Swindlers (27 page)

“You’re not going to prison!” I shouted, as
much to keep me from falling into the abyss as to give her comfort.
“The jury isn’t going to find you guilty: I could see it in their
eyes. And I didn’t call you a whore, and you know it….But isn’t
that what you think? – That because you’re beautiful and you can
choose whomever you want, he might as well be rich?”

Before she could answer, make some reply in
her own defense, I went for the jugular: I told her the truth.
“It’s what you told me – remember? That whole long story of
duplicity and sex: what you did when you decided that you wanted to
be the wife of Nelson St. James! It’s what you told me just the
other night – remember? That you’ve never been in love with anyone,
that you married him because you wanted what he had!”

The relentless, incessant tapping abruptly
stopped. There was nothing, not a sound, not so much as the whisper
of her breath. And then, suddenly, she began to cry, softly at
first, but soon a wild, wailing lament.

“Why are you doing this, Andrew? Why do you
want to hurt me – now, while I’m terrified - out of my mind with
fear! I told you things about me…, I trusted you – No, I was
falling in love with you! And you think I’m a …! Don’t you
understand? If I could do whatever I liked, marry anyone I wanted –
what you said to the jury – I wouldn’t have married another Nelson
– I would have married you!”

The shadows stopped moving; the darkness
slipped away.

“Then why don’t you? – Why don’t you marry
me? You know I want to. Do you?”

“Yes. No. I can’t. Oh, God – I don’t know.”
There was something in her voice I could not quite place, a kind of
bittersweet nostalgia, as of a feeling, a condition of her youth,
that she would have given anything to get back and knew she never
could. “Let’s not talk about it now – I’m too confused. Take me
somewhere to dinner, some place private, where people won’t stare;
some place I can just be with you, where I can forget the trial and
what might happen.”

Another phone line flashed. Danielle waited
while I took the call.

“It was the court clerk,” I told her when I
came back on the line. “They have a verdict.”

“Is that good?” she asked after a long
silence. “That they decided this fast.”

I did not know.

“Yes, I think so.”

An hour and a half later, at eight o’clock in
the evening, in a courtroom filled with reporters, I walked down
the center aisle with Danielle on my arm. It struck me odd, how
often on the most serious occasions of our lives – weddings and
funerals and the verdicts of juries – we make the same entrance,
the formal beginning of the rituals that, in some measure, mark the
moment that will change everything. We could have been entering a
church, ready to begin a new life, instead of a courtroom where we
might be ending an old one.

Robert Franklin was already there, his hands
folded carelessly on the hard polished counsel table in front of
him. He did not look around when we came in, nor did he turn to the
side to glance at us when I pulled out a chair for Danielle and
then took the one next to her. He stared at a space on the table
between his wrists, and did not raise his eyes to look at anything
until, just minutes after Danielle and I had settled into our
places, Alice Brunelli burst through the door at the side.

Before the trial, during the trial, after the
trial, Alice Brunelli was all business. She sat straight as a board
on the front edge of the chair, her thin, almost emaciated face
stern and implacable.

“I have been informed that the jury has
reached a verdict,” she announced in a brittle, metallic voice. She
cast a warning glance at the burgeoning courtroom crowd. “There
will be no demonstrations of any kind, not a word!” Then she looked
at Franklin, and then she looked at me. “Let the record reflect
that counsel both are present, as is the defendant.” She turned to
the bailiff. “Bring in the jury.”

With long, solemn faces and tired, downcast
eyes, the twelve citizens, drawn almost at random from the
obscurity of their private lives, filed back into the jury box.
Careful not to look at anyone, careful not to make a gesture that
might give a hint of what they had done, the decision they had come
to after only three hours of deliberation, they sat in their chairs
like twelve parishioners come to do penance for their sins. Three
hours of deliberations! – I could not get over it. Weeks of
testimony, and only three hours! A murder case, a woman on trial
for her life, and that was all the time they had spent! Three
hours! – What did it mean? Had I missed something? Was it really
all that one-sided? Was it that simple, in a case like this, to
reach a verdict, whatever that verdict might be?

