Swindlers (23 page)

“Your Honor,” I said with perfect
self-assurance, “the defense rests.”

There was a collective sigh as the courtroom
crowd realized that Danielle St. James, the woman they had all come
to see, would not be taking the witness stand in her own defense.
You could almost feel the disappointment, the chance missed to
listen for themselves to this notorious woman that, through the
mouths of others, they had heard so much about. Then, almost
immediately, there was a second reaction, a puzzled silence as for
some reason Danielle had risen from her chair and was looking
directly at Alice Brunelli as if waiting for the chance to
speak.

“Your Honor, don’t I have the right to
testify should I choose to do so?”

My legs went weak, my stomach started
churning. The blood rushed to my face with such rapid force that
for an instant everything went black.

“Danielle!” I whispered in a harsh, strident
voice. “We decided this.”

Alice Brunelli was all attention. Her lips
parted and pushed forward, like someone about to exhale after
holding their breath. With a deeply worried look in her eyes, she
tapped two fingers on the bench, considering what she ought to do,
and then, the decision made, she nodded once to seal it and turned
quickly to the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen, there is a matter that
has to be discussed outside the presence of the jury.”

The moment the jury was out of the room,
Brunelli started to ask Danielle a question, but then, changing her
mind, she asked me one instead.

“May I assume that you have advised your
client of her rights in this matter, Mr. Morrison?”

“
Yes, your Honor; I
have.”

“Specifically, her right to testify in her
own defense?”

“Yes.”

“You told her that a defendant in a criminal
trial does not have to testify, that no one can compel her to
testify, but that she can testify, if she so chooses?”

Alice Brunelli was making a record, getting
my testimony about what I had done before she asked the defendant,
my client, if what I said was true. Alice Brunelli did everything
according to a strict interpretation of the rules, especially when
it involved a potential question about a lawyer’s conduct.

Was that what Danielle was up to? Was it
regarding my conduct as a lawyer? It was an old game, usually
played by street-wise criminals who had been in and out of the
system for most of their lives: make the lawyer the issue, claim
ineffective assistance of counsel as the reason why they should get
a new trial. Danielle had better grounds than most of them ever
had. She could claim that I had not spent as much time as I should
have done on her defense because I was too desperate to spend time
with her in bed. It was ludicrous, idiotic, insane; but it would
have been all she needed.

Alice Brunelli adjusted her spare, thick
glasses and placed both hands on the bench. For a long moment, and
without a trace of sympathy to break the severity of her
countenance, she studied Danielle closely.

“Mrs. St. James, you’ve just heard what your
attorney said. Is all of it true? Has he advised you that you have
the right to testify or not as you choose, and that no one, not
even your attorney, can make that decision for you?”

To my great relief, Danielle nodded
emphatically. She was not going to turn on me after all.

“Mr. Morrison has done all that and more.
He’s explained everything to me. I know I don’t have to testify; I
know no one can make me. And, yes, he’s told me that the decision
whether I do or not is mine to make. This is my fault, your Honor.
Mr. Morrison went through all of this with me again yesterday after
court. I told him I would follow his advice, and perhaps I should;
but now that I have to make that decision, now that there isn’t any
more time, I suddenly realize that, whatever happens, I want to
tell the truth. I want everyone to know what happened. I want to
clear my name.”

There was no change of expression on
Danielle’s eager, innocent face, not the slightest doubt or
uncertainty about what she meant to do, and I now realized that,
despite what she had just told the court, this was no spontaneous,
last minute decision. She had made up her mind a long time ago to
take the stand and testify. If she had not come right out and lied
to me about her intentions, her silence had done it for her.

“Would you like a few minutes to confer with
your client, Mr. Morrison?” asked Brunelli after Danielle had
finished.

Confer with her? I wanted to kill her! What
could I talk to her about now? – What a liar she was, what a fool
she had made out of me? She thought she knew more than I did about
how to win at trial? – Let her try!

