Fatal Flaw Part 2

He stared at me for a long moment, his face straining for an expression of pained sincerity, which might have worked except for the raw fear leaking out his eyes.

I leaned back. "Not me. You need someone else. I'll recommend somebody good. Goldberg, maybe, or Howard. He's at Talbott, Kittredge, so he's expensive, but whoever you get, it's going to cost. A case like this will absolutely go to trial, and a trial is going to cost."

"I don't care. What's money? Money's not a problem."

"No?" I said, surprised and interested at the same time. Guy had left his wife and left his job and in so doing seemed to have left all his money behind.

"No. Not at all." He shook his head and a shiver ran through him. "What happened? I don't understand. Who did this to me?"

"To you?"

"Who did this?"

"You tell me."

"I don't know."

"Tell me what you do know."

"I got home from work late. Hailey was in bed already, asleep. I greeted her, tried to kiss her. She wouldn't get up. Instead she murmured something back and pulled the comforter over her, and that was it, the last we spoke. I filled the Jacuzzi, climbed in, put on the headphones, jacked the Walkman loud, turned the timer to start the jets, lay back in the tub."

"What about the reefer?"

"It was already out, so I rolled myself a joint. We used to smoke some, together. Everything was like we were kids again. I might have fallen asleep in the tub, I don't know. The music was loud, the Jacuzzi also, and I don't know if I heard anything, but I did startle awake for some reason. Maybe just something in the music. I took off the headphones, turned off the whirlpool, called out for Hailey. Nothing. I put in some more hot water, lay back, listened to the rest of the disc. When it was over, I got out, dried off, brushed my teeth. That's when I found her."

I tried not to react too strongly, tried to keep it simple, conversational. "What were you listening to?"

"A Louis Armstrong thing."

"What happened when you saw her?"

"I panicked, I went crazy. I looked around, and there, on the floor, I found the gun."

"Had you ever seen the gun before?"

"Yes. Of course. It's mine."

"Yours? Guy, what the h.e.l.l were you doing with a gun?"

"You think it was easy what I did, leaving everything for Hailey? You think it just went smoothly? My wife went nuts, and her father. Her father, Jesus, he's a scary b.a.s.t.a.r.d, a heart of stone. There were threats, Victor, some shady private eye giving me the number. You'll never know what I went through for love, never. I was scared. I had a gun before, when I was out west, and knew how to use it. So I bought one, kept in the closet downstairs. Never touched it, never even took it to a shooting range to bone up. But when I found her dead, there it was, on the floor. I picked it up. It stank of gunpowder. I thought the guy who used it might still be in the house. I went downstairs looking for him. Nothing. I threw open the door. Nothing. I ran back upstairs and saw her there, still, and I fell apart. When I was able to crawl, I crawled to the side table, picked up the phone, and called you."

"Why me?"

"I don't know. It was the first thing I thought about. Hailey had mentioned something."

"Hailey?" I fought to keep the startle out of my voice.

"A couple days ago she had asked me a strange question. Who I would call if I was in serious trouble. I said I didn't know, hadn't really thought about it. She asked about you and I told her, yeah, Victor would be a good one to call. Aren't all your clients in trouble when they call?"

"That's right."

"So I had it in my mind to get you."

"Why not the police? Why not an ambulance?"

"She was dead, an ambulance wasn't going to help. Victor, I didn't know what I was doing. I was in trouble and I called you. You were the only one I could count on, the only who would understand."

I stared at him.

"You're all I have left."

If I was all Guy had left, he was totally bereft.

"Okay," I said. "That's enough. I don't want to hear any more. Why don't we go to bed, get some rest. Tomorrow we'll get you an attorney, and together you'll figure out what to tell the police. I set you up with a towel and new sheets."

"I'll sleep on the couch."

"No, you need your sleep. I'll stay out here."

"Victor, how much trouble am I really in?"

"More than you could imagine."

"It's hard to believe it could be worse than I imagine." Pause. "Hailey's gone. And I didn't do anything. It's not fair."

