Swindlers (16 page)

Nastasis had been kept on the stand for
hours, forced to wait while the lawyers argued among themselves,
but he had not seemed to mind. Perhaps it was the novelty of the
situation, his first time inside an American courtroom; or perhaps,
like the other spectators who sat, transfixed by the proceedings,
he was intrigued by what had happened, the violent death of Nelson
St. James and the question whether Danielle St. James was going to
get away with it. As I rose to begin cross-examination, he regarded
me with more respect, and considerably more interest, than he had
that morning we first met on the deck of Blue Zephyr.

I took a position at the end of the jury box,
where, along the double line of juror’s faces, I could look
straight at him.

“You testified you went out on deck because
you heard ‘loud voices – screaming.’ Where exactly were you when
you heard those voices – in your cabin?”

“Yes,” he replied, a polite smile on his
lips.

“But you weren’t asleep, were you?”

“No.”

“The voices weren’t so loud – what you called
‘screaming’ – that they woke you up?”

“No, Mr. Morrison; as I say, I was not
asleep.”

I looked down at the floor, smiling to myself
as if what I was driving at was so obvious I should not have to
ask, and only after a long silence raised my eyes.

“What was the screaming about?” I asked
patiently. “What were they saying?”

“I don’t really know. I couldn’t hear the
words.”

“You couldn’t hear the words. I see. You
heard ‘loud voices – screaming’….Which is it, Mr. Nastasis: loud
voices or screaming?”

He did not grasp the distinction. With a
puzzled expression he shrugged.

“It’s not a difficult question, Mr. Nastasis.
People sometimes speak in loud voices to make themselves heard;
sometimes they do it to make a point. In either case, they have
control of themselves. When they’re screaming, on the other hand,
they don’t. So, again, Mr. Nastasis – which is it? Screaming,
wasn’t it? The cabins on the yacht are nearly soundproof, aren’t
they?”

Now he understood.

“Yes, screaming; shouting, if you prefer.
They were angry – I have no doubt.”

“Angry, out of control, irrational – are
those the words you would use to describe what you heard?”

Nastasis agreed immediately. I nodded
emphatically and turned to the jury.

“Angry, irrational – not the voice of someone
about to execute a calculated plan of -”

“Objection!” thundered Franklin as he bolted
from his chair.

I threw up both hands.

“That’s right, I shouldn’t have,” I admitted
before Judge Brunelli could rule. I turned back to the witness.

“You said you heard screaming, and then heard
a shot – what you thought was a gunshot. How much time passed
between the moment the screaming stopped and when you heard the
shot? Seconds, minutes – how long?”

Pinching his lips together, Nastasis stared
into the middle distance, trying to remember. As the silence
lengthened, I began methodically to tap two fingers on the jury box
railing. Finally, Nastasis gave up.

“I don’t know. Not as long as it seemed.”

My mouth dropped open.

“Not as long as…? Yes, I see. The screaming
stopped, then there was nothing – not a sound – and then you heard
it. Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly, just as you describe, with only one
addition. The silence, which may have lasted only seconds, seemed
so much longer because it served to underscore the violent noise
both before and after it.”

He paused to consider what he had said.
Satisfied that it was just the way he had said it was, he nodded
once more. He was ready for the next question, but instead I walked
back to the counsel table and Danielle. I stood there a moment,
looking down at her, as if we both knew something of great
importance. A shrewd, knowing smile edged its way across my mouth
as I turned again to the witness.

“The gun that Mrs. St. James was holding in
her hand – How long had she been holding it?”

Nastasis shook his head in confusion.

“I don’t….”

“Had she just picked it up?” I asked sharply
as I took a quick step forward. “You testified that you heard what
you thought was a gunshot. That was the reason you left your cabin,
the reason you came out on deck. You didn’t actually witness the
gun being fired, did you?” I insisted. “As a matter of fact, you
didn’t see who fired that gun, did you? I’ll repeat – Had she just
picked it up when you came out on deck?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, taken aback by
the sudden violence of my questioning. “I just -”

“You don’t know. Thank you. Now tell me
this,” I went on as I began to pace in front of the counsel table.
“You had been the captain of the St. James yacht for….” I stopped,
looked up and smiled. “Since Nelson St. James had it built,
correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct; since the day it was
christened.”

