Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I had too much to drink, and when I woke up the next morning my head beat like a hammer. I managed to get dressed and make my way up on deck, and into a blinding noontime sun. Even with dark glasses, the shoreline was a distant blur. A steward brought me a Bloody Mary and, clutching the railing, I tried to steady myself.

  “She’s really quite beautiful, isn’t she?”

  I had not heard Nelson St. James come up behind me. Nodding in dim recognition of what he had said, I tried to show enthusiasm as I cast a glance of approval at the sleek lines of his prize possession.

  “Not the boat, Mr. Morrison – my wife! Danielle. You couldn’t take your eyes off her last night. No! Don’t be embarrassed,” he laughed, slapping me with something like affection on the shoulder. “Danielle is one of the world’s truly beautiful women. Only a fool, or a eunuch, wouldn’t want to look at her.”

  He noticed what I was drinking. Smiling to himself, he kicked at the deck and then shook his head.

  “You drank less than any of them, and you’re the only one who feels the effect. All they do is drink. But then, who can blame them? If you were as dull as they are, wouldn’t you try to forget who you are? Or if you had their worries,” he added with a strange, enigmatic look.

  “Then why…?” I blurted out before I could think.

  “Invite them along? Have them as guests?” He leaned on the railing and stared out at the distant hills, rising and falling with the swelling current of the sea. “The cost of doing business, let’s just call it that.” He took a deep breath and held it for a moment before letting it out. “It’s more than that. They have a lot of money invested with me. They’re worried now that it might not be safe.” A look of shrewd malice danced in his eyes. “We’re out here on this pleasure cruise so I can convince them that if they take their money out they’ll lose all chance of getting the kind of returns I’ve been giving them for years. That’s what they really worry about: not whether they might lose what they have, but that they might lose the chance to get even more.”

  A wind kicked up and started to blow in gusts. Short, choppy waves began to slap against the hull. The ice in my glass rattled in my unsteady hand. The wind got stronger, the boat cut deeper into the sea.

  “I’m not much of a sailor, but there’s nothing like it, being out here on a day like this.” He pointed to the coast which, seen from this distance, looked like some vast, uninhabited place still waiting to be discovered. “You can almost feel what it must have been like, back at the beginning, when the Spanish, and then the English, came; when all this was there for the taking, for anyone who had the nerve.”

  A look as of someone cheated out of what he should have had fell across his dark, implacable eyes. He was genuinely distressed, irritated, as it seemed, for having been born too late, thwarted of the kind of ambition he might have enjoyed.

  “A whole country waiting to be built, and now – what?” He turned to me, a rueful expression etched deep with a peculiar bitterness plain on his face. “What?” he demanded. “Make money – just keep adding numbers. It’s the world we live in, the one we never made.” Suddenly, he laughed and threw up his hands in mock frustration. “Even criminals lack all ambition!”

  Still laughing, he took me by the arm and started walking down the deck. The hard, heavy wind nearly knocked me sideways, but St. James, more used to it, did not miss a step.

  “You ever defend someone charged with embezzlement?” he asked, continuing his line of thought. “Wouldn’t matter if they had stolen millions, would it? It would still be boring, compared to a single act of piracy.”

  He stopped and swung around until he was right in front of me, a question in his eyes.

  “That’s not crazy, you know. I can prove it. Think back over the last few years, all the rich guys – I knew a few of them – who went to jail because of the money they had taken out of the companies they ran, or the investors they defrauded. Doesn’t that show you how utterly dull and without imagination they were?”

  His eyes were alive with excitement, eager to show me he was right, and I still had no idea what he was talking about.

  “They were tried and found guilty, and they went to prison. That’s the way it works.”

  He patted me on the arm and started walking, but just for a few steps.

  “Why did they go to trial? That’s one question. The other question is why did they go to prison after they were found guilty?”

  He started off again, but almost immediately stopped again. Clasping his hands behind his back he squinted into the wind.

  “You’re too close to it, too much a part of the system. But what would you do, if you knew you were guilty, and you had, as they say, all the money in the world?” He arched an eyebrow and let me know he could scarcely believe how stupid people could be. “All the money in the world, millions – no, billions – and they go off to jail like good little boys who have been told to go their rooms! All they had to do – any one of them – was get on a private plane and get out of the country. The question is why they didn’t. Isn’t that what you would do, faced with the choice between wealth and freedom in some safe corner of the world or twenty, or thirty, or forty years locked up in a federal prison? Can you imagine a pirate doing that? Do you know why they did it, just went to prison when they didn’t have to? – No imagination, no courage; they were all a bunch of clerks; they didn’t know how to do anything that wasn’t part of a routine. That’s why they did so well in business: they just did what everyone else was doing. Trust me, I know these guys. You could leave their cell doors open, all the guards could disappear, not one of them would think about escape!”

  St. James shook his head in mockery, and then, as if to apologize for his rant against the cowardice of thieves, gave a modest shrug and shook his head once more, this time with an air of resignation.

