Fatal Flaw

7

I COULD barely look at Guy as he sat next to me at the defense table, still in the clothes of the night before, the clothes, like Guy, now rumpled and stinking. I could barely look at his puffy face, his red eyes, the way his hands trembled. I could barely look at the fear that overwhelmed him as he began to understand the abject consequences of his single moment of uncontrollable rage. Whenever I looked at him, I wanted to strangle him, so instead I looked around the courtroom, at the bailiff, the guards, at the bored reporters scattered in the otherwise empty seats, at the detectives sitting in the front row behind the prosecution table, Stone leaning back, arms stretched out, Breger hunched forward in weariness. It was still early, the judge was not scheduled to arrive for another quarter of an hour, but it pays to be prompt when they are arraigning your client for murder.

The Montgomery County Courthouse was an old Greek Revival building with porticoes and pediments and a great green dome, all set in the county seat of Norristown. They had put us in Courtroom A, the building’s largest room, with its high ceilings and wood paneling and big leather chairs at the counsel tables that squeaked with righteousness. The courtrooms in Philadelphia are fresh and spanking new, modern and streamlined, with a sense of the assembly line about them, and so it felt good to be in a place with heavy wooden benches and red carpeting, a place that exuded harsh justice of the old sort. That’s the kind of justice I was hoping to find.

I let my partner, Beth Derringer, coach Guy through the procedure so I could stew blissfully in my own emotions. “This is just a formality, Guy, you know all this,” she said quietly. “We’ll waive the reading of the indictment, plead you not guilty, and get started building your defense.”

Beth was not just my partner, she was my best friend. Sharp, faithful, absolutely trustworthy. So of course I couldn’t trust her with all that had happened between Hailey and me and what had been decided the night before.

And what exactly had been decided? Justice, vengeance, take your pick, they both felt the same to me.

It all would have been simpler had I been able to go it alone, but this would be a trying case, I would need assistance, and so I had asked Beth to assist. And having Beth on my side had another distinct advantage. She could be my canary in the mine shaft. If I could keep her in the dark about what had happened and what I had decided to do about it, I believed I could keep everyone else there, too.

“What about bail?” said Guy. “I’ve got to get out of here. Do you have any idea of what it’s like in prison? Do you have any idea of the way those animals inside look at me?”

“No,” said Beth. “I don’t. We’ll try to get you out, Guy, but it’s a murder charge, and you were trying to run. The judge will grant either no bail or one absurdly high. But how much could you put up if bail is set?”

“I don’t know. There’s money in the account, there’s Hailey’s life insurance, there’s the house. It’s worth a mil or so.”

“Whose house?” I said while still looking away.

“Mine. Leila’s. Our house.”

“That’s not your house,” I said.

As soon as I said it, Guy understood. We sat side by side in Property Law, I cribbed off of his notes for my outline. In Pennsylvania, when any real estate is owned by a married couple, neither spouse has any individual property interest, it is owned by the couple itself, and any disposition of the property must be agreed to by both spouses.

“Will Leila agree to put it up for bail?” asked Beth.

“Yes, of course. To get me out of jail, of course. Let me talk to her.”

“Do you think she’d put up your children’s house to give you a chance to run and leave them homeless?” I said without looking at him so he couldn’t see the expression twisting my features. “Do you really think her father would let her?”

“Talk to her, Victor. You can get her to sign.”

“I’m not that persuasive.”

“Talk to her for me.”

“All right.”

“And tell her I want to see the kids. I need to see the kids.”

Before I could respond, Beth continued. “You mentioned an account. What kind of account?”

“A brokerage account.”

“In whose name?”

“In my name. And Hailey’s.”

I turned suddenly and stared at him, his pleading eyes, his mouth, jerked now and then by a twitch that had never marred his features before his arrest. Not so handsome anymore. “How much?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Depending on the markets, maybe half a million.”

“Where the hell did you get half a million dollars?”

“Hailey had a big case before we got together. Medical malpractice. The settlement was huge.”

“If it was Hailey’s money, why was your name on the accounts?”

“Because we were in love. We were going to be married, so we put all our money together. I added some, too. Part of it was mine.”

I stared at him, suddenly even angrier than before, and then turned away in disgust.

“Do you know where the account is?” said Beth.

“Schwab. Hailey did some trading online. I let her keep track of everything. I didn’t even know the password.”

“That’s okay, Guy. We’ll find out exactly what’s in there.” She reached into her file and pulled out a piece of paper. “We’d like you to sign this power of attorney. It will allow us to access information about your financial accounts. It doesn’t provide us the power to withdraw funds, but it will let us learn what we need to make bail or to convince the judge to set something reasonable later on.”

I watched out of the corner of my eye as Guy reviewed the document. He had said the fee would be no problem, I wanted to make sure. I watched until he signed and handed it back to Beth, and then my disgust forced me to turn away again.

“And you said there was insurance?” asked Beth.

“Life insurance. I already had a policy where I switched my secondary beneficiary to her. She took a policy on herself and named me the beneficiary.”

“Where are the policies?”

“I don’t know. Hailey had them, maybe in her office or something.”

“Okay,” said Beth. “We’ll find them, too. After the arraignment they’re going to take you back to the county lockup, so we won’t be able to talk right away. We’ll set something up as soon as possible. What we need to know right now is if you have any idea who might have done this, if you have any leads you think we ought to investigate?”

I swiveled my head slowly until I was staring straight at him once again. This time he looked at me as if he were pleading for some answers. I had none, at least none he would like.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Everyone loved her. She was great. No one wanted to hurt her.”

“Had there been anything unusual? Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in the past few months?”

“No. Nothing. There were some calls at the house, you know, calls I answered and then the caller hung up. Stuff like that. They ended about a month ago, but maybe something was going on. Maybe there was someone else I didn’t know about.”

I stood and left the table so he wouldn’t hear the snort of disbelief that came unbidden from my throat. It was all too much to take, Guy professing his innocence, casting about for suspects, especially the thing about the phone caller who kept hanging up when he answered, since the phone caller who kept hanging up when he answered was me.

In the peanut gallery behind the bar, a tall man with a suit and a briefcase was standing in the aisle, talking to Breger and Stone. I took him to be the prosecutor and I stepped over to make the introductions. We were going to be a good team, I was sure, he and I, working together as we were toward a common goal.

But as I got closer, I realized the prosecutor and two detectives weren’t talking so much as arguing. Stone was keeping her voice low, but her disgust was evident. Breger looked away, his mouth set with a disappointment that seemed expected yet still painful, like a kid on Christmas morning who finds beneath the tree a puzzle and not a pony. When Stone saw me approach, she stopped talking and gestured to the prosecutor. The tall man with the suit and briefcase turned around.

“You’re Victor Carl?”

“That’s right,” I said. He was a handsome man, lean and athletic, and I thought he looked familiar but I couldn’t be sure.

“Yeah, I recognize you from the paper.” He was talking about this morning’s Daily News. Beneath the headline – SHOT THROUGH THE HEART – was my picture, hand out warding off the camera, looking as guilty as a politician in a strip club.

“They didn’t get my good side,” I said.

“Well, you were facing the camera,” said Stone.

Breger, staring now down at the floor, bowed his head sadly at his partner’s impudence even as his shoulders shook with stifled laughter.

“Now, is that nice?” I said. “Here I am, trying to be pleasant, trying to forge a working relationship with the officers of the law, and you return my overture with insults.”

“That wasn’t an insult,” said Stone, showing off her healthy teeth. “If I was meaning to insult you, I would have started with your tie.”

“What’s wrong with my tie?”

“Please. It’s like you and Breger frequent the same thrift shop.”

“I was just about to compliment Detective Breger on his neck-wear. It’s rare to find a man brave enough to wear a plaid jacket and a plaid tie to go with it.”

“If I may interrupt the soirée,” said the handsome man in the aisle. “I’m Troy Jefferson, chief of the trial division in the DA’s office here. I’ll be prosecuting Mr. Forrest.”

I looked up at him. “I saw you play,” I said. “I saw you light us up for thirty-five when you could barely walk.”

“You went to Abington?”

“I did.”

“Did you play yourself?”

“No. I was barely coordinated enough the climb the bleachers.”

“That’s one game I’ll never forget. I had an operation the next week and was never the same.”

“You were a beautiful player.”

“Thank you.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

I smiled at him. He smiled at me. I reached out my hand and he shook it. Troy Jefferson was the basketball star in our conference when I went to high school. He was fast, aggressive on the dribble, with a sweet jumper from the top of the key. He had led his team to a state championship as a junior, and before his knee collapsed on him had been talked about as the surest thing since Wilt. He played college ball, I remembered, but was never the same as before the injury and went undrafted. I had heard he played in Europe for a few years before going to law school and becoming a prosecutor. Word was he was waiting for the right moment to turn political and leap into some public office, maybe attorney general, maybe higher. He had been a high school superstar, I had been a high school nothing, and now here we were, face to face in a courtroom, each of us smiling. We were going to like one another, Troy and I, we were going to be best friends. Who would have thought it a decade and a half before?

“Have you already entered your notice of appearance?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good,” said my new friend Troy. “Do you have a minute, Victor? I have something I want to talk to you about.”

I glanced at Breger and Stone, who glared not at me but at Troy, and then followed him out of the courtroom. We found a private perch on the marble stairway in the courthouse atrium, beneath a green stained-glass ceiling.

“I just wanted you to know that we’re going to oppose any bail in this case,” said Troy Jefferson.

“I expected as much.”

“That thing with the suitcase and the passport sealed it. And we’re still debating whether to ask for this to be a capital case.”

“That’s your decision,” I said, being as helpful as possible.

“The evidence against your client is overwhelming, and a lot of people, including the detectives in this case, think we should push for death. They don’t like the fact that she was hit before she was shot. Neither do I. And in case you didn’t know, the only fingerprints we could lift from the gun you handed over were your client’s.”

“He picked it up after the killing,” I said perfunctorily, because, as a defense attorney, I was supposed to say things like that, but I must say I admired Troy’s righteous indignation. Juries respond well to righteous indignation.

“Can we keep this conversation absolutely confidential?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Good.” He looked up and down down the empty staircase. “Victor, we haven’t finished our investigation by a long shot, and a lot of people want us to wait before we do anything. But this appears to me to be a crime of passion. Your client and Miss Prouix were fighting, there was a scuffle, your client couldn’t control himself, and he shot his fiancée. It’s a common enough story, and it’s sad, truly, but it’s not worth death. Right now, to me, it appears like nothing worse than man one. Something in the ten-to fifteen-year range. I’ve talked this over with the DA, and we’d be willing to accept a man one plea right now. Your client could be out, with good behavior, in eight to ten years.”

“That’s generous of you,” I said. And it was, shockingly.

“But you should know, Victor, that as our investigation continues, there is no telling what we might find. Stone and Breger are not happy with the offer and they are going to scour the landscape looking for more of a motive. You don’t want them to find it. If they dig up even the hint of a motive beyond the heat of the moment, I’m going to have no choice but to yank the offer and go for murder one with death as a possibility. I know it’s a lot to think about, and you don’t need to decide today, but you don’t want to wait too long either.”

“I understand.”

“So talk it over with your client and let me know.”

“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”

“It was nice meeting you, Victor. Breger said favorable things about you, which is rarer than you can imagine. Let’s see if we can work something out.” He smiled his charismatic Troy Jefferson smile, patted me on my shoulder, and headed back into court. I watched him go, trying to hide my shock.

What the hell was he doing? A woman was murdered in cold blood by a smarmy asshole and he offers up man one, ten to fifteen years, out in eight to ten? Where was the justice in that? I had half a mind to read Troy the riot act. I wouldn’t, of course, it was not the place of a defense attorney to complain of an offer as being too lenient – but still. But still. I had no choice now but to present this abomination to Guy, with the chance that he might just accept. And any normal murderer would accept, would jump as if for a lifeline, which, in fact, this offer was. But this was not a normal murderer, this was the killer of Hailey Prouix. It was a good thing I was not a normal defense attorney either. I would present the offer, yes I would, but I would also use all my powers to present it in such a way that Guy would turn it down. It wouldn’t be so hard, it was all in the presentation. They don’t have the evidence, Guy, they’re running scared, Guy, we can beat the charge, Guy, we can give you back your life, Guy. If I couldn’t turn an offer of man one into a first-degree murder conviction, then I might as well hand in my ticket to practice law and become a dentist.

OUTSIDE THE courthouse, after I had done my bit for the television cameras, Beth and I climbed down the wide front steps. I couldn’t help but notice that bulbs in the flower beds were blooming, birds were atwitter, buds were sprouting in the trees lining the street. It was as if the rain of the night before had washed away the remnants of winter and spring had suddenly swooped down with its special light to spread its finery. And yet it felt to me, for some reason, on those gray, sunlit steps, that I was still standing in the murky gloom, within a landscape of shadows and secrets. I wanted to get away just then, to find a place where the sun might burst through my own personal fog and warm my face, when Detectives Breger and Stone stepped in our way.

“Got a minute, Mr. Carl?” said Stone.

I gestured for Beth to wait and walked off with the two of them. Stone wasn’t smiling now, a bad sign I figured, but Breger wasn’t staring at me either, which seemed to be his way of showing respect. I suppose you spend enough years staring down suspects in the interrogation room, you end up staring away from those you consider respectful and law-abiding. A habit that must make for lovely family dinners.

“You mind if we look at your hands?” asked Breger.

“My hands?”

“If you don’t mind.”

I put down my briefcase and held out my hands. Breger took one each in his big mitts and carefully examined the knuckles before letting them drop.

“Thanks,” he said as he turned his gaze to survey the street. “Troy Jefferson gave you a pretty generous offer.”

“Yes he did. He also told me you said some nice things about me. Thank you.”

“You should know we both opposed the offer. We think it is far too lenient, man one for a homicide like this. Is your client going to accept it?”

“He pled not guilty in court.”

“I know, but is he going to accept the offer?”

“He says he didn’t do it. I relayed the offer and he rejected it outright. Says he didn’t do it.”

“That means the investigation is still moving forward,” said Breger, his eyebrows raised.

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Then we have to ask you a question, Mr. Carl,” said Stone, “about the night of the killing, because something confuses us.”

“That must happen often, Detective.”

“You said that Mr. Forrest called you at your home and then you came right over.”

“That’s correct.”

“Except we got a look at the phone logs from Mr. Forrest’s line just before court and we found something peculiar. Your call to 911 showed up, as expected, and there were other calls to you from earlier dates, as expected since you were a friend, but there was no call to you registered from the night of the killing.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Any idea why that is?”

“Phone company made a mistake?”

“Is that what you think?” said Breger sharply, and as he said it he turned to stare at me. “The computers of the phone company made a mistake?” It was the first time he’d ever looked at me straight on, and I noticed now that one of his eyes wandered slightly. The effect was strangely disorienting and I didn’t like it, the variance in his gazes seemed to suggest a variance between the truth and my words. His gaze itself acted as an accusation.

“Does your client have a cell phone?” he said.

“I don’t know. I suppose if he does there are records.”

“I suppose there are. You didn’t happen to see his cell phone when you were up in that bedroom?”

“No, sir.”

He looked at me for a moment longer and then turned again to survey the street. “You said you were watching a game when he called. What game was that?”

“The Phils were in Atlanta. I slept through most of it, but they were down when I left.”

“They scored two in the bottom of the ninth to beat the bastards.”

“Good,” I said. “Is that all?”

“That’s all. Thank you for the help, Mr. Carl.”

