Swindlers (8 page)

Afraid of getting in the way, I went outside
and walked around the pool. Standing in the shade of the eucalyptus
tree, the same spot where Carol had invited the young couple to
imagine the life they could have, I began to wonder about the same
thing myself. It was easy to imagine the blissful quiet and the
clean, sun-drenched air, away from the city and all the crowded
noise. Maybe it was too late to think of doing something else,
something other than what had become the settled routine of my
solitary life, but for a brief moment I remembered how I felt, with
Danielle in my arms, that night on Blue Zephyr, and thought how
good it would be if I could live in a place like this and come home
every night to someone like her.

“It’s like a zoo in there,” said Carol
Llewelyn, smiling at my distraction. “The owner will be happy.” She
looked back across the pool to the rambling stucco house and the
muted conversations going on inside. “I didn’t mean to abandon
you.” She peered down at the lawn, cut as close as a putting green.
“What’s he like, the man she’s married to, Nelson St. James? I’ve
read some things in the papers, but….”

It seemed incredible, but she insisted that
she did not know him, that they had never met.

“I wasn’t invited to their wedding. I don’t
know what she told him about me; nothing, I imagine. I never heard
from her after she left for New York.”

“Never heard from her?” I asked, stunned by
what she was telling me. “Why would she have done that? Did
something happen?”

“You mean, did we have a fight, did I throw
her out – something like that? – No, nothing like that at all. I
told you she always knew her own mind; that doesn’t mean that she
ever told me what she was thinking, or anyone else that I know of.
Maybe it was because she didn’t have a father; maybe it was because
I wouldn’t tell her who he was. She resented me for that; and of
course there was the way we lived, always just barely getting by.
She was smart, a straight A student. Everything came easy to her.
She could have gone anywhere to school – Stanford, Cal, one of
those schools back east – but she was not interested. The only
place she wanted to go was New York. She knew she had the kind of
face they were looking for, knew she could become a model. No one
else seemed to think so, but I told you she was smart. And so she
went to New York and became Danielle, invented herself and forgot
who she had been.”

She lapsed into a long silence, remembering,
no doubt with regret, but also with unmistakable pride, what her
younger daughter had done.

“I did hear from her once, after her baby was
born. She called from the hospital, happier than I had ever heard
her. She told me she was sorry for what she had done, sorry that
she had stayed away so long, sorry that she had cut me off. She
blamed it on her own selfish ambition, the way she had created a
new identity and become the woman the world wanted to see. She said
that until she had a child of her own she hadn’t known what it was
like to have someone that you love no matter what, someone you
would do anything to protect. She was crying at the end – the first
time I had heard her cry since she was a little girl. She promised
that things would be different, that she wanted me back in her
life.”

A small choking sound rose from Carol’s
throat. She did not need to say that despite Justine’s promise she
had not heard from her again.

“Why? – Do you know?” I asked with all the
sympathy I felt.

“Things are easier the second time. She had
left once; she left again. She may not even have remembered that
she called. Isn’t that what happens in a state of euphoria? – We
say things, do things, we don’t remember…or don’t want to
remember.”

With a look of impatience, a well-dressed
woman in her early thirties beckoned from the open French doors.
She had a question. Carol looked right through her and then turned
back to me.

“Is she in some kind of trouble? I’ve read
things about her husband. But even if they’re true, she wouldn’t
have been involved in anything like that, would she?”

Carol Llewelyn was still greeting new people
when I left, all of them come to see whether this was the house
about which they had always dreamed, the place that would finally
and forever make them happy. As I drove back across the long
double-decked span of the Bay Bridge, watching the city dance in
all its colors through the golden haze of a summer afternoon, I
knew I could never live anywhere else. San Francisco was still a
mystery, the way it drew everything toward it, as beautiful, as
close and as distant, as any look Justine – Danielle St. James –
had ever given anyone.

CHAPTER Five

The telephone was ringing, but it was either
too early or too late and I just wanted it to stop; but it did not,
and I groped around in the dark until I found it.

“What is it?” I barked.

“It’s me,” said someone who sounded
positively delighted that he had woken me up.

“Me?” I asked, turning on the lamp. The clock
next to it read 6:45.

“Yes, me – who else would it be? You don’t
have any other friends.”

Whoever this was, he was too cheerful, too
full of life, too eager to - “Tommy!” I laughed, suddenly wide
awake. “What are you doing, what’s going on?” I swung my legs out
of bed and sat up.

“Have you seen the papers?”

“I’m in the middle of a trial. I don’t read
anything,” I started to explain. “You mean this morning? You just
woke me up! Why, something happen?”

“St. James. I told you it would happen. He’s
been indicted.”

Holding the phone, I walked into the kitchen
and started the coffee, listening while Tommy took me through the
details of the various charges that had been brought. The far flung
financial empire that Nelson St. James had built and controlled
was, according to the grand jury, nothing more than a criminal
conspiracy that had corrupted not only individuals but entire
governments.

“He’s going to call you; he’s going to ask
you to handle it. Don’t do it. Don’t get involved. He’s hurt too
many people.”

“He won’t ask me, and I could not do it if he
did. It’s what I told you before: I wouldn’t know what I was doing.
And even if I did….”

I started to tell him about Justine’s mother
and what she had told me, but I realized that she had not really
said anything that had any bearing on whether Justine’s husband was
someone I would have wanted to defend. It was just a feeling, a
sense that St. James and his wife were two selfish people who cared
about nothing but themselves.

“He won’t ask me, Tommy; and I won’t do it if
he does.”

Tommy seemed almost relieved to hear it; not,
I knew, for the reason he gave me – that I was the only lawyer who
might be able to get him off – but because he did not want to see
my reputation tarnished by a too close connection with a man Tommy
had come to despise.

