by Buffa, D. W.
“There were five bullets left. That’s what you said. What makes you think that one was missing?”
He began to swing his foot back and forth, studying it with the weary contempt of a police detective who has spent a career – a lifetime! - listening to made-up alibis and stupid excuses, and none of them as bad as the questions he sometimes got asked in court. A tired smile cut across his hard, cynical mouth as he lifted his eyes and sighed.
“It holds six bullets. There were five left. You can probably do the math.”
“I could, if I knew what number to start with, but it isn’t clear from your testimony whether that number is really six, as you keep insisting, or only five, which is also possible.”
Britton almost fell out of the witness chair.
“Only five!” he blustered. “Why would -”
“For all you know, detective, whoever loaded the gun might not have loaded it all the way. Isn’t that correct, detective? – for all you know there might have been only five bullets in it!”
He began to scratch at his arm; the irritation he felt became physical.
“Why would anyone do that?”
“It doesn’t matter why anyone would do that, detective. The point is that you assumed – you don’t really know – that the gun was fully loaded.”
He scratched harder, deeper. He bit his lip to keep from lashing out.
“The captain…members of the crew – They all heard the shot. The captain – Nastasis – he found her with the gun in her hand. The barrel was still hot.”
I stepped forward, subjecting him to a close imitation of the cynical indifference with which, just a moment earlier, he had treated me.
“In other words, detective Britton, when you just now testified that the gun was fully loaded, that one bullet was missing, it was not because of anything you yourself observed, but because of what you were told by other people. Which means that your testimony that Nelson St. James was the victim of a homicide should be taken in exactly the same way: it isn’t anything you know for certain, it isn’t anything you observed, it’s just what you assumed!”
“I didn’t assume the blood!” Britton fired back. “I didn’t assume the DNA!”
I was just turning to the jury. I spun around and fixed him with a withering stare.
“The blood came from Nelson St. James – you’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“From his body?”
“Of course from his body!”
“Which part?”
“What?” He was incredulous. “I don’t -”
“Which part, detective? It’s a simple enough question.” I made a quarter turn and faced the jury. “From his leg?”
“I don’t think -”
“From his stomach?”
“I don’t -”
“From his head?” I demanded, my voice rising as I turned and again stared hard at him. “And if from his head, detective Britton, was it from a gunshot right between the eyes – the way someone bent on murder might have killed him? Or from a gunshot to the temple – the way someone with a gun often decides to kill himself?”
Britton could not answer; no one could have. St. James had fallen overboard, his body lost at sea. No one would ever know where he had been hit, or even whether the bullet that struck him had killed him. He might have only been wounded and then died of drowning. He was dead, but the circumstances surrounding his death were either uncertain or subject to interpretation. Everyone thought it murder, but could the evidence prove that it was not suicide? It was not much of a chance, but it was the only one we had.
Franklin asked a few questions on re-direct, doing what he could to show the absurdity of my suggestion that the gun might not have been fully loaded. He was too smart to mention anything about the real point I was trying to make: that all of Britton’s testimony was second-hand.
After Britton, Franklin called several members of the crew, testimony that went on for days. While none of them had witnessed what had happened the night St. James was killed, they each helped paint a picture of a marriage full of tension and about to explode. Maria Sanchez, a chambermaid, told how St. James and his wife had slept apart.
Wearing the same dark suit he did nearly every day, Franklin stood next to the counsel table, his fingers poised above a long list of questions he had written out in advance. He did not look at it; he did not need to. With indefatigable self-discipline he had committed to memory everything he wanted to ask. He did not once glance down, but he seemed to feel better, more confident, knowing that the list was there. His eyes were fastened on the witness as he listened patiently to her testimony that Mr. and Mrs. St. James had on that last, terrible voyage, slept in different beds.
“Was that their usual practice?” he asked in a well-modulated voice full of encouragement.
“No, never; not before that voyage.”
Franklin’s finger, like a paid assistant, moving with what seemed its own, independent, volition, went to the next question on the page, but Franklin did not see.
“And do you remember exactly when this started, when the two of them started sleeping in different rooms?”
Maria Sanchez was young, not yet thirty, with clear dark eyes and a quick, agile mind; but English was not her native language and in front of a crowded courtroom she easily became confused. She thought she had just answered that same question.
“On that voyage,” she repeated, the color rising to her cheek at what might be thought a question about her honesty.
“Yes, I understand. But at what point? Did they start out that way, from the day they left San Francisco, or did something happen that…?”
Her eyes brightened. Now she understood.
“The day we headed back; that night she asked me to make up one of the other cabins.”
That was the end of what Franklin wanted; it was only the beginning of what I was after. I was out of my chair, heading toward the witness, before Judge Brunelli had finished asking if I wanted to cross-examine.
“This wasn’t your first voyage as a maid on board the Blue Zephyr, was it, Ms. Sanchez? If I’m not mistaken, you had been employed there for nearly two years before this happened, isn’t that correct?”
