Swindlers (5 page)

“College.”

“Yeah, college. Best time I ever had.”

He studied me, wondering if I agreed; but
then he remembered the reason why things had not been – could not
have been - the same for me. He was too good a friend to say it, so
I said it for him.

“You were an all-American; I was barely good
enough to play.”

“You started every game our senior year.”

“Only because the other guy got hurt,” I
laughed.

“I always thought you were better. Come on,
let’s go inside. It’s cooler, and I’ll get you a beer, and I’ll
tell you all the lies I’ve been saving up.”

I watched him move, the easy fluid motion,
the way that even standing still he seemed ready to explode,
suddenly running at full-speed, faster, quicker, than anyone I had
ever seen. He left me in the living room and went into the kitchen
and brought us back the promised beer.

“We’re not going to talk football and how
great we were, how we were the best team Southern Cal ever had, how
you won that Rose Bowl game after I ripped up my knee.”

He tapped his bottle against mine and took a
long slow drink. He smiled with his eyes.

“No, I don’t wonder what would have happened
if I had not got hurt, what kind of pro career I might have had. I
use to,” he admitted, “but what’s the point? Tell you the truth, I
don’t much like the game anymore.” He looked out the window next to
him, out at the flower garden and the swimming pool the other side,
out, I suppose, to what he still remembered of his life. “There are
a lot of things I don’t like much anymore.” A moment later, as if
he had just realized what he had said, he shook his head and
laughed. “It’s so damn quiet here, sometimes I start talking out
loud just to make sure I still have a voice.”

I had wondered how I was going to say what I
knew I had to. I had thought about it, tried to think of a way that
did not sound intrusive, but now I just stumbled into it.

“Why didn’t you call me, Tommy? There must
have been something I could have done. We’ve been friends
for….”

He stopped me with a look.

“We’re too good of friends for me to lie to
you the way I did to everyone else. Divorce is a little like death;
worse in some ways. Everyone wants to tell you how sorry they are.
You can’t exactly tell them that it’s the best thing that’s ever
happened, can you? Tell them how thrilled – no, grateful – that she
finally decided to leave. You have no idea what a relief it was.”
He gave me a quick, appraising glance. “No, you know. When you
heard, you weren’t surprised, were you?”

“No,” I admitted, “I wasn’t surprised, but
that didn’t change the fact that I was….”

But he was not listening. He was still caught
up in the memory of what happened and, more than that, the reasons
why, if he had only known it, had made it all inevitable.

“She was the best looking girl in school and
she married an all-American, the great running back, Saturday’s
hero. It was always going to be like that, the guy that everyone is
eager to be friends with, eager to do anything they could to help
us. When I got hurt, when I couldn’t play anymore, when I decided I
better follow you and go to law school and learn how to do
something, it never occurred to her that any of it would change,
and for a few years it didn’t. I was still the player, the college
football star, everyone who saw us full of smiles. And when it all
went away, she went with it; not consciously, not on purpose: she
found other things, other people, more interesting. All that
bright-eyed eagerness went away, all the fun disappeared. When we
were first married she would run to the door when I came home; when
I joined the U.S. Attorney’s office, became a government lawyer on
a government salary instead of joining some high-priced firm, she
barely said hello at night. She never complained, never asked me to
do anything different, but there was a look of disappointment, a
sense that I had let her down, that she had made a mistake.”

Staring straight ahead, he tapped his fingers
briefly on the arm of the overstuffed chair.

“It’s quiet here. I already said that, didn’t
I? It’s true, though. That’s why I came here, why I bought this
place. I’ve never been alone before.”

Suddenly, in that effortless way he had, he
was on his feet. He stretched his arms and then put his hands on
the small of his back and with a thoughtful expression stared down
at the faded red tile floor.

“You never thought you were very good,” he
said, raising his eyes just far enough to meet my gaze. “That’s why
you were better than that other guy, that’s why you’re just about
the best damn lawyer around.”