“Call me Victor, Detective Breger.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You know, Vic,” said Stone, “when we asked you about Miss Prouix, you described her as sweet and nice. We’ve been running the usual inquiries and I have to tell you, we’ve been talking to a lot of people who knew Miss Prouix and they all seemed to have a lot to say, but not a one of them used the words ‘sweet’ or ‘nice’ when talking about her.”

“Maybe I didn’t know her all that well. What was the thing with the hands all about?”

“Last night one of our Forensic Unit technicians was heading into the house to redo a few tests,” said Stone. “A man rushed out and ran her over, a man dressed in black with a watch cap pulled over his face. When she grabbed his leg, he turned and beat her in the face pretty badly.”

“So you checked my hands?”

“Just routine, Vic.”

“Call me Mr. Carl, Detective Stone.”

“She is still in the hospital,” said Breger.

“Good thing then that I didn’t scrape my knuckles on a cement step this morning.”

“Yes it is.”

“Probably just a burglar who knew that the house was empty.”

“Probably,” he said. “Just like the phone company computer probably made a mistake.”

“Bye-bye, Vic,” said Stone with a little wave of her fingers. “We’ll talk again.”

As I walked away from them and down the steps, they huddled together, discussing something or other, apparently not pleased, apparently not pleased at all.

Beth slid over and walked down with me. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It was nothing. Detectives Stone and Breger were just asking about a phone.”

8

IT WAS my phone the detectives were looking for, the same phone that I had picked off the crate beside the corpse of Hailey Prouix and placed in my pocket the night of her murder. My phone. That was why I had taken it that night, why I didn’t want it found anywhere near that house. My phone. Sitting now in my kitchen drawer. Registered in my name, with the bills and records going to my apartment. But I wasn’t willing to wait for the end of the month to see what calls had been made. As soon as we returned from the arraignment, I phoned my service provider and requested that it print up a record of calls for the past month and fax it to my office. The lady on the line was most agreeable and said she’d get right on it. I couldn’t complain about the service, they’d do anything they could to help you out, so long as you let them slip a fifty from your wallet every month.

I told Ellie, my secretary, that I was waiting for a fax.

“I HAVE something for you,” I say to Hailey. This is a month before her murder. I had tried to stay away when I learned about Guy’s proposal and her acceptance, tried to forget the smell of her, the feel of her, the tang of her tongue on my own. I tried, really, but the Sylvester matter kept showing up in my in-box and my dreams grew torrid and haunting. I had tried to stay away, but she pursued me like she needed me and I couldn’t help believing that maybe she did. She understood intuitively my weakness, I am most easily seduced by need. I had tried to stay away, and I had failed and I was glad.

“I have something for you,” I say to Hailey. We are in bed, after, the same huge presence having roared through us the way it always roared through us, leaving us exhausted and dazed.

“Diamonds?” she asks, that twang again in her voice.

“Better.”

“What could be better than diamonds? So flashy, so bright, so readily turned into ready cash.”

“What about me?”

“You?” She laughs as she lifts her legs and twists them locked behind my back, twists them tight so I can’t move in or out, here or there, trapped. “But I already have you, Victor, and you won’t look half so pretty hanging from my ears.”

Hailey in her normal life is a hard piece of work, flinty, sardonic, infected with a nervous bundle of habits that act as sword and shield to protect her inner sadness. She is both desirable and detached, which of course only makes her more desirable. It is impossible to get a straight answer from Hailey Prouix. Ask her a question and she deftly directs the line to something less threatening or, instead, asks a question of her own that puts you smack on the defensive. She is, remember, a lawyer. But after sex, oh after sex, after the two of us are run over by that charging train of hunger and need with its own strange pulse and rhythms, a train that seems to come from neither her nor me but from elsewhere, after all that, it is as if her defenses fall like the walls of Jericho under Joshua’s horn. The easy, drawly vowels replace the clipped, big-city cadence she has adopted in her adopted city and her flinty defensive manner turns richer, her emotions show through almost unguarded.

“I bought you a phone,” I tell Hailey that afternoon.

“I have a phone. I have too many damn phones.”

“But I’ve been having a hard time reaching you at night. How many times can I hang up when Guy answers?”

“So that was you.”

“Who did you think it was?”

“I was hoping it was you.”

“How come you don’t answer your cell phone after hours?”

“Because my clients call. They call to complain about their pains. They call to say they can’t sleep. They want to tell me they’re taking their medicine, they want to tell me they’re not taking their medicine. They call to have me verify their paranoia. They call because, like everyone else, they’re lonely and scared and know I’m not charging by the hour. I leave my phone in the office with the rest of my workday because if I don’t, my clients will drown me.”

“But I’m not a client.”

“So why do you need to reach me?”

“To say hello. To let you know I’m thinking about you. To ask what you are wearing.”

“In other words, so you, too, can tell me you can’t sleep.”

“Exactly.”

“I’d rather have diamonds.”

“But it’s really cute, and I got it in red to match your lipstick.”

“Red?”

“Shocking red.”

“And who else has the number?”

“Just me.”

“So it’s our own private hot line.”

“That’s right.”

“I feel like the president.”

“And best of all, my number is already number one in the speed dial.”

“For now.” She laughs, her hearty, throaty laugh, but I can tell she likes the gift even though she can’t hang it from her ears, I can tell because after she laughs she starts devouring my mouth the way she does when it is time to end our talking, hungrily, meatily, in a way that still tingled even as I remembered two days after her death.

“THAT THING you were waiting for?” said my secretary, sticking her head in my office door. “Is it from the phone company?”

“Yes,” I said, with more excitement than I meant to show. To cover myself I added, “Thanks, Ellie. Just put it on the chair and I’ll get to it when I can.”

She laid the paper on the seat, closed the door, and I leaped out from behind my desk to get my hands on the three stapled sheets.

I started at the last page, the last call. It was registered at 10:15 the night of Hailey’s death, made to my number. It was Guy, telling me that something horrible had happened. Guy. Why had he used the cell phone to make the call?

I sat down hard on the chair and thought it through. It made no sense. No sense, and that might be the only explanation. So undone by his murderous act, he picked up the first thing he could grab, the bright red phone, left out on the end table by Hailey for some reason. Picked it over the regular phone for no special reason, picked it up and dialed my number and made the call. He didn’t even remember that he had used the cell phone, hadn’t mentioned it when he told me the story, would probably swear he had used the regular phone, but he was mistaken, and here was the proof. It was a simple enough explanation, and it would certainly calm Detective Breger’s concerns, and so all I had to do was give him the fax.

Except I couldn’t. Because then I’d have to explain why a phone registered in my name, with the bills going to my home, was in that house the night of the murder. And I’d have to explain all the calls made to my number, and all the calls registered going from my number to that phone, all also listed and on the record. And with that explanation I’d surely be off the case as an attorney. Off the case as an attorney, yes, but still on as a witness or, more precisely, as a suspect. Ah, there it was, the foul root of the problem. If Guy’s unthinking, nonsensical act was discovered, I’d be a suspect. I’d be a suspect that could be used by any competent defense attorney to raise doubt, maybe even reasonable doubt. Wasn’t it I who was having a deceitful relationship with the deceased? Wasn’t it I who had possession of the gun until I dropped it in the laps of the police? Wasn’t it I who had lied about everything so that I could stay on the case as defense attorney to lay blame at the feet of the innocent Guy Forrest? The closing as much as wrote itself. How ironic that I might, in the end, be Guy’s route to freedom. What I held in my hand was reasonable doubt as to Guy’s guilt, except I knew I didn’t do it, and I knew Guy did, and so I had to be sure that no one, no one, would ever be able to see this record.

I’d have to burn it.

I opened my office window and took an old pack of matches out of my desk drawer. Just a little fire, nothing to set off the sprinklers, I hoped, just a little fire. I lit a match. A breath of wind came through the window and killed it. I lit another and placed the flame at the document’s corner. Just as it was catching, just as the blue flame turned yellow and began to curl the three pieces of paper, I noticed something.

I tried to blow out the flame, but it grew and began to devour the pages. I dropped them to the floor and stamped, stamped, stamped out the fire. The office smelled like a cigar bar. I picked up the now blackened documents. Half of each sheet was gone, on the other halves the printing could barely be discerned. But barely was enough.

There were calls on the phone made to two strange numbers. Calls made every other afternoon or so. To a number in area code 304 and then to a number in area code 702. I grabbed my phone book. Area code 304 was West Virginia, Hailey’s home state. That made sense, calls to family or an old friend. But what about the number in the other area code. 702. Nevada. Who was she calling in Nevada?

“Desert Winds, how can I direct your call?”

“Desert Winds?” I said into the phone. “What exactly is Desert Winds?”

“Desert Winds is a full-care retirement community in Henderson, Nevada, just minutes outside exciting Las Vegas. Are you interested in a brochure? I could direct your call to Sales.”

“No, not quite yet. Do the residents have phones in their rooms?”

“Of course. Do you know the member’s extension?”

“No, I’m sorry. I’m calling about a woman named Hailey Prouix. P-r-o-u-i-x.”

“One moment while I check, please. No, I’m sorry, there is no member by that name.”

“Member?”

“At Desert Winds we treat all our guests as if they are members of a very exclusive club.”

“Are there any members named Prouix?”

“No, not currently.”

“Okay, thank you.”

“Are you sure I can’t direct you to Sales?”

“Do you have shuffleboard?”

“Oh, yes, tournaments and everything.”

“Well, in that case, maybe a brochure would be just the thing.”

9

BERWYN IS the story of American sprawl writ across a rolling suburban landscape. At first it was farm county, supplying the big city with its corn and tomatoes. But early in the nineteenth century a few grand estates were carved out by the aristocratic wealthy as necessary places of refuge from the hurly-burly hoi polloi of the city. Of course the estates needed staff, staff that lived in the city, so the railroad, coincidentally owned by those with just such estates, built a train line to ferry the staff back and forth from their meager urban dwellings. It was the railroad that serviced these estates that became known as the Main Line, a name that soon came to designate the entire area. But the raw plow of progress always follows transportation, and it wasn’t long before developers began to sell neat little houses not far from the stations, promising easy train commutes to the city. As the years went on, the suburban outcroppings grew, some would say metastasized, spreading outward, invading farmland like a heartless disease, until only the original great estates were left intact. But who anymore could afford to maintain an eighty-acre estate in the middle of the ’burbs? One by one the estates were sold, subdivided, developed, and turned into the very creatures they had spawned, but with a difference. No typical suburban split-levels were to be built upon these blue-blooded grounds. It was as if their aristocratic origins infected the new developments, and what was created instead were strange imitations of the great manor houses, with falsely majestic fronts and grotesquely shaped wings all out of proportion to their three-quarter-acre lots.

Welcome to the Brontë Estates, luxury homes starting in the low $800,000s. McMansions for those whose aspirations had outlived their times. The American dream on steroids.

I remember when the Forrests first moved into their new house in the Brontë Estates, showing off the seven thousand square feet of luxurious, state-of-the-art suburban space. The ground was still packed hard from the heavy vehicles, the land barren of all but the youngest, barest twigs planted by the developers, most lots were still construction sites, but Leila and Guy were proud as new parents. They had chosen the Heathcliff model, with the extra bedroom, the cathedral ceilings, the oversize great room, the atmosphere of continual yearning. A house, they said, to grow into. Leila talked of all her decorating ideas, and Guy fiddled with the new lawn mower, though his sod lawn had yet to be laid. They had lived in an apartment in the city until Leila had become pregnant with their second child, so they exuded that special glow of freshly minted suburbanites ensconced in a McMansion of their very own. The grass would arrive on a truck, the skinny trees would grow, how could the future be anything but lush?

“Hello, Victor,” said the former Leila Peale at her front door. “I was wondering when you’d arrive.”

“Mind if I come in for a few moments?”

“Of course not. I always have time for an old friend.”

I thought she was being facetious. When Guy had left his family for Hailey, the family friends were forced to make a choice, Leila or Guy. Leila, being the more sympathetic figure and having the older connection to their social set, seemed to end up with everyone but me. I had known Guy long before his marriage and, though I thought what he had done was despicable, I ended up, almost against my will, on his side of the aisle. That he had told me everything before he left his wife and I had said nothing to her only cemented my place outside her circle. I hadn’t seen her, hadn’t spoken to her, since the separation, so when Leila called me an old friend I thought she was making a joke. But she surprised me by ushering me not into the formal parlor with its stiff French furnishings reserved for painfully polite conversation but through the open kitchen area into the spacious, vaulted informal room used by family and friends.

So there we were, perched in the plush green furnishings, two iced teas on coasters atop the coffee table, chatting like, well, like old friends. I wanted to pat her on the knee and assure her that I was taking care of everything, that Guy would pay for all he had done, but it was better to maintain my secrets. When she looked at me, I supposed she saw the bastard lawyer defending her bastard husband. When I looked at her, I supposed I saw an ally.

“I saw you on TV, Victor, giving your little speech as you left the courthouse.”

“It’s part of the job.”

“Well, it doesn’t look as if you hate it.”

“No, can’t say I do.”

“And they do seem to like putting you on.”

“Such is the burden of startling good looks and a winning personality.”

She laughed at that, a deep, good-natured laugh, and curled her legs beneath her on the couch. It reminded me of better times, when Leila and Guy were my mature married friends and I played the part of the unsettled single guy. Leila was a big-boned women with an inviting, if not beautiful, face. Friendly and warm with a lively sense of humor, she had made a nice contrast to the serious and humorless Guy.

Slowly her laughter subsided and her face darkened. “How is he?” she asked.

“Not so good.”

“I didn’t think so. Guy sometimes pretended to be a hard guy, as if the tattoo prepared him for anything, but he is not the prison type.”

“Who is, really? How are the children handling it?” They had two: Laura, a lovely, quiet girl, aged six, and Elliott, a terror who never outgrew his terrible twos, aged four. “Do they know?”

“Not really. It’s not as if he had been much of a presence in their lives after he left anyway. I told them their daddy is in trouble but that it’s all a mistake and he’ll be with them soon.”

“He wants to see them.”

“I don’t think that’s best. After the trial, if he’s convicted, I expect we’ll have to work something out about visitation, but until then I don’t think it healthy for a six-and four-year-old to see their father in prison. I’ve talked it over with the pediatrician and she agrees.”

“I’ll tell him. He’ll be disappointed, but I’m sure he’ll understand.”

“He should write letters. They’d love to hear from him and Laura, at least, can write back. Is there anything else I can do? Anything? I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s sort of why I came, but I’m a little surprised at the offer. I thought a part of you would be glad it turned out like it did.”

“He’s still my husband, Victor, the father of my children. I don’t want him in jail.”

“And Hailey?”

She winced, as if she had just chewed a rotten morsel of beef. “I don’t wish anyone dead, but I won’t mourn Hailey Prouix. Somehow she turned Guy against himself, and that’s a crime. You know, Victor, I was suing her.”

“Suing her?”

“Alienation of affection I think is the legal term, but basically I was suing her for stealing my husband. There have been successful suits just like it all over the country. One woman I heard won a million dollars.”

“Sounds like the lottery.”

“I was suing that witch for every penny she had.”

“What good would that have done, Leila?”

“Other than the money?” She laughed again. “Oh, I suppose in some bitter way it would have cheered me. I wanted to take something from her that she cared about, just like she took Guy from me.”

“He had something to do with it, too.”

“He was bewitched.”

“Leila.”

“Well, it wasn’t love. What Guy and I had together was love, what he had with her was something else. I think love is more than just a one-way obsession, don’t you, Victor? Doesn’t it have to be based on some sort of understanding of the other? Doesn’t it have to be reciprocated in some way to be real?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and in that moment I could have sworn I caught a whiff of jasmine, Hailey’s scent, and I remembered, suddenly, an afternoon we spent together just a few weeks before her death. I blinked the memory away before it overwhelmed me. “Reciprocated or not,” I said, “the emotion feels just the same either way.”

