Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  Everyone still seemed baffled, all except Danielle.

  “You also kill the person who gets blamed. He gets arrested, charged with murder, and though he’s completely innocent, all the evidence is against him; everyone thinks he’s one of those ‘murdering bastards’ of Richard’s elegant description, and he’s convicted and either spends the rest of his life in prison or is executed for his crime. But why is that a problem?”

  She said this in such a casual, offhand way, with such stunning indifference, that I wondered if she meant it, if for all her beauty she could be as cold, as heartless, as that. She saw the doubt in my eyes almost before I knew it was there. The smile on her lips became enigmatic, mysterious, and yet somehow full of understanding, as if instead of just having met we had known each other for years.

  “If the real murderer is worried about that,” she explained in a quiet, thrilling voice, “all he has to do is make sure the accused has someone who can save him, some like you, Anthony Morrison.”

  Dinner was over and the serious drinking began. Whether or not it was the tension brought on by the uncertainty of what was going to happen next, all those whispered rumblings about whether St. James was in trouble and what that might mean for them, the drinking, once it started, did not stop. It went the way of most gatherings of unhappy people forcing themselves to have a good time: cheap talk and brazen laughter, knowing looks and sidelong glances, a single meaningless word the cause of wild hysterics, a sudden dead exhaustion, a raucous shout, and then a call for another round.

  St. James and his wife smiled politely, laughed softly, and, as I noticed, scarcely touched their glasses. The louder the others talked, the quieter, the more withdrawn, the two of them became. A little after midnight, St. James excused himself and said he had had to get off to bed. A few minutes later, Danielle announced she had to get some air. As she passed behind me, she touched my shoulder and quickly whispered, “Join me, if you like.”

  My eyes were fixed directly across the table on Bunny Harper, who was trying to tell me something above the noise, something that, when she finally had my attention, she could not remember. I waited a few more minutes before I slowly rose from the table, stretched my arms and wandered out of the dining room alone.

  It felt good to be outside, away from the noisy chatter and the stale scent of alcohol. Across the moonlit water, the lights of Santa Barbara flickered in the distance and in the cool night air I realized what I fool I had been. She might be the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but she was married, and that was always trouble.

  “What are you laughing about?” asked Danielle in that haunting, breathless voice of hers. “How easy it is to get me outside alone?”

  And then, before I knew what I was doing, she was in my arms and I could not think of anything but how much I wanted her.

  “Danielle!” shouted St. James as he suddenly came out on deck. He was still looking the other way.

  “God, if he sees us…!” whispered Danielle, clutching my arm.

  I started to tell her that it was all right, that he had started in the other direction, but she turned and vanished into the darkness.

  “Oh, it’s you, Morrison,” said St. James as, less than a minute later, he approached. He had removed his coat and loosened his tie. He held a drink in his hand. “I had to get out of there,” he explained with a gruff laugh. “Can’t stand people who can’t hold their liquor. Besides, I had some work to do. Have you seen Danielle? I thought I heard her come up on deck.”

  I could taste the lipstick on my mouth. Danielle’s scent was all around me.

  “I just came out a few minutes ago.”

  A trace of disbelief, or so it seemed to my guilty eyes, edged its way across his face. He offered me a cigar.

  “Oh, I forgot – you don’t smoke. Neither do I - just these.” He lit the cigar and with a practiced movement of his slender wrist made the match go out. “You say you haven’t seen her.” His gaze roamed the distant shore. “Must have been mistaken,” he said as he puffed on the cigar. “Sound carries out here. She’s probably down below.” His gaze, shrewd, knowing, and, if I was not mistaken, sad with disappointment, moved slowly back to me. “Down below with one of my guests, probably in bed.”

  I felt an emotion I clearly had no right to have, a sharp twinge of jealousy, not because of what she was doing with someone else – I knew very well she was not doing anything – but the sinful, taunting knowledge that it was the kind of thing she had done before.

