Swindlers (19 page)

She never wore the same disguise twice. She
came as every kind of woman and had ever kind of voice. There were
so many of them, and all of them, usually, only late at night, that
the doorman, though he never said a word about it, must have
thought I had part interest in a brothel and that one of the
benefits of ownership was an endless sample of what they sold. It
was crazy, and strangely seductive, the way she took on a slightly
different character with each change in her appearance. There was
no end to the illusion. She was every color of the rainbow and it
was hard not to be mesmerized by every one of them. She was always
different, and always the same.

Or was she? Because there were times when I
would start to wonder whether the reason she was never the same
thing twice, the reason she liked to pretend to be other people,
was because there was nothing underneath, nothing that could stand
to go unchanged. If she was a woman who lived on the surface,
perhaps the surface was all there was. Perhaps her only being, what
held her together, what made her who she was, was what had made her
become Danielle and leave Justine behind: the eager willingness to
become whatever she thought others wanted her to be. None of that
mattered, of course, when I was sitting next to her in the
courtroom or talking to her late at night about the case. It was
only in her absence, only when I could not see her, that my mind
was ever clear enough to become metaphysical.

I tried to work when I got home, prepare for
the next witness the prosecution was going to call, consider the
kind of questions, the cross-examination, I would have to conduct,
but I kept thinking back to Tommy and what he had said at dinner
about Danielle and how dangerous he thought she was. I knew he was
right, that Danielle had murdered her husband, but that did not
mean that I thought she was some cold, calculating killer, a born
criminal who would keep doing the same thing over and over again
until she was caught and put away. It was a crime of passion,
something that would not have happened except for a set of
circumstances that in the nature of things could never be repeated.
Danielle was guilty, but not dangerous; and guilty only because the
law does not deal in exceptions.

Or so I told myself as I glanced at the clock
and wondered when she might call. An hour later, she did, and I
tried not to show my disappointment when it became clear that
tonight, at least, she was staying where she was.

It was just as well, I told myself the next
morning as I settled into my usual place at the counsel table and
glanced quickly over the notes I had made. In the concentrated
intensity of a trial the only important thing, the only thing I had
time to think about, was the next witness and the next question I
had to ask. Danielle, on the other hand, seemed to remember only
what she wanted to and only when she pleased. She took the chair
next to mine, and in a voice just loud enough to be heard by the
jurors as they found their places in the box, said good-morning and
called me Mr. Morrison.

Just below the bench, Philip Conrad finished
threading a thick spool of tape through the stenotype machine.
Remembering what Tommy had told me, what he had told Tommy at
lunch, I smiled, but though he was looking right at me, there was
no sign he had even noticed. He sat there, without expression, the
way he always did when he was at his place in court, waiting for
the proceedings to get underway. I smiled again, this time in
recognition of the honest integrity he brought to his job.

With an armload of files, work she could do
on other cases when it was not necessary to pay close attention to
what was going on in the trial, Alice Brunelli swept into court.
Serious, scholarly, brilliant and logical to a fault, her only
passion was the law, and she spent weekends, which other judges
spent playing golf, in the law library or in her study at home.

“Call your next witness,” she ordered, as she
buried her nose in a file.

There was no response, but already engrossed
in what she was reading, she did not notice. Then, when it finally
registered, her head snapped up and she shot an evil glance at the
silent and recalcitrant Robert Franklin. He was not there. His
place was vacant, the chair still shoved tight against the
table.

“Sorry, your Honor!” shouted the deputy
district attorney as he burst through the double doors in back and
came half-running up the center aisle. He dropped his bulging
briefcase on the table and with calculated indifference started
pushing up his tie.

Oddly, Alice Brunelli seemed to enjoy it. A
thin smile of cold revenge coiled across her solemn mouth.

“It’s nice you remembered to finish tying
your tie,” she said in a dry, mocking voice. “Are you sure you
finished with your zipper?”

She was bluffing; he was sure of it, or
almost sure. He was afraid to look, and afraid not to. That
hesitation, that moment’s embarrassment as the courtroom tittered,
was all she wanted.

“Call your next witness,” she said abruptly
and immediately went back to what she was reading.

Franklin took it all in stride. I
half-suspected he had been late on purpose, a way to make an
entrance, teach the jury that while he had to follow the rulings of
the court, he had his own authority, and that what happened in this
trial largely depended on him. He called his next witness with an
air of anticipation, the suggestion that we were about to get to
something of more than ordinary importance. Franklin was good, and
he kept getting better.

Louis Britton was the police detective who
had been summoned to the Blue Zephyr when she first returned to San
Francisco. He had the look of a veteran cop, someone who has seen
too much of human violence and degradation to be much surprised at
anything. The fact of murder did not concern him; his only interest
was in the details. Shaped by what he did, his mind was rational
and methodical; murder, like any other problem, something to be
broken into its elements, analyzed and solved. He had not the time,
and, after everything he had seen, perhaps no longer the capacity,
for moral judgment. Even when called upon to describe the gruesome
slaughter of another human being, an innocent victim of some
utterly depraved killer, it was rare that any expression could be
seen on his face, or any, even the slightest, emotion in his eyes.
He answered Franklin’s questions about what he had found at the
crime scene, the St. James yacht, with what appeared to be almost
bored indifference.

“There wasn’t much to see,” said Britton with
a shrug of his round, sloping shoulders. He threw his hand to the
side in a careless gesture of unimportance. “The captain – Nastasis
– had roped off that section of the deck, but it was three days
before they got back to San Francisco, and between the salt spray
and the rain there had been a fair amount of deterioration.”

Franklin’s eyes twitched with nervous
intensity.

“Yes, I understand; but there was still blood
there, blood you could…?”

