The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller

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СКАЧАТЬ to be the functional equivalent of a private hospital room would have been seriously disappointed. But Jaywalker had been there a thousand times before and knew better. The area was laid out more like a ward or, if you wanted to be extremely charitable about it, a semiprivate room.

      After being ushered through the middle one of three steel-barred outer doors, he entered the lawyers’ area, a row of bolted-down chairs that extended to the far wall on either side. Each chair had a small writing surface in front of it, with wooden partitions rising on either side. Above the writing surfaces was a metal-screened window. If one squinted sufficiently, he could see that on the other side of the screen was another writing surface, and behind it another bolted-down chair, facing his own.

      The inmates were led in through the other doors, one side for men and one for women. That way, segregation was maintained for the three groups—lawyers, male prisoners and female prisoners. Someone had apparently decided that it was safe to permit lawyers of both sexes to mingle.

      The arrangement was an imperfect one, because unless you talked in a whisper with your client or resorted to sign language, you ran the risk of being overheard by lawyers on either side of you, and inmates on either side of your client. Still, it was better than talking over some staticky telephone hookup, or through a hole in reinforced glass, so Jaywalker wasn’t about to complain.

      You picked your battles.

      He spent the better part of twenty minutes reviewing his file on Samara’s case, already two inches thick. He knew it would take a while for them to bring her up from the fourth-floor feeder pen.

      When she came in and took her seat across from him, he was struck again by how tiny she seemed, and how vulnerable. He’d stood alongside her in the courtroom half an hour ago, but his attention had been focused elsewhere then—on the judge, the prosecutor, the court reporter, even the media. Now he had only Samara to look at, and what he saw was a young woman on the verge of tears. He wondered if he’d missed that downstairs, when he’d been all business.

      “Are you okay?” he asked her.

      “No, I’m not okay,” she said, using the heels of her hands to blot her eyes. So much for the verge of tears.

      “I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it, both about her obvious distress and the fact that his dumb question had triggered her meltdown.

      She took a deep breath, fighting to compose herself. “Listen,” she said, “you’ve got to get me out of here.”

      “I’ll do my best,” Jaywalker promised. It was only half a lie. He would certainly do his best, that much was true. The lie part was that even his best wouldn’t be enough to get her out of jail. But he knew she wasn’t ready to hear that, not yet. “We need to talk about the case,” he told her instead, “so we can figure out our best chance of getting you out.” His father, long dead, had been a doctor, the old-fashioned kind. He’d never told his patients that they had a bellyful of inoperable cancer and were going to die from it. He told them they had “suspicious cells,” and that the radiation or chemotherapy he was sending them for was simply a “precautionary measure.” That was what he was doing with Samara now, he recognized. There were times when being a criminal defense lawyer turned you into something you weren’t in a hurry to write home about, he’d realized some years ago, before gradually coming to terms with the fact. Sometimes you donned the white hat and rode the white horse. But there were other times, times when, without quite breaking the rules, you bent them a little and adapted them to the situation. In the long run, you did what you had to do. Did he blame his father for having lied to his patients? He certainly had at the time, back when he was young and idealistic and had all the answers. Now, battle-tested and closing in on fifty himself, he knew enough to look at things a little differently.

      “What do you want to hear?” Samara was asking him.

      “Everything.”

      “From the beginning?”

      “From the beginning.”

      8

      PRAIRIE CREEK

      “I was born in Indiana,” Samara said. “Prairie Creek. Nice name for a town, huh?”

      Jaywalker nodded.

      “It was a shithole.”

      He made a written note on the yellow legal pad in front of him. It didn’t say Indiana, though, or Prairie Creek.

      CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, it said.

      “I never knew my father,” she said. “I grew up with my mother in a trailer, an old rusty thing set up on cinder blocks. My mom, well, she worked her ass off, I’ll say that much for her.”

      “Is she still alive?”

      That got a shrug, telling him that Samara either didn’t know or didn’t much care.

      “I think she also sold her ass off, though I don’t know for sure. She was pretty, prettier’n me.”

      Jaywalker tried picturing prettier than Samara, but didn’t know where to start.

      “She wasn’t home much. Always working or whatever.” Leaving the whatever to hang in the air for a few beats. “I remember being left with babysitters a lot. Guys, mostly.”

      “How did that go?”

      Another shrug. “I learned a lot.”

      “Like what?”

      “How to do shots of beer. How to roll joints.”

      “Anything else?”

      Samara broke off eye contact, looked downward. She tried to shrug again, but this attempt didn’t come off with the same Who-the-fuck-cares? as the two previous ones. It seemed to Jaywalker that her lower lip was pouting more than ever, but maybe it was only the tilt of her head.

      “Is it important?” she asked him.

      “It might be.”

      She seemed to ponder that for a moment before looking up again. When she did, Jaywalker locked eyes with her. Trust me, he told her, without speaking the words out loud.

      “Yeah,” she said, cocking her head slightly, but not looking away. “I learned how to give hand jobs and blow jobs, and how to thigh fuck.”

      “Thigh fuck?” A new one for Jaywalker. He underlined CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, then underlined it a second time.

      “Yeah, you know. Letting the guy stick it in between my legs. All the way up there, but not inside. I was too small for inside. Then, with my legs tight around the guy, I’d let him fuck away until—”

      “Okay,” said Jaywalker, pretty much getting the picture.

      “Get me out and I’ll show you.” Smiling now.

      “How’d you do in school?” he asked her.

      She laughed, whether at his abrupt change СКАЧАТЬ