But if Jaywalker really wanted to be honest with him self, he knew there was more to it even than that. There was Samara herself.
From the moment he'd first seen her six years ago, when she'd come in on that drunk driving charge, he'd been swallowed whole by her dark eyes and pouting lower lip. Even as he'd fought to play the mature, steady defender to her reckless, impulsive child, from the beginning it had been she who'd owned him. Owned him in the sense that, try as he might, he could never take his eyes off her when he was in her presence. He'd dreamed of her at night and fantasized about her by day. Sexual fantasies, to be sure. But life-altering ones, as well. In one of his darker reveries, it had been the sudden, unexplained death of Samara's older husband that had driven her headlong into Jay walker's comforting arms. So real and so elaborate had that particular scenario been that years later, when he first heard that Samara had been arrested for Barry's murder, Jay walker had been forced to wonder if he himself weren't somehow complicit in the crime.
So the reasons were many why he'd hung on to her case, even at seventy-five dollars an hour. And now, as June gave way to July, it was all he had left, the only thing that stood between practicing his craft and being put out to pasture. And it represented his one last grand chance to overcome the impossible odds, slay the drag on, and win the dark-haired, dark-eyed princess of his dreams.
Why impossible odds?
Because in the ten months since he'd first sat down across from Samara in the counsel room to hear her say she hadn't killed her husband, things had indeed gone as Jay walker had suspected they would-from bad to worse to downright dreadful.
The progression had begun almost immediately. From the twelfth-floor counsel visit room, Jaywalker had ridden the elevator down to the seventh floor, where he'd paid a visit to Tom Burke.
"Hey, Jay. Howyadoon?"
A lot of people called him Jay. Not having a first name kind of limited their options.
"Okay, I guess," said Jaywalker. "I've just spent the last three hours with Samara Tannenbaum." It was true. After Samara's denial of her guilt and his own assurance that he believed her, they'd talked for another hour and a half. If he'd been impressed with her willingness to miss the one o'clock bus back to Rikers, he was somewhat troubled by her evident need to keep the meeting going as long as possible.
"From what I hear," said Burke, "people have paid good money to spend thirty minutes with her. But I'll say this. She sure is good to look at."
"That she is," Jaywalker agreed.
"It's a shame she's a cold-blooded killer."
Jaywalker said nothing. He was there to listen and, hopefully, to learn a thing or two, not to posture about his client's innocence. Particularly when he himself was hav ing trouble buying it.
"Did you read the stuff I gave you Friday?" Burke asked him.
"Yeah. And I appreciate your generosity." Jaywalker wasn't being facetious. They both knew Burke had handed over much more than the law required at such an early stage of the proceedings.
"Hey," said Burke. "I got nothing to hide on this one. In my office, it's what we call a slam dunk."
"Why?"
" Why? I've got witnesses who put her there and have her arguing with the deceased at the time of death. I've got her false exculpatory statements, first that she wasn't there, then that they didn't fight. I've got the murder weapon hidden in her home. And I've got ten bucks that says that little dark-red stain on it is going to turn out to be a perfect DNA match with Barry's blood."
"No," said Jaywalker. "I didn't mean, Why is it a slam dunk? I meant, Why did she do it? "
Burke gave an exaggerated shrug. Jaywalker decided he could use a lesson or two on the art from Samara. "Hey," said Burke, "why do seventy percent of murders happen? Two people who know each other get into an argument about some trivial piece of bullshit. They start swearing and calling each other names. Maybe they've been drinking, or smoking something. One thing leads to another. If there happens to be a gun around, or a knife" He extended his arms, elbows bent slightly, palms turned upward, as if to say that in such situations, murder was all but inevitable, a part of the human condition.
"That's it?"
"What are you looking for?" Burke asked. "A motive?"
"God forbid," said Jaywalker. The prosecution was never required to come up with a motive; the most they were ever asked to prove was intent. They taught you the difference in law school. You shot or stabbed or clubbed someone to death with the intent to kill them. Whether your motive behind that intent happened to be greed, say, as opposed to revenge or sadism, didn't matter.
Only it did matter, Jaywalker knew. Because if a crime didn't make sense to him, it might not make sense to a jury, either.
"Tell you what," said Burke, reading Jaywalker's mind. "Give me two weeks, I bet I'll have a motive for you. Want to go double or nothing on that ten bucks?"
