Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  “We loved each other,” she explained to the jury with a rueful glance that seemed to admit mistakes. “We really did; but Nelson had gotten involved in some things – business things; I don’t know what they were – and he became just impossible. And then, when he was indicted, when he knew he was in trouble, serious trouble, things got….”

  Danielle lowered her eyes and heaved a sigh. A moment later, when she looked up, there was a new vulnerability about her, the lost look of a woman who cannot understand how with such good intentions things had gone so horribly wrong.

  “Nelson was running away. With all the publicity, all the awful things that were being said about him, he didn’t think he had a chance, didn’t think anyone would believe him. I told him I wanted to go with him, that I loved him, and that our marriage was worth saving.”

  A bleak expression of irredeemable loss entered her eyes. Her lips began to tremble and only with an effort were made to stop.

  “Mrs. St. James – Do you need a minute?” I asked sympathetically. And the sympathy was real, because no matter how convinced I became of her duplicity, parts of her story, the record of what at different times she must have felt, seemed all too true.

  “Thank you,” she said with a brave smile. “I’ll be all right.” She sat straight up and turned again to the jury.

  “It would have been better if I had let him go by himself. All we did was fight. And we didn’t just fight in private; we had to do it everywhere. That was why I walked out on him that night in the restaurant. When Nelson lost his temper there was no end to the abuse, nothing he wouldn’t say. He could be so charming, so considerate, and then something would set him off and there was no stopping it.”

  “Rufus Wiley testified that your husband wanted a divorce because he discovered you were having an affair. Were you having an affair, Mrs. St. James, and did your husband find out about it?”

  I was standing not ten feet from her, searching her eyes, wondering if she had lied when she told me that had not had an affair, and if she had, whether she was going to lie about it now. Her eyes, as I should have known, never gave her away. Her gaze remained inscrutable, the only change in her expression an almost imperceptible upward tilt to her chin, a reminder that the question itself was an intrusion, a violation of what she had a right to keep private. Instead of turning back to the jury before she answered, she kept looking at me, measuring, as it seemed, what my reaction was going to be.

  “Yes, Mr. Morrison; I had been having an affair, and my husband found out about it.”

  I had not known her then; she had lived on the other side of the country, married to another man, and I still felt a pang of jealousy. Stranger than that, she knew it - that much she let her eyes reveal - and, perhaps not so strange, it did not bother her in the least. She was used to the jealousy and disappointment of men.

  “And was that the reason you were fighting?”

  “Yes, mainly; the affair, if you can call it that – it only lasted a few weeks.”

  She had an absolute genius for diminishing the importance of every sin she committed. Admit an affair, and then dismiss it as a matter of no account, arguing the length! Murder your husband, and then insist he killed himself because of something you admit you should not have said! It was the kind of logic that would have driven the Mad Hatter mad.

  Now she looked at the jury, and especially the women who were on it, and appealed to what they could all understand.

  “I know it’s no excuse, I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I did not know any other way to get his attention, to let him know that things couldn’t go on this way. I could not keep track of all the different women he had been with. But he refused to think that was any excuse for what I had done. It didn’t matter what he did, so long as he was discreet; it mattered what I did because I was his wife and the mother of his child. It told him he was a hypocrite and a fool, and that he was crazy if he thought I was going to stay married to him if he kept doing the things he did.”

  She fell into a long, thoughtful silence, and the courtroom became deathly quiet, so quiet that a muffled cough seemed a jarring noise. I wondered what she was going to say next.

  “It got so bad,” said Danielle finally; “we said so many hateful things. We couldn’t be in the same room without this constant, savage screaming. Nelson told me that I still belonged to him, that I couldn’t leave him. Then, to show me that he meant it, he took me, made me do what he wanted. He thought that settled it, that because he had had me I was still his. But I wasn’t still his, I wasn’t going to live like that, be his dressed up whore! I got dressed, told him I was leaving him, that I didn’t care where it was, the next place we landed I was getting off the Blue Zephyr and I was never coming back! And then I told him something else, something cruel and hateful and unforgivable. I was so angry I could not help myself! I told him I was in love with someone else, the man with whom I had been having the affair. It was a lie, but I wanted to hurt him as much as he had hurt me. I told him that the whole time he had me in bed I was pretending he was that other man, the one I was in love with, and I told him that it didn’t matter anyway, his life was finished. He was going to prison and he was never going to get out!

  “He was out of his mind with anger and rage. He told me I couldn’t leave him; he begged me to stay. He took the pistol we carried for protection and started waving it in the air. He said he didn’t give a damn what happened, he didn’t care about me, he didn’t care about anything anymore, that he might as well be dead. And do you know what I said to him – the words that keep echoing in my mind, the words I would give anything to take back? I told him to go ahead and do it, that no one would miss him when he was gone!”

  Her eyes were wild with the terror she still felt, the awful thing that haunted her and would never let her go.

  “I tried to stop him! I ran after him, out on deck; I screamed at him, pleaded with him not to do it. But it was too late! He put that gun to his head…, and then that awful noise…, and then all that awful blood. And then nothing mattered anymore. Nelson was gone and I knew my life was over.”