“Yes, that’s just it. It feels the same either way, but it isn’t the same. One is real, genuine, an emotional coming-together that forms the basis for everything meaningful. The other is a solipsistic delusion, not so different from a teenager with a crush on a rock star or a stalker obsessed with his prey. Whatever those emotions are, no matter how strong, they are not love. Guy was obsessed with her, I know that, and I can understand it, but it wasn’t love. Whatever trouble he’s in, it arrived because in the midst of his obsession he thought she was feeling what he was feeling, when she was incapable of returning what he felt with anything but scorn.”

“How do you know what she was capable of?”

“So defensive, Victor. It’s charming, your trying to defend my husband’s emotional life, but I know her. I know how she met my husband and why. And I had a run-in with her on my own. After the complaint was filed by some young attorney in my father’s office, she called me. Out of the blue she called me, and what she said… Victor, I was third-team all-American as a swimmer in college and let me tell you, a swimmers’ locker room can be pretty raucous – some of the girls could shame a sailor – but still, I have never heard language coming from a woman like I heard over the phone. When she hung up, I was too startled to be angry. What I was, actually, was sorry for Guy.”

“What did she say?”

“I won’t tell you word for word, I don’t use that kind of language in my home, but it was something to the effect that if I wanted him back so badly, I was welcome to him. But then she warned me that with the taste of her still in his teeth there was no way in hell he was coming back to me. I’ll give her this, at least she knew where her power lay.”

“So you hated her.”

“No, it wasn’t so personal. I wanted it to be personal, me against her, then maybe the lawsuit would have given me true satisfaction, but it wasn’t like that. She was more a force of nature, like a sudden raging storm or a tornado. You don’t hate it, but you sure as hell feel sorry for anyone in its path.”

I winced. I couldn’t help it. It was easy enough to dismiss Leila’s disparagements as the words of a woman scorned, because take away the informal setting and the apparent calm of her voice and that was what she was, a woman scorned, whose husband had left her for something sweeter. It was easy enough to dismiss all she said, except that Leila herself was a presence not easily dismissed.

“Leila,” I said, wanting to change the topic, “Guy is pretty shaken. He says he needs to get out of jail until the trial, but it looks like he won’t have enough assets to put up for bond if bail is set.”

“I thought there was money?”

“There is some, yes. We’re in the process of tracking it down, getting an exact figure, but, from what we can tell so far, there were apparently some bad investments and some unaccounted-for withdrawals.”

“Bad investments and unaccounted-for withdrawals.” She repeated my words, as if to imprint the new idea in her consciousness. “No money? There’s no money?”

“We haven’t tracked down the exact figure yet.”

The exact figure apparently didn’t matter. She started laughing, as if some great practical joke had been played for her benefit. “Well, you don’t have to bother. I can guess all right. There’s no money. So much for my lawsuit.” Her laughter continued, ratcheted up in intensity. “So much for Juan Gonzalez.”

“Who? The ballplayer?”

“Forget it. Nothing.” She kept laughing until she noticed me sitting there glumly and regained her composure. “But, Victor, if there’s no money, how are you getting paid?”

“I don’t know.”

“The loyalty of an old friend?”

“Something like that.”

“I wonder if Guy knows how lucky he is to have you.”

“The point is, Leila, that Guy wants to know if you’d put up the house for his bail. It might not be enough even if you could, but he wanted me to ask, and I said I would, even though I-”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, I would put up the house to get him out of jail. Will it be enough?”

“I don’t know.”

“The mortgage is pretty high, and I don’t know how much equity there is, but whatever I can do I will do. I also have some investments we could use.”

“You know he was trying to run when they arrested him. He could try to run again.”

“He won’t. His life is here.”

“And he might have actually killed her.”

“If he did, he had good reason. Is there something I have to sign?”

“You might want to talk to a lawyer before you do anything. If he runs, you could lose the house. You might want to talk to your father.”

“I know what my father would say and I don’t care. You bring to me what you want me to sign and I will sign it. And you tell Guy I’m still waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“He’ll know.”

“You’re waiting? For him?” My eyes opened wide with my incredulity. “You’re waiting for him to come back?”

“This is his home, too.”

“You still love him, even after all he did?”

“It’s not like a faucet, Victor. You don’t just turn it off.”

“You ever think he’s not worthy of it?”

“Every day.”

“And that if he does get out, he might not choose to live with you again?”

“Victor, everything you say makes a great deal of sense, and thank you for your sage advice, but I’m willing to take my chances. Sometimes in the middle of our lives we don’t realize that our dreams have come true. It’s only after it all disappears that we know. I want it back the way it was before ever we heard of Hailey Prouix. I want my husband back, my children’s father back, my life back. I want everything the way it was.”

“It can never be that way again, Leila. Whatever it is, it will be different.”

“Maybe better, who can tell? She’s dead, isn’t she? You bring me the paper, I’ll sign what I need to sign.”

I hadn’t thought of it before, it hadn’t seemed a possibility before, but now how could I avoid it? Even knowing what I knew, even with all my certainties, how could I avoid it?

“On the night Hailey was killed,” I said, “where were you around ten o’clock?”

“That’s funny, Victor. The police asked me the very same question.”

“They’ve been here?”

“Two detectives. An athletic woman, who might have been a swimmer herself. She did most of the talking. And another, an older black man, a Detective Breger, I think it was, who spent the whole time pacing the room, snooping into every corner. I’ll give you the same thing I gave them.” She stood, walked to the phone table, wrote down a number. “His name is Herb Stein, a very nice man. We had dinner in a Belgian place by the library that night. The mussel sauce splashed all over his tie. He wiped it spotless with a napkin.”

“Don’t be a snob, Leila, I wear polyester ties myself.”

“Well, then, Victor, you can date him. Or Ted Jenrette, with his nose hairs, or Biff Callender and Chip Cannon. What is it, Victor, with men who keep their nicknames from summer camp? My friends are so eager for me to start a new life, when all I want is my old one back. Not very Buddhist of me I know, but, hell, I was raised Episcopalian.”

“Did you ever think, Leila, that your current love for Guy, being completely unrequited, is as solipsistic a delusion as you said was his love for Hailey?”

“I have an appointment, Victor, that I just can’t miss. May I show you out?”

“I know the way,” I said. “I don’t mean to keep you. Can I ask one more thing?”

She glanced at her watch and nodded.

“What made you think that Hailey had enough money to be worth suing?”

“I just supposed. I guess I supposed wrong. You’ll bring those papers for me to sign.”

“I’ll bring the papers. But can I give you a word of advice, as a friend?”

“No.”

“Be careful what you risk on him, Leila.”

It was the best advice I could give, but she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening. All she wanted was for me to take my truths out of her life so she could pursue a past that had receded into fantasy.

Nostalgia is a fire fueled by failures of memory.

10

DRIVING HOME through the narrow suburban streets, I wasn’t smelling the freshness of newly mown grass or marveling at the variety of roadside flora blooming with a fertile exuberance, azaleas and dogwoods, cherry blossoms, forsythia. Something blocked the sun of the afternoon from my sight, something turned the brightness into a gray murk that spread out from me in dusky waves. And in the midst of that gloom the memory that had invaded me at Leila’s returned to work its black magic in my consciousness, and this time I didn’t blink it away. This time, as I drove, I let it overwhelm me. I am smelling her perfume and tasting the salt of her shoulder, feeling the striae of rib beneath her breasts. She is in control, pressing her knees against my sides, licking my breast, her dark hair tickling my chest.

“Do you love him?” I ask.

She raises her head just quick enough to answer,”No.”

“Then why are you with him?”

“Must we?”

“Yes.”

“I needed him.”

“And now you’re going to marry him?”

“It’s what he wants. Suck my thumb.”

“No.”

“Just do it.”

“It’s because you don’t want to talk about him, isn’t it?”

She places her thumb in my mouth, scratches my tongue with her nail, fish-jerks my head to the side and bites my neck.

“How can you marry him if you don’t love him?” I ask later. She is facedown now on the bed, her knees beneath her. I am atop her, moving slowly, methodically, waiting for the train to come through and take control. It has become something akin to an addiction, that train, that strange locomotive of primordial emotion that roars through us and speeds us along on its frenzied uncontrollable ride.

“Last thing I ever want to be again is in love,” she says. It is a shocking statement. It stops short my rhythm.

“You’re lying. The whole world wants to be in love.”

“The whole world is wrong.”

“And you know better than the world?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I know.”

“Were you ever?”

“Yes.”

“And it ended badly?”

“Hiroshima.”

“Who was it? The halfback? The philandering partner?”

“It was the wrong man.”

“Maybe all you need is the right man.”

“Shut up, Victor.”

“Maybe all you need-”

“Shut up,” she says as she rolls away with a loud, sucking thwap and I am left dangling stiffly. “I’m done.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, then,” she says, her back now to me as she walks to the bathroom, “don’t let me stop you.”

Before she leaves the apartment, she stands over me as I lay still naked in my bed. She is fully dressed now, panty-hosed and powdered, buttoned up tight, tall in her heels, glasses on, her face holding the stoic impassivity of a suffering soldier. And she tells me something I remembered with utter clarity as I drove away from Leila’s house.

“I’m sleeping with one man,” says Hailey Prouix, her voice an emotionless monotone, “engaged to another, emotionally entrapped with a third, mourning forever a fourth. I have no illusions about the tragic mess of my life. But I tell you, Victor, everything I have become has been forged by a love so fearsome it has seared my soul. Don’t waste your time trying to understand it, because it is mine and it still baffles me, but don’t for a minute think I want anything like that to happen to me again. Only the deranged want to be struck by lightning twice. In the end you’re no different from Guy, you desperately want love while having no idea what it is. You say love and you think something else, you think of affection tinged with desire, you think of friendship, comfort, you think of someone to cuddle while you watch videos, to help you choose your linens, someone to make you the man you hope to be. That’s all fine, nothing wrong with that, but don’t pretend such watered milk to be love. We fuck and I like it, and maybe I like you better than Guy, and maybe if I were free to choose I’d choose you to watch videos with and help me pick out towels for the master bath, but don’t delude yourself that it is love, Victor, because it is not, thank God. If you knew what love was, what it could do, if you really knew, you wouldn’t want it either. In love there is no choice, no freedom, no dignity, no happiness, no joy, nothing but hunger and burn that eats away at the flesh. Who in their right mind would want that? I’d sooner die than go through it again. I’d sooner you shot me through the heart.”

It was not the kind of declaration you forget, Hailey’s confession of the fearsome love that had singed her soul, but it was not the kind of thing you let get in the way of a healthy sexual obsession either. I wanted Hailey and so I played deaf, assuming her hard stance was merely another attempt to deflect my attempts at intimacy. Who knew better than I all the tricks of the trade in keeping emotional distance? Who knew better than I what soft yearnings lay behind the pose of unconcern? But coming back from Leila’s, after Guy’s wife had spoken to me of the secrets she had learned about Hailey and Hailey’s inability to return Guy’s love, I began to wonder if maybe Hailey had been spilling more of the truth than I had realized. In her lawyer’s garb, in her unimpassioned voice, without the least hint of her cynical smile, maybe she was opening up more than ever I had realized. What had happened in the past, I wondered as I drove through the suburbs and onto the expressway, to wound her so badly? And how did that past intersect with the moment when Guy had aimed his gun and shot her, just as she wished, right through the heart?

11

“SO WHAT do you think?” said Beth.

I was sitting in my office, remembering Hailey as compulsively as if I were worrying a loose tooth, when Beth strolled in and collapsed into the client chair opposite my desk. A document of some sort was clutched in her hand.

“Think about what?” I said.

“About whether Guy killed Hailey Prouix.”

“It’s not our job to figure that out.”

“I know, I know, I know, but still.” Her eyes widened. “What do you think?”

“I think he’s presumptively innocent,” I snapped, pretending to concentrate on something on my desk. “I think we should leave it at that and not act like amateurs.”

“Don’t get snippy about it, Victor. Are you okay? You look like hell. Maybe you need a break. Maybe you should make a date with that mysterious woman you’ve been seeing.”

My head jerked up and I stared at her, bewildered.”Who?”

“I thought you were in the middle of a big romance, sneaking out of the office in the early afternoons, coming back all bleary-eyed and full of sated smiles. You didn’t say anything, but I could tell.”

My nerves contracted in on themselves as I tried to look calm. I had, of course, never told Beth about Hailey, I had never told anyone – there were reasons in the middle of our affair and there were stronger reasons now – but how could I not have figured that she had known I was at least seeing someone?

“It ended,” I said. “Badly. She wants to be friends.”

“Oooh, that’s hard.”

“And not even good friends, more like distant acquaintances who, if we happen to see each other in a theater, nod but make no effort to say hello.”

“That’s really hard.”

“Just to be sure, she changed her number. I think she might have even changed her name. Last I heard she was on a tramp steamer to Marrakesh, which is pretty much a distance record to avoid seeing me again.”

Beth laughed, which was what I wanted. Both of our love lives were in perpetual states of ruin and we liked to comfort one another by detailing our most recent disasters. “Didn’t one of your old girlfriends join the Peace Corps?” she said.

“Yeah, but she was assigned to Guatemala, which is at least in this hemisphere.”

“Maybe that’s why you’ve been acting like you’ve been acting,” she said.

“How have I been acting?”

“A little strange, a little mysterious. Doing things no one would expect from you, very un-Victor-like things.”

“Like what?”

“Like taking this case without a retainer.”

“He’s a friend. He said money would be no problem.”

“Is that what he said? And you believed him?”

“I’ve a trusting soul.”

“Right. And Emily Dickinson was a party girl. And then you up and turned the murder weapon over to the detectives.”

“I was obligated,” I said. “I’m an officer of the court and I held material evidence.”

She leaned forward, stared at me as if she had those X-ray spiral glasses they advertise in the back of Archie comics. “And far be it from you ever to mess with your obligations as an officer of the court.”

“Far be it. What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know, Victor. What should I be getting at?”

I shrugged, but my canary in the mine shaft was making like Pavarotti. If she suspected something, she who knew me best, someone else might, too. I had to get a grip, I had to start assuaging suspicions, I had to start now.

“I’m sorry if I was short,” I said, as sweetly as I could. “I’ve been on edge about this case, but I shouldn’t take it out on you. Maybe I think Guy’s really in trouble. Maybe I’m feeling pressure because he’s a friend. Maybe I’m not handling it as well as I should. You want to know whether I think Guy did it? Well, I think his story about the headphones and the Jacuzzi and hearing nothing is well neigh unbelievable.”

“What about the gun? Maybe it was silenced, maybe he couldn’t hear it.”

“The gun was a revolver,” I said. “You can’t silence a revolver. And anyway, the biggest trouble is that nobody else seems to have a motive.”

“What about his wife? Hailey stole her husband. Is there a better motive than that?”

“Well, she was angry, for sure. She was even suing the victim.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but that works against her doing it, doesn’t it? I don’t think you just off the object of your lawsuit. You already have an outlet for your anger, and it makes it hard to collect damages. But there’s more. I just got off the phone with a Herb Stein. He was with Leila on a date the night of the murder, at a place called Cuvée Notre Dame on Green Street.”

“Good mussels.”

