his kitchen floor, in what the crime scene technician described as “a pool of dried blood.” If the terminology was slightly oxymoronic, the meaning was clear enough.
There’d been no weapon present, and none found in the garbage, which hadn’t been picked up yet, on the rooftop, or in the vicinity of the building. Officers went so far as to check nearby trash cans and storm drains, with, in police-speak, “negative results.”
There was no sign of forced entry, and no indication from the security company that protected the apartment that any alarms had gone off. The apartment was dusted for fingerprints, and a number of latent prints were lifted or photographed. Blood, hair and fiber samples were collected.
The medical examiner’s office was summoned, and the Chief Medical Officer himself, not all that averse to publicity, responded. On gross examination of the body, he found a single deep puncture wound to the chest, just left of the midline and in the area of the heart. There appeared to be no other wounds, and no signs of a struggle. The M.E. took a rectal temperature of the body. Based on the amount of heat it had lost, as well as the progression of lividity and rigor mortis, he was able to make a preliminary estimate that death had occurred the previous evening, sometime between six o’clock and midnight.
The building was canvassed to determine if anyone had heard or seen anything unusual the night before. Only one person reported that she had, a woman in her late seventies or early eighties, living alone in the adjoining penthouse apartment. She’d heard a loud argument between a man and a woman, shortly after watching Wheel of Fortune. She recognized both voices. The man’s was Barry Tannenbaum, whom she knew well. The woman’s, she was just as certain, was his wife, known to her as Sam.
According to TV Guide, Wheel of Fortune had aired that evening at seven-thirty Eastern Standard Time, and had ended at eight.
The doorman who’d been on duty the previous evening was located and called in. He distinctly recalled that Barry Tannenbaum had had a guest over for dinner. As he did with every non-tenant, the doorman had entered the guest’s name in the logbook upon arrival and again upon departure. Although in this particular case he hadn’t required her to sign herself in. The reason, he explained, was that he knew her personally.
Her name was Samara Tannenbaum.
At that point a pair of detectives had been dispatched to Samara’s town house. They had to buzz her from the downstairs intercom and phone her unlisted number repeatedly for a full fifteen minutes before she finally cracked the door open, leaving the security chain in place. They told her they wanted to come in and ask her a few questions.
“About what?” she asked.
“Your husband,” they said.
“Why don’t you ask him yourselves?”
The two detectives exchanged glances. Then one of them said, “Please, it’ll only take a few minutes.”
At that point Samara unchained the door and “did knowingly and voluntarily grant them consent to affect entry of the premises.” Jaywalker would go to his grave in awe over how cops abused the English language. It was as though, in order to receive their guns and shields, they were first required to surrender their ability to spell correctly, to follow the most basic rules of grammar, and to write anything even remotely resembling a simple sentence.
Samara had seemed nervous, they would later write in their report. Her hair “appeared unkept,” her clothes were “dishelved,” and she “did proceed to light, puff and distinguish” a number of cigarettes.
They asked her when she’d last seen her husband.
“About a week ago,” she replied.
“Are you certain?”
“Am I certain I saw him a week ago?”
“No, ma’am. Are you certain you haven’t seen him since?”
“Why?” she asked. Jaywalker could picture her nervously lighting, puffing and “distinguishing” a cigarette at that point. “What’s this all about?”
“It’s just routine,” they assured her. “We only got a few more questions.”
“Well, if you don’t want to tell me what this is about,” Samara told them, “you can just routine yourselves right out the door.”
Again the detectives exchanged glances. “We have people who place you at your husband’s apartment last night,” said one of them.
“So what?”
“So we’d like to know if it’s true, that’s all.”
“So what if it is?”
“Is it?”
Samara seemed to think for a moment before answering. Then she said, “Yeah, sure. We had dinner together.”
“At a restaurant, or at your husband’s apartment?”
“His apartment.”
“Did he cook?”
“Barry? Cook?” She laughed. “The man couldn’t boil water. He told me the first thing he did when he bought the apartment was to have the stove ripped out to make room for a bigger table.”
“What did you eat?”
“Chinks.”
Being detectives, they didn’t have to ask her what she meant. Besides, the crime scene guys had found half-empty containers of Chinese takeout on the counter and in the garbage, when they’d been looking for a weapon.
“Are we done here?” she asked. “Or maybe you’d like to know how many steamed dumplings I ate.”
“Did you have a fight?” they asked.
“No.”
“We’ve got people who tell us they heard a fight.”
“So? Big deal. We always fight.”
“Who hit who first?”
“Nobody hit nobody.”
Jaywalker wondered if maybe Samara might not have made a pretty good cop.
“So what kind of a fight was it?”
“A word fight. An argument, I believe they call it.”
“About what?”
“Who the fuck remembers? Stupid stuff. He started it.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know. I told him he could go fuck himself, and I left. Now maybe you’d like to tell me what this is all about?”
“Sure. It’s about your husband’s murder.”
“Barry? Murdered? You’re shitting me.”
They
