Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  CHAPTER Sixteen

  Danielle did not want to go back to the hotel, but I insisted. There was no point waiting at the courthouse: the jury might be out for days. She would be comfortable in her suite at the Mark Hopkins, and, more importantly, no one could bother her there. I promised I would call her the moment I heard anything. I went back to my office and tried to pretend that this was just another trial and that while I waited for the verdict I could start working on the next case, and the one after that.

  Alice Brunelli had finished giving the jury their instructions and sent them off to begin deliberations a few minutes before three in the afternoon. There was nothing more to be done, and I had another trial scheduled to start next week. I grabbed a cup of coffee and opened the voluminous file that had been gathering dust for weeks. Three pages into it and the words became a blur. I was too worried to think, though I am not sure I could have said exactly what it was I was worried about. The verdict, of course, but no matter how many trials I had had, I always worried about that. What would happen to Danielle if the jury found her guilty – but not with any wrenching sense of anguish or despair. The possibility was too vague, too abstract, to concentrate my attention. No, it was something else: a sense that in some yet undetermined way, I would have to pay a price for what I had done.

  I had known from the beginning that I should have refused when Danielle asked me to defend her. I had been seduced, literally seduced, made to act against my own, better judgment, by the effect she had on me. The effect was physical, the pain of longing for something you want almost more than you can stand, an effect that was all the greater for having known her with the kind of fondness you have for someone’s younger sister. That was it, of course - the fact I had known Justine. It was easy to believe, to convince myself, that because I had known her in a way no one else had known her, before she was the woman everyone knew and wanted, before she was Danielle, she belonged, or should belong, to me. Others had known her only later; I knew her, so to speak, from the beginning.

  None of that excused what I had done. I should have kept my distance, treated her like any other client, once I agreed to take her case; I should never have become involved. She would not have dared do what she did, take the stand after agreeing that she would not testify, and then tell a story full of lies. I would not have let it happen. I would have stopped the proceedings, told the judge in chambers that if the defendant testified I would have to withdraw as her attorney. All the judge had to know was that I was faced with an ethical conflict. Alice Brunelli - any half way competent judge – would have known immediately what that meant. The trial would have been delayed while other counsel was found to take over the defense. It would have been an extreme step to take, but one which I was not only entitled, but, strictly speaking, obligated to take. There are a lot of things a lawyer is supposed to do, but few are as serious as calling a witness you know is going to perjure herself.

  The trial was over, and there was nothing I could do. I could not even confess! The prohibition against revealing the communications of a client was absolute, binding even after death. No one would ever know what she had done, or how I had helped her. I could not tell anyone, and she had every reason not to. There would be no punishment, no sanction - no possibility that I might face disbarment. Danielle might or might not get away with murder, the crime she had committed; there was no question that I would get away with mine. That only made me more certain that sooner or later a price would have to be paid. I was already paying it in a loss of self-respect, the howling protest that came from somewhere the back of my mind at the way I had been used; the voice that I heard late at night, taunting me with the ease at which I rationalized everything when, passion spent, she lay naked in my arms. She had murdered her husband, but that was almost more forgivable than the blind-eyed eagerness with which I had become her after-the-fact accomplice, breaking all the rules so that she could, without penalty, break them too. I was a fool, and I knew it, and there was nothing I could do: I did not have the strength - I did not have the courage - to walk away and forget I had ever known her. I hated myself a little for that; I hated that I had become a coward.

  I tried to go back to work and managed to get through a dozen more pages before I threw the case file to the side and swore softly under my breath. There was nothing to do but wait, wait for the jury’s verdict, wait for what would happen after that. It was quarter past six, but we were in the short days of winter and the only light at the window was from the street below. Switching off the lamp, I stared into the shadows, watching as they danced on the ceiling and down the walls, graceful and insubstantial, a reminder, as if one were needed, of what Danielle and her beauty were all about.

  The telephone rang, breaking the silence with its lonely, insistent call. I knew before I answered who it was.

  “You didn’t think they would be out this long, did you?” asked Danielle. She tried to sound cheerful, confident, full of hope, but the strain was evident and I knew that, like everyone else who had ever been in her position, she was anxious, scared, dying by inches inside. I tried to sound professional and matter of fact, not overly concerned by what was going on.

  “I never know how long a jury is going to be out. It’s impossible to predict.”

  She wanted more than that: she wanted certainty.

  “You didn’t think it would take any time at all,” she insisted in a soft, breathless voice. There was a tapping noise, a pencil, or perhaps a fingernail, beating time, a nervous habit she did not know she had. “Maybe it was just me,” she said, confused by things she could not control. “Maybe I just thought that after what you said, after the way they seemed to hang on every word, that it wouldn’t take them any time at all.”

  I started to fall back on my old, settled routine, explaining that in a murder trial a jury might be out for days, or even weeks, but we had talked about all this before. She was not calling because she wanted me to tell her about it again; she was calling because she did not want to be alone. But I could not think of anything to say, words of encouragement, which would not sound hollow and contrived; and so I sat there in silence, helpless and defeated, listening to the constant nervous drumbeat coming from the other end.

