Fatal Flaw

1

GUY FORREST was sitting on the cement steps outside the house when I arrived. His head was hidden in his hands. Rain fell in streams from his shoulders, his knees, tumbled off the roof of his brow. He was slumped naked in the rain, and beside his feet lay the gun.

From his nakedness and the diagonal despair of his posture, I suspected the worst.

“What did you do?” I shouted at him over the thrumming rain.

He didn’t answer, he didn’t move.

I prodded him with my foot. He collapsed onto his side.

“Guy, you bastard. What the hell did you do?”

His voice rose from the tangled limbs like the whimperings of a beaten dog. “I loved her. I loved her. I loved her.”

Then I no longer suspected, then I knew.

I leaned over and lifted the gun by the trigger guard. No telling what more damage he could do with it. Careful to leave no prints, I placed it in my outside raincoat pocket. The door to the house was thrown open. I slipped around his heaving body and stepped inside.

Later on, in the press, the house would be described as a Main Line love nest, but that raises images of a Stanford White-inspired palace of debauchery – red silk sheets and velvet wallpaper, a satin swing hanging from the rafters – but nothing could be further from the truth. It was a modest old stone house in a crowded Philadelphia suburb, just over City Line Avenue. The walls were bare, the furnishings sparse. A cheap table stood in the dining room to the left of the entrance, a television lay quiet before a threadbare couch in the living room to the right. There was a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, true, but in the furnishings there was a sense of biding time, of making do until real life with real furniture began. In the bedroom, up the stairs, I knew there to be a single bureau bought at some discount build-it-yourself place, a desk with stacks of bills, a fold-up chair, a mattress on the floor.

A mattress on the floor.

Well, maybe the press had it right after all, maybe it was a love nest, and maybe the mattress on the floor was the giveaway. For what would true lovers need with fine furnishings and fancy wallpaper? What would true lovers need with upholstered divans, with Klimts on the wall, with a grand piano in the formal living room? What would true lovers need with a hand-carved mahogany bed supporting a canopy of blue silk hanging over all like the surface of the heavens? Such luxury is only for those needing more in their lives than love. True lovers would require only a mattress on the floor to cast their spells one upon the other and enjoin the world to slip away. Until the world refused.

The mattress on the floor. That’s where I would find her.

Rain dripped off my coat like tears as I climbed the stairway. My hand crept along the smooth banister. Around the landing, up another half flight. As I rose ever closer, my step slowed. A complex scent pressed itself upon me like a smothering pillow. I could detect the sharpness of cordite and something sweet beneath that, a memory scent from my college days touched now with jasmine, and then something else, something lower than the cordite and the sweetness, something coppery and sour, something desolate. A few steps higher and then to the left, to the master bedroom.

The door was open, the bedroom light was on, the mattress on the floor was visible from the hallway outside. And on it she lay, her frail, pale body twisted strangely among the clotted sheets.

There was no need to check a pulse or place a mirror over her mouth. I had seen dead before and she qualified. Her legs were covered by the dark blue comforter, but it was pulled down far enough to reveal her cream silk teddy, shamelessly raised above her naked belly. Crimson spotted the blanched white of her skin. The teddy was stained red at the heart.

I stood there for longer than I now can remember. The sight of her unnatural posture, the colliding scents of gunpowder and pot, of blood and jasmine, the brutal mark of violence on her chest, all of it, the very configuration of her death overwhelmed me. I was lost in the vision, swallowed whole by time. I can’t tell you exactly what was flailing through my mind because it is lost to me now, just as I was lost to the moment, but when I recovered enough to function a decision had been made. A decision had been made. I’m not sure how, but I know why, I surely know why. A decision had been made, a decision I have never regretted, an implacable decision, yet pure and right, a decision had been made, and for the rest of my involvement in that death and its grisly aftermath that decision guided my every step, my every step, starting with the first.

I took a deep breath and entered the bedroom. I squatted, leaned over the mattress, touched her jaw. It was still slightly warm, but the joint now was not perfectly slack. The skin at the bottom of her arm had turned a purplish red. I pressed a finger into the skin; it whitened for an instant before the color returned. It had been about an hour, I calculated. Still squatting, I leaned farther forward and stared closely at her face.

Her name was Hailey Prouix. Black hair, blue eyes, long-necked and pale-skinned, she was thirty years old and lovely as a siren. While still alive she had peered out at the world with a wary detachment. She had seen too much to take anything at face value, her manner said as clear as words, she had been hurt too much to expect anything other than blows. She wore sharp, dark-rimmed glasses that were all business, but her mouth curved so achingly you couldn’t look at it without wanting to take it in your own. And her stare, her stare, containing as it did both warning and dare, could weaken knees.

To gaze at Hailey Prouix was to have your throat tighten with the wanting, and not just sexual wanting, though that of course was part of it, but something else, something even more powerful. There is inevitably, I suppose, a gap between all we ever wanted and all we ever will have, and that gap can be a source of bitter regret. But sometimes there is a glimpse of hope that the gap might be narrowed, might even be obliterated by one brilliant leap. In Hailey Prouix’s detached beauty, and the silent dare to break through her barriers, there was a glimpse of that hope. That her detachment might prove absolute and her barriers inexorable was no matter. To take her and hold her, to squeeze her arms, to kiss her, to win her and make her yours seemed to offer a chance to conquer life itself. Oh, yes, she was as lovely as a siren, and like a siren, she had drawn Guy Forrest from his wife and two children, from his high-powered lawyer’s job, from his finely appointed mini-mansion deep in the suburbs, onto the mattress on the floor of her small stone house just over the city line. And now, I suppose, as was inevitable from the first, he had crashed upon the shoals.

Before I pulled away from the corpse, I gently took hold of the bottom edge of her teddy and tugged it down to cover the exposed dark triangle.

On a crate by the mattress, along with her glasses, an alarm clock, a lamp, and a couple of books, sat two phones, a small red cellular thing and an old-style, corded phone. If anyone saw me arrive at the house, I didn’t want there to be too much of a time discrepancy between when I entered and when 911 logged the call, so I picked up the handset of the line-locked phone, dialed 911, and reported the murder. Then I went to work.

I’m a criminal lawyer. People like Guy Forrest, in the depths of the deepest troubles of their lives, call me in to clean up their messes. It is what I do, it is my calling, and I’m damn good at it. I reach my hand into the mess, rummage around, and pull out evidence. That’s what I work with, evidence. I accept what evidence I must, discredit what I can, hide what I might, create what I need, and from this universe of evidence I build a story. Sometimes the story is true, more often not, but truth is never the standard. Better the credible lie than the implausible truth. The story need only be persuasive enough to clean up the mess. But I don’t always win, thank God. Some messes are too big to be cleaned, some stains can never be rubbed out, some crimes call out for more than a story. And some victims deserve nothing less than the truth.

If this house had been in the city proper, I’d have had plenty of time to rummage around the crime scene and do what I needed to do. But this house wasn’t in Philadelphia County, it was in Montgomery County, the suburbs. There is crime in the suburbs, sure, but of a different quality and quantity than in the city. City cops are overworked, their attentions stretched taut, not so in the suburbs. Out here a murder call trumps shoplifting at the mall. The call was already out, the cars would arrive in minutes, in seconds.

First thing I did was grab the cellular phone off the crate and dump it into my pocket. I was glad it was there in the open, it would have been the first and most crucial thing I searched for. Then I took a quick look around.

In the bathroom, soapy water still filled the Jacuzzi tub, gray and wide, with its water jets now quiet. A Sony CD Walkman and a large pair of Koss headphones sat on the rim, along with a small plastic bag of weed, a pack of papers inside. I left the Walkman and the headphones but stuffed the weed into my pocket with the gun. I didn’t need the cops taking Guy in now on some drug misdemeanor – there were things he and I needed first to talk about. I took out a handkerchief, covered my hand with it, and opened the medicine cabinet. I ignored the cosmetics and over-the-counter remedies and went right to the little plastic bottles. Valium prescribed to Hailey Prouix. Seconal prescribed to Hailey Prouix. Nembutal prescribed to Hailey Prouix. The whole Marilyn Monroe attitude-adjustment kit. And then something else. Viagra prescribed to Guy Forrest.

