Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  I did not want to think about the moral implications of what I was doing. Most of the people I defended were guilty and it had not bothered me before. You did what you had to do to win, and while I may on occasion have bent them, I had never broken any rules. The only thing important, I told myself, my only obligation, was the trial. Later, when it was over, after I had saved Danielle, I could worry whether I might have been able to do it in some other, better, way.

  “It was an accident; you didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “But I did; I told you that I did. I grabbed the gun and followed him up on deck and when he started laughing at me, telling me there was nothing I could do, I shot him. I told you that. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “You didn’t plan to do it,” I said, staring into the vast moonlit night. “You wouldn’t have done it if you had had time to think. You saw what he was doing to you, how he had lied to get you back in bed. You lost control; you didn’t mean to lose control. It just happened. It was as much an accident as if the gun had gone off during a struggle to get it away from him.”

  Danielle lifted her head from my shoulder and gave me a look I did not understand, a look so strange that as I listened to what she said, I began to wonder if I had ever understood anything at all.

  “I suppose it could have happened like that.”

  CHAPTER Twelve

  “The People call Rufus Wiley”

  A cunning smile stole across Robert Franklin’s mouth. Wiley’s testimony was the missing piece with which he would complete the puzzle. Instead of a loose assemblage of disconnected facts, his case would become a flawless narrative, a story of greed and murder in which, like all the stories people like to hear, the killer has to pay for what she has done.

  There was no smile of any kind of Rufus Wiley’s mouth, and you had the impression that there seldom was. He had the shrewd, sober and penetrating eyes of a man trained to reduce things to their basic elements, and it was quite apparent what he believed those to be. Modern physics might describe the world in terms of matter in motion; Rufus Wiley, more familiar with human behavior, thought in terms of money in circulation. He glanced at the jury as if he were making a quick calculation of their average net worth.

  Franklin was nothing but friendly.

  “Mr. Wiley, you were employed by Nelson St. James?”

  “Yes, I was.” His voice was steady, dry, and unemotional. Rufus Wiley was a man who dealt in facts.

  “How long had you been employed by him at the time of his death?”

  Wiley did not hesitate.

  “Eleven years, two months.”

  Franklin seemed to take a certain residual pride in the quick precision with which Wiley answered. Rubbing his hands together, he stepped closer.

  “What exactly did you do for Mr. St. James?”

  “Objection!” I shouted before Wiley could answer.

  Alice Brunelli did not raise her eyes from what she was reading.

  “Grounds, Mr. Morrison?”

  “Vague and conjectural,” I replied with a show of impatience, as if we both had better things to do than constantly point out and correct the mistakes of Mr. Robert Franklin.

  She raised her eyes, inviting me to explain.

  “If Mr. Franklin wants to know what Mr. Wiley did for Mr. St. James in the course of his employment, he should ask him that, and not a question that would include whether he ever played golf with him on his day off, or had a drink with him at the Plaza bar, or once went out on a double-date with him when they were younger, or -”

  That was all she wanted to hear. Waving her hand, she went back to what she was reading.

  “Yes, yes; we understand, Mr. Morrison. Be a little more precise, if you would, Mr. Franklin.”

  Franklin had not moved, except to raise his eyes to the bench. He asked the question again.

  “What was the main function you performed in the course of your employment with Mr. St. James?”

  “I was his private attorney. I handled all of his personal legal affairs.”

  “In that capacity, did you have occasion to draw up any documents in connection with his marriage to the defendant, Danielle St. James?”

  “At Mr. St. James’ request, I drew up a pre-nuptial agreement.”

  “In layman’s terms, what did that pre-nuptial agreement do?”

  Wiley turned and looked straight at the jury.

  “Two things. It stipulated the amount that Mrs. St. James would have during the marriage; her personal allowance, if you will: money she could spend on clothing or whatever else she wanted. The other thing it did was to set forth the agreement concerning what Mrs. St. James would be entitled to should the marriage end in divorce.”

  Franklin folded his arms across his chest and gazed down at the floor, preparing himself, as it seemed, for a question of crucial importance. When he finally raised his eyes, he did it slowly, as if reluctant to delve too closely into someone’s personal affairs.

  “Under the terms of that agreement, how much would she have received in the event of a divorce?”

  “A million dollars a year and their house in the Hamptons.”

  “A house in the Hamptons,” said Franklin, pensively stroking his chin. “And approximately how much would that be worth in today’s market?”

  “In today’s market – ten, maybe twelve, million.”

  Franklin’s eyes opened wide with astonishment.

  “Ten, maybe twelve, million? Plus another million a year. She wasn’t exactly going to be thrown out on the street then, was she?”

  I was out of my chair, objecting with all the self-righteous fury I could muster at the caustic tone and the gratuitous remark, and, in the process, doing the same thing myself.

  “That’s what happens when a prosecutor cares more about a conviction than he does about the facts!”

  With a baleful glance that managed to take in both of us at once, Alice Brunelli issued a warning.

