Swindlers (24 page)

Now she looked at the jury, and especially
the women who were on it, and appealed to what they could all
understand.

“I know it’s no excuse, I
know I shouldn’t have done it, but I did not know any other way to
get his attention, to let him know that things couldn’t go on this
way. I could not keep track of all the different women he had been
with. But he refused to think that was any excuse for what I had
done. It didn’t matter what he did, so long as he was discreet; it
mattered what I did because I was his wife and the mother of his
child. It told him he was a hypocrite and a fool, and that he was
crazy if he thought I was going to stay married to him if he kept
doing the things he did.”

She fell into a long, thoughtful silence, and
the courtroom became deathly quiet, so quiet that a muffled cough
seemed a jarring noise. I wondered what she was going to say
next.

“It got so bad,” said Danielle finally; “we
said so many hateful things. We couldn’t be in the same room
without this constant, savage screaming. Nelson told me that I
still belonged to him, that I couldn’t leave him. Then, to show me
that he meant it, he took me, made me do what he wanted. He thought
that settled it, that because he had had me I was still his. But I
wasn’t still his, I wasn’t going to live like that, be his dressed
up whore! I got dressed, told him I was leaving him, that I didn’t
care where it was, the next place we landed I was getting off the
Blue Zephyr and I was never coming back! And then I told him
something else, something cruel and hateful and unforgivable. I was
so angry I could not help myself! I told him I was in love with
someone else, the man with whom I had been having the affair. It
was a lie, but I wanted to hurt him as much as he had hurt me. I
told him that the whole time he had me in bed I was pretending he
was that other man, the one I was in love with, and I told him that
it didn’t matter anyway, his life was finished. He was going to
prison and he was never going to get out!

“He was out of his mind with anger and rage.
He told me I couldn’t leave him; he begged me to stay. He took the
pistol we carried for protection and started waving it in the air.
He said he didn’t give a damn what happened, he didn’t care about
me, he didn’t care about anything anymore, that he might as well be
dead. And do you know what I said to him – the words that keep
echoing in my mind, the words I would give anything to take back? I
told him to go ahead and do it, that no one would miss him when he
was gone!”

Her eyes were wild with the terror she still
felt, the awful thing that haunted her and would never let her
go.

“I tried to stop him! I ran after him, out on
deck; I screamed at him, pleaded with him not to do it. But it was
too late! He put that gun to his head…, and then that awful noise…,
and then all that awful blood. And then nothing mattered anymore.
Nelson was gone and I knew my life was over.”

CHAPTER
Fourteen

“You lied!” I shouted into Danielle’s cold,
belligerent eyes. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake
her until her teeth rattled, shake her until she came to her sense,
shake her until she understood what she had done. “You lied!” I
yelled again, but the only effect was a thin, ironic smile. Her
eyes were cool, distant, and brazenly analytical.

“How was the story I told any different from
yours!” she dared to ask. “You told them it could have been
suicide; I told them that it was!”

I could not fool myself anymore: Danielle
lacked all conscience. Tell the truth or do not tell the truth, the
only question which would help her most; honesty or rank deception,
nothing but interchangeable means.

“You lied,” I repeated, but quietly and in
the tones of defeat. Her only reaction was a kind of measured
neglect.

“It isn’t any different than what you were
doing.”

Watching out the window at the people on the
street below, hurrying home under a sea of umbrellas raised against
the cold December rain, wishing I were one of them, I did not
bother to look at her, sitting in front of my desk the other side
of the room, elegant and undisturbed in the pale shadows of the
evening light. Instead, I listened like a detached observer, a
courtroom spectator, to the useless monologue of my own
defense.

“I was talking about what the evidence proved
or failed to prove. I told the jury that on the evidence they had
in front of them, there was as much proof that your husband killed
himself as there was that you had murdered him.”

Slowly, and as it were, reluctantly, I turned
my head just far enough to see her. The look of self-satisfaction,
the utter indifference to what she had done; the absence of even
the slightest remorse for the deception, the lies she had told me;
the blatant refusal to think she owed me anything, even honesty,
for what I had done for her, was like being kicked in the face. I
struck back.

“Listen, lady – I knew you were a liar, but I
didn’t think you were a fool! Because only a fool would think that
what I was doing was the same thing as swearing under oath that he
killed himself and that you tried to stop him when he did it. Jesus
Christ! - Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” I demanded as I
stalked back to my desk.

“I helped you win your case! I helped make
sure I won’t go to prison for something you said wasn’t
murder!”

I threw up my hand and bolted forward,
glaring hard at her.

“You lied under oath! That’s called perjury!
And worse yet, you got me to help you do it!”

“So what!” she shouted, glaring back with
contempt. “I told you everything; you knew what happened. I told
you why I killed him, how he drove me to it; but that wasn’t
something you wanted the jury to know about – was it? What was the
last thing you got Rufus Wiley to admit? – How depressed poor
Nelson was the night he called him? I remember what you said – what
you made damn sure the jury heard – that it wouldn’t be very
surprising if someone about to lose his ‘young and beautiful’ wife,
someone facing a life in prison, might decide he didn’t want to
live! Yes, damn you – I lied! But just because you went three years
to law school to learn how to lie within the rules doesn’t mean you
have the right to lecture me on what I should or shouldn’t have
done to save myself!”

It was a schoolgirl’s logic, the argument to
cover every sin: that nothing was very bad if the difference
between good and evil was only a matter of degree. It was the
argument that nothing had ever settled except the very thing she
said I did not have: the power to tell her what she could or could
not do. I slammed my open palm so hard down on the desk that it
made her blink.

“Get out!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
I sprang out of my chair and pointed toward the door. “I don’t ever
want to see you again! I don’t want to talk to you! I don’t want to
have anything to do with you! I swear to God, if you’re not out of
here in two seconds, the only closing argument I’ll make tomorrow
is to tell everyone the truth of what you did!”

