Swindlers (3 page)

“And the place in Palm Beach,” added the
other woman in a biting, scornful voice.

Standing at the railing, like a store window
mannequin, Bunny Harper had short, shiny black hair cut sharp
across her forehead and straight across her slender shoulders,
bright red lipstick and brazen white teeth. She was about to say
something caustic, from the way her lip had begun to curl back,
when she noticed me.

“Have you known Nelson long?” she asked with
a smile invented on the instant.

“We’ve gotten to know each other,” I replied.
“But you were about to say something, and I’m afraid I
interrupted.”

“You were going to say that they’re selling
damn near everything they own,” said Pamela Oliver, still working
on her legs.

Bunny Harper gave her an icy stare.

“I wasn’t going to say anything. I heard
something about the Palm Beach house, but that’s probably not true,
either; probably just more rumors.”

There was an awkward silence. Townsend
Oliver, Pamela’s husband, offered me a drink, and when I asked for
a Bloody Mary allowed that he could use one himself. Bunny’s
husband, Roger Harper, finished off what was left of a gin and
tonic and asked for another. He was older than Townsend, with tired
eyes and a grim, almost brutal mouth, and the voice of a worn out
gambler on a losing streak. His family owned steel mills in
Pennsylvania. Townsend, on the other hand, was one of the new breed
of self-made men; not the kind that, in an earlier generation, had
worked their way up with their fists, but the kind who came from
affluent, upper middle-class homes, and went to Stanford on
scholarship. He had a software company and, not yet forty, had more
money than Harper and his family had ever dreamed of making. I had
not met him before last night, but I knew people who had. There was
talk he wanted to run for governor.

“Why would anyone want to have a place in the
Hamptons, or Palm Beach, or anywhere else for that matter, if you
could live on this?” I asked in all innocence. “There aren’t many
houses this size, and you can go anywhere in the world on it.” I
glanced at Bunny Harper. “And they’re not selling this,” I remarked
with perfect confidence.

Though she tried to hide it, she was
surprised that I seemed to know this. She tried to hide a great
many things. Eye shadow, piled too thick around the edges, had
begun to crumble into pieces, revealing all the effort that had
gone into the failed effect. Her husband, nursing his drink, sat at
some distance from her. He was not surprised at all.

“This is the last thing he’d sell. Morrison
has put his finger on it. You can go anywhere on this, sail far
away, places where the government has no jurisdiction.”

“Careful, Roger! We shouldn’t be talking
about…!”

He ignored her. He took a long drink of his
gin and tonic and signaled the steward he was ready for another. A
shrewd smile settled on his mouth.

“Our good friend Nelson is involved in a
great many things and none of us much cared what he did, or how he
did it, because whatever else happened we could always count on him
getting a good return. The market did well, but we did much better
- didn’t we, Townsend? Did you ever wonder how he did it, did so
much better than anyone else, made us the kind of money that made
us feel smart for talking our way into the deal?”

“And he’s still doing it, isn’t he?” replied
Townsend with some irritation. “Some people are just better at
doing certain things,” he added with confidence. “Nelson knows how
to invest.”

The lines in Roger Harper’s forehead deepened
and grew broader. He looked at Townsend with the pity one feels for
a fool.

“Is that what you think he knows – how to
invest? I think he knows something more interesting than that; I
think he knows how blind people can be, how eager they are to
believe it whenever someone tells them that he knows how to make
them more money than they’ve ever imagined. I think –”

“I think you’ve had too much to drink,” said
Townsend.

“Screw you, Townsend,” said Harper with a
caustic glance. “What the hell do you know about anything? And
screw Nelson St. James,” he added when his wife started to
interrupt. “Screw the whole lot of them.”

He crouched forward, looking straight at me.
There was a marvelous clarity in his eyes, the seasoned certainty
of someone who does not care what anyone else thinks or says.

“When people find out what’s been going on,
when they find out what he did, how he did it, they’ll be talking
about it for years, wondering why no one ever caught on. Who knows,
they may even start to wonder how people who always thought they
were so damn smart could be so stupid!”

