Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  I was on my feet, shouting another objection. Some of the jurors smiled to themselves; all of them leaned forward, anxious to see what would happen now..

  “The question assumes facts not in evidence,” I explained, shrugging my shoulders to show that I could not be blamed for the mistakes of the other side. “No evidence has yet been introduced that Nelson St. James had been shot, much less that he was dead.”

  Franklin nearly laughed. He had me now; he was certain of it.

  “The witness just testified, under your Honor’s thorough examination, that – I believe the exact phrase was, ‘There was blood on the deck, on the railing, blood where Mr. St. James -’ He’s testified, in other words, that the victim was shot and -”

  “That may have been what he thought,” I interjected, “that may have been his impression, but the fact has not yet been proven. The prosecution cannot ask a question that assumes, and by that assumption suggests to the jury, that it has.”

  Brunelli did not need to think about it.

  “Sustained. Rephrase the question, Mr. Franklin.”

  And so it went on, hour after hour, testimony that should have taken twenty minutes lasting three or four times that long. I used everything I knew about the law of evidence and when there was not a rule I could use, made one up. I would not give an inch, and neither would he. There were no more cries of outrage, no more scornful looks. He asked a question, I objected; he waited for the ruling and, if he had to, asked the question a different way again. He never made the same mistake twice, and like a sullen, but determined student, he filed away each lesson for his own, later use. By the end of it, his direct examination of the prosecution’s first witness, he had so far regained his confidence that he was close to the jury box, talking to Mustafa Nastasis as if they were two old friends, almost smiling whenever, through my frequent interruptions I tried to join the conversation. Then, when he was finally finished, it was my turn.

  Nastasis had been kept on the stand for hours, forced to wait while the lawyers argued among themselves, but he had not seemed to mind. Perhaps it was the novelty of the situation, his first time inside an American courtroom; or perhaps, like the other spectators who sat, transfixed by the proceedings, he was intrigued by what had happened, the violent death of Nelson St. James and the question whether Danielle St. James was going to get away with it. As I rose to begin cross-examination, he regarded me with more respect, and considerably more interest, than he had that morning we first met on the deck of Blue Zephyr.

  I took a position at the end of the jury box, where, along the double line of juror’s faces, I could look straight at him.

  “You testified you went out on deck because you heard ‘loud voices – screaming.’ Where exactly were you when you heard those voices – in your cabin?”

  “Yes,” he replied, a polite smile on his lips.

  “But you weren’t asleep, were you?”

  “No.”

  “The voices weren’t so loud – what you called ‘screaming’ – that they woke you up?”

  “No, Mr. Morrison; as I say, I was not asleep.”

  I looked down at the floor, smiling to myself as if what I was driving at was so obvious I should not have to ask, and only after a long silence raised my eyes.

  “What was the screaming about?” I asked patiently. “What were they saying?”

  “I don’t really know. I couldn’t hear the words.”

  “You couldn’t hear the words. I see. You heard ‘loud voices – screaming’….Which is it, Mr. Nastasis: loud voices or screaming?”

  He did not grasp the distinction. With a puzzled expression he shrugged.

  “It’s not a difficult question, Mr. Nastasis. People sometimes speak in loud voices to make themselves heard; sometimes they do it to make a point. In either case, they have control of themselves. When they’re screaming, on the other hand, they don’t. So, again, Mr. Nastasis – which is it? Screaming, wasn’t it? The cabins on the yacht are nearly soundproof, aren’t they?”

  Now he understood.

  “Yes, screaming; shouting, if you prefer. They were angry – I have no doubt.”

  “Angry, out of control, irrational – are those the words you would use to describe what you heard?”

  Nastasis agreed immediately. I nodded emphatically and turned to the jury.

  “Angry, irrational – not the voice of someone about to execute a calculated plan of -”

  “Objection!” thundered Franklin as he bolted from his chair.

  I threw up both hands.

  “That’s right, I shouldn’t have,” I admitted before Judge Brunelli could rule. I turned back to the witness.

  “You said you heard screaming, and then heard a shot – what you thought was a gunshot. How much time passed between the moment the screaming stopped and when you heard the shot? Seconds, minutes – how long?”

  Pinching his lips together, Nastasis stared into the middle distance, trying to remember. As the silence lengthened, I began methodically to tap two fingers on the jury box railing. Finally, Nastasis gave up.

  “I don’t know. Not as long as it seemed.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “Not as long as…? Yes, I see. The screaming stopped, then there was nothing – not a sound – and then you heard it. Is that what you mean?”

  “Exactly, just as you describe, with only one addition. The silence, which may have lasted only seconds, seemed so much longer because it served to underscore the violent noise both before and after it.”

  He paused to consider what he had said. Satisfied that it was just the way he had said it was, he nodded once more. He was ready for the next question, but instead I walked back to the counsel table and Danielle. I stood there a moment, looking down at her, as if we both knew something of great importance. A shrewd, knowing smile edged its way across my mouth as I turned again to the witness.