  “No more! – Do you understand? Now, Mr. Franklin – Ask your questions and be done with it, unless you want the court to ask them for you. And as for you, Mr. Morrison – The court is fairly confident it can rule on an objection without the benefit of a commentary on what you think the prosecution’s state of mind!”

  Franklin immediately picked up where he had left off.

  “So is it fair to say, Mr. Wiley, that at least by most standards she would have been left a very wealthy women had there been a divorce?”

  “Yes, by most standards, I’m sure that’s true,” said Rufus Wiley in a tone that left little doubt that those were not the same standards by which he measured things.

  Restless and preoccupied, Franklin paced back and forth, rubbing his chin. His downward gaze became more intense, a studied look of thoughtful confusion. Back and forth, moving faster and faster, and then, suddenly, he stopped, and, his eyes now steady and unflinching, turned to the witness.

  “Do you have any reason to believe that at the time of his death, Mr. St. James was planning to end his marriage to the defendant, Danielle St. James?”

  “Yes; Nelson – Mr. St. James – had asked me to draw up divorce papers.”

  “He asked you to do this before he left on his trip out here?”

  “Yes. He said his wife had been cheating on him – seeing other men – and that he wouldn’t put up with it, and that he wanted a divorce.”

  For the first time, Rufus Wiley looked at Danielle, a brief, sidelong glance in which, while the condescension was obvious, there was something else, something just below the surface, something I could not quite grasp, but something sinister - I was certain of that. It was almost as if he was glad she was on trial for murder.

  “She had been seeing other men, and he wanted a divorce. That’s what he told you before he left New York. But still, he went with her; he didn’t go alone, when they came out here and then sailed away.”

  Wiley became cautious, circumspect; there were things he could not talk about.

&nb
sp; “Things happened in a hurry. As you know, Mr. St. James had some legal problems -”

  “He was indicted. Yes, we know that. And we know – everyone knows – that he apparently sailed off on his yacht to escape having to face trial. That isn’t relevant now. The question is, if he wanted to divorce his wife, why did he take her with him – why didn’t he just leave her behind?”

  “All I know is what he told me. He said he had told her he was going to divorce her, and that she had not taken it well at all. He agreed to see if they could talk it through. He didn’t think it would make any difference, but he thought if he did what she asked, things might go easier later.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He wasn’t going to change his mind about the divorce,” said Wiley, making a dismissive gesture with his hand, “but he thought she wouldn’t be quite so upset, or feel quite so vindictive, if he spent some time with her talking things over. And of course they have a child. He did not want things to be any more difficult than they had to be. And as I said before,” he added darkly, “this was all at the time when things were moving very fast. He was making a lot of decisions, most of them against my advice.”

  Franklin had one more question, the last blank left to fill.

  “How can you be certain that he didn’t change his mind? Isn’t it possible that out there, just the two of them – they were gone for weeks – he had a change of heart? Isn’t it possible that he decided to try to make the marriage work?”

  Rufus Wiley shook his head emphatically.

  “No. He called me from the yacht – from the Blue Zephyr – and told me that he had made a mistake: that he wanted to come back and clear his name, and that he wanted the divorce more than ever.”

  “When was this? When did Nelson St. James make that call?”

  “The night before he died.”

  Franklin tapped his fingers three times in quick succession on the jury box railing, and then, nodding to himself, started back toward his place at the counsel table.

  I got to my feet, slowly, and with a puzzled expression on my face.

  “When you handled Mr. St. James’ legal affairs, did you typically explain to him each thing involved and what, if any, alternatives he might have?”

  “Yes, I tried to.”

  “But that wasn’t what you did with the pre-nuptial agreement, was it? You said earlier that you drafted it at his request, but that isn’t true, is it? The pre-nuptial agreement wasn’t his idea, Mr. Wiley – it was yours. And as a matter of fact, when you first suggested it, he was opposed to it and told you he didn’t want it – Isn’t that true, Mr. Wiley?”

  “I was his lawyer, Mr. Morrison,” he replied with icy reserve. “It was my obligation to do what was in his best interest.”

  “Because, in your judgment, he didn’t always know what that was?”

  All the features of Rufus Wiley’s long patrician face seemed to close down. His eyes drew in on themselves; his mouth pinched tight at the corners. It was the look of a man who had seldom, or perhaps even never, known great enthusiasm, a man who had never felt the thrill of letting hope triumph over experience. His had always been the voice of caution and restraint.

  “Mr. St. James had been more than generous to the women he had known, but he had not married any of them. I wasn’t sure why he wanted to marry Danielle. Perhaps it was some kind of challenge he had set himself; it was not as if he had fallen in love with her,” he said dismissively.

  “Why do you say that: that he was not in love with her?”

  “I meant really in love with her, because I have to say I never knew him to want anything in quite the same way he seemed to want her.”

  As soon as Wiley said this, there was what I can only describe as a physical reaction. You could almost feel the jury, and not just the jury, acknowledge the truth of it, that Danielle St. James could make even a man who could have everything want her that much.