Well, that, at least, was a cheery sight.

Back in the bedroom I started opening drawers, looking for something, anything. Not much in the bureau other than clothes, cuff-links – Guy was a fancy dresser when he was dressed – loose change, condoms. I picked up one of the foil packages. Lambskin. Fifteen bucks a sheath. It pissed me off just looking at it. Under the clothes in the middle drawer was an envelope filled with cash. New hundreds. Two thousand, three thousand. I counted it quickly and put it back.

The top drawer of the desk held stamps, pens, business cards, golf tees, loose change, nothing. One by one I checked the side drawers. File cards, batteries, Post-it notes, bent paper clips, an old driver’s license, knicks and knacks, the unexceptional detritus of a now expired life. Who designed these things? Who manufactured them, sold them, bought them, kept them well beyond any useful purposes? I didn’t know, all I knew was that there was some great underground industrial complex filling every desk and kitchen drawer in the world with this stuff. I picked up the license and examined it.

It was Hailey’s. It had expired eighteen months ago. The picture didn’t really look like her, she was scowling, her hair was flat, the glasses were less than flattering. Hailey Prouix was glamorous and cosmopolitan, this woman in this picture looked anything but. Still, I took it anyway, put it in my pocket as a keepsake.

And then, in one of the drawers, I spotted a little paper box filled with change, staples, a staple remover, paper clips, keys.

Keys.

Car keys, house keys, old file-cabinet keys. I used the handkerchief to shield my fingers as I rummaged. I was tempted to take them all, willy-nilly, there was no telling what secrets lay behind their locks, but I had to leave something for the suburban detectives. So I took only one, slipped it in with the license before closing the drawer.

As I searched, I tried not to think of the body on the bed. When I remember back, I am amazed that I could still move with such alacrity, still make snap determinations, no matter how warped. I wasn’t thinking so clearly – if I had been I might have taken the money. I might have taken the condom because, well, because it was lambskin. I might have checked those file cards more closely. But even so, what I took proved to be valuable and I am stunned at my level of functioning. If it all sounds so calm and deliberate, so bloody cold-blooded, then that is only in the voice of the remembering, for I assure you my knees were shaking uncontrollably as I moved about that room, my eyes were tearing, my stomach was roiling upon itself from the scent of her blood, her perfume, the sickly sweet smell of smoked marihuana. A decision had been made, and that had calmed me some, but I was still only an inch away from vomiting all across the floor. The Forensic Science Unit technician would have been so pleased as she took her DNA samples.

But then it was time. They would be here any second, and it would be so much better for everyone if I was outside with Guy. At the head of the stairs I took one last look at Hailey Prouix, wiped at my eyes, climbed slowly down.

From the hallway closet, I removed Guy’s black raincoat. He was still collapsed on the steps, naked, drenched. I gently placed the raincoat over his body and squatted beside him, like I had squatted beside Hailey. It was strangely peaceful on that suburban street, leafy and quiet except for the stutter of the dying rain and Guy’s weeping. The world smelled fresh and full of spring. I stayed silent for a moment, let the rain cleanse the bitter scent from my eyes.

“Why?” I said finally, in a voice just soft enough to rise above the quiet roar of the rain.

No response. He just lay there, sobbing.

“Why did you kill her, Guy?”

Still no response.

I slapped the side of his head. “Tell me.”

“I didn’t,” he said through his sobs. “I loved her. I gave up. Everything. For her. And now. Now.”

I stayed silent, let my emotions cool.

“I gave up,” he said. “Everything.”

“I know you did, Guy.” I reached down and petted his hair. “I know you did.”

“I swear. I didn’t. I didn’t.”

“Okay. I’ll believe you for now.”

“Oh, God. What? What am I? What?”

“Shhhhhh. You’ll be all right, Guy. I’ll do what I can. The police are going to come. They are already on the way. Do not talk to them. Do not say anything to the police until we can talk first. I’ll do what I can.”

“I loved her.”

“I know.”

“Victor. God. I loved her. So much.”

“I know you did, Guy. I know you did. That was the problem.”

I was still petting his hair when came the cars with their sirens and their flashing lights, and the three of us, Guy and Hailey and I, were no longer alone.

2

GUY FORREST was sitting now at the dining room table, his head in his hands. A cop had brought down some clothes for him, and rain was no longer streaming from the angles of his body, but his head was still in his hands. His head was in his hands and his lower jaw was trembling, as if struggling to say something, anything. But I maintained a hand on his shoulder and made sure he kept it all to himself. That’s what defense attorneys do. We’re there to make sure our clients don’t do anything stupid after they’ve done something worse than stupid.

With my hand on his shoulder, Guy wasn’t talking, and maybe he wasn’t thinking either. Maybe he couldn’t acknowledge the realities of his world now that Hailey Prouix was dead. Love can do that to you. It can send you soaring higher than falcons, it can rip you open from your sternum to your spleen, it can send you running. That’s what Guy was doing now, at the dining room table with his head in hands and his jaw trembling. I wouldn’t let him do anything stupid like talk to the cops, so instead, in his mind, he was running, but he wasn’t going to get very far.

He was a handsome man, Guy Forrest, wavy dark hair, swarthy good looks, a five o’clock shadow that emphasized his classic bone structure. He worked out regularly, always had, even when we were law students together, but even so, there was something weak about him. His chin was too sharp, his gaze too wavering. Looking at Guy, you had the sense you were looking at a Hollywood facade of what a man should look like, perfect on the outside, but one stiff breeze would blow him down. And now he had been beset by a hurricane.

It had grown crowded in and about that little house. Someone upstairs was taking pictures. Someone upstairs was dusting for fingerprints and swabbing for blood. Someone outside in the rain was examining the windows and flower beds for signs of forced entry. Someone in the neighborhood was going door to door, asking questions. Television vans, alerted by the scanner, were on the street in force. The noose was already tightening around Guy Forrest’s neck, and there was precious little I could do about it.

The coroner’s van sat on the street by the house’s front entrance, its motor running, its lights flashing. The attendants were in the front seat reading the Daily News, drinking coffee, waiting for the okay to take the body away. We were in the dining room, drinking nothing, but also waiting to be allowed to leave. I had already given as much information about Hailey Prouix’s next of kin as I could extract from Guy, the name of and an address for her sister, and had packed for Guy a small gym bag with a change of clothes. Twice I had tried to exit the house with him, twice I had been politely ordered to remain until Guy could speak to the detectives. Except Guy wouldn’t be speaking to the detectives.

“Mr. Carl, is it?” said a tall, good-looking young woman in jacket and pants who entered the room. Her hair was cut short, her nose freckled. With her broad shoulders and confident smirk, she carried the athletic air of a field-hockey coach and referred to her notepad as if it were a playbook.

“That’s right,” I said.

“And Mr. Forrest?”

Guy raised his head, looked at the woman, said nothing. His eyes were impressively red-rimmed, the eyes of the seriously bereaved. Or, considering what I had found in the bathroom, maybe the eyes of someone who was about to ask you to bust open another sack of Doritos, dude.

“As you can understand,” I said, “it’s been a very difficult evening for us all.”

“Of course,” said the young woman. “I’m County Detective Stone. With me is County Detective Breger.”

She gestured at the man standing behind her, whose attention was turned away from us as he examined the edges of the dining room carpet. He was a good three decades older than she, with a sad face and plaid jacket. His shoulders were thick and rounded, his posture slumped, he was a great hunch of a man. There was something soft about Breger, something tired, as if he had grown comfortable in a routine that was being shattered by his younger, more enthusiastic partner.

“I am sorry for your loss, Mr. Forrest,” said Detective Breger even as he continued his inspection of the room. “I have been doing this now for thirty-six years, and it is still a tough thing to see.”

Guy tried to get a thank-you past his quivering jaw and failed.

“Miss Prouix was what to you, Mr. Forrest?” asked Stone. “Your girlfriend?”

“His fiancée,” I said.

“Fiancée?” said Breger. “Oh, hell. That is a tough one. When was the wedding supposed to be?”