  “When did you decide to do that – what you said to the jury about what I would have done after a divorce?” she asked, eager to escape her own thoughts. “Do you really think that’s what I would have done, if Nelson had gotten a divorce – married someone else, someone with money?”

  “Don’t,” I said quietly, as I leaned on my elbow and stared into the darkness, my eyes heavy with fatigue. “There’s no point to it.”

  “Marry another wealthy man? – That’s what you said: that every wealthy man would want me and I could pick and choose among them. Like some whore! - you should have said.” There was a frantic quality to her belligerence, the sudden onset of something close to panic. The tapping noise got louder, and more insistent. “‘She’s a whore, and a whore can always get money from another man!’- You should have said. Marry another wealthy man! I may never marry anyone; I may be going to prison - I may not live!”

  Fatigue gave way to depression. The room began to turn, the shadows moving quicker on the wall, moving faster in a spiral, a black whirlpool pulling everything down behind it. I slammed my hand hard on the top of the desk, shining with my own reflection.

  “You’re not going to prison!” I shouted, as much to keep me from falling into the abyss as to give her comfort. “The jury isn’t going to find you guilty: I could see it in their eyes. And I didn’t call you a whore, and you know it….But isn’t that what you think? – That because you’re beautiful and you can choose whomever you want, he might as well be rich?”

  Before she could answer, make some reply in her own defense, I went for the jugular: I told her the truth. “It’s what you told me – remember? That whole long story of duplicity and sex: what you did when you decided that you wanted to be the wife of Nelson St. James! It’s
what you told me just the other night – remember? That you’ve never been in love with anyone, that you married him because you wanted what he had!”

  The relentless, incessant tapping abruptly stopped. There was nothing, not a sound, not so much as the whisper of her breath. And then, suddenly, she began to cry, softly at first, but soon a wild, wailing lament.

  “Why are you doing this, Andrew? Why do you want to hurt me – now, while I’m terrified - out of my mind with fear! I told you things about me…, I trusted you – No, I was falling in love with you! And you think I’m a …! Don’t you understand? If I could do whatever I liked, marry anyone I wanted – what you said to the jury – I wouldn’t have married another Nelson – I would have married you!”

  The shadows stopped moving; the darkness slipped away.

  “Then why don’t you? – Why don’t you marry me? You know I want to. Do you?”

  “Yes. No. I can’t. Oh, God – I don’t know.” There was something in her voice I could not quite place, a kind of bittersweet nostalgia, as of a feeling, a condition of her youth, that she would have given anything to get back and knew she never could. “Let’s not talk about it now – I’m too confused. Take me somewhere to dinner, some place private, where people won’t stare; some place I can just be with you, where I can forget the trial and what might happen.”

  Another phone line flashed. Danielle waited while I took the call.

  “It was the court clerk,” I told her when I came back on the line. “They have a verdict.”

  “Is that good?” she asked after a long silence. “That they decided this fast.”

  I did not know.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  An hour and a half later, at eight o’clock in the evening, in a courtroom filled with reporters, I walked down the center aisle with Danielle on my arm. It struck me odd, how often on the most serious occasions of our lives – weddings and funerals and the verdicts of juries – we make the same entrance, the formal beginning of the rituals that, in some measure, mark the moment that will change everything. We could have been entering a church, ready to begin a new life, instead of a courtroom where we might be ending an old one.

  Robert Franklin was already there, his hands folded carelessly on the hard polished counsel table in front of him. He did not look around when we came in, nor did he turn to the side to glance at us when I pulled out a chair for Danielle and then took the one next to her. He stared at a space on the table between his wrists, and did not raise his eyes to look at anything until, just minutes after Danielle and I had settled into our places, Alice Brunelli burst through the door at the side.

  Before the trial, during the trial, after the trial, Alice Brunelli was all business. She sat straight as a board on the front edge of the chair, her thin, almost emaciated face stern and implacable.

  “I have been informed that the jury has reached a verdict,” she announced in a brittle, metallic voice. She cast a warning glance at the burgeoning courtroom crowd. “There will be no demonstrations of any kind, not a word!” Then she looked at Franklin, and then she looked at me. “Let the record reflect that counsel both are present, as is the defendant.” She turned to the bailiff. “Bring in the jury.”

  With long, solemn faces and tired, downcast eyes, the twelve citizens, drawn almost at random from the obscurity of their private lives, filed back into the jury box. Careful not to look at anyone, careful not to make a gesture that might give a hint of what they had done, the decision they had come to after only three hours of deliberation, they sat in their chairs like twelve parishioners come to do penance for their sins. Three hours of deliberations! – I could not get over it. Weeks of testimony, and only three hours! A murder case, a woman on trial for her life, and that was all the time they had spent! Three hours! – What did it mean? Had I missed something? Was it really all that one-sided? Was it that simple, in a case like this, to reach a verdict, whatever that verdict might be?

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” asked Judge Brunelli with a tight smile of purely formal politeness. Her lashes beat like butterfly wings.