Even though I was in trial, I began to read
the papers, following the story with the rest of the country, if
with a peculiar interest all my own. I could not get out of my head
what Danielle’s mother had said: that whatever the son-in-law she
had never met might have done, her daughter could not be involved.
Behind the apparent assurance with which she had said it, there had
been the bare glimmer of a doubt, the hint of a possibility that,
given everything else she had done, how easily she had turned her
back on the past, she might after all be capable of even something
like this. But there was no mention of Danielle in any of the
printed stories, nothing beyond a passing mention that Nelson St.
James had after a messy divorce married the famous fashion model
four years ago.

The stories were all about him, and at first
they followed the usual, predictable pattern. He did what every
rich man does when he gets caught, claimed that he was innocent and
promised in a public statement that when he had a chance to tell
his story in a court of law everyone would know that the only
conspiracy involved was the one of which he had been made the
innocent victim. Then the pattern changed. There were no more
statements. He simply disappeared.

It was astonishing, how swiftly the rumors
spread and how quickly they changed. Nelson St. James became the
most famous fugitive in the world, Blue Zephyr a phantom ship that
could be in two places at once. On the same day he was seen in
Singapore, drinking gin and tonics in a bar, and also observed
having a heated discussion with a suspicious looking man in the
lobby of a Sydney hotel. He was seen in Paris, he was seen in Rome;
Blue Zephyr was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, Blue
Zephyr was anchored somewhere deep in Egypt, far up the Nile. For
weeks there was a flurry of speculation, and then, gradually, with
every rumor spent and not one thing proven true, other, different,
stories crowded St. James and his pirate ship out of the papers and
off the screen. Months went by, and then, after those who still
remembered had finally given up and declared with utter certainty
that St. James was living somewhere in South America where search
was meaningless and extradition did not exist, Blue Zephyr, as new
and shiny as the day she was christened, sailed beneath the Golden
Gate and into the San Francisco bay. But Nelson St. James was not
on her.

St. James was dead. He had been murdered,
shot to death, his body lost at sea. That was the headline in the
morning papers, but it was the picture beneath it that drew my
attention and held it there, the photograph of Danielle – Justine,
when I had known her, when she was the young girl no one noticed
twice, the girl who in her adolescent imagination had thought she
was in love with the still young man nearly twice her age who had
been engaged to her older sister. The picture in the paper, the
picture in my head, two pictures that looked nothing alike, and
yet, remembering the wistful disappointment in her eyes when she
told me that I had forgotten her, two pictures that merged as one:
the face of the girl and the woman she had become. What I could not
put together, what seemed impossible, was what the paper said had
happened: that Danielle St. James had killed her husband and had
now been charged with murder.

“Are you going to do it?”

I did not need to look up from my corner
table in the courthouse cafeteria. Philip Conrad had been a court
reporter for almost twenty years when I first started practicing
law, and in a strange way we had become friends; strange, because
we never saw each other outside of court. I knew him the way we all
know people with whom we spent part of our time at work. If I had
been asked where he lived or what he did on weekends, all I could
have said was that he lived somewhere in the city and that he
probably spent most of Saturday and Sunday typing up the trial
transcript some lawyer needed for an appeal.

There were things I knew about him, however,
that others did not. He had taken an interest in me from the first
trial I had in which he was the reporter, and he used to tell me, a
young lawyer who could not find his way to the clerk’s office
without help, stories about the legendary lawyers he had known
years earlier. A few years after we first met, he told me that he
had married the girl from the neighborhood where he had grown up,
the girl he had known ever since he was just a boy, how he married
her after he came home from Vietnam, a twice-wounded veteran of the
war, how they moved into a small two-bedroom house out on the
avenues where he still lived. He had an old-fashioned way of
talking, especially when it came to things that were by any measure
personal and deeply felt. In a single sentence, spoken with the
kind of restrained emotion that only makes you, the witness, feel
how much another man has suffered, he told me in a firm, quiet
voice that she saved his soul every day he lived with her, and that
when she died, a year and a half later, struck by a car on her way
home from the store, the best part of him had died as well. He kept
her picture on the bedroom dresser, and year after year went
through the motions of his life, and never once, in that
regrettable phrase which treats all tragedy as a temporary
inconvenience, thought of ‘moving on.’ Modest, self-effacing, with
a pleasant round face and gentle eyes, he was, so far as the world
knew, a generally cheerful man.

“Are you going to do it?” he asked again as
he settled into the chair on the other side of the plain plastic
table.

“Do what?” I asked, though I knew very well
what he meant.

He nodded toward the newspaper I had just put
down.

“Defend her.”

“I haven’t been asked.”

“You knew them, didn’t you?”

Beyond the fact that I had spent a weekend on
Blue Zephyr, I could not remember how much I had told him.

“I met them; I couldn’t really say I got to
know them very well.”

His eyes raised a question, seemed to suggest
a doubt. He had been the reporter in so many trials, listened to so
many lawyers, that he knew by a kind of instinct not just when
someone was lying, but when, in that more subtle form of deception,
they were leaving something out.

“You should have been a prosecutor,” I
observed. “You ask a question, hear the answer, and then just sit
there and wait for something more. There isn’t,” I tried to assure
him, but then, because I could not ignore that somber, unrelenting
gaze of his, I had to qualify it. “Nothing important.”

A prosecutor – any cross-examining attorney -
would have smiled at this admission, but Philip Conrad, with his
mute insistence, did not care about making a point, he only wanted
to hear the truth. The only change in his expression was a slight
movement of his thinning eyebrows as he discovered a deeper meaning
in what I had said.

“A woman that beautiful, there’s always
something more.”