by Buffa, D. W.
“She murdered him for the money, it’s as simple as that.”
Robert Franklin struck a combative pose. With small, pudgy, grasping hands, thick black hair plastered to his skull, and small, black, impenetrable eyes, he had at times the look of a fanatic. Shrill and insistent, he rose up on the balls of his feet, jabbing the air to emphasize the crucial importance of what he was saying.
“This was not one of those so-called crimes of passion, an act of violence when an argument got out of hand. This was cold-blooded murder carried out for gain. Nelson St. James was one of the wealthiest men in America. With his death, his widow inherits everything he had.”
Franklin turned slowly toward the table where Danielle was sitting next to me. Pausing for dramatic effect, he raised his arm and pointed.
“She murdered him in cold-blood, and then tried to blame it on someone else.”
Robert Franklin had the habit of precision, an addiction to taking each thing step by step. This gave his argument a relentless, logical quality, but it also narrowed his focus to what was right in front of him. He was about my age, perhaps a few years older, and like most lawyers of our generation, much of what he knew of courtroom dialogue had come from movies he had seen, and much of what he knew of courtroom theatrics from all the television he had watched. Though a seasoned prosecutor, the murder trial of Danielle St. James was the most important case of his career, a chance to make a name for himself. Anything would be possible after this: a seat on the bench, elective office, things he had dreamed about since law school, if only he did everything right. He must have rehearsed his opening statement for days, or even weeks, gone over it so many times he could give it backwards in his sleep. He was flawless, every word, every gesture, exactly the way he had planned it, and then, five minutes into it, he suddenly stopped. The next word, the next phrase - which from the look on his face was going to be the most devastating thing he had said so far – had somehow, unaccountably, vanished from his mind, and what came after that he did not know. The silence became uncomfortable and then embarrassing. Philip Conrad looked up from his machine.
“‘Then tried to blame it on someone else,’” I said in the bored voice of a director forced to remind an actor of his lines.
Robert Franklin blinked and, in his dazed condition not certain where the voice had come from, looked around. His mouth began to twitch nervously and his black, tiny eyes, smoldering with resentment, grew smaller still. His hands, held down at the level of his jacket pockets, tightened into a pair of useless fists. He stared at me, puzzled because he had not quite understood what I said, then with open hostility when he heard the courtroom laugh. He wheeled around and faced the jury, ready to redouble his attacks on the defendant and the evil calculation of what she had done.
He forgot what he was going to say.
“She killed him,” he mumbled, buying time. “Killed him, and we’re going to prove it.” Head down, his hands clasped behind his back, he began to pace in front of the jury box, but before he had taken two steps he stopped and looked up. “I mean, the People are going to produce evidence that will show that….”
He could not remember what came next, and without that he was lost. His short, squat neck bulged over his stiff white shirt collar; beads of sweat formed a thin necklace on his forehead. The harder he tried to think, to remember all those well-rehearsed lines with which he was going to drive a stake into the heart of the defendant before the trial was an hour old, the angrier and more embarrassed he became.
Others might feel sorry for Robert Franklin; I could not afford to show mercy. If he made a mistake, I was there to take advantage of it. Sitting at the counsel table, less than ten feet from the jury box, I leaned forward.
“This is usually the place where the prosecutor says something about meeting the burden of proof,” I said in a whispered shout.
Franklin went white with rage.
“Your Honor!” he cried. “This is my opening statement. The defense doesn’t have the right to interrupt!”
One of the youngest trial judges in the city, Alice Brunelli was also one of the best. Tapping a pencil in a slow methodical cadence, she gave Franklin a look that was anything but sympathetic.
“You’re no doubt familiar with the phrase, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ Mr. Franklin? It’s your opening statement – if you can make it. And while I’m not sure Mr. Morrison really meant to be helpful,” she went on, with a quick, warning glance in my direction, “you’ll have to admit that what he suggested might perhaps be exactly what you ought to do.”
Never in a hurry when trying to teach a lesson, the judge removed the thick horn-rim glasses that reinforced the no-nonsense, scholarly impression she would have made even without them, breathed on the lenses and then wiped them clean with the hem of her robe. She held the glasses up to examine them, and after a close inspection, put them back on and immediately turned her attention to a document she had on the bench in front of her.
“The floor is yours, Mr. Franklin. If you can keep it,” she added, her sharp gray eyes still fastened on the page.
Franklin had suffered what was tantamount to stage fright, the temporary inability to remember what he was supposed to say, but he was not an empty headed fool who could only recite lines someone else had written. He had written them himself, written them in long hand on the pages of a long yellow legal pad left on the counsel table with his other things. With a new air of self-confidence, he looked them over as if he were only now about to begin.
Keeping to the facts, the concise litany of what the prosecution intended to prove, Franklin was capable, efficient, and completely persuasive. The jury of seven men and five women, the majority of them middle-aged or even older, followed with steady, believing eyes the simple, straightforward narrative of what had happened. He was not up on the balls of his feet any longer, his arms were not flying in the air; he had given up those theatrics. He stood flat-footed a step or two from the railing of the jury box, his hands plunged deep down in his pockets, speaking in a normal, conversational tone and, though it must have cost him an effort, sounding almost pleasant.