She slammed the door behind her, and suddenly
I was all alone, faced with the strange and discouraging task of
continuing a conspiracy to cheat. There was no other word for it:
cheat, lie, stand in front of those twelve anonymous faces, a
so-called jury of her peers, and tell them that the prosecution had
failed to make its case; stand there with all the false sincerity I
could command and tell them that when they considered all the
evidence, including the lying testimony of the only witness for the
defense, they had no alternative, no other reasonable choice, but
to return a verdict of not guilty. The only saving grace was that I
did not have to tell them that they had to call her innocent.

The evidence; thank God for that. I reminded
myself that that was what I was supposed to sum up - not what I
believed, not what I knew to be true – only the evidence, the
evidence that had been heard in court. I did not have to say
anything about what I had been told in the privacy of my office, or
in the intimacy of my bed. The evidence kept me sane.

For a while I remembered what it was like to
be a lawyer, trying cases in which the defendant could be anyone at
all, because the only thing that mattered was the prosecution’s
case and the weaknesses I could find inside it. That is what I was
trained for, the craft at which through long years of practice I
had tried to become proficient. It was what I lived for; more than
that, it was who I was: a lawyer, a trial lawyer, and if I was not
good at that, I was not good at anything. Gradually, Danielle
disappeared and Mrs. St. James took her place. I knew every inch of
Danielle’s naked body; I had only on occasion touched Mrs. St.
James on the arm, and then only to show the jury that I was
sympathetic.

The case, my case, the case I could make to
the jury, began to take on a shape of its own. My closing argument
began to write itself. All the major elements - the claims made by
the prosecution that they had not been able to prove – arranged
themselves in the right, sequential order; the words and phrases
describing what the prosecution had not done began to sort
themselves out on the written page. My pen was flying as I wrote
and re-wrote, not whole paragraphs or even whole sentences, but the
short, fragmentary notes that would be all I needed to remember
when I stood in front of the jury and spoke as if it were all
spontaneous and none of it studied in advance. For a few brief
hours, working away in the lamplight of my office, I forgot about
Danielle and remembered myself.

A few minute past eleven, finally finished, I
turned out the light and locked the door behind me. Everything was
ready for tomorrow. Downstairs in the lobby, an elderly janitor,
his eyes half shut, clung to a broom the way he must have once
danced with a woman, long ago, when he was young. Outside, the
gray, relentless drizzle had cleared and the sky was full of stars
and the air sweet and clean. There were still people on the
streets, moving slower than they did in the early morning or the
late afternoon, coming in and out of restaurants, falling in and
out of bars. They were all strangers and yet I seemed to know them
all. In San Francisco the night was always full of nostalgia.

I took a deep breath and looked all around. I
felt better than I had in days. Tomorrow, and the trial was over;
one more day and I could wash my hands of the whole sordid affair.
One more day, and I could get my conscience back. The jury would
decide what would happen to Danielle. After I finished my closing
argument, my responsibilities were at an end.

Except for a few passing cars, the street
outside my Nob Hill building was deserted. Two blocks ahead, at the
Mark Hopkins, a small crowd of gray haired women and their well-fed
husbands, waited with bright, shining faces for their cars.
Upstairs in her room, Danielle was probably sound asleep. Before I
reached the door, I looked one last time down the empty sidewalk. I
could still see her, the way she used to walk the few short blocks
from the hotel, wearing one of her crazy disguises, full of a
strange, eager excitement at what my first, startled, reaction
would be. I tried to tell myself that it was better that, once the
trial was over, I would never see her again; that she was too
dishonest, too dangerous – a woman who had murdered her husband and
might get away with it; a woman who had lied to me, used me, made a
fool of me in court. It was all true, and I knew it, and it did not
do anything to take away the hurt I felt, the howling sense of
loss.

The doorman had the door open before my hand
was on it.

“She’s been here for more than an hour,” he
said in a confidential tone as he rolled his eyes toward the two
easy chairs next to the front window. Danielle was sitting in one
of them. She had come as herself.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured with downcast eyes.
“Sorry for what I did…, for what I said.” She looked at me, worried
that this time she had gone too far, and that nothing she could say
could change it. “I’m sorry; I was too scared to think straight. I
should have done what you said; I should have listened. Can you
forgive me? I hate myself for what I did.”

I grabbed her wrist and held it tight.

“Don’t talk about it now.”

We waited in silence for the elevator. She
seemed nervous, distracted; her eyes darted all around. There was
an air of desperation, like that of a gambler who does not hesitate
to take a risk and then, when it is too late to pull back, has
second thoughts. The elevator groaned to a halt and the door
creaked open. We started the ascent, but almost immediately, on the
third floor, there was the sound of a bell and the elevator jolted
to a stop. An elderly couple in their sixties or seventies with
whom I had a nodding acquaintance got on. The woman smiled
perfunctorily and looked straight ahead, but her husband recognized
Danielle. With a serious, courtly expression, he said good-evening
in a way that seemed to wish her nothing but good luck. Everyone
was following the trial.

The elevator reached my floor and we walked
slowly down the narrow hallway to my apartment. The door swung shut
behind us. We stood in the shadows, looking at each other. Neither
of us said a word. She started unbuttoning her blouse; I took off
my coat and started unbuttoning my shirt. Then, still half dressed,
we were on the floor and I was inside her and she was all I knew.
There was nothing but Danielle.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a gentle, soothing
voice when it was over. “Sorry for what I did to you. I’ve never
trusted anyone, but I should have trusted you.”

She picked up our scattered clothing and
tossed it together in a heap on a chair. She held out her hand.

“The floor was nice, but the bed is
better.”