  “Have another Bloody Mary. I have some dull business to attend to; nothing like the life of a pirate – it will probably take all afternoon.”

  He walked away, laughing quietly, and then, suddenly, shouted back. “Maybe that’s what I should do: raise the skull and crossbones and sail the seven seas!” A large, irresistible, grin cut hard across his mouth. “But then I suppose they’d just track me down with a global satellite and take all the fun out of even that!”

  I did not know quite what to make of Nelson St. James. The more time I spent with him, the less I understood. But despite my growing confusion, I was starting to like him. Perhaps because he had so much of it, he seemed to have no interest in money, and a barely concealed contempt for those who had. It was all a game to him, money merely the counters, the way you kept score.

  I settled into a deck chair and watched the long white wake stretch out in the distance, the ephemeral mark of where we had been. After a while the wind subsided and the sea grew calm and the only sound was the quiet murmur from the engine room below. Two couples came up on deck to take the sun and, though I was not in the mood for conversation – my head still hurt too much for that – I decided I owed it to my hosts to mingle with the other guests.

  “They’re selling the place in the Hamptons,” said Pamela Oliver as she rubbed lotion on her long, sleek legs.

  I had met her the night before, but then she had clothes on and not a bathing suit. She had the air of a pampered sportswoman, more concerned with how she looked on the golf course or the tennis court than how well she played the game.

  “And the place in Palm Beach,” added the other woman in a biting, scornful voice.

  Standing at the railing, like a store window mannequin, Bunny Harper had short, shiny black hair cut sharp across her forehead and straight across her slender shoulders, bright red lipstick and brazen white teeth. She was about to say something caustic, from the way her lip had begun to curl back, when she noticed me.

  “Have you known Nelson long?” she asked with a smile invented on the instant.

  “We’ve gotten to know each other,” I re
plied. “But you were about to say something, and I’m afraid I interrupted.”

  “You were going to say that they’re selling damn near everything they own,” said Pamela Oliver, still working on her legs.

  Bunny Harper gave her an icy stare.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything. I heard something about the Palm Beach house, but that’s probably not true, either; probably just more rumors.”

  There was an awkward silence. Townsend Oliver, Pamela’s husband, offered me a drink, and when I asked for a Bloody Mary allowed that he could use one himself. Bunny’s husband, Roger Harper, finished off what was left of a gin and tonic and asked for another. He was older than Townsend, with tired eyes and a grim, almost brutal mouth, and the voice of a worn out gambler on a losing streak. His family owned steel mills in Pennsylvania. Townsend, on the other hand, was one of the new breed of self-made men; not the kind that, in an earlier generation, had worked their way up with their fists, but the kind who came from affluent, upper middle-class homes, and went to Stanford on scholarship. He had a software company and, not yet forty, had more money than Harper and his family had ever dreamed of making. I had not met him before last night, but I knew people who had. There was talk he wanted to run for governor.

  “Why would anyone want to have a place in the Hamptons, or Palm Beach, or anywhere else for that matter, if you could live on this?” I asked in all innocence. “There aren’t many houses this size, and you can go anywhere in the world on it.” I glanced at Bunny Harper. “And they’re not selling this,” I remarked with perfect confidence.

  Though she tried to hide it, she was surprised that I seemed to know this. She tried to hide a great many things. Eye shadow, piled too thick around the edges, had begun to crumble into pieces, revealing all the effort that had gone into the failed effect. Her husband, nursing his drink, sat at some distance from her. He was not surprised at all.

  “This is the last thing he’d sell. Morrison has put his finger on it. You can go anywhere on this, sail far away, places where the government has no jurisdiction.”

  “Careful, Roger! We shouldn’t be talking about…!”

  He ignored her. He took a long drink of his gin and tonic and signaled the steward he was ready for another. A shrewd smile settled on his mouth.

  “Our good friend Nelson is involved in a great many things and none of us much cared what he did, or how he did it, because whatever else happened we could always count on him getting a good return. The market did well, but we did much better - didn’t we, Townsend? Did you ever wonder how he did it, did so much better than anyone else, made us the kind of money that made us feel smart for talking our way into the deal?”

  “And he’s still doing it, isn’t he?” replied Townsend with some irritation. “Some people are just better at doing certain things,” he added with confidence. “Nelson knows how to invest.”

  The lines in Roger Harper’s forehead deepened and grew broader. He looked at Townsend with the pity one feels for a fool.

  “Is that what you think he knows – how to invest? I think he knows something more interesting than that; I think he knows how blind people can be, how eager they are to believe it whenever someone tells them that he knows how to make them more money than they’ve ever imagined. I think –”

  “I think you’ve had too much to drink,” said Townsend.

  “Screw you, Townsend,” said Harper with a caustic glance. “What the hell do you know about anything? And screw Nelson St. James,” he added when his wife started to interrupt. “Screw the whole lot of them.”

  He crouched forward, looking straight at me. There was a marvelous clarity in his eyes, the seasoned certainty of someone who does not care what anyone else thinks or says.

