Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  She stepped back, a signal that there was nothing more she wished to say, but all it did was make each of the other reporters more determined to get in a question of their own. The place was half-mad with noise. I tried to stop it.

  “There is nothing more to be said. The jury reached the only verdict it could have reached. Mrs. St. James is going home.”

  With my arm around her shoulder we started walking, moving quickly, trying to reach the door before the reporters and the cameras could catch up. The lights from the traffic in the street outside made a crazy, changing, crisscross pattern on the white marble walls.

  “The jury may not have found her guilty, but everyone else thinks she did it!”

  I stopped in my tracks and spun around, searching the pack of reporters clinging to our heels.

  “Who said that?”

  “I did!” shouted a woman with lacquered hair and vapid eyes.

  “You’d substitute your judgment for the judgment of the jury?” I yelled back, angry and looking for a fight. Danielle tugged at my sleeve, reminding me that the car was just outside and that we were almost there.

  “They may not have been able to prove it,” said the reporter, staring at Danielle with a thin, caustic grin. “Your lawyer may have convinced the jury that there was a reasonable doubt. But do you really think anyone is going to believe that Nelson St. James committed suicide?”

  Danielle pulled on my arm, determined to get me out the door, but I would not move. I glared at the reporter, defying her smug belligerence.

  “What an ugly thing to say, but then, that’s what you get paid for – isn’t it? – To say really stupid things! It’s nice you’ve found something you’re so good at!”

  Then we were out the door and across the sidewalk to the waiting car.

  Her eyes closed tight, and her small fists pressed hard on her knees, Danielle doubled over and began to sob. My hand went to her shoulder. She threw herself against me, and her tears fell hot and wet against the side of my face, and for a few moments I held her close and let her cry.

  “It’s never going to be over, is it?” she asked plaintively when the crying stopped. “That’s what they’ll say about me – what everyone will think – that I murdered him and that I got away with it.”

  There was not much I could say to give her comfort against what, despite the verdict, we both knew to be the truth. It was only now, after it was over, that she had finally to recognize that getting away with murder was not the complete victory she might have wished.

  “I know you thought you had to do what you did,” I said in a voice that sounded even to me lifeless and without conviction. “I know that you -”

  “You don’t know anything!” she cried. She pushed away from me and looked at me with something that seemed almost like hatred. “You don’t have the slightest idea what happened – what really happened! No one does; no one ever will.” She made a gesture with her hand, as if to ask forgiveness for what she said, or rather, the way she had said it. “I’m sorry…, I didn’t mean….” She waved her hand again, and then stared out the window, helpless and vulnerable and all alone.

  The driver had just turned onto California Street, on the way to Nob Hill. The city was all lit up, the stores, the windows, full of decoration, painted in the bright cheerful colors of Christmas, December scenes of falling snow in a place where it never got cold enough for anything but fog and rain. We passed a cable car, full of giddy tourists, chugging up the shiny iron tracks to the top. Danielle tapped on the glass.

  “I’m not going to the hotel. You can drop us both at Mr. Morrison’s building.”

  It was only after the car was gone, after we had slipped through the lobby and the elevator door had closed behind us, that I started repeat what in my lame attempt to make her feel better I had tried to say before. But now I did it because I was confused and worried, and more than little angry, that she had waited until after the verdict to tell me that apparently nothing she had told me had been the truth.

  “You said it happened because of that look he had on his face, that look he had after he finished with you in bed; that look that said he could do whatever he wanted and there was nothing you could do about it! Are you telling me that wasn’t true? – That it wasn’t the reason you killed him, that it was something else?”

  Every conceivable emotion – anger, defiance, pride, and then hurt, regret, fatigue, and even sorrow – ran one after the other through her marvelous eyes in a losing race to dominate, take control, give her, if only for a moment, a clear sense of who she was and what she really felt. I could not escape the feeling that some part of her was almost desperate to tell me the truth, but that another part of her, stronger and more disciplined, and I think more instinctive, would not let her.

  “What was it?” I pleaded. “What really happened that night? You owe me that much, after what I’ve done.”

  The elevator shuddered to a stop. She did not say anything – she did not even look at me – until we were inside the apartment, and then it was only to tell me that she was not going to answer.

  “Let’s not talk about anything. Let’s make love and then sleep and then make love again.” She looked at me with a strange, wounded expression, like someone forced into an ordeal that was still not over, that might never be over. “Whatever happens, when I told you that I might be falling in love with you – that was true. I am falling in love with you. Remember that,” she said as we started toward the bedroom door. “Whatever happens later, remember that.”

  CHAPTER Seventeen

  The next morning, before I left for the office, we agreed to meet that night for dinner. In a few days, Danielle would be going back to New York to spend time with her son, but after I finished the next trial I had, we would meet somewhere and decide then what we wanted to do next. It seemed a very good idea, given everything that had happened, to take our time and let things take their course. We would find a place - Danielle mentioned an island in the Caribbean – where we could have all the privacy we needed. For the first time in a long time - since, really, the day she asked me to defend her - I felt confident and relaxed, certain about the future, or as certain as anyone can be. I was almost looking forward to the trial that was coming up, getting back to my normal life.