“As soon as Mr. Forrest’s divorce came through,” I said.

Stone shot me a look. “Mr. Carl, you’re a friend? An adviser? What?”

“I am a friend of Mr. Forrest’s, but I am also a lawyer. Mr. Forrest called me when he found Miss Prouix on the bed.”

“So you’re here now as what?”

“A friend,” I said. “But a friend who knows that when a man is in shock over the death of a loved one, maybe it’s not the best time to be talking to the police.”

“It is if the goal is to get the bastard who did this before the trail grows cold. We have questions for Mr. Forrest.”

“I don’t think he’d be much help in his current condition.”

“Seems to me you’re acting more like a lawyer than a friend.”

“For the moment, yes, that’s how I’m going to handle it.”

“Is that what he wants?” said Stone, nodding her head at Guy.

“That’s what he wants.”

“What about our questions?”

“I’ll answer what I can,” I said.

Stone looked at Breger, Breger shrugged. This is normally when the cops get angry and indignant, this is normally when it all turns adversarial. This is when Stone starts threatening and Breger holds her back and the whole madcap mad-cop routine plays itself out. I knew it was coming, anxious as I was to get Guy out of that house I was steeled for the onslaught of police craft, but instead of putting on a snarl, Stone smiled. “We appreciate your help. Having you here to assist us will make things easier. At some point we will need to ask Mr. Forrest some questions.”

“Mr. Forrest is still in something of a daze. Could your questioning of him wait until tomorrow?”

“If that’s what you think best,” said Breger, his gaze now scanning the ceiling.

“I do.”

“Of course you do,” said Breger. “Mr. Forrest is going through an ordeal. His fiancée is dead in their bed, a bullet wound in her chest. Any of us would be in shock. You want him to be able to pull himself together before he speaks to us.”

“How’s tomorrow morning?” said Stone as she handed me her card.

“I think that would be all right. I’ll let you know in the morning if his condition makes it impossible. I was going to take Mr. Forrest to my apartment for the night.”

“Good idea,” said Breger, who had stepped over to a window and was closely examining the sill. “Mr. Forrest looks like he could use a stiff drink or two.”

“He knows not to leave the area,” said Stone.

“I’ll make sure of it. I’ll bring him to you myself tomorrow morning.”

“Along with his new attorney,” said Stone.

Stone smiled at me. I smiled back. This was something completely new. They were playing good-cop, good-cop. I supposed that’s how they did it in the suburbs.

“So now,” I said, “if we could be excused, I’d like to let Mr. Forrest get some sleep.”

“If it is any consolation, Mr. Forrest,” said Breger, looking straight at Guy now, “we are going to do our best to get the bastard who did this. We will put all our resources into digging out the truth and, believe us, dig it out we will. We will not rest until the killer is found and tried and convicted. We will not rest until the killer is rotting away in the penitentiary. I want you to know that, Mr. Forrest, and I hope it gives you some comfort.”

“Yes, well, thank you for that, Detective Breger,” I said. “Now, if we could be excused.”

“Can you just give us a moment, Mr. Carl?” said Stone.

The two detectives stepped out of the dining room. I patted Guy on the shoulder and followed.

“Can you tell us what you know?” said Stone, who was taking the lead in the questioning while Breger examined some paperwork.

“I was home, sleeping through the baseball game, when Guy called.”

“What did he say?”

“I can’t tell you. Depending on the circumstances, it might be a privileged communication.”

“You mean if he was calling you as a lawyer,” said Breger, “instead of as a friend.”

“That’s right. But he didn’t say much. He wasn’t really coherent. He sounded out of his head, confused.”

“Stoned?”

“With grief, maybe. I didn’t know what to do. I told him to stay calm, that I’d be right over.”

“What number did he call?”

“My home number.” I gave it to them. “When I arrived, he was sitting on the steps waiting for me.”

“In the rain?”

“Yes. Sobbing. And he was naked. I ran upstairs and found her on the mattress. I used the upstairs phone to call 911. Then I took a black raincoat from the hall closet, went back out with Guy, covered him as best I could. I waited out there with him.”

“When you were up in the room, did you see a gun or shells or anything?”

“No.”

“Did you smell anything, anything funny?”

“Other than the gunpowder and the smell of the blood? No.”

“It must have been a shock for him to see her dead like that,” said Breger.

“I suppose so.”

“Why, then, do you think he called a lawyer?” asked Breger, his head still in the file. “Of all the people he could call when he saw what he saw, why do you think he called a lawyer? I don’t think I would call a lawyer. A doctor, the police, my mother maybe, but not a lawyer.”

“He burned a lot of bridges when he left his family and his job to move in with Hailey. We had stayed in contact. He had introduced me to Hailey months ago. Maybe there was no one else for him to call.”

“You say Guy left his wife for her?” asked Stone. “What is the wife’s name?”

“Leila,” I said. “Leila Forrest. They weren’t yet divorced.”

“Do you have an address?”

I gave it to her.

“That’s Berwyn.”

“Yes it is.”

“Nice place, Berwyn. Any idea who might have wanted to kill Ms. Prouix other than this Leila Forrest?”

“I never said Leila wanted to kill her. And I don’t know of anyone else.”

“What was she like, the victim?”

“I don’t know, Hailey was… special. Sweet, in her own way. Pretty. A nice girl. This thing is just tragic.”

“Any problems between Mr. Forrest and Ms. Prouix?”

“They were in love, madly in love. Sick in love. Anything else?”

“You want to get him out of here, don’t you?” said Breger. “You want to take him someplace where the body of his fiancée isn’t lying dead on a mattress upstairs.”

“Exactly.”

“Good idea. We’ll see you and Mr. Forrest tomorrow. Is nine too early?”

“It’s going to be a tough night,” I said. “Let’s shoot for ten.”

Breger and Stone glanced at each other. Maybe it was my unfortunate choice of verb.

“Ten it is,” said Stone. “You didn’t by any chance have an umbrella or something?”

“No, why?”

“Thank you for your help,” said Breger, his gaze back in the file. “See you tomorrow at ten.”

I left the two of them huddling in quiet conversation and went back to Guy in the dining room. I spoke to him softly. I helped him stand. I helped him put on the raincoat. I took hold of his gym bag. Gripping his arm, I helped him toward the door before Detective Breger dropped his meaty hand on Guy’s shoulder.

“Mr. Carl,” he said, while looking not at me but at Guy, “we won’t ask Mr. Forrest any questions, because you asked us not to, but could we perform one small test, just for our peace of mind?”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I said.

“Just one test,” said Breger. “It won’t take but a minute. Just a precaution really. Shirley, come here please. Shirley is one of our best Forensic Unit technicians. Shirley, could you do what you have to do with Mr. Forrest’s hands?”

“I really should get him out. Why don’t we leave this for tomorrow?”

“This won’t take but a minute,” said Breger. “The strips are already prepared, which makes it go really quickly. And it could really help us move the investigation forward.”

“Hold out your hands, Mr. Forrest,” said Stone in a quiet but commanding voice that left no possibility of refusal. Guy did as he was told.

Shirley took wide strips of clear adhesive and pressed them on the back of each of Guy’s hands, concentrating on the web of flesh between the thumb and the forefinger. With a flourish she ripped the strips off, one at a time, and carefully put them on a fresh backing. Then she did the same to each palm.

“What do you think?” said Breger.

“His hands seem too clean,” said Shirley. “How long was he out in the rain?”

Breger turned to me and raised an eyebrow.

“Could have been twenty minutes,” I said, “could have been more.”

“Doubtful there would be anything left,” said Shirley, “but you never know.”

“Okay, thank you,” said Breger. “We appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Carl. See you tomorrow.”

I grabbed hold of Guy’s arm and tried to rush him out of the house before they could think of some other hoop through which they wanted him to jump. We were just about to step outside when I heard Breger say, “Oh, Mr. Carl.”

I stopped, breathed deep, turned.

He was bent on one knee, examining the carpet to the left of the doorway. Without looking up, he said, “It’s a little nasty out there tonight. Be sure to drive carefully.”

Suburban cops.

