Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  “That’s the funny thing,” said Carol. “She never had a date in high school; no one ever asked her out. She wasn’t bad looking; she just wasn’t obviously pretty.”

  “Obviously pretty?”

  “I could see it: what she was going to look like. It was all there: the perfect structure of her face, the large, green blue eyes, the soft luster of her hair; but she was skinny and, worse yet, much too serious for her age. I don’t really remember a single time she laughed.” Reminded of something, she shook her head. “She laughed at her sister,” she said, staring at me as if this almost forgotten fact had a new significance. “Laughed when she found out Jean had broken of her engagement; told her - she was only sixteen, her sister twenty-two – that she was a fool and that one day she would regret it. That was the difference between them,” added Carol with a thoughtful gaze. “Justine always knew exactly what she thought; with Jean you never knew what she was going to do.”

  The young couple that had been wandering through the house looked around the corner to say goodbye. Carol would not hear of it.

  “Not before you see the pool!”

  It was fun to watch. She was on her feet, walking toward them as if the pool were some prize possession of her own, one she shared, when she shared it at all, only with her closest, most trusted friends. I had seen some of that in Justine, the way she had made everyone feel important. It was a gift, an instinct for playing a part, playing it so well that it was not really playing at all, but, for the time they were doing it, what they really were. I watched now, seeing the daughter in the mother, as Carol Llewelyn led the young man and his young wife through the French doors onto the stone patio where, under the shade of a eucalyptus tree, long strips of tan bark peeling from the trunk, she made them feel what it would be like to live here in the quiet dry heat of a long summer’s day.

  “They’ll be back,” she said with an air of satisfaction after she waved goodbye from the front door. “They want it. I could see it in their eyes. They’ll go someplace, a restaurant, sit across a table and talk it over. They can’t afford it, but they’re young, and they come from money. Did you see what they’re driving? The market is down. This house would have gone for twenty, thirty percent higher a year or so ago. It’s a good time to buy. That’s what they’ll tell themselves.” A shrewd, knowing grin cut across her mouth. “He’s still in love with her; he’ll take it as a challenge. Sweet, really; men always love women more than they are loved back – while it lasts, that is,” she whispered as she went to greet another, older, couple at the door.

  Another car stopped outside, and another one after that. She met each new arrival before they could take a step inside, saying their names out loud to make sure she remembered them. Soon there seemed to be people in every room, poking their heads in closets, trying door knobs, looking all around. A man in his sixties wanted to know about the security system and whether the gate at the bottom of the drive could be closed electronically from inside the house. Whatever the question, she not only had an answer but gave it as if she had been waiting all day for someone smart enough to ask something as sensible as that.

  Afraid of getting in the way, I went outside and walked around the pool. Standing in the shade of the eucalyptus tree, the same spot where Carol had invited the young couple to imagine the life they could have, I began to wonder about the same thing myself. It was easy to imagine the blissful quiet and the clean, sun-drenched air, away from the city and all the crowded noise. Maybe it was too late to think of doing something else, something other than what had become the settled routine of my solitary life, but for a brief moment I remembered how I felt, with Danielle in my arms, that night on Blue Zephyr, and thought how good it would be if I could live in a place like this and come home every night to someone like her.

  “It’s like a zoo in there,” said Carol Llewelyn, smiling at my distraction. “The owner will be happy.” She looked back across the pool to the rambling stucco house and the muted conversations going on inside. “I didn’t mean to abandon you.” She peered down at the lawn, cut as close as a putting green. “What’s he like, the man she’s married to, Nelson St. James? I’ve read some things in the papers, but….”

  It seemed incredible, but she insisted that she did not know him, that they had never met.

  “I wasn’t invited to their wedding. I don’t know what she told him about me; nothing, I imagine. I never heard from her after she left for New York.”

  “Never heard from her?” I asked, stunned by what she was telling me. “Why would she have done that? Did something happen?”

  “You mean, did we have a fight, did I throw her out – something like that? – No, nothing like that at all. I told you she always knew her own mind; that doesn’t mean that she ever told me what she was thinking, or anyone else that I know of. Maybe it was because she didn’t have a father; maybe it was because I wouldn’t tell her who he was. She resented me for that; and of course there was the way we lived, always just barely getting by. She was smart, a straight A student. Everything came easy to her. She could have gone anywhere to school – Stanford, Cal, one of those schools back east – but she was not interested. The only place she wanted to go was New York. She knew she had the kind of face they were looking for, knew she could become a model. No one else seemed to think so, but I told you she was smart. And so she went to New York and became Danielle, invented herself and forgot who she had been.”

  She lapsed into a long silence, remembering, no doubt with regret, but also with unmistakable pride, what her younger daughter had done.

  “I did hear from her once, after her baby was born. She called from the hospital, happier than I had ever heard her. She told me she was sorry for what she had done, sorry that she had stayed away so long, sorry that she had cut me off. She blamed it on her own selfish ambition, the way she had created a new identity and become the woman the world wanted to see. She said that until she had a child of her own she hadn’t known what it was like to have someone that you love no matter what, someone you would do anything to protect. She was crying at the end – the first time I had heard her cry since she was a little girl. She promised that things would be different, that she wanted me back in her life.”