  CHAPTER Fourteen

  “You lied!” I shouted into Danielle’s cold, belligerent eyes. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled, shake her until she came to her sense, shake her until she understood what she had done. “You lied!” I yelled again, but the only effect was a thin, ironic smile. Her eyes were cool, distant, and brazenly analytical.

  “How was the story I told any different from yours!” she dared to ask. “You told them it could have been suicide; I told them that it was!”

  I could not fool myself anymore: Danielle lacked all conscience. Tell the truth or do not tell the truth, the only question which would help her most; honesty or rank deception, nothing but interchangeable means.

  “You lied,” I repeated, but quietly and in the tones of defeat. Her only reaction was a kind of measured neglect.

  “It isn’t any different than what you were doing.”

  Watching out the window at the people on the street below, hurrying home under a sea of umbrellas raised against the cold December rain, wishing I were one of them, I did not bother to look at her, sitting in front of my desk the other side of the room, elegant and undisturbed in the pale shadows of the evening light. Instead, I listened like a detached observer, a courtroom spectator, to the useless monologue of my own defense.

  “I was talking about what the evidence proved or failed to prove. I told the jury that on the evidence they had in front of them, there was as much proof that your husband killed himself as there was that you had murdered him.”

  Slowly, and as it were, reluctantly, I turned my head just far enough to see her. The look of self-satisfaction, the utter indifference to what she had done; the absence of even the slightest remorse for the deception, the lies she had told me; the blatant refusal to think she owed me anything, even honesty, for what I had done for her, was like being kicked in the face
. I struck back.

  “Listen, lady – I knew you were a liar, but I didn’t think you were a fool! Because only a fool would think that what I was doing was the same thing as swearing under oath that he killed himself and that you tried to stop him when he did it. Jesus Christ! - Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” I demanded as I stalked back to my desk.

  “I helped you win your case! I helped make sure I won’t go to prison for something you said wasn’t murder!”

  I threw up my hand and bolted forward, glaring hard at her.

  “You lied under oath! That’s called perjury! And worse yet, you got me to help you do it!”

  “So what!” she shouted, glaring back with contempt. “I told you everything; you knew what happened. I told you why I killed him, how he drove me to it; but that wasn’t something you wanted the jury to know about – was it? What was the last thing you got Rufus Wiley to admit? – How depressed poor Nelson was the night he called him? I remember what you said – what you made damn sure the jury heard – that it wouldn’t be very surprising if someone about to lose his ‘young and beautiful’ wife, someone facing a life in prison, might decide he didn’t want to live! Yes, damn you – I lied! But just because you went three years to law school to learn how to lie within the rules doesn’t mean you have the right to lecture me on what I should or shouldn’t have done to save myself!”

  It was a schoolgirl’s logic, the argument to cover every sin: that nothing was very bad if the difference between good and evil was only a matter of degree. It was the argument that nothing had ever settled except the very thing she said I did not have: the power to tell her what she could or could not do. I slammed my open palm so hard down on the desk that it made her blink.

  “Get out!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. I sprang out of my chair and pointed toward the door. “I don’t ever want to see you again! I don’t want to talk to you! I don’t want to have anything to do with you! I swear to God, if you’re not out of here in two seconds, the only closing argument I’ll make tomorrow is to tell everyone the truth of what you did!”

  She slammed the door behind her, and suddenly I was all alone, faced with the strange and discouraging task of continuing a conspiracy to cheat. There was no other word for it: cheat, lie, stand in front of those twelve anonymous faces, a so-called jury of her peers, and tell them that the prosecution had failed to make its case; stand there with all the false sincerity I could command and tell them that when they considered all the evidence, including the lying testimony of the only witness for the defense, they had no alternative, no other reasonable choice, but to return a verdict of not guilty. The only saving grace was that I did not have to tell them that they had to call her innocent.

  The evidence; thank God for that. I reminded myself that that was what I was supposed to sum up - not what I believed, not what I knew to be true – only the evidence, the evidence that had been heard in court. I did not have to say anything about what I had been told in the privacy of my office, or in the intimacy of my bed. The evidence kept me sane.

  For a while I remembered what it was like to be a lawyer, trying cases in which the defendant could be anyone at all, because the only thing that mattered was the prosecution’s case and the weaknesses I could find inside it. That is what I was trained for, the craft at which through long years of practice I had tried to become proficient. It was what I lived for; more than that, it was who I was: a lawyer, a trial lawyer, and if I was not good at that, I was not good at anything. Gradually, Danielle disappeared and Mrs. St. James took her place. I knew every inch of Danielle’s naked body; I had only on occasion touched Mrs. St. James on the arm, and then only to show the jury that I was sympathetic.

  The case, my case, the case I could make to the jury, began to take on a shape of its own. My closing argument began to write itself. All the major elements - the claims made by the prosecution that they had not been able to prove – arranged themselves in the right, sequential order; the words and phrases describing what the prosecution had not done began to sort themselves out on the written page. My pen was flying as I wrote and re-wrote, not whole paragraphs or even whole sentences, but the short, fragmentary notes that would be all I needed to remember when I stood in front of the jury and spoke as if it were all spontaneous and none of it studied in advance. For a few brief hours, working away in the lamplight of my office, I forgot about Danielle and remembered myself.