"Fairness has nothing to do with it. They found her murdered on your shared bed. From what I could tell, there were no signs of forced entry. They'll check fingerprints, but my guess is they'll discover yours and Hailey's, that's it. By now they've found the money in the bureau, so they'll rule out robbery. And then they'll dig into your lives and find a motive. Had you been fighting?"

"No. G.o.d, no, we were in love."

"No trouble in the relationship?"

He looked away as he said no.

"They'll find a motive, Guy. There's always a motive between a man and a woman: jealousy, pa.s.sion, heat-of-the-moment anger. It doesn't take much to convince a jury that one lover killed another. How were you and Hailey really?"

"Fine. Great."

"Tell me the truth."

"We were great."

"Was there anyone else?"

"No. I had given up everything for her. We had been planning our future together just the other night. We were going to Costa Rica for two weeks. Why would I screw around with anyone else? Everything was rosy."

I stared at him. He stared back.

"Rosy," I said.

"That's right. And then this nightmare. That's what it is, a nightmare. And it's only just beginning, isn't it? Jesus."

"Let's get some sleep."

"What am I going to say to them tomorrow?"

"You're either going to tell the truth or you're going to say nothing. Those are the options."

"Which one am I going to follow?"

"It's not up to me," I said. "We'll get you a lawyer tomorrow, and the two of you will figure it out."

I helped him up off the couch, took him into the bedroom.

"Thanks, Victor," he said as I stood in the doorway. "Thanks for everything."

I nodded and closed the bedroom door behind me. Then I sat in the living room, outside the cone of light, and waited. The toilet flushed, the faucet turned on and off, the toothbrush scrubbed, the faucet turned on and off once again. I wondered if he would glance at the page in the novel I had left marked for him, but the light under the crack disappeared too quickly for that. I waited a while longer and then, when I heard no sound for a quarter of an hour, I stood and went to my raincoat, still hanging over the chair.

I took out the portable phone, the expired license, and the key and placed them in a kitchen drawer. I took out the marihuana and ran it, wad by wad, through the garbage disposal until there was nothing left of it. Then, with my handkerchief, I lifted the gun out of the raincoat pocket.

I lifted the gun out of the raincoat pocket.

The gun.

I took it to the kitchen, wiped the trigger guard where my fingers had touched it when I picked it off the step, and dropped it into a plastic sandwich bag.

It was a revolver, thick and silvery, a King Cobra .357 Magnum, so said the markings on the barrel. It felt heavy, solid. It felt just then like a serious instrument of justice. Even in its plastic sheath it was a comfort in my hand.

I brought the bagged gun with me back to the couch. I turned off the light, lay down with my head on the armrest, placed the gun on my lap. I had never much liked guns before, never even wanted to fire one, but, I had to admit, it gave one options. I lay down on my couch with the gun and tried to figure what to do about my old friend Guy Forrest. What to do about Guy. Because, you see, I had listened very carefully to everything he had to say about Hailey Prouix and her murder, listened to his whole sad story, and, at the end, I knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt at all, that dear old Guy was lying.

4.

GUY FORREST and I attended law school together. Two kids from poor, dysfunctional families looking to reinvent themselves, we took to each other right away. I used to crack wise to him about everyone else in the cla.s.s, laughing at all their elevated aspirations even when my aspirations were just as inflated, only more so, and he would smile tolerantly. I was in law school because I saw it as a way to make some real money in the future, something that had always been denied my father. Guy saw it as a lifeline out of a misspent youth. Through college and beyond he had lived wild; drugs, women, a scam out west that had gone bad, the details of which he never quite laid out for me but which had left him with a tattooed skull on his left breast and a crushing desire to go straighter than straight. To that end he strangled his wild inclinations with a grim seriousness that he thought appropriate for his new profession and never let go of his grip. and I attended law school together. Two kids from poor, dysfunctional families looking to reinvent themselves, we took to each other right away. I used to crack wise to him about everyone else in the cla.s.s, laughing at all their elevated aspirations even when my aspirations were just as inflated, only more so, and he would smile tolerantly. I was in law school because I saw it as a way to make some real money in the future, something that had always been denied my father. Guy saw it as a lifeline out of a misspent youth. Through college and beyond he had lived wild; drugs, women, a scam out west that had gone bad, the details of which he never quite laid out for me but which had left him with a tattooed skull on his left breast and a crushing desire to go straighter than straight. To that end he strangled his wild inclinations with a grim seriousness that he thought appropriate for his new profession and never let go of his grip.

