Free Swindlers by D.W. Buffa Page A

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