“Yes, this is true.”
“So you had quite a few occasions to observe Mr. and Mrs. St. James – how they behaved toward one another…, where they slept?”
Almost before the answer was out of her mouth, I smiled at her and went on as if we agreed on everything.
“They didn’t always sleep in the same room, though, did they?” I asked in a quiet voice. “Sometimes – especially when Mr. St. James had to be on the phone at all hours, staying in touch with his various enterprises all around the world – they slept apart.”
A witness - and none more than Maria Sanchez, a woman without friends in a place she did not know - no matter how confident they look, often feel lonely and nervous, afraid they may make a mistake in the way they answer a question and, instead of an honest attempt, be accused of a deliberate lie. A witness, in other words, is almost always susceptible to a face they can trust. Two questions, and Maria Sanchez was confident I would not betray her.
“Yes, that’s true,” she replied almost eagerly. “That sometimes happened.”
I smiled and moved closer.
“So when you told Mr. Franklin a moment ago that before this last voyage Mr. and Mrs. St. James never slept apart, you didn’t mean that it had never happened before, only that it didn’t happen very often – Isn’t that what you meant to say?”
Maria Sanchez was grateful for the chance to explain, to get it right.
“Yes. Sometimes he – Mr. St. James – was up all night working, and then….”
“Yes, of course,” I said, gently. “But there were other times when this happened, weren’t there? – Times when they slept apart because they weren’t getting along, because they argued; because, on more than one occasion, Mr. St. James became drunk and abusive.�
�
She lowered her large black eyes, murmuring an answer no one could hear. I asked her to repeat it.
“Yes, that happened.”
“On one occasion you saw him strike her with his hand, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but it was late, and he had had too much to drink, and….”
“He accused her of sleeping with other men, didn’t he? Wasn’t that the main reason they quarreled? Weren’t those the times when they usually slept in different rooms – after one of those drunken rages when he went after her, sometimes with his fists, because he thought she had shown too much interest in someone else?”
“That was what I understood.”
I took two steps toward the jury box, glanced at those twelve pair of attentive eyes, and then turned back to Maria Sanchez.
“You changed the beds every day, didn’t you – put on fresh sheets?”
“Yes, always.”
“And you had done that, changed the sheets in both their rooms, the morning of the day Mr. St. James died?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And what about the next morning, the morning after Mr. St. James died – did you do it then as well?”
“Yes, I -”
“No, Ms. Sanchez, you did not; not both of them, only the bed where Mr. St. James slept. Isn’t that correct? Because no one had slept in Mrs. St. James’ bed, had they?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she replied, angry with herself for having forgotten. “Mrs. St. James did not go to bed that night. After what happened, she…. Only Mr. St. James’ bed had been used.”
“Yes, - used! Not just slept in – used. Two people had used that bed, hadn’t they, Ms. Sanchez?” My hand on the jury box railing, I held her with my eyes. “Isn’t that what you found when you went in the next morning to clean up his cabin – blankets off the bed, pillows all askew, and the sheets not just crumpled but stained with the tell-tale signs of sex? Isn’t that what you found, Ms. Sanchez – proof, irrefutable proof, that sometime before midnight when that single shot was fired, Danielle St. James was in the cabin she shared with her husband having sex with the man the prosecution claims she was just about to murder!”
The courtroom was pandemonium. Franklin was on his feet screaming an objection no one could hear. Alice Brunelli beat her gavel to no effect at all. And me? – I smiled at Maria Sanchez and went back to my chair at the counsel table and sat down next to Danielle.
When I left the courthouse late that afternoon, I felt for the first time that there might really be a chance, that despite the prosecution’s best effort they might not be able to make their case. There had been a gunshot and St. James was dead and Danielle was seen holding the gun, but no one had actually seen her shoot him. Franklin would argue murder as the only possible explanation, but without an eyewitness to prove it, and without a body to show precisely how and where St. James had been shot, the case was circumstantial and, far more importantly, allowed a different explanation, a different narrative of what had happened.
That at least is what I told myself in the euphoria of the moment, after a cross-examination that had gone better than I could have expected. I walked for blocks, thinking back over it, how easily the questions had come, how perfectly the answers had fallen into place. Filled with energy, my blood still hot, manic with the thought of what I could do tomorrow and all the other days the trial lasted, I became the willing prisoner of my own delusions. I must have looked like a strange, demented creature, glowing with the memory of what I had done, talking to myself like an actor playing both parts of a dialogue, my hands shoved deep in my pockets as I stumbled quick-footed down the straight wide street, blind to everything except the jumbled images running through my fevered brain.
I was intoxicated with my own performance, giddy with my own achievement, and suddenly embarrassed because of it. I knew better than to think like this. I had been through too many trials to get excited over anything, much less what I had accomplished with a single witness, before the trial was over. It was, I realized, as my heart stopped racing and I became aware of what a fool I must look, the false confidence of a first hope, the empty, ungrounded belief that because things no longer looked quite so desperate, success was just around the corner. But it was a belief Danielle fully shared.
