Swindlers (18 page)

“Listen to me. I had speed, I knew what I
could do; I didn’t have to work at it. But the truth is that I wish
I had been more like you, that things hadn’t come so easy. I might
have learned something, how to get better, how important it is to
work. There’s something else, and I mean this: You’re a hell of a
lot better in a courtroom than I ever was on a football field, but
you still don’t think it’s good enough. That’s something else I
found out today. I had lunch with the court reporter.”

“Philip Conrad? You had lunch with him?”

“In the courthouse cafeteria. It was crowded.
I saw him sitting alone at a table, asked if I could join him. I
told him I’d been with the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A. That
didn’t impress him. I told him you and I had gone to school
together. He got all excited. Told me you were his favorite lawyer,
said he was the court reporter in one of the first cases you took
to trial. He seemed surprised when I told him we played ball
together. Said he didn’t know that about you, that you had never
mentioned it. He wanted to know what you were like then, and I
wasn’t quite sure what to tell him. He doesn’t strike me as the
kind who wants to hear about how you played; he’s too serious for
that. He wanted to know who you were. I told him how you used to
watch film. You didn’t care much about the plays that didn’t work;
you said anyone could see what was wrong with them. You only really
studied the ones that worked, not to see why they worked, but what
could be done to make them work even better.”

Tommy rested his elbows on the table and
folded his hands together in front of his mouth. A distant look
came into his eyes, remembering, I think, what we had both been
like, all those years ago. It lasted only a second, and then a
smile flashed across his face and he started back on the story he
wanted to tell me.

“His eyes – Conrad, the court reporter; nice
man, by the way – got all wide and eager. He had to tell me
something. The first trial, the first of yours in which he was the
court reporter, a case no one thought you had a chance to win... He
said he had never seen anything like it, the way you destroyed the
prosecution’s main witness with one of the most devastating
cross-examinations he had ever seen, and done it so easily that it
almost seemed as if the witness had only been waiting for the
chance to tell the jury that everything he had said to the
prosecuting attorney had been a lie. But that surprise wasn’t
anything like what happened next, after the trial was over.”

Tommy looked at me with a baffled expression
and then started laughing. He threw up his hands, exuberant that
someone else, an anonymous court reporter, had had the same
experience, and with the same reaction, as his own.

“He’s sitting there in his cubbyhole office,
and this young lawyer – barely out of law school, only had two or
three trials – comes in and starts to ask how much it will cost to
get a transcript of the trial. Tells him he knows he charges by the
page, but if he tells him how much it might run, he can pay him
something now and the rest when it’s finished. The guy didn’t know
what to think. He knows you’re pretty damn good in a courtroom, but
you obviously don’t know much about the law.

“‘
You only appeal when you
lose, Mr. Morrison,’ he explains. ‘That’s the only time you need to
go back through the transcript: when you have to find some judicial
mistake, some error of law. And the prosecution can’t appeal a
verdict of acquittal in a criminal case, so you see, there’s no
need to bother with a transcript. You won, Mr. Morrison, and the
prosecution can’t appeal. There’s nothing more you have to
do.’

“And then, to his astonishment, you tell him
that’s the reason you want the transcript. He still hasn’t
forgotten what you said.

“‘
I know I won; I thought I
better find out why.’

“You weren’t interested in any mistakes the
judge might have made. That’s what Conrad told me. You were only
interested in mistakes of your own, things you might have done
better, ways you might improve. And it wasn’t just in that trial
you did it; you’ve done it in every trial since, all the years
you’ve been practicing. That’s you, all right: nothing is ever good
enough; you can always do it better. Must make you crazy, knowing
no matter how hard you try, nothing is ever going to be
perfect.”

He moved his right shoulder back and turned
his head, looking at me, as it seemed, not just from a different
angle but with a new perspective.

“That’s why she’s got you, isn’t it? It’s how
she looks. That’s got to be about as perfect as it gets. It’s
probably what made St. James do half the things he did, at least in
the beginning when he was first with her. Looks like….”