  “When people find out what’s been going on, when they find out what he did, how he did it, they’ll be talking about it for years, wondering why no one ever caught on. Who knows, they may even start to wonder how people who always thought they were so damn smart could be so stupid!”

  Bunny Harper was tugging at his arm.

  “He’s coming!” she whispered urgently as he started to resist.

  “Come on everyone!” shouted St. James as he stepped up on deck. “Danielle wants a picture.”

  That evening Blue Zephyr anchored off the Channel Islands. The lights of Santa Barbara danced on the moon-covered sea and the liquor flowed freely and everyone acted as if they were the best of friends, all of them anxious to please. St. James glanced down the table to where I was sitting between Pamela Townsend and Richard Darwin’s small, waspish wife.

  “We were talking last night about -”

  “Getting away with murder,” interjected Darwin as he continued to eat. His eyes never left his plate. St. James looked at him as if the man were hopeless. “Getting away with murder,” Darwin reminded him again as he reached for another piece of bread.

  “Yes, and for some reason it suddenly seems a much more attractive possibility,” said St. James as he watched Darwin wipe the bread into some gravy before shoveling it into his mouth. The remark was lost on Darwin, but his wife understood.

  “Getting away with murder,” she said in a small, reedy voice that seemed to hiss with resentment, “If you have enough money I suppose you might think you could get away with anything.”

  She meant to stab him in the heart, to do all the injury she could; St. James treated it as an intelligent suggestion that led to the very point he wanted to make.

  “Money would be essential. Without it, you couldn’t hire Morrison.”

  But Darwin’s wife was not going to let it stop there. She did not like being put off. She was about to make another caustic remark when Danielle got everyone’s attention by challenging her husband.

  “But if someone wanted to get away with murder – thought about it in advance – why would they need to hire Anthony? Isn’t the best way to get away with murder not to get caught in the first place? Isn’t the only reason to hire Anthony Morrison and his honest face because you’ve failed, didn’t plan it well enough?”

  Darwin belched, and seemed not be aware of it. There was nothing left on his plate. Beneath their heavy lids, his sharp, rapacious eyes darted from one side of the table to the other, searching for something he might have overlooked. Vaguely disappointed, he slid back in his chair and folded his arms.

  “That’s worse than murder.”

  He was looking right at me, and there was nothing friendly in the way he was doing it. I knew what he was going to say - it was written all over his face, and I had heard it often enough before. I tried not to laugh.

  “What’s worse than murder?”

  “What you do, helping someone get away with it; what a lawyer does when he tricks a jury into letting some murdering bastard go free.”

  “Is that what you think you would call it – ‘murdering bastard,’ ‘a lawyer’s tricks’ – if you were charged with a murder you didn’t commit? It’s really quite amazing,” I said, daring him to disagree, “how many people who always thought anyone who was arrested must be guilty, suddenly decide the police are idiots or worse and the whole system stupid and corrupt when they’re the ones charged with a crime.”

  Richard Darwin was too used to running things, too accustomed to everyone agreeing with him, to consider me anything but offensive. His face turned several shades of red, but before he could sputter an angry reply, Danielle again intervened.

  “What I want to know,” she said, laughing as if Darwin was acting a part, pretending to an anger he did not feel, “isn’t how you could defend one of those ‘murdering bastards’ Richard gets so upset about; what I want to know is how you, yourself – after all you’re the only one here who really knows about this sort of thing – would go about it, what you would do to get away with murder. Yes, tell us!” she cried. “You’ve worked with all these people, tried all these cases – you must have thought about it,” she purred. “What would you do if you wanted to kill someone and did not want
to get caught? Tell us, Anthony Morrison; tell us how to commit the perfect murder.”

  I felt a strange sense of triumph. I could look right at her now, return her gaze, and not lose my train of thought.

  “Three things: an alibi that is unbreakable, a weapon that is untraceable, and, most important of all, someone else to blame.”

  “Someone else to blame?” asked St. James from the end of the table.

  “The jury has to believe that the real murderer is out there, still at large, and that if they don’t vote to acquit the defendant, the real murderer, whoever he is, will get away with it.”

  “But we’re talking about the perfect murder,” he reminded me. “The killer never goes to trial because he never gets caught.”

  “It comes down to the same thing: There has to be someone else to blame. The police almost never look for a second suspect once they have the first. There’s one problem of course.”

  I looked around the table, at Darwin, who was thinking about something else, and at the others, at Townsend Oliver and Roger Harper and the women they had married, and at the other couples, all of them rich beyond imagining and certain that they were worth even more. The problem I had posed was obvious, but only if you had a conscience. None of them were willing to hazard a guess. If you could get away with murder, if it was as easy as I had seemed to suggest – an alibi, a weapon no one could find, and someone else to blame – what problem, if there was one, could rank in importance with the fact that it could be done?

  “Instead of committing just one murder,” I explained finally, “you would be committing two.”