  A small choking sound rose from Carol’s throat. She did not need to say that despite Justine’s promise she had not heard from her again.

  “Why? – Do you know?” I asked with all the sympathy I felt.

  “Things are easier the second time. She had left once; she left again. She may not even have remembered that she called. Isn’t that what happens in a state of euphoria? – We say things, do things, we don’t remember…or don’t want to remember.”

  With a look of impatience, a well-dressed woman in her early thirties beckoned from the open French doors. She had a question. Carol looked right through her and then turned back to me.

  “Is she in some kind of trouble? I’ve read things about her husband. But even if they’re true, she wouldn’t have been involved in anything like that, would she?”

  Carol Llewelyn was still greeting new people when I left, all of them come to see whether this was the house about which they had always dreamed, the place that would finally and forever make them happy. As I drove back across the long double-decked span of the Bay Bridge, watching the city dance in all its colors through the golden haze of a summer afternoon, I knew I could never live anywhere else. San Francisco was still a mystery, the way it drew everything toward it, as beautiful, as close and as distant, as any look Justine – Danielle St. James – had ever given anyone.

  CHAPTER Five

  The telephone was ringing, but it was either too early or too late and I just wanted it to stop; but it did not, and I groped around in the dark until I found it.

  “What is it?” I barked.

  “It’s me,” said someone who sounded positively delighted that he had woken me up.

  “Me?” I asked, turning on the lamp. The clock next to it read 6:45.
r />   “Yes, me – who else would it be? You don’t have any other friends.”

  Whoever this was, he was too cheerful, too full of life, too eager to - “Tommy!” I laughed, suddenly wide awake. “What are you doing, what’s going on?” I swung my legs out of bed and sat up.

  “Have you seen the papers?”

  “I’m in the middle of a trial. I don’t read anything,” I started to explain. “You mean this morning? You just woke me up! Why, something happen?”

  “St. James. I told you it would happen. He’s been indicted.”

  Holding the phone, I walked into the kitchen and started the coffee, listening while Tommy took me through the details of the various charges that had been brought. The far flung financial empire that Nelson St. James had built and controlled was, according to the grand jury, nothing more than a criminal conspiracy that had corrupted not only individuals but entire governments.

  “He’s going to call you; he’s going to ask you to handle it. Don’t do it. Don’t get involved. He’s hurt too many people.”

  “He won’t ask me, and I could not do it if he did. It’s what I told you before: I wouldn’t know what I was doing. And even if I did….”

  I started to tell him about Justine’s mother and what she had told me, but I realized that she had not really said anything that had any bearing on whether Justine’s husband was someone I would have wanted to defend. It was just a feeling, a sense that St. James and his wife were two selfish people who cared about nothing but themselves.

  “He won’t ask me, Tommy; and I won’t do it if he does.”

  Tommy seemed almost relieved to hear it; not, I knew, for the reason he gave me – that I was the only lawyer who might be able to get him off – but because he did not want to see my reputation tarnished by a too close connection with a man Tommy had come to despise.

  Even though I was in trial, I began to read the papers, following the story with the rest of the country, if with a peculiar interest all my own. I could not get out of my head what Danielle’s mother had said: that whatever the son-in-law she had never met might have done, her daughter could not be involved. Behind the apparent assurance with which she had said it, there had been the bare glimmer of a doubt, the hint of a possibility that, given everything else she had done, how easily she had turned her back on the past, she might after all be capable of even something like this. But there was no mention of Danielle in any of the printed stories, nothing beyond a passing mention that Nelson St. James had after a messy divorce married the famous fashion model four years ago.

  The stories were all about him, and at first they followed the usual, predictable pattern. He did what every rich man does when he gets caught, claimed that he was innocent and promised in a public statement that when he had a chance to tell his story in a court of law everyone would know that the only conspiracy involved was the one of which he had been made the innocent victim. Then the pattern changed. There were no more statements. He simply disappeared.

  It was astonishing, how swiftly the rumors spread and how quickly they changed. Nelson St. James became the most famous fugitive in the world, Blue Zephyr a phantom ship that could be in two places at once. On the same day he was seen in Singapore, drinking gin and tonics in a bar, and also observed having a heated discussion with a suspicious looking man in the lobby of a Sydney hotel. He was seen in Paris, he was seen in Rome; Blue Zephyr was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, Blue Zephyr was anchored somewhere deep in Egypt, far up the Nile. For weeks there was a flurry of speculation, and then, gradually, with every rumor spent and not one thing proven true, other, different, stories crowded St. James and his pirate ship out of the papers and off the screen. Months went by, and then, after those who still remembered had finally given up and declared with utter certainty that St. James was living somewhere in South America where search was meaningless and extradition did not exist, Blue Zephyr, as new and shiny as the day she was christened, sailed beneath the Golden Gate and into the San Francisco bay. But Nelson St. James was not on her.