  St. James puffed on his cigar, his eyes glistening with something very close to regret. He leaned both elbows on the railing and flicked away an ash, and then, a moment later, stepped back and threw his cigar as far as he could, watching as the faint red glow grew fainter still and finally died.

  “She had that talent, you know; that talent some women have. Even when she’s being unfaithful, even when you know it, she can make you believe that she still belongs to you.” A smile that beneath its cynicism seemed oddly sympathetic drifted across his mouth. “You must have felt that, those few moments she was out here, alone, with you.”

  And then he turned and walked away and did not look back, and for the first time in a very long time I felt something close to shame.

  I tried to blame it on the alcohol. I had not had that much to drink, but the others had, and the rules of conduct had been forgotten in the late night sensuality of men and women who could not think but only feel. It was the worst excuse I had ever heard, blaming my misbehavior on someone else’s state of mind, like a burglar blaming his victim for leaving the doors unlocked.

  The night was getting cooler. I pulled my coat close around my throat and started walking, trying to clear my head. The sky was full of stars, a shining audience to the brief drama – comedy or farce? – that had just unfolded: the husband with the faithless wife who, given half a chance, would be forever faithful to a man she had only just met; a man with whom, had the scene lasted just a little longer, she might have run away and never once had occasion to regret it. I felt a kind of triumph, not because I thought it might really have happened, but that I was capable of imagining it. She was married, but what did the rules mean to me? But then, why that feeling of a guilty secret betrayed when I realized that St. James had known?

  Twice around the deck and I was through. Like an actor leaving the stage, I waved my hand at the watching stars and went below. The dining room had been abandoned, empty glasses scattered on the table, some of what had been in them spilled on the chairs. Gold-rimmed plates tumbled against one another, half-eaten desserts crushed and melted into shapeless blobs of sugar. The silence was everywhere, eerie and absolute, as if the passengers and crew, grown tired of the voyage and of each other, had left me there alone. But then, as I passed the door of the yacht’s master suite, I thought I heard a muffled noise. I stopped still, listening intently until I was certain what I heard. It was St. James all right, shouting at his wife. I could not make out what he was saying, the door was too thick for that, and if Danielle was saying anything, none of it, not even the sound of her voice, came through. It was none of my business, I told myself, but the taste of her mouth was still on my lips, and I knew that they were arguing about me. I started to walk away, but suddenly the door opened and Danielle came running out.

  “I don’t care if I ever -!” she screamed over her shoulder just before she turned and saw me. The look of anger on her face changed to something close to panic. Spinning around, she faced St. James and cried in an injured tone, “Do you think I want to sleep with every man I talk to?” And then, closing the door behind her, she went back inside.

  I thought about that question, that last thing I had heard her ask, as I lay in bed and tried to sleep; not whether she wanted to go to bed with every man she talked to, but whether she wanted to with me. If we had been somewhere else, where there was more privacy and where, with her husband gone, there had been more time, would it have happened, would we have forgotten everything except each
other and what we wanted? It was no question at all. That kiss had answered that. I tried not to think about her, but I could not think of anything else. Laying there, in the middle of the night, I laughed out loud at how easily I could play the fool, mesmerized by a woman I could never have and, once this short cruise was over with, would never see again. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, I did not feel bad about it. It was vanity, and I knew it, but I liked knowing that for a few stolen moments Danielle had wanted me. In the secret recesses of my uninhibited heart I was Don Juan, but in heaven, not in hell. There may have been a smile on my lips when I finally fell asleep.

  “Who’s there?” I demanded as I woke up with a start. The shadow moving toward me moved more swiftly at my voice.

  “Quiet, not so loud,” whispered Danielle as she pressed her fingers on my mouth and sat down on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a silk nightgown that did not quite come to her knees. “He’s asleep, but when he’s angry….I’m sorry you heard that, sorry that -” But before she could finish I pulled her down to me and started to kiss her.

  “No,” she protested. “We can’t – not here, not like this.”

  I couldn’t help myself, I wanted her too much, and I tried again.