He paused, remembering something, or perhaps
it just now came to him, the thought that brought everything
together, made sense out of at least some of what had happened. He
bent forward, searching my eyes in a way that told me that this was
important and that it was important for me.

“That’s what they both did, as near as I can
tell: made themselves crazy trying to have it all. Ask the question
no one takes seriously anymore: why didn’t he quit, and get out
when it was still safe? Why did he keep going after more? And more
than the money, why did he have to have her? And why did she have
to have him? The reason is that they didn’t know what they wanted,
only that it had to be more. That’s what I was trying to tell you,
the reason I wanted to see you: to warn you, if you didn’t know it
already. She may have been the kid sister of the girl you wanted to
marry, but she isn’t a kid anymore, and whatever she was like
then….”

I stopped him with a look that said there was
nothing he could tell me about Danielle I had not already thought
about.

“I’m her lawyer. She’s on trial for murdering
her husband. What is it you think I don’t know?”

There was now no more nostalgia. We were not
reminiscing about the past. We were two lawyers, still good
friends, but too experienced to yield to the illusions of younger
men. We had been burned too often to take very much on trust.

“She did it, didn’t she? – I know you can’t
tell me, but it makes sense. What was she going to do, sail around
the world the rest of her life, married to a fugitive, never able
to come home?”

“He might not have been able to come back,
but she could have. He was the one indicted.”

Troubled and momentarily disconcerted, Tommy
stared off into the distance, pondering, as it seemed, some
dilemma. The only thing I could tell for certain that, whatever it
was, it had to do with Danielle.

“I’m not supposed to….I quit working for the
government, but there are still things – open cases – I’m not
supposed to talk about. But screw it, you need to know. There would
have been another indictment. After they got her husband, they
would have gone after her. They still might,” he hastened to add.
“If you get her off, if she doesn’t go down on the murder
conviction. It’s a tougher case, with him dead, but a lot of people
got hurt, and if they can’t get him, they’ll try to get her.”

“Get her for what? She was married to him.
She wasn’t the one defrauding all those investors with that scheme
of his.”

There is a look that grows on people as they
get older, a look that gives expression to what they have done.
Doctors, priests, day laborers and shifty eyed thieves all have it,
badges of their professions, and while Tommy still moved like the
athlete he had been born to be, he had acquired the gaze of the
practiced prosecutor, the knowing glance that holds more secrets
than you ever thought existed.

“You were out there, on that yacht of theirs,
with their other guests. You watched them both – more than that,
from what I remember – Do you really think she didn’t know what was
going on? You really think she didn’t know exactly what she was
doing? We had them under surveillance for years, tracked them
everywhere they went. She was always there, on the Blue Zephyr,
where he did most of his business. Every time someone came on board
she was there to greet them.”

Pushing his empty plate to the side, he
reached for his glass, but just as he picked it up he had a thought
that took him back again into the past, though not the one we had
lived together.

“She changed her name, from what it was when
you knew her, to Danielle. He did the same thing, a long time ago,
before he ever came to New York. He grew up in a small town in
Michigan, Petoskey, a little north of Traverse City. His father had
a gas station; his mother ran off with someone else. Ray Williams,
that was his name, about as plain as you can get, dropped out of
high school in the tenth grade, lied about his age and joined the
army. Then he sold insurance for a while, made enough money to buy
a few old houses, turned them for a profit, and then – he had a
kind of genius for this – started doing the same thing with bigger
properties, office buildings, then companies, and then…. Then
Nelson St. James became rich as hell and no one asked questions
about how he got it, only how he could help them get rich as well.
They both invented themselves. That’s what they had in common.
Funny, when you think about it, no one ever looked at either one of
them when they were kids just growing up. I suppose that’s part of
what drove them, the need to do something that would get them
noticed.”

