Swindlers

by Buffa, D. W.

  I waited for an answer, but she kept her answer to herself. Smiling at the ease with which things could be set in motion, I kicked at another pebble and watched it bounce onto the next stone and roll a little after that.

  “The man you married, the father of your child?” I continued. “You could do that: murder a man who was father to your child?”

  Again there was no answer, just that same deathlike silence. I looked up and found her waiting, her eyes cold, dismissive, and impatient.

  “Once you’re acquitted, they can’t try you again – can they?”

  It was nearly word for word, as if it were the only question that could possibly matter: not whether murder was wrong, but could she get away with it.

  “Double jeopardy – That’s what you want to know?”

  She pressed her lips together and raised her chin in an attitude so imperious, so superior to what the world in its simplicity called morality, that it fairly took my breath away. She had told me one lie after another, she had been guilty of every kind of deception, but I had not until now understood how utterly amoral she really was. She was all instinct, and the instincts were those of a child: selfish and immediate, without any thought of the consequences. And, like a child, almost blameless because of it. I say almost, because of course she did not have the excuse of her age. But she had something else that made it even more tragic. She had the power, often seen in children, to make others want to give her what she wanted; the power to make you believe that what in someone older would have been nothing short of criminal had in her case all the charm of innocence. It had taken me a long time to realize my mistake, to understand that behind those bright, eager eyes that made you feel so wanted, so alive, there was nothing real; that what you saw was only a mirror made to reflect your own private hopes and secret dreams.

  “Why would you want to kill him?” I asked finally. “You’re both so much alike.”

  But nothing could stop her. I could have screamed at her and it would have made no difference. She had to have an answer; she had to know.

  “They can’t, can they?”

  I was just about to tell her the truth, that not only could they try her again, but, given what she had done before – made a travesty of the solemn proceedings of a court of law – would come after her like a pack of jackals, when, suddenly, my eyes moved past her. St. James was coming toward us, moving slowly through the crowd, every step a burden. Sweat glistened on his forehead and there was a troubled, dangerous expression on his face. He grabbed Danielle, digging his fingers into her arms, demanding to know why she had tried to run off. She pulled hard, trying to get away, but she could not break his grip.

  “Let me go! What do you think you’re doing? Are you crazy!” she cried as she continued to struggle. “I wasn’t running anywhere!”

  He held her in both hands and began to shake her. His face was all twisted up, demented and full of rage, as he screamed at her.

  “You think I don’t know what you’re doing, what you’d like to do – run off with him! You were sleeping with him – Goddamn you, you admitted it!”

  Flushed, breathing hard, he shut his eyes and shoved with all his strength. She stumbled backward and nearly fell.

  “Go ahead – leave! You think I give a damn what you do!”

  He glared at her; and then, as if he were seeing her for the first time and did not like what he saw, shook his head with disgust. Slowly, but with an unmistakable air of finality, he turned and left.

  Danielle stood there, watching, angry and defiant. It was over; she was done with him, now free to do what she wished. I started toward her to tell her that nothing mattered but us. The anger, the defiance, all the bitterness which just moments earlier had led her to utter dark words of hatred and murder, vanished from her eyes. She was ready for a new life, ready to give up everything and go away with me. The reservations, the doubt that she was capable of thinking of anyone but herself, had no chance against that hope. I could see it in her eyes, an instant’s intuition that she was going to tell me she loved me and would go anywhere I wanted.

  The next moment, faced with the reality of it, that he was leaving her, leaving her without anything except the clothes on her back, leaving her without any way to get even what she would have had in a divorce, she was seized by panic. Without a word of explanation, without a word of any kind, she went running after him.

  “I told you what happened,” I heard her say as she caught up with St. James and walked alongside him. “I told you it was a mistake. If I’d wanted to run off with him, why would I have come back? Everything we planned has worked perfectly. Don’t ruin it all because one night I got too lonely and did something I wish I hadn’t.”

  One night! I could not hear the rest of their conversation, I don’t know what else she might have told him, except that, whatever it was, it was not the truth; not the whole truth, anyway. That was the really remarkable thing about her, even more than the way she looked – this ability she had to make you want to believe her no matter how many times she had lied to you before. There was a certain intimacy in that, the knowledge that if she lied to you it was only because she still wanted you to think well of her. St. James knew that about her, and so did I, but we both wanted her too much for it to make any difference.

  It was crazy; I admit it. I have asked myself why I did not put a stop to things; why I did not just check into a hotel and the next day fly home. I did not have to keep following them; I certainly did not have to go back to the yacht. St. James may or may not have been planning to get rid of me, but he was too upset, too distracted, to worry about anything except how to work out some manageable arrangement with his wife. He would not have noticed I was gone. The only answer I can come up with is that I was trapped in a spell of uncertainty. I did not know what was real and what was not, whether Danielle loved me or whether even that had been a lie. It all seemed too unfinished, and I had to see it through to a conclusion, though I knew, with a kind of terrible certainty, that however it ended, it would end badly. Call it a premonition, call it fear, but it assumed an importance – a test, if you will, of what I was made of – that I could not resist without admitting to cowardice, a refusal to see things for what they were. It was stupid, irresponsible, and I know it; but it did not feel that way. I had crossed a boundary, stepped over a line; I had become almost as instinctive, as free or restraint, as Danielle.