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” asked Judge
Brunelli with a tight smile of purely formal politeness. Her lashes
beat like butterfly wings.

The second juror from the left on the bottom
row, the youngest member of the jury, not more than thirty, with a
crooked nose and eyes set too close together, stood up. I was
surprised, and alarmed. There were other jurors better educated and
more articulate that should have been chosen foreman instead. He
seemed weak, indecisive, during voir dire; someone more likely to
go along with what others might think rather than have, much less
express, any strong opinion of his own. When he spoke now, however,
he did not seem to have any reluctance to be out in front. No
matter how many questions you asked during jury selection, you
never really knew what you were getting. It was all guess work in
the end.

“We have, your Honor.”

Danielle’s fingers close tight around my
hand.

“Would you please hand the verdict form to
the clerk.”

Alice Brunelli examined the verdict form with
no more change of expression than if she were reading the weather
report. Through the clerk, she gave it back to the foreman. The
silence in the courtroom was massive and intense. The footsteps of
the clerk as she walked the short distance from the bench to the
jury box echoed with a harsh staccato. The verdict form, that
single piece of white paper, seemed to make a violent, cracking
sound as the foreman unfolded it. And then, when he began to read,
it seemed to take forever, each word a gate that had to be opened,
and then closed, before the next gate, the next word, came into
view and could be approached. A lifetime could have been lived
between the beginning and the end of that single interminable
sentence.

“We, the jury, in the above entitled case, on
the sole count of the indictment, murder in the first degree, find
the defendant, Danielle St. James…”

He stopped, did not say another word, folded
up the verdict form as if, knowing the secret, he had decided not
to share it. He looked around the crowded courtroom, everyone
waiting. The moment belonged to him and he was not going to lose
it. Slowly, and with astonishing presence, he turned and looked
straight at Danielle.

“Not guilty.”

The courtroom, despite the judge’s warning,
erupted into a bedlam of confusion and noise. Danielle threw her
arms around my neck, thanking me through her tears.

“They did it because of you,” she murmured,
digging hard with her fingers. “They believed you, believed what
you said; believed that you believed me.”

Still clutching my shoulder, she wiped her
wet eyes with other her other hand, tried to smile at the jury, and
started to cry again.

Alice Brunelli thanked the jury for their
service, and with one quick stroke of her gavel brought the trial
to a final end. Robert Franklin started to leave, but then
remembered that there was one more thing he had to do. He came
over, looked me straight in the eyes, and offered his
congratulations. He did not once look at Danielle.

“Horrible man,” said Danielle under her
breath, after Franklin disappeared into the crowd.

“Actually, one of the best I know,” I
remarked, remembering what I had learned about what, against all
odds, he had done. But Danielle was not interested in anything but
her own feelings of relief. And who could blame her? It was over,
and she was free; and if the meaning of that was not what it once
might have been, years earlier, before she had met Nelson St.
James, it was still far more than she could have hoped for the
night she killed him. Because whatever we might tell each other,
however we might excuse it, the truth was that, with my help, she
had just gotten away with murder, and we both knew it.

“I owe you everything,” she whispered
frantically. “My life, my….”

There were too many people pressing close,
eager to get one last look; too many reporters trying to ask one
last question. Maybe that was the reason it happened – the sudden
panic in her eyes, the sudden, urgent need to get away –all those
people pulling, pushing, grabbing at whatever they could get their
hands on, all of them trying to get at her.

“Get me out of here!” she cried. “I can’t
breathe!”

Wrapping my arm close around her shoulder, I
bowled my way through a frenzied gauntlet of flying arms and
grasping hands. It was bedlam, pure and simple, the noise
deafening, overwhelming. An elbow, hard and sharp, struck me in the
eye; a knee jabbed my thigh and nearly crippled my leg.

