was afraid of this time; it was he himself Jaywalker didn't trust.
'Listen, Samara,' he said.
'I'm listening.'
'I need you to talk to me.'
'Once upon a time-'
'Stop,' he said. 'I know you're happy to be out, and I'm happy for you. But this is serious. I mean I need you to talk to me about the case.'
'What about it?'
'Well, for starters, you were the only one at Barry's apartment that evening. The two of you have an argument, loud enough to be heard through the wall of a prewar building. After you leave, the apartment suddenly be comes quiet. Barry's body gets found the next day with a fatal stab wound to the heart. Along with a blouse and a towel, a knife is found hidden away in your place. All three have Barry's blood on them. Nobody but you had been there since his death. When questioned by the police, you lie about having been at Barry's, and about having argued.'
'Looks bad, huh?'
'Yes, it looks bad.' Jaywalker realized that, almost un consciously, he'd gradually been lowering his volume as he'd progressed through his narrative, and at the same time he'd slowed his tempo. It was his sad voice, his voice of the inevitable. By using it, he'd been verbally putting his arms around Samara from across the room, hugging her to him as a father might hug a daughter, all the while calming her, patting her, stroking her softly. With the modulation of his voice, he'd been telling her that it was all right for her to let go of the awful burden that came with not being able to share some terrible secret. He'd been trying to make it seem that her not opening up to him would be infinitely worse, nothing less than a betrayal, in fact, a signal that he wasn't a trustworthy friend after all, just another lawyer better kept at arm's length.
Now he put it into words, offering her the key. Lowering his voice even further, he looked into her eyes and said the actual sentence that needed to be said. 'It's okay to tell me.'
Samara sat up straight. For a second Jaywalker's ego got the better of him, and he readied himself to hear her mea culpa.
'You know what?' Samara asked him.
'What?'
' Fuck you, that's what.' Then she said it again, at least the Fuck you part, as though he needed to hear it more than once. Then she stood up, grabbed her jacket and said, 'Can I use your phone? I've got to tell them I'm going home.'
'Sit down, Samara.'
The firmness of his own voice took Jaywalker by surprise. It seemed to make something of an impression on Samara, too. She didn't actually sit down, but she did at least look his way and engage him.
'I don't care how bad things look,' she hissed. 'You can't possibly know I killed Barry.'
Given her choice of the word know, Jaywalker was about to agree on a technicality, when he realized Samara had merely taken a midsentence breath and had more to say.
'Because I didn't,' she added. 'So fuck you for making it sound like I did. You have no right.'
'Sorry,' he said, 'but not only do I have the right, I have the obligation. It's my job. It's what you're paying me the big bucks for. Look, Samara, you may not enjoy looking at the evidence and seeing how strong it is, but sooner or later that's exactly what a jury's going to be asked to do. So we've got a choice. We can stick our heads in the sand and ignore it, or we can talk about what they're going to see when they look. Besides which, if you didn't kill Barry-and you're right, I can't possibly know if you did or you didn't-it's only by looking at the evidence that we're ever going to figure out a way to win this thing.'
That seemed to help. At least she sat back down.
But there are victories, and there are victories. Though they talked for another hour, not once did Samara even come close to admitting that she'd killed her husband. She was evidently one of those people, he decided, who found denial the toughest addiction of all to break.
Outside the lone window to the office, the November darkness was already settling in, and Jaywalker decided it was time to call a halt to the meeting. Samara phoned the corrections department to tell them she was heading home, well in advance of her eight o'clock curfew. Jaywalker shared a cab uptown with her, stopping directly in front of her building. Opening the door to get out, she turned to him and asked, 'Want to come in?'
'Uh, I don't think that would be, uh, the best, uh… Know what I mean?'
Smiling at his embarrassment, Samara turned away and got out. He watched her until she'd unlocked the door of her building and disappeared from view. Then he gave his own address to the cabdriver. The man, who looked Middle Eastern and according to the placard on the partition went by the name of Ali Bey Ali, responded with something that sounded like Y oonorn. Though Jaywalker couldn't quite make sense of it, he figured it might have been New York, so he said, 'Yes, New York.' It was only twenty blocks later that it came to him.
The man had said, 'You moron.'
With Samara firmly in denial, Jaywalker realized that, in contrast to the way things had proceeded in her DWI case six years earlier, this time there would be no quick guilty plea. He was in the case for the long haul. Which meant it was time to prepare written motions. He had long ago devised a computer template for the purpose, and the following day he pulled it up on his screen. His motions, like most everything else about him, differed markedly from those of his colleagues. Where theirs were lengthy and exhaustive, asking for all sorts of things they weren't entitled to, his were short and focused. Where theirs cited long strings of cases that were rarely if ever on point, his rarely contained a single citation. And where theirs were written in florid and redundant legalese, his were crafted in crisp, short sentences. He'd tried preaching his method to those who were willing to listen, but he'd won few converts. The more pages a set of motion papers ran to, the more hours its creator felt justified in billing for. In the end, as so often happened, other lawyers tended to make more money, while Jaywalker got better results.
As required by the statute, Jaywalker made a motion to have Samara's indictment dismissed. But knowing it would be denied, he wasted little time on it. Ditto when it came to discovery. Tom Burke had already given the defense far more than it was entitled to under the statutory timetable, and he could be counted on to continue doing so. When it came to the matter of suppression of evidence, however, Jaywalker slowed down. This was the important part of motion practice, he knew.
The constitutions of both the United States and the state of New York prohibit, among other things, conducting un reasonable searches and compelling a person to testify against himself. For many years, if a police officer violated either of those provisions-say by searching an individ ual's home with no good reason, or by beating a confes sion out of a suspect-the officer could be prosecuted, administratively punished, even sued for damages. But those things happened about as often as Martian landings. Beginning in the 1950s, the Supreme Court (the real one this time, not the one on the upper floors of 10 °Centre Street) finally got around to realizing that if the prohibitions were to amount to anything in real life terms, the judges would have to come up with a more meaningful formula for discouraging police misconduct. What they came up with has come to be known as the exclusionary rule.
The exclusionary rule, surprisingly enough, means pretty much what it sounds like. It means that, in order to deter that unreasonable search or beating, the fruits of it will be excluded from trial, or suppressed. In a series of landmark cases, among them Mapp v. Ohio (search and seizure) and Miranda v. Arizona (confessions), the so- called Warren court added teeth to the exclusionary rule, by defining 'unreasonable' and 'involuntary' in broad terms. More recently, the so-called Rehnquist court did its level best to pull those teeth, but with no better than mixed results.
Written motion papers are the vehicle by which a defense lawyer seeks to trigger an evidentiary hearing, one in which witnesses testify, to determine whether something ought to be suppressed. If that something happens to be physical evidence, the lawyer must assert facts to support three things. First, he must demonstrate illegality, that an unreasonable search in fact occurred and led to the seizure of the evidence. Second, that there was state action, that it was some branch of law enforcement, whether federal, state or local, that conducted the unreasonable search. Third, that the defendant has the requisite standing to complain about the illegality, by being the person ag grieved by the violation of his reasonable expectation of privacy.
The knife, the blouse and the towel fit the bill nicely enough. There certainly had been a search, and if the affi