If this had been just a few blocks over, on the city side of City Line Avenue, it wouldn’t have gone down with such sweet understanding. The city cops would have put Guy in custody right smack away. They would have seen him as the obvious suspect, as the only suspect, actually. And the fact that he had called a lawyer before an ambulance would have been for them absolute proof of his guilt. Next day I’d be standing next to Guy in the crummy little courtroom in the Roundhouse as he was arraigned for first-degree murder. The DA would have noted the crime was a capital one, the judge would have denied bail, and Guy would have spent the next year growing sallow in jail as he waited for his trial. And with him in jail, what good could I accomplish? With him in jail, how could I ask what I needed to ask, learn what I needed to learn?

A decision had been made and I needed Guy out of jail, even for just a few days, a few hours, to carry it through. It is why I scoured the crime scene like I did, why I took the reefer and didn’t tell them about the gun. Even so, I didn’t think it would be enough, even so even the greenest city cop would have taken him in. But see, we weren’t on the city side of City Line Avenue, we were on the other side, the suburban side, where the police were ever helpful and ever polite. Despite the little incident with the gunpowder test, the suburban cops maintained their form and sent Guy and his lawyer off into the night with a kindly admonition to drive carefully.

“Thank you, Detective Breger,” I said, feeling the weight of the gun pull down at my raincoat pocket, “you’ve been most kind.” And I meant every word of it.

3

I CARED for him as best I could.

Like a Secret Service agent, I took for myself the blows of lights and flashes from the cameramen and photographers waiting predatorily outside the house. The reporters had already ferreted out the details of the crime, knew the name of the victim, the name of her fiancé. “Mr. Forrest, any comment about what happened to Miss Prouix?” “Mr. Forrest, who killed Hailey?” “Guy, can you tell us how you feel?” “Are you devastated?” “Show us some tears.” “Why did you do it, Guy?” “Was there a stripper involved, like the other one?” “If you have nothing to hide, why won’t you talk to us?” “Hey, Guy.” “Yo, Guy.” “Over here.” I deflected their questions with a smile and a few brief words about the tragedy. I strategically kept myself between Guy and the camera lenses while pulling him to my car. Speed and silence, I had learned, were the best weapons against the media, giving them nothing of interest to show their sensation-starved audience. But then again I’ve always found it hard to turn down free publicity – one of the very few things money can’t buy. So even as I pulled Guy to my car, I forced a smile and gave a little speech and handed out my business cards to make sure in the early editions they spelled Carl with a “C.”

As I drove off, the cameras and their lights were staring at us through the car windows like alien eyes.

The rain had tapered off somewhat, now it was only spitting on the windshield as we drove through the glum night. Guy tried to tell me in the car what had happened and I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him. His face was green from the dashboard light as we drove past the dark, rotting porches of West Philly. I suggested he lie back in the passenger seat and close his eyes. I didn’t want him to talk about it just then. The time would come that night, but not just then. I checked the rearview mirror to make sure no reporters were following and spotted nothing.

The street outside my building was dark and wet. I helped him up the stairs to my apartment and sat him on the couch. I turned the lights out except for the lamp by his head, which bathed his trembling body in a narrow cone of light. I gave him a beer. He tried again to tell me what had happened but I shushed him quiet.

I let him sit alone on the couch while I changed the sheets of my bed, the pillowcases, laid out a fresh towel for him, a new toothbrush still in its wrapping, an old pair of flannel pajamas in case he wanted to be cozy. Atop my bureau I placed the gym bag with his change of clothes.

On the table, by my bed, lay a book I had just started rereading, a potboiler to take my mind off the trials of my day. I had bought it for a buck from a street vendor. The story started with a murder, it ended with a confession, there was a cunning investigator, a lecherous old cardsharp, a prostitute with a heart of gold. I stared at the volume, the blue binding and lurid gold letters of the title. Crime and Punishment. The words seemed just then like a moral compulsion. I considered for a moment putting it away so as not to trouble my guest and then thought better of it, placing a bookmark in the final page before the epilogue and setting the book beside the reading lamp next to the bed. Before I left the room I switched on the lamp.

With the bedroom taken care of, I stood in the shadows and watched Guy as he finished his beer. I went to the fridge and got him another. I pulled a chair close to the couch, but not close enough to be within the cone of light, and sat down. Once more he tried to speak, and once more I wouldn’t let him. The silence acted as a comforter, blanketing us both in calm. My raincoat, still wet, pocket bulging, was draped over the back of a chair. I glanced at it every so often and then looked back at my friend, my friend, as he slumped on the couch.

I cared for him as best I could and I waited until he couldn’t help himself and when he started again to say something, this time I let him.

“What am I going to do?”

I didn’t answer. He had a sharp voice, the words seemed to gallop out of his mouth with a certainty that turned every question rhetorical. Guy had never been one for self-doubt and it was hard for him to play the role of the confused and humbled man, even if that was exactly what he had become.

“I loved her so much,” he said. “She was everything to me. What am I going to do?” The words, which could have been full of pathos coming out of another man, were now like the words of a business executive analyzing a deal that had gone south and asking his lawyer for advice.

“I don’t know.”

“Why? Tell me why? Why? I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand, Guy?” I said, leaning forward. “She’s dead. She’s been murdered. And you’re the one who killed her.”

He looked up at me, a puzzled horror creasing his face. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. You’re wrong. What are you thinking? Victor, no. I didn’t.”

“That’s how it looks.”

“I don’t care how it looks. I didn’t do it. You need to make them believe it. She’s gone, my life is ruined, and I didn’t do it. How can I make it right?”

“See a priest.”

“I need a lawyer. You’ll be my lawyer. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Make terrible things right again.”

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 hell 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 bastard, 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. God, 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, passion, 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 class, 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 associates 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 lust, Hailey had that effect, that mouth, the way it twitched into a smile, God, but lust surely turned into love for Guy Forrest. Lust 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? Viagra, 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 sexual 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 unbuttoned 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 naïveté 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 circumstances, 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 knob. Slowly, silently, I turned the knob 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 bastard, that lying bastard, he was gone.

5

THE BEDROOM window was closed. I shoved it open and scanned the street, slick and black, still wet though the rain had stopped. Nothing. It was three flights down, a fierce jump with nothing to grab on to except the spindly branches of a struggling urban maple. The desperate leap to the sagging tree was not Guy’s way, though until tonight I would have said that murder, too, was not Guy’s way.

I performed a quick search of the room. I opened the closet, checked the bathroom, threw back the shower curtain. No Guy. He had disappeared from my grasp like a phantom.

How had he gotten away without my knowing? I couldn’t figure it until I remembered my remembrances of Hailey Prouix, a reverie that had faded into a dream. I ran back into the living room.

The chain latch of my front door, the chain I fastened each night out of habit, was hanging loose.

The chain latch was undone, as were my plans. I’d had him exactly where I wanted, and then I let him slip away while I was asleep. Damn it. Now he was on the loose, now he was fleeing to freedom. I shucked on my raincoat, stuffed the plastic bag with its gun into the pocket, grabbed my key, and headed out after him.

He could have gone anywhere, I thought at first, but as I sat in the driver’s seat of my car and considered each possibility, I realized that wasn’t true. He couldn’t go back to his wife. He couldn’t go to the offices of Dawson, Cricket and Peale. He couldn’t go to the police. His parents were dead, his brother lived in California, his friends had all sided with Leila. Where once the world had been open to him, now his options were completely limited. Who would still embrace him and take him in? Who had his love for Hailey not betrayed? I thought it through, went over one possibility and the next and the next until, suddenly, his destination became clear.

He was going to her, to Hailey.

The old saw holds that criminals always return to the scene of the crime and like most old saws, this one contains a portion of truth. Arsonists are often in the crowds surrounding the blazes they set; police routinely videotape the funerals of the murdered dead to see if they can spot a killer paying his final disrespects. A criminal, by definition, is defined by his crime, and which of us doesn’t return again and again to the crucial moment of our lives, where we married, where our children gamboled, where we spent an eventide of abandon that fuels still the fantasies that warm our cold, lonely nights. Guy Forrest had a family, a profession, a circle of accomplishment, but if you asked him about his depths, he would have said simply he was a man in love. If you asked me, I would have told you he was a murderer. Both the lover and the murderer were created in that house, in that bedroom, on that mattress on the floor. He was going back, he couldn’t not. And I was going, too.

