The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller

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      “I stuck around till the day after my fourteenth birthday. I wanted to see if I got any good presents.” Apparently she hadn’t. “I caught a bus to Terre Haute, then hitchhiked my way west, to Nevada. I wanted to be a showgirl or an actress, something like that. But you know what they told me? Too short. Too short. Now if I’d’a been too fat, or too thin, or too something-else-like-that, I could’a done something about it. But too short? What the fuck was I supposed to do about that?”

      “So?”

      “So I tended bar and waited tables, mostly.”

      “Mostly?”

      “And supplemented my income every now and then.”

      “By doing what?”

      “By doing what I would have done anyway. Only thing I did was when a guy wanted to give me something after, I took it.”

      “And that something included money?”

      “Sometimes.”

      “Ever get arrested? Other than this and that DWI thing?” Her criminal record printout showed nothing else, but Jaywalker knew that there might be out-of-state cases, or arrests that hadn’t led to convictions that often wouldn’t show up.

      “No.”

      “Are you absolutely sure?”

      A pause, then, “Maybe there was this one time in Reno for attempted soliciting. It was pure bullshit. I was standing in front of a club, smoking a cigarette. Some vice cop decided that meant I had to be hooking.”

      Underneath CLEAN UP HER MOUTH, Jaywalker wrote WORK ON GETTING HER TO TELL THE TRUTH, and underlined it three times. “What happened to the case?” he asked.

      “It was dismissed.”

      “How much of a fine did you pay?”

      “Fifty dollars.”

      When a case was dismissed, there was no fine to pay. Jaywalker added an exclamation point to his latest reminder.

      “Other arrests?”

      “No.”

      “Absolutely sure?”

      “Yes!” she snapped. Then, “Sorry.”

      “How did you meet Barry?”

      She’d been working for tips off a phony driver’s license in Vegas, serving drinks to the rollers in one of the lounges in Caesars Palace. She was eighteen at the time. “It was like three o’clock in the morning, going into Sunday, and the crowd was beginning to thin out. I see this guy staring at me, I mean really staring. I bring him a drink, a Diet Coke. He tells me I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Not the most beautiful person, the most beautiful thing. Shit, I should’a known right then. But being eighteen and dumb, I think it’s pure poetry. Know what I mean?”

      Jaywalker nodded. He’d come up with worse lines in his day, though not by all that much.

      “I go up to his room after I get off, and we talk. Talk. For like five hours I’m carrying on a conversation with a man who’s been to college, knows about politics and world affairs and wine and all sorts of other stuff. But he wants to know about me. Where I grew up, what it was like, why I ran away, what my hopes and dreams are. Hopes and dreams. And I’m telling him shit I wouldn’t tell my best friend, if I had one. Like I’m opening my heart to him.

      “Eleven o’clock comes, and he’s got to go to a meeting. Asks me if he can kiss me. I say, ‘Sure.’ With that he touches me, barely touches me, with both hands on the sides of my face, and gives me the gentlest kiss in the world. No tongue, no open mouth, no grabbing. I gotta tell you, I felt like Madonna.”

      Jaywalker was pretty sure he knew which one she was referring to.

      “Anyway, he leaves, goes back to New York. But he keeps calling me, like every day, and sending me flowers. Next he asks me to come east to visit him. I tell him right, like I’ve got money for a bus ticket. He tells me that won’t be necessary, he’ll send one of his planes to get me. One of his planes. So I go to New York, and we get married eight months later.”

      To Jaywalker, the segue seemed natural enough.

      The fact that the marriage had survived for eight years was hardly testimony to its success. The place Samara had persuaded Barry to buy her before the first year was over was the four-story brownstone in the lower Seventies, between Park and Lexington. The city’s inflated real estate had driven up the asking price to close to five million dollars, but if Barry complained, it was to deaf ears. “He used to tip that much in a year,” according to Samara.

      Within a few months she had basically set up residence in the town house. She continued to appear in public with Barry but made no secret of the fact that theirs had become an “open marriage,” a throwback phrase from an earlier generation. Still, there was no talk of divorce. Barry had been there and done that three times already, and apparently had no taste for a fourth go-round.

      “But according to your statement to the police,” Jaywalker pointed out, “you admitted having fights, the two of you.”

      “That was their word,” said Samara. “Fights.”

      “And your word?”

      “Arguments.”

      “What did you argue about?”

      “You name it, we argued about it. Money, sex, my driving, my clothes, my drinking, my language. Whatever couples argue about, I guess.”

      A corrections officer came into the lawyers’ section of the room and asked for everyone’s attention. “Anyone who wants to make the one o’clock bus back,” he announced, “wind it up. You got ezzackly five minutes.”

      Jaywalker looked at Samara. If she missed the one o’clock, it meant she’d be stuck in the building till after five, which could mean not getting back to Rikers before ten or eleven, and having to settle for a bologna or cheese sandwich instead of what passed for a hot meal. But Samara gave one of her patented shrugs. Jaywalker took it as a good sign that she was willing to make personal sacrifices in order to finish telling him her story.

      He should have known better.

      There was a lot of rustling in the room as other inmates rose to leave, and other lawyers gathered their papers and snapped their briefcases shut.

      “Tell me about the month or so before Barry’s death,” he said.

      “What about it?”

      “What was going on? Any new arguments? Anything out of the ordinary?”

      Samara seemed to think back for a moment. “Not really,” she said. “Barry was sick, and—”

      “Sick?”

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