Swindlers (36 page)

Tommy’s eyes were tired, and full of
sympathy. A half-hearted smile started across his mouth and then
vanished at once. He started to speak but had to clear his throat;
and then, when he was able, his voice had a low, husky rasp.

“If you were ‘a murderer, plain and simple,’
you wouldn’t have done what you did next; you wouldn’t have done
any of the things that happened later. You would have stayed with
Danielle.”

I tried to smile, to pretend that none of it
was of any consequence, but I felt the tears start to come and I
had to look away.

“Maybe I should have,” I said when I could
finally look back. “Maybe it would have been better. But something
happened that night, when I murdered St. James: something broke
inside.”

“You tried to kill yourself,” Tommy tried to
remind me.

“You give me too much credit. I jumped, but I
wasn’t trying to kill myself. I didn’t care what happened. I didn’t
know if I could make it to shore – we were a little less than a
mile off the coast – I didn’t care if I drowned; all I knew was
that I had to get away, get away from what I had learned about
myself, the evil in my soul. I loved Danielle, more than I thought
I could ever love anyone, and I hated her as well, hated her for
what she had made me into. But more than anything, I hated myself
for letting her do it. I jumped because in that moment I knew that
if I stayed with her I was lost.”

“You’re not a murderer,” Tommy kept
insisting. He seemed to think that everything would change if only
he could convince me that he was right about that. In my awkward
way, I tried to cheer him up a little.

“You mean, because no one believed me when I
tried to confess?”

He glanced at me with the kind of disapproval
that cannot begrudge a certain degree of admiration. Though he
thought that what I had done had been the right thing, he wished I
had not done it. But we both knew that it would not have made any
difference, that the same thing would have happened if instead of
going first to the district attorney, and then, when that did not
work, to the judge, I had kept it to myself. I would still be here,
retired from the world, living in peaceful seclusion instead of
back in the city, practicing law.

“Of course, I didn’t think so at the time,
but it really was quite funny. Poor Franklin. You should have seen
the look on his face - I should say the looks, because he must have
had a dozen of them, one right after the other, an escalating
series of curiosity, disbelief, and then alarm – as I told him that
the trial had been start to finish a gigantic hoax, that Danielle
had not killed anyone, that Nelson St. James had not been murdered,
that they had staged the whole thing, and then sailed off to
Sicily, changed their names to Orsini, painted the yacht – that
really made his eyes pop open! – painted the yacht and changed its
name. ‘It’s the Midnight Sun, now; not Blue Zephyr.’ That I found
them, that they were going to kill me, but that, at the last
second, Danielle gave me the gun and instead of becoming the victim
of a homicide I became a murderer, and that I was there in his
office, come to make my confession.”

Exchanging a glance with Tommy, I laughed
softly; remembering with what at the time had been puzzlement but
was now something close to affection, the kindness Franklin had
tried to show me.

“He told me he was sorry about everything I
had been through, and that the best thing I could do was to go home
and try to get some rest. ‘After a few days,’ he said as he led me
out of his office, ‘things will be better.’”

I shrugged helplessly, and though Tommy was
right in front of me, just a few feet away, I stared right at
Robert Franklin, watching the embarrassment, and more than that,
the genuine sense of concern, spread across his countenance. When
he said goodbye, I heard him stutter through the final words.

“And then you had to go tell Brunelli,” said
Tommy, bringing me back to myself.

“Yes, then I had to tell Brunelli.” I shook
my head with shining eyes, eager not to tell him again about my
last meeting with a judge. “It’s nice here, isn’t it?” I asked,
surprised that this passing thought just came out. I made a vague
gesture with my hand, meant to take in all of it: the long drive,
the stately trees, the well-tended garden. “Nice as any place, I
suppose.”

“Alice Brunelli.”

I looked at Tommy, for a moment not sure what
he meant.

“Oh, yes – Alice Brunelli. I think I was in a
state of shock. Franklin did not believe me. I had told him
everything, and he refused to believe it. Can you imagine? I
confess to murder, and all he can say is that I couldn’t have
killed St. James because he had been killed a year earlier. Now,
Brunelli, to give her credit, took me much more seriously. She
listened – did not say a word – let me tell her everything. She
didn’t show any emotion, no reaction of any kind. She was just like
she is in court: her face a perfect mask. Then when I was finished,
when I told her that I murdered St. James, she quite calmly began
to ask me questions. Questions about a lot of things, and not all
of them about the things I had just finished telling her.

“We must have spent an hour in her chambers.
She told me that she knew I was telling her what I thought to be
the truth, but that because there was no evidence, nothing to prove
that Nelson St. James had been alive, nothing to prove that I had
killed anyone, she wanted me to talk to someone else, a friend of
hers, who was quite good at finding out things like this. She meant
an investigator, I was sure of it. And she did mean that – an
investigator, though a different kind than what I thought. Anyway,
after a while, after I talked to a few more people, I began to
realize that no one was ever going to believe me, and that I had to
make some changes, that I had to leave the city, stop practicing
law, and come up here, away from all that madness, and live a quiet
life.”

When it was time for Tommy to leave, I asked
if he had been able to find out anything about Danielle. The last
time I had seen him, a few months earlier, he had told me he would
look into it.

“Nothing definite. You were right about
Sicily, what you said someone told you: that it’s always full of
rumors – rumors, secrets and lies. The new owner of the Midnight
Sun is someone supposed to be rich and reclusive, a South American
who, according to one rumor, won it all from Orsini one night at
cards. There is another rumor that says Gabriella Orsini was in
love with him, that her husband found out, and that in the argument
they had she shot him to death and that his body was never found.
There are even those who insist that they – Gabriella and her new
lover – were in it together, and that he was the one who, in order
to have her, murdered her husband one night at sea. All anyone
knows for certain is that the new owner, whoever he is, painted the
Midnight Sun a different color and gave her a different name. There
is one other thing. They say that the new owner is married to one
of the most beautiful women anyone has ever seen.”

I stood on the porch and waved as Tommy got
into his car and drove away. I watched as he went down the long,
narrow drive and out through the gate and the two stone pillars,
out past the sign for the Napa State Hospital. I watched until
there was nothing left to see.

That night, after I had had dinner and taken
my medication, I dreamed, the way I often do, of a beautiful woman
and a long, elegant yacht, Danielle St. James on board the Blue
Zephyr, sailing down the California coast on a sunlit summer night.
I watch as it moves farther and farther away, until it becomes a
tiny speck on the horizon, caught for a fleeting moment in the
scarlet light before it finally and forever vanishes out of sight.
And then I see myself, staring at the empty sea, wondering what
will happen to me now that I am safe on land and all alone.

A Note from the Author:

Thank you for reading
The Swindlers
. Please let
me know your thoughts about the book. You can send me email, sign
up for my newsletter and get updates about new releases by visiting
my web site at
www.dwbuffa.net
.

- D.W. Buffa

OTHER BOOKS BY D. W.
BUFFA

The Defense

The Prosecution

The Judgment

The Legacy

Star Witness

Breach of Trust

Trial by Fire

The Grand Master

EVANGELINE

Rubicon

(Released under the pen name

‘Lawrence Alexander’)