blood.
'This is where it happened,' said the detective.
'No shit,' said Burke.
It did seem pretty obvious, but Jaywalker had long ago learned not to trust the obvious. 'How do you know?' he asked.
'No other blood,' said the detective.
'Unless the killer cleaned it up.'
'Ever try getting blood outa this kinda tile?'
'No,' said Jaywalker, who'd never tried to get blood out of any kind of tile, at least so far as he could recall. 'And everything's exactly the way it was?'
'Yup. The first officer on the scene secured it right away. We haven't even let the maid in, or the real estate brokers in to get a look at it. And I've got to tell you, we could've made a bundle by giving one or two of 'em a sneak preview. Had to tell them sorry, no peeking until after the conviction.'
'Suppose there is no conviction?'
The detective laughed politely, to let Jaywalker know that he'd gotten his joke. But when they left a few minutes later, he was back to all-business, locking the apartment door, replacing the broken seal with a new one and restring ing the crime scene tape.
Jaywalker celebrated New Year's Eve home alone, having turned down an offer from Samara to come over. Some things didn't change, he guessed. He was still a moron. But the professional in him, or at least what was left of the professional in him, knew that no matter how much you wanted to, you didn't sleep with your client. Not till after the case was over, anyway. By which time, of course, it would be too late. Last he'd checked, they weren't allowing conjugal visits on Rikers Island.
He made it to midnight this time, draining the final drops from his last bottle of Kahlua. There would be no place in his life for alcohol once the trial began, he knew. And as far as sleep was concerned, well, there would pretty much be no place for that, either.
17
'Calendar number one,' read the clerk, 'for trial. The People of the State of New York versus Samara Tannen baum.'
Once again they took their places at the defense table in the front of the courtroom. 'Are The People ready?' asked Judge Sobel.
'Yes,' said Tom Burke.
'The defendant?'
'Yes,' said Jaywalker.
'Bring in the panel.'
He'd done it a hundred times, two hundred. He knew the case now, forward, backward and inside out. He could have delivered his opening statement at a second's notice. Hell, he could have delivered his summation, if called upon to do so. He was as ready as any lawyer had ever been for any trial. Yet none of that kept the butterflies from making their presence known. They were beating their wings now, just beginning to flap wildly, rising somewhere between his stomach and his throat. They would quiet down soon enough. They always did, the way a prizefighter's nerves quieted down with the first punch, or a quarterback's with the first completion. But for the moment, they were all he could feel, the butterflies.
They'd barely been around the day before, when they'd had the suppression hearing. Of course, there'd been no jurors then, and the whole thing had lasted barely an hour. Burke had called a single witness, one of the two detectives who'd gone to Samara's town house the day after the murder. She'd invited them in, he testified, and answered their questions willingly. She'd denied having been at her husband's apartment the previous evening, and then, when told she'd been both seen and heard there, she'd changed her story. She'd denied that they'd argued, and then she'd admitted that, too, once they'd confronted her with the facts. At no time during the interview had Samara been in custody. It was only when she'd said she wanted to call a lawyer that the questioning had stopped and they'd arrested her. Sub sequently, the detectives had applied for and obtained a search warrant for her home, and it had been during that search that they'd found the knife, the blouse and the towel, hidden behind the toilet tank of an upstairs bathroom.
Jaywalker had gone into the hearing knowing he had no chance of getting any evidence suppressed. But he'd wanted to put Burke through it anyway, to use it as discov ery. On cross-examination, Jaywalker had asked the detec tive a dozen or so questions, nailing him down on a couple of things he wanted to use at trial and generally sizing him up as a witness. He'd called no witnesses of his own; there had been no reason to expose Samara to cross-examination. Better to save her for the trial, when he would be needing her, than to give Burke a crack at her now.
As expected, Judge Sobel had refused to suppress any thing. Samara's statements had been noncustodial, he ruled, and therefore required no Miranda warnings. And since they'd been voluntarily made, they hadn't tainted the issuance of the search warrant.
They'd then had a Sandoval hearing, a misnomer, be cause it wasn't really a hearing at all-no witnesses were called-but a legal argument. Burke wanted to be able to bring out Samara's six-year-old drunk driving conviction if she were to take the stand at trial, on the theory that the jurors might feel it adversely affected her credibility. Jay walker argued against it. The conviction had been for driving while impaired, he pointed out, which was only a traffic infraction. Unlike a conviction for perjury, fraud, or even larceny, it had little to do with credibility and every thing to do with prejudicing the jury against Samara. The judge had agreed. Burke would be prohibited from asking about it, unless Samara were to testify that she'd never been arrested or convicted of anything. As for the Las Vegas arrest for attempted soliciting, or whatever the charge had been, Burke either didn't know about it or realized it was too old to ask about. Whichever was the case, Jaywalker wasn't about to bring it up.
'Anything else?' the judge had asked.
There'd been nothing else.
'Panel entering!' announced a court officer, and a hun dred and twenty prospective jurors were ushered into the courtroom. They carried overcoats, hats, briefcases, tote bags, shopping bags, umbrellas, books, knitting, laptops, cell phones, lunch bags and whatever else they'd thought to bring with them to the courthouse that morning. They looked at the judge, at the lawyers, at the court officers, and at the American flag and the curious IN OD WE TRUST sign on the wall above it. But mostly they looked at Samara Tannenbaum. Stared at her, to be more precise. With jury selection looming, the media had recently rediscovered the case, and any of the prospective jurors who claimed over the next two days to know nothing about the defen dant or the crime she stood accused of-and there would be a handful-were either brain-dead, living on another planet or flat-out lying.
Jaywalker, sitting next to the object of the stares, did his best to project an attitude of quiet confidence. Right now, as the prospective jurors took seats in the long rows of benches that made up the spectator section, he was speaking with his client, one hand on her shoulder, the way a father might speak with a daughter. Look at me, he was telling the jurors. Look at how I trust her. I'm sitting right next to her, talking with her, touching her, making contact with her. There's nothing scary about her, no reason for me to be afraid of her. Or for you to be, either, for that matter.
The touching was a big part of it, so much so that there was actually one judge in the system who'd gone so far as to prohibit it altogether. Jaywalker, who personally be lieved that the consensual touching of another adult was a form of expression protected by the First Amendment, had persisted in doing so, despite several mid-trial warnings. His behavior had cost him a contempt citation, a thousanddollar fine and a one-night sleepover date at Rikers Island.
But he'd won the trial.
