Swindlers by D.W. Buffa Page B

I’m going to help you,” I told her after
a long pause, “there can’t be any secrets. I have to know
everything; you can’t hold back anything.”
    She promised to tell me everything, swore she
would be the best, most cooperative client I had ever had, and I
believed her, not just because I had known her long before she
became the famous face so many people thought they knew, but
because she knew I meant it when I told her that the first time she
lied to me would be the last, that even if we were in the middle of
the trial she would never see me again. When she asked me what I
wanted to know, I started at the beginning, or what I thought was
the beginning. I asked her why she had married him. I did not doubt
it was all about the money, but I wondered if there had been
something more, if not love, then at least a feeling. Though the
question could not have been simpler, it seemed to catch her off
guard. Apparently, she had thought I was going to ask about the
murder, of what had been called murder, her husband’s death. She
had an answer for that; there would have been little else she would
have thought about, coming to ask a lawyer to take her case, but
she had not thought about this.
    “Why did you marry him?” I asked again.
    “I’ll tell you; I’ll tell you everything,
though I wonder what you’ll think of me when you know. But I want
you to know one thing first: marrying Nelson St. James was the
worst mistake I ever made. I wish I’d never met him, I wish….”
Shaking her head in despair, she bit her lip and looked away.
    “Take your time,” I told her, watching the
way she seemed to recoil from even the bare mention of her dead
husband’s name. “Start at the beginning. Tell me how you first met
him.”
    Her head snapped up. She glared with what
seemed anger, but, as soon became clear, it was directed, not at
me, but at the memory of what had happened, of what, as it turned
out, she had done to make it happen. That look of anger quickly
became one of derision.
    “It was in an office, an office rather like
this,” she said, with an expansive gesture of her hand. “It was
larger, of course, much larger; but furnished in the same
impeccable manner, the understated look of someone who knows the
value of things. Whatever else Nelson did or did not know, he knew
that.”
    Resting an elbow on the arm of the chair, she
draped her thumb and forefinger around her chin and gave me a look
catlike in its luminous intensity.
    “He wanted to see me,” she began, speaking
slowly, making sure I understood the hidden meaning, the real
truth, of each word. “Nelson St. James, the mysterious and always
elusive Nelson St. James, wanted to see me.” Her eyes flashed, her
chin came up a defiant half-inch. “I was not invited, I was
summoned. He owned everything – half of New York - , more than
that, I suppose. Nelson St. James wanted to see me, a young fashion
model with ambition. Why wouldn’t I go?”
    She bent forward, closer, a strange
excitement coming over her as she began to tell me what had
happened.
    “He said he admired my work; he said he
wanted to talk about my future. He said a lot of things about how
my career would be managed and how famous I was about to become. I
listened, I waited, I did not say a word; and then, when he was
finished – after he had told me all the great things that were
going to happen – I told him that was not the reason he had sent
for me, and that he should have just told me at the beginning what
he wanted. And then, before he could even think to say anything
more, before he could start on that stale, practiced seduction he
must have used on a thousand different women, I let him have me,
right there in his office, an office just like this. When it was
over, when he started to ask about the weekend and the places we
could go, I laughed, and then I left. He started calling, of
course….”
    ‘Of course’ - She pronounced that phrase
without a shade of arrogance or