  An hour after I started I had finished going through the case file, the same one that just a few days earlier I had not been able read even two pages without losing concentration. Everything fell into place. I began to make a list of witnesses, prosecution witnesses, with a short summary of what they could be expected to say and what I thought would be the weak points of their testimony by which I could discredit them. My mind was clear. I could see in advance everything that was going to happen: every question I was going to ask and every answer I could turn to advantage. I worked without any awareness of time, lost in what I was doing, the next trial, the only trial that mattered. I did not hear the buzzer on the telephone, and did not know my secretary had something to tell me until her hand was on my shoulder.

  “There’s someone here to see you.”

  Tall, taciturn, with a strict devotion to work, Stella Summerfield knew my habits better than I knew them myself. When I was getting ready for a trial, there were no phone calls, no appointments, nothing that would interrupt what I was doing. Telling me that someone was here to see me made no sense at all.

  “I told him you were busy and that he needed to make an appointment,” she explained when my only response was a blank, incredulous stare. “He says it’s about the St. James trial.”

  The blank expression on my face turned to one of puzzled annoyance. That was the last reason I would see anyone, and she knew it.

  “He was a witness, a witness for the prosecution,” she said with her usual calm efficiency. “He says he has something to tell you he thinks you should know.”

  “Did he tell you his name?” I asked, vaguely interested.

  “Rufus Wiley.”

  “Rufus Wiley!” I exc
laimed, astonished as much that he was here, in San Francisco, as that he had something to say to me. “Yes, all right; send him in.”

  There was none of the smug complacency, the irritating condescension, which had so much marked Wiley’s demeanor when I had first watched him take the witness stand in court. He moved with a cautious, almost hesitant, step as he came toward my desk and took the wing back chair in front. I did not get up, did not reach out my hand, as perhaps I should have done. I was too surprised that he was here, too intrigued by why he might have come to see me this soon after the trial, to remember courtesy; and besides, I did not like him. Whatever the reason he was here, it was not likely to be pleasant.

  “You said you wanted to see me,” I said, watching him, as it were, from a distance. “Something about the trial?”

  Wiley bent his head to the side. There was a pensive, and oddly troubled, expression on his round, smooth face.

  “Yes, about the trial…, that business about Nelson killing himself.” He tilted his head farther to the side. A nervous smile started onto his mouth and then as quickly disappeared. “You didn’t know she was going to say that, did you? – until she said it on the witness stand.”

  It was none of his business, but that was not what got my attention.

  “You were there – in the courtroom - watching the trial?”

  He seemed to study me for a moment, searching my eyes to see if I meant it. He smiled, not like before, narrow and cramped, but broadly and with what, if I understood it right, seemed like relief, though at what, or for what reason, I could not have guessed. Suddenly, he glanced around my office and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

  “It’s like this room. If you closed your eyes and I asked you to describe it, I’ll bet you couldn’t tell me the color the walls are painted.” That thought seemed to lead to another, an escalating sense of analysis. “You wouldn’t notice if you came in one morning and all the paintings had been removed, all the furniture taken away, and all the books stolen, so long as you had that desk and chair, a place you could work. That’s why you’re so good at what you do, Mr. Morrison: perfect concentration, or as close to perfect as I have ever seen. I admire you for that. It’s a gift I wish I had. Yes, I was there, watching the trial; seldom missed a day of it after I was finished as a witness. But you didn’t see a thing, did you? - didn’t even notice me there in the crowd. As I say, I’m not surprised.”

  “But why did you?” I asked, deeply curious.

  “Because of you, Mr. Morrison. You see, I was certain she was going to be convicted, but then – well, I saw what you could do, and I wasn’t so sure anymore.”

  He was older than I, twenty years or more, a lawyer all his life and a man not given to praise. One leg crossed over the other, his hands held together in his lap, he spoke with the tempered judgment of a senior partner drawing on a vast, accumulated experience.

  “That question you asked right at the end, whether Nelson, the last time I talked to him, had not seemed depressed: that was brilliant – a stroke of genius, really. Everyone said you were good, but I had no idea you were as good as that. One question, and you had everything you needed; or rather, all she needed.”

  He laughed, as at some private joke, a low, muffled laugh followed immediately by a rueful smile. He seemed certain I would understand.

  “That must have been when she first thought of it – when you suggested it as a possibility – the story she could tell, the one that gave her the best chance to save herself. You didn’t know, did you? – You didn’t know, and then you had no choice when she took the stand and started telling that made-up story of hers.”

  I could not see the point to this. Why was he here? It had been obvious from the moment he had taken the stand as a witness for the prosecution that he disliked Danielle. I did not need to listen to him tell me that again.

  “You wanted her to be convicted, didn’t you? Was that reason you stayed around: to see the look on her face when the jury found her guilty?”

  He ignored me, dismissed my remark as somehow irrelevant to the reason he was there. He was so intent on what he had come to say I am not even sure he had heard me.