“So he said. I don’t think we can pin it on her and, frankly, I don’t know who else, besides Guy, might have been involved enough to want her dead.” I leaned back in my chair, stared at the ceiling. “Except, of course, Guy doesn’t have much of a motive either. It’s the weakest part of the government’s case. The why. Why would he be so angry at her as to shoot her through the heart? As long as they don’t have an answer, Guy has a chance.” I took a quick glance at Beth. “That’s why I advised him to reject the government’s offer. There is means and opportunity, sure, but you also need motive.”

“Interesting, because the coroner’s report came in while you were out.” She waved the document in her hand. “Bullet through the heart, like we knew, a bruising on her cheek, like we knew, tubes tied, like we could have expected.”

“Really?”

“And there was one thing more, one quite interesting thing more.”

I raised an eyebrow and waited.

“They found traces of semen inside her.”

“No surprise. She was living with Guy.”

“Yes, except that they did preliminary tests on the sample pending DNA typing. It turns out the semen came from a secretor, so they could do a quick determination of blood type. Type A.”

“That’s common enough. What is it, a third of the population?”

“Forty-two percent, according the report. But we don’t care about the general population, we’re not representing the general population, we’re representing Guy. And that’s where it all starts looking hinky. Guy is type B.”

I bathed my face in false surprise.

“She was cheating on him, Victor. There was another man.”

I stared at her, fighting to remain impassive. “Did he know it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose we’ll have to find out.”

“I suppose we will. But, Victor, Hailey was cheating on him, that is a fact. He can deny knowing it all he wants, but no one has to believe him. Hailey was cheating on him and there, Victor, on a fine silver salver, is your motive.”

I stared at her, stared at her as the case against my client strengthened immeasurably right before my very eyes, based ironically on my own blood antigens, stared at her as Guy Forrest took three giant steps toward a life sentence, and the whole time I was fighting the urge to smile.

12

“WHO DO you think killed her, Guy?” asked Beth.

“I don’t know.”

“You have to have some idea. Hailey’s dead and you’re on trial for her murder. You knew her life better than anyone. You have to have some theory.”

We were in one of the lawyer-client rooms at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, a squat, sprawling building of orange brick, with a green ribbed roof and shiny loops of barbed wire, set out more for their aesthetic appeal than for security, a prison built for five hundred inmates but holding more than twice that amount. The room itself was slate gray, with a metal table, walls of cinder block, a solid steel door, and it had that lovely prison smell of ammonia and sweat and fear, with the faintest undertone of urine, which may have come from the surrounding halls or may have come from Guy himself, who was certainly distraught enough. In the week or so since his arrest he had grown gaunt. His hands shook slightly even as he held them on the tabletop. His eyes were like a bleary red smear. There was a welt beneath his left eye, blue-black against his gray pallor, fitting, since Hailey’s corpse held the same kind of welt, and the tic that jerked his upper lip to the right at arraignment was developing nicely.

I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against a wall in the corner of the room and let Beth handle the questioning. This was all pro forma, something we had to do, keeping Guy fully apprised of what was happening to him as we asked him for as much information as possible. There were no surprises here. He continued to maintain his innocence as I leaned against the wall and watched the lies spill out.

“The only answer,” said Guy, “is that someone came in while I was in the Jacuzzi. I didn’t hear him because of the headphones. That had to be what happened.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They were mad at me, not at her.”

“Who was mad at you, Guy?”

“Leila was upset when I left, and so was her father.”

“Jonah Peale?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“Only by reputation,” said Beth.

“A hard son of a bitch. Scary. He told me to stay away from Leila and stay away from him or he’d shove a pitching wedge down my throat and take a swing at my spleen.”

“Can you blame him?” I said.

Guy shot me a look of annoyance. “There was also an investigator who did some work for the firm, an ugly little lizard named Skink. Phil Skink. He had a rough reputation, and I never understood why the firm used him. There was a time, before I met Hailey, when he tried to buddy up with me for some reason. I blew him off. Frankly, he creeped me out. And then, after I left everything for Hailey, I started running into Skink in strange places.”

“Where?”

“Outside my new office, in a bar. Once I was pissing at a urinal in a restaurant bathroom. The son of a bitch came out of nowhere, sidled up next to me, and gave me that gap-toothed smile of his.”

“Phil Skink?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Not directly, he was too sly for that. But he did mention some files I had taken with me when I left Dawson, Cricket. I told him to stay the hell away from me, and he laughed. Once, when I was walking up to Hailey on the street, from afar I saw her talking to some man. As I got closer, I realized it was Skink. It sent a shiver through me. When he spotted me, he simply walked away. Hailey would never tell me what he said.”

“You think he threatened her?”

“That’s what I assumed. Maybe he was the one making the calls and then hanging up. Maybe he was the one who killed her.”

“Phil Skink?” I said.

“Yeah, maybe it was him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.” Or maybe O.J. was in town, I thought.

“Did you lock the front door of the house before you went upstairs?” said Beth.

“I usually did, bolted the door and locked the windows. We’re still pretty close to the city where we live. Lived.”

“And that night?”

“I think so.”

“The windows were locked when the police came, but the door was open. Did you unlock the door when you went outside?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Was it locked or was it open? After you climbed out of the Jacuzzi, you saw her on the mattress, you picked up the gun, you searched the house. Then you called Victor and went outside to wait for him. Is that all correct?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“When you went outside, did you have to unlock the door?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it, Guy.”

“I don’t remember unlocking it. I just opened it. It must have been unlocked. It must have been unlocked.” He opened his eyes wide, as if he had just discovered a wonderful, liberating secret. “The killer somehow unlocked it and left it unlocked. That’s it. That’s the proof.”

I stared at him from my corner, Beth stared from across the table. We didn’t say a word, didn’t a move a muscle.

“Why don’t you tell them? That’s the answer. The door was unlocked. That proves everything I said is true.”

“And the evidence for that is?” said Beth, softly.

His gaze shifted crazily around the room, and then, as if her question had been a pin inserted into his abdomen, his body deflated.

I pushed myself off the wall and walked to the desk until I stood over him, my arms still crossed. “Tell me again about your relationship with Hailey,” I said.

He looked up at me. “We were in love.”

“Still?”

“What do you mean, still? Yes, of course.”

“Did you have sex the night she died?”

“No.”

“The night before?”

“I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

“The night before that?”

“I don’t know specifically. We had an active sex life.”

“Is that why the Viagra?”

“Yes.” Pause. “But I didn’t need it.”

“Has any company ever made more money selling a drug that nobody claims to need?”

“Its just that… that… Hailey liked to keep going. The pill helped. She made me get it.”

“She made you? When was the last time you used the Viagra?”

“I don’t remember. Is it important? Why is this important?”

“Were you and Hailey fighting? Did you have any fights?”

“Some, sure. Everyone does. We did, too. About the usual things. She was fiery when we were fighting and then again when we made up.”

“Did you ever hit her?”

“No.”

“Did you hit her the night of her death?”

“No. Stop it. What are you saying?”

“There was a bruise on her cheek.”

“Maybe the killer-”

“Did you fight the night of her death? Did you hit her the night of her death?”

“No. Hit her? No. Never. Why would I do something like that?”

“Out of raw anger.”

“No.”

“Because she was sleeping with someone else. Because she was fucking someone else, Guy, and she wasn’t fucking you.”

He stared up at me, horrified and pained. “You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” I said.

Beth’s calm voice broke through the fierce flow of testosterone coursing through the room. “The coroner found semen traces in her vagina,” she said. “Such traces don’t last more than a day and half, two days maximum. The coroner swabbed out a sample and took a preliminary test. It doesn’t match your blood type, Guy. They’ll perform other tests, but that will only prove it more convincingly. Hailey Prouix was cheating on you.”

Guy didn’t say anything for a long time, nothing, and then he lied. “I didn’t know,” he said.

I stood over him for a moment longer before, ignoring Beth’s questing gaze, I turned and strolled back to the corner.

Guy’s head shook as if it were struggling to take in a new bolt of information. It was a treat, actually, to watch him work. He was dramatically sliding through the appropriate emotions like a ski racer sliding through the gates, first one, then the other. He was giving us an approximation of the emotional reaction of a man learning for the first time that his dead fiancée had been cheating on him, and a rather awkward one at that, except for the verisimilitude of the setting and situation. And then he glanced up at Beth, he glanced up as if to make sure that his emotional slalom run had been duly noted and admired, before saying:

“He did it.”

“Who?” asked Beth.

“The bastard who was doing her. You asked me who did it. I’m telling you right now. It was him. I have no doubt about it. She was staying with me, and he didn’t like it. He knew how to get in. Maybe she had even given him a key to the house. Maybe she had even shown him the gun. He did it. He did it, damn it. We have to find him. He’s a murderer. He killed Hailey.”

I stared at him with disgust, even as I thought the theory through. It wasn’t bad, it had promise. Guy had never been a legal scholar, but he was a trial lawyer himself and had always been a clever strategist. And now he had come up with a damn clever strategy. Just what I did not need.

“It’s a theory,” I said, “but there’s no evidence to support it.”

“Find the evidence. Find the bastard. He did it, I know it. Find him, and if you can’t find him, that doesn’t change a thing. He did it. That’s what I want you to argue, Victor. That’s what I want you to prove. That’s our theory.”

“Without proof it’s a loser,” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Beth. “It sounds pretty good to me.”

“If you make the lover the issue,” I said slowly, as if instructing a first-year Criminal Law class, “you just throw Guy’s motive in the jury’s face over and over and over. Every time you mention the lover, Guy’s reason to kill her becomes more evident. And of course, if we make the lover the issue, then Jefferson will put every resource into finding him. And if he does find him, and there’s an alibi, then you might as well check the guilty box on the verdict form yourself.”

“Guy, have you thought any more about the deal?” asked Beth.

“Some. Maybe I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“Don’t lose your nerve here, Guy,” I said.

“I can’t spend my life in here. It’s been only a week, and already I’m a wreck.”

“Don’t lose your nerve,” I repeated, ignoring Beth’s gaze.

“Okay.”

“Everything still looks solid,” I said.

“Okay, okay. I’m sticking with you, Victor. So when can I get out of here? When can I get a bail set?”

“That’s also what we came to talk about,” said Beth. “You remember, at arraignment, when the judge set no bail, she indicated that she might reconsider if we could come up with a complete financial profile so she could set a figure high enough to be sure to deter flight. To that end we began to examine your economic resources, using the authority you gave us when you signed those documents.”

“Then let’s get moving. If I have to spend another night in here, I don’t know if…” He stopped speaking. He clasped his hands tighter to stop the shaking.

“We found your account at Schwab.” Beth reached into her briefcase and took out a statement. “It was registered in your and Hailey’s names, as joint tenants, as you told us, and we wanted you to have a look at it and maybe explain some things to us.”

“Fine,” he said, holding his hand out for the statement.

“Before you look,” I said, “can we go over again why you and Hailey had a joint account?”

“We were committed to each other, Victor. That’s the way you do it when you’re going to spend the rest of your lives together. She had some money from a case, I had some money for me to live on after I left Leila, we put it together.”

“What case did she get the payment from?”

“I don’t know, some big medical malpractice case.”

“When did it settle?”

“Last year or something.”

“You don’t know the name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Who was the defense attorney? He’ll know the name.”

“I don’t know who it was.”

“Didn’t you discuss it with her at all?”

“Sure. War stories, you know.”

“And you don’t know the name of the opposing counsel? Because when I tell my war stories to other lawyers, I always mention who was on the other side. It makes the tale of victory so much sweeter.”

“I don’t remember.”

“How much was in the account?”

“Maybe half a million.”

“Who had access to the money?”

“Hailey mainly. I let her deal with it. Didn’t we already go over this? Can I see the statements?”

“You said you fought with Hailey now and then about the usual things,” said Beth. “The most usual thing for couples to fight about is money. Did you ever fight with Hailey about the money in the account?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t remember. Maybe.”

There was a pause, which neither Beth nor I deigned to fill.

“Yes. Once. Or maybe more than once. There was some money missing. I called up the brokerage. I wanted to make a payment to Leila for the house without Hailey knowing. It was silly, but she had been complaining about having to sign checks for my wife, so I thought I’d wire some money right to the mortgage company to take care of a few months and everything would be fine. But I was surprised at the amount they said was available. It was less than I thought it should be, about half, actually. I asked Hailey about it. She told me it was none of my business, that she was taking care of it, that some of her investments hadn’t worked out.”

“Did anyone hear you fight?” asked Beth.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Was it at home or in a public place?”

“Maybe a restaurant, I don’t know. I decided after to take some cash out of the account, just to be safe.”

“The cash you had in the suitcase?”

“That’s right. Can I see the statement?”

“Do you know a man named Juan Gonzalez?” I asked.

He stopped, made a show of searching through his memory. “The ballplayer?”

“No. Not the ballplayer. Someone else.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about Hailey? Did she ever mention someone by that name?”

“No. Never heard of him. I would have remembered. The name rings no bell.” Pause. “Where did you hear it?”

“From your wife. She’s actually willing to put up the house for your bail. She still loves you.”

Guy didn’t respond, he merely shrugged, as if it were expected.

“She also said she had sued Hailey Prouix.”

“Yes,” said Guy. “Alienation of affection.”

“She said she thought that Hailey had all this money that made her worth suing, and as she said it the name Juan Gonzalez slipped out.”

“Well, as usual, when it comes to Leila, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Don’t take anything she says too seriously. Can I see my financial statement now?”

I stood there for a moment and then nodded. Beth handed it over. I watched carefully as he examined the document, watched him screw his face into puzzlement and scratch his head, watched his eyes shift from uncertainty to fear.

“What happened to the money? There’s nothing here.” His voice dropped from his normal swift confidence to something scared, to something desperate and caught, like a furry animal trapped in a corner discovering that its escape hole has been cemented shut. There was nothing of the deliberate sliding through the expected here, this was real and desolate and terrifying, and his whole body shook as his voice whined like a siren, “Where is my money? Where is it? Where?”

After the guard led him away, Beth and I sat quietly together in the conference room for a moment.

“Things grew a little heated there,” said Beth.

“It’s going to get more heated if he takes the stand. It was time for him to get a taste of what it will be like.”

“I had a dog once,” she said. “A bichon frisé, a pretty little white thing we called Pom Pom. I had begged so shamelessly for a dog for so long that my mother finally gave in. But she insisted Pom Pom stay in his little crate in the mud room whenever he wasn’t being walked on his leash. Pom Pom hated his crate, cried incessantly, whined and yipped and snapped at all of us whenever he was let out for brief reprieves. You could hear his moans all through the house. He had an eye condition common to the breed, so his eyes were surrounded with a red crust that only made his whining all the more pitiable. Then one day after school my mother picked me up in the car and held me tight and told me Pom Pom had been killed by a car.”

“Now, that’s hard.”

“No, it was a relief. I grew to hate that dog and his desperate whining. It made me feel guilty every time I looked at his red runny eyes behind the barred door of his crate.”

“What suddenly brought to mind your old family dog?”

“He should take the plea.”

“It’s his choice.”

“It’s a good offer. He should take the plea. His lover theory isn’t bad, but something’s not right about the money.”

“I know.”

“He’s not telling us something.”

“I know.”

“And when they find out about it, and they will find out about it, it’s going jump up and bite him in the ass.”

I didn’t say anything, but I knew she was absolutely right. It was going to jump up and bite him in the ass, and all I had to do was figure out what it was. All I had to do was figure out what it was, and I knew where to start the figuring.

Juan Gonzalez.

“Funny thing about that dog,” said Beth. “It wasn’t until I was already in college that I began to wonder. If little Pom Pom was always locked in his crate, how did that car manage to drive into our mud room and squash him flat?”

13

JUAN GONZALEZ.

