board pres ident, simply hadn't had enough at stake to do it. And William Smythe, Barry's accountant, had come off too squeaky-clean to seem capable of murder.
That left Alan Manheim, Barry's recently fired personal lawyer. Jaywalker reviewed his notes from Manheim's tes timony. On direct, Burke had had Manheim admit that he and Barry had had a 'falling-out.' They'd parted company over Barry's accusations of embezzlement six months before Barry's murder. True, Manheim denied the charge, even to the point of boasting that shortly after leaving Barry's employ, he'd landed a better paying position.
Jaywalker had gotten Manheim to offer the opinion that he'd been underpaid by Barry, even at the rate of over four million dollars annually, counting his bonus. And the amount of that little alleged embezzlement? Jaywalker would remind the jurors of that. In Manheim's own words, two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars. Jaywalker would repeat the numbers, as though in absolute awe of them. There were people on the jury who felt lucky to make two hundred and twenty-seven dollars a week, in cluding overtime. There were jurors who couldn't count to two hundred and twenty-seven million, let alone visualize the significance of that kind of wealth.
Manheim had had everything to lose. His money, his reputation, his new job, his law license. Not to mention his freedom. That's grand larceny Barry Tannenbaum accused him of, Jaywalker would tell the jurors. That's about as grand as larceny can get, as a matter of fact. W as that reason enough for Manheim to want Barry Tannenbaum out of the way? Here was how he would like them to think of it, Jaywalker would tell them. Alan Manheim, the alleged thief and embezzler, didn't just have a reason to kill Barry Tannenbaum, he had two hundred and twenty- seven million reasons.
Manheim had come off as a terrible witness, a fact only enhanced because it had been the prosecution who'd called him in the first place. He was sleazy, smug and self-serving. If Jaywalker were to end up deciding to point the jurors in the direction of one suspect to the exclusion of all others, Alan Manheim was certainly going to be his guy.
Jaywalker turned the lights off. It was past two in the morning, and he suspected he was no longer operating on all cylinders. He knew if he were to refocus and read back the last of the notes he'd written, the stuff about Alan Manheim, they, too, would end up in pieces on the kitchen floor. So he told himself his thinking was getting too fuzzy to continue. And then he told himself something else, the sacred creed of all procrastinators.
There was always tomorrow.
But as seductive a lover as she can be at first, procras tination makes a hideously cruel mistress. He who allows himself to be folded into her welcoming arms buys no true respite. The warmth and safe harbor she promises him are but an illusion, a simple projection of his own needs. All he ends up with is pure agony, drawn out, intensified and robbed of the tiniest measure of comfort or the least sem blance of peace.
It would be hours before sleep would come to Jay walker, and when it did, it came in fits and starts, punctu ated by fragments of dreams that came and went, but refused to make sense. Alan Manheim appeared in one of them, laughing at Jaywalker from the witness stand, the pupils of his eyes dilated and transformed into dollar signs. 'But how could I have gotten into her home,' he taunted, 'in order to hide the evidence?' Jaywalker's wife was in a second dream, gently scolding him for not emptying the dishwasher or being able to win the impossible case, the one out of ten nobody could win. In yet another, a serene Roger McBride was being wheeled from the hospital by his adoring wife and children, a knife still stuck in his chest. His hands were folded pontifically in his lap, clasped around something that at first glance looked like a large metal cross. Only when the wheelchair drew nearer was Jaywalker able to see that it wasn't a cross at all but an enormous jailer's key.
By Sunday morning Jaywalker was experiencing the first symptoms of panic. He wasn't talking to himself yet, or pacing the floor. In fact, he was still in what he consid ered his constructive mode, jotting ideas down on paper as they occurred to him, then discarding them as soon as it occurred to him that they were worthless. So it was a con trolled panic still, but an incremental step along the way to full-blown, out-and-out hysteria.
It had happened before, in other cases, preparing for other summations. Arguments that had seemed airtight suddenly developed leaks and needed patching, reinforc ing or restructuring. But there'd always been a solution; it had simply been a matter of holding the problem up to the light, identifying the weakness and addressing it.
Samara's case was, as it was in almost every other respect, different. It defied repair. It was almost as though it had taken on a life of its own at some point, a willful ness, and was intent on proving to Jaywalker that whatever he did and however he did it, it didn't matter; the evidence would change, mutate, morph and reinvent itself in order to defeat him. Look at how he'd proposed not one but four possible suspects for the jury to consider. Back comes De tective Roger Ramseyer to blow them all out of the water with new fingerprint checks. And Samara. Just when it had looked as though she'd survived the worst of Tom Burke's cross-examination, up pops the fourteen-year-old incident to make her look like a serial stabber.
It was even happening now with Jaywalker's summa tion. He'd promised the jurors in his opening that it would be the very strength of the prosecution's case that would point them to the realization that someone had to be framing Samara. Well, he'd been right about the first part of the equation. The evidence against Samara was over whelming, more overwhelming than even Jaywalker could have imagined. But the second part was missing in action. Nowhere did the evidence break down of its own weight; nowhere did it reveal meaningful cracks or gaps that in any way suggested innocence on Samara's part or guilt on anyone else's.
So what did you do when you couldn't sum up?
It was a question Jaywalker had never been forced to answer before, not in more than twenty years of trying cases. And even as it occurred to him, he forced himself to ignore it. There had to be a way to win this case, there simply had to be. It was just a matter of his not having figured it out yet. It was just a matter of time.
Something he was rapidly running out of.
29
Jaywalker arrived at the courthouse neurotically early, as he always did on summation day. He showed up drawn, pale, gaunt and tired. But inside, he was pumped on adren aline. Over the past two weeks, he'd slept an average of three hours a night and had lost a total of seventeen pounds. His good-luck suit hung loosely enough on him by now that, had he wanted to, he could have had the buttons moved and worn it double-breasted. His hair was combed, more or less, and he was clean-shaven, but even shaving had extracted its price. Jaywalker shaved two hundred and fifty times a year without incident. (He took weekends and holidays off.) He could shave with one eye closed. Hell, he could have shaved with both eyes closed, if he'd had to. But on summation day, he always managed to cut himself and then to bleed like a hemophiliac. Always. One time he'd had to sum up with tiny pieces of toilet tissue stuck to his chin and neck, in order to keep from bleeding onto his shirt and tie, his notes, or even the jurors in the front row of the box. They'd acquitted his client, they told him afterward, not so much because they'd doubted his guilt, but because they'd been afraid that a conviction might have pushed Jaywalker over the line, and made him go home and finish the job.
Chances were they'd only been kidding. Then again, did it really matter? An acquittal was an acquittal in Jay walker's book, and he wasn't about to apologize for it.
The courtroom was packed by the time Jaywalker entered. More of the media were on hand than during the testimony itself. Summations were easy for the press; they produced ready-made sound bites, perfect for the evening news or the following morning's print columns. And from the beginning, this case had had everything. A beautiful young woman from an obscure, impoverished past. Dark hints of sex abuse, persistent rumors of prostitution, veiled accusations of gold digging. A much older man, eccentric, powerful, fabulously wealthy, three times married and three times divorced. Sprinkle in generous measures of in fidelity, jealousy and humiliation. Take one fatal stabbing to the heart. Add a murder weapon, hidden and found in the wife's home, stained with the husband's blood. Stir until a perfect motive reveals itself. And, just before serv ing, finish it off with an old secret, newly unearthed, a dark secret of rape and revenge.
