Swindlers (12 page)

“‘
Then tried to blame it on
someone else,’” I said in the bored voice of a director forced to
remind an actor of his lines.

Robert Franklin blinked and, in his dazed
condition not certain where the voice had come from, looked around.
His mouth began to twitch nervously and his black, tiny eyes,
smoldering with resentment, grew smaller still. His hands, held
down at the level of his jacket pockets, tightened into a pair of
useless fists. He stared at me, puzzled because he had not quite
understood what I said, then with open hostility when he heard the
courtroom laugh. He wheeled around and faced the jury, ready to
redouble his attacks on the defendant and the evil calculation of
what she had done.

He forgot what he was going to say.

“She killed him,” he mumbled, buying time.
“Killed him, and we’re going to prove it.” Head down, his hands
clasped behind his back, he began to pace in front of the jury box,
but before he had taken two steps he stopped and looked up. “I
mean, the People are going to produce evidence that will show
that….”

He could not remember what came next, and
without that he was lost. His short, squat neck bulged over his
stiff white shirt collar; beads of sweat formed a thin necklace on
his forehead. The harder he tried to think, to remember all those
well-rehearsed lines with which he was going to drive a stake into
the heart of the defendant before the trial was an hour old, the
angrier and more embarrassed he became.

Others might feel sorry for Robert Franklin;
I could not afford to show mercy. If he made a mistake, I was there
to take advantage of it. Sitting at the counsel table, less than
ten feet from the jury box, I leaned forward.

“This is usually the place where the
prosecutor says something about meeting the burden of proof,” I
said in a whispered shout.

Franklin went white with rage.

“Your Honor!” he cried. “This is my opening
statement. The defense doesn’t have the right to interrupt!”

One of the youngest trial judges in the city,
Alice Brunelli was also one of the best. Tapping a pencil in a slow
methodical cadence, she gave Franklin a look that was anything but
sympathetic.

“You’re no doubt familiar with the phrase,
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ Mr. Franklin? It’s your opening statement
– if you can make it. And while I’m not sure Mr. Morrison really
meant to be helpful,” she went on, with a quick, warning glance in
my direction, “you’ll have to admit that what he suggested might
perhaps be exactly what you ought to do.”

Never in a hurry when trying to teach a
lesson, the judge removed the thick horn-rim glasses that
reinforced the no-nonsense, scholarly impression she would have
made even without them, breathed on the lenses and then wiped them
clean with the hem of her robe. She held the glasses up to examine
them, and after a close inspection, put them back on and
immediately turned her attention to a document she had on the bench
in front of her.

“The floor is yours, Mr. Franklin. If you can
keep it,” she added, her sharp gray eyes still fastened on the
page.

Franklin had suffered what was tantamount to
stage fright, the temporary inability to remember what he was
supposed to say, but he was not an empty headed fool who could only
recite lines someone else had written. He had written them himself,
written them in long hand on the pages of a long yellow legal pad
left on the counsel table with his other things. With a new air of
self-confidence, he looked them over as if he were only now about
to begin.

Keeping to the facts, the concise litany of
what the prosecution intended to prove, Franklin was capable,
efficient, and completely persuasive. The jury of seven men and
five women, the majority of them middle-aged or even older,
followed with steady, believing eyes the simple, straightforward
narrative of what had happened. He was not up on the balls of his
feet any longer, his arms were not flying in the air; he had given
up those theatrics. He stood flat-footed a step or two from the
railing of the jury box, his hands plunged deep down in his
pockets, speaking in a normal, conversational tone and, though it
must have cost him an effort, sounding almost pleasant.

“The defendant in this case, Danielle St.
James, was married to the victim, Nelson St. James, for a little
more than five years. They lived in New York, among other places,
but they spent most of their time on his yacht. You have probably
heard the rumors about Mr. St. James and his financial dealings;
you have probably read in the papers about the trouble he was in.
His difficulties have some bearing on this case.”

He paused to let the jury
consider for itself the link that might exist between one of the
great financial scandals of the century and the murder of the man
who had, if you believed half of what was written, swindled half
the country out of what it owned.

“Shortly after Mr. St. James was indicted,
they left New York and disappeared, though they did not disappear
all at once. Before they set out to sea again – that last,
mysterious voyage of theirs – they flew out here, to San Francisco,
where the yacht was waiting. They were heard arguing from the
moment they stepped off his private plane, they were heard arguing
that night at dinner. They were still arguing the next day. The
arguments became so heated that the defendant walked out of the
restaurant where they were having dinner the second night and got
into a cab alone.”

Again Franklin paused, but this time, instead
of watching the jury and how they reacted, he looked out at the
courtroom, jammed with spectators eager to see what would happen
next. He was glad to have an audience for this, his biggest, most
important trial. His dark, deep-set eyes registered his approval,
but then, almost immediately, he remembered another face. It was
astonishing how he tried to hide it, the way he narrowed his eyes
and tightened his jaw, preparing to look at Danielle without
appearing nervous or unsure of himself. Because there she was, on
trial for murder, and no woman had ever looked more desirable and
less like a killer. She wore a simple, pale blue dress, something
that, for the first time in years, she had bought off the rack,
and, even in that dim, windowless courtroom, her hair was like
summer sunshine and her eyes lit up the room. Like a teenage boy
peeking around a corner at a girl he had a crush on, Franklin
finally turned and looked, and then immediately looked away. No
one, not even the prosecutor who was determined to send her to her
execution, was immune from the spell she cast. It was there in his
voice, the tell-tale catch in his throat, as he faced the jury and
tried to pretend the face of the defendant was no different than
that of any other women he had ever prosecuted for a crime.