A name that meant nothing, except that Leila had mentioned it offhandedly and then Guy had made quite a show of knowing nothing about it. Too much of a show for me to leave it alone. A name that meant nothing except that it meant something, surely.

Juan Gonzalez.

Beth had said it for me: Something was not right about the money. Why had everyone thought there was once so much of it? Why had Hailey, who was startlingly unsentimental about love and romance, allowed it to be put into a joint account? To where had it disappeared? Something was not right about the money, something that would cause grievous harm to Guy’s cause if discovered, and so my number-one priority was to discover it. I didn’t know yet what it was, that secret, but I knew enough to lead me to its shelter. I knew its name.

Juan Gonzales.

First name Juan, John in Spanish. Family name Gonzalez, might as well be Smith. Juan Gonzalez. John Smith. How was it possible to find a connection between such a name and Hailey Prouix? Was it business or personal? Was he a lawyer or a client? Was he a friend or a relative. Was he a lover of Hailey’s or Guy’s or both? The possibilities were endless. All I knew for sure was that he wasn’t the ballplayer, but whoever he was, he was important enough for Guy and Leila to want to hide the truth, and so he was important enough for me to find.

“Never heard of him,” had said Guy. “I would have remembered. The name rings no bell.” When he told us this he was lying. Guy thought he had a secret without realizing that there is no such thing. There is always a trail, always a betrayal of some sort of another. To say you have a secret is only to say that you know something no one cares enough yet to figure out, But I cared, I cared like hell.

“Leila,” I said into the phone. “I have a question.”

“How is Guy?”

“About as you would expect.”

“Did you tell him what I agreed to do with the house? Did you tell him what I said?”

“Yes, I did. I have a question.”

“What did he say when you told him?”

“He shrugged, Leila.”

“He’s distraught still. He needs time.”

“Yes,” I said. He needs about thirty to life, I thought without saying. “Juan Gonzalez. You mentioned that name.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, you did. Who is he?”

“I don’t know, Victor. You said he was a ballplayer.”

“Not the ballplayer.”

“Then I must have misspoken.”

“You didn’t misspeak. Who is he?”

“Do you have those papers for me to sign? Does it look like he’ll be out of prison soon?”

“Leila, if I’m going to defend Guy, if I’m going to do right by Guy, I need to know everything. I need to know about Juan Gonzalez.”

“No, Victor. No you don’t. I heard the prosecutor made an offer.”

“Yes.”

“If he accepts the offer, when would he be out?”

“Somewhere between eight and ten years. Maybe less.”

“I’d be forty-five or so.”

“I need to know about Juan Gonzalez, Leila.”

“Tell him I’d wait. Will you tell him that?”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

“He’s not taking my calls.”

“Isn’t that answer enough?”

“I have to go. I have to pick up Laura at school.”

“Juan Gonzalez.”

“Tell him what I said, Victor.”

In the Philadelphia phone book there were three listings for a Juan Gonzalez, five more for J. Gonzalez. I would call each one and ask if he knew a Hailey Prouix or a Guy Forrest. If that didn’t work, I’d expand my search to include the suburbs, then New Jersey, then Delaware, spreading out nationwide in a great arc of inquiry. There were also records to check, computer databases to consult, sources to pump. It would take days, weeks, it could tie up my office for months, but still I wouldn’t stop until I had the answer. And I would find the answer, I had no doubts, because Guy thought his secret was safe without realizing that no secrets are safe. A secret has weight, it feasts and swells, it fills voids, it invades sleep, it withers joy, it darkens the landscape and presses down upon the soul and grows ever larger until it is too great to be contained. Then it crawls out into the world, hiding in dark places, waiting to be found.

I would check the files and peruse the records and follow the slime trail. One by one I would turn over the rocks, one by one, until underneath some seemingly irrelevant hunk of granite there it would lie, like a fat, wriggling worm. A worm with a name.

Juan Gonzalez.

14

I WASN’T sleeping. I couldn’t figure what was the problem, but somehow my circadian rhythms had come undone, and I wasn’t sleeping.

At night, in my bed, I would feel myself slipping, falling delightfully into sleep. And then something would happen, something hard would seize my fall. I couldn’t figure what it was, but something would happen and I would end up staring at the ceiling, seeing the darkness separate into pinpricks of matter, each hurtling away from me with fierce velocity.

In desperation, to pass the night, I’d pick up the book on my bed-stand. In college, how many how many times had I fallen asleep at my desk, my head resting on the pages of a book from my Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature class? Just a few philosophical diatribes from one Karamazov brother or another and I would be gone. But such was not the case with Crime and Punishment. I found all of it compelling, all of it enthralling, all of it somehow resonant. Taking a breath and pressing his hand against his thumping heart, he immediately felt for the hatchet and once more put it straight. Then he began to mount the stairs very quietly and cautiously, stopping every moment to listen for any suspicious noise. I thought it would put me to sleep, the old Russian master spinning out his words by the bushelful, but each night, after hours of the toss and turn, I lit the lamp and opened the book and dropped into old St. Petersburg. And what does it tell you about my state of mind that, even as I struggled to ensure Guy’s conviction, I was rooting for Raskolnikov to get away with murder?

Then, in the mornings, more exhausted than I was the night before, I would wash the sleeplessness from my eyes and step out into the dreary morning and head to the diner. It was at the diner, in the netherworld between my sleepless nights and my surreptitious days, that I found some respite. I’d sit undisturbed at the counter, spread my paper across the countertop beside me, eat my eggs and home fries, coffee up, read the sports page and comics. The front page was too depressing, but the Phils were winning and though “Doonesbury” had grown tepid over the years and “Family Circle” was too cloying to bear, there was always “The Piranha Club,” “For Better or for Worse,” and that bastion of old values, “Rex Morgan, M.D.” And then of course there was the Jumble.

So there I was at the diner, safe within my exhaustion, struggling to form a word from the letters TOZALE, when a man in a brown suit, with a face like a battered hardball, sat down smack beside me.

“What’s good in this here joint?” he said. He spoke slowly, his voice soft and throaty, as if his larynx had been scarred by fire.

“About what you’d expect,” I said as I eased away from him so our elbows wouldn’t knock.

“What you got there, the eggs?”

I looked down at my plate, the yolks of my easy-overs broken, the yellow spread like thick paint over the home fries, and then looked past him at all the empty stools he had chosen to ignore when he set down next to me.

“Yes,” I said, turning back to my paper. “The eggs.”

Unless it is crowded at the counter of a diner, no one sits next to another patron. As the stools are left vacant and then occupied, the crucial spacing of two or three stools is maintained as if the rules were written on the blackboard above the swinging chrome door. People sit at the counter of a diner to stare into their plates, to read their papers undisturbed, to be left alone. I turned slightly, showing my back to the stranger, and leaned close to the paper.

“I used to love my eggs and bangers,” said the stranger, ignoring my body language, “toast sopping with butter. Every morning. But then my cholesterol, it shot higher than Everest, it did. My dentist told me it was time for a change. You might ask why my dentist, but I don’t gots no other doctor. The rest of me I let go to hell, but you gots to take care of the choppers.”

He smiled at me, showing off his bright whites, with a large gap between his two front teeth, before slapping on the counter for Shelly. When I said he looked like a battered hardball, I didn’t mean a sweet major league ball with one single smudge, I meant one of those ruined remainders we used to play with as kids, brown, misshapen, waterlogged balls we kept banging on even as the stitching came undone and the gray stuffing leaked from the seams. His face was flat and round, his ears stuck out like handles, his nose was the Blob, there was even heavy stitching on the line of his jaw. He was so ugly it was hard to look away from him. His face was like an accident on the side of the road.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he called to Shelly at the other side of the counter, “a bowl of oatmeal here. That’s right, with some skim milk and a joe. Thanks. Oatmeal, that’s what I’m reduced to. It’s a sorry sight when a man with teeth like mine is wasting bicuspids on oatmeal, innit? The dentist, she told me. It’s the fiber what cleans out the arteries, she said. That and garlic. I was eating the garlic raw for a while, but for some reason people stopped talking to me, so nows I take the pills. They say garlic does wonders. At least that’s what they say now. Next week they’ll be telling us something different, like the best thing for your heart is smoking stogies and wanking off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Smoking stogies and wanking off. Wouldn’t it be something if for once they tell us that the things what are actually good for you are the things everyone does anyway?”

“Not everybody,” I muttered, my face back in the paper.

“What, you don’t fancy cigars? Let me guess, you’re a lawyer, right?”

“That’s right.”

He slapped the counter. “I got you, didn’t I? First time, too. I got a knack for these things. Used to sell cars. Buicks, Olds. I got so I could pick out who was what just by the way they sashayed into the showroom. Lawyers would come in like they was daring you to try to sell them. And you never saw a lawyer come in and say ‘I’ll take it.’ The lawyer was always sniffing here, sniffing there, and then he’d check six other showrooms to see if he could save a nickel. If I spotted a lawyer walking through them doors, I’d say, ‘Joey, why don’t you take this one.’ And then Joey would waste his afternoon with the lawyer in the three-piece while I would grab the guy with the grease beneath his fingernails who would buy that big red Buick on the spot. Zealot.”

“What?”

“The word, in the Jumble you’re stuck on. TOZALE is zealot.”

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all. The next one, SORIAL, is sailor. I used to do them Jumbles every day. I was like the Michael Jordan of the Jumble. It’s a talent I got for taking things that are all mixed up and putting it in an order that makes sense. That’s how I got into my new line. But I still got friends in the car biz. Hey, you looking for a new car? I could set something up.”

“All I want is to finish reading the paper in peace.”

“Yeah, I notice a lot of guys come to places like this to be left alone, but I never understood that. I want to be alone, I’ll eat my oatmeal standing by the sink in my skivvies. It’s like in the car business. When I was working the shop, no one wanted to be jammed by a salesman right off. They wanted to be able to browse around la-di-da on theys own. But I figure, why come into a sales center if you don’t want to be sold? You let the bastards browse around on theys own, next thing you know they’ll be browsing their way over to the Toyota place across the street.

“Thanks, sweetheart, and more coffee when you can. Javalicious. Hey, could you pass the sugar? This one is all lumped up. Yeah.

“Funny thing about them lawyers in the salesroom, though. When it came down to negotiating a deal, they was like virgins in a sailors’ bar. They would do theys research, sure. They’d come in loaded with papers, figuring they knew everything they needed to know, when really they knew nothing. Because what was important wasn’t all the crap they brought in, it was how much the dealer was paying in the first place, how desperate was the cash-flow situation, what the boss’s girlfriend was whining for that week, all stuff that ain’t in Consumer Reports. Is the slurping bothering you? Good. The oatmeal is better with the milk, makes it like a soup. Anywise, the lawyers would bypass the salesman and sit down with the assistant manager, which is like bypassing the pilot fish to deal directly with the shark. Frigging lawyers. By the time they got finished with the assistant manager and with the F &I guys, they was getting it up the arse, down the throat and in both ears.”

By now my face was out of the paper and I was staring at the man beside me. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

“You know what they should teach you first thing in law school?” he said. “They should teach you that maybe you don’t know everything you think you know. They should teach you that if a deal for some reason seems too good to be true, then maybe you should jump off your arse and grab it afore it disappears. Maybe sometimes you should take the damn deal before something bad happens, before something awful happens that will absolutely ruin your day. What the hell do you think of that?”

“What line did you say you were in now?” I asked.

“Nowadays I solve bigger puzzles than the Jumble. Things what don’t add up, I find the sense of the things and make them add up in a way that everybody wins. Even me. Especially me.” He reached into his jacket pocket for a wallet, took out a five, and slapped it on the counter. Calling to Shelly, he said, “Here you go, sweetie. You keep what’s left.”

“You got a card?” I asked.

“Nah, those what need me know where to find me.”

“Can I ask you a favor?”

“Shoot,” he said.

“Next time you want to send me a message, do it by fax.”

He stared at me for a long moment, the geniality leaking out of his face. “Don’t get too smart on me, I’m liable to change my whole opinion of the profession.” Then he let out a belch that shook the plates on the counter before us. “There’s the problem with the oatmeal, right there.”

“What do you want, Skink?”

“A bowl of oatmeal. A cup of joe. A chance to pass a few friendly words. I’m doing you a favor here by giving you an honest piece of advice. Forget your snooping around about this Juan Gonzalez. He ain’t important. What’s important is that you do the right thing. Take the deal. It’s a good deal. It ends everything and keeps everybody happy.”

“Who sent you?”

“See, here’s the thing, Vic. You think you knew her, but you didn’t know the first thing about her. You think you understood her, but you understood nothing. She was like a fancy gold watch, she was, simple and slim on the outside, but inside was wheels within wheels within wheels. And you never had the frigginest.”

“And you did?”

“Me and her, we understood each other. Me and her, we got along like long-lost pals. We had things in common. She talked to me.”

“About what?”

“You know. About her affairs and such.”

I didn’t say anything, I just stared. He smiled and leaned so close I was glad he had stopped eating his garlic raw, leaned so close his whisper was like a roar.

“I know,” he said.

“Know what?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Your little no-no.”

“My no-no?”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “Yes I does. I know.”

I stood abruptly, as if the secret itself propelled me off my stool. I stood, but I didn’t say anything and I didn’t leave. I stood and listened.

“She told me so herself,” said Skink. “I assure you, Vic, I’m not here to hurt you, I’m here to help. It’s safe with me, your little secret. I got no wish to spread it around like butter on a stack of flap-jacks. But don’t be like those lawyers in the showroom with their lawyerish ways. Take the deal. It wasn’t no picnic getting Jefferson to go for the plea. Don’t think we can keep it on the table forever. Forget about Juan Gonzalez. Take the deal, put everything right, so no one ends up knowing nothing and we all go home happy.”

He nodded at me, pushed himself off his stool, and headed for the door. He had a strange, waddling walk, like he’d just jumped off his horse after riding for a fortnight. Then he stopped, turned, and waddled back.

“You was in the house alone after she was doffed, wasn’t you?”

I said nothing.

“An item is missing, a small item. No bigger than a key, if you catch the drift. It wasn’t logged in by the police detectives, and it seems no longer to be in the house.”

“How would you know?” I blurted out, my gaze dropping down from his eyes to his hands, which were now hidden in his pockets.

He ignored my question. “You didn’t happen to pilfer the item whilst inside the house, did you? You didn’t happen to palm it for your own invidious purposes?”

I couldn’t answer, too frightened and stunned to even try to deny it. I stood there shaking, mute, my eyes watering involuntarily as they hadn’t done in years. I couldn’t answer, but it wasn’t the type of question that demanded an answer. I got the sense that Phil Skink didn’t need many answers from anyone, especially from me.

“G’day, Vic,” he said with a click and a wink.

I watched him push open the door, head out to the street, and then I wheeled around in terror.

15

HE KNEW. That bastard, Skink, he knew. I could have brazened it out with denial after denial, but that wouldn’t have altered a thing. The truth was in his ugly puss. He knew. How was it possible? How? Why? Because Hailey… because Hailey had told him, so he said. They had had an understanding, so he said. They had things in common. Hailey Prouix and Phil Skink. What the hell could they have had in common? But Skink knew, no doubt about it, and there was no telling the kind of hurt he could put on me with what he knew.

I stared into my plate, filthy now with the yellow of smeared yolk and the paprika of the potatoes. The greasy slop in my stomach turned and I gagged with a sudden nausea. There is always a faint tinge of nausea after a heavy diner meal, as if the high heat of the griddle renders cheap grease into a mild emetic, but this was something different, something far richer and justly deserved.

