Swindlers (21 page)

“Rufus Wiley testifies tomorrow. He’ll make
it sound like I had every motive to want Nelson dead.”

“The only one who really knows what happened
is you, and you’re not going to testify.”

She wanted to be sure that she understood,
but she was afraid to ask; afraid that she might seem to be
questioning my knowledge and my judgment.

“It’s all right,” I told her; “whatever it
is, go ahead and ask.”

“You don’t think the case against me is good
enough. You don’t think Franklin can prove I did it. But you can’t
be sure of that, can you?”

“No,” I admitted, “I can’t. I’d be lying if I
said I was.”

She got up from the sofa and came up to me
and put her arm around my neck and kissed me gently. She started to
say goodnight, and then it happened, and even if I had wanted to I
could not have stopped myself. It was too late; it had always been
too late, no matter how many lies I told myself; too late from the
day I first saw her standing on the deck of the Blue Zephyr as it
rode high in the water that sun drenched afternoon off the coast of
California. We stumbled into the bedroom, and this time we did not
stop. We made love with all the evil innocence of a man and a woman
who had wanted each other more, far more, than anyone else they had
ever known.

Later, after we were finally finished, as she
lay naked in my arms, the moonlight streaming through the window,
she asked if it bothered me, not that we had made love, a lawyer
and his client, but something far more personal.

“Does it bother you that I killed him, that
I’m not as innocent as you want everyone else to believe?”

I did not want to think about the moral
implications of what I was doing. Most of the people I defended
were guilty and it had not bothered me before. You did what you had
to do to win, and while I may on occasion have bent them, I had
never broken any rules. The only thing important, I told myself, my
only obligation, was the trial. Later, when it was over, after I
had saved Danielle, I could worry whether I might have been able to
do it in some other, better, way.

“It was an accident; you didn’t do it on
purpose.”

“But I did; I told you that I did. I grabbed
the gun and followed him up on deck and when he started laughing at
me, telling me there was nothing I could do, I shot him. I told you
that. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“You didn’t plan to do it,” I said, staring
into the vast moonlit night. “You wouldn’t have done it if you had
had time to think. You saw what he was doing to you, how he had
lied to get you back in bed. You lost control; you didn’t mean to
lose control. It just happened. It was as much an accident as if
the gun had gone off during a struggle to get it away from
him.”

Danielle lifted her head from my shoulder and
gave me a look I did not understand, a look so strange that as I
listened to what she said, I began to wonder if I had ever
understood anything at all.

“I suppose it could have happened like
that.”

CHAPTER Twelve

“The People call Rufus Wiley”

A cunning smile stole across Robert
Franklin’s mouth. Wiley’s testimony was the missing piece with
which he would complete the puzzle. Instead of a loose assemblage
of disconnected facts, his case would become a flawless narrative,
a story of greed and murder in which, like all the stories people
like to hear, the killer has to pay for what she has done.

There was no smile of any kind of Rufus
Wiley’s mouth, and you had the impression that there seldom was. He
had the shrewd, sober and penetrating eyes of a man trained to
reduce things to their basic elements, and it was quite apparent
what he believed those to be. Modern physics might describe the
world in terms of matter in motion; Rufus Wiley, more familiar with
human behavior, thought in terms of money in circulation. He
glanced at the jury as if he were making a quick calculation of
their average net worth.

Franklin was nothing but friendly.

“Mr. Wiley, you were employed by Nelson St.
James?”

“Yes, I was.” His voice was steady, dry, and
unemotional. Rufus Wiley was a man who dealt in facts.

“How long had you been employed by him at the
time of his death?”

Wiley did not hesitate.

“Eleven years, two months.”

Franklin seemed to take a certain residual
pride in the quick precision with which Wiley answered. Rubbing his
hands together, he stepped closer.

“What exactly did you do for Mr. St.
James?”

“Objection!” I shouted before Wiley could
answer.

Alice Brunelli did not raise her eyes from
what she was reading.

