Beyond Suspicion

41

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It was almost midnight as they lay together in Cindy’s old bedroom, their last night at Cindy’s mother’s. A small twenty-five-year-old lamp on the nightstand cast a faint glow across the bedsheets. It was a girl’s lamp with a pink-and-white shade. Jack wondered what had gone through Cindy’s head as a child, as she’d lain in this very room night after night. He wondered what dreams she’d had. Nothing like the nightmares she had as a grown-up, surely. It pained him to think that perhaps Evelyn was right, that he only added to Cindy’s anxieties.

“Are you really okay with this?” he said.

Cindy was on her side, her back to him. He’d told her everything about the will and the child Jessie had given up for adoption. She’d listened without interruption, without much reaction at all.

She sighed and said, “Maybe I’m just getting numb to the world. Nothing shocks me anymore.”

“I know I keep saying this, but it’s so important: Everything that happened between me and Jessie was before you and I ever met.”

“I understand.”

“Don’t go numb on me.”

Jack was right beside her but still looking at the back of her head. She wouldn’t look at him. “What are you going to do about the boy?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to try to find him?”

“I might have to.”

“Do you want to?”

“It’s all so complicated. I don’t think I’ll know the answer to that question until some of the dust has settled.”

Silence fell between them. Cindy reached for the switch on the lamp, then stopped, as if something had just come to mind. “When did Jessie make her will?”

Jack paused, wondering where this was headed. “About a year ago.”

“That was before she came to you and asked you to be her lawyer, right?”

“Yeah, it’s when she supposedly was diagnosed with ALS.”

“Why do you think she did that?”

“Did what?”

“Wrote her will just then.”

“It was part of the scam. She had to make it believable that she was diagnosed with a terminal disease, so she ran out and made a will.”

“Do you think it’s possible that she really did think she was going to die?”

He thought for a second, almost found himself entertaining the possibility. “No. She told me it was a scam.”

“Did she tell you it was her scam or Dr. Marsh’s scam?”

“It doesn’t matter. They were in it together at the end.”

“If they were in it together, then why wasn’t his name on the joint bank account?”

“Because they were smart. Only the stupidest of coconspirators would put their names together on a joint bank account.”

Silence returned. After a few moments, Cindy reached for the light switch, then stopped herself once again. “In your heart, you truly believe that Jessie ended up dead because she scammed those viatical investors, right?”

“One way or the other, yeah. Either they killed her or she killed herself because they were about to get her good.”

“Down the road, if you have to prove to someone-to a jury, God forbid-that Jessie scammed the investors, how are you going to do it?”

“I saw her and Dr. Marsh holding hands in the elevator after the verdict. And then she admitted to me that it was a scam.”

“So, really, your only proof of a scam is what you claim you saw in the elevator and what you claim she said to you afterward?”

He felt a pang in his stomach. It was the toughest cross-examination he’d ever faced, and he was staring at the back of his wife’s head. “I guess that’s what it boils down to.”

“That’s my concern,” she said quietly.

“You shouldn’t be concerned.”

“But maybe you should be.”

“Maybe so.”

Finally she rolled over, looked him in the eye, and gently touched his hand. “You and Jessie weren’t having an affair. You didn’t know about the child. You didn’t know about the joint bank account in the Bahamas. You didn’t know that she’d left you all that money in her will. She turns up dead, naked, in our bathtub, and the only evidence that someone else might have killed her is your own self-serving testimony. You claim that she admitted the whole thing was a scam, even though you, as her lawyer, knew nothing about it until after the trial was over. I would never tell you and Rosa how to do your jobs, but I’ve gained enough insights from you over the years to know that it’s looking harder and harder for you to avoid an indictment.”

“Don’t you think I realize that?”

“I’m not saying it to make you mad. My only point is that unless there are twelve Cindy Swytecks sitting on the jury, how do you expect them to believe you? How could anyone believe you, unless they wanted to believe you?”

He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, but even though she’d been the one to initiate physical contact a minute earlier, she felt somewhat stiff and unreceptive. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Me too.” She rolled over and switched off the lamp. They lay side by side in the darkness. Jack didn’t want to end it on that note, but he couldn’t conjure up the words to make things better.

“Jack?” she said in the darkness.

“Yes?”

“What does it feel like to kill someone?”

He assumed she meant Esteban, not Jessie. Even so, it wasn’t something he liked to talk about, that battle to the death with his wife’s attacker five years earlier. “It feels horrible.”

“They say it’s easier to kill again after you’ve killed once. Do you think that’s true?”

“No.”

“Honestly?”

“If you’re a normal human being with a conscience, taking a human life under any circumstances is never easy.”

“I didn’t ask if it was easy. I asked if you thought it was easier.”

“I don’t think so. Not unless you’re miswired in the first place.”

She didn’t answer right away. It was as if she were evaluating his response. Or perhaps evaluating him.

She reached for the lamp, and with a turn of the switch the room brightened. “Good night, Jack.”

“Good night,” he said, trying not to think too much of her decision to sleep with the light on. And then there was silence.