  “The gun that Mrs. St. James was holding in her hand – How long had she been holding it?”

  Nastasis shook his head in confusion.

  “I don’t….”

  “Had she just picked it up?” I asked sharply as I took a quick step forward. “You testified that you heard what you thought was a gunshot. That was the reason you left your cabin, the reason you came out on deck. You didn’t actually witness the gun being fired, did you?” I insisted. “As a matter of fact, you didn’t see who fired that gun, did you? I’ll repeat – Had she just picked it up when you came out on deck?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, taken aback by the sudden violence of my questioning. “I just -”

  “You don’t know. Thank you. Now tell me this,” I went on as I began to pace in front of the counsel table. “You had been the captain of the St. James yacht for….” I stopped, looked up and smiled. “Since Nelson St. James had it built, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct; since the day it was christened.”

  “Blue Zephyr. How did he happen to pick that name, do you know?”

  “He came across it in some book he read: A novel, I think; something about a murder in Hollywood. He said it was much more than that, and that he identified with one of the characters, a director falsely accused of murdering his movie star wife. Blue Zephyr was the name of a movie. That’s all he told me.”

  “You got to know Mr. St. James fairly well, then?”

  The response was cold, measured, and, I suspected, utterly dishonest.

  “I worked for Mr. St. James. That was the nature of our relationship.”

  Apparently, Mustafa Nastasis was not interested in helping the dead. Was he interested in helping the living? I took a chance.

  “He wasn’t an easy man to work for, was he?”

  Nastasis pressed his finger to his mouth, weighing in the balance, as it seemed, what he remembered about St. James and what he knew about human behavior. I tried to help him along.

  “Not an easy man…, but you liked Mrs. St. James, didn’t you? Nelson St. James may not have t
reated you very well, but you could always count on her for a kind word, couldn’t you?”

  He did not have to think about his answer, there were no complexities to unravel, no subtle shades of meaning to disentangle. His response was immediate and, so far as anyone could tell, utterly sincere.

  “Yes, Mrs. St. James was always pleasant, not just with me, but with all the members of the crew. She always asked questions about my family, where I came from, that sort of thing. They were wealthy people, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way she treated us.”

  My suspicion had been correct. I was certain of it now. Mustafa Nastasis might have been called by the prosecution, but he was my witness.

  “You saw them earlier that evening, while they were having dinner, didn’t you?”

  “I looked in on them to see if there was anything they needed.”

  I smiled, not to put Nastasis on his ease, but to give the jury every reason to think that all I wanted was the truth.

  “And when you saw them having dinner together, just a few short hours before he was shot to death, did Mrs. St. James look like a woman planning to murder her husband?”

  Franklin had to object. I wanted him to object. That was the reason I asked the question in the way I did. He was on his feet, starting on a long oration on why the question could not be asked, but Brunelli did not need to take lessons on the law of evidence.

  “Sustained!” she ruled with clinical indifference before Franklin could say another word.

  Now! Do it now, I told Nastasis with my eyes. Say it now! Whether he caught my meaning, or did it on his own, he did it.

  “No, she didn’t look like a woman planning to murder her husband,” he answered with a blameless gaze.

  “‘Sustained,’ means that you’re not supposed to answer the question,” explained Brunelli with a stern glance. “The jury will disregard both the question and the answer.”

  Then she studied me, a silent warning that she would only be pushed so far. It may have been nothing more than my imagination, which in this instance might be just another name for vanity, but just behind the formal disapproval I thought I saw a faint glimmer of recognition, quiet admiration for the skill, if not the judgment, of what I had done: elicited without a word to prove it a flagrant violation of the rules. I went back to the witness.

  “I can’t ask you that question, Mr. Nastasis. Let me ask you this instead: Before that night, during the entire course of that lengthy voyage, did you ever see her throw anything at him?”

  “No.”

  “Hit him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see her threaten him with a gun?’

  “No,” he said, his dark impenetrable eyes wide and intense.

  “Just a few more questions. After you heard the shot, after you rushed outside and saw blood on the deck and on the railing, when you saw the defendant, Danielle St. James, standing there with the gun in her hand, you thought she had killed her husband, didn’t you?”

  Nastasis hesitated, unsure quite how to answer. I told him it was all right, that all anyone wanted was the truth.

  “Yes, I have to admit I thought that. It’s what I assumed.”

  “But if, as I asked you earlier, she had only just picked up the gun – in a state of shock picked it up from where it had fallen – then you would have thought something else, wouldn’t you? – Not that Danielle St. James had murdered her husband, but that her husband had killed himself!”

  Franklin was bellowing an objection, but I did not care. I sat down at the table, more than satisfied with what I had done.

