Free Swindlers by D.W. Buffa

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