Swindlers (26 page)

Robert Franklin sank into his chair,
exhausted, having gone to the limit of what he could do. He sat
there, staring straight ahead, physically spent, but with a sense
of his own achievement. Danielle St. James was guilty, and he had
proven it.

The voice of Alice Brunelli broke a silence
so profound that had you been sitting there you would have sworn
you could hear your own heartbeat.

“Mr. Morrison, are you ready to make your
closing argument?”

Instead of rising from my chair, instead of
moving quickly and with a sense of purpose to the jury box, I
crossed one leg over the other, threw my arm over the back of the
chair and stayed where I was.

“Nothing that was said here, none of the
testimony that the prosecution has spoken at such length about, is
nearly as important as something Mr. Franklin did not mention at
all. You never heard it from any witness, you never heard it from
anyone; but it was always there, right in front of your eyes, the
single undeniable fact that explains everything, and changes
everything. The prosecution wants you to think that it was murder,
but cannot prove it was murder at all.”

Slowly, almost casually, I got to my feet and
with my hand on the corner of the table shook my head as if I had
only now come to understand something that, though they did not yet
know it, they knew as well. They were waiting for me, all twelve of
them, when I raised my eyes; waiting for me to tell them what it
was, quite without their knowing, they had always understood. I
pointed to Danielle.

“Look at her. Have you ever seen anyone who
looked like that, looked that beautiful? And yet no one has even
mentioned it, not one of the witnesses called by the prosecution.”
I stepped closer to the jury box. “What did they talk about
instead? – Money. That’s all you heard about: how she married her
husband for his money, how she murdered him because she wasn’t
going to get all the money she thought she deserved.”

I looked at Danielle as if I were seeing her
for the first time, and in a way, that was true. I had been so
enamored of the way she looked, she had had such an astonishing
effect on the way I felt, that I had lost the distance necessary to
understand what it meant; not for me, but for everyone else, all
the other people who, drawn by the way she looked, had feelings of
their own.

“Assume that everything you’ve been told by
the prosecution is true,” I continued, my attention back on the
jury. “Assume she was greedy, calculating, interested only in what
she could get; assume that more than anything she wanted the kind
of wealthy, privileged life Nelson St. James with all his money
could give her. That might tell you why she married him; it doesn’t
tell you why he married her. But that’s obvious, isn’t it? Look at
her! Everyone in this courtroom knows why he married her. You knew
it the moment you walked in her and saw her for the very first
time. Rufus Wiley must have known it, too, the first time he saw
her. Rufus Wiley knew why Nelson St. James wanted to marry her. It
wasn’t because he wanted a child – he could have had a child with
anyone. It was because she was quite simply the most beautiful
woman Nelson St. James had ever seen!”

Every eye in the courtroom followed mine as I
stepped back from the jury box and gazed across at Danielle. She
looked at me as if we were all alone, the only two people in the
room. It did not bother her that a crowd was watching: she was used
to everyone staring at her, the most beautiful woman any of them
had ever seen. Something sad and wistful in her eyes, luminous and
not immodest, seemed to acknowledge the truth of what others saw.
With a pensive expression, I walked behind her and placed a
protective hand lightly on her shoulder. The jury had to look at
her while I spoke.

“If the reason – the only reason – she
married Nelson St. James was because she wanted money, why would
she worry about what she might be left with after a divorce?”

The question, absurd on the face of it, had a
different meaning applied to her, a meaning just below the surface
of conscious thought, one of those possibilities that, once you are
made to see it, become suddenly the only thing that makes sense. I
put it to them directly.

“
If she married him for
money – if what the prosecution says is true – how long do you
think it would have been before she found someone else, someone
just as rich? The money was supposed to have meant everything to
her. What did the prosecution tell us? - That she killed him
because of all the money she was going to lose! – But how could it
have meant anything, when there were always so many other men with
money, all of them as eager, as desperate, as Nelson St. James had
been to have her for their own? Or is the prosecution going to
insist that a divorced woman, even one who looks like this, has no
prospects in this day and age?” I asked with a smile on my lips and
laughter in my eyes.

My hand fell away from Danielle’s shoulder. I
stepped to the side, not far, but enough to move her into the
background so that nothing would distract the attention of the jury
from the last thing I had to say to them. If they remembered
nothing else, I wanted them to remember this.

“The prosecution insists it was murder. The
defendant testified under oath that Nelson St. James took his own
life. The evidence brought by the prosecution proves suicide every
bit as much as it proves murder. And that means that the
prosecution has not proved murder at all. Danielle St. James told
you what happened, and not one witness called by the prosecution
can prove that she was lying.”

I could have proved it, but I was not a
witness for the prosecution: I was the lawyer for the defense.
Caught up in all the emotion of the moment, the single-minded
intensity of a closing argument in which the words had taken on a
life of their own, I was almost convinced I was telling the
truth.

CHAPTER Sixteen

Danielle did not want to go back to the
hotel, but I insisted. There was no point waiting at the
courthouse: the jury might be out for days. She would be
comfortable in her suite at the Mark Hopkins, and, more
importantly, no one could bother her there. I promised I would call
her the moment I heard anything. I went back to my office and tried
to pretend that this was just another trial and that while I waited
for the verdict I could start working on the next case, and the one
after that.

