by Buffa, D. W.
Franklin did not hear her. A smile, cold and vengeful, was playing at the corners of his mouth as he stared down at the floor, lost in the recollection of his own achievement, an opening statement that, if it had not gone perfectly, had gone well enough.
Alice Brunelli had no patience for those who made her wait.
“Mr. Franklin,” she said sharply. “Please call your first witness!”
Shocked out of his daydream, Franklin looked at the judge with a stunned, bewildered expression.
“My first witness?”
He seemed surprised to see me sitting at the counsel table instead of on my feet, heading toward the jury box. The color rose above his stiff shirt collar and spread like fire along his cheek. He realized what Brunelli had asked, what he had not heard, and that was only the beginning of his embarrassment. Springing forward, he tore at a thick binder and started thumbing through the pages, searching for the list of witnesses that would remind him of the name he wanted to call first.
Alice Brunelli watched these clumsy antics with an icy stare. She had a way of looking at you that reminded you of the least favorite teacher you had ever had, the one who could make you feel invisible, as if, of all the pupils she had ever taught, you were the one great failure of her long and otherwise distinguished career.
“Never mind, Mr. Franklin,” she said with weary impatience. “We’ll start again in the morning.” But she could not leave it there. She shot him a last, withering glance. “Perhaps by then you’ll have some idea how you want to try this case!”
He stood there, straight as a board, like a soldier facing discipline, holding his breath, forcing himself to keep his silence, while she gathered up her books and papers and, rising from the bench, walked briskly out of the courtroom and into her chambers. When the door swung shut behind her, when she was finally gone, his shoulders slumped forward and he could breathe. He began to collect his things, but then, with his hand on his tan briefcases, he turned his head slightly to the side, just far enough so I could see the anger in his eyes.
CHAPTER Eight
Robert Franklin had only himself to blame, and I was in any event scarcely in a mood to sympathize. I had my own reasons to be angry, and they were far more substantial than some hurt feelings caused by a judge whose only concern was that you do your job properly. Franklin’s problem was his own vanity; my problem was my client.
Muttering to myself, I tossed my suit coat on the chair behind my desk and stood at the window, peering into the dark gray dreariness of the late November day. Thanksgiving was a week away and the Christmas decorations were already up, the merchants doing everything they could to create the mood, continue the illusion, that you could still buy happiness, if only you could afford it.
“You did not tell me,” I said in a grim, determined voice that echoed quietly in the silence of the room.
“It isn’t true.”
I kept looking out the window, watching the people on the street, wondering what it would have been like to be married with children, someone with a regular job, and not have to spend every day sorting through all the lies I was told.
“That was the second promise, wasn’t it – or was it the first? Give him a child and -”
“Have a child,” she said, insisting on a distinction I did not understand. “Not give him one. Michael is more my child than he was ever his.”
“And stay faithful,” I reminded her. I turned just far enough to see her. “That’s the promise we need to talk about.”
Danielle raised her chin, the way she did whenever she was challenged, in her mind unfairly. With calculated belligerence, I stared back.
“It isn’t true,” she insisted, now adopting a tone of indifference, as if it did not matter if it were true or not. It was astonishing how distant, how utterly detached, she could become when there was something she would have preferred to ignore.
“All those months getting ready for trial, all the times I asked you if there were anything – anything at all! – you hadn’t told me; and I have to hear it first in the prosecution’s opening statement: that your husband was about to start divorce proceedings and that you were going to lose all that money!”
She would not respond a third time to what she considered the same accusation. With the limitless arrogance of a woman who has better things to do, she sat there, silent and beautiful, staring past me.
“Does this bore you?” I asked with a cynical indifference that quickly yielded to disgust. I picked up my jacket and settled into the comfortable security of my chair. “Is there some place you would rather be? It must be difficult, having to go through all this, when you could be back in New York, going to parties with all your wealthy, famous friends. It must be inconvenient, being charged with murder, having to sit all day in the drab surroundings of a courtroom with nothing to talk about except the evidence that may very well cost you your life, forced to listen to someone like Robert Franklin, compelled to -”
“Franklin is an ass!” she cried, all the indifference, all the belligerence, now concentrated in her eyes. She bolted forward. “Who is going to believe anything he says, after what you did to him? He could barely remember what he was supposed to do!”
My eyes full of warning, I bent closer.
“You think he isn’t any good, because he made one or two mistakes? He’ll be up all night getting ready for tomorrow, making sure he won’t get caught like that again. This isn’t just another case to him; it’s the biggest case of his career. He’s been dreaming about this since the day he got to law school. You think he won’t learn from what happened? You think he isn’t serious? Didn’t you see the look in his eyes just before we left?”
“No, why would I look at him? I saw the way he looked at me before.”
Like most of the rest of us, she only understood what she knew, and there was one thing she understood as well, or better, than anyone.