“No, your Honor,” I replied with an angry,
tight-lipped smile. “If I had known the defendant wanted to
testify, I would have called her. I apologize for the
confusion.”

Brunelli motioned toward the bailiff and
ordered him to bring back the jury.

We had a minute, maybe two, before the jury
was back in the box and I had to call the first and last witness
for the defense. I moved my chair closer to Danielle.

“I’ve spent the whole trial trying to make
them think he might have killed himself, and now you’re going to
get up there and tell them that you pulled the trigger instead? If
you take the stand,” I warned her, “there’s nothing I can do to
save you. It’s not too late; all I have to do is stand up and say
you’ve decided not to do it after all. For God’s sake, Danielle! –
Think what you’re doing. Your child doesn’t have a father. Don’t
you want him to at least have a mother?”

She was nodding her head, following every
word. The nodding stopped. Her eyes became hard, cold, and
determined.

“Trust me,” she said in a voice that, even
after everything she had done, astonished me for the almost callous
certainty it carried; “I know what I’m doing.”

There was no choice: I had to call her. For
the first time in my career, someone else had taken charge of the
defense.

Every eye was on her as she stood and without
hesitation swore to tell the truth. If there was a trace of
nervousness in her voice, no one heard it. The silence in the
courtroom as she settled onto the witness chair echoed back on
itself, the way it does late at night when the very stillness seems
to speak a language all its own. Everything was up to her now.

I began as if this were just another routine
examination, no different than what I would do with a witness in
any other trial.

“Would you please state your full name and
spell your last for the record?”

I should have asked her to state her real
name, the one given her at birth, instead of the made-up lie with
which she had become famous, rich, and, I was now convinced, truly
lethal.

“Danielle St. James,” she replied in that
thrilling, breathless voice which, as I had learned, she could turn
on and off at will. She turned to the court reporter and slowly
spelled her last name. Philip Conrad did not bother to look, but
methodically went about his business.

One question, the one that always gets asked
first, and I did not know what to ask next. I had no idea what she
was going to say. All I could do was invite her to tell her own
story in her own words and, while I listened along with everyone
else, try to pretend that it was the same story she had told me
from the beginning. That was my intention, but then something
happened. Whether it was the lawyer in me, the pride I had in what
I did, or simply wounded vanity, I asked the question I would have
asked if I had even once thought she might be innocent.

“Mrs. St. James, did you or did you not
murder your husband, Nelson St. James?”

“No, I didn’t kill Nelson. He killed himself.
But it’s my fault. He wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for
me.”

It was quite simply the most stunning lie I
had ever heard. Even more astonishing, she actually seemed to
believe it. Her eyes were filled with anguish and remorse, her
voice a soft, choking sob. I was so lost in amazement I could not
quite hide my own incredulity.

“It’s your testimony, given here under oath,
that you did not murder Nelson St. James, that you didn’t shoot him
with a gun? It’s your testimony that your husband killed
himself?”

“Yes!” she cried with desperation, looking
every bit a woman on the verge of collapse. “But he wouldn’t have
done it if I hadn’t said what I did!”

“Said what you did?” I asked with a blank
stare.

“He told me he was going to do it,” she said
through bitter tears. “I told him he should!”

A shock wave spread through the courtroom,
hitting everyone at once. It was such an awful, dreadful thing to
admit - that she had told her husband to kill himself and that then
he had - it had to be true. No one would lie about a thing like
that. And she was just getting started.

“I told him to go ahead, kill himself, for
all I cared!” she cried, her eyes bright with the memory of her own
wicked defiance. “He may have pulled the trigger, Mr. Morrison –
but I’m the one responsible. So when you ask me, did I kill him,
the honest answer is yes!”

I was trapped. There was no way out. She was
lying through her teeth and I knew it. I had put on the stand a
witness who was committing perjury and she was doing it with my
assistance. And I had no choice; I had to pick up the thread of her
deceit and see where it would take us.