She came to see me that night, not late, the way she usually did, but early in the evening, and, perhaps to raise the stakes a little, run the hazard of a greater risk, came without disguise.
“You must see your clients at home once in a while,” she said as she breezed past me. Tossing her tan raincoat over a chair, she added with an impish stare, “Or maybe that nice man downstairs thinks that one of those shameless late night ladies who sometime come to see you has come disguised as me.”
She was on trial for her life, but you would have thought she had just come from a movie.
“You think he doesn’t know that all of them were you?”
“He may suspect,” said Danielle, as she glanced around the room. She seemed to take her bearings by the proportions of things. It may have come from her years as a model, or it might have been an instinct, something she was born with, but one look and she knew exactly where she needed to be, where she would be seen to the greatest advantage. “He may suspect,” she repeated, careless with the truth of it, “but he can’t be sure; and besides, he’d never say anything. The risk is being seen by someone on the street. That’s how rumors start: when you’re seen by someone you don’t know.”
She sat at the far end of the sofa, her arm stretched along the top of it. I made us both a drink and sat in the overstuffed chair next to the fireplace, just the other side of the glass coffee table. The tension of the trial had vanished, and she looked as confident and relaxed, as much at ease, as she had that day I first saw her on the deck of the Blue Zephyr. She seemed almost happy.
“You were wonderful today,” she said with eager eyes. “I couldn’t wait to tell you – that’s the reason I didn’t call, why I came straight over – how great I thought you were. We don’t have anything to worry about now, do we? You know you’re going to win.”
I took an almost boyish pleasure in her smile. She had that effect on me, bringing back a native shyness that I thought long since conquered, forcing me to laugh at little at my own embarrassment; and when she heard it, the smile on her lovely, vulnerable mouth grew brighter and she laughed a little as well.
I tried to bring us back to the only thing that mattered, the trial and what was going to happen next. Rolling the ice around in my drink, I became serious.
“It didn’t go too badly today, but all I know for certain is that we haven’t lost yet and we still have a chance.”
But her bright eyes kept their glitter and her smile stayed all-knowing. It made me more determined. I sat on the edge of the chair and did not smile back.
“This isn’t some game where all that matters is how well you played. You’re on trial for murder. I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake.”
The smile still lingered, but grew faint.
“I know what will happen – what could happen – if we lose; but I know what I saw, what you did in court, what you did with those witnesses. And I know what the jury thinks: they like you; they want to believe what you tell them.”
“I was lucky,” I said. I stood up and began to walk around.
“It wasn’t luck,” she insisted, following me with her eyes. “You were brilliant. No one is as good as you. I always knew that about you; I was sure of it that weekend.”
I was not thinking about what had happened that weekend on the Blue Zephyr, that weekend we sailed down the California coast. I was thinking about the trial and what we had to do.
“It’s the best chance we’ve got,” I explained, pacing back and forth. “We have to raise questions about everything the prosecution is trying to tell the jury. They say you must have killed him because you had the gun in your hand, but they can’t prove you didn’t pick it up; they can’t prove �
� not beyond a reasonable doubt – that he didn’t kill himself. They said that you had stopped sleeping together, and now the jury knows that wasn’t true -”
“But we both know it wasn’t suicide,” she reminded me. “We both know I killed him.”
I stopped moving and looked straight at her. There was a hard truth involved and she needed to understand it.
“You’ve never told anyone that but me, and you’re not going to. The important thing is that they can’t prove it – at least not beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Intensely curious, she searched my eyes.
“Rufus Wiley testifies tomorrow. He’ll make it sound like I had every motive to want Nelson dead.”
“The only one who really knows what happened is you, and you’re not going to testify.”
She wanted to be sure that she understood, but she was afraid to ask; afraid that she might seem to be questioning my knowledge and my judgment.
“It’s all right,” I told her; “whatever it is, go ahead and ask.”
“You don’t think the case against me is good enough. You don’t think Franklin can prove I did it. But you can’t be sure of that, can you?”
“No,” I admitted, “I can’t. I’d be lying if I said I was.”
She got up from the sofa and came up to me and put her arm around my neck and kissed me gently. She started to say goodnight, and then it happened, and even if I had wanted to I could not have stopped myself. It was too late; it had always been too late, no matter how many lies I told myself; too late from the day I first saw her standing on the deck of the Blue Zephyr as it rode high in the water that sun drenched afternoon off the coast of California. We stumbled into the bedroom, and this time we did not stop. We made love with all the evil innocence of a man and a woman who had wanted each other more, far more, than anyone else they had ever known.
Later, after we were finally finished, as she lay naked in my arms, the moonlight streaming through the window, she asked if it bothered me, not that we had made love, a lawyer and his client, but something far more personal.
“Does it bother you that I killed him, that I’m not as innocent as you want everyone else to believe?”