Bunny Harper was tugging at his arm.

“He’s coming!” she whispered urgently as he
started to resist.

“Come on everyone!” shouted St. James as he
stepped up on deck. “Danielle wants a picture.”

That evening Blue Zephyr anchored off the
Channel Islands. The lights of Santa Barbara danced on the
moon-covered sea and the liquor flowed freely and everyone acted as
if they were the best of friends, all of them anxious to please.
St. James glanced down the table to where I was sitting between
Pamela Townsend and Richard Darwin’s small, waspish wife.

“We were talking last night about -”

“Getting away with murder,” interjected
Darwin as he continued to eat. His eyes never left his plate. St.
James looked at him as if the man were hopeless. “Getting away with
murder,” Darwin reminded him again as he reached for another piece
of bread.

“Yes, and for some reason it suddenly seems a
much more attractive possibility,” said St. James as he watched
Darwin wipe the bread into some gravy before shoveling it into his
mouth. The remark was lost on Darwin, but his wife understood.

“Getting away with murder,” she said in a
small, reedy voice that seemed to hiss with resentment, “If you
have enough money I suppose you might think you could get away with
anything.”

She meant to stab him in the heart, to do all
the injury she could; St. James treated it as an intelligent
suggestion that led to the very point he wanted to make.

“Money would be essential. Without it, you
couldn’t hire Morrison.”

But Darwin’s wife was not going to let it
stop there. She did not like being put off. She was about to make
another caustic remark when Danielle got everyone’s attention by
challenging her husband.

“But if someone wanted to get away with
murder – thought about it in advance – why would they need to hire
Anthony? Isn’t the best way to get away with murder not to get
caught in the first place? Isn’t the only reason to hire Anthony
Morrison and his honest face because you’ve failed, didn’t plan it
well enough?”

Darwin belched, and seemed not be aware of
it. There was nothing left on his plate. Beneath their heavy lids,
his sharp, rapacious eyes darted from one side of the table to the
other, searching for something he might have overlooked. Vaguely
disappointed, he slid back in his chair and folded his arms.

“That’s worse than murder.”

He was looking right at me, and there was
nothing friendly in the way he was doing it. I knew what he was
going to say - it was written all over his face, and I had heard it
often enough before. I tried not to laugh.

“What’s worse than murder?”

“What you do, helping someone get away with
it; what a lawyer does when he tricks a jury into letting some
murdering bastard go free.”

“Is that what you think you would call it –
‘murdering bastard,’ ‘a lawyer’s tricks’ – if you were charged with
a murder you didn’t commit? It’s really quite amazing,” I said,
daring him to disagree, “how many people who always thought anyone
who was arrested must be guilty, suddenly decide the police are
idiots or worse and the whole system stupid and corrupt when
they’re the ones charged with a crime.”

Richard Darwin was too used to running
things, too accustomed to everyone agreeing with him, to consider
me anything but offensive. His face turned several shades of red,
but before he could sputter an angry reply, Danielle again
intervened.

“What I want to know,” she said, laughing as
if Darwin was acting a part, pretending to an anger he did not
feel, “isn’t how you could defend one of those ‘murdering bastards’
Richard gets so upset about; what I want to know is how you,
yourself – after all you’re the only one here who really knows
about this sort of thing – would go about it, what you would do to
get away with murder. Yes, tell us!” she cried. “You’ve worked with
all these people, tried all these cases – you must have thought
about it,” she purred. “What would you do if you wanted to kill
someone and did not want to get caught? Tell us, Anthony Morrison;
tell us how to commit the perfect murder.”

I felt a strange sense of triumph. I could
look right at her now, return her gaze, and not lose my train of
thought.

“Three things: an alibi that is unbreakable,
a weapon that is untraceable, and, most important of all, someone
else to blame.”

“Someone else to blame?” asked St. James from
the end of the table.