“Let’s start at the beginning. What was the
reason you went with your husband on that last voyage, when he
decided to leave the country rather than face trial? You’ve heard
the testimony of your husband’s attorney, Rufus Wiley, that your
husband wanted a divorce and that you wanted a chance to talk him
out of it.”

She had had time to collect herself, and was
now ready to answer questions without undue emotion.

“There was more to it than that,” she
explained. “It’s true that Nelson said he wanted a divorce, and he
told me that he had changed his will – just as Mr. Wiley said. But
this wasn’t the first time Nelson had made a threat like that. The
thing that was different is that this time I told him that if he
didn’t file for divorce, I would. I couldn’t stand it anymore, all
his infidelities, and then, despite that, all his jealous rages
whenever he saw me even talk to another man.”

The color had started to rise to her cheek, a
blush of anger and defiance I had seen before when she began to
talk about something that had been done that she did not like. But
she caught it coming, as it were, and quickly turned it to her own
advantage.

“We loved each other,” she explained to the
jury with a rueful glance that seemed to admit mistakes. “We really
did; but Nelson had gotten involved in some things – business
things; I don’t know what they were – and he became just
impossible. And then, when he was indicted, when he knew he was in
trouble, serious trouble, things got….”

Danielle lowered her eyes and heaved a sigh.
A moment later, when she looked up, there was a new vulnerability
about her, the lost look of a woman who cannot understand how with
such good intentions things had gone so horribly wrong.

“Nelson was running away. With all the
publicity, all the awful things that were being said about him, he
didn’t think he had a chance, didn’t think anyone would believe
him. I told him I wanted to go with him, that I loved him, and that
our marriage was worth saving.”

A bleak expression of irredeemable loss
entered her eyes. Her lips began to tremble and only with an effort
were made to stop.

“Mrs. St. James – Do you need a minute?” I
asked sympathetically. And the sympathy was real, because no matter
how convinced I became of her duplicity, parts of her story, the
record of what at different times she must have felt, seemed all
too true.

“Thank you,” she said with a brave smile.
“I’ll be all right.” She sat straight up and turned again to the
jury.

“It would have been better if I had let him
go by himself. All we did was fight. And we didn’t just fight in
private; we had to do it everywhere. That was why I walked out on
him that night in the restaurant. When Nelson lost his temper there
was no end to the abuse, nothing he wouldn’t say. He could be so
charming, so considerate, and then something would set him off and
there was no stopping it.”

“Rufus Wiley testified that your husband
wanted a divorce because he discovered you were having an affair.
Were you having an affair, Mrs. St. James, and did your husband
find out about it?”

I was standing not ten feet from her,
searching her eyes, wondering if she had lied when she told me that
had not had an affair, and if she had, whether she was going to lie
about it now. Her eyes, as I should have known, never gave her
away. Her gaze remained inscrutable, the only change in her
expression an almost imperceptible upward tilt to her chin, a
reminder that the question itself was an intrusion, a violation of
what she had a right to keep private. Instead of turning back to
the jury before she answered, she kept looking at me, measuring, as
it seemed, what my reaction was going to be.

“Yes, Mr. Morrison; I had been having an
affair, and my husband found out about it.”

I had not known her then; she had lived on
the other side of the country, married to another man, and I still
felt a pang of jealousy. Stranger than that, she knew it - that
much she let her eyes reveal - and, perhaps not so strange, it did
not bother her in the least. She was used to the jealousy and
disappointment of men.

“And was that the reason you were
fighting?”

“Yes, mainly; the affair, if you can call it
that – it only lasted a few weeks.”

She had an absolute genius for diminishing
the importance of every sin she committed. Admit an affair, and
then dismiss it as a matter of no account, arguing the length!
Murder your husband, and then insist he killed himself because of
something you admit you should not have said! It was the kind of
logic that would have driven the Mad Hatter mad.