Guy worked harder than I did, he had a true grinder's mentality-we all made outlines; he outlined his outlines-but I was the sharper student. In our first year, when they try to teach you a new way to think, I adapted pretty quickly, but Guy had troubles. He found it impossible to pull out the crucial differences in fact patterns that distinguished one case from another. Something in the way his brain worked made it difficult for him to prioritize. I think one reason Guy hung with me was that I could see order in what to him was a blizzard of meaninglessness. I hung with Guy because, in the bars where the law students scarfed wings and sucked beers, he was a chick magnet and I hoped to the catch the runoff.

Guy actually ended with better grades than mine, hard work does pay, but neither of us did well enough to guarantee our careers. At Harvard, middling grades will get you a freshly minted job at some hotshot Wall Street firm. Where we went to law school, middling grades leave you scrambling to find any kind of work. I applied to the best firms in the city, was rejected by each and every one, and was forced to hang my own shingle. I asked Guy if he wanted in on my fledgling enterprise but he turned me down, so I partnered instead with a sharp night-school graduate in a similar predicament, Beth Derringer. Guy was determined to find a respectable job, and he did, at a nasty little sweatshop called Dawson, Cricket and Peale.

Dawson, Cricket was one of the defense factories that burned out scores of young lawyers as it churned each year through thousands of cases representing insurance companies against a myriad of both worthy and unworthy claims. At Dawson, Cricket you were on the side of the doctor against the patient butchered by incompetence, on the side of the insurance company against the sick and the injured, on the side of money. It was not a place for lawyers with much social consciousness or joie de vivre. Up and out was their motto, and most of the young a.s.sociates were sent packing after their youthful enthusiasm was torched by the brutal workloads and less-than-thrilling pay, but not Guy. The usual tenure for young lawyers at Dawson, Cricket and Peale was eighteen months; Guy stayed for eight years and was teetering on the verge of partnership. It helped that his billable hours were far and away the most at the firm. It also helped that he met, wooed, impregnated, and married Leila Peale, daughter of one of the firm's founding partners. Guy had seen what he wanted, reached out to grab hold, and there it was, seemingly within his grasp.

Then he left it all, the job, the family, the wife, the life, left it all to shack up with Hailey Prouix.

Ain't love grand?

Oh, it was love. Probably not at first sight, at first sight it was probably l.u.s.t, Hailey had that effect, that mouth, the way it twitched into a smile, G.o.d, but l.u.s.t surely turned into love for Guy Forrest. l.u.s.t will make a fool of any man, but it is only love that can truly ruin him.

What are we looking at when we are looking at love? Eskimos have like six billion different words for snow because they understand snow. Don't ever try to snow an Eskimo. But for six billion different permutations of emotional attachment we have just one word. Why? Because we don't have a clue.

Guy said he loved Hailey Prouix, and he did, I had no doubt, but where on the emotional matrix his particular brand of love fell, I couldn't for certain have told you. Was it selfless and devotional? Not likely. Was it platonic? v.i.a.g.r.a, lambskin condoms, the way Hailey could turn even the most innocuous remark into something blatantly erotic, please. Was it a romantic dream, a mutual commingling of souls to last through all eternity? I guessed not. Was it a false projection of all his hopes and aspirations on a person ill equipped, no matter how lovely, to make those hopes and aspirations come true? There lay my bet. Whenever we look in our lover's eyes, we see a reflection of the person we hope to become and that, I believed, was what Guy fell in love with. It wasn't pure narcissism, the reflection in her eyes was different from the reflection in his morning mirror. The mirror showed a man trapped by the dreary burdens of a certain kind of success, Hailey showed to him all the freedom for which his soul pined. To Guy Forrest, Hailey was more than a woman, more than a lover-she was a way out.

