Swindlers (22 page)

Wiley had no sense of romance, he was too
prosaic, to understand what being in love really meant.

“You talk about her, the woman who, by your
own testimony, was the woman he wanted to marry, as if she were
just an object of his temporary affection; that there was, if I can
put it like this, too much passion for it to last. But isn’t that
exactly the reason why people marry, Mr. Wiley – because they want
each other that much?”

“In the usual case, I’m sure that’s true,” he
replied in a cold, condescending tone. “But Nelson was not the
usual case. He hated anything that even suggested permanence.”
Wiley bent forward, his gaze determined and emphatic. “That is what
made him what he was: the belief that there was always something
new to get. And once he decided what that new things was, there was
no stopping him. But – and this is very important if you want to
understand what kind of man he was – the only reason he bought
anything was to sell it later.”

“And you were there to make sure that, in
this case at least, he did not overpay?”

He ignored the sarcasm; he ignored me. He
talked directly to the jury, trying to impress upon them the honest
motive of his actions.

“He decided he had to have Danielle, had to
marry her. Why he thought he had to do that, I’m not sure. But
Nelson had not changed: the game was all in the pursuit. He meant
to have her; he never meant to keep her. That’s why I told him he
had to have a pre-nuptial agreement: because it was my job to
protect him against what I knew would happen later.”

He was still looking at the jury, a man who
knew his business.

“You say he never meant to keep her?” I
waited until he turned and looked at me again. “But earlier you
made it sound just the other way round: that she didn’t mean to
keep him.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”

“You said Nelson St. James wanted a divorce!
You said he had taken her with him – on his flight as a fugitive
when he sailed off into the Pacific- only to make divorce as easy
as possible. You said he called you the night before he died to
tell you that he was coming back and that he wanted a divorce more
than ever! You said all that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s what I said, but I don’t see how
that -”

“Have you forgotten what you told us was the
reason he wanted a divorce? It wasn’t because he had gotten tired
of her; it wasn’t because, as you put it, ‘he never meant to keep
her.’ It was because he thought his wife had been having an affair!
Isn’t that what you said, Mr. Wiley? Wasn’t that your sworn
testimony?”

“Yes, that’s what I said,” replied Wiley,
fidgeting nervously with his fingers. “But that doesn’t change the
fact that it wouldn’t have lasted, that -”

“But it did last, didn’t it? Through seven
years and the birth of a child; lasted until, according to your
testimony, he found out she was having an affair – didn’t it?”

“Yes, but -”

“But what, Mr. Wiley? Did you misunderstand?
Are you now going to tell us that he wanted a divorce, not because
his wife was having an affair, but because he was having one?”

“No, that’s not -”

“It’s not true that Nelson St. James was
having an affair? Not true that during the course of their marriage
he had numerous relationships with other women?”

“I tried to stay out of his personal
affairs.”

“You tried to stay -! You’re the one who
insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement! You’re the one who not two
minutes ago claimed that he – what was the phrase you used? –
‘never meant to keep her.’ I will ask you directly, Mr. Wiley: Is
it not true that Nelson St. James slept with other women during his
marriage to the defendant, Danielle St. James?”

Wiley sat with his elbows on the arms of the
witness chair, and hands, fingers interlaced, dangling in his lap.
He was used to giving instructions; he did not much care for
answering someone else’s questions.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Do you think he did it because he thought
each one might be the last?”

The question confused him. I tried to
explain.

“Nelson St. James was a comparatively young
man, in his early forties, and so far as we know was in good
health. But he worried about his own mortality, didn’t he?’

“Yes, he did, and to a surprising degree.
There was apparently some history in his family. His father – he
did not talk about him; I only learned this second hand – died of a
heart attack before he was fifty.”

“Each time he was with a new woman was proof
of his continued virility, proof that he still had more time – Do
you think that possible?”

Wiley turned up his palms. “I really would
not know how to answer that.”