“They argued all weekend – at one point the
hotel had to send someone up to their suite to ask them to stop.
They checked out of the hotel early Sunday morning and left San
Francisco on their yacht, and, as was widely reported at the time,
disappeared. We now know that they were sailing around the south
Pacific, stopping at different places but without any apparent
destination. The arguments never stopped, and if anything, got
worse; got so bad in fact that she finally moved out of the cabin
she shared with her husband and slept alone. And then, a short time
later, she killed him.”

Franklin was back in stride, reciting the
elements of the crime with the kind of certainty that makes doubt
seem impossible and even absurd. He was good at this, better than
most prosecutors, better than most lawyers. The main point was that
he was not afraid of the courtroom, was not afraid to stand up in
front a dozen jurors and a watching crowd of strangers and give it
everything he had. He made mistakes, forgot a few of the things he
wanted to say, but that was not going to stop him. He had the great
advantage of believing that everything he said was the truth.

“This is not a complicated case, once you get
beyond the celebrity of the people involved. It is as cut and dried
as any murder case can be. If the way she did it does not seem
particularly inventive, murder, despite what you see on television,
is seldom well-planned. They had an argument, a fight – they had
been going at it for days. She had a gun, and she used it.”

He hesitated, quite on purpose, just long
enough so everyone could wonder if it could really be that simple
and guilt that obvious. And then, to make sure a doubt like that
never arose again, he showed that it could.

“You will have evidence,” he said with a
glance that warned that this went right to the heart of their
obligation as jurors, “that the bullet that killed Nelson St. James
came from the gun she was still holding in her hand after he was
shot. You will hear evidence that the gun belonged to them, Nelson
St. James and his wife. I say belonged to them both because you
will also hear testimony that Nelson St. James bought it because
his wife, Danielle St. James, the defendant, wanted a gun for her
own protection.”

With both hands, he leaned on the jury box
railing, eager and tenacious, looking from one juror to the next,
searching their eyes, daring them – daring anyone! – to
disagree.

“It was her gun, and her fingerprints were
all over it. There was no one else who could have done it. She shot
him dead and he fell overboard into the sea. There was blood on the
deck, blood on the railing, and – make no mistake! – the blood was
his.”

While Robert Franklin went on about the
witnesses who would testify about the murder weapon and the
fingerprints found on it, I tried to project an air of unshaken
confidence, to act as if nothing he said would in the end have any
consequence. I turned to Danielle, put my hand on her arm, and
whispered in her ear to look at me and smile back. Then, nodding to
myself, like someone in complete control of things, I scribbled a
brief note, an illegible scrawl that meant nothing, but that, seen
from the distance of the jury box, might be thought significant.
There was only one point in this masquerade, one reason only for
this mimic’s dance, and that was to create by any means I could the
impression that what the prosecution was promising it would prove
would turn out to be nothing like as damaging as Franklin wanted
them to believe.

“The question isn’t whether the defendant
murdered his husband,” insisted Franklin, assuming his own
conclusion. “The question is why did she do it, what was her
motive? She was angry – they had been arguing for days – but the
defendant isn’t charged with manslaughter, she’s charged with
murder in the first degree, and that means that she killed him with
‘malice aforethought,’ that she intended to do it before she did
it; that she didn’t just fly off the handle and kill him in a fit
of rage, but that she thought about it, decided she was going to do
it, and then did it, murdered him in cold blood.”

With one hand on the jury box railing and the
other on his hip, Franklin arched an eyebrow and shook his head in
scorn.

“She may have killed him during an argument,
but she did not pull the trigger in a moment of uncontrollable
anger. She had a motive that did not depend on rage, one of the
oldest motives there is: money, more money than you or I could ever
imagine.”

Franklin walked to the end of the jury box
closest to the empty witness stand and turned, until, with the jury
on his left, he was facing the crowd.

“Rufus Wiley was the personal attorney of
Nelson St. James. Mr. Wiley is a witness for the prosecution. He
will testify that the defendant signed a pre-nuptial agreement
under which she would have been left, in the event of a divorce,
what most of us would consider a very wealthy woman, with a house
in the Hamptons and a million dollars a year.”

A thin, malevolent smile edged its way across
Franklin’s narrow pinched mouth. He stood there for a moment, and
then another, saying nothing, letting everyone consider for
themselves the meaning of the phrase, ‘what most of us would
consider,’ and the implication that what most of us might think did
not even begin to measure the extent of certain other people’s
greed.

“A house in the Hamptons and a million a
year,” repeated Franklin, his voice venomous and sarcastic. “What
was that, compared to the hundreds of millions – the billions! –
that would be left to her if she was married to him when he died.
But there was a problem. Nelson St. James wanted a divorce. He had
told his attorney, Rufus Wiley, to draw up the papers. That is what
they were arguing about, the victim and the defendant: he wanted a
divorce, and that is why she killed him: to make sure it did not
happen!

“All that money at stake, all that money she
wouldn’t have! What was a million dollars compared to that?” he
asked, slamming his hand on the jury box railing as he lunged
forward. “A million dollars! – That’s probably less than she spends
a year on clothes!”

I was on my feet, shouting an objection.

“Your Honor! First he forgets his opening,
and now he thinks he’s in the middle of his close! Worse yet, the
argument he seems to be making is pathetic! He’s attacking the
defendant because she happens to look rather good in well-made
clothes?”

It had to have been one of the strangest
objections ever made, but I was not interested in how the judge
would rule on it; I wanted to make Franklin seem the real villain,
a man who would taunt a woman for how she looked. Whether or not it
worked on the jury, it worked on Franklin.

“It’s part of the People’s case!” he
sputtered, as bits of saliva went flying. Lifting his hooded eyes
to the bench, he pled the importance of the point. “The difference
between what she would have gotten and what she would have
lost.”