Swindlers by D.W. Buffa Page A

do. That look of disappointment, that was not her,
that was me. Maybe that’s why, despite my better judgment, I can’t
help but admire St. James a little. He’s like what I was – what you
were, too – in college. We didn’t follow anyone’s rules but our
own, we were better than the game. Everyone wanted to know us, get
close to us. We could have anything we wanted and we never thought
there was anything wrong with it. We could have any woman we wanted
and I married the best looking girl in school, and he married damn
near the best looking woman in the world.”
    “Danielle is all of that,” I agreed.
    “That’s not her real name, you know,” he
remarked quite casually. It was nothing important, a minor fact he
had picked up along the way, something anyone who conducted a
criminal investigation, or simply followed the New York social
scene and knew something about the world of high fashion, would
have known. “‘Danielle’ was the name she used as a model. Just that
one word. Clever, when you think about it; different, easy to
remember. The most famous model in New York, the face that for a
while was on practically every magazine cover any woman cared to
buy. She was beautiful, and St. James was rich and good looking. So
now she’s Mrs. Justine St. James, and along with her husband, is
about to lose everything she’s got.”
    “Justine? Is that what you said?”
    “Justine Llewelyn, that was her real
name.”
    “Justine Llewelyn, who grew up near San
Francisco, the other side of the bay?”
    “As a matter of fact, she did. Why? – Oh, I
see. You did know her then.”
    I was shaking my head in disbelief. Justine
Llewelyn. I had not seen her since her older sister, the girl I
wanted to marry, had broken our engagement.
    “Justine was all of about sixteen, skinny as
a rail and plain looking except for her eyes. A nice, quiet, shy
kid. She felt sorry for me, after what her sister did, and she told
me that she would marry me, when she was old enough. I remember
laughing and telling her that she could do much better. And now
she’s Danielle, and I didn’t remember a thing about her.”

CHAPTER Four
    Though it had been more than a dozen years
since I had last seen her, Carol Llewelyn greeted me as if I had
married into the family and had been gone only a few weeks.
    “It’s been a long time,” I remarked.
    “I’ve followed your career,” she said with a
brief smile. “I always knew you would do well.”
    Opening the trunk of her car, she reached for
the metal sign. I started to help, but she swung it free on her
own, joking that it was the only exercise she got. She carried the
bright red and blue open house sign to the bottom of the driveway
and placed it in front of the stone pillar on the right side of the
open iron gate. She stood there for a moment, her eyes full of
hopeful calculation, as she looked first at the house she was
trying to sell and then down the curving narrow two lane road.
Trying to guess what effect the searing summer heat might have, she
squinted up at the sky. There might not be many people out looking
on a day like this; on the other hand, the ivy covered house, set
back from the road under the shade of a massive spreading oak,
promised a welcome refuge from the blinding mid-day sun. With a
quick glance that said she thought things were fine, she started up
the drive, the staccato sound of her high heel shoes cracking the
silence of the burning air.
    The sun was not kind to Carol Llewelyn. Her
make-up was too thick; her lashes too black and too brittle. She
was in that inadmissible part of middle-age, when the vanity of
youth has been reduced to the sad and useless lie that she was only
forty-nine. The dress she wore, though perfectly pressed, was a
little frayed, and a little out of fashion; and the silver-blue
Mercedes she drove, though clean and polished to a shine, was
almost ten years old. It was easy to imagine her, after a grueling
day of smiling through the inane