“I imagine that’s a look you’ve seen a lot,” I said, drawing back. Folding my arms, I watched closely her reaction to that basic fact of her existence. Her first response was purely conventional.
“I try not to notice.”
“The effect you have on men?”
There was a flash of impatience in her eyes. The answer was obvious, the question, worse than unnecessary, almost obscene, an inquiry in which the truth could only be stated with apparent conceit. This time, however, the question had nothing to do with the modest good manners society required of its more fortunate members.
“What Franklin did – that stupid gawking look on his face, like some teenage kid who had never been out with a girl before – couldn’t have been more effective if he had planned it in advance.”
At this, Danielle seemed curious. Her attitude, the reluctance bordering on open refusal to listen to anything more I had to say, disappeared. She waited for me to explain.
“Everyone on that jury thinks they know why you married your husband. They’ve seen the pictures: the gorgeous young model who marries a man ten or fifteen years older, a man who just happens to be one of the world’s richest men. You’ve lived too long in a cocoon of money and privilege; you’ve forgotten what it’s like to have to settle for whatever you can get and work at something you hate. No one thinks it’s fair, that you should have all that: looks and money, too. Most of the people on that jury – all of them, for all I know – never had anyone look twice at them and have to struggle just to get by. And now,” I went on in an ominous tone, meant to tell her that what they felt, those twelve random jurors who were watching every day in court, would be every bit as important as the evidence they heard; “now they have a way to make it all even out. You killed your husband and, as Franklin just finished telling them, you did it for the money, something that none of them, with their average looks and their average lives, would ever think of doing. They want to believe you’re guilty – want to believe it in the worst way, though they would never admit it, even to themselves – because if you are, if you murdered yo
ur husband, it means that instead of being better than they are, you’re not nearly as good! They want to convict you – don’t you understand that yet?”
She heard me, took in every word, but she did not believe me. It is one of the failings of rich men and beautiful women to think that everyone likes them for themselves. After all, everyone they come in contact with is always so nice to them.
“No one feels sorry for the rich. Why should they? The rich buy themselves out of trouble. Don’t you know what most people – the kind who do jury duty – think of all the famous, beautiful people like you? - That you’re all spoiled and stupid and only worried about yourselves.”
It had no discernible effect. Nothing disturbed those perfect mannequin eyes, and I began to wonder if anything ever could. Philosophers and gifted artists may live within their minds, indifferent to what the world thinks important; Danielle, and people like her, lived at the center of the world’s attention. Men had always wanted her; women had always wanted to be just like her – Why would anyone ever wish her harm?
I got up and began to prowl aimlessly around the room, glancing vaguely at the pictures and the books and the few articles I had kept as memorabilia from other trials. Perhaps something would remind me of some forgotten tactic or strategic device that might make the jury begin to see her in a new and different light, see her, not as some remote celebrity, a face in the papers, but as someone more like themselves.
“There isn’t anyone sitting in the first row behind us to show support. Your mother would come, if you’d ask her.”
Danielle fairly bristled at the suggestion.
“If she had wanted to be here, she would have been.” She said this with a cold, implacable expression, as if we were talking about someone she barely knew but did not like, instead of the woman who had raised her.
“I haven’t seen her in years,” she added, studying her nails. “I certainly don’t want to see her now.” She threw me a measured glance, and then stood up, ready to go.
“There is one other thing we could do…,” I remarked in a cautious, tentative voice. We had talked about it before, or rather I had talked about it and she had listened, but always to no result. Nothing, not even, it seemed, the chances of her own survival, would change her mind. On this point, she was adamant, and the truth was I respected her more for refusing than I would have had she, with whatever reluctance, agreed. Ironic, in that by refusing to do the one thing that might help to make the jury more sympathetic, she proved the jury wrong in their assumption that, rich and beautiful, she cared only for herself.
“No, never,” she declared emphatically. “I’ll do anything you want, but not that. Michael isn’t going to be dragged into this. Think what it would do to him, listening to how his father was murdered and all the reasons his mother did it! And besides,” she added with a shrewd insight into how really desperate I had become, “wouldn’t the jury just decide that I must be really awful, exploiting my own child like that?”
Exhausted, out of ideas, I sank into the tall leather chair in which I seemed to spend half my life and fell into a long silence. I gestured toward the other chair, but Danielle remained standing, searching my eyes, trying to guess what I was thinking. Whether she had a rare instinct for anticipation or I was just too easy to read, she guessed right.
“It isn’t true,” she said finally.
My gaze, which had drifted away, swung back; my mind, which had become lazy and confused, was suddenly clear and on point.
“What isn’t true? – That you were having an affair, or that Nelson was going to divorce you because of it.”
Her eyes grew wider, a mark of interest in the way I had posed the question; but if there was any emotion behind them – fear that she might have been caught in a lie, anger that she had been accused of something she had not done – I could not find it. A brief smile, an acknowledgment of the logical precision with which the issue had been framed, and then the same studiously blank expression, the only visible sign of what she felt, or rather did not feel, because with her, as I was learning, there was always something missing.
