Swindlers by D.W. Buffa

he was not saying,
something he was holding back.
    “You don’t think I should, do you?”
    He hesitated, as if he were not quite sure
what he thought.
    “It might be one you can’t win. A jury won’t
like her. Married to a man with that much money, a woman who looks
like that – a jury won’t trust her. Would you?”
    Conrad did not wait for an answer; I suppose
because he thought the question answered itself. He was right, of
course, if you had to make a judgment based on who she married and
how she looked. It was in its own way one of the great ironies,
that everyone thought they knew all about her when they knew those
two things - all that money and that stunningly beautiful face -
and that a dozen years earlier no one could have imagined that
anyone with money would ever have wanted to marry her. That still
left the question whether, whatever a jury might think, I could
trust her if I had to, and the answer was that I did not know. When
I knew her as a girl, I had never had any reason not to trust
Justine to tell me the truth, but Danielle was a woman whom I
barely knew at all. Justine could not have hurt anyone; Danielle,
for all I knew, had done exactly what they said she had, murdered
the man she married, the father of her child. Of course it did not
matter what I thought. I had not heard from her and I was certain I
never would. Some high profile lawyer from New York was no doubt
already preparing a defense. I would not have to struggle with the
question whether Justine had really committed murder and what could
be done about it.
    But I was wrong; I would have to struggle
with it, a struggle that would be much harder than anything I had
imagined. Danielle was waiting for me late that Friday afternoon
when I got back from court, the trial that had lasted weeks finally
over.
    “I seem to be in some trouble,” she said in a
soft, silky voice that floated breathless in the air. She rose from
the chair, a faint smile of nostalgia and regret on her lips. “I
was hoping you could help.”
    Though it scarcely seemed possible, she was
even more beautiful than I remembered. I led her into my private
office and watched, half-mesmerized, as she slid on the chair the
other side of my desk and started taking off her gloves.
    “If I had come here a week or so after that
weekend on Blue Zephyr,” she asked as she pulled five slender
fingers out of the second black glove, “what would you have done?-
Perhaps invited me out to lunch?”
    I felt too stupid, too confused, to talk. She
seemed to enjoy it, how easily she had reduced me to utter
incoherence. But there was more to it than the knowledge of the
effect she had. For a brief moment, behind the laughter in her
eyes, I thought I glimpsed the secret triumph of revenge. She
tossed her head in what appeared to be defiance, not just at the
memory of what she had felt as rejection, all those years ago, but
at what was expected of a woman in her present, unfortunate,
situation.
    “Where do you think we would have gone?” she
persisted in a mocking, teasing voice. “One of those busy places
near the Ferry Building with a view – or a restaurant in some small
hotel where we might have left before we ordered anything and taken
a room?”
    I was not sure what to say or even what to
think. All I knew for certain – and if I had had any doubt about it
before, I was sure about it now – was that I could not help her and
she needed to find another lawyer. But then, before I could tell
her, she shrugged her shoulders and with the quick, furtive glance,
of someone who knows you share her secret, gave a rueful laugh.
    “This is like one of those old movies, isn’t
it? – The widow accused of murdering her wealthy husband, the
window in the black dress, the dress that suggests a great many
things, though mourning isn’t one of them, walks into the office of
the only lawyer who might be able to save her and tries to seduce
him into doing it.”
    In her quiet, pleading glance,