Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  “I’m not supposed to….I quit working for the government, but there are still things – open cases – I’m not supposed to talk about. But screw it, you need to know. There would have been another indictment. After they got her husband, they would have gone after her. They still might,” he hastened to add. “If you get her off, if she doesn’t go down on the murder conviction. It’s a tougher case, with him dead, but a lot of people got hurt, and if they can’t get him, they’ll try to get her.”

  “Get her for what? She was married to him. She wasn’t the one defrauding all those investors with that scheme of his.”

  There is a look that grows on people as they get older, a look that gives expression to what they have done. Doctors, priests, day laborers and shifty eyed thieves all have it, badges of their professions, and while Tommy still moved like the athlete he had been born to be, he had acquired the gaze of the practiced prosecutor, the knowing glance that holds more secrets than you ever thought existed.

  “You were out there, on that yacht of theirs, with their other guests. You watched them both – more than that, from what I remember – Do you really think she didn’t know what was going on? You really think she didn’t know exactly what she was doing? We had them under surveillance for years, tracked them everywhere they went. She was always there, on the Blue Zephyr, where he did most of his business. Every time someone came on board she was there to greet them.”

  Pushing his empty plate to the side, he reached for his glass, but just as he picked it up he had a thought that took him back again into the past, though not the one we had lived together.

  “She changed her name, from what it was when you knew her, to Danielle. He did the same thing, a long time ago, before he ever came to New York. He grew up in a small town in Michigan, Petoskey, a little north of Traverse City. His father had a gas station; his mother ran off with someone else. Ray Williams, that was his name, about as plain as you can get, dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, lied about his age and joined the army. Then he sold insurance for a while, made enough money to buy a few old houses, turned them for a profit, and then – he had a kind of genius for this – started doing the same thing with bigger properties, office buildings, then companies, and then…. Then Nelson St. James became rich as hell and no one asked questions about how he got it, only how he could help them get rich as well. They both invented themselves. That’s what they had in common. Funny, when you think about it, no one ever looked at either one of them when they were kids just growing up. I suppose that’s part of what drove them, the need to do something that would get them noticed.”

  I wondered, from the way he looked at me, the things he had said about how nothing had ever been good enough, that I was always trying to get better, if he thought the same thing had driven me. Perhaps it had. All I knew was that one of the reasons I had always liked him, why he was the only friend I had, is that Tommy Lane had once had the great good fortune to be so much better than anyone else at what he did that he had not had to worry about anything except the pure enjoyment of what he did. If he was not lying when he said he wished he had been more like me, he should have been.

  CHAPTER Eleven

  A light rain had started to fall and the night air was cool and clean. The street in front of the restaurant was a shiny black mirror full of neon lights and changing colors. A young woman walked by, laughing as the man she was with struggled to hold an umbrella over her head while his other arm was around her waist. Across the street, two middle-aged men in dark, well-tailored suits, dashed from the front door of another, more exclusive, eating place to a waiting cab. A second taxi was just coming around the corner.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with me? There’s plenty of room.”

  “Next trip,” said Tommy as we shook hands. “When you’re not in the middle of a trial. I’ll come up and we can spend a few days.”

  The cab driver reached behind him and opened the door. Tommy put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a serious look.

  “Remember what I told you. Be careful. There are some other things….” His voice trailed off, and I did not know whether they were things he did not think he should tell me or things he was not sure were true. His eyes took on a sudden urgency. “She killed him – remember that. You may get her off, but it won’t be because she’s innocent.”

  Tommy had always known me better than I knew myself. He was worried about me because he understood my vulnerabilities. He had a habit of warning about things – women, mainly that he knew I could not resist. The warnings had never done any good, except to prove later, though he would never say so, that he had been right all along.

  The cab driver was waiting. Tommy flashed that huge smile of his, put his arm around my neck, suddenly kissed me on the side of my face, and said with affection, “You’re the best fuck-up I ever knew. Whatever happens, you’ll always land on your feet.”

  I watched him get into the cab, watched the way he began a cheerful banter with the driver, watched while the cab wove through the nighttime traffic, watched until the tail lights vanished around the corner, and then watched in my mind the things he had done when he and I were both young.

  The weather, instead of getting worse, got better and the rain became a fine mist that swirled around like the thin fog that sometimes comes on summer nights and makes the visitors from out of town think its winter. I started walking up the hill, the steep ascent on sidewalks grooved like washboards to keep from slipping backward those brave or foolish enough to try it. At the top, two blocks ahead of me, across the street from the Fairmont, the other famous old hotel, the Mark Hopkins, was lit up like Christmas, with limousines and taxi cabs and shiny dark sedans and sleek foreign sports cars, all moving in slow procession through the open portals to the front entrance where a liveried footman helped each entitled passenger on either their arrival or their departure. Somewhere on one of the upper floors, Danielle St. James was probably in her room, perhaps on the telephone to her young son in New York, or perhaps trying to decide what time she would call me to talk about what had happened in court and what we could expect tomorrow. The only nights she did not call were the ones she decided she had to talk to me in person.