“Grounds, Mr. Morrison?”

“Vague and conjectural,” I replied with a
show of impatience, as if we both had better things to do than
constantly point out and correct the mistakes of Mr. Robert
Franklin.

She raised her eyes, inviting me to
explain.

“If Mr. Franklin wants to know what Mr. Wiley
did for Mr. St. James in the course of his employment, he should
ask him that, and not a question that would include whether he ever
played golf with him on his day off, or had a drink with him at the
Plaza bar, or once went out on a double-date with him when they
were younger, or -”

That was all she wanted to hear. Waving her
hand, she went back to what she was reading.

“Yes, yes; we understand, Mr. Morrison. Be a
little more precise, if you would, Mr. Franklin.”

Franklin had not moved, except to raise his
eyes to the bench. He asked the question again.

“What was the main function you performed in
the course of your employment with Mr. St. James?”

“I was his private attorney. I handled all of
his personal legal affairs.”

“In that capacity, did you have occasion to
draw up any documents in connection with his marriage to the
defendant, Danielle St. James?”

“At Mr. St. James’ request, I drew up a
pre-nuptial agreement.”

“In layman’s terms, what did that pre-nuptial
agreement do?”

Wiley turned and looked straight at the
jury.

“Two things. It stipulated the amount that
Mrs. St. James would have during the marriage; her personal
allowance, if you will: money she could spend on clothing or
whatever else she wanted. The other thing it did was to set forth
the agreement concerning what Mrs. St. James would be entitled to
should the marriage end in divorce.”

Franklin folded his arms across his chest and
gazed down at the floor, preparing himself, as it seemed, for a
question of crucial importance. When he finally raised his eyes, he
did it slowly, as if reluctant to delve too closely into someone’s
personal affairs.

“Under the terms of that agreement, how much
would she have received in the event of a divorce?”

“A million dollars a year and their house in
the Hamptons.”

“A house in the Hamptons,” said Franklin,
pensively stroking his chin. “And approximately how much would that
be worth in today’s market?”

“In today’s market – ten, maybe twelve,
million.”

Franklin’s eyes opened wide with
astonishment.

“Ten, maybe twelve, million? Plus another
million a year. She wasn’t exactly going to be thrown out on the
street then, was she?”

I was out of my chair, objecting with all the
self-righteous fury I could muster at the caustic tone and the
gratuitous remark, and, in the process, doing the same thing
myself.

“That’s what happens when a prosecutor cares
more about a conviction than he does about the facts!”

With a baleful glance that managed to take in
both of us at once, Alice Brunelli issued a warning.

“No more! – Do you understand? Now, Mr.
Franklin – Ask your questions and be done with it, unless you want
the court to ask them for you. And as for you, Mr. Morrison – The
court is fairly confident it can rule on an objection without the
benefit of a commentary on what you think the prosecution’s state
of mind!”

Franklin immediately picked up where he had
left off.

“So is it fair to say, Mr. Wiley, that at
least by most standards she would have been left a very wealthy
women had there been a divorce?”

“Yes, by most standards, I’m sure that’s
true,” said Rufus Wiley in a tone that left little doubt that those
were not the same standards by which he measured things.

Restless and preoccupied, Franklin paced back
and forth, rubbing his chin. His downward gaze became more intense,
a studied look of thoughtful confusion. Back and forth, moving
faster and faster, and then, suddenly, he stopped, and, his eyes
now steady and unflinching, turned to the witness.

“Do you have any reason to believe that at
the time of his death, Mr. St. James was planning to end his
marriage to the defendant, Danielle St. James?”

“Yes; Nelson – Mr. St. James – had asked me
to draw up divorce papers.”

“He asked you to do this before he left on
his trip out here?”

“Yes. He said his wife had been cheating on
him – seeing other men – and that he wouldn’t put up with it, and
that he wanted a divorce.”