  “Nelson wanted her – that is certainly true,” continued Wiley; “but he had an impulsive nature. When he wanted something he did not always see that he might lose interest once he had it.”

  Wiley had no sense of romance, he was too prosaic, to understand what being in love really meant.

  “You talk about her, the woman who, by your own testimony, was the woman he wanted to marry, as if she were just an object of his temporary affection; that there was, if I can put it like this, too much passion for it to last. But isn’t that exactly the reason why people marry, Mr. Wiley – because they want each other that much?”

  “In the usual case, I’m sure that’s true,” he replied in a cold, condescending tone. “But Nelson was not the usual case. He hated anything that even suggested permanence.” Wiley bent forward, his gaze determined and emphatic. “That is what made him what he was: the belief that there was always something new to get. And once he decided what that new things was, there was no stopping him. But – and this is very important if you want to understand what kind of man he was – the only reason he bought anything was to sell it later.”

  “And you were there to make sure that, in this case at least, he did not overpay?”

  He ignored the sarcasm; he ignored me. He talked directly to the jury, trying to impress upon them the honest motive of his actions.

  “He decided he had to have Danielle, had to marry her. Why he thought he had to do that, I’m not sure. But Nelson had not changed: the game was all in the pursuit. He meant to have her; he never meant to keep her. That’s why I told him he had to have a pre-nuptial agreement: because it was my job to protect him against what I knew would happen later.”

  He was still looking at the jury, a man who knew his business.

  “You say he never meant to keep her?” I waited until he turned and looked at me again. “But earlier you made it sound just the other way round: that she didn’t mean to keep him.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”

  “You said Nelson St. James wanted a divorce! You said he had taken her with him – on his flight as a fugitive when he sailed off into the Pacific- only to make divorce as easy as possible. You said he called you the night before he died to tell you that he was coming back and that he wanted a divorce more than ever! You said all that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said, but I don’t see how that -”

  “Have you forgotten what you told us was the reason he wanted a divorce? It wasn’t because he had gotten tired of her; it wasn’t because, as you put it, ‘he never meant to keep her.’ It was because he thought his wife had been having an affair! Isn’t that what you said, Mr. Wiley? Wasn’t that your sworn testimony?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said,” replied Wiley, fidgeting nervously with his fingers. “But that doesn’t change the fact that it wouldn’t have lasted, that -”

  “But it did last, didn’t it? Through seven years and the birth of a child; lasted until, according to your testimony, he found out she was having an affair – didn’t it?”

  “Yes, but -”

  “But what, Mr. Wiley? Did you misunderstand? Are you now going to tell us that he wanted a divorce, not because his wife was having an affair, but because he was having one?”

  “No, that’s not -”

  “It’s not true that Nelson St. James was having an affair? Not true that during the course of their marriage he had numerous relationships with other women?”

  “I tried to stay out of his personal affairs.”

  “You tried to stay -! You’re the one who insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement! You’re the one who not two minutes ago claimed that he – what was the phrase you used? – ‘never meant to keep her.’ I will ask you directly, Mr. Wiley: Is it not true that Nelson St. James slept with other women during his marriage to the defendant, Danielle St. James?”

  Wiley sat with his elbows on the arms of the witness chair, and hands, fingers interlaced, dangling in his lap. He was used to giving instructions; he did not much care for answering someone else’s qu
estions.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Do you think he did it because he thought each one might be the last?”

  The question confused him. I tried to explain.

  “Nelson St. James was a comparatively young man, in his early forties, and so far as we know was in good health. But he worried about his own mortality, didn’t he?’

  “Yes, he did, and to a surprising degree. There was apparently some history in his family. His father – he did not talk about him; I only learned this second hand – died of a heart attack before he was fifty.”

  “Each time he was with a new woman was proof of his continued virility, proof that he still had more time – Do you think that possible?”

  Wiley turned up his palms. “I really would not know how to answer that.”

  “You just testified that what kept him going – what we needed to understand if we were going to understand what kind of man Nelson St. James really was – was the belief that there was always something new to get. That included, did it not, a new woman to take to bed?”

  “Well, I -”

  “He was obsessed with his own mortality, wasn’t he? Obsessed with the very real possibility, given his family history, that he might die at an early age.”

  “Perhaps, but -”

  “Didn’t this fear of an early death bring with it a fear of not leaving anything behind? You said he wanted to marry Danielle because he wanted her, and that you knew that eventually he would get tired of her and want a divorce. But there was another reason Nelson St. James wanted to get married, wasn’t there? Nelson St. James wanted a child.”

  “Yes, I suppose he did.”

  “You suppose he did! You know he did. He made a will when he got married, didn’t he? Or rather, he changed the will he had.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And you drafted it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, as I say, I was his -”

  “Lawyer. Yes, we know. There were a number of charitable bequests in that will, were there not?”

  “Quite a number, yes.”

  “And those amounted to approximately how much?”