Swindlers (20 page)

Britton could not answer; no one could have.
St. James had fallen overboard, his body lost at sea. No one would
ever know where he had been hit, or even whether the bullet that
struck him had killed him. He might have only been wounded and then
died of drowning. He was dead, but the circumstances surrounding
his death were either uncertain or subject to interpretation.
Everyone thought it murder, but could the evidence prove that it
was not suicide? It was not much of a chance, but it was the only
one we had.

Franklin asked a few questions on re-direct,
doing what he could to show the absurdity of my suggestion that the
gun might not have been fully loaded. He was too smart to mention
anything about the real point I was trying to make: that all of
Britton’s testimony was second-hand.

After Britton, Franklin called several
members of the crew, testimony that went on for days. While none of
them had witnessed what had happened the night St. James was
killed, they each helped paint a picture of a marriage full of
tension and about to explode. Maria Sanchez, a chambermaid, told
how St. James and his wife had slept apart.

Wearing the same dark suit he did nearly
every day, Franklin stood next to the counsel table, his fingers
poised above a long list of questions he had written out in
advance. He did not look at it; he did not need to. With
indefatigable self-discipline he had committed to memory everything
he wanted to ask. He did not once glance down, but he seemed to
feel better, more confident, knowing that the list was there. His
eyes were fastened on the witness as he listened patiently to her
testimony that Mr. and Mrs. St. James had on that last, terrible
voyage, slept in different beds.

“Was that their usual practice?” he asked in
a well-modulated voice full of encouragement.

“No, never; not before that voyage.”

Franklin’s finger, like a paid assistant,
moving with what seemed its own, independent, volition, went to the
next question on the page, but Franklin did not see.

“And do you remember exactly when this
started, when the two of them started sleeping in different
rooms?”

Maria Sanchez was young, not yet thirty, with
clear dark eyes and a quick, agile mind; but English was not her
native language and in front of a crowded courtroom she easily
became confused. She thought she had just answered that same
question.

“On that voyage,” she repeated, the color
rising to her cheek at what might be thought a question about her
honesty.

“Yes, I understand. But at what point? Did
they start out that way, from the day they left San Francisco, or
did something happen that…?”

Her eyes brightened. Now she understood.

“The day we headed back; that night she asked
me to make up one of the other cabins.”

That was the end of what Franklin wanted; it
was only the beginning of what I was after. I was out of my chair,
heading toward the witness, before Judge Brunelli had finished
asking if I wanted to cross-examine.

“This wasn’t your first voyage as a maid on
board the Blue Zephyr, was it, Ms. Sanchez? If I’m not mistaken,
you had been employed there for nearly two years before this
happened, isn’t that correct?”

“Yes, this is true.”

“So you had quite a few occasions to observe
Mr. and Mrs. St. James – how they behaved toward one another…,
where they slept?”

Almost before the answer was out of her
mouth, I smiled at her and went on as if we agreed on
everything.

“They didn’t always sleep in the same room,
though, did they?” I asked in a quiet voice. “Sometimes –
especially when Mr. St. James had to be on the phone at all hours,
staying in touch with his various enterprises all around the world
– they slept apart.”

A witness - and none more than Maria Sanchez,
a woman without friends in a place she did not know - no matter how
confident they look, often feel lonely and nervous, afraid they may
make a mistake in the way they answer a question and, instead of an
honest attempt, be accused of a deliberate lie. A witness, in other
words, is almost always susceptible to a face they can trust. Two
questions, and Maria Sanchez was confident I would not betray
her.

“Yes, that’s true,” she replied almost
eagerly. “That sometimes happened.”

I smiled and moved closer.

“So when you told Mr. Franklin a moment ago
that before this last voyage Mr. and Mrs. St. James never slept
apart, you didn’t mean that it had never happened before, only that
it didn’t happen very often – Isn’t that what you meant to
say?”

Maria Sanchez was grateful for the chance to
explain, to get it right.

“Yes. Sometimes he – Mr. St. James – was up
all night working, and then….”

“Yes, of course,” I said, gently. “But there
were other times when this happened, weren’t there? – Times when
they slept apart because they weren’t getting along, because they
argued; because, on more than one occasion, Mr. St. James became
drunk and abusive.”

She lowered her large black eyes, murmuring
an answer no one could hear. I asked her to repeat it.

“Yes, that happened.”

“On one occasion you saw him strike her with
his hand, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but it was late, and he had had too
much to drink, and….”

“He accused her of sleeping with other men,
didn’t he? Wasn’t that the main reason they quarreled? Weren’t
those the times when they usually slept in different rooms – after
one of those drunken rages when he went after her, sometimes with
his fists, because he thought she had shown too much interest in
someone else?”

“That was what I understood.”

I took two steps toward the jury box, glanced
at those twelve pair of attentive eyes, and then turned back to
Maria Sanchez.

“You changed the beds every day, didn’t you –
put on fresh sheets?”

“Yes, always.”

“And you had done that, changed the sheets in
both their rooms, the morning of the day Mr. St. James died?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And what about the next morning, the morning
after Mr. St. James died – did you do it then as well?”

“Yes, I -”

“No, Ms. Sanchez, you did not; not both of
them, only the bed where Mr. St. James slept. Isn’t that correct?
Because no one had slept in Mrs. St. James’ bed, had they?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she replied, angry with
herself for having forgotten. “Mrs. St. James did not go to bed
that night. After what happened, she…. Only Mr. St. James’ bed had
been used.”

“Yes, - used! Not just slept in – used. Two
people had used that bed, hadn’t they, Ms. Sanchez?” My hand on the
jury box railing, I held her with my eyes. “Isn’t that what you
found when you went in the next morning to clean up his cabin –
blankets off the bed, pillows all askew, and the sheets not just
crumpled but stained with the tell-tale signs of sex? Isn’t that
what you found, Ms. Sanchez – proof, irrefutable proof, that
sometime before midnight when that single shot was fired, Danielle
St. James was in the cabin she shared with her husband having sex
with the man the prosecution claims she was just about to
murder!”

