Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

"Do you want to go over cross-examination?" she asked. "One last time?"

"No," he said, "you're ready." Which was his way of saying, If you're not now, you never will be. He hailed her a cab and opened the door for her to get in.

"You sure?" she asked. "I mean, we have until tomorrow afternoon. To get me even readier, I mean."

He smiled at the transparency of her invitation. "Re member what we said," he reminded her.

"After," she said.

"After," he echoed.

At home that evening, Jaywalker pondered the trial schedule. Tomorrow was Thursday. Burke could easily take all afternoon cross-examining Samara. Add on re direct and recross, and she might even be back on the stand Friday morning. Having steered clear of the Seconal issue, Jaywalker had no other witnesses to call, and he doubted that Burke would feel the need to put on a rebuttal case. But even if Samara were to finish up tomorrow, that still left the charge conference with the judge, which would take an hour, and the two summations, figure a couple of hours each. Judge Sobel wouldn't charge the jury and give them the case on Friday afternoon, not with the weekend coming. It was one thing to bring a deliberating jury back on a Saturday and then waste Sunday when you had no choice, but quite another to do it deliberately. Particularly in winter, when it meant having to heat the courtroom and the jury room.

So whenever Samara finished, whether it was tomorrow afternoon or sometime Friday, summations wouldn't take place until Monday, at the earliest. Which meant that Tom Burke was the only one who had to stay up late tonight, working on his cross-examination of Samara. Well, too bad for him. For once in his life, Jaywalker could afford to relax and forget about a case he was in the midst of trying.

As if.

There's a general rule that prosecutors make poor crossexaminers. Not that there's anything innate about this par ticular characteristic, at least not in the sense that the job somehow attracts underqualified questioners or corrupts qualified ones. Rather, it's more likely a simple matter of insufficient practice. Many trials, if not most, consist of a series of prosecution witnesses and few, if any, defense wit nesses. As a result, the assistant district attorney typically gets all sorts of opportunities to conduct direct examina tions of various sizes, shapes and varieties, but only rarely does he get a chance to cross-examine. And when he does, that lack of practice tends to show.

Not so with Tom Burke.

Because a handful of cases from Judge Sobel's calendar call were still left over from the morning session, Burke didn't begin with Samara until just after three o'clock. When he did, he took her back to her very first encounter with Barry, back to when she was eighteen and working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace.

MR. BURKE: That was a very short time after you had, as you put it, been accepting money and other gifts for sexual favors. Isn't that so?

MS. TANNENBAUM:

MR. BURKE:

MS. TANNENBAUM:

MR. BURKE: I'm not sure I said "sexual favors," but yes, it was a short time after that. So whatever you want to call it, you'd stopped doing it. That's right. I'd turned eigh teen, finally, and I was get ting a paycheck. And then one night you spied Barry Tannenbaum.

MS. TANNENBAUM: Right. Although I didn't

MR. BURKE:

MS. TANNENBAUM:

MR. BURKE:

MS. TANNENBAUM:

MR. BURKE:

MS. TANNENBAUM: know he was Barry Tan nenbaum, or who Barry Tannenbaum was. I see. Tell us, did he initiate contact with you, or did you initiate contact with him? I'm not sure what you mean by initiate contact. Did he approach you first, or did you approach him? I approached him. In fact, you began bringing him drinks. Diet Cokes.

MR. BURKE: Those are drinks, aren't they?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Not in Vegas, they're not.

A ripple of laughter from the jury box signaled that Samara had scored a point. More importantly, it suggested that they were still willing to like her. But Jaywalker also detected a danger sign in Samara's answers. She was sparring with Burke, trying to get the better of him whenever she could, even in little ways. Jaywalker had warned her against that, but now he was seeing how hard it was for her to suppress her natural feistiness. Chill out, he told her subliminally, and just answer the questions. But even as he sent her the message, he doubted that she was fully capable of hearing it.

MR. BURKE: And isn't it a fact, Mrs. Tan nenbaum, that when your shift ended that night, you and Barry went out?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Went out? No, that's not a fact.

MR. BURKE: Where did you go?

MS. TANNENBAUM: To his apartment, upstairs in the hotel.

MR. BURKE: Ah. That's not going out, is it?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Here's the problem I'm having, Mr. Burke.

Jaywalker cringed in his seat. The last thing he wanted from Samara was combativeness. Sixty seconds into her cross-examination, she was about to deliver a lecture to Burke, to tell him what was wrong with his questions. Jay walker tried to think of a basis on which to object, but couldn't. Besides, the jury would only see it for what it was, an attempt to shut up his own client. He slid down in his seat, gritted his teeth and waited for the worst.

MS. TANNENBAUM: (Continuing) Where I come from, and especially in Las Vegas, some of these terms you're using have special meanings. Drinks have alcohol in them. P artying means doing cocaine. Dating means having sex. And going out means hav ing sex on a regular basis.

There was actually an audible clap from somewhere in the jury box. Jaywalker felt his teeth unclench ever so slightly, and his body began to relax a bit. He allowed himself to straighten up in his chair and exhale a breath he suddenly realized he'd been holding so long he could feel his pulse pounding in his temples. Maybe, just maybe, Samara had what it took to pull this off, after all.

But Burke had a nice way of rolling with the punch. Instead of taking issue with Samara's speech and trying to pick it apart, he genuinely seemed to get a kick out of it. He quickly established that whatever one wanted to call it, she had indeed spent a number of hours in Barry's hotel room that first night. He left it to the jurors to decide pre cisely what they were doing. Then he took Samara to the point where she'd learned who Barry was, and how much money he was reported to have.

MR. BURKE: When did you learn about that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm not sure. Maybe two weeks after we'd met. Something like that.

MR. BURKE: From an article in a magazine, right?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Right.

MR. BURKE: And how soon after that did

MS. TANNENBAUM: You're doing it again.

MR. BURKE: Excuse me? you fly to New York to be with him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I need to know what you mean by "be with him."

MR. BURKE: Touche. T o visit him. Is that better?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Much better. I came to New York about two weeks after I found out.

MR. BURKE: And within six months, you were married.

MS. TANNENBAUM: That's right.

Burke left it there. The timing of the events made the implication clear enough. Jaywalker had spent hours pre paring Samara for a barrage of questions about how much Barry's wealth had to do with her marrying him. It was a factor, she was readily prepared to admit, but so were his tenderness, his gentleness and his interest in the things she had to say, which were all novel concepts to her. But Burke was smart enough to know that Jaywalker would have primed Samara with just that sort of response, and he wasn't about to give her an opening.

He showed her a copy of the prenuptial agreement, which bore a date one week before the wedding, and asked her if the signature at the bottom was hers.