  “It’s too dangerous,” she said with a look in her eyes that seemed ready to chance it. “Too dangerous,” she repeated as if to remind herself what she stood to lose. “You don’t know him; no one knows him the way I do. He’d kill us if we got caught.”

  For a moment, neither of us said anything. In the moonlight, filtered through the window like a silver screen, her face was as lovely as any I had ever seen. It held me captive, unable, unwilling, to look away. She was almost too beautiful to want, a painting in a museum too beautiful to touch.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said finally, gently stroking my hair. She smiled at the look of hopeful disappointment in my eyes. “I had to see you again, one more time alone.”

  The excitement, the confidence, the sense of being always at the center of things, watched by everyone whenever she entered a room, all of that was gone. In its place was something sad and wistful and far away.

  “You don’t remember me, do you? I knew it as soon as I saw you, as soon as we started talking. You didn’t recognize me; you don’t remember anything about me. And I was always so certain that you would.”

  Without another word, without telling me anything of what she meant, she kissed me on the side of my face and vanished into the night.

  CHAPTER Three

  It made me a little crazy, trying to remember a face that was impossible to forget. I could not have known her, despite what she said. Perhaps we had met at some gathering, a large party, in San Francisco or New York, where I did not know anyone and, to hide my awkward self-consciousness, I had had too much to drink. But she had meant more than that, more than some chance meeting that had lasted only a few, brief seconds. We had known each other well enough that I would have remembered – should have remembered - things about her, not just her face. I lay there in the darkness, searching through my past, wondering why I could not find her, how she could have vanished. The next morning, when I went up on deck to join the others, I could almost hear the laughter in that silky voice of hers, telling me all about a memory I did not share.

  The motor launch was heading toward the shore. Sitting next to her husband, Danielle, a white scarf whipping in the breeze, was looking back over her shoulder, trying, as it seemed, to catch one last glimpse of what she had left behind. I thought she saw me, and I thought she smiled.

  “Mr. and Mrs. St. James had to fly back to New York.”

  I turned and found myself under the watchful gaze of Blue Zephyr’s captain who immediately offered his hand.

  “Mustafa Nastasis. We haven’t met. I’m acquainted with the other guests, but this is your first time, isn’t it?”

  There was something out of place about him, something that did not feel right. His manner was too formal, too studied, everything too perfect. His dark gray hair was cut just right, his black mustache trimmed with precision. His double-breasted blazer gleamed like a dinner jacket, and his tailored flannel slacks broke at exactly the right angle across a pair of soft Italian loafers. He spoke English with the meticulous pronunciation that a native speaker never uses.

  “Greek,” he explained in answer to the question he read in my eyes. “On my father’s side; my mother was from Istanbul. They usually hate each other, the Greeks and the Turks, but my parents did not care for politics, only each other. They had nine children.”

  His eyes, shrewd and observant, moved past me to the motor launch, barely visible in the morning haze.

  “Are they coming back?”

  “To Blue Zephyr?” His glance was full of meaning, or rather the suggestion of one, because there was something enigmatic in his look. A smile of cheerful malevolence suddenly started across his mouth, but then he shrugged his shoulders and made the vague remark, “Always, but when, or where….”

  “They decided to leave rather suddenly. They didn’t say anything about it last night.”

  His gaze turned inward, as if to shut out the question, or any other inquiry about what Nelson St. James might be planning to do next.

  “Tomorrow, in Los Angeles, a plane will take you back to San Francisco.”

  “That’s very kind of Mr. St. James,” I replied, “but it won’t be necessary.” With an expression as enigmatic as his, I added, “I have other plans.”

  I was telling the truth. I did have plans of my own, something I had been meaning to do for a long time. Tommy Larson was just about the only friend I had. Though we lived only an hour’s plane ride apart, he never seemed to get to San Francisco and I almost never went to L.A. We talked on the phone once in a while, usually after I had won a case and he called to complain that, thanks to me, the streets were now less safe than they had been and all the women were in danger, but I had not seen him in nearly a year. A lot had happened and not all of it was good.