“The defendant in this case, Danielle St. James, was married to the victim, Nelson St. James, for a little more than five years. They lived in New York, among other places, but they spent most of their time on his yacht. You have probably heard the rumors about Mr. St. James and his financial dealings; you have probably read in the papers about the trouble he was in. His difficulties have some bearing on this case.”
He paused to let the jury consider for itself the link that might exist between one of the great financial scandals of the century and the murder of the man who had, if you believed half of what was written, swindled half the country out of what it owned.
“Shortly after Mr. St. James was indicted, they left New York and disappeared, though they did not disappear all at once. Before they set out to sea again – that last, mysterious voyage of theirs – they flew out here, to San Francisco, where the yacht was waiting. They were heard arguing from the moment they stepped off his private plane, they were heard arguing that night at dinner. They were still arguing the next day. The arguments became so heated that the defendant walked out of the restaurant where they were having dinner the second night and got into a cab alone.”
Again Franklin paused, but this time, instead of watching the jury and how they reacted, he looked out at the courtroom, jammed with spectators eager to see what would happen next. He was glad to have an audience for this, his biggest, most important trial. His dark, deep-set eyes registered his approval, but then, almost immediately, he remembered another face. It was astonishing how he tried to hide it, the way he narrowed his eyes and tightened his jaw, preparing to look at Danielle without appearing nervous or unsure of himself. Because there she was, on trial for murder, and no woman had ever looked more desirable and less like a killer. She wore a simple, pale blue dress, something that, for the first time in years, she had bought off the rack, and, e
ven in that dim, windowless courtroom, her hair was like summer sunshine and her eyes lit up the room. Like a teenage boy peeking around a corner at a girl he had a crush on, Franklin finally turned and looked, and then immediately looked away. No one, not even the prosecutor who was determined to send her to her execution, was immune from the spell she cast. It was there in his voice, the tell-tale catch in his throat, as he faced the jury and tried to pretend the face of the defendant was no different than that of any other women he had ever prosecuted for a crime.
“They argued all weekend – at one point the hotel had to send someone up to their suite to ask them to stop. They checked out of the hotel early Sunday morning and left San Francisco on their yacht, and, as was widely reported at the time, disappeared. We now know that they were sailing around the south Pacific, stopping at different places but without any apparent destination. The arguments never stopped, and if anything, got worse; got so bad in fact that she finally moved out of the cabin she shared with her husband and slept alone. And then, a short time later, she killed him.”
Franklin was back in stride, reciting the elements of the crime with the kind of certainty that makes doubt seem impossible and even absurd. He was good at this, better than most prosecutors, better than most lawyers. The main point was that he was not afraid of the courtroom, was not afraid to stand up in front a dozen jurors and a watching crowd of strangers and give it everything he had. He made mistakes, forgot a few of the things he wanted to say, but that was not going to stop him. He had the great advantage of believing that everything he said was the truth.
“This is not a complicated case, once you get beyond the celebrity of the people involved. It is as cut and dried as any murder case can be. If the way she did it does not seem particularly inventive, murder, despite what you see on television, is seldom well-planned. They had an argument, a fight – they had been going at it for days. She had a gun, and she used it.”
He hesitated, quite on purpose, just long enough so everyone could wonder if it could really be that simple and guilt that obvious. And then, to make sure a doubt like that never arose again, he showed that it could.
“You will have evidence,” he said with a glance that warned that this went right to the heart of their obligation as jurors, “that the bullet that killed Nelson St. James came from the gun she was still holding in her hand after he was shot. You will hear evidence that the gun belonged to them, Nelson St. James and his wife. I say belonged to them both because you will also hear testimony that Nelson St. James bought it because his wife, Danielle St. James, the defendant, wanted a gun for her own protection.”
With both hands, he leaned on the jury box railing, eager and tenacious, looking from one juror to the next, searching their eyes, daring them – daring anyone! – to disagree.
“It was her gun, and her fingerprints were all over it. There was no one else who could have done it. She shot him dead and he fell overboard into the sea. There was blood on the deck, blood on the railing, and – make no mistake! – the blood was his.”
While Robert Franklin went on about the witnesses who would testify about the murder weapon and the fingerprints found on it, I tried to project an air of unshaken confidence, to act as if nothing he said would in the end have any consequence. I turned to Danielle, put my hand on her arm, and whispered in her ear to look at me and smile back. Then, nodding to myself, like someone in complete control of things, I scribbled a brief note, an illegible scrawl that meant nothing, but that, seen from the distance of the jury box, might be thought significant. There was only one point in this masquerade, one reason only for this mimic’s dance, and that was to create by any means I could the impression that what the prosecution was promising it would prove would turn out to be nothing like as damaging as Franklin wanted them to believe.