The bloody night was on its way out, the darkness already cracked from the force of dawn. I must have slept longer than I had imagined. I must have been dead asleep. I drove as fast as I dared with a gun in my pocket. I wondered if Guy had seen the King Cobra on my lap as he skulked out of the apartment. Probably not, probably too busy skulking. He hadn’t turned on the lights, he hadn’t wanted to wake me. He had stayed as far from me as possible as he made his way out of the bedroom and through my apartment door. Who could have imagined he had developed the honed survival instincts of a cockroach?

I drove west on Walnut to Sixty-ninth Street, took a right, heading to Haverford Avenue. It was a familiar route, I had driven this way before on the nights when Guy was out of town. Is it cheating to cheat on a cheating bastard? I had felt bad about it at the first when we made our initial assignation, but it hadn’t lasted, the guilt, it hadn’t lasted past the first time I tasted Hailey Prouix’s tongue. Maybe Guy’s guilt over cheating on his wife had died the same sweet death. There were more cars on the road than I expected, the early shift heading into work, the occasional cab. That’s what he had caught, a cab. Maybe he even phoned for one from my bedroom before leaving.

“Where to?” had said the cabby.

“To the scene of the crime,” had said Guy.

I passed a cop car going the opposite direction, and I ducked. I ducked. I had never been afraid of the police before. Working with them or against them had always been simply part of my job, there had never been the fear that I felt now. But then again never before did I have a gun in my pocket. I was not a gun person. Or a cat person. The only time I ever before wanted a gun was to kill a cat. But here I was, heading out in the rain with a gun in my pocket and my quarry on the loose and I was ducking in my car when the police drove past. It was a strange, hard feeling, all of it. And I liked it. I liked it. It’s the only kind of feeling you want after you see your lover dead on a mattress on the floor.

Out Haverford Avenue, across City Line, into the twisting suburban streets, old trees leaning over the roadbeds, calm homes still asleep to the rising morn. Down this short road, left at that stop sign, right at the next, up the hill and to the left, and there it was, dark and solitary.

There was no yellow tape. I thought there would be yellow tape. There was no yellow tape, there were no police cars, there was no police presence whatsoever. In the city the place would have been swaddled in yellow caution tape like a newborn in its blanket. But this was the suburbs, no reason to make a spectacle for the neighbors, no reason to place property values at risk. The sight filled me with anger. They were going to screw it up, they were going to let him off. It was up to me. All along I had known it was, all of it, up to me.

I parked across the street and waited. The lights were off. I didn’t know if he hadn’t yet gotten to the house or if he was already inside, doing whatever he was doing in the darkness. I parked across the street and waited. There was no rush. If he wasn’t yet at the house, he would be, and if he was, which I suspected, he wouldn’t be there long. He would do whatever he felt compelled to do and then he would leave, he would run, he would take the keys from the desk drawer and head straight for one of the cars, his or Hailey’s, parked out front. Hailey had driven a new Saab convertible. Guy drove a new black Beemer. Both cars were on the street, waiting for his great escape, and so was I.

Waiting. Waiting. And then waiting no more.

He came out from the back, his shoulders hunched, his black coat turning him almost invisible, his head swiveling this way and that as he checked the empty road for watchers. He carried a large, hard shell suitcase. He was making for the BMW.

I climbed out of my car and stuck my hand in my raincoat pocket so that it gripped the hard hunk of metal. Then I headed off to intercept.

“Guy,” I called out.

He looked up at me, startled, before setting his shoulders in a posture of determination and continuing to the car.

“Guy,” I called out again, shuffling as quickly as I could toward him. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”

“Don’t try to stop me, Victor. I’m getting out of here.”

“Why?”

By now he had just about reached his car and I had just about reached him. As he tried to stick his key in the slot, I pulled at his arm. Keytus interruptus. He stared up at me with an unfathomable fear.

“They’re going to kill me,” he said. “You told me that yourself.”

“No, I did not.”

“In so many words, yes, you did. They’re going to arrest me and throw me in jail and kill me. I’m not going to sit around and let them. I didn’t do anything.”

“And this is going to convince them of that? Come back with me to my apartment.”

“Forget it.”

“You can’t run, Guy.”

“Watch me,” he said as he pulled his arm from my grasp and slid the key into the lock. I tried to grab him again. He swung at me with his suitcase, I raised my hand in defense. The suitcase banged into my shoulder. I fell back hard onto my side. The butt of the gun dug into my hip.

He slammed the door, locked himself inside, started the engine.

I spun onto my back, tightened my grip on the gun.

Suddenly another car, boxy and brown, just missed running over me as it pulled alongside Guy’s Beemer and stopped dead, blocking him in.

Guy slammed on his horn, but the brown car didn’t move.

Guy tried to pull forward, hopping the curve and riding on the sidewalk, around a parked car, and back onto the street to get away, but another car, boxy and black, pulled up suddenly and blocked him in again.

From out of the black car jumped Detective Stone, who quickly drew her gun and aimed it at Guy.

Detective Breger calmly exited his vehicle, ambled over to Guy’s BMW, and peered in the window. He gestured for Guy to open the lock. As he patiently waited, first one, then two, then three police cruisers appeared on the street, their flashing lights painting acres of aluminum siding red and blue.

I rose from the ground, my hand out of my raincoat pocket. Breger calmly motioned me away, and I stepped back.

Guy did nothing, did nothing, and then, finally, he electronically unlocked his car. Breger opened the passenger door and leaned inside.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Forrest?”

Guy tried to say something, but Stone, gun still drawn, swung open the other door and cut him off. “Step out of the vehicle, please.”

Guy began again to speak.

“Step out of the vehicle, please,” repeated Stone.

Guy slowly climbed out, looking at me helplessly for a moment before Stone holstered her gun and jammed him roughly up against the Beemer’s side, cuffing his hands behind him.

“You are under arrest for the murder of Hailey Prouix,” said Stone when the cuffs were in place. She spun him around and began to read him his rights.

“I’m a lawyer,” said Guy halfway through.

“Good,” said Stone. “That means there won’t be any misunderstandings.” She continued.

I walked over to Detective Breger, who, with surgical gloves in place, was rifling through the contents of Guy’s suitcase.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Search incident to arrest,” said Breger without looking up from the suitcase. “Chimel v. California.”

“I know the damn cite. How’d you know he was here?”

“Where do you think you are, Mr. Carl? A woman is found shot dead in her bed, all the doors locked, the windows, no evidence of a break-in, no evidence of a robbery. You think we let the only other person in the house walk without a tail? Stone was following from the moment you left here. Saw him sneak out of your building, grab a cab, take it here, where I had been waiting all night just in case, hoping he would do exactly what he did.”

“Well, aren’t you the clever pair.”

“Clothes,” he said as he continued his search through the suitcase, “toothbrush, a prescription of” – he held the bottle away from his face and squinted at the label – “Viagra. Anticipating some fun, was he? And what is this? An envelope filled with cash. It’s not the three thousand, we already logged that, and it was much slimmer. Whoa. Ten, twenty, maybe fifty, sixty. Our Mr. Forrest had plans. Oh, and look, how sweet, his passport.”

“Is that what you were hoping to find?”

“It is what I was expecting to find. The coroner called in a preliminary report. Said Miss Prouix was beaten before she was killed. Her left eye was bruised.”

I fought to keep my emotions in check, I bit the inside of my cheek and fought to bat not an eyelash as I heard about the bruise. I stood stone-still and watched as Breger kept searching the suitcase and then, disappointed, started in on the car, the glove compartment, the back seat, the trunk. Finding nothing, he called over to Stone, “You pat him down?”

“Only a wallet,” said Stone, leaning against the side of the car into which she had deposited Guy.

“What are you missing?” I managed to get out.

“The gun. We still have not found the gun. I figure the gun is the final rail in your buddy’s prison cell.”