"Sure," said Jaywalker. "You're on."
It was less than two weeks later that Jaywalker found himself standing before the three disciplinary committee judges. So if now he needed yet another reason to include Samara's name on his list, he had it: he had twenty bucks riding on the outcome.
With Samara indicted but yet to appear in Supreme Court for her arraignment, the case fell into a legal limbo of sorts. In terms of formal proceedings, nothing would happen for the time being. No written motions could be filed yet, no hearings could be asked for, no plea could even be entered. Before any of those things could take place, the case would first have to travel from the fourth floor of 10 °Centre Street to the eleventh. In real time, such a journey might be expected to take two minutes, three if the eleva tors were out of order, a fairly regular occurrence. But in courthouse time, it took three weeks.
"Sorry, counselor," the lower court judge would always say. "If I give you an earlier date, the papers won't make it upstairs in time."
"Give 'em to me," Jaywalker had pleaded over the years. "I'll have 'em up there before you can unzip your robe." But all it ever got him were unamused stares and even longer adjournments. To paraphrase an old saying, judges don't get mad, they get even.
That said, the fact that Samara's case was stalled in traffic for the next three weeks didn't mean it was time for Jaywalker to sit on his hands or catch up on old issues of The New Yorker. Quite the opposite.
Perhaps the single most overlooked job of the criminal defense lawyer-overlooked by not only the general public but by too many defense lawyers themselves-is investi gation. To far too many lawyers, investigation meant read ing the reports turned over by the prosecution and, in the rare case that the defendant screamed loudly enough and often enough that he had an alibi, going through the motions of checking it out.
That said, the fact that Samara's case was stalled in traffic for the next three weeks didn't mean it was time for Jaywalker to sit on his hands or catch up on old issues of The New Yorker. Quite the opposite.
Perhaps the single most overlooked job of the criminal defense lawyer-overlooked by not only the general public but by too many defense lawyers themselves-is investi gation. To far too many lawyers, investigation meant read ing the reports turned over by the prosecution and, in the rare case that the defendant screamed loudly enough and often enough that he had an alibi, going through the motions of checking it out.
In Samara's case, Jaywalker had read, reread and all but memorized every word in the materials supplied by Tom Burke. He'd picked his client's brain and probed the recesses of her memory for a solid three hours, more time than a lot of lawyers spent talking with their clients over the life of a case. As far as any alibi defense was concerned, he'd ruled that out in the first five minutes. Samara, after initially lying to the detectives, now freely admitted that she'd been at Barry's apartment right around the time of his murder and had gone straight home from there, spending the rest of the evening alone.
Still, one of the first things Jaywalker did was to sub poena the records for both her home phone and her cell. There'd been a time when all you could get were records of outgoing long distance calls. Nowadays, with everything done by computer, there was a record of every call. MUDDs and LUDDs, they called them, for Multiple Usage Direct Dialed and Local Usage Direct Dialed. Who knew what might turn up? Suppose she'd phoned Barry right after getting home and had since forgotten that she'd done so. If he'd picked up, that fact would show up on her records, proving that he'd been alive, or at least that someone who was alive had been there. Either way, it would mean that Samara was innocent.
Innocent.
Funny word, thought Jaywalker. To him, it had an almost religious mystique. For in criminal law, the word all but disappeared. You pleaded guilty or not guilty, and the jury was instructed to decide if your guilt had been proven or not, and told to return a verdict of guilty or not guilty. The only time the words innocent or innocence were even uttered during the course of a trial occurred when the judge charged the jury to remember that in the eyes of the law, the defendant was presumed innocent. After that, it was all about guilty or not guilty; rarely was the word innocent ev er heard again.
Which was just as well, particularly in Samara's case. For despite her insistence that she hadn't done it, Jaywalker knew it was just a matter of the passage of time and the building up of trust until she told him otherwise. Murder cases fell into two categories, he'd come to understand. There were the whodunnits and the whyithappeneds. If the evidence demonstrating that your client was the killer was shaky, you turned the trial into a whodunnit, raising what was sometimes referred to as the SODDI defense, for Some Other Dude Did It. On the other hand, if the evidence that your client did it was overwhelming, you looked around for things like self-defense, insanity or extreme emotional dis turbance. In other words, you conceded that it was your client who committed the act that resulted in the victim's death, and focused instead on the circumstances, particu larly the defendant's state of mind at the time of the incident.