“Things were easy for you,” I reminded him.
“You were born with speed and quickness, and you could see how
things were going to happen before they did.”

“Things were easy for you, too – you finished
near the top of your class in law school. I barely made it.”

“And you became one of the best prosecutors
the government had.”

“Not good enough to get the guy you just went
sailing with.”

“You didn’t tell me that when I told you what
I was doing. You were after St. James?”

He made a helpless gesture, a rueful smile
that suggested that he wished he had had the chance. “I didn’t know
if you were about to represent him. Is that why he invited you – to
ask you if you would?”

We were friends, but we were also lawyers, a
prosecutor and a defense attorney, and I started to hedge my
answer. He caught my hesitation.

“I’m not prosecuting anymore. I quit,
remember?”

Tommy had left the U.S. Attorney’s office
shortly after his divorce. He had not given any reason, only the
familiar phrase that he was leaving to “pursue other
opportunities.” He had not pursued any, so far as I could tell,
unless you considered living alone somewhere outside L.A. among the
many possibilities that vague phrase suggested.

“Quit for good, or just long enough to figure
out what you want to do?”

With his hands shoved into his pockets, he
twisted his mouth to the side and narrowed his eyes, as if the
question had been written out on a piece of paper and he was
studying it for an answer.

“Quit the government for good. Quit being a
lawyer? I don’t know. Maybe.” He searched my eyes as if he thought
he might find the answer there, but nothing in my own experience
would help him find a way out of what was clearly a dilemma. “I
like the courtroom. I like the action. But it isn’t like football:
it isn’t a game. You don’t just walk off the field at the end, you
don’t just add up another game to the number you’ve won or lost.”
He was bouncing up on the balls of his feet, his shoulders slightly
lowered, his eyes focused straight ahead, but, just like when he
was playing, seeing everything around him. “You ever lose a case
where you know the guy was innocent, ever have to watch someone go
off to prison for something he didn’t do and there wasn’t a damn
thing you could do about it?”

“Is that what happened?” I asked, intensely
curious. “You sent someone away for something he didn’t do?”

“Not on purpose, not with what they call
‘conscious knowledge.’ In some ways it was worse. We were going
after people we knew we could get. Drug stuff mainly, easy cases to
win; not the ones in charge, the ones who manufacture, the drug
lords – we’d go after them when we could – but possession cases.
You get some kid, he’s hooked on crack, and you send him to prison
for ten, twenty years. He broke the law, you convict him. You do it
over and over again, and then you start to notice that it doesn’t
make any difference. The kid was a junkie, an addict; he needed
help. But we aren’t in the business of helping kids like that. So
we go after people who are, some of them, the real victims, and we
let a guy like St. James go around stealing billions and don’t do
anything about it because it’s too complicated, too expensive,
because it takes too much time to build a case you have any chance
of winning.”

He burst out laughing.

“Christ! Listen to me, sounds like one of
those half-time speeches we used to have to listen to – We’d be up
thirty points and the coach would be talking about how lousy we’d
played.” His eyes shined bright with the memory of it and he
laughed again, quietly now, at his own nostalgia. “That was the
problem, you see – running up the score. You can always have a
winning record – hell, you can go undefeated – if you only schedule
weak opponents.” He turned deadly serious. “That’s what we were
doing, trying only cases we knew we could win. I quit because I got
tired of beating up on people who could not fight back, kids who
had never had a chance. What kind of system is it that says that if
you steal a few hundred you do twenty years, but if you steal a few
billion – if you steal the whole damn country – you get to make an
apology and a chance to make amends?”

With a wistful expression in his clear blue
eyes, Tommy scratched his head. A smile that could have meant a
dozen different things moved slowly across his fine, straight
mouth, and then, slowly, faded away.

“But I might have gone on doing it, told
myself that lie we all tell ourselves, that I was just doing my
job, if I hadn’t suddenly found myself divorced and if they hadn’t
closed down the case I had against St. James.”

