by Buffa, D. W.
“What are we going to do?”
We looked at each other in the night time darkness. She smiled at me with her eyes.
“What are we going to do?” she asked me again, her voice become a sweet, sad lament.
“I don’t know. Get through tomorrow; get through the trial. See what happens then, I guess.”
“Why don’t we just stay here, after the trial, after it’s all over. I could – if you wanted me to.”
“Yes, I want you to. Would you?”
“Yes, I want to.”
“You have Michael.”
“Yes, I have Michael. Do you mind that – that I have a child?”
“No, of course not; why would I?”
“Maybe it isn’t a good idea; maybe it wouldn’t work.”
“It will work if we want it to. Do you want it to?”
“Yes, but let’s see how we feel – how you feel – when this is all over. You feel a certain way now, but when it’s over, when the trial stops, you won’t have the same responsibility, the same sense of obligation.”
I told her what I had not told her before, what I had known, deep down, from the beginning; what I had known from the first moment I saw her.
“I’m in love with you; obligation has nothing to do with it.”
She pressed her finger against my mouth and with a fragile smile tried to warn me.
“I’m not what you think I am. I’m not what I used to be. I wish I were; I wish I were still sixteen. I wish I could give you all you want, all you need, but I can’t! So don’t be in love with me, not like that, not so much that you can’t forget all about me when you find out how wrong I am for you.”
It may have been the only completely honest thing she ever said to me, but it was too late. I was in love with her; more in love than I had ever thought I could be. Everything that was going to happen, everything that was going to happen to me, all the heartache and tragedy, was written from that.
I did not sleep that night, not because I could not sleep, but because I did not want to miss a moment of what it was like to hold her in my arms. And so I held her while she slept, until morning came and I could not hold her anymore. The trial was not finished.
CHAPTER Fifteen
Robert Franklin wore a new suit. It had been bought off the rack at a department store, and it was less than a perfect fit, but the effort to look his best had itself a favorable effect on the jury when he stood in front of them, ready to begin his summation. He began by reminding them of the mistakes he had made.
“I’ve prosecuted a lot of cases, but this was the first time in a long time that I was nervous at the start of a trial.” He looked at them with shared sympathy. “Most of you, I imagine, felt a little the same way yourselves: all those people watching, knowing that everything was going to be reported all around the country, all around the world.” Remembering what he had done, a modest, rueful smile flashed across his face. “And then, not two minutes into my opening statement, I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say!” The smile grew broader, and more emphatic. He shook his head at his own misfortune. “Tell you the truth, for a moment I couldn’t even remember where I was.”
The only jurors who did not smile were the ones who were nodding their encouragement. They liked him for what he was doing. As much as any lawyer I had known, and far more than most, Franklin understood that jurors, like the rest of us, are far more likely to admire, and to trust, someone honest enough to admit his own deficiencies. Perhaps it was the lesson of his own handicap and what he had done to overcome it. America was the land of second chances.
“I made a fool of myself, I’m afraid; not only forgot what I wanted to say, but probably said some things I didn’t mean to say. It was not just the crowd; it was not just the coverage of the media, all the attention the trial received, that made me so self-conscious and ill at ease. That might not have bothered me at all if I had been up against someone else,” he said as his gaze drifted from the jury box and came to rest on me. “I have faced other lawyers before, some of them quite good, but none of them anything like as formidable and well-prepared as Mr. Morrison, the attorney for the defense.”
He looked at me, sitting just a few feet away, with what seemed genuine respect. With a brief nod, and a business-like smile, I acknowledged the gesture as coming from a respected adversary. The jury noticed, and approved, what it thought Franklin’s sense of fairness. It was a victory for the prosecution.
“But this is not a trial about the lawyers,” said Franklin, turning serious. “This is a trial about whether the defendant, Danielle St. James, murdered her husband, Nelson St. James. And on that issue the evidence is entirely on one side: Danielle St. James is guilty. Let me remind you what I told you at the beginning; what, despite my own mistakes, the prosecution was going to prove. I told you that this was not some crime of passion, an act of violence when an argument got out of hand; I told you that it was cold-blooded murder carried out for financial gain.
“The defendant came here, to San Francisco, with her husband, and they argued all the time. They were arguing when the plane landed, arguing at dinner to the point that she walked out of the restaurant, arguing when they left on that last deadly voyage on their yacht.”
Franklin’s eyes moved in a slow, methodical arc from one end of the jury box to the other. Shoving his left hand into his pocket, he dipped his forehead as he made a long, sweeping turn toward the table where Danielle sat next to me. It drew every eye toward her, serving as reminder that for all the courtroom fireworks, she was the one on trial and that he at least did not have the slightest doubt that she was as guilty of murder as anyone could ever be.
