Swindlers (9 page)

“I suspect you’re right about that,” was my
vague response.

“Are you going to do it, defend her? You
haven’t been asked. I know. But you’ve met her; she’s met you; and
even if you hadn’t met, who else would she ask? Everyone who gets
in trouble wants you for their lawyer.”

There was something he was not saying,
something he was holding back.

“You don’t think I should, do you?”

He hesitated, as if he were not quite sure
what he thought.

“It might be one you can’t win. A jury won’t
like her. Married to a man with that much money, a woman who looks
like that – a jury won’t trust her. Would you?”

Conrad did not wait for an answer; I suppose
because he thought the question answered itself. He was right, of
course, if you had to make a judgment based on who she married and
how she looked. It was in its own way one of the great ironies,
that everyone thought they knew all about her when they knew those
two things - all that money and that stunningly beautiful face -
and that a dozen years earlier no one could have imagined that
anyone with money would ever have wanted to marry her. That still
left the question whether, whatever a jury might think, I could
trust her if I had to, and the answer was that I did not know. When
I knew her as a girl, I had never had any reason not to trust
Justine to tell me the truth, but Danielle was a woman whom I
barely knew at all. Justine could not have hurt anyone; Danielle,
for all I knew, had done exactly what they said she had, murdered
the man she married, the father of her child. Of course it did not
matter what I thought. I had not heard from her and I was certain I
never would. Some high profile lawyer from New York was no doubt
already preparing a defense. I would not have to struggle with the
question whether Justine had really committed murder and what could
be done about it.

But I was wrong; I would have to struggle
with it, a struggle that would be much harder than anything I had
imagined. Danielle was waiting for me late that Friday afternoon
when I got back from court, the trial that had lasted weeks finally
over.

“I seem to be in some trouble,” she said in a
soft, silky voice that floated breathless in the air. She rose from
the chair, a faint smile of nostalgia and regret on her lips. “I
was hoping you could help.”

Though it scarcely seemed possible, she was
even more beautiful than I remembered. I led her into my private
office and watched, half-mesmerized, as she slid on the chair the
other side of my desk and started taking off her gloves.

“If I had come here a week or so after that
weekend on Blue Zephyr,” she asked as she pulled five slender
fingers out of the second black glove, “what would you have done?-
Perhaps invited me out to lunch?”

I felt too stupid, too confused, to talk. She
seemed to enjoy it, how easily she had reduced me to utter
incoherence. But there was more to it than the knowledge of the
effect she had. For a brief moment, behind the laughter in her
eyes, I thought I glimpsed the secret triumph of revenge. She
tossed her head in what appeared to be defiance, not just at the
memory of what she had felt as rejection, all those years ago, but
at what was expected of a woman in her present, unfortunate,
situation.

“Where do you think we would have gone?” she
persisted in a mocking, teasing voice. “One of those busy places
near the Ferry Building with a view – or a restaurant in some small
hotel where we might have left before we ordered anything and taken
a room?”

I was not sure what to say or even what to
think. All I knew for certain – and if I had had any doubt about it
before, I was sure about it now – was that I could not help her and
she needed to find another lawyer. But then, before I could tell
her, she shrugged her shoulders and with the quick, furtive glance,
of someone who knows you share her secret, gave a rueful laugh.

“This is like one of those old movies, isn’t
it? – The widow accused of murdering her wealthy husband, the
window in the black dress, the dress that suggests a great many
things, though mourning isn’t one of them, walks into the office of
the only lawyer who might be able to save her and tries to seduce
him into doing it.”

In her quiet, pleading glance, something of
the young girl I had once known came back, and I could not just
tell her to find someone else.

“I’m sorry about the trouble you’re in,
Justine.”

Her large eyes brightened with what seemed
almost gratitude.

“You remembered.”

“You changed, and it was a long time ago, at
least a dozen years, and you were very young and I was nearly
thirty, and….”

“And you were crazy about my sister and I was
just a kid; and what I said to you, when you broke up, about
marrying you – that must have seemed like some adolescent fantasy.”
She waited until I smiled, admitting the truth of it, before she
added, “But even then I knew what I wanted, and I wanted you.”

Something caught her eye, or perhaps she
wanted to change the subject by the fact of distance. She got up
from the wing back chair and went across to the window where her
glance moved down the narrow, busy street to the Bay Bridge, to the
hills on the other side and, beyond them, to a place she could not
see, the place where when she was growing up no one seemed to
notice her or pay her any attention.

“I always like San Francisco. I used to come
out here, to get away from New York. Just for a few days, then I
had to get back…. New York is like that, you know.” Her voice was
distant, wistful, and full of mystery. She kept staring out the
window at the bay shining silver bright in the summer light below.
“You think you’ll go mad if you don’t get away from all the people,
all the noise; and then, even if it’s only for a weekend in the
Hamptons, you have to get back, afraid you might miss something if
you don’t.” With an expression that suggested the vanity of things,
she looked over her shoulder. “Or afraid that if you stay away too
long, no one will miss you. But then, after I married Nelson,
things changed, and we were always on the move, going wherever we
felt the urge.”

She came back to the chair and sat down
again. For a long time, she stared at me and did not say a word.
The silence became complete.

“Will you help me?” she asked, finally.

“I better not.”

“But why?”

“You know why,” I said as gently as I could.
Her eyes cast too great a spell, and I looked past her to the
window. “I knew you when you were still…, I almost married your
sister. I knew your mother,” I said as I brought my gaze back to
hers. “I saw her just a few weeks ago.” There was no reaction,
nothing, not the slightest interest. “I might have been able to
represent Danielle; but you’re Justine.”

“No, I’m not,” she said quite seriously, as
if I had made some kind of mistake. “That’s who I used to be; I’m
not her anymore.”