The courtroom was pandemonium. Franklin was
on his feet screaming an objection no one could hear. Alice
Brunelli beat her gavel to no effect at all. And me? – I smiled at
Maria Sanchez and went back to my chair at the counsel table and
sat down next to Danielle.

When I left the courthouse late that
afternoon, I felt for the first time that there might really be a
chance, that despite the prosecution’s best effort they might not
be able to make their case. There had been a gunshot and St. James
was dead and Danielle was seen holding the gun, but no one had
actually seen her shoot him. Franklin would argue murder as the
only possible explanation, but without an eyewitness to prove it,
and without a body to show precisely how and where St. James had
been shot, the case was circumstantial and, far more importantly,
allowed a different explanation, a different narrative of what had
happened.

That at least is what I told myself in the
euphoria of the moment, after a cross-examination that had gone
better than I could have expected. I walked for blocks, thinking
back over it, how easily the questions had come, how perfectly the
answers had fallen into place. Filled with energy, my blood still
hot, manic with the thought of what I could do tomorrow and all the
other days the trial lasted, I became the willing prisoner of my
own delusions. I must have looked like a strange, demented
creature, glowing with the memory of what I had done, talking to
myself like an actor playing both parts of a dialogue, my hands
shoved deep in my pockets as I stumbled quick-footed down the
straight wide street, blind to everything except the jumbled images
running through my fevered brain.

I was intoxicated with my own performance,
giddy with my own achievement, and suddenly embarrassed because of
it. I knew better than to think like this. I had been through too
many trials to get excited over anything, much less what I had
accomplished with a single witness, before the trial was over. It
was, I realized, as my heart stopped racing and I became aware of
what a fool I must look, the false confidence of a first hope, the
empty, ungrounded belief that because things no longer looked quite
so desperate, success was just around the corner. But it was a
belief Danielle fully shared.

She came to see me that night, not late, the
way she usually did, but early in the evening, and, perhaps to
raise the stakes a little, run the hazard of a greater risk, came
without disguise.

“You must see your clients at home once in a
while,” she said as she breezed past me. Tossing her tan raincoat
over a chair, she added with an impish stare, “Or maybe that nice
man downstairs thinks that one of those shameless late night ladies
who sometime come to see you has come disguised as me.”

She was on trial for her life, but you would
have thought she had just come from a movie.

“You think he doesn’t know that all of them
were you?”

“He may suspect,” said Danielle, as she
glanced around the room. She seemed to take her bearings by the
proportions of things. It may have come from her years as a model,
or it might have been an instinct, something she was born with, but
one look and she knew exactly where she needed to be, where she
would be seen to the greatest advantage. “He may suspect,” she
repeated, careless with the truth of it, “but he can’t be sure; and
besides, he’d never say anything. The risk is being seen by someone
on the street. That’s how rumors start: when you’re seen by someone
you don’t know.”

She sat at the far end of the sofa, her arm
stretched along the top of it. I made us both a drink and sat in
the overstuffed chair next to the fireplace, just the other side of
the glass coffee table. The tension of the trial had vanished, and
she looked as confident and relaxed, as much at ease, as she had
that day I first saw her on the deck of the Blue Zephyr. She seemed
almost happy.

“You were wonderful today,” she said with
eager eyes. “I couldn’t wait to tell you – that’s the reason I
didn’t call, why I came straight over – how great I thought you
were. We don’t have anything to worry about now, do we? You know
you’re going to win.”

I took an almost boyish pleasure in her
smile. She had that effect on me, bringing back a native shyness
that I thought long since conquered, forcing me to laugh at little
at my own embarrassment; and when she heard it, the smile on her
lovely, vulnerable mouth grew brighter and she laughed a little as
well.

I tried to bring us back to the only thing
that mattered, the trial and what was going to happen next. Rolling
the ice around in my drink, I became serious.

“It didn’t go too badly today, but all I know
for certain is that we haven’t lost yet and we still have a
chance.”

But her bright eyes kept their glitter and
her smile stayed all-knowing. It made me more determined. I sat on
the edge of the chair and did not smile back.

“This isn’t some game where all that matters
is how well you played. You’re on trial for murder. I don’t have to
tell you what’s at stake.”

The smile still lingered, but grew faint.

“I know what will happen – what could happen
– if we lose; but I know what I saw, what you did in court, what
you did with those witnesses. And I know what the jury thinks: they
like you; they want to believe what you tell them.”

“I was lucky,” I said. I stood up and began
to walk around.

“It wasn’t luck,” she insisted, following me
with her eyes. “You were brilliant. No one is as good as you. I
always knew that about you; I was sure of it that weekend.”

I was not thinking about what had happened
that weekend on the Blue Zephyr, that weekend we sailed down the
California coast. I was thinking about the trial and what we had to
do.

“It’s the best chance we’ve got,” I
explained, pacing back and forth. “We have to raise questions about
everything the prosecution is trying to tell the jury. They say you
must have killed him because you had the gun in your hand, but they
can’t prove you didn’t pick it up; they can’t prove – not beyond a
reasonable doubt – that he didn’t kill himself. They said that you
had stopped sleeping together, and now the jury knows that wasn’t
true -”

“But we both know it wasn’t suicide,” she
reminded me. “We both know I killed him.”

I stopped moving and looked straight at her.
There was a hard truth involved and she needed to understand
it.

“You’ve never told anyone that but me, and
you’re not going to. The important thing is that they can’t prove
it – at least not beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Intensely curious, she searched my eyes.