“And I told you that just moments after the shot was fired that killed Nelson St. James, the defendant, Danielle St. James, was found with the gun still in her hand, and that there was blood all over. That’s what I told you. Has it been proven? Was Nelson St. James shot on his yacht in the middle of the Pacific? Yes, of course: you heard the testimony – there isn’t any doubt about it. Was his death caused by a gunshot wound? Yes, everyone – even including the defense – agrees that was how he died. Nor does anyone dispute that the gun that killed him was found in the defendant’s hand or that the gun had the fingerprints of the defendant all over it.”
With his hands held loosely behind his back, Franklin began to pace, short, wandering steps, first in one direction, then another. The lines in his forehead deepened and spread farther across his brow. He was concentrating, as it seemed, on some problem of enormous difficulty and importance.
“All of the evidence – all of it! – points to her. No one else was out there, on the deck of the Blue Zephyr, when it happened. Her gun was the murder weapon – Yes, I know that it was purchased under her husband’s name, but she doesn’t deny that he bought it for her. It was her gun; she killed him with it; and before she could get rid of it – toss it overboard into the sea – she was caught with it, still holding it in her hand. All the evidence points to her, evidence about which there is not even the possibility of a doubt. But the question, the question the defense has tried to raise every chance it could, is why? Why would Danielle St. James have murdered her husband?”
Franklin stood at the end of the jury box, resting his left hand on the railing. A thin line of perspiration glistened on his forehead.
“I told you in my opening statement, as I reminded you just a few minutes ago, that it was ‘cold-blooded murder carried out for gain.’ Perhaps I should have said, ‘cold-blooded murder carried out because of money.’ The defense has tried to argue that Danielle St. James had every reason to want her husband alive. He was going to get a divorce, but so what if he did? She would get the house in the Hamptons and a million dollars a year. Now, because he’s dead, she doesn’t even get that. The death of Nelson St. James, in other words, costs her everything. But that leaves out all the anger, all the rage, the humiliation, she must have felt at being forced to submit to a pre-nuptial agreement that, no m
atter how large it may seem to you and me, was nothing compared to what she would have gotten in a divorce had that agreement never been signed. She murdered him, ladies and gentlemen – shot him to death – not because of the money she was going to get, but because of the money she was going to lose!”
Folding his arms across his chest, Franklin stepped back from the jury box and cast a baleful glance at Danielle.
“The evidence against her is overwhelming. What is her defense?” he asked, turning back to the jury as if they already knew the answer. “Does she claim that someone else on board took the gun and killed him? Does she claim that it was an accident, that the gun went off while they were in the middle of another one of their arguments? Does she claim that it was self-defense: that he was attacking her and it was the only way she had to stop him? No! She tells us that he killed himself! He was depressed, she tells us: depressed that he was losing her, depressed that he was in trouble. And the evidence offered for this? – Why, the testimony of the defendant herself. All the evidence proves she did it, and what does she say? – ‘I didn’t do it – he did. I didn’t kill him – he killed himself!”
Pausing, Franklin cast a long, knowing look at the jury, a look that told them they should treat Danielle’s testimony with all the contempt lies like that deserved. When he began to speak again, he was cool and methodical, calm and efficient, all the outrage gone as he became the voice of reason and responsibility.
For the next hour, Franklin reviewed with textbook precision the testimony of each witness, listing every relevant fact in a bare-bones outline of everything that had been said in the course of the trial. My mind on other things, I barely heard a thing he said. With everyone watching him, I looked at Danielle. Odd as it may seem, I felt grateful just to see her, a woman that beautiful with a face that perfect. And then, suddenly, I realized what I had been missing; what, of all things, I had not understood. That face – her face – was the best defense she had! Hurriedly, I scribbled a note to myself, not that I thought I could possibly forget what, had I only noticed, had always been obvious, but for the pure pleasure of seeing it in tangible form down on paper.
Franklin was nearly finished. I gave him my full attention and, because I now knew not only what I was going to do, but the effect it was likely to have, began to enjoy it, the way someone enjoys the performance of a play they have seen once before.
“All the evidence points to the defendant, Danielle St. James – and what does she tell us?” he asked, repeating with studied cynicism the question he had raised at the beginning. “That she did not do it, he did. It was suicide, and she feels bad about it because when he threatened to do it, she told him no one would miss him if he did.”
His hands on his hips, he thrust his chin forward and glowered defiance. He stared at Danielle, daring her, as it seemed, to rise from her chair and deny the truth of what he was saying.
“All good lies have some basis in truth. You wanted him dead, and by these words of yours you admitted it! But kill himself!” he asked, incredulous, as he wheeled around to the waiting eyes of the jury. “Why? Because he was about to lose his ‘young and beautiful’ wife, as Mr. Morrison would have us believe? But wasn’t it the defense that kept insisting that Nelson St. James was habitually unfaithful: all those other women and Nelson St. James kills himself because he is about to lose his wife? If this weren’t a case of murder, we’d all be laughing!