This, though it made more sense than what he
had said about it before, raised a different, and a more
intriguing, question.

“You were good enough to get him, but someone
wouldn’t let you. Someone in the government didn’t want St. James
prosecuted?”

“You could say that, but it’s nothing I could
ever prove. The order came from Washington, said we had spent too
much time on it, too much expense. They didn’t say I couldn’t
prosecute, only that I didn’t have any more time to build a case.
That was no choice at all and they knew it. I didn’t have a case,
not yet, that I could win.”

“He got to someone, got them to back
off.”

“Not like that, not the way you imagine. It’s
more subtle. No one gave anyone a bribe. No one transferred a few
million into some Swiss account. Some Washington lawyer, someone
who represents certain interests that St. James controls, would
have met with the attorney general, a friend of his, someone he
sees at social occasions, and mentioned that there were rumors of
an investigation, that Mr. St. James had nothing to hide, but that
this kind of publicity was harmful to the various enterprises on
which a good many people depended for their livelihood. If the
government had a case, Mr. St. James would welcome the chance to
prove his innocence, but if not, well, perhaps the attorney general
could look into it.”

“And the attorney general did – look into it,
I mean?”

“I doubt he looked into anything. He didn’t
have to. All he had to do was let it be known that we were there to
try cases, not waste time building cases that we weren’t sure would
ever amount to a case we could win. It’s a perfectly legitimate
policy, nothing that you could use to argue that the attorney
general had done something improper.”

There was something he had not told me.

“So why did I ask you if he wanted you to
represent him, if the case against him had been dropped? After I
quit, I had a long conversation with a reporter I knew, someone who
works for one of the financial papers. I told him everything I
knew, everything I suspected. He started an investigation of his
own, and now he has started to write about it. No one will be able
to stop it now. St. James will be indicted. It’s only a matter of
time.”

He went into the kitchen and got us each
another beer, and we went outside and sat at a wooden table beneath
a eucalyptus tree and talked about college and how nothing had ever
been quite that good again. We remembered some of the others we had
played ball with and talked about what had happened to them and the
way that for most of us our lives were still defined by what we had
been, whether we were still living in the reflected glory of the
past or trying to prove to ourselves and others that we were more
than a faded memory of a vanished boyhood dream. We talked for
hours, and the years fell away, and the dismal, minor tragedies of
our lives seemed like nothing, as vague and distant from the
present as when, instead of being part of us, they still waited in
a future we did not yet know. It felt good, the way it always did,
when I was with him, talking like this, the words less important
for what they said than all the other things they triggered; three,
four words and a dozen different visions of what we had not just
seen but felt at the moment, years before, when they passed before
our eyes. We talked about women, the ones we chased and the ones
who, because they did not know us, chased us, but more than all the
others, the ones that, if we had been smarter, we would have chased
instead. We talked and laughed and then the light was almost gone
and the still night air turned cool.

“We need to go eat,” said Tommy as he stood
up and headed back to the house. “I’ll change. It won’t take a
minute.”

It took less than that. He put on a long
sleeve shirt and we were ready to leave. He still had on the khaki
shorts and the sandals with the broken strap. We drove into town,
less than a mile away, a four block street that seemed deserted,
and out the other end, through two miles of orange groves to a
roadside café. The waitress knew Tommy by sight, and without
waiting to be asked brought him a glass of red wine. She had broad
shoulders and the large hands of a woman who had always worked, and
the tired, friendly eyes of a woman who never complained. When I
told her I would have the same thing, she nodded her approval.

We were halfway through dinner when Tommy
again brought up St. James.

“He’s going to be indicted, and he’s too
smart not to know it. That’s the reason you were invited, wasn’t
it? Because he wanted to have a chance to get to know you, to
decide if everything he had heard about you was true – he would
have had you checked out before he ever thought about meeting you,
of course, as he’s that careful. He asked you, didn’t he?”