of the TV, half watching a Yankee game or an old movie, a tumbler of Kahlua on the table beside him.
And when winter came, the only concessions he made were to sleep in even later in the morning, to bundle up and walk more briskly in the afternoon, and to switch from baseball to football or basketball in the evening.
Just because he was going to have to lose the last trial of his career, that didn't mean he had to spend an entire year doing it.
Would he have kept it up, this totally uncharacteristic avoidance of responsibility? Would he have gone into trial no better prepared-and indeed, considerably less prepared- than the prosecution? Or would he have awakened on his own from his self-inflicted paralysis in time to pull himself together, put in the long hours that had become his trade mark, and-even if he were destined to lose-try the case of his life, as he had every other time out?
The answer is, there's simply no way of knowing for sure. Because before Jaywalker could awake on his own, if ever he was going to, the phone woke him. It rang on a Thursday night in mid-December. He picked up on the sixth ring, or maybe the seventh. He'd been asleep at the time, so he had no way of knowing. And he'd disconnected his answering machine months earlier, shortly after his list of remaining cases had dwindled down to one.
He mumbled 'Jaywalker' into the phone, his voice thick with Kahlua and sleep. He found the remote and muted the TV set, half noticing that an old M*A*S*H episode was on. Hawkeye and Radar were planning some trick on Frank Burns.
'Are you awake?' It was a woman's voice, a vaguely familiar one. For an instant he thought it might be his wife. Then he remembered. His wife was dead. She'd died almost a dozen years ago.
'Sorta,' he said. 'Who is this?'
'Sam.'
'What time is it?'
'Eleven,' she said. 'Five after eleven.'
'Jesus.'
'Jaywalker?'
'Yeah?'
'I need you to come over.'
'Now?' he asked.
'Now.'
'Why?'
'Because I've found something.'
15
Samara met his cab in front of her town house and ushered him in. She took his overcoat, a threadbare thing he'd owned forever, and hung it up in a closet, unnecessarily dignifying it, as far as Jaywalker was concerned. He would have preferred to toss it on a chair, or, better yet, to keep it on for warmth. What time had she said it was?
'You're freezing,' she said. She left the room, and when she reappeared, she was carrying a wool blanket. Without so much as asking him, she pushed him down onto a chair, straddled him and wrapped the blanket around him, tuck ing the corners underneath him. She could be a real Nurse Ratched when she wanted to be.
He tried to tell her that, and to explain that he was fine without it, but a sudden lump in his throat kept the words from coming out. Once, when he and his wife had been hiking too late in the year in the Canadian Rockies, they'd made it back to their cabin in the early stages of hypother mia, shivering uncontrollably. They'd stripped off their clothes, pulled the blankets off the bed, swaddled them selves together in them, and spent the rest of the day laughing and loving themselves warm.
'I'm okay,' he said, not because he was, but because he needed to hear the sound of his own voice to bring him back from where he'd gone.
'You're not okay,' she told him. 'You're freezing. Keep it on. I don't want to be responsible when you get pneu monia and die.'
Even as he succumbed and kept the blanket wrapped around him, he was aware that there was something about the way she'd said it that bothered him. Not the part about her ordering him around; that felt strangely comforting. No, it was the other part. Shouldn't she have said, ' if you get pneumonia and die,' rather than 'when'? He decided it was a thought best kept to himself.
'Okay,' he said. 'Tell me what you found.'
'Come,' she said.
He and the blanket followed her up a flight of stairs and into a kitchen that looked spotless. Either Samara was an extremely neat housekeeper or a woman in the same mold as her late husband, who'd never cooked. He was pretty sure where he would lay his money on that one.
She walked past the stove and opened a narrow cabinet. Inside were little jars of herbs and spices, the expensive organic ones.
'Look,' she said.
He looked. He saw basil, oregano, parsley, tarragon, cumin and a dozen others. 'Look at what?' he asked. He found it hard to believe that she'd called him to come over in the middle of the night because she'd suddenly discov ered she had spices.
'In the back row,' she said.
He looked in the back row. There, among the little jars, was an amber-colored plastic container with a white top, the kind prescription drugs came in. He reached in and lifted it out by the ribbed top, being careful not to touch the smoother surface of the container itself. He read the label, saw that it was in Samara's name, had been pre scribed by a Dr. Samuel Musgrove, and had been filled a year ago August. That would have been less than a month before Barry's murder. It was for Seconal, twenty-five pills. He held the bottle up to the light. Inside were three or four whole pills and a powder of ground-up ones. All told, the bottle was about a quarter of the way full. He guessed that at least half the pills had been removed.
It was, Jaywalker instantly knew, a piece of evidence every bit as incriminating as that twenty-five-million- dollar insurance policy Samara had taken out on Barry's life right around the same time and had since conveniently forgot ten about. Only this time she'd dodged a bullet; in search ing the house, the police somehow hadn't noticed the pills.
'Tell me about this,' he said.
'There's nothing to tell,' said Samara, punctuating her remark with one of her trademark shrugs. 'I've never seen it before. I don't know anything about it.'
Vintage Samara.
'So why were you in such a hurry to show it to me?'
'I was looking for the chocolate syrup,' she said. 'I had an urge for an ice cream sundae. And I saw this. I read the label and saw it was for Seconal. I remembered you said that was one of the things they found in Barry's blood.'
'So you picked up the bottle?'
'No,' she said. 'I have no idea who ordered it, who picked it up, or who put it in there.'
'No, no,' said Jaywalker, uninterested in yet another of her absurd denials. 'What I mean is, you picked it up in your hands tonight, before calling me.'
She nodded.
So much for his careful handling of it. Now, he knew, it would have her fingerprints on it, even if she'd been smart enough to wipe them off more than a year ago. He wondered if the law imposed an obligation upon him to turn the bottle over to Tom Burke or to the court. He knew that as a so-called 'officer of the court,' whatever that was supposed to mean, he couldn't very well throw evidence away or destroy it; doing so would amount to obstruction of justice, or criminal tampering. But did he have to come forward with it, and in the process bury his