  It had become a bizarre routine, on the nights she did it, to come in disguise. At first I thought she was doing it out of an abundance of caution, the fear of the rumors that might start if she were seen coming to my apartment too often late at night. But gradually I began to realize that it was not concern for her reputation; it certainly was not any concern for mine. She liked the game, the known risk, the chance that she might get caught; her only pride, the nights she did it, how many people she might fool. It did not require much effort; what she did was never elaborate. A wig, a different dress, a change of make-up and, of course, a change of mood; and, with it, the look she wore. It seemed to give her a strange pleasure, to dress as another woman and live, if only for a brief time, another woman’s life. Once in a while, when she had nothing else to do, she would drop by the hotel bar dressed as someone else and let someone buy her a drink. She spent an hour with a man who said he lived less than two blocks from where Danielle St. James lived in New York. He insisted she was innocent; she told him that he obviously knew nothing about women. “I had to explain to him that with a woman like Danielle St. James you could never be sure of anything.” She told me this as if all she knew about Danielle was what she had read in the papers.

  She never wore the same disguise twice. She came as every kind of woman and had ever kind of voice. There were so many of them, and all of them, usually, only late at night, that the doorman, though he never said a word about it, must have thought I had part interest in a brothel and that one of the benefits of ownership was an endless sample of what they sold. It was crazy, and strangely seductive, the way she took on a slightly different character with each change in her appearance. There was no end to the illusion. She was every color of the rainbow and it was hard not to be mesmerized
by every one of them. She was always different, and always the same.

  Or was she? Because there were times when I would start to wonder whether the reason she was never the same thing twice, the reason she liked to pretend to be other people, was because there was nothing underneath, nothing that could stand to go unchanged. If she was a woman who lived on the surface, perhaps the surface was all there was. Perhaps her only being, what held her together, what made her who she was, was what had made her become Danielle and leave Justine behind: the eager willingness to become whatever she thought others wanted her to be. None of that mattered, of course, when I was sitting next to her in the courtroom or talking to her late at night about the case. It was only in her absence, only when I could not see her, that my mind was ever clear enough to become metaphysical.

  I tried to work when I got home, prepare for the next witness the prosecution was going to call, consider the kind of questions, the cross-examination, I would have to conduct, but I kept thinking back to Tommy and what he had said at dinner about Danielle and how dangerous he thought she was. I knew he was right, that Danielle had murdered her husband, but that did not mean that I thought she was some cold, calculating killer, a born criminal who would keep doing the same thing over and over again until she was caught and put away. It was a crime of passion, something that would not have happened except for a set of circumstances that in the nature of things could never be repeated. Danielle was guilty, but not dangerous; and guilty only because the law does not deal in exceptions.

  Or so I told myself as I glanced at the clock and wondered when she might call. An hour later, she did, and I tried not to show my disappointment when it became clear that tonight, at least, she was staying where she was.

  It was just as well, I told myself the next morning as I settled into my usual place at the counsel table and glanced quickly over the notes I had made. In the concentrated intensity of a trial the only important thing, the only thing I had time to think about, was the next witness and the next question I had to ask. Danielle, on the other hand, seemed to remember only what she wanted to and only when she pleased. She took the chair next to mine, and in a voice just loud enough to be heard by the jurors as they found their places in the box, said good-morning and called me Mr. Morrison.

  Just below the bench, Philip Conrad finished threading a thick spool of tape through the stenotype machine. Remembering what Tommy had told me, what he had told Tommy at lunch, I smiled, but though he was looking right at me, there was no sign he had even noticed. He sat there, without expression, the way he always did when he was at his place in court, waiting for the proceedings to get underway. I smiled again, this time in recognition of the honest integrity he brought to his job.

  With an armload of files, work she could do on other cases when it was not necessary to pay close attention to what was going on in the trial, Alice Brunelli swept into court. Serious, scholarly, brilliant and logical to a fault, her only passion was the law, and she spent weekends, which other judges spent playing golf, in the law library or in her study at home.

  “Call your next witness,” she ordered, as she buried her nose in a file.

  There was no response, but already engrossed in what she was reading, she did not notice. Then, when it finally registered, her head snapped up and she shot an evil glance at the silent and recalcitrant Robert Franklin. He was not there. His place was vacant, the chair still shoved tight against the table.

  “Sorry, your Honor!” shouted the deputy district attorney as he burst through the double doors in back and came half-running up the center aisle. He dropped his bulging briefcase on the table and with calculated indifference started pushing up his tie.

  Oddly, Alice Brunelli seemed to enjoy it. A thin smile of cold revenge coiled across her solemn mouth.

  “It’s nice you remembered to finish tying your tie,” she said in a dry, mocking voice. “Are you sure you finished with your zipper?”

  She was bluffing; he was sure of it, or almost sure. He was afraid to look, and afraid not to. That hesitation, that moment’s embarrassment as the courtroom tittered, was all she wanted.

