The Tenth Case. Joseph Teller

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СКАЧАТЬ of such evidence, the prosecution had succeeded in proving that the defendant had committed the crime, and whether it had done so beyond all reasonable doubt.

      The difference proved to be staggering.

      By the time he stood before the three judges who would deliver his punishment, Jaywalker had become something of a legend in his own time at 100 Centre Street. But his success hadn’t come without a price. For one thing, he drove himself relentlessly, demanding of himself that he come into court not only better prepared than his adversary but ten times better prepared, fifty times better prepared. He slept almost not at all when he was on trial, and when he did, it was with pen and paper within reach, so that he could jot down random thoughts in the dark and try to decipher them come morning. He planned for every conceivable contingency, agonized over every detail, and organized with the fanaticism of the obsessive-compulsive he was. Walking out of the courthouse after yet another acquittal, he would look upward and utter thanks to a god he didn’t believe in, followed by a prayer that he might never have to go through the ordeal another time.

      But, of course, there always was another time.

      His remarkable record, even as it earned him the admiration of his colleagues in the criminal defense bar, also created a problem for them, in much the same way that the acquittal of a former football star and minor celebrity, three thousand miles away and a decade earlier, had created a problem for them. “If he can do it,” their clients demanded to know, “why can’t you?” It was perhaps no surprise, therefore, that many of those who’d attended Jaywalker’s punishment hearing, almost all of whom admired him on a professional level, liked him personally and in most respects truly wished him well, also secretly rejoiced at the thought of being rid of him, if only for a while.

      But even to the most relieved of them, three years had seemed like a rather stiff suspension for blowing off a few rules and succumbing to something that didn’t sound so different, when you got right down to it.

      All of that had been back in September.

      It had taken Jaywalker until the following June, and the ninth first-Friday-of-the-month appearance before the three-judge panel, to report that he’d succeeded in disposing of virtually all of his remaining clients.

      The fourteen-year-old kid in the drug program was now fifteen, drug-free and in aftercare. The Sudanese handbag salesman had been granted permanent residence status, thanks to a little help from Herman Greencard. The homeless woman had an apartment of her own, a job and custody of her two children. The former gang member had relapsed, jumped bail and fled to southern California, from where he sent Jaywalker postcards picturing scantily-clad (or nonclad) sunbathers. The Sing Sing inmate’s appeal had been heard, and a decision was expected shortly. The pants-wetter’s case had been dismissed. A drunk driver had pleaded guilty to operating a motor vehicle while impaired. A minor drug dealer had settled for a sentence of probation. And a three-card-monte player had been acquitted once Jaywalker had convinced a jury that the man’s skill in conning his victims was so consummate that it completely negated the “game of chance” element required by the language of the statute.

      Nine months, nine cases, nine clients, nine pretty good results.

      Leaving exactly one.

      Samara Moss.

      3

      SAMARA

      Her name was Samara Moss, and she was a gold digger. At least that had been the universal consensus of the tabloids, ever since she’d set her sights on Barrington Tannenbaum. That had been nine years earlier, when Tannenbaum had been sixty-one. He’d made his fortune buying and selling oil and gas leases, than made it multiply several times over in the shipping business. Among the things he’d shipped were munitions, body armor and jet fighter planes. He had a short list of clients, but most of them had titles like “Sultan” or “His Excellence” before their names. Tannenbaum’s net worth had once been estimated at somewhere in the range of ten to twenty billion dollars.

      Samara’s net worth, at the time she married Tannenbaum, had been somewhere in the range of ten to twenty dollars.

      She’d grown up in a third-rate trailer park in Indiana, where she’d become so accustomed to hearing the phrase trailer trash that she no longer considered it an insult, much the way ghetto blacks think little of calling each other nigger. She was raised by a single mother who alternately waited tables, bartended and lap-danced at night, leaving Sam—as everyone had called her for as long as she could remember—in the care of a string of boyfriends. Some of those boyfriends ignored her; others taught her how to drink beer, curse and do drugs. By the time she was ten, Sam could roll a perfect joint, using either gummed or ungummed paper. At twelve, she was smoking the joints she rolled. To hear Sam tell it, several of those same boyfriends molested her on occasion, although the extent is unknown and the certainty remains unestablished to this day. Two things are clear, though. She was pretty enough to make her junior high school cheerleading squad at age twelve (no mean feat), and undisciplined enough to be kicked off it two months later.

      She ran away from home the day after her fourteenth birthday, landing first in Ely, Nevada, then in Reno and finally in Las Vegas, with dreams of becoming a showgirl and eventually a Hollywood star. She became, instead, a cocktail waitress and sometime prostitute, though she would have been quick to deny the latter description, insisting that she went to bed only with nice men to whom she was attracted. Who was she to complain when some of them chose to express their admiration in the form of gifts, including the occasional monetary one?

      It was in Las Vegas that Barrington Tannenbaum spied her, in the cocktail lounge at Caesars Palace, at three o’clock one Sunday morning. Barry was newly divorced at the time, a three-time loser at love. Although he was absurdly rich, he was also lonely, bored and as much in need of a project as Samara was in need of a sugar daddy. And one thing about Barry Tannenbaum—if you listened to his business associates or bitter rivals, most of whom counted themselves in both columns—was that once he got involved in a project, he never did so halfheartedly. From the moment he and Samara met, he was as determined to save her as she appeared determined to snare him. If it wasn’t quite a match made in heaven, it certainly had an otherworldly ring to it.

      It has been said that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, and recent history had amply demonstrated that Barry Tannenbaum was the marrying kind. The truth is that for all of his new money, Barry was an old-fashioned sort of guy. He’d grown up in an age when, if you loved the girl, you married her, had kids and lived happily ever after—even if ever after was something of a relative term. It’s therefore not all that surprising that, in spite of his dismal track record, Barry felt compelled to make an honest woman of Sam, in the most old-fashioned sense of the expression. Eight months to the day after he’d first set eyes on her in the neon glow of Caesars Palace, he married her. By that time, he was sixty-two.

      Samara was still not quite nineteen.

      If the tabloids had had fun with the forty-two years and fifteen billion dollars that separated the couple, they weren’t the only ones. It seems that gold diggers tend to arouse feelings of ambivalence in most of us. The hooker-turned-heroine played by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman earns our unabashed cheers when she lands the wealthy Richard Gere character, but only because the script took care to make it clear that she didn’t set out to do so from the start. Anna Nicole Smith, the Playmate of the Year and self-described “blond bombshell” who at twenty-six married an eighty-nine-year-old Texas billionaire, won considerably less public support. Still, there was an audible “You go, girl!” sentiment expressed by many when it appeared that Anna Nicole’s stepson—himself old enough to be her СКАЧАТЬ