  “That was a brilliant performance,” he went on; “not just yesterday – though that closing argument of yours was as good as anything I’ve seen, - but all the way through. I thought you might win, after what you did with me on cross-examination, but until she took the stand and told that lie of hers, I have to confess I wasn’t quite sure how you were going to pull it off. Even with what she said on the stand, if you hadn’t been her lawyer, if she’d had anyone else….”

  Wiley fell into a long, brooding silence. Streaming through the curtained window on the other side of the room, the morning light made the slightest movement of his eyes seem furtive and full of secrets, as if he knew more than he wanted to; more, even, than he should.

  “You made quite a point of the legal difficulties Nelson was in,” he said presently; “that being indicted must have weighed heavily on his mind, added to the depression he must have felt over the failure of his marriage. Did you really believe that she knew nothing about the kind of business Nelson was in? I was his lawyer,” he added, quick to put some distance between himself and what his client had done; “I was not his accountant. I didn’t know what he was doing with all his different financial schemes and transactions. But she was married to him, and she’s much too intelligent – much too shrewd – not to have known what he was up to. Every time someone visited the yacht, every time Nelson brought someone on board to discuss what they were going to do next, she was there to greet them. You were there, Mr. Morrison, on the Blue Zephyr – you met Nelson, and you’ve now spent months with her. Which of them do you think was smarter? Do you really think she didn’t know?”

  Wiley searched my eyes, subjecting me to a scrutiny suggesting culpability on my part. Either I was a fool for not having believed she could be involved in her husband’s criminal acts, or a liar for denying it.

  “I don’t know anything about the things St. James might have done – or what his wife may have known. But even if I did,” I added, wondering why I felt the need to explain myself to him, “you know as well as I do that I can’t discuss anything my client may have said.”

  “She never mentioned it, never said a word about how he got all that money – nothing about how he stole it?” he persisted, ignoring what I had just told him. “Never told you how the money was the real reason she killed him? Never said anything about how killing Nelson was the only chance she had to keep it all for herself?”

  This was crazy; none of it made sense. Wiley had been at the trial; he could not have forgotten.

  “‘The chance to keep it all for herself’? - She doesn’t get anything! He changed his will – you did it, you made the changes! There was no divorce, so she doesn’t even get what she would have had under the pre-nuptial agreement you insisted she sign! If money was what she wanted, the last thing -”

  “Was to have him dead – Yes, I remember what you told the jury. But you left something out: the will. Almost everything now goes to their son, but he’s just a boy and his mother will be the trustee. Yes, that’s correct: the woman you convinced the jury would get less from her husband’s death than she would have gotten in a divorce ends up in control of everything. Why do you think she’s going back to New York? Because now that she’s been acquitted of Nelson’s murder, there are certain papers – papers I have to draw up – transferring ownership from his name to hers.”

  “She’s going back to New York to see her son. She probably doesn’t even know she’s going to be trustee for the money he inherits.”

  Rufus Wiley rose from the chair. He looked at me, pitying the deception of which he seemed certain I had been the victim.

  “Is that what she told you: that she was going to New York to be with her son? He’s been in a private boarding school in Switzerland for the last two years. And as for not knowing she would become the trustee
, with full power to do with the money what she likes, she called my office first thing this morning and made the appointment to sign the papers. It’s really quite ironic. If Nelson had lived, it would not have mattered if he had stayed out there on the Blue Zephyr, a fugitive from the law, or come back and been convicted at trial: the government would have taken everything, all the houses, all the money, even the yacht. There wouldn’t have been anything left for Danielle, not the house in the Hamptons, not the million dollars a year, nothing. I rather imagine she knew that, understood right from the beginning that Nelson was finished, and that her only chance was to make sure he died before the government started proceedings against everything he owned.”

  I had listened to everything Wiley said, concentrating on every word; I had studied his face, peered into his eyes, watched each gesture, each small change of expression, trying to learn if there was something else, something he was holding back; but if there was, I could not discover it. He stood with his hand resting on the top of the wing-back chair, his eyes somber and filled with regret. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that Danielle could never have been that calculating, that ruthless, but it all was too close to what I had known was true and had not wanted to believe.

  “I’m sorry I had to tell you this, but I thought you would want to know the truth. I owed you that much. I meant what I said earlier: you’re the best trial lawyer I’ve ever seen. We’ve all had clients who lied to us, and you and I have had two of the best at that. They were two of a kind that way, Nelson and Danielle. Even when you knew they weren’t telling the truth, you wanted to believe them. That’s always the danger when you’re dealing with beautiful and charming people who have a gift for making you think they are whatever you want them to be. We all seem to need someone or something to worship, don’t we?”

  As soon as Wiley was gone, I picked up the telephone and called the Mark Hopkins. I wanted to confront Danielle, tell her what Wiley had just told me, and let her try to lie her way out of it, but when I asked to be connected to her room I was told that she had checked out an hour earlier. Danielle was gone. Everything had been a lie, everything; not just all the different versions of what had happened the night she killed her husband, but everything that had happened between us.