“There are other lawyers, eager to take a
case like this. I can give you names; I’ll even make the call.”

“I don’t want anyone else; I won’t have
anyone else! You’re the only one who can help me. Don’t you
understand? – You’re the only one I can trust. I’m in trouble, a
lot of trouble, and if you don’t help me, no one can!” She was
trembling so hard she could barely finish.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as she took a
handkerchief from her purse and tried to dry her eyes. “I couldn’t
trust anyone the way I trust you; I couldn’t tell them half the
things they would want to know. You knew me when – that’s what you
said – when I was just a kid, but I knew you, too; knew you better
than you know. I saw what you were like, I saw how much it hurt
when my foolish sister did what she did. I would have done anything
for you then. I always believed in you, knew that, no matter what,
you’d always do the right thing – I still believe in you. I know
you’ll help me. You have to. It’s the only chance I have.”

The decision, like all the decisions that
change our lives forever, had already been made, made somewhere
deep inside where a voice insisted that only a coward refused a
challenge, even when the danger was almost certain
self-destruction.

“If I’m going to help you,” I told her after
a long pause, “there can’t be any secrets. I have to know
everything; you can’t hold back anything.”

She promised to tell me everything, swore she
would be the best, most cooperative client I had ever had, and I
believed her, not just because I had known her long before she
became the famous face so many people thought they knew, but
because she knew I meant it when I told her that the first time she
lied to me would be the last, that even if we were in the middle of
the trial she would never see me again. When she asked me what I
wanted to know, I started at the beginning, or what I thought was
the beginning. I asked her why she had married him. I did not doubt
it was all about the money, but I wondered if there had been
something more, if not love, then at least a feeling. Though the
question could not have been simpler, it seemed to catch her off
guard. Apparently, she had thought I was going to ask about the
murder, of what had been called murder, her husband’s death. She
had an answer for that; there would have been little else she would
have thought about, coming to ask a lawyer to take her case, but
she had not thought about this.

“Why did you marry him?” I asked again.

“I’ll tell you; I’ll tell you everything,
though I wonder what you’ll think of me when you know. But I want
you to know one thing first: marrying Nelson St. James was the
worst mistake I ever made. I wish I’d never met him, I wish….”
Shaking her head in despair, she bit her lip and looked away.

“Take your time,” I told her, watching the
way she seemed to recoil from even the bare mention of her dead
husband’s name. “Start at the beginning. Tell me how you first met
him.”

Her head snapped up. She glared with what
seemed anger, but, as soon became clear, it was directed, not at
me, but at the memory of what had happened, of what, as it turned
out, she had done to make it happen. That look of anger quickly
became one of derision.

“It was in an office, an office rather like
this,” she said, with an expansive gesture of her hand. “It was
larger, of course, much larger; but furnished in the same
impeccable manner, the understated look of someone who knows the
value of things. Whatever else Nelson did or did not know, he knew
that.”

Resting an elbow on the arm of the chair, she
draped her thumb and forefinger around her chin and gave me a look
catlike in its luminous intensity.

“He wanted to see me,” she began, speaking
slowly, making sure I understood the hidden meaning, the real
truth, of each word. “Nelson St. James, the mysterious and always
elusive Nelson St. James, wanted to see me.” Her eyes flashed, her
chin came up a defiant half-inch. “I was not invited, I was
summoned. He owned everything – half of New York - , more than
that, I suppose. Nelson St. James wanted to see me, a young fashion
model with ambition. Why wouldn’t I go?”

She bent forward, closer, a strange
excitement coming over her as she began to tell me what had
happened.

“He said he admired my work; he said he
wanted to talk about my future. He said a lot of things about how
my career would be managed and how famous I was about to become. I
listened, I waited, I did not say a word; and then, when he was
finished – after he had told me all the great things that were
going to happen – I told him that was not the reason he had sent
for me, and that he should have just told me at the beginning what
he wanted. And then, before he could even think to say anything
more, before he could start on that stale, practiced seduction he
must have used on a thousand different women, I let him have me,
right there in his office, an office just like this. When it was
over, when he started to ask about the weekend and the places we
could go, I laughed, and then I left. He started calling, of
course….”

‘Of course’ - She pronounced that phrase
without a shade of arrogance or conceit. Everyone wanted her, the
woman she had become.

“I didn’t take his calls,” she continued;
“and I wouldn’t call him back. I made him wait a week; then I
called him and asked him not to call again. He started writing
letters, sending flowers, apologizing for what had happened as if
it had somehow happened without my consent!”

It seems ludicrous, bizarre, but I tried to
make excuses.

“You had second thoughts; you realized what
you had done had been a mistake?”

I could have been sixteen, a young boy - an
innocent at heart - for the look she gave me.

“I did exactly what I had planned to do, and
he did exactly what I had expected. Nelson had everything, all the
money in the world, but he could not have me, not after that one
time. He might have forgotten all about it, if I had said no at the
beginning. I understood that, let him have me – part of me, anyway
– and then I wouldn’t let him have me again. He thought that I had
wanted him, that day in his office, and that I didn’t want him
anymore.”

She searched my eyes, letting me know that
she trusted me in a way that she had not trusted anyone before.

“It’s worse for a man, isn’t it – to have a
woman once who doesn’t want you again – than not to have her at
all? It makes you feel inadequate, undesirable, a little like what
a woman feels when she’s been cast aside for someone younger and
more exciting. It was a new experience for Nelson. He didn’t like
it.”

Danielle lowered her eyes, a secret on her
lips. Her long, slender legs were crossed and bent to the side. She
held her hands in her lap, barely visible behind her knees.

“What happened then?” I asked, despite myself
intrigued.