  CHAPTER Ten

  Judge Brunelli cautioned the jurors not to discuss the case and not to read about it in the papers, or watch any of the reported accounts of the trial on television. Aware, as always, that people had their eyes on us, I gathered up the notes and papers scattered on the table and exchanged a few brief words with Danielle. Although nothing had happened between us after that night when I had pulled back at the last moment from making what would have been a serious mistake, I had made a point of treating her with a new formality. We did not talk about what might have happened, or whether something might happen later; we talked only about the trial. The situation was forced and artificial, pretending she was just another client, instead of a woman with whom, if I were honest with myself, I was probably already in love, but there was nothing else I could do. She was a criminal defendant and I was her lawyer and I had to concentrate on that. It was a strange pantomime I went through, keeping a respectable distance as I got ready to leave the courtroom, barely touching her on her arm, the way I would have done with any other woman on trial for her life, telling her, in case anyone was close enough to overhear, that I would see her in the morning and that she should try to get some rest. Then I left her in the hands of a bodyguard, waiting just behind the railing to take her to a waiting car. Eager to get a closer look at the famous and now notorious Danielle St. James, the surging crowd followed her outside.

  I was glad to be left alone, able to walk down the deserted corridor and into an empty men’s room without worrying who was going to assault me next with a question they had to ask or an observation they felt compelled to share. It was embarrassing, when you thought about it, this need for attention, this desire for the acknowledgement of other people, and, when we have it, the tired hypocrisy of wishing it would all go away. It was like the difference between how we look and how we feel, what we show the world and what we know inside. Like the face I now saw in the mirror, which that looked better, less exhausted, than I felt; seeing it, I felt much better than I had.

  Throwing some cold water on my face, I reached for a paper towel. Then I heard it, an awful, retching noise from one of the stalls at the far end of the narrow, white tile room. As quickly as I could, I dried my hands and face and turned to go; but just then the stall door flew open and Robert Franklin, his face white as a sheet, staggered toward the sink. He had not heard anyone come in, and the shock of seeing me was so intense, so profound, that he seemed to lose his senses. He opened his mouth, struggling to find an explanation, an excuse, for the condition in which I had found him, but three words into it he began to stutter and could not stop.

  That was when I first began to understand something of the effort with which Robert Franklin had made himself into a lawyer. He had a speech impediment – a stutter as awful as any I had ever heard – and yet had somehow overcome it. That was the reason he started out at such a distance from the witness and the jury: not because he loved the sound of his own voice, not because of vanity; but because he had with a stringent discipline I could not even imagine, he had trained himself to speak the words he wanted without falling into a bottomless well of hellish repetition.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, stung by a guilty conscience. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Franklin took a deep breath, and then, to my surprise, laughed in a quiet, self-deprecating way and patted me gently on the arm. His eyes, so often filled with what seemed dark malevolence, were almost friendly.

  “I could tell you it was something I ate, but the truth is that I always get too tense at a trial. I wish I could be more like you; you always look like you’re having the time of your life in there. I envy that.”

  I tried to remind myself, as I walked out of the courthouse, that no one took prisoners in a trial, that it was all about winning, but I began to regret a little the way I had pushed things, objecting to nearly every question, doing what I could to make Franklin look mean tempered and insensitive. He had not just worked his way through night school, he had overcome a handicap, forced himself through God knows what difficult and painful exercises to become a lawyer; and not just any kind of lawyer, but a courtroom lawyer, a prosecuting attorney who had to speak clearly, who had to make sense, who could not afford to get all tangled in knots. We were both in it to win, but I started asking myself whether I was going too far, throwing sand in the eyes of the jury, turning the serious busin
ess of a murder case into a carnival game in which, if I could get away with it, the prosecutor instead of the defendant was put on trial.

  I tried to sort it all out. If you looked only at the facts and ignored what people feel, the way the mind can snap with sufficient provocation, there was no question but that Danielle was guilty. She had not been in any physical danger when she killed her husband. She could have walked away; there had not been any necessity for violence. But if you had any regard for a woman’s self-respect, her right to be treated as a person with feelings of her own, and not just the muffled object of her husband’s temporary lust, then what she had done was defensible at least in a moral sense. Or was I only trying to make myself feel better, invent an excuse for the lawyer’s tricks I was playing in court? Danielle had killed her husband because she did not like his look, because she ‘could not stand it anymore.’ If she had felt humiliated, why not humiliate him in return instead of killing him? She did not have to let him have his divorce; she could have taken him to court and, precisely because he was rich and famous - and not just that: notorious, with who knew how many secrets to hide – made his life a living hell. But it was an impulse, there had not been time to think; it happened before she knew it. That is what she told me, but then she had told me a lot of things that did not always fit together.

  I was almost at the end of the corridor. The glass doors at the entrance were just ahead. It was after five, and except for the uniformed guard at his desk, the only other person around was someone standing off to the side, leaning against the wall reading a newspaper.

  “So, are you screwing her yet?” he said as I passed by him.

  I spun around, ready to dare him to repeat it, and then I started to laugh. It was Tommy, Tommy Lane, looking at me with a cocky grin, daring me to deny it.

  “No, I’m – What are you doing here?” I asked as we gave one another a hug. I forgot all about the trial, forgot about everything, except how glad I was to see him. “When did you get here – just now?”

  “Are you kidding? I’ve been here all day, watching you work.”