Her name was Samara Moss, and she was a gold digger. At least that had been the universal consensus of the tabloids, ever since she'd set her sights on Barrington Tan nenbaum. That had been nine years earlier, when Tannen baum had been sixty-one. He'd made his fortune buying and selling oil and gas leases, than made it multiply several times over in the shipping business. Among the things he'd shipped were munitions, body armor and jet fighter planes. He had a short list of clients, but most of them had titles like 'Sultan' or 'His Excellence' before their names. Tan nenbaum's net worth had once been estimated at some where in the range of ten to twenty billion dollars.
Samara's net worth, at the time she married Tannenbaum, had been somewhere in the range of ten to twenty dollars.
She'd grown up in a third-rate trailer park in Indiana, where she'd become so accustomed to hearing the phrase trailer trash that she no longer considered it an insult, much the way ghetto blacks think little of calling each other ni gger. She was raised by a single mother who alter nately waited tables, bartended and lap-danced at night, leaving Sam-as everyone had called her for as long as she could remember-in the care of a string of boyfriends. Some of those boyfriends ignored her; others taught her how to drink beer, curse and do drugs. By the time she was ten, Sam could roll a perfect joint, using either gummed or ungummed paper. At twelve, she was smoking the joints she rolled. To hear Sam tell it, several of those same boy friends molested her on occasion, although the extent is unknown and the certainty remains unestablished to this day. Two things are clear, though. She was pretty enough to make her junior high school cheerleading squad at age twelve (no mean feat), and undisciplined enough to be kicked off it two months later.
She ran away from home the day after her fourteenth birthday, landing first in Ely, Nevada, then in Reno and finally in Las Vegas, with dreams of becoming a showgirl and eventually a Hollywood star. She became, instead, a cocktail waitress and sometime prostitute, though she would have been quick to deny the latter description, in sisting that she went to bed only with nice men to whom she was attracted. Who was she to complain when some of them chose to express their admiration in the form of gifts, including the occasional monetary one?
It was in Las Vegas that Barrington Tannenbaum spied her, in the cocktail lounge at Caesars Palace, at three o'clock one Sunday morning. Barry was newly divorced at the time, a three-time loser at love. Although he was absurdly rich, he was also lonely, bored and as much in need of a project as Samara was in need of a sugar daddy. And one thing about Barry Tannenbaum-if you listened to his business associates or bitter rivals, most of whom counted themselves in both columns-was that once he got involved in a project, he never did so halfheartedly. From the moment he and Samara met, he was as determined to save her as she appeared determined to snare him. If it wasn't quite a match made in heaven, it certainly had an otherworldly ring to it.
It has been said that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, and recent history had amply demonstrated that Barry Tannenbaum was the marrying kind. The truth is that for all of his new money, Barry was an old- fashioned sort of guy. He'd grown up in an age when, if you loved the girl, you married her, had kids and lived happily ever after- even if e ver after w as something of a relative term. It's therefore not all that surprising that, in spite of his dismal track record, Barry felt compelled to make an honest woman of Sam, in the most old-fashioned sense of the ex pression. Eight months to the day after he'd first set eyes on her in the neon glow of Caesars Palace, he married her. By that time, he was sixty-two.
Samara was still not quite nineteen.
If the tabloids had had fun with the forty-two years and fifteen billion dollars that separated the couple, they weren't the only ones. It seems that gold diggers tend to arouse feelings of ambivalence in most of us. The hookerturned-heroine played by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman earns our unabashed cheers when she lands the wealthy Richard Gere character, but only because the script took care to make it clear that she didn't set out to do so from the start. Anna Nicole Smith, the Playmate of the Year and self-described 'blond bombshell' who at twenty-six mar ried an eighty-nine-year-old Texas billionaire, won consid erably less public support. Still, there was an audible 'You go, girl!' sentiment expressed by many when it appeared that Anna Nicole's stepson-himself old enough to be her grandfather-might have overreached in manipulating her out of his father's will. In a poll taken as the case headed toward the Supreme Court (polls having pretty much been established as the operative method of governance by the dawn of the twenty-first century), nearly forty percent of Americans with an opinion on the matter responded that Smith deserved all or most of the $474 million she sued for when her husband happened to die a year into their marriage.
Chances are Samara wouldn't have fared as well in the court of public opinion. For one thing, there was the fact that she lived with Tannenbaum for only the first of their eight years of marriage, quickly setting up residence in a town house just off Park Avenue, which she'd persuaded Barry to buy her because she'd never had a place of her own. The price tag had been $4.5 million. Small change, to be sure. But a wee bit unseemly, perhaps.
For another thing, there were the affairs Samara carried on, some with discretion, but others with an openness that bordered on outright flaunting. Not an issue of the National Enquirer hit the stands without an account of SAM'S LATEST FLING, more often than not accompanied by a photo of the cheating couple entering or exiting some trendy club, complete with an overabundance of calf or cleavage.
And finally, there was the small but not-to-be-over looked detail of Samara's having taken an eight-inch steak knife and plunged it into her husband's chest, 'piercing the left ventricle of his heart and causing his death,' as re counted by the New York County District Attorney, and fol lowed up in short order with a murder indictment handed down by a grand jury of Samara's peers.
Which was right about where Jaywalker had come in.
4
Not that Jaywalker was a total stranger to Samara Moss by any means. They'd met six years earlier, when she'd shown up at his office, delivered there by her chauffeur. Or Barry Tannenbaum's chauffeur, to be more precise. The thing was, Samara wasn't driving herself anywhere right then. Two weeks earlier she'd borrowed one of Barry's favorite toys, a $400,000 Lamborghini. And borrowed might be a stretch, seeing as she'd simply found the keys one evening, gone down to the twelve-car garage beneath Barry's Scarsdale mansion and taken off for Manhattan. She'd made it all the way to Park Avenue and 66th Street, when she realized she was a bit too far downtown and attempted a U-turn. Normally, one would execute that maneuver between the raised islands that separate the avenue's southbound lanes from its northbound ones. Sa mara, however, had attempted it mid-island, a slight mis calculation. The result had been a one-car, $400,000 accident, and an arrest for driving while intoxicated, reck less driving, refusal to submit to a blood-alcohol test, driving without a license, and a little-known and seldomused Administrative Code violation entitled 'Failure to Yield to a Stationary Object.'
To woefully understate the fact, Barry had been mightily pissed off. He'd posted Samara's bail, then assigned his chauffeur the task of finding her a criminal lawyer who was good enough to keep her off death row, but not so good that she'd walk away scot-free. The chauffeur spent a couple of days asking around. The name that kept coming up, it seems, was Jaywalker's.
They'd talked for an hour and a half, with Jaywalker almost literally unable to take his eyes off her the entire time. He was already widowed back then, and over the course of his life he'd seen a dozen prettier women up close, and slept with half of them (not that he hadn't tried with the remaining half). But there was something capti vating about Samara, something-he would decide later- absolutely arresting. She was small, not only of height and build, but of facial feature. Her hair was dark and straight, whether naturally or with help. Only her lower lip was standard issue, making it too large by far for the rest of her face and giving her a perpetual pout. But it was her eyes that held him most. They were so dark that he would have had to call them black. They had a slightly glassy look to them, suggesting that she might have been wearing con tacts too long, or was on the verge of crying. And they seemed totally impenetrable, taking in everything while letting out absolutely nothing.
The things she said made little or no sense. She'd taken the car because she'd felt like it. She'd drunk a large glass of Scotch before she'd set out because she'd been nervous about working the Lamborghini's standard