What the hell was I doing? I had slept with my friend’s fiancée, I had taken evidence from the scene of her murder, and now I was defending her killer to the worst of my abilities. In the heat of everything, when it played out only in my consciousness, it had all seemed so logical, even so inevitable. But now, when my perfidy played out also in the consciousness of the world’s sleaziest private eye, the end result was humiliation. How had I looked to him? I could see it in his eyes. I had put myself into a position to be ethically condescended to by the likes of Phil Frigging Skink. I was a fool, I was in far over my head, I was making mistake after mistake.

I closed my eyes and let the nausea slide through me and waited for it to fade. But it didn’t fade. It grew and twisted inside my stomach, reached out its arms and stretched. Unsteadily, I made my way past the empty stools and into the lavatory, turned on the light, locked the door behind me. It was filthy and small, the floor was wet, the trash bin jammed with paper towels even this early in the morning, and it smelled like, well, like a toilet. I leaned on the sink, looked in the mirror at my face, oily and green. I was getting sicker by the second. My breaths were coming now in panicky gulps. I had to figure out what to do. I had to figure out my options. Had to. Had to. Now.

Give it up, let my plan of vengeance fade, back away from the trial and disclose the affair and hope it all turned out right? Yes, yes, I could do that, yes. Except that it wouldn’t go away and nothing would turn out right. Skink might disappear, true, but Guy’s new defense attorney would blame me for the murder, Guy would strut out of jail, and I, stripped of my membership in the bar and humiliated in the press, would be the new chief suspect of Detectives Stone and Breger.

Ignore the bastard and continue on as I was continuing on? Yes, yes. Maybe that was it, maybe I should just brazen it through. I bent over the sink, splashed water on my overheated face, felt the hard living thing in my stomach bubble and belch, rise into my chest and then fall again. Skink had said the secret was safe with him, that he only wanted to help. But he wanted something from me, and he was not the kind to give up on what he wanted. There would be more visits, more threats. It would never end, never, end, until the bastard broke me in two.

“Oh, God,” I said as I banged on the wall.

Of course, of course, there was another route. Give him what he wanted, take the plea. Skink wanted it, Beth wanted it, even Guy was inclined. That was it, the easiest way out and the most obvious. Good, yes, but… A plea would hardly avenge Hailey, and even with a plea, Phil Frigging Skink would still hold his sword of knowledge over my head. How much would I have to pay him in the future to keep his mouth shut? What would it be like to have another partner?

Derringer, Carl and Skink.

What kind of name was Skink anyway?

No, it was all bad, there were no options. I was lost, I was sunk, there was no solution to that bastard Skink, nothing to be done except throw up. I lurched over to the scummy little toilet and in one quick spasm gave up my morning’s feed.

I stared at my red-rimmed orbs in the mirror. My face looked like a tawdry country music song. I dampened a paper towel and wiped my face and then pressed it onto my overheated forehead and let the cool seep through my skin. I rinsed out my mouth, one spit, two, wiped my teeth roughly with the paper towel. I felt better, yes, I felt much better, and my emotions settled. Slowly I began to calm, and as I did, I sifted through the detritus of my panic, searching for one thing, anything, on which to grab hold. And what I came up with had the face of a battered hardball.

Skink.

What was his game? I knew enough about guys like Skink to know the Jumblemeister wasn’t after honor or love or sense of self in a world beset with meaninglessness – he was thinking of one thing only: money. And he seemed to have a route to it all his own. Wasn’t it funny that in a case I had thought turned only on passion and rage there seemed to be an underlying theme of money? The cash in the envelope. The cash in Guy’s suitcase. The funds mysteriously absent from the brokerage account about which Guy and Hailey had fought. The strange untapped relationship between Leila’s vindictive grab for Hailey’s money and the name Juan Gonzalez. I had still no doubt as to who had pulled the trigger, but Guy’s motivation might not be as simple as I had imagined. Maybe my personal involvement had twisted my thinking on the why, maybe it wasn’t that he loved her too much, maybe it was that something he loved too much was missing. I remembered the look on his face when he learned that the brokerage account was empty. Money money money. How could ever I be surprised to learn that money ran through a story of murder like the sewers run through Paris?

Skink.

What was his relationship to Juan Gonzalez? Why did he want Guy to plead? And how did a piece of slime like Phil Frigging Skink get the estimable Troy Jefferson, with his overt political ambitions, to offer a lowball plea in the first place? The answer was, he didn’t. The answer was, someone else did. He had used the first-person plural, and my guess is that Phil Frigging Skink was not the type to routinely use the royal”we.”

Guy said Skink had worked for Jonah Peale, Guy’s father-in-law. Odds on, that’s who he still was working for. Maybe Jonah Peale was the other part of the “we.” Maybe I should go right at him, barge in, make all sorts of threats, see what I shook up. Except I knew Jonah Peale, had met him at Guy’s wedding to Leila and had spotted him since around town. He was a short, bellicose man who nodded at me brusquely as he passed me in the street, not quite sure, I could tell, who I was or how he had met me, but quite sure he didn’t care. Whatever he was, he wouldn’t shake easily. I didn’t know enough yet to go after him. Something was eluding me, something basic that explained much.

I took a deep breath and then another, let the oxygen flow rich through my veins. Good, see, panic was useless. With my breakfast down the toilet, I could think things through calmly and coolly.

Skink.

Juan Gonzalez.

Jonah Peale.

Skink.

Juan Gonzalez.

Jonah Peale.

Three names. Three. Somehow they were connected. How? Why? Three names. Or was it more than three names? Wasn’t it also Guy Forrest? Wasn’t it also Leila Forrest, née Peale? Wasn’t it also Hailey Prouix? What was it that could link them all together?

It came to me in a flash of empathic insight. It came to me because I was standing in a stinking shithole, having just thrown up in disgust at myself, and understood how low it was possible to fall. It came to me because I was treading the same path for Hailey that had already been trodden before me, for Hailey, and so I could see the footsteps of the prior traveler as clearly now as I could see my own. It came to me, and when it came to me, it seemed so obvious that I could barely believe I hadn’t seen it with utter clarity before.

It would be nothing to confirm, and I would confirm it, but I would do more. For not only did I suddenly understand exactly who was Juan Gonzalez, but also exactly what he could do for me. He was probably dead, or as good as dead, but that was no matter. Juan Gonzalez would single-handedly get Skink off my back and bring Jonah Peale in line. Juan Gonzalez would be my enforcer. But there was more.

If it was played just right, Juan Gonzalez would also convict Guy of first-degree murder as if he himself were the decisive witness, as if he himself had seen Guy fire that shot into Hailey Prouix’s heart. All I needed was to bring his name, and his story, to the proper authorities so that the insulting plea offer would be withdrawn forthwith. All I needed was a way to introduce Juan Gonzalez to Troy Jefferson without it seeming as if I were the matchmaker. All I needed was a sly plan, too clever by half, that would do by proxy what I couldn’t do in person. The plan would have to be dirty, base, vile. The plan would have to exhibit a complete lack of moral fiber in the soul of the deranged maniac who dreamed it up.

I was just the man for the job.

16

STANDING AT the reception desk on the ground floor of the Dawson, Cricket and Peale building, I could feel them working above me, the swarm, buzzing and fussing, drafting and faxing, answering phones, answering complaints, answering insults with insults, investigating, inventing, tendering offers and refusing offers, wheeling, dealing, hustling, bustling, holding firm, holding firmer, shopping for experts, shopping for forums, shopping online, filing interrogatories, answering interrogatories, deposing, defending, coaching witnesses, browbeating witnesses, browbeating secretaries, snapping pencils, complaining with righteous indignation, responding with moral sincerity, filing motions to dismiss, filing motions for summary judgment, filing motions for sanctions, responding to motions for sanctions, exploding with anger in calculated bursts, filing trial memos, filing witness lists, hiring jury consultants, conducting mock trials before focus groups, meeting, discussing, shuddering with fear, settling, settling, always settling, quickly, before the next complaint arrived. Standing at the reception desk on the ground floor of the Dawson, Cricket and Peale building was like standing beneath a hive of drones and feeling the vibrations of a hundred thousand wings beating in crazy disorder toward the common goal of honey, honey, and more honey.

“Jonah Peale,” I said to the receptionist. She presided over a desk beside the elevator, an armed guard behind her, and behind him the firm’s name spelled out in steel. Between the elevator and the front door sat a large marble fountain, a huge copper fish leaping out of the water with a foul spray erupting from its mouth. The spitting of the fish was almost loud enough to drown out my words.

“Is he expecting you?”

“No.”

“Then I’m sorry, but Mr. Peale has a very busy-”

“Get him on the phone. He’ll see me,” I said. “Tell him it’s Victor Carl. Tell him I’m here to talk about his beloved son-in-law.”

Peale grabbed my arm as I came out of the elevator on the sixth and top floor. He was ten inches shorter than me, but his grip was iron and so was his voice. “I’m meeting with clients in my office,” he said as he pulled me into the conference room. “We’ll talk in here.”

The room was large, long, with a huge wooden table and a wall of windows. Peale was wearing a black pin-striped suit with a bright red tie bursting with flowers. He sat me down and then walked around the table until he stood directly across from me, his arms straight, his fists resting on the tabletop as he leaned forward. With the light streaming in from behind him, he seemed taller, the red tie glowed with power. I felt like a trash hauler negotiating a union contract with the chairman of the board.

“We’ve met before,” he said.

“At Leila and Guy’s wedding.”

“Feh.” Disgust twisted his hard features as if a piece of gristle were stuck in his teeth.

“Maybe you should be more careful in vetting your recruits.”

His eyes flashed anger. He had a way of speaking as if every declarative statement were a barroom challenge. “I wasn’t recruiting for Leila. What you want in a litigator is very different from what you want in a son-in-law. But I was wrong about him as a lawyer, too. What the hell kind of man gets a tattoo like that on his chest?”

“The kind that good daughters inevitably fall for.”

“To their regret. Your friend betrayed my daughter, he betrayed my grandchildren, he betrayed his vows. That he finally betrayed his lover by murdering her is no great surprise. I hope you received your fee in advance, or he’ll betray you, too.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“It’s his nature to cheat.”

“I’m not talking about my fee, I’m talking about the murder.”

“How do I know? Because he’s family.” His tongue moved angrily within his cheek, still searching for the gristle.

“If you’re that certain, Mr. Peale, then why are you so anxious for him to plead to a lesser charge?”

“Am I?”

“Yesterday morning a man named Phil Skink” – I left out the adjective that had become for me like a middle name – “invaded my breakfast at a neighborhood diner.”

“Skink? Phil Skink? Don’t know him.”

“Really, now. In our conversation this Skink wanted me to plead your son-in-law out to manslaughter. In fact, he wanted it so badly he bound the request in a threat. I assumed he was speaking for you, since Guy had told me Skink did some work for your firm. If he wasn’t speaking for you, then the detectives investigating Hailey Prouix’s murder would surely want to speak to him about his peculiar interest in the case. I thought I’d check with you before I gave the information to the police.”

I stared calmly at him and he stared fiercely back. He was a little man with a little mustache, but his eyes beneath his wire-frame glasses burned with intensity as bright as his tie. I remembered then that his wife was exceptionally large and the two of them made a comically proportioned couple, but no one ever dared laugh. I remembered then that he had been caught in some scandal involving a congressman and his aide a few years back and that the congressman’s aide was a tall, full-size blonde named Agatha.

“Mr. Skink,” he said finally, “is occasionally contracted by this firm to provide investigative services. He may have taken it upon himself to voice my concerns about the effects of a lengthy murder trial on my family.”

“He threatened me.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“I don’t like to be threatened.”

“Things happen to all of us that we don’t like. I’ll be blunt. I don’t want that bastard’s picture in the papers staring at me for the next six months. I don’t want the articles talking about my daughter. I don’t want her forced to testify. I don’t want my grandchildren used as pawns. I don’t want the tragedies of my family played out in the tabloids. I want it to be over. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Your familial concern is touching.”

“So you’re touched. Is that all? Because I have a client in my office.”

“Give him the newspaper. Tell him to do the Jumble while he waits. I have more questions.”

“I have no more answers. You can send any request for further information to my lawyer. Good day, Mr. Carl. We are through.” He started the long walk around the table.

“Do you want a subpoena, Mr. Peale? Because I have one in my briefcase with your name on it.”

“I’ll quash it.”

“I’ll quash back. I was a Division Two quash champion in college. And then, when you’re under oath, maybe I’ll start asking about the promises you made to support Troy Jefferson’s future political aspirations in exchange for a quick plea.”

He stopped. “There were no promises.”

“Call them what you will. The only way a political opportunist like Jefferson backs away from a high-profile murder trial is if the political payoff is higher than all those appearances on the six o’clock news. What does he want to be, DA? Attorney general? Lieutenant governor? What does he want to be, the big man himself?”

“Troy Jefferson is a young man with sterling qualities who would be an asset to the commonwealth in any public role.”

“Yes, and he had a nice jump shot, too, but that’s not what’s going on, is it? Why are you trying to end this case before it starts?”

“I told you. My family-”

“No. Try again.”

“My daughter-”

“Sorry, wrong answer.”

“My grandchildren-”

“I don’t think so. Not unless you have a grandchild named Juan Gonzalez.”

Peale pressed his thin lips together, his head jerked within his starched collar. He took hold of the closest seat and sat down. His voice, when it came, had lost its iron edge. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I understand why you wanted it kept secret. Red Book Insurance is your largest and oldest client. It bought this building for you, paneled your offices. It keeps you in feed, and not chicken feed at that. If you had told them what happened right at the start, you could have weathered it, maybe, but you kept it from them, kept it your little secret. For them to find out now would destroy the relationship irrevocably. They’d leave, for sure, and the scandal would convince others to leave, too. Who could ever trust your firm after this? It would be over for Dawson, Cricket and Peale, except at the unemployment line.”

“You’re barking off half-cocked.”

“I can tell I’m right, you’re mixing metaphors. What I don’t understand is how you expected it to stay a secret. It wasn’t hidden, really. All it took was a visit to the clerk’s office, a review of the case files, the discovery of a medical malpractice action entitled Juan Gonzalez v. Dr. Irwin Glass et al. The whole story is there right on the docket sheet. I found it all yesterday, after my little breakfast meeting with Skink. Representing the plaintiff: Hailey Prouix, Esquire. Representing the defendant doctor and insurance company: Guy Forrest, Esquire. Oh, not only Guy, your name was at the top of the list of lawyers, you were the billing partner, I suppose, but Guy did the work. It was on that case that he met Hailey, wasn’t it? It was during the length of the litigation that he dined her, romanced her, seduced her. And after the settlement, after the three million dollars were handed from the insurance company to the plaintiff, about the going rate for a man entering the hospital for routine prostate surgery and leaving in a coma, Guy ditched his wife, his children, your firm, to move in with Hailey. Living on her share of the award, her one-third, a cool mil.”

“It was a solid case,” said Peale. “The settlement was a fair one. I oversaw it all. For the three million dollars Red Book escaped exposure to a much larger amount, an amount that could have crippled its operations.”

“Maybe, but I think not. I think there was something there that would have won the case for Red Book, some hard piece of evidence that Guy hid until after the settlement was signed and the money paid and Guy and Hailey had a million dollars to start their lives together. Otherwise he would have dropped off the case once the relationship started. Otherwise Hailey Prouix would have insisted on it. Why allow even the tinge of impropriety to hazard the settlement somewhere down the line? Why put a million dollars at risk? Unless it was the only way to get the million dollars in the first place. I had wondered why Hailey’s big fee was placed in a joint account, and now I know, because they both earned it. And you knew, didn’t you? You knew and tried to keep it quiet. That’s why you wanted the plea accepted. That’s why you sent Skink to threaten me.”