“Is that what you figure?”

I didn’t wait for an answer, I simply turned and walked toward one of the police cars with its lights still flashing. Guy was sitting forward in the back seat, his mouth tight, his fists clenched behind his back. He looked at me angrily when I came over, and I looked away, hoping to hide what it truly was I felt about him.

“I didn’t do it,” he said through clenched teeth. “Victor, I swear I didn’t do it.”

“Don’t talk,” I advised him while surveying the scene, purposely avoiding his gaze.

“I loved her, you know I loved her. How could I have killed her? Victor, I swear I didn’t do it.”

“What did I just tell you? Don’t say anything to anybody, especially when you’re sitting in a police car. Don’t talk to the cop driving you to the station, don’t talk to the cop processing you for admittance, and for heaven’s sake don’t talk to whatever greaseball they happen to stick you with in the lockup. Do you understand?”

“Will they let me out today?”

“Do you understand what I said?”

“Yes. I understand. I was in the same damn Criminal Law class as you, Victor. Will they let me out of jail today?”

“You were running away. You had sixty thousand dollars and a passport. They’re going to charge you with murder. No judge, even a suburban judge, is going to grant you bail. You’re in till your trial.”

“I am so cooked.”

“Yes you are.”

“Will you represent me?”

I turned to stare at him.

“I’m desperate,” he said. “I need someone I trust. At least for now. I need someone who understands. Victor, I’m begging you. Will you represent me?”

It didn’t take me a moment to make up my mind, it didn’t take me a moment to run through the implications and make up my mind. “Yes. I’ll represent you.”

He gave me a wan smile.

I returned it along with a chuck on the shoulder. “Now there’s something I need to do, all right? So do as I say, and I’ll see you at the arraignment.”

I waited as one of the uniforms shut the car door and another climbed behind the wheel. With the lights still on, they drove Guy away, into the dying night. I suppressed a smile and headed over to Breger, who was continuing to search through the Beemer.

“You might want to know, Detective, that Guy Forrest just asked me to represent him on more than a temporary basis, and I agreed.”

“Bully. You get a retainer?”

“I was hoping it was in that envelope you found.”

“That envelope, along with its contents, is evidence. Evidence, as you well know, stays in our custody all the way through appeal.”

“Too bad,” I said as I reached into my pocket. “It would have looked nice in piles on my desk. Still, we’ll see what the judge has to say about it. But I have something for you. I can’t tell you how I got this, attorney-client privilege now in full force and effect, but I believe I’m obligated as an officer of the court to turn it over, as it may be material to your investigation.”

I pulled my hand out of my coat pocket and offered what was in its grasp to Detective Breger. The detective’s eyes bulged.

“Is that…?”

“You have tests to identify it, don’t you?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Well, then.”

He took the bag with the gun and hefted it in his hand, and something suddenly went out of me, something ugly and hard. It was as if a brutal rod of steel had been extracted from my spine.

“I might have been rude back there,” said Breger, still gazing at the gun.

“Are you trying to apologize for your manner, Detective?”

“I want you to know that I am sorry if I was rude. I should not have been rude. You’re a guy just trying to do your job. It has been noted that you went after him when you discovered he sneaked out of your place. It has been noted that you tried to stop him from running and he knocked you down with his suitcase. It has now been noted that you turned over what might prove to be the murder weapon. The law says you need to turn it over, I know, but still, nine out of ten would have buried it. So all of that has been noted, and I am sorry if I was rude back there.”

“Okay,” I said.

He nodded and, without saying another word, headed off to show his shiny new prize to his partner.

I stayed at the scene until all the police, car by car, had left, until the dawn had fully broken through and the morning stretched and twittered and came alive. I thought about what had happened that night, what I had lost, what I had just done, what I had just set about to do. I felt my weary sadness turn to determination. I was glad the gun was gone. It was all wrong for me, a gun, like boxing gloves on a poet. But that didn’t mean it was over, that didn’t mean I was through.

How can you defend a man you know is guilty?

No matter where I was, at a bar or a ball game, whenever my profession was discovered, the inevitable question was raised. And never yet had I found an adequate answer.

Oh, I knew the Constitution, I could cite the Sixth Amendment backward and forward, the case law, too, but still the question always gave me pause. Where in the Constitution did it provide that every participant in a criminal trial was duty bound to seek the ends of justice with the sole exception of the attorney for the defense? Where in the Constitution did it say that assistance of counsel meant assistance in escaping the just consequences of your merciless crime? I had been asked the question dozens of times, and now, here, with my lover dead on a mattress on the floor, I finally had my answer: I can’t, I won’t. And it wasn’t enough to refuse the case, let someone else do the dirty work. This was no time to punt. A decision had been made to discover the truth and be certain it was served. A decision had been made, and I would follow it through. I had discovered the truth that very night, in my apartment when Guy lied so shamelessly and later, on the street, when he whacked me with his suitcase as he was about to make good his escape from justice. The second part, I was sure, would be a snap.

Yes indeed, I’d represent that son of a bitch. What better way to keep my pledge? What better way to remember Hailey Prouix?

6

SHE SITS across from me, leaning away from me, arms crossed, legs crossed. She leans away from me, but her bright red lips are curved and challenging. She raises her cigarette to her mouth. Her blue eyes, framed dramatically by the dark rails of her glasses, squint from the smoke. Her narrowed gaze rakes across my face, down my throat. I look at her and forget to breathe.

“Victor,” says Guy Forrest, sitting beside her at the table, “I’d like to you to meet Hailey Prouix.”

“So pleased,” I say, and I am.

We are in a Spanish restaurant on Twelfth Street, modern, cruelly lit, cold stone tables for the hot paella. You want comfort, stay in bed. Guy had called and asked me to meet him, and here I am, forgetting to breathe, and I feel a love surging inside me. Love, not for her, because she is nothing yet but possibilities, instead love for my dear friend Guy, who thought well enough of me to introduce me to her, to set up this setup. Was ever a friend dearer?

But they are sitting side by side. That should have been my clue.

We order drinks, we chat. I smile and do my best to be charming. I am jolly, I am self-deprecating, I am wry. Oh, am I wry. Guy tells me Hailey is also a lawyer. I make a joke. He tells Hailey that he and I went to law school together. She asks what kind of law I do.

“Mostly criminal defense, but I also pursue the intentional torts that flow out of crime. Fraud, assault, the occasional wrongful death.”

“Lucrative?”

“Sometimes, sometimes not, but it keeps me busy. Though not as busy as they keep Guy at Dawson, Cricket. How’s the sweatshop, Guy?”

“Fine, I suppose, but I’m not going to be there much longer.”

I stare at him blankly. I hadn’t heard through the legal grapevine that he had been in trouble at his firm.

“I’m taking a page from your book,” says Guy. “I’m going to try it on my own.”

“You’re six months from partnership.”

“I want something new.”

“What does Leila say?”

“She doesn’t have a say,” he says as he puts an arm around Hailey. “I’m leaving her, too.”

Ah, so there it is. My charming smile freezes on my face, the love I had felt for a loyal friend withers. This isn’t a setup, this is an announcement. I turn my head to look at her. Her lovely lips are pursed, as if she were examining me for some reason, as if there were something she might want from me. She smashes out her cigarette and excuses herself. Guy scrambles to stand as she slides out of her seat, and we both watch while she walks down the aisle. She walks as if she knows what she is doing, as if she has been walking near all her life.

“You look happy,” I say to Guy, even though he suddenly looks positively miserable.

“Oh, I am. Like I’ve never been before.”

“Where are you going to live?”

“She has a small house. Nothing fancy. A sofa, a table, a mattress on the floor.”

“A mattress on the floor?”

He gives a boyish half grin that makes me want to smash him in the face. He reads my expression, and the grin dies. “You don’t approve,” he says.

“It’s not up to me to approve or disapprove, is it? I’m only trying to understand what you’re doing.”

“I’ve decided to change my life.”

I snap my fingers. “Just like that.”

“I don’t have a choice. I love her, Victor. What else is there to understand? I’m sick in love with her.”

