Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  I had wondered how I was going to say what I knew I had to. I had thought about it, tried to think of a way that did not sound intrusive, but now I just stumbled into it.

  “Why didn’t you call me, Tommy? There must have been something I could have done. We’ve been friends for….”

  He stopped me with a look.

  “We’re too good of friends for me to lie to you the way I did to everyone else. Divorce is a little like death; worse in some ways. Everyone wants to tell you how sorry they are. You can’t exactly tell them that it’s the best thing that’s ever happened, can you? Tell them how thrilled – no, grateful – that she finally decided to leave. You have no idea what a relief it was.” He gave me a quick, appraising glance. “No, you know. When you heard, you weren’t surprised, were you?”

  “No,” I admitted, “I wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t change the fact that I was….”

  But he was not listening. He was still caught up in the memory of what happened and, more than that, the reasons why, if he had only known it, had made it all inevitable.

  “She was the best looking girl in school and she married an all-American, the great running back, Saturday’s hero. It was always going to be like that, the guy that everyone is eager to be friends with, eager to do anything they could to help us. When I got hurt, when I couldn’t play anymore, when I decided I better follow you and go to law school and learn how to do something, it never occurred to her that any of it would change, and for a few years it didn’t. I was still the player, the college football star, everyone who saw us full of smiles. And when it all went away, she went with it; not consciously, not on purpose: she found other things, other people, more interesting. All that bright-eyed eagerness went away, all the fun disappeared. When we were first married she would run to the door when I came home; when I joined the U.S. Attorney’s office, became a government lawyer on a government salary instead of joining some high-priced firm, she barely said hello at night. She never complained, never asked me to do anything different, but there was a look of disappointment, a sense that I had let her down, that she had made a mistake.”

  Staring straight ahead, he tapped his fingers briefly on the arm of the overstuffed chair.

  “It’s quiet here. I already said that, didn’t I? It’s true, though. That’s why I came here, why I bought this place. I’ve never been alone before.”

  Suddenly, in that effortless way he had, he was on his feet. He stretched his arms and then put his hands on the small of his back and with a thoughtful expression stared down at the faded red tile floor.

  “You never thought you were very good,” he said, raising his eyes just far enough to meet my gaze. “That’s why you were better than that other guy, that’s why you’re just about the best damn lawyer around.”

  “Things were easy for you,” I reminded him. “You were born with speed and quickness, and you could see how things were going to happen before they did.”

  “Things were easy for you, too – you finished near the top of your class in law school. I barely made it.”

  “And you became one of the best prosecutors the government had.”

  “Not good enough to get the guy you just went sailing with.”

  “You didn’t tell me that when I told you what I was doing. You were after St. James?”

  He made a helpless gesture, a rueful smile that suggested that he wished he had had the chance. “I didn’t know if you were about to represent him. Is that why he invited you – to ask you if you would?”

  We were friends, but we were also lawyers, a prosecutor and a defense attorney, and I started to hedge my answer. He caught my hesitation.

  “I’m not prosecuting anymore. I quit, remember?”

  Tommy had left the U.S. Attorney’s office shortly after his divorce. He had not given any reason, only the familiar phrase that he was leaving to “pursue other opportunities.” He had not pursued any, so far as I could tell, unless you considered living alone somewhere outside L.A. among the many possibilities that vague phrase suggested.

  “Quit for good, or just long enough to figure out what you want to do?”

  With his hands shoved into his pockets, he twisted his mouth to the side and narrowed his eyes, as if the question had been written out on a piece of paper and he was studying it for an answer.

  “Quit the government for good. Quit being a lawyer? I don’t know. Maybe.” He searched my eyes as if he thought he might find the answer there, but nothing in my own experience would help him find a way out of what was clearly a dilemma. “I like the courtroom. I like the action. But it isn’t like football: it isn’t a game. You don’t just walk off the field at the end, you don’t just add up another game to the number you’ve won or lost.” He was bouncing up on the balls of his feet, his shoulders slightly lowered, his eyes focused straight ahead, but, just like when he was playing, seeing everything around him. “You ever lose a case where you know the guy was innocent, ever have to watch someone go off to prison for something he didn’t do and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it?”

  “Is that what happened?” I asked, intensely curious. “You sent someone away for something he didn’t do?”

  “Not on purpose, not with what they call ‘conscious knowledge.’ In some ways it was worse. We were going after people we knew we could get. Drug stuff mainly, easy cases to win; not the ones in charge, the ones who manufacture, the drug lords – we’d go after them when we could – but possession cases. You get some kid, he’s hooked on crack, and you send him to prison for ten, twenty years. He broke the law, you convict him. You do it over and over again, and then you start to notice that it doesn’t make any difference. The kid was a junkie, an addict; he needed help. But we aren’t in the business of helping kids like that. So we go after people who are, some of them, the real victims, and we let a guy like St. James go around stealing billions and don’t do anything about it because it’s too complicated, too expensive, because it takes too much time to build a case you have any chance of winning.”