I was guessing, this last part about the hidden evidence, but it was a guess that made sense, and Jonah Peale’s reaction, a sort of head swivel of frustration, told me that my guess was spot on.

“You have no proof,” he said.

“I don’t need proof right now, all I need is to know I’m right. It won’t be too hard to find what it was Guy hid, now that we know what to look for. And wouldn’t Red Book be interested as hell in seeing it for themselves?”

Jonah Peale’s face turned pale and then paler still. He lost so much color I thought he would collapse, right there before me, collapse and fall off that chair. Then, suddenly, he composed himself, as if a knob had been turned. He took off his spectacles, cleaned the lenses with the tip of his bright red tie. “It would destroy this firm’s reputation,” he said calmly, “destroy the firm I’ve put my life into. I can’t allow that to happen.”

“So it’s not the family you’re concerned about, is it?”

“We all have our priorities. Why are you here?”

And there it was, the negotiation had begun. It was a pretty impressive performance by Peale, he had taken the shot, recovered, and now was ready to take control of the situation. Good for him, good for me.

“We both have an interest in keeping this information quiet,” I said. “If it becomes public, it could be damaging to my client’s case. As long as I control the disclosure, and the spin, I think I could manage it. I could even turn it to Guy’s advantage, paint Hailey as a schemer out for the money, reduce the natural sympathy for the victim. But still, it complicates things as far as motive. And, of course, to you it would be devastating. So I believe it is in our interests to work together to keep it quiet.”

“Agreed. What do you want?”

“I want Skink off my back.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“I don’t want to see him again. I don’t want him talking to anyone about this case in any way, shape, or form. It would be best if he took a vacation until this whole thing is cleared up.”

“He will be so instructed.”

“I see him, I hear word one from him or about him, then I’ll let out the information my way, and Red Book will know not only what Guy did but that you were hiding it from them.”

“You’ve made yourself clear.”

“I also assume there are documents showing what Guy discovered and hid. I assume there is a file.”

“Maybe there is.”

“If we agree to keep it quiet, I can’t afford to have it slip out when I least expect it. I don’t want anyone to control that information but me. I want the file. I want all copies of it.”

“That may prove difficult.”

“I don’t want to hear excuses.”

“It may prove difficult,” said Jonah Peale, “because if there is a file, I don’t have it.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not the type, Mr. Carl.”

“It must keep you up at night.”

“Yes, well, with the way my wife snores, I don’t get much sleep anyway.”

“Any ideas what happened to it?”

“Ask your client. Anything else?”

I sat for a moment, tapped my chin. “One more thing, I suppose. I like your tie.”

“Thank you.”

“I want it.”

He stared at me, hard. I was going way overboard, but there was a purpose to it. His face reddened with anger and then the color subsided. “I’ll messenger it over tomorrow.”

“Actually I was going out tonight, and it would go marvelously with my blue suit.”

He stared at me a moment longer, bloody daggers in his eyes, and then he reached a finger into the knot. As he worked the tie loose, his thin lips spread in an approximation of a smile. “You know, Victor, may I call you Victor? I suspect, Victor, that in the end we’ll work well together. I’ll make sure Mr. Skink is cooperative, as we discussed, but you might want to rethink Troy Jefferson’s offer. Hell, it really is the best that asshole could ever hope for. It would be to everyone’s benefit for this to go away. And as for your fee, which your expression told me had not been paid for in advance, if he takes the deal, I’ll make sure your fee is paid in full. Whatever the invoice says, no questions asked. He is family, after all, at least until the inevitable divorce.”

I slapped my thighs and stood. “Talk to Skink.”

He held out the tie. I stepped forward to take it. “Done,” he said.

“Good.” I turned to face the door and then stopped, turned around again. This was the moment, the crucial moment. It had to seem incidental, offhand. “By the way, you mentioned the inevitable divorce. Don’t be so sure about that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your daughter wants him back.”

“Of course she doesn’t.”

“I visited her just last week. She wants everything returned to the way it was before. Her husband back in her happy home, sharing her bed, raising their children.”

“She…” His voice softened. “She can’t be serious.”

“Oh, she is. Quite. She has even agreed to put up the house for his bail.”

He didn’t react like I expected. Instead of exploding in anger, he looked away from me, toward the windows, and creased his forehead in thought. “She can’t,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s not hers to put up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I cosigned the mortgage. She can’t do a thing without my agreement, and I won’t put up a penny to get that bastard out of jail. Not a penny.” He turned quickly to stare at me. “You wouldn’t insist that I do that, too, would you? You wouldn’t do that.”

The pleading in his voice was almost pathetic. I made a gesture of thinking on it for a moment before smiling to myself. “No. Better not to tip our hand. If you agreed to bail him out, it would look suspicious.”

“She really wants him back?”

“As soon as I acquit him.”

“How could she be such a fool?” he said, his voice now almost wistful, his gaze back to the window.

I said something or other by way of ending the meeting, but he didn’t respond, just kept on staring, and so I left without another word, though on the way out I have to admit I skipped a step or two. Call me Satchmo, seeing as I had just played Jonah Peale like a cornet.

In the lobby I stopped in front of the fish leaping out from the marble fountain. The fish’s fish lips were puckered and spitting out the nasty little stream. Someone, somewhere, thought the effect was pleasing, but who? How? Maybe that was the biggest mystery of all. I wrapped Jonah Peale’s red power tie tight around that ugly fish’s neck and stepped into the street.

17

“YOU KNOW if this leaks,” said Beth after I had told her of my discovery about Juan Gonzalez and my meeting with Peale, minus the bit about Skink, “it would devastate Guy’s defense. He wants us to pursue the lover as the killer. Fine. In a lover’s triangle it’s easy enough to point the finger at the missing member.”

“Speaking metonymically, of course.”

“But money trumps love. If the prosecution can show a monetary motive for Guy’s anger, like being cheated out of the money they had stolen together, they’ll have a much easier go.”

“I know,” I said.

“And if Troy Jefferson finds out what you found out, he’ll withdraw the plea offer in a second.”

“I know that, too.”

“Then maybe we should accept it before it disappears.”

“Maybe, but we need to talk to Guy first. We need to give Guy a chance to tell us his side of the story.”

“Guy stole the money, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And Hailey transferred it out of their joint account, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Then what is there that he could tell us to alter those fundamental facts? His explanation won’t change the government’s ability to turn that into motive. You add this to his fingerprints on the gun, the improbability of his story, the evidence of another lover, the lack of evidence of a break-in, you add it all up and the sum is a guilty.”

I avoided her gaze and shrugged. “Convictions happen.”

She stared at me. I refused to stare back.

“You look terrible.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s so sweet.”

“You have bags under your eyes the airlines would make you gate-check.”

“I’ve been staying up late reading.”

“Must be something good.”

“A classic.”

“I’ve been wondering why you haven’t pushed Guy to accept the plea. At first I thought maybe it was because you like appearing on the evening news and it had been a while since you had a case that put you there. Then I thought you just wanted to keep the case alive so you could bury yourself in work and forget your failed romance. But I never thought it was because you believed Guy is innocent. Do you, Victor?”

“What?”

“Believe he’s innocent?”

I turned my head to look at her straight on. “It shouldn’t matter.”

“But it does, doesn’t it? I can feel it in you.”

“Let me turn it around. How would you feel if you learned that Guy was absolutely guilty? How would you feel then about defending him? How would you feel then about getting for him a sweetheart deal?”

“I’d feel lousy about it.”

“But you’d still defend him to the best of your abilities?”

“Yes. I would. That’s the job.”

“I know the job. I’m not talking about the job. I’m talking about what you think of the job.”

“Sometimes I think it’s rotten.”

“There you go.”

“So you do believe he did it.”

“I’m saying it shouldn’t matter, but sometimes it does. I’m saying that I’m in a tough situation, but I’m doing the best I can. I’m saying that all I need from you is a little faith that I’ll do the right thing.”

“You usually do.”

“Thank you.”

“But sometimes,” she said, “you do it for all the wrong reasons.”

I didn’t want to ask her what she meant by that, so I ignored the comment. She scratched her neck and tilted her head as if she were trying to work it out, trying to find the missing piece that would explain everything. But she didn’t have it, I knew, and she wouldn’t get it if I had anything to say about the matter. What had been between Hailey and me was a secret, and even if Skink knew, that was where it would end. I had seen to that.

But I could still sense her unease. It was time to bring her tacitly on my side, time for her to see the absolute truth. It was time, finally, for Guy to confess, if only to his lawyers. Nothing admissible in a court of law, of course, but enough to get Beth working with and not against me. Time for Guy to tell the whole truth, and I knew just how to squeeze it out of him.

Juan Gonzalez.

IT WAS like cracking a walnut.

Guy again denied knowing anything about Juan Gonzalez. Guy again denied knowing the specifics of the case in which Hailey had won her big contingency fee. Guy again explained that the only reason Hailey’s money was in a joint account was that they were in love and that’s how lovers treat money. Guy again said he wasn’t really upset that some money from the account had been missing because most of it was Hailey’s money to begin with. Guy again claimed that he didn’t kill her, that he loved her and couldn’t have hurt her.

Beth and I listened to it all with straight faces, and then, slowly, I brought out the lever.

We placed the docket sheet for the Juan Gonzalez case on the table in front of him. He looked down at the paper, up at us, back down at the paper. His gray face turned grayer, the twitch in his lip became grotesque.

“Who knows about this?” he said in soft voice.

“Just us,” I said. “And of course your father-in-law.”

“Oh, God,” he said.

“Leave Him out of it.”

“I didn’t kill her,” he said.

“You can’t tell us that and then lie about the rest,” I said. “We don’t have time to play around anymore. We have to know everything. From the beginning. We have to know everything about you and Hailey.”

He stared down at the docket sheet and closed his eyes. Beth and I waited in silence. He kept his eyes closed for a long time, and when they finally opened, he said, “I made a decision. It turned rotten.”

I nodded. “Leaving Leila and your family for another woman.”

“No,” said Guy. “Before Hailey. The decision at the heart of it all, to become a lawyer.”

18

GUY FORREST

THERE IS a story I don’t want to get into, a story about a motorcycle, a guy named Pepito, who weighed, it must have been three hundred pounds, and a stripper from Nogales named CiCi. It’s a bad story and it makes no sense, just like the way I was living made no sense.

After college I lost seven years trying hard not to be ordinary, chasing something, I never knew what, falling into a squalor I can’t anymore imagine. I grew sick of the carelessness, the drugs, the greasy food, the bad grammar. There had to be a better way. Had to be. I was living then on the outskirts of a college town, and some kids we were dealing to were talking about the LSATs, and I figured I was smarter than they were, so I signed up, too. It was a lark, but it wasn’t a lark, because underneath I knew what it was pointing to. And I did all right, better than the college kids. So when Pepito walked through my door, just walked right through it, wood crashing down around him, waving a sawed-off shotgun in the air, misusing adjectives as adverbs, I knew it was time to change everything.

Law school was hard. I didn’t take to it like you did, Victor, too many rules based on imprecise language, too many leaps of twisted logic, but that’s not what made it so hard. It was hard because it wasn’t just a few years of professional training for me. I was reinventing myself. I knew what I would be falling back into if I didn’t make it. I worked harder than I ever thought possible, kept my nose clean, changed my whole way of living. I saw some of our classmates right out of college hanging in the bars, trying to act cool, and I just shook my head. I knew cool, I nearly froze to death in the desert from cool. That’s why I liked you. Beside the fact you could explain things to me, you weren’t trying to be something other than you were, you weren’t cool. See, every day I was pretending to be something less than I was. I kept everything buttoned, everything tight and grim. I was going the other route one hundred percent. I was keeping my head low, because any day Pepito could burst again through my door.

I was tempted to go in with you after law school, Victor, it would have been fun, but the law for me was not about fun. It was about security, about money, about gaining some status starting from nothing. It was about leading a different life. At Dawson, Cricket and Peale, straight was the only way to play it. I put my head down and sucked up the hours, the workload, the bland social obligations. When the thing with Leila came along, I figured it had happened, the change, that I was someone shiny and new. And in no time there we were with the big house, the country club, the kids, the life. The goddamn life. I’m not claiming to be a victim here, none of this was done to me, the whole thing was my choosing, but even so, something was wrong. The clue was, I suppose, that after eight years I still wasn’t comfortable in a suit and tie. I hated my job, hated the work, hated the firm, yet my grandest ambition was to become partner. The schizophrenia of it was tearing me apart. Do you know the word “anhedonia?” I suffered it, I was plagued by it. After eight years I looked up and realized I was living in black and white.

It was in a hospital room. There had been a bad result to a simple surgery. The doctor had notified the insurance company, Red Book, and they had notified us. In my briefcase was a contract that I was to have the wife sign, a contract that would guarantee the patient’s medical care in exchange for an agreement to arbitrate any dispute over his prior care and a waiver of any claims for pain and suffering. Hey, bad things happen, and some bad things that happen are nobody’s fault. That was our motto there at Dawson, Cricket and Peale. For a while I sat alone in the darkened room with the patient. He had intravenous lines leading into his arms, he had a catheter leading from his prick, he had a respirator tube snaking down his throat. The bellows of the respirator rose and fell, over and over, like a torture machine. Allow me to introduce you to Juan Gonzalez.

Once he had been a handsome man, he had played minor league baseball, he had raised a family by the strength of his hands. Now I looked at him lying near lifeless in the bed, and in a way I envied him. For him, at least, it was over, the maneuvering, the arguing, the rushing here and there for results that meant nothing. That was how far I had fallen – I envied the man in the coma – when Mrs. Gonzalez walked into the room.

She was a nice lady, sweet and terrified, devoted to her husband, worried about his future, her ability to continue his care. Her insurance had a limit, it would run out, it would run out, and then what would she do? I commiserated. In my job I had become excellent at commiseration. I was wearing a dark suit, an overcoat, polished black shoes. I must have seemed the bearer of very bad tidings, but I was there to help, I told her. In any way I could.

There was an order to things. You couldn’t just presume, you couldn’t just go in waving dollar bills. You needed to follow the order of things. If you showed any eagerness, they would want a lawyer of their own, and once they found a lawyer of their own, it became a whole different game. I learned that from my clever father-in-law, Jonah Peale himself. So I moved in slowly.

“Are you happy with the room?” I asked. “Are you happy with the care, the nursing? Anything we can do to help in this most difficult time, we will do. Just ask. Please. Anything. You shouldn’t worry about the limit on your medical insurance, Mrs. Gonzalez. I will personally make sure that no transfer takes place until you are satisfied that his care in the new facility will be as good as the care here. We want to take care of you. How are things at home without Mr. Gonzalez’s salary? Are you managing? If you need anything, I want you to call me. There are people who can help. I’m on your side. Tell me what I can do to help. Anything. Anything.”

It was going well, so well that I opened the briefcase and took out the long piece of paper. It was always the crucial moment, the opening of the briefcase. You didn’t open the briefcase unless you felt the deal, and once it was open you didn’t leave the room until the deal was closed. The briefcase was open, the papers were out, Mrs. Gonzalez was on the verge of signing. Pushing her would have been as easy as pushing aside a curtain, I could feel it, but I didn’t push. That was not the way it was done. It had to be her choice, and she was choosing to sign. The pen was in her hand, and she was choosing to sign.

When a voice from outside the room said,”Stop.”

I turned to see a pair of bright crimson lips set upon a pale face, a flash of color so vivid it cut like a Technicolor knife through the gray scale of my world. They were smirking at me, those bright red lips, and yet I couldn’t look away, I couldn’t help myself from staring, soaking in the color. There was the body, too, of course, small, frail, even in the black suit, even with the briefcase and in the heels, but it was the crimson of the lips that caught me off guard, a flash of color so vivid it startled me.