“Out of my way!” I shouted, scowling fiercely
at the contorted faces pressing all around me. “Get out -!” Other
faces, other bodies, jumped in front. I shoved through them and we
kept moving, fighting our way, stumbling out of the courtroom into
the harsh lights of a dozen glaring cameras and a dozen waiting
microphones. The crowd behind us, the mob that had been clawing at
the chance to get closer, to touch Danielle, suddenly lost interest
in her and lost itself instead, every sweating red-faced one of
them, in the thought that they might get on television. They would
not have stopped moving so quickly had they run straight into a
brick wall. Now we all had different parts to play. The crowd could
not stop us, but those cameras could.

“The trial is over,” I announced with the
fastidious air of someone about to say something quite profound.
Danielle let go of my arm and, perfectly calm, stood next to me.
“The jury has returned its verdict. Danielle St. James is not
guilty. All she wants now is to be left alone.”

This said nothing at all, but it seemed to be
enough. The news people had the shot they wanted, the one that
would be shown on the late night news and seen in all the morning
papers: Danielle St. James, minutes after her acquittal on a charge
of murder, looking somehow even more beautiful than she had
before.

“Danielle!” shouted some reporter I could not
see. “Isn’t there something you want to say?”

Danielle looked at me as if to see if it was
all right and then took a half step forward. The silence was sudden
and complete.

“This has been a tragedy from start to
finish. My husband killed himself and, as I said at the trial, I
will always blame myself. Now I want to go home to New York and
take care of my child.”

She stepped back, a signal that there was
nothing more she wished to say, but all it did was make each of the
other reporters more determined to get in a question of their own.
The place was half-mad with noise. I tried to stop it.

“There is nothing more to be said. The jury
reached the only verdict it could have reached. Mrs. St. James is
going home.”

With my arm around her shoulder we started
walking, moving quickly, trying to reach the door before the
reporters and the cameras could catch up. The lights from the
traffic in the street outside made a crazy, changing, crisscross
pattern on the white marble walls.

“The jury may not have found her guilty, but
everyone else thinks she did it!”

I stopped in my tracks and spun around,
searching the pack of reporters clinging to our heels.

“Who said that?”

“I did!” shouted a woman with lacquered hair
and vapid eyes.

“You’d substitute your judgment for the
judgment of the jury?” I yelled back, angry and looking for a
fight. Danielle tugged at my sleeve, reminding me that the car was
just outside and that we were almost there.

“They may not have been able to prove it,”
said the reporter, staring at Danielle with a thin, caustic grin.
“Your lawyer may have convinced the jury that there was a
reasonable doubt. But do you really think anyone is going to
believe that Nelson St. James committed suicide?”

Danielle pulled on my arm, determined to get
me out the door, but I would not move. I glared at the reporter,
defying her smug belligerence.

“What an ugly thing to say, but then, that’s
what you get paid for – isn’t it? – To say really stupid things!
It’s nice you’ve found something you’re so good at!”

Then we were out the door and across the
sidewalk to the waiting car.

Her eyes closed tight, and her small fists
pressed hard on her knees, Danielle doubled over and began to sob.
My hand went to her shoulder. She threw herself against me, and her
tears fell hot and wet against the side of my face, and for a few
moments I held her close and let her cry.

“It’s never going to be over, is it?” she
asked plaintively when the crying stopped. “That’s what they’ll say
about me – what everyone will think – that I murdered him and that
I got away with it.”

There was not much I could say to give her
comfort against what, despite the verdict, we both knew to be the
truth. It was only now, after it was over, that she had finally to
recognize that getting away with murder was not the complete
victory she might have wished.

“I know you thought you had to do what you
did,” I said in a voice that sounded even to me lifeless and
without conviction. “I know that you -”

“You don’t know anything!” she cried. She
pushed away from me and looked at me with something that seemed
almost like hatred. “You don’t have the slightest idea what
happened – what really happened! No one does; no one ever will.”
She made a gesture with her hand, as if to ask forgiveness for what
she said, or rather, the way she had said it. “I’m sorry…, I didn’t
mean….” She waved her hand again, and then stared out the window,
helpless and vulnerable and all alone.