Swindlers (14 page)

“No, never,” she declared emphatically. “I’ll
do anything you want, but not that. Michael isn’t going to be
dragged into this. Think what it would do to him, listening to how
his father was murdered and all the reasons his mother did it! And
besides,” she added with a shrewd insight into how really desperate
I had become, “wouldn’t the jury just decide that I must be really
awful, exploiting my own child like that?”

Exhausted, out of ideas, I sank into the tall
leather chair in which I seemed to spend half my life and fell into
a long silence. I gestured toward the other chair, but Danielle
remained standing, searching my eyes, trying to guess what I was
thinking. Whether she had a rare instinct for anticipation or I was
just too easy to read, she guessed right.

“It isn’t true,” she said finally.

My gaze, which had drifted away, swung back;
my mind, which had become lazy and confused, was suddenly clear and
on point.

“What isn’t true? – That you were having an
affair, or that Nelson was going to divorce you because of it.”

Her eyes grew wider, a mark of interest in
the way I had posed the question; but if there was any emotion
behind them – fear that she might have been caught in a lie, anger
that she had been accused of something she had not done – I could
not find it. A brief smile, an acknowledgment of the logical
precision with which the issue had been framed, and then the same
studiously blank expression, the only visible sign of what she
felt, or rather did not feel, because with her, as I was learning,
there was always something missing.

“It isn’t true that Nelson was about to start
divorce proceedings because I was having an affair.”

She could have run for public office, the way
she appeared to answer a question while she was evading it. There
were not many lawyers as quick to produce a simple statement with a
double meaning; nor many actors as able to fashion a smile as
ambiguous as Mona Lisa and as enigmatic as Machiavelli. Holding her
confident and inscrutable gaze as close as I could, I tried, and
failed, to penetrate it with a searching gaze of my own. The game
continued.

“He was going to start divorce proceedings
for another reason? Or he was not going to start divorce
proceedings, though he knew about the affair?”

A smile, similar but even briefer than the
first, shadowed her mouth, and then vanished as quickly as it came.
She stared down at her hands, held with elegant indifference in her
lap, in search, as I thought, for another, more Byzantine, path
away from the question. But when she raised her head and looked at
me again, I found in her eyes something that seemed more a
recognition of defeat, than any sense that she had discovered a new
way out.

“Nelson was going to start divorce
proceedings as soon as he stopped running from the government, but
it was not because I was having an affair. He was having an
affair.”

I did not believe her. The words were as much
a lie as the look of pleading vulnerability that had suddenly come
onto her face. It was impossible. Why would Nelson St. James – why
would anyone - want another woman when he could have her?

She seemed amused by my stunned reaction.

“That’s right: Nelson was going to leave me
for another woman. And he would have, too, if he had not been
indicted, if he had not had to leave the country and get away. I
wasn’t surprised; I’d been expecting it.”

“Did you know about this – the affair –
before he asked for a divorce?”

She looked at me in disbelief, and then
laughed out loud.

“Asked? Nelson never asked for anything. He
told me he was getting a divorce. He didn’t have to tell me why. I
knew about the other women; I knew it was only a matter of
time.”

She had been all day in court, forced to
pretend that she was oblivious to the prying eyes, the constant,
relentless scrutiny of countless strangers come to look and pass
their own private judgment, and now, for nearly an hour, here in my
office, questioned again about the same things she had been asked
dozens of times before. She was all wound up, tight as a drum, and
now, suddenly, she could not do it anymore. Her eyes began to move
erratically, darting from one place to the next, and then, without
warning, she slapped her hands on the arms of the chair and jumped
to her feet.

“I told you I killed him!” she shouted
fiercely. “I told you how it happened; I told you why. It was that
look on his face, that look that said he owned me and that he could
do anything he wanted and there was nothing I could do about
it.”

She marched to the window, and when she got
there spun around on her heel.

“Do you know why I went to bed with him that
night, why we had sex? Because after days of telling me that he was
going to get a divorce, days of telling me that he would get one
even if he could never go back to New York, he told me that evening
at dinner that he had made a mistake, that he was sorry for all the
things he had said, sorry for the things he had done. And then he
said that for the sake of Michael, we should try to make it
work.”

A strange self-doubt came into her eyes, as
if even now she could not understand how, knowing what she did
about her husband, she had let herself be used.

“For the sake of Michael,” she repeated,
ghostlike, in the failing light that beat a pale reflection on the
glass. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Michael, and so I
went to bed with Nelson and was every bit the uninhibited whore he
wanted me to be; and then I saw that look, and I knew that it was
all a lie, and that he was going to shove me aside and divorce me
after all. He had used me. That was all right; I had used him, too
– married him because of who he was and what he had - but that
night, that was unforgivable, using Michael, our son, just to have
me again. That look told me everything. That look - I couldn’t
stand it! Something happened, something I can’t explain. Something
broke, snapped inside. I’d never hated anyone, but that night I
hated him!”

Her face went ashen, and a tear started down
her cheek. She stood there, staring at me, waiting helpless for me
to tell her what to do, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing,
I could say.

“All I could think about was Michael, and how
he shouldn’t have to have a father like that.”

It was curious, when I thought about it as a
lawyer, how little sense it made. It was not self-defense: she had
not acted to save her own life; it was not, according to any legal
standard, any defense at all; but it was hard to think that Nelson
St. James had not gotten what he deserved. If it was a crime, what
she had done, it was a crime of passion, committed in the heat of
the moment. But should it be even that? She had been lied to, told
by her husband that he had changed his mind, that he did not want a
divorce after all. For the sake of their son he wanted to try
again. And then, when he was nearly finished with her, finished
using her for his own enjoyment, she had seen in his eyes the awful
truth of what he had done. She had killed him, but what woman with
any self-respect would not have wanted to do the same thing? It was
manslaughter, not murder, but under the circumstances should it
even be a crime, should a woman be sent off to prison for doing
what Danielle had done? The question assumed, of course, that she
was telling me the truth, that she had killed her husband for the
reason, and in the way, she said she had, but even now, watching
her wipe away a tear as, in a wretched halting step, she came back
to her chair, I still was not sure.