  The second juror from the left on the bottom row, the youngest member of the jury, not more than thirty, with a crooked nose and eyes set too close together, stood up. I was surprised, and alarmed. There were other jurors better educated and more articulate that should have been chosen foreman instead. He seemed weak, indecisive, during voir dire; someone more likely to go along with what others might think rather than have, much less express, any strong opinion of his own. When he spoke now, however, he did not seem to have any reluctance to be out in front. No matter how many questions you asked during jury selection, you never really knew what you were getting. It was all guess work in the end.

  “We have, your Honor.”

  Danielle’s fingers close tight around my hand.

  “Would you please hand the verdict form to the clerk.”

  Alice Brunelli examined the verdict form with no more change of expression than if she were reading the weather report. Through the clerk, she gave it back to the foreman. The silence in the courtroom was massive and intense. The footsteps of the clerk as she walked the short distance from the bench to the jury box echoed with a harsh staccato. The verdict form, that single piece of white paper, seemed to make a violent, cracking sound as the foreman unfolded it. And then, when he began to read, it seemed to take forever, each word a gate that had to be opened, and then closed, before the next gate, the next word, came into view and could be approached. A lifetime could have been lived between the beginning and the end of that single interminable sentence.

  “We, the jury, in the above entitled case, on the sole count of the indictment, murder in the first degree, find the defendant, Danielle St. James…”

  He stopped, did not say another word, folded up the verdict form as if, knowing the secret, he had decided not to share it. He looked around the crowded courtroom, everyone waiting. The moment belonged to him and he was not going to lose it. Slowly, and with astonishing presence, he turned and looked straight at Danielle.

  “Not guilty.”

  The courtroom, despite the judge’s warning, erupted into a bedlam of confusion and noise. Danielle threw her arms around my neck, thanking me through her tears.

  “They did it because of you,” she murmured, digging hard with her fingers. “They believed you, believed what you said; believed that you believed me.”

  Still clutching my shoulder, she wiped her wet eyes with other her other hand, tried to smile at the jury, and started to cry again.

  Alice Brunelli thanked the jury for their service, and with one quick stroke of her gavel brought the trial to a final end. Robert Franklin started to leave, but then remembered that there was one more thing he had to do. He came over, looked me straight in the eyes, and offered his congratulations. He did not once look at Danielle.

  “Horrible man,” said Danielle under her breath, after Franklin disappeared into the crowd.

  “Actually, one of the best I know,” I remarked, remembering what I had learned about what, against all odds, he had done. But Danielle was not interested in anything but her own feelings of relief. And who could blame her? It was over, and she was free; and if the meaning of that was not what it once might have been, years earlier, before she had met Nelson St. James, it was still far more than she could have hoped for the night she killed him. Because whatever we might tell each other, however we might excuse it, the truth was that, with my help, she had just gotten away with murder, and we both knew it.

  “I owe you everything,” she whispered frantically. “My life, my….”

  There were too many people pressing close, eager to get one last look; too many reporters trying to ask one last question. Maybe that was the reason it happened – the sudden panic in her eyes, the sudden, urgent need to get away –all those people pulling, pushing, grabbing at whatever they could get their hands on, all of them trying to get at her.

  “Get me out of here!”
she cried. “I can’t breathe!”

  Wrapping my arm close around her shoulder, I bowled my way through a frenzied gauntlet of flying arms and grasping hands. It was bedlam, pure and simple, the noise deafening, overwhelming. An elbow, hard and sharp, struck me in the eye; a knee jabbed my thigh and nearly crippled my leg.

  “Out of my way!” I shouted, scowling fiercely at the contorted faces pressing all around me. “Get out -!” Other faces, other bodies, jumped in front. I shoved through them and we kept moving, fighting our way, stumbling out of the courtroom into the harsh lights of a dozen glaring cameras and a dozen waiting microphones. The crowd behind us, the mob that had been clawing at the chance to get closer, to touch Danielle, suddenly lost interest in her and lost itself instead, every sweating red-faced one of them, in the thought that they might get on television. They would not have stopped moving so quickly had they run straight into a brick wall. Now we all had different parts to play. The crowd could not stop us, but those cameras could.

  “The trial is over,” I announced with the fastidious air of someone about to say something quite profound. Danielle let go of my arm and, perfectly calm, stood next to me. “The jury has returned its verdict. Danielle St. James is not guilty. All she wants now is to be left alone.”

  This said nothing at all, but it seemed to be enough. The news people had the shot they wanted, the one that would be shown on the late night news and seen in all the morning papers: Danielle St. James, minutes after her acquittal on a charge of murder, looking somehow even more beautiful than she had before.

  “Danielle!” shouted some reporter I could not see. “Isn’t there something you want to say?”

  Danielle looked at me as if to see if it was all right and then took a half step forward. The silence was sudden and complete.

  “This has been a tragedy from start to finish. My husband killed himself and, as I said at the trial, I will always blame myself. Now I want to go home to New York and take care of my child.”