“The question isn’t whether the defendant murdered his husband,” insisted Franklin, assuming his own conclusion. “The question is why did she do it, what was her motive? She was angry – they had been arguing for days – but the defendant isn’t charged with manslaughter, she’s charged with murder in the first degree, and that means that she killed him with ‘malice aforethought,’ that she intended to do it before she did it; that she didn’t just fly off the handle and kill him in a fit of rage, but that she thought about it, decided she was going to do it, and then did it, murdered him in cold blood.”
With one hand on the jury box railing and the other on his hip, Franklin arched an eyebrow and shook his head in scorn.
“She may have killed him during an argument, but she did not pull the trigger in a moment of uncontrollable anger. She had a motive that did not depend on rage, one of the oldest motives there is: money, more money than you or I could ever imagine.”
Franklin walked to the end of the jury box closest to the empty witness stand and turned, until, with the jury on his left, he was facing the crowd.
“Rufus Wiley was the personal attorney of Nelson St. James. Mr. Wiley is a witness for the prosecution. He will testify that the defendant signed a pre-nuptial agreement under which she would have been left, in the event of a divorce, what most of us would consider a very wealthy woman, with a house in the Hamptons and a million dollars a year.”
A thin, malevolent smile edged its way across Franklin’s narrow pinched mouth. He stood there for a moment, and then another, saying nothing, letting everyone consider for themselves the meaning of the phrase, ‘what most of us would consider,’ and the implication that what most of us might think did not even begin to measure the extent of certain other people’s greed.
“A house in the Hamptons and a million a year,” repeated Franklin, his voice venomous and sarcastic. “What was that, compared to the hundreds of millions – the billions! – that would be left to her if she was married to him when he died. But there was a problem. Nelson St. James wanted a divorce. He had told his attorney, Rufus Wiley, to draw up the papers. That is what they were arguing about, the victim and the defendant: he wanted a divorce, and that is why she killed him: to make sure it did not happen!
“All that money at stake, all that money she wouldn’t have! What was a million dollars compared to that?” he asked, slamming his hand on the jury box railing as he lunged forward. “A million dollars! – That’s probably less than she spends a year on clothes!”
I was on my feet, shouting an objection.
“Your Honor! First he forgets his opening, and now he thinks he’s in the middle of his close! Worse yet, the argument he seems to be making is pathetic! He’s attacking the defendant because she happens to look rather good in well-made clothes?”
It had to have been one of the strangest objections ever made, but I was not interested in how the judge would rule on it; I wanted to make Franklin seem the real villain, a man who would taunt a woman for how she looked. Whether or not it worked on the jury, it worked on Franklin.
“It’s part of the People’s case!” he sputtered, as bits of saliva went flying. Lifting his hooded eyes to the bench, he pled the importance of the point. “The difference between what she would have gotten and what she would have lost.”
Peering over the tops of her glasses, lowered halfway down her lengthy nose, Judge Brunelli pursed her thin, white lips.
“This is the time to give the jury an outline – a brief outline – of the prosecution’s case. You can argue your point later, after all the evidence is in. Now let’s move on, shall we?”
Franklin had been too much in court to make the mistake of arguing anything with a trial court judge. As soon as Brunelli finished, he turned to the jury and without any change of expression picked up where he had left off.
“A million dollars a year, when she could have had it all! What better motive for murder?” He cocked his head and struck a pose, as if a question of some considerable importance had just occurred to him. “What better motive for murder?” he repeated in a pensive tone, the question no longer rhetorical. “Other than that other motive, at least as ol
d: sex. Yes, that’s right, a double motive was involved, sex and money both. Nelson St. James was going to divorce his wife because, as Rufus Wiley will testify, his wife, the defendant, Danielle St. James, had been having an affair. That was the reason she killed him, because it was the only way she could have both her lover and the money, too.”
Someone might as well have kicked the chair out from under me. She had been having an affair and the prosecution could prove it, and this was the first I had heard about it! Franklin had not called his first witness and I was already certain we had lost. I wanted to turn to Danielle and tell her what I thought, dare her to try to explain why she had never told me. And I might have done it, too, if Franklin had not chosen that moment to end his opening statement. I watched as he sank into his chair at the other counsel table, farthest from the jury box, a brazen look of self-satisfaction on his face.
Judge Brunelli checked the clock and then peered down at me.
“Mr. Morrison, do you wish to make an opening statement at this time?”
It was the routine, formal request, the moment when the defense attorney gets to his feet, reminds the jury that they have not yet heard any of the witnesses whose testimony the prosecution had just described, and, with all the false honesty he can invent, tells them that when they do they will discover that rather than proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the evidence will prove instead the necessity of an acquittal. You did not have to believe it when you said it, but it was always good to have at least the hope.
I got to my feet, but instead of starting toward the jury box I looked at the judge.
“With the court’s permission, the defense would like to reserve its opening statement to the close of the prosecution’s case.”
“Permission granted.” Brunelli penciled a note, reminding herself of the agreement, and then, folding her arms, sat back and glanced toward the other counsel table. “The prosecution will please call its first witness.”
