Swindlers (10 page)

“The letters, the flowers – that finally
stopped. I waited another week. Then I called and told him I had
not returned any of his calls because I had been busy at work. We
both knew it was a lie. That was the reason I told it.”

She waited to see if I understood, if I could
fully appreciate the artful maneuver, the shrewd calculation, the
way she had twisted everything to make it come out the way she
wanted. It made me wonder about her estimate of me, what she
thought my limitations might be. I had spent years examining the
sometimes insidious means by which ingenious and unscrupulous
people went after what they wanted, and she seemed unsure whether I
could understand what she had told me without some further
explanation.

“Because it was only if he knew, not just
that it was a lie, but that you knew he would know it was a lie,
that he would know you were interested, but only on terms of your
own. Yes?”

“Yes, but can you guess the terms?” she asked
as if this were some game she had now decided she wanted to play.
“Will you be shocked to learn that having spent one short afternoon
as the whore of every fantasy he had, I insisted on the same
conditions that any proper virgin would impose?”

“Marriage?”

“If you want me – want me ever again – marry
me! It was as simple as that. It was only complicated because it
took him so long to understand it, to believe that I would never
sleep with him again, never do much more than kiss him goodnight,
until I became his wife, Mrs. Nelson St. James.”

Justine – Danielle – laughed at her own
temerity, and then, commenting on her own performance, threw me a
glance that suggested that it had not been any great
achievement.

“Nelson did what everyone does when there is
something they don’t have and think they need: he fell in love with
me. Marriage became his idea. The thought of it made him happier
than he had ever been. The night he asked me, he looked ten years
younger. He took me to his favorite restaurant in Manhattan and
gave me a diamond ring bigger, brighter, than anything I had ever
seen. The whole evening was perfect. I said no.”

“You said no?”

“I didn’t want to get married.”

“But you just said…?”

“That he couldn’t have me again unless we
were married. He made the same mistake you did: he assumed I wanted
to marry him.”

She rose from the chair and stood next to the
window, thinking back to what she had done and whether she was
really prepared to keep her promise and, without holding anything
back, tell me everything. She turned and looked at me, but still
kept her silence. Her eyes seemed to widen and grow softer; a
smile, strange and ambiguous, full of a meaning I could not yet
fathom, moved slowly across her mouth.

“I told him that when I met the man I wanted
to marry, I would know right away.”

She kept looking at me, reminding me that
long before she had become Danielle, she had been Justine. And
then, finally, she moved away from the window, but instead of
coming back to her chair, she walked idly about the room, dragging
her fingers on the furniture she passed as she glanced at the
different pictures on the walls.

“That was cruel, to tell him that,” she said
as she stopped in front of a photograph taken years earlier on my
first day in court. “Cruel, but necessary; or so I thought before
he showed me how seriously I had underestimated him.”

She spun on her heel and strolled back to the
window. When she turned around and faced me, her eyes were all
aglow.

“I thought he would be devastated. Does that
shock you? - That I did it on purpose, that I was so determined to
get what I wanted that I didn’t care what I did? Have you ever felt
like that? – wanted something so much you didn’t care anything
about the rules?”

“You wanted to marry him? You wanted to be
Mrs. Nelson St. James?” I declared in a voice that surprised me by
its harshness.

“Yes, Mrs. Nelson St. James. I didn’t want
Nelson, I wanted what he had!” The eager defiance with which she
said this seemed an incitement, a wish – no! a compulsion - to
confess, to admit what she had done and why she had done it. “I
said no because I thought he would ask again, and that he would
want me even more when he did. I had not counted on his sense of
self-respect, the sense he had of his own importance.” She paused
just long enough to emit a slight, self-deprecating laugh. “The
very reason I wanted to be married to him, and I didn’t understand
what it meant!

“I said no, and do you know what he did? – He
smiled and told me that he hoped that when it happened – when I
fell in love with someone the first time I saw him – that I would
be as much in love as he was with me. He took me home, kissed me on
the cheek, and left. A few days later, I read in the papers that he
had gone to Europe on an extended vacation. It was the honeymoon
trip he had planned for us. Two months later, he came back, engaged
to some vaguely titled woman from a country and a court that no
longer exists.”

I could not pretend to sympathize for a plan
that had so obviously deserved to fail, but I was interested in
what she had felt about it and, of even more importance for the
purpose of grasping something essential about what kind of woman
she had become, what she had done about it, how she had managed to
make her plan finally work.

“And how did you feel?” I asked, staring at
her in a way that let her know I would not settle for some vague,
inconsequential response. “What did you do when you thought he was
going to marry another woman?”

“I knew he wouldn’t marry her; he was only
back a week before he took me out to dinner and asked me
again.”

She had not felt anything, certainly neither
jealousy nor doubt; nothing but a cold, almost brutal calculation.
But then, as I remembered, however much St. James may have thought
he was in love, he had also seen certain other advantages to a
marriage with her.

“He talked about you, that weekend on the
yacht, as if you were one of his possessions, something he owned.
He told me there wasn’t any point being married to a beautiful
woman unless you could show her off.”

“He married me because he wanted me,”
insisted Danielle, thrusting out her chin. “But Nelson never wanted
anything unless it was something everyone else wanted and could not
have. Nelson was a bastard; I knew it, and I didn’t care. I made my
bargain and I kept it. I made him three promises and I kept each
one of them.”

There was something in the way she said it,
something in the otherwise inscrutable look she gave me, that told
me that what she was about to say would change everything, and
that, however I remembered Justine, I would never be able to think
about Danielle the same way again.

“What three promises did you make?”