He despised his work at Dawson, Cricket and Peale. Only his perverse desire to make partner there outweighed his hatred for the place. He was tired of his wife. She was a warm, funny woman who talked too much of too many things about which he didn't care. They seemed to be a good match on the surface, his seriousness countered by her light touch, but he had never shared her interests in literature and culture and had lost whatever s.e.xual desire he might have felt for her from the start. Night after night, lying awake by her side as she clutched him close, he felt the trap growing ever tighter. His house was too large and took too much work to maintain, his children were draining and unresponsive.

Most of us have those moments when nothing seems right and we are in desperate need of a savior. Some suck it up and soldier on, some take up painting, some take up golf, some actually make drastic changes in their lives, more consult a chiropractor. But the truly lost among us often see their savior in someone else, someone like Hailey Prouix. When Guy gazed into Hailey's lovely blues, he saw not a woman with her own desperate needs and complex motivations, a woman with impenetrable barriers forged in a past that haunted her right through to her death, but instead the reflection of a man suddenly free of the shackles he himself had forged about his limbs, someone who could smoke reefer in the bathtub, listen to Louis Armstrong sing "Mack the Knife," make sweaty love on a mattress on the floor. Someone who lived like he had a tattoo of a skull on his breast.

And Hailey Prouix, what did she see when she looked into the dark, handsome eyes of Guy Forrest? Her soul mate? Her future? Or a terrible, terrible mistake? I'll take door number three, Monty.

Was I guessing? Yes, of course, but not as wildly as you may imagine. Guy confided in me during the storm of his relationship with Hailey. We were at that age when most of our contemporaries are either married or contemplating such and therefore not receptive to the strangled yearnings of a man breaking free through infidelity. But I was alone, and lonely, and for some reason Guy mistakenly thought I was vastly interested. And as for how Hailey Prouix felt about it all, well, she had told me herself, the very afternoon before the evening of her death, told me that she and Guy were good as through.

She is looking into a mirror, fixing her makeup, painting her lips with the shocking red she favors. Her heels, stockings, her gray checked skirt are all in place, but her white blouse is unb.u.t.toned and untucked as she stands before my mirror. I lie in the bed, arms behind my head, and watch her left breast as it slides and bounces ever so slightly while she works. And it is there, then, while she stands in my bathroom and makes up her face, that she tells me she is going to finally, unequivocally, end it with Guy.

She has told me this before and each time after has backed away for some reason she wouldn't explain, but this time I sense is different. She has been tense now for days, ever since she came back from a business trip, tense and angry and more lost than usual, but this day she bursts into my apartment as if the weight of a hundred pasts has been lifted off her shoulders, and she makes love with a joy that hasn't been there before. Ever.

She is a woman in perpetual trouble, it was obvious from the first, it is much of what draws me to her, she is a woman in perpetual trouble, but this day she seems less in trouble than before. This day there is from her the rarest of things, an unironical smile. And forgive me, but I feel as if I have helped, as if I have been a source of succor in her time of need. For weeks now I have been urging her to take control of her life. Things are not preordained, I have told her. Your life is full of choices, not imperatives, I have told her. I have given her the existentialist creed. It isn't missionary work, there isn't much missionary involved in what we do on stolen afternoons, but certainly all along I have seen a pain in her that I feel compelled to salve. She is a woman in perpetual trouble, and I want to help, and if her taking control of her life meant I would take Guy's place upon the mattress on the floor, all the better.

What are we looking at when we are looking at love? What did I see when I looked into my lover's eyes? Was I deluding myself to believe I saw Hailey Prouix clear? Was I no different from Guy, falsely projecting my hopes and aspirations upon that trim, lithe body? Guy was looking for a savior, I suppose I was looking for someone I could save. Were we, both of us, fools? I couldn't know then that the answers, brutal as they were, would come after me with a vengeance, answers that haunt me to this day, as they haunt also Guy. No, this I could not know, but there was one thing I believed I could know, one thing of which I was then absolutely certain.