  Two more days went by in which I did not see either of them. We had left the coast of Sicily and started sailing toward Algeria, though why we were headed there instead of continuing around the island I was not told. The weather changed, hot as blazes in the day and still hot at night, the wind from Africa warm on my face in the evening, the air clean and good to breathe.

  It was close to midnight on the second day that I was summoned up on deck. I had not been told who wanted to see me, but I did not need to ask. I had always known, I think, that it was going to happen. Nelson was waiting for me. He had been drinking, drinking quite a lot. He was not drunk, but his face had a reddish tinge and instead of looking straight at me, the way he usually did, his eyes darted back and forth with a strange, inexplicable excitement. Then I saw Danielle.

  Two days they had been together, two more days in which, whatever else they had talked about, they had talked about me. Something had been decided, I was certain of that; I was not quite so certain what it was, except that it was final, and none of it good. Danielle was standing just a few feet away, the third point, if you will, of the triangle we formed. I had never seen her look like this: nervous, intense, her face drawn and almost rigid, something wild and half-crazy about her eyes. I was so struck by how different, how almost deranged, she appeared, that at first I did not notice the revolver, pointed downward toward the deck, that she was holding in her hand.

  “Danielle will do anything for me, Morrison,” said St. James with a grim, triumphant smile. “It’s what you never understood. Look what she did for me at the trial: put herself un
der that much at risk, willing to have everyone believe that she committed murder! How many women do you know would do a thing like that? She slept with you – I know that – and I’m sure she told you things, and she might even have meant them when she said them,” he added, for a moment strangely sympathetic. “But she never forgot what she was there to do. You should have left it alone. I really wish you had. There’s no choice now. We have to do this. Danielle has to do this,” he said, glancing at her as she slowly raised the gun. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? That you should end up the way everyone thinks I did: shot to death, your body lost at sea, murdered by the same woman who murdered me!”

  He turned away, choosing not to look.

  “Do it, Danielle. Do it now!”

  CHAPTER Twenty Two

  Tommy Lane was curious. He looked at me, expecting me to go on, but I retreated into a long silence.

  “What happened then? Tell me,” he said patiently.

  I crossed my arms and sank lower in the rocking chair. The light in mid-morning gave a silver sheen to the water sprinkling the lawn. The gardener, bent with age, knelt at the edge of the flower bed on the far side of the cottage, removing with a surgeon’s touch every tiny weed.

  “I’ve told you before. Why do you want to hear it again? It’s been two years and every time I see you, you ask the same thing. Why? Don’t you believe me? You think I’m making it up – you think I’m crazy?” I laughed.

  “No, of course not,” replied Tommy. Sitting next to me in one of the wooden chairs scattered along the front porch, he patted my arm in reassurance. “I’ve always believed you.”

  “I know you have,” I said after another long pause. It was not because I needed time to think about it; I just did not know what else I could tell him about what had happened or why.

  We sat there, listening to the rhythmic clicking noise as the sprinklers moved back and forth, shooting plumes of water across the long, sloping lawn.

  “How is it for you here,” asked my old friend. “Do you miss the city, do you miss…?”

  He had become diplomatic as of late, approaching certain questions with a delicacy that anyone who had known him in college would never have suspected. We were young then, and full of ourselves, and certain that everyone else was full of us as well.

  “Do I miss the law, do I miss the courtroom? Yes, all the time; no, hardly ever. Hell, I don’t know.”

  I shook my head in confusion. It was hard sometimes to think too clearly about questions that, as I now understood, had no real answers. Then I remembered something, or rather a new thought came from somewhere and made me think it was my own creation.

  “You quit, too. Do you ever miss it – being a lawyer? Do you miss football, the Saturdays in the fall – days like this – when the air was crisp and clean and there was that smell of new cut grass? Yes, no, sometimes, all the time, almost never? Depends what else you’re doing, doesn’t it?”

  We lapsed into a long silence. Tommy sat with folded hands, trying, as I knew, to think of something that might cheer me up. I felt sorry for him. I knew how difficult it was for him. Sometimes the only way to tell the truth, especially about how you feel, is to tell a lie.

  “No, I don’t miss it much,” I said with a quick, confident grin. Clutching the arm of the chair I began to rock back and forth. “Sometimes, especially late at night, I miss the city, the sense of excitement, the mystery; but I needed a place like this, away from all the madness and the noise. I suppose I’ll go back on day, live in the city again, but for now Napa is a better place for me.” I gestured toward the oak trees and the sloping green grass lawn, out to the tan colored hills. “It’s a peaceful setting, don’t you think? Nice cottage, nothing much I have to do. Some days I don’t even bother getting dressed; I just lounge around in the same pajamas I wore to bed.”

  Tommy listened and nodded and did not say very much. He kept staring out at the long private drive, wondering perhaps how things had come to this, two old friends trapped in a past one of them could not understand and the other could not escape.