  He burst out laughing.

  “Christ! Listen to me, sounds like one of those half-time speeches we used to have to listen to – We’d be up thirty points and the coach would be talking about how lousy we’d played.” His eyes shined bright with the memory of it and he laughed again, quietly now, at his own nostalgia. “That was the problem, you see – running up the score. You can always have a winning record – hell, you can go undefeated – if you only schedule weak opponents.” He turned deadly serious. “That’s what we were doing, trying only cases we knew we could win. I quit because I got tired of beating up on people who could not fight back, kids who had never had a chance. What kind of system is it that says that if you steal a few hundred you do twenty years, but if you steal a few billion – if you steal the whole damn country – you get to make an apology and a chance to make amends?”

  With a wistful expression in his clear blue eyes, Tommy scratched his head. A smile that could have meant a dozen different things moved slowly across his fine, straight mouth, and then, slowly, faded away.

  “But I might have gone on doing it, told myself that lie we all tell ourselves, that I was just doing my job, if I hadn’t suddenly found myself divorced and if they hadn’t closed down the case I had against St. James.”

  This, though it made more sense than what he had said about it before, raised a different, and a more intriguing, question.

  “You were good enough to get him, but someone wouldn’t let you. Someone in the government didn’t want St. James prosecuted?”

  “You could say that, but it’s nothing I could ever prove. The order came from Washington, said we had spent too much time on it, too much expense. They didn’t say I couldn’t prosecute, only that I didn’t have any more time to build a case. That was no choice at all and they knew it. I didn’t have a case, not yet, that I could win.”

  “He got to someone, got them to back off.”

  “Not like
that, not the way you imagine. It’s more subtle. No one gave anyone a bribe. No one transferred a few million into some Swiss account. Some Washington lawyer, someone who represents certain interests that St. James controls, would have met with the attorney general, a friend of his, someone he sees at social occasions, and mentioned that there were rumors of an investigation, that Mr. St. James had nothing to hide, but that this kind of publicity was harmful to the various enterprises on which a good many people depended for their livelihood. If the government had a case, Mr. St. James would welcome the chance to prove his innocence, but if not, well, perhaps the attorney general could look into it.”

  “And the attorney general did – look into it, I mean?”

  “I doubt he looked into anything. He didn’t have to. All he had to do was let it be known that we were there to try cases, not waste time building cases that we weren’t sure would ever amount to a case we could win. It’s a perfectly legitimate policy, nothing that you could use to argue that the attorney general had done something improper.”

  There was something he had not told me.

  “So why did I ask you if he wanted you to represent him, if the case against him had been dropped? After I quit, I had a long conversation with a reporter I knew, someone who works for one of the financial papers. I told him everything I knew, everything I suspected. He started an investigation of his own, and now he has started to write about it. No one will be able to stop it now. St. James will be indicted. It’s only a matter of time.”

  He went into the kitchen and got us each another beer, and we went outside and sat at a wooden table beneath a eucalyptus tree and talked about college and how nothing had ever been quite that good again. We remembered some of the others we had played ball with and talked about what had happened to them and the way that for most of us our lives were still defined by what we had been, whether we were still living in the reflected glory of the past or trying to prove to ourselves and others that we were more than a faded memory of a vanished boyhood dream. We talked for hours, and the years fell away, and the dismal, minor tragedies of our lives seemed like nothing, as vague and distant from the present as when, instead of being part of us, they still waited in a future we did not yet know. It felt good, the way it always did, when I was with him, talking like this, the words less important for what they said than all the other things they triggered; three, four words and a dozen different visions of what we had not just seen but felt at the moment, years before, when they passed before our eyes. We talked about women, the ones we chased and the ones who, because they did not know us, chased us, but more than all the others, the ones that, if we had been smarter, we would have chased instead. We talked and laughed and then the light was almost gone and the still night air turned cool.

  “We need to go eat,” said Tommy as he stood up and headed back to the house. “I’ll change. It won’t take a minute.”

  It took less than that. He put on a long sleeve shirt and we were ready to leave. He still had on the khaki shorts and the sandals with the broken strap. We drove into town, less than a mile away, a four block street that seemed deserted, and out the other end, through two miles of orange groves to a roadside café. The waitress knew Tommy by sight, and without waiting to be asked brought him a glass of red wine. She had broad shoulders and the large hands of a woman who had always worked, and the tired, friendly eyes of a woman who never complained. When I told her I would have the same thing, she nodded her approval.

  We were halfway through dinner when Tommy again brought up St. James.

  “He’s going to be indicted, and he’s too smart not to know it. That’s the reason you were invited, wasn’t it? Because he wanted to have a chance to get to know you, to decide if everything he had heard about you was true – he would have had you checked out before he ever thought about meeting you, of course, as he’s that careful. He asked you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, no…not exactly,” I mumbled incoherently.