“The jury has to believe that the real
murderer is out there, still at large, and that if they don’t vote
to acquit the defendant, the real murderer, whoever he is, will get
away with it.”

“But we’re talking about the perfect murder,”
he reminded me. “The killer never goes to trial because he never
gets caught.”

“It comes down to the same thing: There has
to be someone else to blame. The police almost never look for a
second suspect once they have the first. There’s one problem of
course.”

I looked around the table, at Darwin, who was
thinking about something else, and at the others, at Townsend
Oliver and Roger Harper and the women they had married, and at the
other couples, all of them rich beyond imagining and certain that
they were worth even more. The problem I had posed was obvious, but
only if you had a conscience. None of them were willing to hazard a
guess. If you could get away with murder, if it was as easy as I
had seemed to suggest – an alibi, a weapon no one could find, and
someone else to blame – what problem, if there was one, could rank
in importance with the fact that it could be done?

“Instead of committing just one murder,” I
explained finally, “you would be committing two.”

Everyone still seemed baffled, all except
Danielle.

“You also kill the person who gets blamed. He
gets arrested, charged with murder, and though he’s completely
innocent, all the evidence is against him; everyone thinks he’s one
of those ‘murdering bastards’ of Richard’s elegant description, and
he’s convicted and either spends the rest of his life in prison or
is executed for his crime. But why is that a problem?”

She said this in such a casual, offhand way,
with such stunning indifference, that I wondered if she meant it,
if for all her beauty she could be as cold, as heartless, as that.
She saw the doubt in my eyes almost before I knew it was there. The
smile on her lips became enigmatic, mysterious, and yet somehow
full of understanding, as if instead of just having met we had
known each other for years.

“If the real murderer is worried about that,”
she explained in a quiet, thrilling voice, “all he has to do is
make sure the accused has someone who can save him, some like you,
Anthony Morrison.”

Dinner was over and the serious drinking
began. Whether or not it was the tension brought on by the
uncertainty of what was going to happen next, all those whispered
rumblings about whether St. James was in trouble and what that
might mean for them, the drinking, once it started, did not stop.
It went the way of most gatherings of unhappy people forcing
themselves to have a good time: cheap talk and brazen laughter,
knowing looks and sidelong glances, a single meaningless word the
cause of wild hysterics, a sudden dead exhaustion, a raucous shout,
and then a call for another round.

St. James and his wife smiled politely,
laughed softly, and, as I noticed, scarcely touched their glasses.
The louder the others talked, the quieter, the more withdrawn, the
two of them became. A little after midnight, St. James excused
himself and said he had had to get off to bed. A few minutes later,
Danielle announced she had to get some air. As she passed behind
me, she touched my shoulder and quickly whispered, “Join me, if you
like.”

My eyes were fixed directly across the table
on Bunny Harper, who was trying to tell me something above the
noise, something that, when she finally had my attention, she could
not remember. I waited a few more minutes before I slowly rose from
the table, stretched my arms and wandered out of the dining room
alone.

It felt good to be outside, away from the
noisy chatter and the stale scent of alcohol. Across the moonlit
water, the lights of Santa Barbara flickered in the distance and in
the cool night air I realized what I fool I had been. She might be
the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but she was married, and
that was always trouble.

“What are you laughing about?” asked Danielle
in that haunting, breathless voice of hers. “How easy it is to get
me outside alone?”

And then, before I knew what I was doing, she
was in my arms and I could not think of anything but how much I
wanted her.

“Danielle!” shouted St. James as he suddenly
came out on deck. He was still looking the other way.

“God, if he sees us…!” whispered Danielle,
clutching my arm.

I started to tell her that it was all right,
that he had started in the other direction, but she turned and
vanished into the darkness.

“Oh, it’s you, Morrison,” said St. James as,
less than a minute later, he approached. He had removed his coat
and loosened his tie. He held a drink in his hand. “I had to get
out of there,” he explained with a gruff laugh. “Can’t stand people
who can’t hold their liquor. Besides, I had some work to do. Have
you seen Danielle? I thought I heard her come up on deck.”