“You just testified that what kept him going
– what we needed to understand if we were going to understand what
kind of man Nelson St. James really was – was the belief that there
was always something new to get. That included, did it not, a new
woman to take to bed?”

“Well, I -”

“He was obsessed with his own mortality,
wasn’t he? Obsessed with the very real possibility, given his
family history, that he might die at an early age.”

“Perhaps, but -”

“Didn’t this fear of an early death bring
with it a fear of not leaving anything behind? You said he wanted
to marry Danielle because he wanted her, and that you knew that
eventually he would get tired of her and want a divorce. But there
was another reason Nelson St. James wanted to get married, wasn’t
there? Nelson St. James wanted a child.”

“Yes, I suppose he did.”

“You suppose he did! You know he did. He made
a will when he got married, didn’t he? Or rather, he changed the
will he had.”

“Yes, he did.”

“And you drafted it, didn’t you?”

“Yes, as I say, I was his -”

“Lawyer. Yes, we know. There were a number of
charitable bequests in that will, were there not?”

“Quite a number, yes.”

“And those amounted to approximately how
much?”

“Roughly two hundred million.”

“And the rest of it – which must run into the
hundreds of millions, if not more – Who would have inherited
that?”

“His wife, Danielle St. James.”

I stood next to the jury box, holding him
tight in my gaze.

“With his death, then, Mrs. St. James would
have become one of the wealthiest women in the world. I say would
have, because Mr. St. James changed that will, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he -”

“And he did that at about the same time he
told you to prepare divorce papers, didn’t he – just days before he
left New York?”

“Yes, that’s right: he changed his will.”

I stared hard at him, letting him, and the
jury, know that this was crucial, indispensable to an understanding
of what had happened.

“And how much does Mrs. St. James stand to
inherit now, Mr. Wiley – after the changes made to the will?”

“Nothing. He was going to divorce her, he was
going to -”

“Give her what he was required to give her
under the pre-nuptial agreement. Yes, we understand. But she
doesn’t get even that now, does she, Mr. Wiley?”

The jurors looked at one another, wondering
how this was possible.

“And why is that, Mr. Wiley? Tell the jury
why the woman who supposedly murdered her husband for his money
doesn’t benefit at all from his death!”

Rufus Wiley swallowed hard.

“He died before he could get a divorce.”

“And because of that, she doesn’t get
anything, does she? She doesn’t get the house in the Hamptons; she
doesn’t get a million dollars a year.”

Shaking my head in derision, I shot a glance
at Robert Franklin, but he had his face buried in a file, desperate
to find something – anything – he could use to repair the damage. I
wheeled around and challenged Wiley.

“You never told anyone about this, did you? –
The fact that Nelson St. James changed his will; the fact that
Danielle St. James was going to be left with nothing; the fact
that, if she was after his money, the last thing in the world she
would have wanted was for her husband to die!”

“I was Mr. St. James’ lawyer! What I did for
him was private!” he shot back, outraged and indignant. Suddenly,
his expression changed. The anger vanished and a cold, cynical
smile cut across his straight thin mouth. He sat back in the
witness chair, full of the old confidence. “I doubt he told anyone,
either. So she wouldn’t have known that she had been cut out of the
will, would she?”

“It was obvious the moment you took the stand
that you didn’t like her,” I said, smiling back. “Of course he told
her! How would I have known about it if I hadn’t heard it from
her?”

With a last, disdainful glance, I went back
to the counsel table and started to pull out my chair, but I
stopped and looked up.

“One last question, Mr. Wiley: That last time
you spoke to him, when he told you he still wanted a divorce, did
he sound like a man on top of the world, or did he perhaps sound a
little depressed?”

“Understandably, it had all been quite a
strain.”

“Yes, not only was he about to lose his wife,
he was about to lose everything else as well, wasn’t he?”

Wiley had been bred to caution. He waited for
me to expand upon the question, sharpen the details.