  “Yes, no, not exactly? What kind of answer is that?” laughed Tommy.

  “He told me that he might need a lawyer, but I’m not really sure anymore that it was his idea. I’m not sure it wasn’t his wife’s idea instead.”

  I told him what had happened, how she said we had met before, and the strange reaction she had when she realized that I did not remember, but Tommy was not listening; he was enjoying too much some thought of his own.

  “No, I didn’t!” I protested when I realized what it was.

  “You weren’t screwing around with Nelson St. James’ gorgeous wife? You’re going to tell me that nothing happened?”

  We had known each other too long, known each other too well. His laughing eyes taunted me with what they knew.

  “I kissed her, once – that’s all,” I insisted.

  He raised an eyebrow and nodded eagerly, waiting, certain there was more and that I would not be able to stop myself from telling him.

  “I shouldn’t have done it, and I knew it, and it didn’t matter: as soon as it happened, I wanted to again. It was after dinner, and there had been a lot of drinking, and she asked me to meet her up on deck. That’s when it happened, and then her husband showed up and -”

  “He caught you? What did -?”

  “He didn’t see us. That’s what we thought, anyway. As soon as she heard him, she disappeared. Then he saw me, standing there alone, and he came over and started talking about his wife, how she was probably downstairs in bed with someone else, and then he let me know that he knew she had been there with me. I don’t think he saw us; I think he was guessing, but guessing the way you do when you’re sure of something, when you know it, when you can feel it. Then, later, she slipped into my room.”

  Tommy’s blue eyes glittered in anticipation of what he was certain must have happened. I did not say anything and let him know by my silence that there was something unusual, unpredictable, about what had happened.

  “She came to tell me that she could not see me again – nothing had happened, just that one, fugitive kiss. That’s when she told me that we had known each other before and that she knew I did not remember. And that was all. She did not tell me where, or when, or anything. I’ve tried to remember. It doesn’t seem possible. Who could forget her?’

  “Maybe she just wanted to make you crazy. One thing’s for sure: you’ll never forget her now.”

  “You’re probably right about that,” I sighed. “I’ll never see her again, but I won’t forget her.”

  “You might see her again. St. James is still going to need a lawyer.”

  I reminded him that it was not the kind of case I took.

  “I wouldn’t know what to do in a securities case. I do simple things like murder.”

  Tommy tossed his head in silent laughter, acknowledging the point, and then rested his elbows on the table and pressed his fingers together. He became quite serious.

  “What he’s done is worse than murder, the lives he helped ruin. Though to give him credit, he’s more honest than most of them, or maybe just more immoral. He’s certainly more interesting than the rest of that Wall Street crowd.”

  He thought about what he had just said, then pushed back from the table and crossed one leg over the other. He sat at an angle, with his arms folded and a pensive, almost brooding expression on his mouth.

  “I used to love this country; I’m not sure I do anymore. I used to think there was a clear line between right and wrong, that those who broke the law got punished. I was not so naïve to believe that everyone who broke the law got caught, but I thought that even those who got away with something knew they had something to hide. And that’s true, for ordinary criminals, the guys that break into houses, who steal money at the point of a gun. But these guys on Wall Street, guys who head up banks and corporations, the whole New York financial crowd – they don’t give a damn about anything except the money. Money is the only measure and only fools and suckers care about the rules. They rigged the markets, made billions doing it
and thought themselves shrewd investors instead of thieves. That’s what makes St. James so damn interesting: He realized what America had become – what no one else could see – not a country, but a system of organized theft. None of the others understood what they were doing. They had no self-awareness, if I can put it like that. They were just doing what everyone else did: bend the rules a little, maybe even break them once in a while, because the rules weren’t really that important: technical stuff mainly, rules about insider trading, that kind of thing, nothing serious. If you got caught you might get a fine, might even, in the rare case, go off to prison for a year or two, but even then it was still a civil matter, nothing like what real criminals do. You know,” he said as a jaundiced grin ran sideways across his lips, “murderers, rapists, and thieves – least of all thieves. These guys could steal billions, cost thousands of decent, hard working people – people who would never cheat anyone out of anything – their life savings, but that didn’t put them in the same category as some guy who instead of growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut did not know his father, and instead of going to Harvard did not finish the tenth grade, a guy desperate for a few bucks grabs a woman’s purse and gets caught in the attempt. That’s the real lesson about what kind of country we’ve become: steal from one person, go to jail; steal from thousands, hundreds of thousands, steal from millions – say you’re sorry and start a charity.”

  Tommy’s eyes were solemn, remote, with a look of grim remembrance etched deep within them. A rueful smile, the silent echo of something he had once believed, a shattered faith, twisted down the corners of his mouth.