And just then he looks it, sick in love, as if love were an illness that he has caught, an exotic virus that was biding its time in the nuclei of his cells until it burst forth to ravage him.

“Well, that’s great, Guy,” I say, “just great. I’m glad for you. Really.”

I take a sip of my Sea Breeze and I am suffused with the bitter aftertaste of disappointment. But is it with Guy, with what he is going to do to his wife and his children and the image I had held of his happy, happy family, or is it because he hasn’t brought her to this restaurant for me?

When she returns, the conversation is awkward, charmless, wryless. There is no longer flirtation in the air. Guy talks, I listen, Hailey smokes. But at the end, as we part and say our good-byes, in a moment while Guy looks away, I am staring once again at her lips when they silently mouth “Call me,” and I do.

WE MEET for a drink after work. Nothing secret or surreptitious, we are in the open, in a public place, the bar of a famous restaurant where Guy could march in at any time, but he won’t. Even so, he is with us, as real a presence as the man with the toupee and the flowered tie sitting two stools down. Hailey drinks an Absolut martini, I drink my usual Sea Breeze. The man with the toupee drinks Scotch. Hailey’s eyes are bluer than I remember, her lips freshly lacquered and in constant motion, hovering uneasily just beneath a smile. I can’t take my eyes off them, they are devouring.

“I have a client that might be facing criminal charges,” she says. “I wondered if you wanted to handle the case.”

“So this is a business meeting.”

“What did you think it was?” Her words are accusatory, but her smile is anything but. It feels like a seduction, but I wonder who is seducing whom.

“I thought we were going to talk about Guy,” I say.

“No we weren’t.”

“You’re going to destroy him, aren’t you?”

“And that would concern you?”

“He’s my friend.”

“And that’s why you’re here, having a drink with me, because he’s your friend?”

“You phrase questions like a psychiatrist, not a lawyer.”

“Objection noted. Answer the question.”

“There you go. Fine deposition form.”

“You’re not here having a drink with me because Guy is your friend, are you, Mr. Carl?”

“No.”

“Good. At least that’s settled.”

“Is it so easy?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

And she is right.

WE COURT like Victorians, slowly, chastely. The strange omnipresence of Guy is our chaperon. He is always there, the guy with the afro, the guy in the tweed suit, the guy cross-dressing who thinks we can’t tell. He is always there, and his presence lets us pretend that we want only to be friends. Merely friends. That is all. Isn’t it obvious?

There are more drinks in the twilight. She crosses her legs and we bump knees. Just the thought of her turns me blue, but she won’t let me kiss her. She says that nothing can ever happen, that she is devoted to Guy. Her admonitions allow me to assuage any guilt that our meetings are other than innocent, but when she crosses her legs, we bump knees.

On nights when Guy is busy, we have dinner. She orders fish but barely eats a thing. She drinks more than she ought and smokes when she drinks. Mostly what we do is talk. We talk of incidental things, our cases, our tastes in movies. She is not one for weepy chick flicks. She likes action-adventure, she likes explosions. Arnold. John Woo. She has a longing for Sylvester Stallone.

“Whatever happened to him?” I ask.

“He tried to get serious.”

“Is that fatal?”

“Always.”

“You’ve never been serious?” I say.

“I didn’t say that. But whenever I’ve been serious, I’ve been seriously bad.”

“You exaggerate.”

“No, no I don’t.”

“Tell me about it, tell me the worst.”

“Are you a priest? I could only tell a priest.”

“I didn’t know you were religious.”

“I’m not, and that’s why. So I never have to tell.”

“It’s not that bad, I’m sure.”

“That’s sweet of you. Or dim of you. One or the other. Which is it?”

“Sweet?”

“Too bad. There is nothing more appealing sometimes than an utter lack of imagination.”

“Has Guy moved in yet?”

“Oh, yes. Yes he has.”

“How is it, living with Guy?”

“Like a dream.”

“You sound overwhelmed with joy.”

“I never knew bliss could feel this way.”

She has no sense of humor, but she laughs well. She is a grand audience, she is Ed McMahon if Ed McMahon wore a size four. I make wisecracks, and she pretends they are funnier than they really are, and I let her. We tell stories of our childhoods and treat them like revelations, when all they are are stories culled to hide the revelations. I tell her how my mother left when I was still in my boyhood, how she now lives with some alcoholic cowboy in Arizona. I tell her how my father still cuts lawns even with half a lung. She tells me of the tragic death of her father.

This is what I learn of her past, the bones of her life as she relates them to me. She was born in West Virginia, on the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains. Her daddy was a Cajun who came north looking for work in the lumber mills. They went to church every Sunday, had a house with a verandah on the high side of the river. She walked to school with her sister, came home to a plate of cookies and milk each afternoon, played in the park across from the courthouse. She was eight when a load of timber came loose during stacking and crushed her father to death.

There was no pension, no payout. He had been working all those years as an independent contractor. There was insurance, but barely enough for the burial. Her mother worked, but even so, things grew very hard very quickly and although she was still only a child at the time, in all her years after, she never forgot the bitter taste of financial desperation. In order to help out, her mother’s brother moved in and joined his wages with his sister’s. No family of his own, a drinker and gambler, her uncle settled down long enough to help raise the family. Eight years he lived with them, until the strain became too much and he disappeared, presumably to start again with the drinking and the gambling. But by then his job was complete, the girls were almost grown.

Hailey was popular, pretty, a prom queen who walked the high school halls arm in arm with the star halfback. Awarded a church scholarship, she left home to attend a small college in Maryland, and for the first time she concentrated more on her studies than on her social life. To her great surprise she discovered that she was good at academics. Dean’s-list good. Good enough for the church scholarship to be extended to graduate school if she wanted to attend, and she did. She never forgot what had happened to her father and family, never forgot how an unfair contract and unsafe conditions had left her family on the brink. It was that experience, she told me, that had sent her into the law, and when she said it, there was none of the ironic tone that normally left you looking for the explanatory footnotes. A law school in New Jersey gave her enough aid so that with the scholarship and loans she could make a go of it. Three years later she landed an associate’s position with a small but profitable plaintiff’s firm in Philadelphia. Four years after that, when an affair with the managing partner created a scandal, she took a stack of files and went out on her own.

“It all sounds so damn inspiring,” I say. “Rags to riches.”

“Yes, I’m the American dream.”

“How did you meet Guy?”

“At a seminar on proving and defending the medical malpractice case.”

“I always knew CLE had to be good for something.”

“That’s what I get for trying to improve my mind.”

“You think you deserve better?”

“I think I’m getting exactly what I deserve. Another martini, please.”

“When do you have to get home?”

“After this drink.”

“Then make it a double.”

I SENSE in her the grand design of some awesome inevitability. I don’t know from where it emanates, maybe it comes from having your father crushed beneath a load of pine, but its symptom is a weary resignation.

“Why don’t you just end it?” I ask.

“But I like seeing you.”

“I mean with Guy.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

“Because you love him?”

“Why else?”

“I don’t know.”

“See. It’s so simple, isn’t it?”

She is committed to Guy, absolutely, she tells me so all the time, there is no other option. But still, when I call, she picks a place.

“I am so tired,” she says. “Do you ever get so tired?”

“No,” I say. “I’m too frightened all the time to be tired.”

“Frightened of what?”

“Of learning that the best is behind me.”

“Sometimes I have this urge to just start over,” she says. “Be something new.”

“Don’t talk about it, do it. Guy has, apparently. You can, too.”

“But I already have. This is it.”

“You thought you’d change your life with Guy?”

“No, Guy was something else.”

“And what am I?”

“You are an indulgence. Something not good for me, like a cigarette or a drink.”

“Hazardous to your health.”

“If only you knew.”

WHAT SHE sees in me, I can only guess. What I see in her, besides the obvious beauty, is a sadness, palpable but elusive, a sadness that reaches into my heart like a claw.