  A few minute past eleven, finally finished, I turned out the light and locked the door behind me. Everything was ready for tomorrow. Downstairs in the lobby, an elderly janitor, his eyes half shut, clung to a broom the way he must have once danced with a woman, long ago, when he was young. Outside, the gray, relentless drizzle had cleared and the sky was full of stars and the air sweet and clean. There were still people on the streets, moving slower than they did in the early morning or the late afternoon, coming in and out of restaurants, falling in and out of bars. They were all strangers and yet I seemed to know them all. In San Francisco the night was always full of nostalgia.

  I took a deep breath and looked all around. I felt better than I had in days. Tomorrow, and the trial was over; one more day and I could wash my hands of the whole sordid affair. One more day, and I could get my conscience back. The jury would decide what would happen to Danielle. After I finished my closing argument, my responsibilities were at an end.

  Except for a few passing cars, the street outside my Nob Hill building was deserted. Two blocks ahead, at the Mark Hopkins, a small crowd of gray haired women and their well-fed husbands, waited with bright, shining faces for their cars. Upstairs in her room, Danielle was probably sound asleep. Before I reached the door, I looked one last time down the empty sidewalk. I could still see her, the way she used to walk the few short blocks from the hotel, wearing one of her crazy disguises, full of a strange, eager excitement at what my first, startled, reaction would be. I tried to tell myself that it was better that, once the trial was over, I would never see her again; that she was too dishonest, too dangerous – a woman who had murdered her husband and might get away with it; a woman who had lied to me, used me, made a fool of me in court. It was all true, and I knew it, and it did not do anything to take away the hurt I felt, the howling sense of loss.

  The doorman had the door open before my hand was on it.

  “She’s been here for more than an hour,” he said in a confidential tone as he rolled his eyes toward the two easy chairs next to the front window. Danielle was sitting in one of them. She had come as herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured with downcast eyes. “Sorry for what I did…, for what I said.” She looked at me, worried that this time she had gone too far, and that nothing she could say could change it. “I’m sorry; I was too scared to think straight. I should have done what you said; I should have listened. Can you forgive me? I hate myself for what I did.”

  I grabbed her wrist and held it tight.

  “Don’t talk about it now.”

  We waited in silence for the elevator. She seemed nervous, distracted; her eyes darted all around. There was an air of desperation, like that of a gambler who does not hesitate to take a risk and then, when it is too late to pull back, has second thoughts. The elevator groaned to a halt and the door creaked open. We started the ascent, but almost immediately, on the third floor, there was the sound of a bell and the elevator jolted to a stop. An elderly couple in their sixties or seventies with whom I had a nodding acquaintance got on. The woman smiled perfunctorily and looked straight ahead, but her husband recognized Danielle. With a serious, courtly expression, he said good-evening in a way that seemed to wish her nothing but good luck. Everyone was following the trial.

  The elevator reached my floor and we walked slowly down the narrow hallway to my apartment. The door swung shut behind us. We stood in the shadows, looking at each other. Neither of us said a word. She started unbuttoning her blouse; I took off my coat and started unbuttoning my shirt. Then, still half dressed,
we were on the floor and I was inside her and she was all I knew. There was nothing but Danielle.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a gentle, soothing voice when it was over. “Sorry for what I did to you. I’ve never trusted anyone, but I should have trusted you.”

  She picked up our scattered clothing and tossed it together in a heap on a chair. She held out her hand.

  “The floor was nice, but the bed is better.”

  A sad, wistful look entered her large oval eyes. She started to say something, hesitated and looked away, and then, her mind made up, looked back.

  “I’ve never been in love with anyone -” She stopped, a sudden sparkle in her eyes. “If you don’t count what a sixteen year old girl once felt.” Then she turned serious again. “I’ve never been in love with anyone. You knew that, didn’t you? I could see it in your eyes – when I told you what I had done with Nelson that first time in his office – that tinge of disappointment, and maybe even hurt. You didn’t want to think of me like that – the kid sister of the girl you almost married – a woman who would use her sex to get what she wanted. You thought I deserved better than that; you thought I should have found someone I wanted as much as he wanted me. That never happened to me; I never wanted anyone that much. I’ve never been in love, Andrew Morrison,” she said plaintively, “but I think I may be, or could be, with you.”

  I put my arm around her and held her close and wished I never had to let her go, that I could just hold her and feel her heart beat next to mine and know that for all the heat and violence of what we did together there was something more than that, and that there was at least a chance that it might last.

  “Let’s go to bed,” she whispered in the soft, enchanted voice that made me forget everything except the moment and what I felt.

  We made love with a kind of first time innocence, gentle, at times awkward, full of hesitant anticipations and small apologies, a carnal ignorance neither of us had known for a very long time. A dance of our own invention, it ended as slowly, and as easily, as it had begun.