“But what about you?” I asked quietly in the
eerie calm that had descended on the dark, shadowed room.

She ran the back of her fingers a last time
across her tear-stained cheek.

“What about me?”

“You said you had known about other women.
Had you started seeing other men? Nelson seemed to think so, from
what he told me.”

She did not ask me what Nelson had said, but
launched instead into a bitter attack on his lawyer.

“Did I do what Rufus Wiley is going to say I
did? – That evil little bastard with his greedy eyes. He should
know all about that pre-nuptial agreement! He’s the one who
insisted we have one. Nelson did not care. He was embarrassed; he
didn’t like the way it made him look, like he wasn’t sure of what
he was doing – or that he wasn’t sure about me. He blamed it all on
Rufus; or tried to, because in the next breath he was telling me
that Rufus was only doing his job, that he had been hired to do
what was in Nelson’s best interests even if Nelson objected. Nelson
could explain away anything. That was part of his charm, the way he
made whatever he wanted sound like something you thought he should
have.”

The tears were gone, her eyes were dry, and
there was nothing missing of their former clarity and force. She
might have killed her husband, and given all the consequences she
had already had to endure she might have felt some regret about
that, but there was certainly no remorse. She talked about him and
his lawyer as if they were a pair of ruthless conspirators whose
only aim in life had been to take advantage of her.

“Rufus knew how to look after Nelson’s
interests, all right; because he knew how quickly, once Nelson had
what he wanted, Nelson could change his mind. The pre-nuptial
agreement might have been Rufus Wiley’s idea, but he knew that
Nelson would eventually thank him for it.”

She shook her head, but not in anger, or even
disappointment. There was more to the story, a final chapter that
would nullify what the two of them, Nelson St. James and his
lawyer, had tried to do.

“That agreement isn’t as important as that
Mr. Franklin seems to think it is,” she said as she rose from the
chair and prepared to leave. “He doesn’t know about the changes to
the will.”

“The will?” I asked, realizing that it was
not just the prosecution that was in the dark. “What about the will
– what changes?”

But she was already thinking about other
things.

“I have to go; I have to get back to the
hotel. It’s three hours later in New York and I have to call
Michael to say goodnight.”

It was only after she left that I remembered
that she had not answered my other question. The one about other
men.

CHAPTER Nine

Robert Franklin was hunched over the counsel
table a few feet to my left, holding a pencil with both hands,
testing it with his flat thumbs to see how much pressure he could
apply. His thumb nails dug in opposite directions two irregular
grooves into the yellow sides. The pencil began to bend, ready to
splinter in half, but as if he knew its exact tolerance, he
stopped, let go of one end of it and starting tapping the eraser in
a sharp staccato.

It was quiet. Courtrooms, even one as packed
as this one with cynical reporters and thrill seeking spectators,
usually were; but never as quiet as when someone was on trial for
murder and the likely punishment was death. A trial at this level,
murder, a capital case, brought with it a sense of solemnity, a
reminder of finality, the feeling you might expect to have if,
somehow, you could watch someone’s funeral in advance. I had not
thought about it before, but now it came to me all at once, the way
all these strangers, men and women who had never met her, would
glance at Danielle, sitting next to me, and then immediately look
away. It was not what Franklin had done, look way because he was
afraid what his look might show; it was not that at all. They
looked away for the same reason we find it hard to look at someone
we know is going to die. Death is the one obscenity we still
avoid.

Franklin kept tapping the eraser, beating
time, measuring the wait. Philip Conrad, the court reporter, sat at
his machine like a well-trained and proficient musician just before
the moment when, the orchestra ready, the conductor walked on stage
and, with a single motion of his baton, started everything into
motion. Danielle, in the chair closest to the jury box, not ten
feet away, stared straight ahead, lost in thoughts of her own.

I leaned back in the curved wooden chair,
chipped and scuffed from years of use, turned away from Franklin
and the murderous rhythms of his impatience and looked out at the
sea of faces on the chance there might be someone I knew. I was not
sure whether it happened to other lawyers, but it was always
easier, when I had a trial, to be in the courtroom than home at
night worrying about what was going to happen the next day or the
day after that. It started the first trial I had. I had not been
able to sleep, my mind full of a thousand different possibilities -
questions I could ask, answers that might be given – nothing
ordered, nothing in its proper sequence, just the jumbled noise of
my own helpless incoherence. In the morning, when it was time to
go, it got even worse. I had to force myself to get dressed, force
myself to leave the safety of home. When I climbed the courthouse
steps I learned what it felt like to attend your own execution. And
then I opened the door to the courtroom and entered a different
world. All the thinking stopped; everything slowed down, everything
was easy. I knew what I was doing and, though it may sound strange
and even demented, watched myself do it. I did not know what I was
going to say before I said it, everything happened on the instant,
and there were no second chances. I was like an actor in a play,
and though all the lines were different, scarcely ever room for
repetition, they came - the way, I’m told, they come to someone on
stage - as if of their own volition. I could not get enough of it;
the only thing I did not like was the fact that at the end of every
day we had to quit.

Franklin stopped tapping the eraser end of
the pencil. Holding it between his hands, his fingers pointing
forward, he twisted it back and forth, the way campers without
matches use the friction from a twig to start a fire. Suddenly, the
door at the side flew open and the wraithlike figure of Alice
Brunelli blew into court.