Swindlers (35 page)

“Danielle will do anything for me, Morrison,”
said St. James with a grim, triumphant smile. “It’s what you never
understood. Look what she did for me at the trial: put herself
under that much at risk, willing to have everyone believe that she
committed murder! How many women do you know would do a thing like
that? She slept with you – I know that – and I’m sure she told you
things, and she might even have meant them when she said them,” he
added, for a moment strangely sympathetic. “But she never forgot
what she was there to do. You should have left it alone. I really
wish you had. There’s no choice now. We have to do this. Danielle
has to do this,” he said, glancing at her as she slowly raised the
gun. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? That you should end up the way
everyone thinks I did: shot to death, your body lost at sea,
murdered by the same woman who murdered me!”

He turned away, choosing not to look.

“Do it, Danielle. Do it now!”

CHAPTER Twenty
Two

Tommy Lane was curious. He looked at me,
expecting me to go on, but I retreated into a long silence.

“What happened then? Tell me,” he said
patiently.

I crossed my arms and sank lower in the
rocking chair. The light in mid-morning gave a silver sheen to the
water sprinkling the lawn. The gardener, bent with age, knelt at
the edge of the flower bed on the far side of the cottage, removing
with a surgeon’s touch every tiny weed.

“I’ve told you before. Why do you want to
hear it again? It’s been two years and every time I see you, you
ask the same thing. Why? Don’t you believe me? You think I’m making
it up – you think I’m crazy?” I laughed.

“No, of course not,” replied Tommy. Sitting
next to me in one of the wooden chairs scattered along the front
porch, he patted my arm in reassurance. “I’ve always believed
you.”

“I know you have,” I said after another long
pause. It was not because I needed time to think about it; I just
did not know what else I could tell him about what had happened or
why.

We sat there, listening to the rhythmic
clicking noise as the sprinklers moved back and forth, shooting
plumes of water across the long, sloping lawn.

“How is it for you here,” asked my old
friend. “Do you miss the city, do you miss…?”

He had become diplomatic as of late,
approaching certain questions with a delicacy that anyone who had
known him in college would never have suspected. We were young
then, and full of ourselves, and certain that everyone else was
full of us as well.

“Do I miss the law, do I miss the courtroom?
Yes, all the time; no, hardly ever. Hell, I don’t know.”

I shook my head in confusion. It was hard
sometimes to think too clearly about questions that, as I now
understood, had no real answers. Then I remembered something, or
rather a new thought came from somewhere and made me think it was
my own creation.

“You quit, too. Do you ever miss it – being a
lawyer? Do you miss football, the Saturdays in the fall – days like
this – when the air was crisp and clean and there was that smell of
new cut grass? Yes, no, sometimes, all the time, almost never?
Depends what else you’re doing, doesn’t it?”

We lapsed into a long silence. Tommy sat with
folded hands, trying, as I knew, to think of something that might
cheer me up. I felt sorry for him. I knew how difficult it was for
him. Sometimes the only way to tell the truth, especially about how
you feel, is to tell a lie.

“No, I don’t miss it much,” I said with a
quick, confident grin. Clutching the arm of the chair I began to
rock back and forth. “Sometimes, especially late at night, I miss
the city, the sense of excitement, the mystery; but I needed a
place like this, away from all the madness and the noise. I suppose
I’ll go back on day, live in the city again, but for now Napa is a
better place for me.” I gestured toward the oak trees and the
sloping green grass lawn, out to the tan colored hills. “It’s a
peaceful setting, don’t you think? Nice cottage, nothing much I
have to do. Some days I don’t even bother getting dressed; I just
lounge around in the same pajamas I wore to bed.”

Tommy listened and nodded and did not say
very much. He kept staring out at the long private drive, wondering
perhaps how things had come to this, two old friends trapped in a
past one of them could not understand and the other could not
escape.