“He had been indicted by a federal grand
jury; he was one of the most despised men in America. He was facing
charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. And
instead of trying to prove his innocence, he had left the country,
disappeared -”

“Yes, but he was coming back. I told you
that. In that last phone call, the night before he was killed, he
said he had made a mistake, that he was -”

“Coming back to stand trial! We’ll never know
for sure though, will we, Mr. Wiley? All we know for certain is
that before he disappeared, sailed away on that yacht of his, he
promised he would not leave. You may take his word for things; all
the people he defrauded may not be quite so willing.”

Franklin was on his feet, objecting.

“Is there a question in there somewhere? If
there is, I missed it!”

Brunelli started to tell me to move on, but I
was ahead of her. I glared at Rufus Wiley.

“There he was, out there on the ocean alone,
about to lose not just his beautiful young wife, but his money, his
reputation, and if he did what he told you he was going to do –
come back and stand trial – his freedom. It isn’t any wonder - Is
it, Mr. Wiley? - that a man in his condition would decide to take
his own life!”

CHAPTER
Thirteen

Rufus Wiley had done more for the defense
than any witness I could have called. The pre-nuptial agreement
Franklin had thought crucial, proof of what Danielle would have
lost in a divorce, proved instead what she would have won. The
murder of Nelson St. James was supposed to have been all about the
money, but in terms of money, the worst thing that could have
happened to Danielle was to have her husband die. His death had
cost her everything she would have had in a divorce.

In one of the great ironies, the question of
money, instead of a motive for murder, had suddenly become our best
defense. The prosecution could not prove motive, and without motive
Franklin could not prove his case. It was true that the gun had
Danielle’s fingerprints on it, but Nelson’s prints were there as
well. The physical evidence was just as consistent with suicide as
it was with murder, and Rufus Wiley, the prosecution’s own witness,
had been forced to admit that Nelson St. James had been
depressed.

We were almost home. Rufus Wiley was the
prosecution’s last witness and there was no one I could call, no
one who could testify that anything said by any of the
prosecution’s witnesses was wrong; no one who could give Danielle
an alibi, insist she was not there when her husband died; no one
who could make a credible claim that Nelson St. James had been
killed by someone else. I could scarcely put Danielle on the stand
to tell the jury how she had done it, how it was not suicide at
all, that she had done exactly what the prosecution said she had
done: killed her husband with a gun. I did not have a case, but,
then, I did not need one. The burden was on the prosecution to
prove that Danielle had done it, and I was as certain as I could be
that Robert Franklin had failed to do that, and that the jury,
whatever they might really think about her guilt, would have to
acquit her.

I explained this to Danielle that evening,
but she had heard it all before. The distance I normally kept
between myself and a client had long ago ceased to exist. I had
held nothing back, telling her everything I thought about what
happened each day in trial, and what I planned to do next. But more
than that, I told her things about myself I had never told anyone,
the kind of secrets all of us have, the ones we keep hidden except
when we find ourselves desperately in love. I trusted her, but
only, or mainly, because I knew how much she trusted me. Her life
was in my hands, and she was perfectly content, I might even say
eager, to let me decide everything we did in court. The next
morning, as we waited for the judge to enter and the day’s
proceedings to begin, I felt relaxed and confident, as certain of
the outcome as I could be.

“Mr. Morrison,” said Alice Brunelli, after
she settled herself on the bench, “Is the defense ready to call its
first witness?”

Lawyers, honest ones, will tell you that
there is always a sense of relief when they know the case is over,
when they know the last witness has been called and there are no
more questions to be asked, no more answers to be dissected and
analyzed on the spot. There is still the closing argument, still
that terrible, endless wait for the verdict, but with no more
witnesses there are no more surprises, nothing that can catch you
unawares. Rufus Wiley, the last witness for the prosecution, had
been the last witness in the trial. Everything that remained, the
long summations both Franklin and I would make, the lengthy
instructions Judge Brunelli would give to the jury, the jury’s slow
deliberations behind closed doors, all of that would be based on
what was now completed.