  “She made me crazy, you know – Danielle, what happened that night, what it taught me….It wasn’t just that night of course; I mean, none of it would have happened if…. If everything! If she hadn’t been the kid sister of the girl I almost married, if she hadn’t changed into the woman she became; if she hadn’t met St. James, if he hadn’t cheated half the world; if he hadn’t gotten caught, if they hadn’t figured out a way to commit the perfect murder that wasn’t murder at all; if she hadn’t known she could seduce me into becoming a party to a fraud -”

  “You weren’t an accomplice in anything!” insisted Tommy with some heat. “A woman, a client – someone you’re defending – takes the stand and tells a different story than what she’s told you. It’s the middle of the trial. There wasn’t anything you could have done.” He put his hand on my shoulder, forcing me to look at him instead of staring off into space. “She was right when she told you she didn’t need to sleep with you to take the stand and lie!”

  “And I was right when I told her that it changed how I felt!”

  Tommy was still insistent. I do not know how many times now he had told me that it was not my fault, that there was nothing in my conduct as a lawyer of which I had to be ashamed. I looked back at the sloping lawn and the fence at the bottom where it ended.

  “Danielle’s mother – Justine’s mother – told me I should move out of the city, find a place with privacy, tennis courts and a swimming pool, all the things that make life worth living – that kind of thing,” I said, smiling to myself at the memory of Carol Llewelyn and the endless eagerness with which she praised the virtues of every home she sold. “She and her daughter weren’t that much different,” I remarked, struck by a similarity I had only just grasped. “The different sides of the great American dream: A house that everyone will envy, a house you can exchange for a better one when you have more money, and a new life, one you can invent for yourself, when you get tired of the one you have. They were both selling something, but it wasn’t what you imagined; they were both selling you an image of yourself.”

  With my hands in my lap and my fingers intertwined, I beat my thumbs together in rapid, birdlike, repetition, and blinked my eyes to keep them company. It is a habit I have now developed, a nervous habit I suppose; though I don’t feel the least bit anxious when I do it. Quite the contrary, if you really want to know. There is something actually very soothing about doing the same thing over and over again, the only variable the speed.

  “Could you stop that!” said Tommy, unable to repress his irritation.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I seem to be getting all sorts of bad habits. Where were we?”

  “That night. Tell me what happened.”

  “What happened? We were all the same – the three of us, I mean. I didn’t understand that for a long time, but it’s true. I didn’t want to understand that. He was a thief, a charlatan, a man who stole billions and did not think he had done anything wrong. And Danielle – beautiful beyond description, and incapable, or unwilling, to think of anyone but herself. And I was just like that, too: unwilling, or incapable, of thinking about anything except what I thought I had to have. Don’t you see? It’s what each of us believed: that whatever we didn’t have was more important than what we had. It was not enough to be rich, or beautiful, or good at what you did; we always, each of us, always had to have more. It’s what makes this country great – this restless drive to keep moving from one thing to the next, always getting more – and that’s also the reason why we’re all so miserable.”

  I got up from the rocking chair and stood at the porch railing. Far to the north, at the end of the valley, a gray haze lay along the ridge top of the hills, the sign of a distant wildfire, the price of summer in a rainless season.

  “It’s going to be hot today,” I remarked. “Not hot like Sicily, but hot enough.”

  Both hands on the railing, I spread my legs and bent forward.
I could feel the motion of the ship, the Blue Zephyr turned Midnight Sun, and the smooth vibration of the engine; I could hear the sounds of the waves slapping hard against the hull. I could see Nelson turning away, choosing not to watch; I could see Danielle and her gorgeous, fevered eyes, the gun held firmly in her hand, the barrel shining smooth and silver in the moonlight. Two years, and it might have all happened just last night – it might be happening right now! – That was how vivid it remained in my mind.

  “What happened that night?”

  It was the only question he knew how to ask; the only one that had a meaning. Was it because he did not believe me, thought it was some kind of delusion of mine that, forced often enough to talk about it, I would eventually reject as my own fabrication, or because he thought I was still concealing something, that I still refused to tell the truth? Or was the real reason simply that the truth was too difficult, that it did not correspond to what he wanted to believe? Tommy was the only friend I had, and I liked him even more for that, for how reluctant he was to take at face value what I had told him, for insisting so often that there must be some other explanation. But I also liked him too much, trusted him too much, to lie. There had been enough, more than enough, of that.

  “You want to know what happened that night? Everything happened that night,” I said as I turned around to face him. “And all of it in just a few seconds. It’s strange how your whole life can be defined in a single act. Did you ever wonder what you would do if you saw someone about to be hit by a car, wonder whether you would jump out in front, push them clear, knowing that you would get hit instead, save someone and die yourself? I used to imagine that, wonder about it. Would I do the brave and noble thing, or freeze instead: watch helpless while someone – a child, perhaps – got run over. No one would blame you if you didn’t do anything, but you would always blame yourself, or at least question what you had done, or rather, hadn’t done. But suppose – just suppose – those weren’t the two alternatives; suppose that it wasn’t a question of whether you would put your own life at hazard to save another. Suppose – just suppose – that you have another choice, a choice to do nothing, or to make that other person die!”