  Tommy had moved out of Los Angeles, from Pasadena where he had lived for years, since shortly after finishing law school, to a small town an hour’s drive north, not far from Santa Barbara and a dozen miles inland. Ojai was a place to grow oranges and avocados, and a place to hear yourself think. The Thatcher school was the other side of the orchards on the east end of town, and there were other shady private schools spread along the oak lined approach. Gurus and mystics, disciplines of eastern religions that taught the path to inner peace, had flourished here, and Aldous Huxley, back in the 1950s, had often driven up for long discussions about what it all meant. There was still some of that, though it more often took the form of classes on yoga and other, stranger, meditations, but now the famous people who came here were mainly interested in having a place to hide. Celebrities walked around, or sat in small restaurants, dressed in shabby clothes, and for the most part no one noticed. Tommy had been famous once, but that was not the reason he had moved.

  I followed the long straight palm-lined street up into the foothills until I reached a one story Spanish style house that looked as if it had been here for years, since sometime in the 1920s when some now forgotten movie star had wanted a place where he could escape the prying eyes of tourists and, depending on whom he was with, a jealous husband or an overzealous cop. It was barely visible from the road, hidden behind a tangle of reddish orange bougainvillea and clumps of cactus with exotic purple flowers. Low rock walls, three feet thick, rocks piled by hand on top of each other, rocks taken when the land was cleared and the house was built, marked the boundary of the property and both sides of a long narrow drive. It was Los Angeles a hundred years ago, before the movies made it famous and anyone who was anyone had to live in a mansion.

  Tommy was sitting on the front porch in a faded gray t-shirt and a pair of tattered khaki shorts. The straw hat on his head had seen better days and one of his leather sandals had a broken strap. With a familiar grin he watched while I parked the car, then he s
tretched his arms and slowly rose from the stiff-backed chair.

  “As you can see,” he announced as he ran his hand across the heavy stubble on his face, “I’ve gone to a lot of trouble getting ready for your visit. What are you laughing at?” he demanded with a gruff, half bent grin. “Hell, I even got dressed, sort of; not like you, all pressed and buttoned up, but good enough. At least as good as I ever do anymore.” He clasped my hand and with his other hand held my arm steady. “I hate to say it, but it’s good to see you. What’s it been – at least a year?” He seemed dazzled by the thought of it, that that much time had passed. “Funny how that works. Wasn’t that long ago, I saw you every day.”

  “College.”

  “Yeah, college. Best time I ever had.”

  He studied me, wondering if I agreed; but then he remembered the reason why things had not been – could not have been - the same for me. He was too good a friend to say it, so I said it for him.

  “You were an all-American; I was barely good enough to play.”

  “You started every game our senior year.”

  “Only because the other guy got hurt,” I laughed.

  “I always thought you were better. Come on, let’s go inside. It’s cooler, and I’ll get you a beer, and I’ll tell you all the lies I’ve been saving up.”

  I watched him move, the easy fluid motion, the way that even standing still he seemed ready to explode, suddenly running at full-speed, faster, quicker, than anyone I had ever seen. He left me in the living room and went into the kitchen and brought us back the promised beer.

  “We’re not going to talk football and how great we were, how we were the best team Southern Cal ever had, how you won that Rose Bowl game after I ripped up my knee.”

  He tapped his bottle against mine and took a long slow drink. He smiled with his eyes.

  “No, I don’t wonder what would have happened if I had not got hurt, what kind of pro career I might have had. I use to,” he admitted, “but what’s the point? Tell you the truth, I don’t much like the game anymore.” He looked out the window next to him, out at the flower garden and the swimming pool the other side, out, I suppose, to what he still remembered of his life. “There are a lot of things I don’t like much anymore.” A moment later, as if he had just realized what he had said, he shook his head and laughed. “It’s so damn quiet here, sometimes I start talking out loud just to make sure I still have a voice.”