Lying on my couch with that gun on my lap while Guy Forrest lay asleep in my bed just a doorway away, I closed my eyes and I could see her, standing at the mirror with her shirt open, telling me of her determination to be free at last from Guy, from her past. And I could see her press her lips one upon the other to set the lipstick and dab at it with a tissue folded thin. And I could see her turn to look at me and toss her hair and smile that dazzling, strangely sincere smile. And she comes right over to the bed and sits down and tells me how happy she is that she knows it now will be over in the right way. In the right way, whatever that means. I reach out and with my fingertips brush that lovely breast, the breast that just a few minutes before I had suckled while she writhed and bucked above me, with my fingertips I brush that lovely breast and feel the softness, the firmness, feel the soft pulse of her blood beneath the white of her skin. And I tell her, with a trill of laughter to belie the seriousness, that I love her. But I do, in all seriousness, love her, of that I am certain, of that I hold no doubt. Maybe it is twisted and wrong. Maybe it is based on my perception of her needs and my abilities, perceptions that were, both of them, spectacularly misjudged. Maybe it is, by the very misconceptions at its core, doomed to fall apart at the slightest touch, like a spider's web. Still, there it is. And even though she doesn't make the rote response, even though she scrupulously avoids that word with me, always, I believe in my naivete that she does, that she does. And my fingertips still move softly upon the surface of her breast, back and forth, up and down, circling her taut nipple. And she takes her own hand and presses my fingers into her breast, presses them hard, and as she does she arches her neck ever so slightly, but enough for me to know, for me to be certain. And I could still feel her hand over my hand, her breast pressed beneath my fingers, the jaggy beat of her heart, still feel it even as I awoke, startled, my erection tenting my suit pants just above where lay the gun.

It was time. I was ready. I waited for my erection to subside, and then I stood, taking hold of the gun as best I could, still as it was in its plastic bag. I took a step and then another toward the bedroom door. What was it Lenin had said about truth coming from the barrel of a gun? Well, maybe it wasn't Lenin who said it, and maybe he wasn't talking about truth, but you get the idea.

Guy had lied when he said everything was fine between him and Hailey, and if Guy was lying about that one crucial point, isn't it likely that he was lying about everything? And if he was lying about everything, then he had killed her. He had killed her. She had told him that she was leaving, and he had reacted as she should have expected him to react, like a man about to lose his savior, like a man driven to the edge, with nothing to lose but his desperation, and he had killed her.

Guy's decision had been made, and so had mine. His decision was to kill my love dead. My decision was to act as a perfect instrument of justice, to rely not on the tribunals of law whose imperfections I knew all too well, but to take matters into my own hands, to discover the truth and be certain it was served. I made my living spinning the lies that allowed desperate people to escape the just consequences of their unjust acts, but over the dead body of my lover a decision had been made, an implacable decision yet pure and right, a decision had been made that no lie would allow the killer of Hailey Prouix to escape the hard consequences of that heinous act. No lie, under no circ.u.mstances, whatever the price to be later paid.

He was asleep in my bed, in the sheets I had changed just so he wouldn't recognize her scent upon the pillow. He was asleep in my bed, but not for long.

I held the gun, still in its bag, in my right hand and stepped toward the doorway. The gun had the heft of a grand jury subpoena, the precision of a syringe filled with sodium pentothal. It would serve as an intricate and powerful truth-finding machine. In the confused and frightening moments after he was awakened, he'd be most vulnerable to the truth. I had more questions to ask my old school chum, and the sight of the gun in my hand, that gun, his gun, the sight of the gun in my hand would compel his confession.

I grabbed hold of the k.n.o.b. Slowly, silently, I turned the k.n.o.b and opened the door.

In the indifferent light from the street I could see the bed, the sheets, a strange lump in the middle. It didn't look right, he didn't look right.

Without taking my gaze off the bed I grappled for the switch.

A harsh yellow light flooded the room, and then I could see what had happened. Then I could see.

The book was spilled disdainfully on the floor, the drawers had been ransacked, the gym bag was missing, and that lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d, that lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he was gone.

5.