Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

He talked less about the guilty ones he also got off, but he didn't lose sleep over them. He believed passionately in the system that entitled the accused- any accused, no matter how despicable the individual, how heinous the crime, or how overwhelming the proof against him-to one person in his corner who would fight as hard and as well as he possibly could for him. That left it to the city's thirty thousand cops, two thousand prosecutors and five hundred judges (the great majority of whom were former prosecu tors, tough-on-crime politicians, or both) to fight just as hard and just as well to put the guy away forever. That made for pretty fair odds, as far as Jaywalker was con cerned, and if he succeeded in overcoming them-as he'd been doing on a pretty regular basis lately-he felt no need to apologize. It all came down to a simple choice, he'd realized long ago. You fought like hell, trying your hardest to win-yes, win — or you regarded it as nothing but a job, and you simply went through the motions. Jaywalker knew a lot of lawyers who did just that. When they lost-and they lost every bit as often as Jaywalker won-they shrugged it off and said things like, "The scumbag was guilty," "The idiot self-destructed on the witness stand," or "Justice was done." Jaywalker had a term for them. He called them whores.

Tolerance had never been one of his virtues.

He phoned Tom Burke, the assistant D.A. who was prosecuting Samara Tannenbaum. He'd seen Burke's name in the T imes article, and had confirmed that it was his case during the conversation he'd had with the lawyer who'd handled Samara's initial court appearance.

"Burke," said a deep voice.

"Why don't you pick on somebody your own size?" Jay walker asked.

"Who is this?"

"What's the matter, doesn't the old man spring for caller ID?"

"Are you kidding?"

"I never kid."

"Jaywalker?"

"Very good."

Jaywalker liked Burke. They'd had a couple of cases together in the past, though none of them had ended up going to trial. Burke was no legal scholar, but he was a hardworking, straight-shooting, seat-of-the-pants lawyer.

"How the fuck are you?" he asked.

"Not bad," said Jaywalker.

"Let me guess. Samara Tannenbaum?"

"Bingo."

"Why am I not surprised?" Then, "Oh, yeah. You rep resented her on that DWI thing."

"I see you've been doing your homework."

"You assigned?" Burke asked.

"No," said Jaywalker. "I weaned myself off the public tit some time ago, just in time to miss the rate hike." It was the truth. Fresh out of Legal Aid, Jaywalker had been happy to take all the court-appointed cases he could get, even at twenty-five dollars an hour for out-of-court work and forty an hour for in-court. He'd been putting his daughter through law school at the time, and needed every cent to do it. Once she'd graduated and had found a job, he'd stopped taking assignments, except for an occasional favor to a judge, or when New York briefly restored the death penalty. A few years ago, under pressure from a lawsuit, they'd finally gotten around to raising the rates to seventyfive an hour, in-court and out. But Jaywalker hadn't been tempted. By that time he had enough private work to keep him busy, and his expenses were low enough that he didn't need the extra money. Getting rich had never been high on his list of priorities.

"If you don't mind my asking," said Burke, "who's retained you?"

"Samara. Or at least she's in the process."

"It's not going to work."

"Oh?"

"I've gotten an order freezing all of Barry Tannen baum's assets," said Burke. "Including a bank account in Samara's name."

"Shit," was all Jaywalker could think to say.

Tom Burke had only been doing his job, of course. He'd been able to trace the deposits to Samara's account and demonstrate to a judge that every dollar-and there were currently nearly two hundred thousand of them-had come from her husband. Under the law, if Samara were to be con victed of killing him, she would lose her right to the money, as well as to any other of Barry's assets. Next, Burke had informed the judge that he'd already presented his case to a grand jury, which had voted a "true bill." That meant an indictment, which amounted to an official finding of probable cause that Samara had in fact committed a crime resulting in Barry's death. Based upon that, the judge, a pretty reasonable woman named Carolyn Berman, had had little choice but to freeze all of Barry Tannenbaum's assets, the bank account included.

Even if Burke and Berman had only been doing their jobs, the result certainly added up to a major headache for Jaywalker. The good news was that he could now skip going to the bank. But that consolation was more than offset by the fact that instead he had to spend two days drawing up papers so that he and Burke could go before the judge and argue about the fairness of the ruling.

They did that on a Friday afternoon, convening at Part 30, on the 11th floor of 10 °Centre Street, the Criminal Court Building. Jaywalker's home court, as he liked to think of it.

"The defendant has a constitutional right to the counsel of her choice," he argued.

"True enough," Burke conceded, "but it's a limited right. When you're indigent and can't afford a lawyer, the court assigns you one. Only you don't get to choose who it is."

"But she's not indigent, and she can afford a lawyer," Jaywalker pointed out. "At least she could have, until you two decided that instead of her paying for counsel, the tax payers should get stuck footing the bill."

It was a fairly sleazy argument, he knew, but there were a half-dozen reporters taking notes in the front row of the courtroom, and Jaywalker knew that the judge didn't want to wake up tomorrow morning to headlines like JUDGE

RULES TAXPAYERS SHOULD PAY FOR BILLION AIRESS'S DEFENSE.

In the end, Judge Berman hammered out a compromise of sorts, as judges generally try to do. She authorized a limited invasion of the bank account for legal fees and nec essary related expenses. But she set Jaywalker's fee at the same seventy-five dollars an hour that it would have been had Samara been indigent and eligible for assigned counsel.

Great, thought Jaywalker. Here I got paid thirty-five grand to cop her out on a DWI, and now I'm going to be earning ditch-digger wages for trying a murder case.

"Thank you," was what he actually said to Judge Berman.

With that he walked over to the clerk of the court and filled out a notice of appearance, formally declaring that he was the new attorney for Samara Moss Tannenbaum. And was handed a 45-pound cardboard box by Tom Burke, containing copies of the evidence against his client. So far.

Nothing like a little weekend reading.

It turned out to be a horror story.

Jaywalker began his reading that night, lying in bed. The cardboard box Burke had given him contained police reports, diagrams and photographs of the crime scene, the search warrant for Samara's town house, a "return," or list of items seized there, a typewritten summary of what Samara had said to the detective who first questioned her, requests for scientific tests to be conducted on various bits of physical evidence, and a bunch of other paperwork.

It was a lot more than the prosecution was required to turn over at this early stage of the proceedings. A lot of as sistants would have stonewalled, waiting for the defense to make a written demand to produce, followed up with formal motion papers and a judge's order. Tom Burke didn't play games like that, a fact that Jaywalker was grateful for.

At least until he began reading.

From the police reports, Jaywalker learned that when Barry Tannenbaum hadn't shown up at his office one morning and his secretary had been unable to reach him either at his mansion in Scarsdale or his penthouse apart ment on Central Park South, she'd called 9-1-1. The Scars dale police had kicked in the door, searched the mansion, and found nobody there and nothing out of order. The NYPD had been luckier, if you chose to look at it that way. Let into the apartment by the building superintendent, they'd found Barry lying facedown on his kitchen floor, in what the crime scene technician described as "a pool of dried blood." If the terminology was slightly oxymoronic, the meaning was clear enough.