I wondered, from the way he looked at me, the
things he had said about how nothing had ever been good enough,
that I was always trying to get better, if he thought the same
thing had driven me. Perhaps it had. All I knew was that one of the
reasons I had always liked him, why he was the only friend I had,
is that Tommy Lane had once had the great good fortune to be so
much better than anyone else at what he did that he had not had to
worry about anything except the pure enjoyment of what he did. If
he was not lying when he said he wished he had been more like me,
he should have been.

CHAPTER Eleven

A light rain had started to fall and the
night air was cool and clean. The street in front of the restaurant
was a shiny black mirror full of neon lights and changing colors. A
young woman walked by, laughing as the man she was with struggled
to hold an umbrella over her head while his other arm was around
her waist. Across the street, two middle-aged men in dark,
well-tailored suits, dashed from the front door of another, more
exclusive, eating place to a waiting cab. A second taxi was just
coming around the corner.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay with me?
There’s plenty of room.”

“Next trip,” said Tommy as we shook hands.
“When you’re not in the middle of a trial. I’ll come up and we can
spend a few days.”

The cab driver reached behind him and opened
the door. Tommy put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a serious
look.

“Remember what I told you. Be careful. There
are some other things….” His voice trailed off, and I did not know
whether they were things he did not think he should tell me or
things he was not sure were true. His eyes took on a sudden
urgency. “She killed him – remember that. You may get her off, but
it won’t be because she’s innocent.”

Tommy had always known me better than I knew
myself. He was worried about me because he understood my
vulnerabilities. He had a habit of warning about things – women,
mainly that he knew I could not resist. The warnings had never done
any good, except to prove later, though he would never say so, that
he had been right all along.

The cab driver was waiting. Tommy flashed
that huge smile of his, put his arm around my neck, suddenly kissed
me on the side of my face, and said with affection, “You’re the
best fuck-up I ever knew. Whatever happens, you’ll always land on
your feet.”

I watched him get into the cab, watched the
way he began a cheerful banter with the driver, watched while the
cab wove through the nighttime traffic, watched until the tail
lights vanished around the corner, and then watched in my mind the
things he had done when he and I were both young.

The weather, instead of getting worse, got
better and the rain became a fine mist that swirled around like the
thin fog that sometimes comes on summer nights and makes the
visitors from out of town think its winter. I started walking up
the hill, the steep ascent on sidewalks grooved like washboards to
keep from slipping backward those brave or foolish enough to try
it. At the top, two blocks ahead of me, across the street from the
Fairmont, the other famous old hotel, the Mark Hopkins, was lit up
like Christmas, with limousines and taxi cabs and shiny dark sedans
and sleek foreign sports cars, all moving in slow procession
through the open portals to the front entrance where a liveried
footman helped each entitled passenger on either their arrival or
their departure. Somewhere on one of the upper floors, Danielle St.
James was probably in her room, perhaps on the telephone to her
young son in New York, or perhaps trying to decide what time she
would call me to talk about what had happened in court and what we
could expect tomorrow. The only nights she did not call were the
ones she decided she had to talk to me in person.

It had become a bizarre routine, on the
nights she did it, to come in disguise. At first I thought she was
doing it out of an abundance of caution, the fear of the rumors
that might start if she were seen coming to my apartment too often
late at night. But gradually I began to realize that it was not
concern for her reputation; it certainly was not any concern for
mine. She liked the game, the known risk, the chance that she might
get caught; her only pride, the nights she did it, how many people
she might fool. It did not require much effort; what she did was
never elaborate. A wig, a different dress, a change of make-up and,
of course, a change of mood; and, with it, the look she wore. It
seemed to give her a strange pleasure, to dress as another woman
and live, if only for a brief time, another woman’s life. Once in a
while, when she had nothing else to do, she would drop by the hotel
bar dressed as someone else and let someone buy her a drink. She
spent an hour with a man who said he lived less than two blocks
from where Danielle St. James lived in New York. He insisted she
was innocent; she told him that he obviously knew nothing about
women. “I had to explain to him that with a woman like Danielle St.
James you could never be sure of anything.” She told me this as if
all she knew about Danielle was what she had read in the
papers.