I’m not struggling to understand why her sadness touches me as it does, why I feel about her what I feel; it doesn’t take Jung to dredge up the suspects. My mother drinking gin late nights in the kitchen, drumming her fingers on the Formica, wondering how she ended up married to this man, living in this tattered house in this decaying suburb, shackled to this brat with his whine like a siren. Or my father, in his chair in front of the television with a can of Iron City in his hand, sitting in the chair in the dark after his wife left him alone with his son, on his face the dazed expression of a car-crash victim staggering out of his wrecked vehicle. Why is it that children of alcoholics find themselves mysteriously attracted to the alcoholic personality? Answer that and you might understand why I found myself, many years before, engaged to a sad, sweet girl named Janice, who fulfilled all my greatest fears by breaking the engagement and running off with a forty-seven-year-old urologist named Wren. Or why, a few years after that, I prostrated my heart and my career on the altar of Veronica Ashland, a sad drug-addled woman whose betrayal was as inevitable as the thunderstorm at the end of a brutally sweltering day. Or why I find myself obsessively attracted to the sadness in Hailey Prouix. Is it that I see in her sadness a chance to ease my soul, to do for her what I could never do for my parents as they tore their lives apart? Or is it just that she is with my dear friend Guy and so hot my blood is boiling at the wanting?

IT IS usually me who calls, who tells the receptionist it is Victor Carl to talk about the Sylvester matter. That is our code case, the Sylvester matter, in honor of her silver-screen hero. It is usually me who calls, so I am surprised when I return from a court appearance to see a message in my box pertaining to the Sylvester matter. When I phone, she speaks to me in a whisper.

“Are you free for lunch?”

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

“When can you shake loose?”

“Now. Where do you want to meet? What are you hungry for?”

“Oh, pick a place, Victor. Any place, any place at all.”

She is waiting for me at the sandwich joint. There are little tables crowded into a long, narrow room, and the tables are filled with men and women talking loudly and stuffing corned beef specials into their mouths, strands of coleslaw hanging from their teeth. She is leaning back in her chair, arms crossed.

“What looks good?” I say as I sit.

“Everything,” she says.

“The corned beef seems to be it.”

“Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“The most wonderful thing,” but her voice is anything but gladdened. “What are we going to do, Victor, you and I?”

“Have lunch?”

“Is that all? Because lately that seems like all.”

“I’ve been following your lead.”

“Well, I’m a lousy dancer.”

“Did something happen between you and Guy?”

“Yes. Something happened.”

Just then the waitress comes to our table, her pad out. “Are you ready?”

“Victor, are you ready?” asks Hailey.

“I don’t know.”

“Can you give us a minute,” says Hailey. The waitress rolls her eyes before rushing off to grab an order in the kitchen.

“I’m not hungry,” she says. “Are you hungry?”

“Not anymore.”

“Then let’s go for a walk.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere you want.”

Outside, it is damp and chill and the temperature brings a rouge to her cheeks. She wears a gray overcoat atop her lawyer’s garb, her hands tucked into the pockets.

“Do you want a drink? You look like you could use a drink. I have some beers in my apartment.”

“Yes,” she says. “Let’s do that.”

“Is it about work?” I ask. “Is it about Guy?”

“Yes.”

“Which?”

“Aren’t you sick of talking? Aren’t you sick to death of talking? The more I talk, the less I know. The words are so fuzzy they turn everything into a lie, and then the lie becomes the new truth and I don’t know anything for certain anymore.”

I begin to say something, some comforting inanity, but the hungry look of tragedy in her eyes stops me midword, and so we walk in quiet through the noontime crowds toward my apartment.

It is a mess, like it is always a mess. I leave her standing in the living room as I gather up the clothes on the coach, the towel on the door, gather them up and dump them all into the hamper in my bathroom. She stands motionless as I work, still in her coat, hands still in her pockets. When it is almost presentable, I stop and look at her standing still in her coat, and the sadness that is always there is pouring out of her. I can see it, a dark blue pouring out of her. She looks at me, and her eyes beneath her glasses are moist, and the blue is pouring out of her, and I am helpless to stop myself from going to her and wrapping my arms about her and squeezing, as if I could squeeze out the sadness.

She feels thin beneath my arms, bones and nothing more. She smells of jasmine and smoke. I tell her it will be all right, even though I don’t know what is troubling her and I suspect it will turn out badly. I tell her it will be all right, and I touch my lips to the top of her head in a brotherly kiss.

“I’m so bad.”

“No you’re not.”

A brotherly kiss to the soft of her temple.

“I am. You don’t know.”

“I know what I need to know.”

A brotherly kiss to the soft ridge beneath her eye, and I taste the salt of a tear.

I pull away. She lifts her face to me. Her eyes are wet, her nose red, her mouth quivering. She is the picture of desolation, and I can’t help myself. I don’t want to help myself. Something has happened between her and Guy and that now is enough for me. I take her biceps in my hands and squeeze, even as I kiss her gently. Even as our lips barely touch. There is no mashing, no gnashing, just the gentlest touch. The gentlest touch. A saving touch, I think, I hope. Our mouths open slightly, the touch of our lips staying just as gentle, and nothing slips between them, no tongue, no moisture, nothing, but not nothing, because there is a commingling of spaces, a creation of something new, and in the enclosure formed between our gently touching mouths I feel an emptiness flowing and growing, hers, mine, ours.

I WANT it to be slow.

I had fantasized about the two of us together, often, incessantly, it had been my nighttime preoccupation since our first meeting, and it had always been hard, rough, full of laughter and grabbing, she seemed that kind of lover, but in the presence of her overwhelming sadness I want this now to be slow, as gentle as our first kiss.

I brush my lips again upon her temple, upon her cheek, take her lips gently in my teeth. We are naked now, kneeling on the bed, our hands gently brushing each other’s arms, sides, backs, thighs.

She is thinner than ever I thought, so thin and fragile and, without her glasses, so seemingly vulnerable, so in need of protection. And that is what I want to do, to protect her.

The afternoon light slices in through the blinds, her smell of smoke and jasmine is charged by the sharp edge of musk.

I slide closer. I am pressed up against the flat of her belly.

I glide my hand around the contour of her breast. I lift its weight in my palm.

I kiss her shoulder, I kiss the line of jaw, her neck. A tremor rises from her throat and with it a sound soft as a spring drizzle. I kiss the bone of her clavicle, I kiss the hollow beneath the bone, the first swell of her chest, the soft skin, the excited pink areola. The sound rises, stretches, widens to fill every inch of space.

I want it to be slow, but suddenly there is a presence in the room other than the two of us. A hunger, a need. Something foreign and relentless, primordial, with a rhythm of its own, a breath hot and dank, a power, and I don’t know from whence it came. Is it mine, hers, is it an entity of its own invading our lives? I don’t recognize it, I don’t understand it, I’ve never felt anything like it before, this hunger, this need. It is brutal and violent and immortal, and before I know what has happened, it has taken control.

I want it to be slow, but what I want no longer matters.

And when it is over, she lies on her side, covered in sweat and sheets and I lie behind her, in a shocked silence, sore and uncertain, my arms wrapping her like a stole.

“That was insane,” I say.

“It always is.” There is a twang in her voice, a slight shift west and south into the hillocks of her West Virginia home, as if whatever it was that roared through us took her back into her past.

“No, it was a like freight train was in the room with us.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“So you felt it, too?”

“Shhhhhh.”

“What was it?”

“A vestige.”

My chest is pressed into her back, my hips are pressed into her thighs. She doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t understand what has happened. I hold her tight and feel the sadness and hold her tighter, but with the shift in her accent for a moment I am not certain anymore whom I am holding.

“What was the thing?” I say. “The thing you wanted to tell me about.”

“Nothing important.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing you should worry about. Nothing that affects you.”

I don’t say anything. I hold tight and wait. She wanted to tell me before, she wants to tell me now, so I wait.

“It was last night,” she says. “Guy. We were together in the Jacuzzi. There were candles, rose petals.”

“I don’t want to hear the details.”

“He thought it was romantic. The candles. Like a commercial or something.”

“Really, I don’t want to hear.”

“Then he asked me to marry him as soon as the divorce goes through. To marry him.”

She says nothing more, and I say nothing, and the silence swells and stretches until it is as taut as an overinflated balloon that I can’t help but prick with my words:

“And what did you say?”

“What could I say? I said yes.”