyone says he was murdered.