“She made me crazy, you know – Danielle, what
happened that night, what it taught me….It wasn’t just that night
of course; I mean, none of it would have happened if…. If
everything! If she hadn’t been the kid sister of the girl I almost
married, if she hadn’t changed into the woman she became; if she
hadn’t met St. James, if he hadn’t cheated half the world; if he
hadn’t gotten caught, if they hadn’t figured out a way to commit
the perfect murder that wasn’t murder at all; if she hadn’t known
she could seduce me into becoming a party to a fraud -”

“You weren’t an accomplice in anything!”
insisted Tommy with some heat. “A woman, a client – someone you’re
defending – takes the stand and tells a different story than what
she’s told you. It’s the middle of the trial. There wasn’t anything
you could have done.” He put his hand on my shoulder, forcing me to
look at him instead of staring off into space. “She was right when
she told you she didn’t need to sleep with you to take the stand
and lie!”

“And I was right when I told her that it
changed how I felt!”

Tommy was still insistent. I do not know how
many times now he had told me that it was not my fault, that there
was nothing in my conduct as a lawyer of which I had to be ashamed.
I looked back at the sloping lawn and the fence at the bottom where
it ended.

“Danielle’s mother – Justine’s mother – told
me I should move out of the city, find a place with privacy, tennis
courts and a swimming pool, all the things that make life worth
living – that kind of thing,” I said, smiling to myself at the
memory of Carol Llewelyn and the endless eagerness with which she
praised the virtues of every home she sold. “She and her daughter
weren’t that much different,” I remarked, struck by a similarity I
had only just grasped. “The different sides of the great American
dream: A house that everyone will envy, a house you can exchange
for a better one when you have more money, and a new life, one you
can invent for yourself, when you get tired of the one you have.
They were both selling something, but it wasn’t what you imagined;
they were both selling you an image of yourself.”

With my hands in my lap and my fingers
intertwined, I beat my thumbs together in rapid, birdlike,
repetition, and blinked my eyes to keep them company. It is a habit
I have now developed, a nervous habit I suppose; though I don’t
feel the least bit anxious when I do it. Quite the contrary, if you
really want to know. There is something actually very soothing
about doing the same thing over and over again, the only variable
the speed.

“Could you stop that!” said Tommy, unable to
repress his irritation.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I seem to be getting all
sorts of bad habits. Where were we?”

“That night. Tell me what happened.”

“What happened? We were all the same – the
three of us, I mean. I didn’t understand that for a long time, but
it’s true. I didn’t want to understand that. He was a thief, a
charlatan, a man who stole billions and did not think he had done
anything wrong. And Danielle – beautiful beyond description, and
incapable, or unwilling, to think of anyone but herself. And I was
just like that, too: unwilling, or incapable, of thinking about
anything except what I thought I had to have. Don’t you see? It’s
what each of us believed: that whatever we didn’t have was more
important than what we had. It was not enough to be rich, or
beautiful, or good at what you did; we always, each of us, always
had to have more. It’s what makes this country great – this
restless drive to keep moving from one thing to the next, always
getting more – and that’s also the reason why we’re all so
miserable.”

I got up from the rocking chair and stood at
the porch railing. Far to the north, at the end of the valley, a
gray haze lay along the ridge top of the hills, the sign of a
distant wildfire, the price of summer in a rainless season.

“It’s going to be hot today,” I remarked.
“Not hot like Sicily, but hot enough.”

Both hands on the railing, I spread my legs
and bent forward. I could feel the motion of the ship, the Blue
Zephyr turned Midnight Sun, and the smooth vibration of the engine;
I could hear the sounds of the waves slapping hard against the
hull. I could see Nelson turning away, choosing not to watch; I
could see Danielle and her gorgeous, fevered eyes, the gun held
firmly in her hand, the barrel shining smooth and silver in the
moonlight. Two years, and it might have all happened just last
night – it might be happening right now! – That was how vivid it
remained in my mind.

“What happened that night?”