  “Call your next witness,” she said abruptly and immediately went back to what she was reading.

  Franklin took it all in stride. I half-suspected he had been late on purpose, a way to make an entrance, teach the jury that while he had to follow the rulings of the court, he had his own authority, and that what happened in this trial largely depended on him. He called his next witness with an air of anticipation, the suggestion that we were about to get to something of more than ordinary importance. Franklin was good, and he kept getting better.

  Louis Britton was the police detective who had been summoned to the Blue Zephyr when she first returned to San Francisco. He had the look of a veteran cop, someone who has seen too much of human violence and degradation to be much surprised at anything. The fact of murder did not concern him; his only interest was in the details. Shaped by what he did, his mind was rational and methodical; murder, like any other problem, something to be broken into its elements, analyzed and solved. He had not the time, and, after everything he had seen, perhaps no longer the capacity, for moral judgment. Even when called upon to describe the gruesome slaughter of another human being, an innocent victim of some utterly depraved killer, it was rare that any expression could be seen on his face, or any, even the slightest, emotion in his eyes. He answered Franklin’s questions about what he had found at the crime scene, the St. James yacht, with what appeared to be almost bored indifference.

  “There wasn’t much to see,” said Britton with a shrug of his round, sloping shoulders. He threw his hand to the side in a careless gesture of unimportance. “The captain – Nastasis – had roped off that section of the deck, but it was three days before they got back to San Francisco, and between the salt spray and the rain there had been a fair amount of deterioration.”

  Franklin’s eyes twitched with nervous intensity.

  “Yes, I understand; but there was still blood there, blood you could…?”

  “Yes,” said Britton. A trained and experienced witness, he turned immediately to the jury. “Blood on the railing, on the deck – more than enough to make a conclusive identification.”

  “Conclusive identification?”

  “DNA. There is no question that Nelson St. James was the victim, that he was shot and no one else.”

  “And did you also recover the murder weapon, the -”

  “They haven’t proved there was a murder!” I objected as I bolted from my chair. “All they have shown is that there was some dried blood on the deck and that it appears the blood belonged to Nelson St. James.”

  “Appears?” shouted Franklin, determined to be heard. “It’s his blood, his DNA!”

  “Gentlemen, that’s enough!” cried Alice Brunelli. Leaning across the bench, she lashed us with her eyes. “Enough!” she repeated even louder when I tried to continue with my objection.

  It was instinct, the larcenous habit of what through years of practice I had learned to do; simple in the execution, effective, sometimes, in the result. I raised an eyebrow, just that, nothing more, as if, instead of chastened, I was actually amused, by her sudden show of temper. It gave the appearance, created the illusion, that, whatever strained relationship the judge might have with the prosecutor, she and I were friends. Even Alice Brunelli, as tough-minded a judge as there was, was caught off guard, and for a moment did not seem quite certain what to do. She tried to recover, but the flashing anger in her eyes had gone too far away.

  “Enough,” she said quietly and sank back in her chair.

  Franklin moved immediately to get the jury’s attention back on the prosecution’s witness.

  “And did you also recover a weapon?”

  “Yes, a handgun,” replied Britton with that same bland expression. “The one Captain Nastasis had taken from the defendant, Danielle St. James.”

  Franklin asked the clerk to give the witness the prosec
ution’s next exhibit, a clear plastic bag with a revolver inside it.

  “Is this the gun you recovered?”

  Britton examined the identification tag.

  “Yes, this is my mark. That’s the gun Captain Nastasis gave me, the gun -”

  “Yes, the gun he saw in the defendant’s hand. We’ve had his testimony that he caught her with the gun in her hand before she had time to throw it overboard -”

  I shot to my feet, genuinely angry.

  “That wasn’t what the witness testified!”

  The objection was sustained, but it scarcely mattered. Franklin had made his point and there was nothing I could do about it. No one was going to remember in all the testimony that would be given that it was not a witness, but the prosecutor, who had said that if Nastasis had not stopped her Danielle would have thrown the murder weapon into the sea.

  “Could you tell if the gun had been used?” asked Franklin.

  “One bullet had been fired.”

  That was Franklin’s last question of the witness and I challenged the answer as soon as I was on my feet.

  “You have no idea whether what you just said is true or not, do you?”

  This at least produced a change of expression. Puzzled, he squinted, leaned on his elbow, and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “You said that one bullet had been fired from the revolver.”

  “Yes, and…?”

  “How do you know that, detective? You weren’t there.”

  “There were five bullets left in the chamber. The gun holds six.”

  “I see. Five bullets left in a gun that holds six. Therefore, one bullet must have been fired.”

  I said this as if it was a simple question of arithmetic and I was only trying to clarify the point before I moved on to more important matters. He waited for me to ask the next question; I waited for him to explain. He was confused; I was patient. The silence took on a meaning of its own, though no one could guess what that might be.