“Blue Zephyr. How did he happen to pick that
name, do you know?”

“He came across it in some book he read: A
novel, I think; something about a murder in Hollywood. He said it
was much more than that, and that he identified with one of the
characters, a director falsely accused of murdering his movie star
wife. Blue Zephyr was the name of a movie. That’s all he told
me.”

“You got to know Mr. St. James fairly well,
then?”

The response was cold, measured, and, I
suspected, utterly dishonest.

“I worked for Mr. St. James. That was the
nature of our relationship.”

Apparently, Mustafa Nastasis was not
interested in helping the dead. Was he interested in helping the
living? I took a chance.

“He wasn’t an easy man to work for, was
he?”

Nastasis pressed his finger to his mouth,
weighing in the balance, as it seemed, what he remembered about St.
James and what he knew about human behavior. I tried to help him
along.

“Not an easy man…, but you liked Mrs. St.
James, didn’t you? Nelson St. James may not have treated you very
well, but you could always count on her for a kind word, couldn’t
you?”

He did not have to think about his answer,
there were no complexities to unravel, no subtle shades of meaning
to disentangle. His response was immediate and, so far as anyone
could tell, utterly sincere.

“Yes, Mrs. St. James was always pleasant, not
just with me, but with all the members of the crew. She always
asked questions about my family, where I came from, that sort of
thing. They were wealthy people, but you wouldn’t have known it
from the way she treated us.”

My suspicion had been correct. I was certain
of it now. Mustafa Nastasis might have been called by the
prosecution, but he was my witness.

“You saw them earlier that evening, while
they were having dinner, didn’t you?”

“I looked in on them to see if there was
anything they needed.”

I smiled, not to put Nastasis on his ease,
but to give the jury every reason to think that all I wanted was
the truth.

“And when you saw them having dinner
together, just a few short hours before he was shot to death, did
Mrs. St. James look like a woman planning to murder her
husband?”

Franklin had to object. I wanted him to
object. That was the reason I asked the question in the way I did.
He was on his feet, starting on a long oration on why the question
could not be asked, but Brunelli did not need to take lessons on
the law of evidence.

“Sustained!” she ruled with clinical
indifference before Franklin could say another word.

Now! Do it now, I told Nastasis with my eyes.
Say it now! Whether he caught my meaning, or did it on his own, he
did it.

“No, she didn’t look like a woman planning to
murder her husband,” he answered with a blameless gaze.

“‘
Sustained,’ means that
you’re not supposed to answer the question,” explained Brunelli
with a stern glance. “The jury will disregard both the question and
the answer.”

Then she studied me, a silent warning that
she would only be pushed so far. It may have been nothing more than
my imagination, which in this instance might be just another name
for vanity, but just behind the formal disapproval I thought I saw
a faint glimmer of recognition, quiet admiration for the skill, if
not the judgment, of what I had done: elicited without a word to
prove it a flagrant violation of the rules. I went back to the
witness.

“I can’t ask you that question, Mr. Nastasis.
Let me ask you this instead: Before that night, during the entire
course of that lengthy voyage, did you ever see her throw anything
at him?”

“No.”

“Hit him?”

“No.”

“Did you ever see her threaten him with a
gun?’

“No,” he said, his dark impenetrable eyes
wide and intense.

“Just a few more questions. After you heard
the shot, after you rushed outside and saw blood on the deck and on
the railing, when you saw the defendant, Danielle St. James,
standing there with the gun in her hand, you thought she had killed
her husband, didn’t you?”

Nastasis hesitated, unsure quite how to
answer. I told him it was all right, that all anyone wanted was the
truth.

“Yes, I have to admit I thought that. It’s
what I assumed.”

“But if, as I asked you earlier, she had only
just picked up the gun – in a state of shock picked it up from
where it had fallen – then you would have thought something else,
wouldn’t you? – Not that Danielle St. James had murdered her
husband, but that her husband had killed himself!”