Alice Brunelli had finished giving the jury
their instructions and sent them off to begin deliberations a few
minutes before three in the afternoon. There was nothing more to be
done, and I had another trial scheduled to start next week. I
grabbed a cup of coffee and opened the voluminous file that had
been gathering dust for weeks. Three pages into it and the words
became a blur. I was too worried to think, though I am not sure I
could have said exactly what it was I was worried about. The
verdict, of course, but no matter how many trials I had had, I
always worried about that. What would happen to Danielle if the
jury found her guilty – but not with any wrenching sense of anguish
or despair. The possibility was too vague, too abstract, to
concentrate my attention. No, it was something else: a sense that
in some yet undetermined way, I would have to pay a price for what
I had done.

I had known from the beginning that I should
have refused when Danielle asked me to defend her. I had been
seduced, literally seduced, made to act against my own, better
judgment, by the effect she had on me. The effect was physical, the
pain of longing for something you want almost more than you can
stand, an effect that was all the greater for having known her with
the kind of fondness you have for someone’s younger sister. That
was it, of course - the fact I had known Justine. It was easy to
believe, to convince myself, that because I had known her in a way
no one else had known her, before she was the woman everyone knew
and wanted, before she was Danielle, she belonged, or should
belong, to me. Others had known her only later; I knew her, so to
speak, from the beginning.

None of that excused what I had done. I
should have kept my distance, treated her like any other client,
once I agreed to take her case; I should never have become
involved. She would not have dared do what she did, take the stand
after agreeing that she would not testify, and then tell a story
full of lies. I would not have let it happen. I would have stopped
the proceedings, told the judge in chambers that if the defendant
testified I would have to withdraw as her attorney. All the judge
had to know was that I was faced with an ethical conflict. Alice
Brunelli - any half way competent judge – would have known
immediately what that meant. The trial would have been delayed
while other counsel was found to take over the defense. It would
have been an extreme step to take, but one which I was not only
entitled, but, strictly speaking, obligated to take. There are a
lot of things a lawyer is supposed to do, but few are as serious as
calling a witness you know is going to perjure herself.

The trial was over, and there was nothing I
could do. I could not even confess! The prohibition against
revealing the communications of a client was absolute, binding even
after death. No one would ever know what she had done, or how I had
helped her. I could not tell anyone, and she had every reason not
to. There would be no punishment, no sanction - no possibility that
I might face disbarment. Danielle might or might not get away with
murder, the crime she had committed; there was no question that I
would get away with mine. That only made me more certain that
sooner or later a price would have to be paid. I was already paying
it in a loss of self-respect, the howling protest that came from
somewhere the back of my mind at the way I had been used; the voice
that I heard late at night, taunting me with the ease at which I
rationalized everything when, passion spent, she lay naked in my
arms. She had murdered her husband, but that was almost more
forgivable than the blind-eyed eagerness with which I had become
her after-the-fact accomplice, breaking all the rules so that she
could, without penalty, break them too. I was a fool, and I knew
it, and there was nothing I could do: I did not have the strength -
I did not have the courage - to walk away and forget I had ever
known her. I hated myself a little for that; I hated that I had
become a coward.

I tried to go back to work and managed to get
through a dozen more pages before I threw the case file to the side
and swore softly under my breath. There was nothing to do but wait,
wait for the jury’s verdict, wait for what would happen after that.
It was quarter past six, but we were in the short days of winter
and the only light at the window was from the street below.
Switching off the lamp, I stared into the shadows, watching as they
danced on the ceiling and down the walls, graceful and
insubstantial, a reminder, as if one were needed, of what Danielle
and her beauty were all about.

The telephone rang, breaking the silence with
its lonely, insistent call. I knew before I answered who it
was.

“You didn’t think they would be out this
long, did you?” asked Danielle. She tried to sound cheerful,
confident, full of hope, but the strain was evident and I knew
that, like everyone else who had ever been in her position, she was
anxious, scared, dying by inches inside. I tried to sound
professional and matter of fact, not overly concerned by what was
going on.

“I never know how long a jury is going to be
out. It’s impossible to predict.”

She wanted more than that: she wanted
certainty.

“You didn’t think it would take any time at
all,” she insisted in a soft, breathless voice. There was a tapping
noise, a pencil, or perhaps a fingernail, beating time, a nervous
habit she did not know she had. “Maybe it was just me,” she said,
confused by things she could not control. “Maybe I just thought
that after what you said, after the way they seemed to hang on
every word, that it wouldn’t take them any time at all.”

I started to fall back on my old, settled
routine, explaining that in a murder trial a jury might be out for
days, or even weeks, but we had talked about all this before. She
was not calling because she wanted me to tell her about it again;
she was calling because she did not want to be alone. But I could
not think of anything to say, words of encouragement, which would
not sound hollow and contrived; and so I sat there in silence,
helpless and defeated, listening to the constant nervous drumbeat
coming from the other end.

“When did you decide to do that – what you
said to the jury about what I would have done after a divorce?” she
asked, eager to escape her own thoughts. “Do you really think
that’s what I would have done, if Nelson had gotten a divorce –
married someone else, someone with money?”

“Don’t,” I said quietly, as I leaned on my
elbow and stared into the darkness, my eyes heavy with fatigue.
“There’s no point to it.”

“Marry another wealthy man? – That’s what you
said: that every wealthy man would want me and I could pick and
choose among them. Like some whore! - you should have said.” There
was a frantic quality to her belligerence, the sudden onset of
something close to panic. The tapping noise got louder, and more
insistent. “‘She’s a whore, and a whore can always get money from
another man!’- You should have said. Marry another wealthy man! I
may never marry anyone; I may be going to prison - I may not
live!”

Fatigue gave way to depression. The room
began to turn, the shadows moving quicker on the wall, moving
faster in a spiral, a black whirlpool pulling everything down
behind it. I slammed my hand hard on the top of the desk, shining
with my own reflection.