“It isn’t true that Nelson was about to start divorce proceedings because I was having an affair.”
She could have run for public office, the way she appeared to answer a question while she was evading it. There were not many lawyers as quick to produce a simple statement with a double meaning; nor many actors as able to fashion a smile as ambiguous as Mona Lisa and as enigmatic as Machiavelli. Holding her confident and inscrutable gaze as close as I could, I tried, and failed, to penetrate it with a searching gaze of my own. The game continued.
“He was going to start divorce proceedings for another reason? Or he was not going to start divorce proceedings, though he knew about the affair?”
A smile, similar but even briefer than the first, shadowed her mouth, and then vanished as quickly as it came. She stared down at her hands, held with elegant indifference in her lap, in search, as I thought, for another, more Byzantine, path away from the question. But when she raised her head and looked at me again, I found in her eyes something that seemed more a recognition of defeat, than any sense that she had discovered a new way out.
“Nelson was going to start divorce proceedings as soon as he stopped running from the government, but it was not because I was having an affair. He was having an affair.”
I did not believe her. The words were as much a lie as the look of pleading vulnerability that had suddenly come onto her face. It was impossible. Why would Nelson St. James – why would anyone - want another woman when he could have her?
She seemed amused by my stunned reaction.
“That’s right: Nelson was going to leave me for another woman. And he would have, too, if he had not been indicted, if he had not had to leave the country and get away. I wasn’t surprised; I’d been expecting it.”
“Did you know about this – the affair – before he asked for a divorce?”
She looked at me in disbelief, and then laughed out loud.
“Asked? Nelson never asked for anything. He told me he was getting a divorce. He didn’t have to tell me why. I knew about the other women; I knew it was only a matter of time.”
She had been all day in court, forced to pretend that she was oblivious to the prying eyes, the constant, relentless scrutiny of countless strangers come to look and pass their own private judgment, and now, for nearly an hour, here in my office, questioned again about the same things she had been asked dozens of times before. She was all wound up, tight as a drum, and now, suddenly, she could not do it anymore. Her eyes began to move erratically, darting from one place to the next, and then, without warning, she slapped her hands on the arms of the chair and jumped to her feet.
“I told you I killed him!” she shouted fiercely. “I told you how it happened; I told you why. It was that look on his face, that look that said he owned me and that he could do anything he wanted and there was nothing I could do about it.”
She marched to the window, and when she got there spun around on her heel.
“Do you know why I went to bed with him that night, why we had sex? Because after days of telling me that he was going to get a divorce, days of telling me that he would get one even if he could never go back to New York, he told me that evening at dinner that he had made a mistake, that he was sorry for all the things he had said, sorry for the things he had done. And then he said that for the sake of Michael, we should try to make it work.”
A strange self-doubt came into her eyes, as if even now she could not understand how, knowing what she did about her husband, she had let herself be used.
“For the sake of Michael,” she repeated, ghostlike, in the failing light that beat a pale reflection on the glass. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Michael, and so I went to bed with Nelson and was every bit the uninhibited whore he wanted me to be; and then I saw that look, and I knew that it was all a lie, and that he was going to shove me aside and divorce me after
all. He had used me. That was all right; I had used him, too – married him because of who he was and what he had - but that night, that was unforgivable, using Michael, our son, just to have me again. That look told me everything. That look - I couldn’t stand it! Something happened, something I can’t explain. Something broke, snapped inside. I’d never hated anyone, but that night I hated him!”
Her face went ashen, and a tear started down her cheek. She stood there, staring at me, waiting helpless for me to tell her what to do, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could say.
“All I could think about was Michael, and how he shouldn’t have to have a father like that.”
It was curious, when I thought about it as a lawyer, how little sense it made. It was not self-defense: she had not acted to save her own life; it was not, according to any legal standard, any defense at all; but it was hard to think that Nelson St. James had not gotten what he deserved. If it was a crime, what she had done, it was a crime of passion, committed in the heat of the moment. But should it be even that? She had been lied to, told by her husband that he had changed his mind, that he did not want a divorce after all. For the sake of their son he wanted to try again. And then, when he was nearly finished with her, finished using her for his own enjoyment, she had seen in his eyes the awful truth of what he had done. She had killed him, but what woman with any self-respect would not have wanted to do the same thing? It was manslaughter, not murder, but under the circumstances should it even be a crime, should a woman be sent off to prison for doing what Danielle had done? The question assumed, of course, that she was telling me the truth, that she had killed her husband for the reason, and in the way, she said she had, but even now, watching her wipe away a tear as, in a wretched halting step, she came back to her chair, I still was not sure.
“But what about you?” I asked quietly in the eerie calm that had descended on the dark, shadowed room.