“But forget all that; forget that Nelson St. James was one of the wealthiest men in the world and, whatever you or I may think of how he lived, could do pretty much as he pleased; forget that he was in trouble with the law. Nelson St. James had a son, his only child, the child he wanted, the child he had married his wife to have. The defense wants us to believe that he killed himself because he was depressed? He had everything to live for, and the only reason he isn’t home with his son somewhere is because his wife could not stand the thought that she was about to be cast aside, replaced by someone else, cheated out of the fortune that in her mind should have been hers! Danielle St. James is guilty of murder, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and guilty is the only verdict you can give!”
Robert Franklin sank into his chair, exhausted, having gone to the limit of what he could do. He sat there, staring straight ahead, physically spent, but with a sense of his own achievement. Danielle St. James was guilty, and he had proven it.
The voice of Alice Brunelli broke a silence so profound that had you been sitting there you would have sworn you could hear your own heartbeat.
“Mr. Morrison, are you ready to make your closing argument?”
Instead of rising from my chair, instead of moving quickly and with a sense of purpose to the jury box, I crossed one leg over the other, threw my arm over the back of the chair and stayed where I was.
“Nothing that was said here, none of the testimony that the prosecution has spoken at such length about, is nearly as important as something Mr. Franklin did not mention at all. You never heard it from any witness, you never heard it from anyone; but it was always there, right in front of your eyes, the single undeniable fact that explains everything, and changes everything. The prosecution wants you to think that it was murder, but cannot prove it was murder at all.”
Slowly, almost casually, I got to my feet and with my hand on the corner of the table shook my head as if I had only now come to understand something that, though they did not yet know it, they knew as well. They were waiting for me, all twelve of them, when I raised my eyes; waiting for me to tell them what it was, quite without their knowing, they had always understood. I pointed to Danielle.
“Look at her. Have you ever seen anyone who looked like that, looked that beautiful? And yet no one has even mentioned it, not one of the witnesses called by the prosecution.” I stepped closer to the jury box. “What did they talk about instead? – Money. That’s all you heard about: how she married her husband for his money, how she murdered him because she wasn’t going to get all the money she thought she deserved.”
I looked at Danielle as if I were seeing her for the first time, and in a way, that was true. I had been so enamored of the way she looked, she had had such an astonishing effect on the way I felt, that I had lost the distance necessary to understand what it meant; not for me, but for everyone else, all the other people who, drawn by the way she looked, had feelings of their own.
“Assume that everything you’ve been told by the prosecution is true,” I continued, my attention back on the jury. “Assume she was greedy, calculating, interested only in what she could get; assume that more than anything she wanted the kind of wealthy, privileged life Nelson St. James with all his money could give her. That might tell you why she married him; it doesn’t tell you why he married her. But that’s obvious, isn’t it? Look at her! Everyone in this courtroom knows why he married her. You knew it the moment you walked in her and saw her for the very first time. Rufus Wiley must have known it, too, the first time he saw her. Rufus Wiley knew why Nelson St. James wanted to marry her. It wasn’t because he wanted a child – he could have had a child with anyone. It was because she was quite simply the most beautiful woman Nelson St. James had ever seen!”
Every eye in the courtroom followed mine as I stepped back from the jury box and gazed across at Danielle. She looked at me as if we were all alone, the only two people in the room. It did not bother her that a crowd was watching: she was used to everyone staring at her, the most beautiful woman any of them had ever seen. Something sad and wistful in her eyes, luminous and not immodest, seemed to acknowledge the truth of what others saw. With a pensive expression, I walked behind her and placed a protective hand lightly on her shoulder. The jury had to look at her while I spoke.
“If the reason – the only reason – she married Nelson St. James was because she wanted money, why would she worry about what she might be left with after a divorce?”
The question, absurd on the face of it, had a different meaning applied to her, a meaning just below the su
rface of conscious thought, one of those possibilities that, once you are made to see it, become suddenly the only thing that makes sense. I put it to them directly.
“If she married him for money – if what the prosecution says is true – how long do you think it would have been before she found someone else, someone just as rich? The money was supposed to have meant everything to her. What did the prosecution tell us? - That she killed him because of all the money she was going to lose! – But how could it have meant anything, when there were always so many other men with money, all of them as eager, as desperate, as Nelson St. James had been to have her for their own? Or is the prosecution going to insist that a divorced woman, even one who looks like this, has no prospects in this day and age?” I asked with a smile on my lips and laughter in my eyes.
My hand fell away from Danielle’s shoulder. I stepped to the side, not far, but enough to move her into the background so that nothing would distract the attention of the jury from the last thing I had to say to them. If they remembered nothing else, I wanted them to remember this.
“The prosecution insists it was murder. The defendant testified under oath that Nelson St. James took his own life. The evidence brought by the prosecution proves suicide every bit as much as it proves murder. And that means that the prosecution has not proved murder at all. Danielle St. James told you what happened, and not one witness called by the prosecution can prove that she was lying.”
I could have proved it, but I was not a witness for the prosecution: I was the lawyer for the defense. Caught up in all the emotion of the moment, the single-minded intensity of a closing argument in which the words had taken on a life of their own, I was almost convinced I was telling the truth.