It was the only question he knew how to ask;
the only one that had a meaning. Was it because he did not believe
me, thought it was some kind of delusion of mine that, forced often
enough to talk about it, I would eventually reject as my own
fabrication, or because he thought I was still concealing
something, that I still refused to tell the truth? Or was the real
reason simply that the truth was too difficult, that it did not
correspond to what he wanted to believe? Tommy was the only friend
I had, and I liked him even more for that, for how reluctant he was
to take at face value what I had told him, for insisting so often
that there must be some other explanation. But I also liked him too
much, trusted him too much, to lie. There had been enough, more
than enough, of that.

“You want to know what happened that night?
Everything happened that night,” I said as I turned around to face
him. “And all of it in just a few seconds. It’s strange how your
whole life can be defined in a single act. Did you ever wonder what
you would do if you saw someone about to be hit by a car, wonder
whether you would jump out in front, push them clear, knowing that
you would get hit instead, save someone and die yourself? I used to
imagine that, wonder about it. Would I do the brave and noble
thing, or freeze instead: watch helpless while someone – a child,
perhaps – got run over. No one would blame you if you didn’t do
anything, but you would always blame yourself, or at least question
what you had done, or rather, hadn’t done. But suppose – just
suppose – those weren’t the two alternatives; suppose that it
wasn’t a question of whether you would put your own life at hazard
to save another. Suppose – just suppose – that you have another
choice, a choice to do nothing, or to make that other person
die!”

I was almost used to his reaction, the way,
quite without his meaning to, his mouth tightened at the corners
and his eyes went dead, as if he had given up hope, as if he knew
that there was not any use, the story was not going to change. No
matter how many different ways I told it, the ending stayed the
same.

“You don’t want me to tell you the rest?” I
asked, ready to give up myself.

Tommy got to his feet and with that athletic
step of his crossed over to the railing, a few feet from where I
stood. He blinked into the morning the sun, reminding himself to
stay patient.

“No, tell me. I want to know. But the way you
started – it’s all wrong. There wasn’t any choice like that. You
were out there, all alone, in the middle of the night, off the
coast of North Africa, and they were about to kill you. St. James
had just turned his back; Danielle had the gun in her hand.

I could not help myself. It made me angry,
this refusal to remember - or remembering, believe – what I had
told him so many times before.

“Yes, damn it! She had the gun in her hand.
More than that, she was pointing the damn thing right at me. I
thought she was going to kill me, all right. The look in her eyes!
– The sheer excitement! - The thought of murder seemed like sex to
her. And then, suddenly, before I knew what was happening, she gave
the gun to me - shoved it into my hand - and then stepped away. She
was looking at Nelson, and I could not stop looking at her,
frenzied, maniacal, her eyes on fire, telling me, over and over
again, ‘Do it, do it - Do it now!’ Nelson turned, saw her - saw
that look of hatred, saw how much she despised him. He started
toward her, reaching for her; ready to strangle her if he could. He
did not even look at me. If he saw the gun he did not care; he did
not care if he was going to die, as long as he could kill her
first. That’s when I fired, that’s when the gun went off, because
for a moment – until he staggered backward – I did not know I had
done it, - murdered Nelson St. James!”

“But you didn’t murder him!” protested Tommy.
“They were going to kill you – He was going to kill you! He had
given her the gun. She gave it to you -”

“Because she wanted me to do it, kill her
husband.”

“He was going after her. You just said it. He
would have killed her if you hadn’t stopped him.”

“You think I wouldn’t have shot him, killed
him, if he hadn’t moved; if he had just stood there, waiting to see
what I would do? You forget how much I wanted her, how much I
wanted him out of the way. No, it wasn’t self-defense; it wasn’t
the defense of another. It was none of those lawful excuses. The
truth is what I told you. If I didn’t think about what I was doing,
if I didn’t even know I had done it until the blood came pouring
out of his chest, it was only because I didn’t have to think about
it: the decision had already been made. The decision had been made,
maybe not with my conscious mind, but made by that someone I really
am. You don’t stop and think when you dash into traffic to save
someone: it’s who you are. I didn’t think when I fired the gun,
when I killed St. James: it’s what I was – what I am - a murderer,
plain and simple.”