Swindlers by D.W. Buffa Read Free Book Online

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