For the first time, Rufus Wiley looked at
Danielle, a brief, sidelong glance in which, while the
condescension was obvious, there was something else, something just
below the surface, something I could not quite grasp, but something
sinister - I was certain of that. It was almost as if he was glad
she was on trial for murder.

“She had been seeing other men, and he wanted
a divorce. That’s what he told you before he left New York. But
still, he went with her; he didn’t go alone, when they came out
here and then sailed away.”

Wiley became cautious, circumspect; there
were things he could not talk about.

“Things happened in a hurry. As you know, Mr.
St. James had some legal problems -”

“He was indicted. Yes, we know that. And we
know – everyone knows – that he apparently sailed off on his yacht
to escape having to face trial. That isn’t relevant now. The
question is, if he wanted to divorce his wife, why did he take her
with him – why didn’t he just leave her behind?”

“All I know is what he told me. He said he
had told her he was going to divorce her, and that she had not
taken it well at all. He agreed to see if they could talk it
through. He didn’t think it would make any difference, but he
thought if he did what she asked, things might go easier
later.”

“Meaning?”

“He wasn’t going to change his mind about the
divorce,” said Wiley, making a dismissive gesture with his hand,
“but he thought she wouldn’t be quite so upset, or feel quite so
vindictive, if he spent some time with her talking things over. And
of course they have a child. He did not want things to be any more
difficult than they had to be. And as I said before,” he added
darkly, “this was all at the time when things were moving very
fast. He was making a lot of decisions, most of them against my
advice.”

Franklin had one more question, the last
blank left to fill.

“How can you be certain that he didn’t change
his mind? Isn’t it possible that out there, just the two of them –
they were gone for weeks – he had a change of heart? Isn’t it
possible that he decided to try to make the marriage work?”

Rufus Wiley shook his head emphatically.

“No. He called me from the yacht – from the
Blue Zephyr – and told me that he had made a mistake: that he
wanted to come back and clear his name, and that he wanted the
divorce more than ever.”

“When was this? When did Nelson St. James
make that call?”

“The night before he died.”

Franklin tapped his fingers three times in
quick succession on the jury box railing, and then, nodding to
himself, started back toward his place at the counsel table.

I got to my feet, slowly, and with a puzzled
expression on my face.

“When you handled Mr. St. James’ legal
affairs, did you typically explain to him each thing involved and
what, if any, alternatives he might have?”

“Yes, I tried to.”

“But that wasn’t what you did with the
pre-nuptial agreement, was it? You said earlier that you drafted it
at his request, but that isn’t true, is it? The pre-nuptial
agreement wasn’t his idea, Mr. Wiley – it was yours. And as a
matter of fact, when you first suggested it, he was opposed to it
and told you he didn’t want it – Isn’t that true, Mr. Wiley?”

“I was his lawyer, Mr. Morrison,” he replied
with icy reserve. “It was my obligation to do what was in his best
interest.”

“Because, in your judgment, he didn’t always
know what that was?”

All the features of Rufus Wiley’s long
patrician face seemed to close down. His eyes drew in on
themselves; his mouth pinched tight at the corners. It was the look
of a man who had seldom, or perhaps even never, known great
enthusiasm, a man who had never felt the thrill of letting hope
triumph over experience. His had always been the voice of caution
and restraint.

“Mr. St. James had been more than generous to
the women he had known, but he had not married any of them. I
wasn’t sure why he wanted to marry Danielle. Perhaps it was some
kind of challenge he had set himself; it was not as if he had
fallen in love with her,” he said dismissively.

“Why do you say that: that he was not in love
with her?”

“I meant really in love with her, because I
have to say I never knew him to want anything in quite the same way
he seemed to want her.”

As soon as Wiley said this, there was what I
can only describe as a physical reaction. You could almost feel the
jury, and not just the jury, acknowledge the truth of it, that
Danielle St. James could make even a man who could have everything
want her that much.

“Nelson wanted her – that is certainly true,”
continued Wiley; “but he had an impulsive nature. When he wanted
something he did not always see that he might lose interest once he
had it.”