  St. James was dead. He had been murdered, shot to death, his body lost at sea. That was the headline in the morning papers, but it was the picture beneath it that drew my attention and held it there, the photograph of Danielle – Justine, when I had known her, when she was the young girl no one noticed twice, the girl who in her adolescent imagination had thought she was in love with the still young man nearly twice her age who had been engaged to her older sister. The picture in the paper, the picture in my head, two pictures that looked nothing alike, and yet, remembering the wistful disappointment in her eyes when she told me that I had forgotten her, two pictures that merged as one: the face of the girl and the woman she had become. What I could not put together, what seemed impossible, was what the paper said had happened: that Danielle St. James had killed her husband and had now been charged with murder.

  “Are you going to do it?”

  I did not need to look up from my corner table in the courthouse cafeteria. Philip Conrad had been a court reporter for almost twenty years when I first started practicing law, and in a strange way we had become friends; strange, because we never saw each other outside of court. I knew him the way we all know people with whom we spent part of our time at work. If I had been asked where he lived or what he did on weekends, all I could have said was that he lived somewhere in the city and that he probably spent most of Saturday and Sunday typing up the trial transcript some lawyer needed for an appeal.

  There were things I knew about him, however, that others did not. He had taken an interest in me from the first trial I had in which he was the reporter, and he used to tell me, a young lawyer who could not find his way to the clerk’s office without help, stories about the legendary lawyers he had known years earlier. A few years after we first met, he told me that he had married the girl from the neighborhood where he had grown up, the girl he had known ever since he was just a boy, how he married her after he came home from Vietnam, a twice-wounded veteran of the war, how they moved into a small two-bedroom house out on the avenues where he still lived. He had an old-fashioned way of talking, especially when it came to things that were by any measure personal and deeply felt. In a single sentence, spoken with the kind of restrained emotion that only makes you, the witness, feel how much another man has suffered, he told me in a firm, quiet voice that she saved his soul every day he lived with her, and that when she died, a year and a half later, struck by a car on her way home from the store, the best part of him had died as well. He kept her picture on the bedroom dresser, and year after year went through the motions of his life, and never once, in that regrettable phrase which treats all tragedy as a temporary inconvenience, thought of ‘moving on.’ Modest, self-effacing, with a pleasant round face and gentle eyes, he was, so far as the world knew, a generally cheerful man.

  “Are you going to do it?” he asked again as he settled into the chair on the other side of the plain plastic table.

  “Do what?” I asked, though I knew very well what he meant.

  He nodded toward the newspaper I had just put down.

  “Defend her.”

  “I haven’t been asked.”

  “You knew them, didn’t you?”

  Beyond the fact that I had spent a weekend on Blue Zephyr, I could not remember how much I had told him.

  “I met them; I couldn’t really say I got to know them very well.”

  His eyes raised a question, seemed to suggest a doubt. He had been the reporter in so many trials, listened to so many lawyers, that he knew by a kind of instinct not just when someone was lying, but when, in that more subtle form of deception, they were leaving something out.

  “You should have been a prosecutor,” I observed. “You ask a question, hear the answer, and then just sit there and wait for something more. There isn’t,” I tried to assure him, but then, because I could not ignore that somber, unrelenting gaze of his, I had to qualify it. “Nothing important.”

  A prosec
utor – any cross-examining attorney - would have smiled at this admission, but Philip Conrad, with his mute insistence, did not care about making a point, he only wanted to hear the truth. The only change in his expression was a slight movement of his thinning eyebrows as he discovered a deeper meaning in what I had said.

  “A woman that beautiful, there’s always something more.”

  “I suspect you’re right about that,” was my vague response.

  “Are you going to do it, defend her? You haven’t been asked. I know. But you’ve met her; she’s met you; and even if you hadn’t met, who else would she ask? Everyone who gets in trouble wants you for their lawyer.”

  There was something he was not saying, something he was holding back.

  “You don’t think I should, do you?”

  He hesitated, as if he were not quite sure what he thought.

  “It might be one you can’t win. A jury won’t like her. Married to a man with that much money, a woman who looks like that – a jury won’t trust her. Would you?”

  Conrad did not wait for an answer; I suppose because he thought the question answered itself. He was right, of course, if you had to make a judgment based on who she married and how she looked. It was in its own way one of the great ironies, that everyone thought they knew all about her when they knew those two things - all that money and that stunningly beautiful face - and that a dozen years earlier no one could have imagined that anyone with money would ever have wanted to marry her. That still left the question whether, whatever a jury might think, I could trust her if I had to, and the answer was that I did not know. When I knew her as a girl, I had never had any reason not to trust Justine to tell me the truth, but Danielle was a woman whom I barely knew at all. Justine could not have hurt anyone; Danielle, for all I knew, had done exactly what they said she had, murdered the man she married, the father of her child. Of course it did not matter what I thought. I had not heard from her and I was certain I never would. Some high profile lawyer from New York was no doubt already preparing a defense. I would not have to struggle with the question whether Justine had really committed murder and what could be done about it.