“Yes,” said Britton. A trained and
experienced witness, he turned immediately to the jury. “Blood on
the railing, on the deck – more than enough to make a conclusive
identification.”

“Conclusive identification?”

“DNA. There is no question that Nelson St.
James was the victim, that he was shot and no one else.”

“And did you also recover the murder weapon,
the -”

“They haven’t proved there was a murder!” I
objected as I bolted from my chair. “All they have shown is that
there was some dried blood on the deck and that it appears the
blood belonged to Nelson St. James.”

“Appears?” shouted Franklin, determined to be
heard. “It’s his blood, his DNA!”

“Gentlemen, that’s enough!” cried Alice
Brunelli. Leaning across the bench, she lashed us with her eyes.
“Enough!” she repeated even louder when I tried to continue with my
objection.

It was instinct, the larcenous habit of what
through years of practice I had learned to do; simple in the
execution, effective, sometimes, in the result. I raised an
eyebrow, just that, nothing more, as if, instead of chastened, I
was actually amused, by her sudden show of temper. It gave the
appearance, created the illusion, that, whatever strained
relationship the judge might have with the prosecutor, she and I
were friends. Even Alice Brunelli, as tough-minded a judge as there
was, was caught off guard, and for a moment did not seem quite
certain what to do. She tried to recover, but the flashing anger in
her eyes had gone too far away.

“Enough,” she said quietly and sank back in
her chair.

Franklin moved immediately to get the jury’s
attention back on the prosecution’s witness.

“And did you also recover a weapon?”

“Yes, a handgun,” replied Britton with that
same bland expression. “The one Captain Nastasis had taken from the
defendant, Danielle St. James.”

Franklin asked the clerk to give the witness
the prosecution’s next exhibit, a clear plastic bag with a revolver
inside it.

“Is this the gun you recovered?”

Britton examined the identification tag.

“Yes, this is my mark. That’s the gun Captain
Nastasis gave me, the gun -”

“Yes, the gun he saw in the defendant’s hand.
We’ve had his testimony that he caught her with the gun in her hand
before she had time to throw it overboard -”

I shot to my feet, genuinely angry.

“That wasn’t what the witness testified!”

The objection was sustained, but it scarcely
mattered. Franklin had made his point and there was nothing I could
do about it. No one was going to remember in all the testimony that
would be given that it was not a witness, but the prosecutor, who
had said that if Nastasis had not stopped her Danielle would have
thrown the murder weapon into the sea.

“Could you tell if the gun had been used?”
asked Franklin.

“One bullet had been fired.”

That was Franklin’s last question of the
witness and I challenged the answer as soon as I was on my
feet.

“You have no idea whether what you just said
is true or not, do you?”

This at least produced a change of
expression. Puzzled, he squinted, leaned on his elbow, and shook
his head.

“What?”

“You said that one bullet had been fired from
the revolver.”

“Yes, and…?”

“How do you know that, detective? You weren’t
there.”

“There were five bullets left in the chamber.
The gun holds six.”

“I see. Five bullets left in a gun that holds
six. Therefore, one bullet must have been fired.”

I said this as if it was a simple question of
arithmetic and I was only trying to clarify the point before I
moved on to more important matters. He waited for me to ask the
next question; I waited for him to explain. He was confused; I was
patient. The silence took on a meaning of its own, though no one
could guess what that might be.

“There were five bullets left. That’s what
you said. What makes you think that one was missing?”

He began to swing his foot back and forth,
studying it with the weary contempt of a police detective who has
spent a career – a lifetime! - listening to made-up alibis and
stupid excuses, and none of them as bad as the questions he
sometimes got asked in court. A tired smile cut across his hard,
cynical mouth as he lifted his eyes and sighed.

“It holds six bullets. There were five left.
You can probably do the math.”

“I could, if I knew what number to start
with, but it isn’t clear from your testimony whether that number is
really six, as you keep insisting, or only five, which is also
possible.”

Britton almost fell out of the witness
chair.

“Only five!” he blustered. “Why would -”

“For all you know, detective, whoever loaded
the gun might not have loaded it all the way. Isn’t that correct,
detective? – for all you know there might have been only five
bullets in it!”

He began to scratch at his arm; the
irritation he felt became physical.

“Why would anyone do that?”

“It doesn’t matter why anyone would do that,
detective. The point is that you assumed – you don’t really know –
that the gun was fully loaded.”

He scratched harder, deeper. He bit his lip
to keep from lashing out.

“The captain…members of the crew – They all
heard the shot. The captain – Nastasis – he found her with the gun
in her hand. The barrel was still hot.”

I stepped forward, subjecting him to a close
imitation of the cynical indifference with which, just a moment
earlier, he had treated me.

“In other words, detective Britton, when you
just now testified that the gun was fully loaded, that one bullet
was missing, it was not because of anything you yourself observed,
but because of what you were told by other people. Which means that
your testimony that Nelson St. James was the victim of a homicide
should be taken in exactly the same way: it isn’t anything you know
for certain, it isn’t anything you observed, it’s just what you
assumed!”

“I didn’t assume the blood!” Britton fired
back. “I didn’t assume the DNA!”

I was just turning to the jury. I spun around
and fixed him with a withering stare.

“The blood came from Nelson St. James –
you’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“From his body?”

“Of course from his body!”

“Which part?”

“What?” He was incredulous. “I don’t -”

“Which part, detective? It’s a simple enough
question.” I made a quarter turn and faced the jury. “From his
leg?”

“I don’t think -”

“From his stomach?”

“I don’t -”

“From his head?” I demanded, my voice rising
as I turned and again stared hard at him. “And if from his head,
detective Britton, was it from a gunshot right between the eyes –
the way someone bent on murder might have killed him? Or from a
gunshot to the temple – the way someone with a gun often decides to
kill himself?”