“I promised that I would be faithful, and I
promised I would have his child.”

“And the third promise, what was that?”

Danielle pulled back her shoulders and did
not blink.

“I promised that I would kill him, and I
did.”

CHAPTER Six

Danielle had a talent for confusion, a way of
making things sound completely different than they were. She had
killed her husband, shot him after he had finished with her in bed,
a fact she had not even admitted to anyone until she admitted it to
me, and she had not admitted it to me all at once. She told me the
day she came to my office that she had killed him, but, strange as
it may seem, not the meaning of what she had done. That third
promise, the promise to kill him, the promise she had carried out,
had not meant at the beginning anything like what it meant at the
end. St. James had said it, made her promise she would kill him, in
a way that was playful and nothing serious. Perhaps he said it,
after what they had done that day in his office; to convince her
that he would never do anything against her will. Perhaps there was
not any reason at all, perhaps he was just in a mood to make a
noble sounding gesture, when told her that he thought that men who
mistreated women ought to be taken out and shot, and, while he was
still laughing about it, made her promise she would kill him, shoot
him dead, if he should ever treat her like that.

It had been, as I say, a lover’s gesture,
whose only meaning was as a pledge of gentle treatment and
devotion, a promise that, having served its purpose, they would
both certainly forget, a promise there was no reason to remember
until she began to hate him and wish he were dead. Then the words,
with a new and bitter meaning, came flooding back, and with a kind
of vengeful pride that long forgotten promise became the definition
of betrayal and a justification for what she did.

And that was the problem. Her justification
was no defense. She killed him, the fact was indisputable, and
however she might insist that she had good reason to have done what
she did, it was, by any definition, still murder. I had looked at
it every way I knew how, examined the question from all sides, read
every reported case that appeared to have even a remote connection
with the issue, and there was nothing, nothing that would allow a
woman to kill her husband for breaking the vows he had made. The
law was all on the side of the prosecution. Danielle St. James was
guilty of murder and there was nothing I could do about it, nothing
I could do to save her. The only chance she had was luck, and the
only thing I knew for certain was that I could not let her testify.
If she told a jury the truth about what happened, not even luck
could save her. I could not let her testify and I had no other
witness I could use, no one who could help persuade a jury of her
innocence. The only chance I had, and this had happened to me more
than once in a trial, was to use the witnesses of the prosecution
to prove, not her innocence, but a doubt, a reason to question
whether, despite its best efforts, the case against her was
sufficient.

It was easy to know what you had to do; the
trick of course was how to do it, and the night before the trial I
still did not know. I had gone through the police reports and
statements of the witnesses, everything the prosecution had, dozens
of times; I had gone through them so often that I only had to
glance at the first line on the page to know everything that was
written there, but it had not helped. I was going to have to
challenge everything the prosecution did, seize on any
inconsistency, no matter how minor, wait for the other side to make
a mistake; but there were no inconsistencies, no mistakes, nothing
that had been left out in anything I had read. The only hope was
the trial itself. A witness on the stand was a different creature
than a witness on paper, easier to trap in a life, easier, if the
truth be told, to make seem a fool.

I lay on the sofa in the living room of my
Nob Hill apartment, staring at the ceiling, driving myself a little
crazy each time I tried to think of some flaw in the prosecution’s
case against Danielle St. James. I hated nights like this, the
night before a trial, when no matter how hard I tried, I could not
think of anything except the trial and all the unexpected things
that were almost sure to happen. It was never easy, the night
before a trial, but this night was the worst one of all, because I
already knew I had made a mistake, and it was too late to do
anything about it. I had known almost from the beginning that I
should never have taken the case, that I should have done what I
had meant to do and told Danielle to find another lawyer. The words
of Philip Conrad, the court reporter, kept echoing in my over
cluttered mind, that a jury would not like her, that they would not
trust a woman that was so beautiful and rich.

I suddenly remembered that I had wanted to
remind Danielle to wear to court in the morning something simple
and understated, and wondered if I had. Then, in my confusion, I
remembered that though it was nearly eleven, I had not eaten
anything. At least that was something I could do something about. I
got up and was headed for the kitchen when the telephone rang. It
was the doorman, calling to tell me that ‘Mrs. St. James’ was there
to see me.

“I thought you might have some last minute
things you wanted to talk about,” said Danielle.

Her voice had none of the anxiety, none of
the trepidation, expected from someone about to go on trial for
murder. She walked through the marble entryway and into the wood
paneled living room as if, despite the late hour, this was nothing
more than a social visit. Hesitating, not quite sure where to sit,
she settled on a pale blue easy chair across from the sofa where I
had spent half the evening and next to the fireplace I had never
used. She seemed in no particular hurry, as she glancing around,
making herself familiar with the room. Pushing her legs farther out
in front of her, she sank lower in the cushioned chair. The gray
silk dress, made by some designer especially for her, inched up
above her knees.

The easy certainty, the sense, not exactly of
entitlement, but of utter confidence that she could do whatever she
chose to do; the way that with a single lifted eyebrow, the bare
beginning of a smile, she thought she could command my attention;
the very things that made her so damnably attractive, were now,
with the trial just hours away, the source of as much irritation as
I had ever felt. I was not sure if I was angry because of the way
she was, or because, despite those solemn promises I had forced her
to give me before, against my better judgment, I had agreed to
become her lawyer. In a strange way it was funny.

“You’re on trial for murder, I still don’t
know how I’m going to save you, and you come over here with that ‘I
don’t give a damn attitude’ of yours, as if nothing can touch you!
Why? Because you’ve always been able to lie your way out of
anything?”