Franklin was bellowing an objection, but I
did not care. I sat down at the table, more than satisfied with
what I had done.

CHAPTER Ten

Judge Brunelli cautioned the jurors not to
discuss the case and not to read about it in the papers, or watch
any of the reported accounts of the trial on television. Aware, as
always, that people had their eyes on us, I gathered up the notes
and papers scattered on the table and exchanged a few brief words
with Danielle. Although nothing had happened between us after that
night when I had pulled back at the last moment from making what
would have been a serious mistake, I had made a point of treating
her with a new formality. We did not talk about what might have
happened, or whether something might happen later; we talked only
about the trial. The situation was forced and artificial,
pretending she was just another client, instead of a woman with
whom, if I were honest with myself, I was probably already in love,
but there was nothing else I could do. She was a criminal defendant
and I was her lawyer and I had to concentrate on that. It was a
strange pantomime I went through, keeping a respectable distance as
I got ready to leave the courtroom, barely touching her on her arm,
the way I would have done with any other woman on trial for her
life, telling her, in case anyone was close enough to overhear,
that I would see her in the morning and that she should try to get
some rest. Then I left her in the hands of a bodyguard, waiting
just behind the railing to take her to a waiting car. Eager to get
a closer look at the famous and now notorious Danielle St. James,
the surging crowd followed her outside.

I was glad to be left alone, able to walk
down the deserted corridor and into an empty men’s room without
worrying who was going to assault me next with a question they had
to ask or an observation they felt compelled to share. It was
embarrassing, when you thought about it, this need for attention,
this desire for the acknowledgement of other people, and, when we
have it, the tired hypocrisy of wishing it would all go away. It
was like the difference between how we look and how we feel, what
we show the world and what we know inside. Like the face I now saw
in the mirror, which that looked better, less exhausted, than I
felt; seeing it, I felt much better than I had.

Throwing some cold water on my face, I
reached for a paper towel. Then I heard it, an awful, retching
noise from one of the stalls at the far end of the narrow, white
tile room. As quickly as I could, I dried my hands and face and
turned to go; but just then the stall door flew open and Robert
Franklin, his face white as a sheet, staggered toward the sink. He
had not heard anyone come in, and the shock of seeing me was so
intense, so profound, that he seemed to lose his senses. He opened
his mouth, struggling to find an explanation, an excuse, for the
condition in which I had found him, but three words into it he
began to stutter and could not stop.

That was when I first began to understand
something of the effort with which Robert Franklin had made himself
into a lawyer. He had a speech impediment – a stutter as awful as
any I had ever heard – and yet had somehow overcome it. That was
the reason he started out at such a distance from the witness and
the jury: not because he loved the sound of his own voice, not
because of vanity; but because he had with a stringent discipline I
could not even imagine, he had trained himself to speak the words
he wanted without falling into a bottomless well of hellish
repetition.

“Are you all right?” I asked, stung by a
guilty conscience. “Is there anything I can do?”

Franklin took a deep breath, and then, to my
surprise, laughed in a quiet, self-deprecating way and patted me
gently on the arm. His eyes, so often filled with what seemed dark
malevolence, were almost friendly.

“I could tell you it was something I ate, but
the truth is that I always get too tense at a trial. I wish I could
be more like you; you always look like you’re having the time of
your life in there. I envy that.”

I tried to remind myself, as I walked out of
the courthouse, that no one took prisoners in a trial, that it was
all about winning, but I began to regret a little the way I had
pushed things, objecting to nearly every question, doing what I
could to make Franklin look mean tempered and insensitive. He had
not just worked his way through night school, he had overcome a
handicap, forced himself through God knows what difficult and
painful exercises to become a lawyer; and not just any kind of
lawyer, but a courtroom lawyer, a prosecuting attorney who had to
speak clearly, who had to make sense, who could not afford to get
all tangled in knots. We were both in it to win, but I started
asking myself whether I was going too far, throwing sand in the
eyes of the jury, turning the serious business of a murder case
into a carnival game in which, if I could get away with it, the
prosecutor instead of the defendant was put on trial.