MS. TANNENBAUM: No, it just bounced off him. It was empty. It wouldn't have injured a mouse. We had a good laugh over it.
MR. JAYWALKER: Other than that incident, did you ever physically harm your husband, or attempt to?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No, never.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you love him?
MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm honestly not sure. I know I thought I did, at first. But Barry was hard to love, the way he was obsessed with his businesses. And I've never been good at loving. I think I learned early on in my life to close up, to not give of myself. So maybe love was hard for both of us.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you want to get out of the relationship?
MS. TANNENBAUM: Only when we were ar guing, or fighting, as some people call it. Other than those times, no. I was Mrs. Barry Tannenbaum. Plus I had my own place, my own friends, my own life. As they say in Vegas, it might not have been black jack, but it was good enough to stick with.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you murder Barry?
MS. TANNENBAUM: No, I did not.
MR. JAYWALKER: Did you take this knife, or anything else, and plunge it through his chest and into his heart?
MS. TANNENBAUM: God, no.
With her denial, Jaywalker walked back to the defense table and took his seat. On a scale of one to ten, he would have given her a solid nine, deducting half a point for too much emotional control down the home stretch and another half for the argument-fight slip. Though he had to give her credit for patching that up a second time, entirely un prompted, near the very end of her testimony.
The only problem was that, given the sheer weight of the evidence against her, he knew a nine wasn't going to be good enough. Hell, a perfect ten might not even do it.
Then again, there was still cross-examination. Jaywalker had learned over the years that jurors subconsciously deducted points on their own during a witness's direct examination. The reason was simple. Direct examination, they intuitively understood, was spoon-fed. It could be re hearsed, re-rehearsed and re-re-rehearsed until it flowed from the witness's mouth with something approaching per fection. Cross-examination was different. On cross, the witness was suddenly confronted with unexpected ques tions and forced to come up with unrehearsed answers.
Most lawyers, if they were aware of the difference at all, regarded it as nothing more than an accepted fact of the trial process. To Jaywalker, it was an opportunity. If he spent twenty hours preparing a defendant for his own questions, and he did, he spent forty preparing that same witness for the prosecutor's questions. What they might include, how to pause reflectively before answering, what the absolute best answer was, and precisely how that answer should be delivered. The result was that, unlike most witnesses, who tend to come off well enough on direct but not so well on cross, Jaywalker's witnesses-and especially Jaywalker's defendants-did even better on cross than they did on direct. And the same jurors who'd deducted points during direct without ever realizing they were doing so were equally prone to give extra credit on cross. So it was entirely conceivable that Samara's best might still be yet to come.
But not now.
Even before Tom Burke rose and asked to approach the bench, Jaywalker knew he would. Rather than start his cross-examination now, at quarter of five, he asked Judge Sobel's permission to go over to the morning.
'Not the morning,' said the judge. 'I've got my calendar call then. But, yes, you can begin with her tomorrow af ternoon.' Then he proceeded to explain to the jurors that they wouldn't have to show up until two o'clock the fol lowing day. To those who had jobs, children, parents or even pets to look after, the five-hour respite seemed to come as the best news in the world. Press people into in voluntary servitude for a couple of weeks, and they'll rejoice over a slice of stale bread.
'Great job,' Burke said to Jaywalker, once the jurors had filed out of the courtroom.
'I'm sure you'll blow her away in the first five minutes,' said Jaywalker.
If the exchange represented mind games played by op ponents, and surely it did, at the same time it reflected hard earned respect and genuine affection between two men who were not only among the very best at what they did for a living, but who also might have been the best of friends, had only Jaywalker allowed himself that sort of indulgence.
Jaywalker walked Samara up to Canal Street. 'You did great,' he told her. 'Do half as well tomorrow, and I'll take care of the rest.'
'Do you want to go over cross-examination?' she asked. 'One last time?'
'No,' he said, 'you're ready.' Which was his way of saying, If you're not now, you never will be. He hailed her a cab and opened the door for her to get in.
'You sure?' she asked. 'I mean, we have until tomorrow afternoon. To get me even readier, I mean.'
He smiled at the transparency of her invitation. 'Re member what we said,' he reminded her.
'After,' she said.
'After,' he echoed.
At home that evening, Jaywalker pondered the trial schedule. Tomorrow was Thursday. Burke could easily take all afternoon cross-examining Samara. Add on re direct and recross, and she might even be back on the stand Friday morning. Having steered clear of the Seconal issue, Jaywalker had no other witnesses to call, and he doubted that Burke would feel the need to put on a rebuttal case. But even if Samara were to finish up tomorrow, that still left the charge conference with the judge, which would take an hour, and the two summations, figure a couple of hours each. Judge Sobel wouldn't charge the jury and give them the case on Friday afternoon, not with the weekend coming. It was one thing to bring a deliberating jury back on a Saturday and then waste Sunday when you had no choice, but quite another to do it deliberately. Particularly in winter, when it meant having to heat the courtroom and the jury room.
So whenever Samara finished, whether it was tomorrow afternoon or sometime Friday, summations wouldn't take place until Monday, at the earliest. Which meant that Tom Burke was the only one who had to stay up late tonight, working on his cross-examination of Samara. Well, too bad for him. For once in his life, Jaywalker could afford to relax and forget about a case he was in the midst of trying.
As if.
26
There's a general rule that prosecutors make poor crossexaminers. Not that there's anything innate about this par ticular characteristic, at least not in the sense that the job somehow attracts underqualified questioners or corrupts qualified ones. Rather, it's more likely a simple matter of insufficient practice. Many trials, if not most, consist of a series of prosecution witnesses and few, if any, defense wit nesses. As a result, the assistant district attorney typically gets all sorts of opportunities to conduct direct examina tions of various sizes, shapes and varieties, but only rarely does he get a chance to cross-examine. And when he does, that lack of practice tends to show.
Not so with Tom Burke.
Because a handful of cases from Judge Sobel's calendar call were still left over from the morning session, Burke didn't begin with Samara until just after three o'clock. When he did, he took her back to her very first encounter with Barry, back to when she was eighteen and working as a cocktail waitress at Caesars Palace.
MR. BURKE: That was a very short time after you had, as you put it, been accepting money and other gifts for sexual favors. Isn't that so?
MS. TANNENBAUM:
MR. BURKE:
