biggest challenge faced by a lawyer in examining his own client is that the defendant will invariably try to summarize the facts instead of elaborating on them. Good lawyers will therefore devote hours of practice sessions to drawing out the minute details of events, re peatedly explaining to the witness the need to convey those details to the jury. Jaywalker, as he did with most things, took it a step further.
'You're going to get nervous on the witness stand,' he'd told Samara more than once. 'You're going to look out from where you're sitting and see hundreds of strangers. You're going to see reporters and sketch artists and gawkers. It's going to freak you out, trust me. And when that happens, your natural impulse is going to be to sum marize, to cut things short. Everybody does it. What I need is for you to fight that impulse as hard as you possibly can. And the best way to fight it is to slow down and give me as much detail as you can come up with.'
It had worked.
Had Samara testified simply that Barry had been a hypo chondriac preoccupied with his health, the jurors would have heard her, but it would have been only her intellec tual conclusion that they heard. When she went on to describe how, having come across an item about mice on the Internet, Barry had become afraid to ejaculate, lest it shorten his life span by a month, they got it. So, too, when she'd complained about how the tabloid photographers wouldn't let her alone. Words. Only when she described the health clinic episode and the headline suggesting she had AIDS or herpes or was coming from an abortion, or when she talked about the photo revealing her nipple, did she give them something to truly picture and remember and take home with them that night. The difference lay in the fact that they hadn't been forced to accept her conclusions. Instead they'd taken her details and drawn their own con clusions from them.
What Jaywalker was less happy about was the way Samara had been so ready to acknowledge the depth of her anger at Barry. Where had that come from? He couldn't remember her bringing it up in any of their sessions. Had she done so, he almost certainly would have worked with her to tone it down. As it stood, that anger, especially when coupled with the life insurance policy, could have provided her with enough motivation to kill Barry a dozen times over. And Tom Burke certainly hadn't missed it. Jaywalker had noticed him out of the corner of his eye, scribbling away on his notepad, as soon as the words were out of Sa mara's mouth.
Not that Jaywalker himself wouldn't do his best to patch things up before Burke got a chance to exploit them. Still, the anger was there, and it didn't help matters.
With the jurors settled back in their seats following the recess, Jaywalker wasted no time in getting to the part of Samara's testimony that they'd been waiting for all day. Waiting for, as a matter of fact, for a week and a half now.
MR. JAYWALKER: Do you recall the very last time you saw Barry?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, I do.
MR. JAYWALKER: When was that?
MS. TANNENBAUM: The evening everyone says he was murdered.
Joseph Teller
The Tenth Case
MR. JAYWALKER: And where was it you saw him?
MS. TANNENBAUM: At his apartment.
She described how she'd gone there at Barry's invita tion to discuss something he'd said was important but which she could no longer remember. It had been around dinnertime when she'd arrived, and he'd ordered Chinese food, which they'd eaten straight from the takeout cartons. Barry hadn't eaten much, she recalled. He'd com plained he had a cold, or the flu, or something like that.
Typical Barry.
Within twenty minutes they'd found themselves arguing over whatever it was Barry had wanted to talk about.
Perhaps it had been his humiliation over her latest antic, or perhaps she was just saying that to fill in the blank in her memory, she couldn't be sure. In any event, the argument quickly turned nasty and loud, and ended when
Samara called Barry a name she knew he hated and stormed out.
MR. JAYWALKER: Do you remember the name you called him?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I do.
MR. JAYWALKER: What name?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I called him an asshole. I'd called him lots of things at one time or another, but that was the only one he really hated. He'd told me it made me sound like a slut, like the trailer trash I was. I'd told him I didn't care. If I was trailer trash,
I was trailer trash. Whatever. Anyway, that's what I called him that night, just to push his button. That's how angry I was.
MR. JAYWALKER: And yet you don't remem ber what it was you were angry about?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Exactly. I mean, how stupid is that? But that's how it was with the two of us.
From Barry's, she'd caught a cab and gone straight home. She hadn't bathed or showered, washed her hair or her clothes, or done anything else out of the ordinary. She no longer recalled what time she'd gone to bed or fallen asleep. Only that sometime the next afternoon two detectives had come and rung her doorbell, asking to talk with her, and she'd let them in. When she'd asked them what it was about, they'd refused to tell her, which had annoyed her.
MR. JAYWALKER: What did they ask you?
MS. TANNENBAUM: They wanted to know when was the last time I'd seen my husband.
MR. JAYWALKER: What did you answer?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I asked them why, or what business it was of theirs. Something like that. They still wouldn't answer me. So I said about a week ago.
MR. JAYWALKER: Was that the truth?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No, it was a lie.
MR. JAYWALKER: Why did you lie to them?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I don't know. Like I said, they were piss-they were annoying me, telling me I had to answer their questions but refusing to answer any of mine. Maybe that's why I lied, to get even. I'm honestly not sure.
MR. JAYWALKER: What happened next?
MS. TANNENBAUM: They told me I was lying. They told me they had a witness who could put me in Barry's apartment the night before. So I said yes, I'd been there, so what?
MR. JAYWALKER: What happened then?
MS. TANNENBAUM: They asked me if we'd had a fight, Barry and me. I didn't think it was any of their business, what went on between my husband and me, and I think I told them that.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever say yes or no about having had a fight the previous evening?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I said no. We hadn't had a fight. To me, a fight is when two people hit each other, throw things, stuff like that. What we'd had was an argument.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you volunteer that?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I wasn't volunteering any thing. As far as I was concerned, I'd let these guys into my home, and they didn't have the decency to tell me why they were there and what it was all about. I was just supposed to listen up and answer whatever they asked me, like some five-year-old.
MR. JAYWALKER: What happened next?
MS. TANNENBAUM: They told me I was lying again, that they had another witness who'd heard us fighting. I told them again that we hadn't been fight ing. They said how about arguing? And that's when I said sure, we argued, we argued all the time.
MR. JAYWALKER: What's the next thing you recall happening?
MS. TANNENBAUM: One of them, the one who testified here the other day MR. JAYWALKER: Detective Bonfiglio?