“This is a private room,” I stammered, “and this is a private meeting.”

“Not anymore,” said the woman.

The lips widened, showing now teeth, white and even, and between the bright teeth the pink tip of her tongue. She was sticking her tongue out at me.

“Your daughter asked me to come, Mrs. Gonzalez,” she said. “I’m a lawyer.” When she said that she adjusted her serious, dark-framed glasses as if to emphasize the point. “Your daughter asked me to speak to you before you signed anything.” She looked at me. “It appears I’ve come just in time.”

I tried to get rid of her, get the meeting back on track, but in that flash of a moment it was over. The woman explained to Mrs. Gonzalez the consequences of the contract, and it was over. I put the paper back in the briefcase, snapped it shut. The closing of the briefcase. I stared impassively for a moment at the lawyer’s bright red lips as they unsuccessfully fought a smile, and then I turned to Mrs. Gonzalez.

“I hope everything turns out well for you and your family,” I said, and then I started out of the room.

“I’ll be in touch,” said the woman lawyer to my back.

I hesitated for a moment, fought the urge to turn around, and then I continued out the door, and what I was seeing as I walked down the hall was not the failure of my meeting but shades of red, the crimson of her lips, the pink of her tongue. She had said she’d be in touch, and I was hoping then that she would keep to her word.

She did.

Hailey Prouix.

IT WAS Hailey who placed the calls, at least at the start. She asked questions about the case. She made demands for settlement even before she filed, ridiculous demands. And then there were other calls, not strictly necessary for the business at hand. And all the conversations ended on a note light and flirty.

I began thinking of her in odd moments, those lips, those cheekbones, the intonations of her soft laughter over the phone. In the grays that had become my life, she was a splash of color. Her calls became the highlight of my day. It was inevitable that we would meet for lunch. Inevitable that after a few lunches we would meet for drinks after work. It happened slowly. It wasn’t something I didn’t want, but it wasn’t anything I pursued either. I knew the costs, I knew the dangers, and still it happened.

She filed her lawsuit on behalf of Juan Gonzalez and his family. I responded. In our offices the litigation moved apace, but in addition to the business calls we left each other more personal messages about the Willis case, named for her favorite movie star at the time. After work almost every other day we met somewhere and sopped up martinis and avoided talking about what both of us were thinking. We sat close while we drank, we shared cigarettes, our knees bumped. We never talked about anything too personal, but we talked. Every day I found her more lovely, every day I found the sadness that enveloped her like an exotic perfume more intoxicating. I stared at the red of her lips, the blue of her eyes. Starved as I was for color, I couldn’t help myself from gorging. I came home later each evening, my family life dimmed. But in the middle of the night, for the first time since I’d entered the law, I began to dream again in more than black and white.

It was after work one evening, at the bar of the Brasserie Perrier, when, in the middle of a conversation about something meaningless, like the weather or the Supreme Court, she said simply, “What are we going to do?”

I knew what she meant, but I didn’t want to answer, so I said, “Have another drink.”

“I don’t want another drink.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I want to not want anything. I want to pretend we are simply two lawyers on opposite sides of a case.”

“That’s all we are,” I said.

“I’m glad. It makes everything easier.” She picked up her purse, gathered up her things. “It’s time we both go home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” I said, and I didn’t. I didn’t.

“Go home to your children.”

“They’re already in bed.”

“Kiss them gently while they sleep,” she said. “Go home to your wife, on whom, as you’ve told me over and over, you’ve never cheated.”

“She’s waiting up for me,” I said. “She always does.”

“Then make love to her.”

“When I do, I think of you.”

“How satisfying for me.” She downed the last of her drink, stood from her stool.

“I kiss her breast,” I said without looking at her, “and I think of the swelling flesh beneath your blouse. I kiss her thigh and I think of the softness beneath your skirt. I kiss her neck and smell the jasmine of your skin and my heart leaps.”

“Then hurry home.”

I grabbed her wrist. “I want you so badly my kidneys ache.”

She shook her arm free.

“Go home, Guy,” she said. “Go home to your family and your life. Just go home.”

When she left the bar, I had the urge to chase her, but I didn’t. I let her leave, I let her leave, and instead I caught the train, dark and dreary, to the station, to my car, to my house. The children were asleep. I kissed them each, gently. Leila was reading in bed. I slipped beneath the covers. She closed her book. I responded to her questions. She reached a hand to me, and I felt a chill. It was like the hand of death. It touched me and I felt all the color in my body bleed out through the touch. I had the urge to jump out of bed, to run from the house, but I didn’t. I stayed in the bed, frozen from the touch. I stayed with my wife for that night and the next and the next. I stayed with my wife and let her hold me as she slept, let her nuzzle my neck with her cold chin, let her reach beneath my tee shirt with her cold hands. Those nights I dreamed again in black and white.

A few days later, after being able to hold off no longer, I left Hailey a message about the Willis matter. When I met her that afternoon for lunch, there was no lunch.

IT WAS Paris after the liberation.

It was champagne and abandon, laughter, twisting tongues, drunken revelry, teeth-clattering sex. Oh, don’t make a face, Victor, don’t be such a prude. It was amazing, amazing, like some strange brute force was running through as we pounded away. And it was like she didn’t merely want it, she needed it, more and more of it. Thus the Viagra. But it was more than just great sex. She freed a part of me that had been imprisoned for ten years, the part that Pepito had sent fleeing off to law school.

I tend to rocket too far in any direction I head off in, that was what happened after college and again when I went on to law school, and this was no different. I wanted, that first afternoon, to give over everything to my lover, to end it with Leila, to flee parenthood, to quit the firm and the law, to move in and start it all again with Hailey. I wanted the new sense of freedom to be instantaneous and irrevocable, right then and there, but she wouldn’t have it. Not until some things were settled, not until the Gonzalez case was over, not until my family situation had sorted itself out and we had some money to make a go of it. And I understood. I would lose my job for sure, as soon as it all became public, I couldn’t wait to lose my job, but then what would happen to us? What would happen to my family, my children whom I would still need to support? She was the one who brought me back to my responsibilities. We had to move slowly, she said, surely, and I loved her all the more for her sensible sensibility in the midst of our hard passion.

So instead of embracing an earth-shifting freedom, I fell into the patterns of simple adultery. I left my messages about the Willis case, I snuck out for long lunches, I led a double life. It was so much easier this way that I didn’t fight it, no need to tell Leila, confront my children, no need to deal with my father-in-law. My unthinking love for Hailey was just as strong, maybe even stronger, for all the wanting, but it hadn’t transformed my life as I believed it would, it had only complicated it.

Still, there was the future. It would happen in the future, she assured me. As soon as we had some money, as soon as the Gonzalez case was over. She joked that we would live off her share of the Gonzalez settlement, and I laughed. But it was a big case with a high potential value for the plaintiffs; I had been involved in cases just like it that had settled for millions and saw no reason why this one would not. So the next time she made the joke, I didn’t laugh. We stared at each other, and without the passing of a word it became understood that once the Gonzalez case was settled we would make the move, take the fee, go off together somewhere and start over. “Costa Rica,” she said one late afternoon as she lay in my arms. “I’ve been thinking about Costa Rica.” I knew what she meant, the two of us living the expatriate life in Costa Rica, sun, sand, excursions deep into the verdant forest, or, hand in hand, scuba diving beneath the perfect turquoise surface of the sea. I couldn’t think of anything sweeter. Juan Gonzalez would be our ticket out.

It was shortly thereafter that the file came.

AT THE start of the Gonzalez case I had made all the routine inquiries and received the routine answers. Gonzalez had lived for a time in Denver, so I contacted his old employer for his insurance records and used those to track down possible hospitals where he might have been treated. From those hospitals I requested any medical records they might have had on the man. I had sent out my requests, backed by threat of subpoena, before the thing with Hailey turned into what it became. And then, after everything had changed, out of the blue a package came from Denver. I closed the door and, with shaking hands, I opened it. It was Juan Gonzalez’s medical file with a copy of my request inside. He’d had pains in his head, there was a scan taken, they had found an aneurysm, ready to burst at any moment. There was nothing to be done, no operation that was not too risky. The advice was to leave it alone and pray, and that is what he had done.

Juan Gonzalez had a preexisting medical condition that he had not disclosed to his doctor and that had caused his grievous injury. Bad things happen, and some bad things that happen are nobody’s fault, and this time I could prove it.

Before I showed the file to anyone else, I took it to Hailey. She didn’t seem terribly surprised. She took off her glasses, read it through, shrugged her shoulders, smiled sadly. “I suppose Costa Rica will have to wait,” she said.

To her credit, she didn’t push. She didn’t even so much as suggest. She could have, and I would have gone along. Pushing me would have been as easy as pushing aside a curtain, I could feel the weakness in myself, but she didn’t push. That would have changed everything, and she knew enough not to change anything. So it was my idea to tell no one, to bury the file, to continue moving the case toward settlement. My idea, my choice. And it wasn’t even that hard a choice.

In my mind I was already free of my family, my career. I had broken every rule for the love I felt for Hailey, why should one more transgression make any difference? Leaving my wife, my children, that would be hard. But in my mind I had already fled my career, ditched the law, to which I discovered I was constitutionally ill suited. To ditch my fiduciary responsibilities and work it so that Red Book Insurance compensated the Gonzaleses for the bad result visited upon their patriarch, and to finance my freedom in the process, seemed nothing in comparison to what I had already decided to abandon.

I handed her the file.

She said she would destroy it, and then she kissed me, she kissed me, and whatever feeling of dread I felt washed out of me with that kiss, along with something else.

What would I call it? Innocence? No, not innocence, something else. Hope maybe. I had held the hope, foolish certainly, but still the hope that everything would work out perfectly, that my wife would serenely accept my defection and move on with her life, my children would adjust without any damage, that Hailey and I would sail off into the pure waters of unadulterated happiness. Can there be unadulterated happiness in adultery? Yes, there can. I felt it in those moments when, naked, we pressed against each other, when I hugged her so tight it hurt, because I wanted us to be as close as two could possibly be. I felt it then, and I held true every hour to the fantasy that such would comprise our future. I suppose my final hope had been that Hailey would tell me to not to hide the file, to give it to the insurance company, to start our lives clean. Maybe that was the most foolish hope of all.

When she said not a word as I handed it to her and then gave me her kiss, the hope bled out of me, all my hope, and I saw with utter clarity what lay ahead: disillusion, bitterness, separation, devastation. I saw it so clearly, and yet there was nothing I could do to stop it. Because I loved her, Victor, and I had no option but her. I was ready to lose everything for a hope I now knew was false. I now knew it was false, impossible, ruined already by my own hand, and still I had no choice.

What does a degenerate gambler do when the luck dies and he loses everything, when he knows the tide has turned and he has no chance at all? He doubles the wager and bets his life.

IT WAS never the same after that. Never.

I convinced Red Book to settle, and once the papers were signed and the check cleared, I went about the grim task of extricating myself from my grim legal life. Leila took it badly, melodramatically, played it out in a series of ugly scenes; the children took it better than I expected, which was somehow even worse. My father-in-law went stone cold with rage. He knew enough to suspect something about the Gonzalez case but did nothing, except send Skink after me looking for any files I might still have. The one he wanted, though, I had already given to Hailey. To Hailey. And I decided, as a cover for the money we had stolen, to stay in the law, at least for a time. I started my own practice, forged anew my old chains. I figured I would find my great transformation not in a new profession but solely in Hailey.

But even before I moved in, she had changed, grown mysterious. I still loved her so much it ached, but she had changed. I tried to step out a bit, start a new life with her. I introduced her to you even before the move and to some other of my former friends after, but something was wrong. We stopped making love, she came up with excuses every night. She would take pills to go to sleep and drift off into something closer to a coma than a doze. It drove me crazy, her denying me and slipping away from me like that, and strangely it made me want her even more. As she lay drugged beside me, I fantasized about her and grew painfully overheated. I forced her once, and she was too drowsy to stop me, telling me in that drugged girlish voice to be quiet, be quiet, they might hear. I hated myself after that and didn’t again, ever, but that didn’t stop the wanting.

She started coming home late, coming home half drunk, as I had come home half drunk when I started seeing her. I sensed she was becoming involved with someone else. Feeling desperate, I acted desperately. It had always been my plan to wed after the divorce, and so I set the scene with a hundred candles surrounding the tub. I filled the Jacuzzi and tossed rose petals onto the surface of the water and I waited. She looked at the scene strangely when she came home, as if disgusted at the overt romantic display. I told her milady’s bath was waiting. She sneered at the corniness of the line and then undressed as if facing an execution. She immersed herself so deeply I was afraid she would drown. When she came up for air, I fell to my knee and asked, and she said yes, a sad, stone-faced yes.

But nothing changed. We still made no love, she still took her pills to get to sleep, I still lay beside her, my mind a riot. She was distant, distracted. There would be days when she disappeared entirely without explanation. I grew certain that she was seeing someone else. I snooped through her drawers, her effects, I found baggage receipts for the airport in Vegas. I imagined she had gone there with her new lover and it drove me crazy. Our relationship had turned into a nightmare even before I discovered that most of the money was gone.

I won’t go blow-by-blow with you, how I found out, how I confronted her, how she reacted, and how I reacted back. There were arguments, bitter fights, threats, tears, more fighting. It wasn’t the money I was upset about, it was her. I was losing her. We fought about the money because it was easier than fighting about what was really happening. If I confronted her about her lover or Vegas, I feared it would be over, I feared she would throw me out, and so I kept it to the money only. But she never told me what she had done with it, what she had spent it on, and my shouts only strengthened her resolve to stay silent.

I threatened to call the police about the theft. In response she threatened to turn over to them the Gonzalez medical file. “You destroyed it,” I said. “Did I?” she said. Her eyes narrowed when she said it and she grew cold, cold as ice, frighteningly cold. It was like she was another person entirely, somebody hard and damaged and capable of horrible things, and still, Victor, I was desperate not to lose her.

I think by then it was not her I was afraid of losing but the vision of myself that she had liberated, the vision of a man wild, daring, brave enough to live his own life, a man eternally free. I couldn’t give her up because that meant giving up on that part of myself.

TWO WEEKS before she was murdered, she disappeared, another of her jaunts with her lover, I supposed, but when she came back, things had changed. She was suddenly loving again. We had sex again, and it was as amazing as before, even if tinged with a strange sadness. She spoke of our future, our married life together. She asked when the divorce would be finalized. She even mentioned again Costa Rica. Have you ever been to Costa Rica, Victor? I hear it’s magical. She asked me to buy tickets to take us there for a vacation, and I did. I figured that she had been dumped by her lover, and I was thrilled. There’s the sign of how gone I was. I had projected so much onto her, had sacrificed so much, made so many choices based on our future together that I couldn’t imagine going on without her. It would mean facing what I had done to my family, my life, the false fantasies that had led me once again astray. Anything that kept me from facing my failures was reason for celebration.

Then one night she came home late, very late, and acted strangely when she saw me, as if she didn’t know who I was or what I was doing there. She even gasped when she saw me waiting for her. It was peculiar, and a fear gripped me like a fist around my throat. I figured she was out drinking again, back with that other man again, or maybe someone new. That night she went back to her pills, even pricking the capsules to make them work more quickly. And the next night, when I came home, she was waiting for me.

“There is no kind way to say this,” she said, “so I won’t try to make it kind. It’s over.”

She was lying on the mattress, smoking, glasses on, staring at me as if I were a thief. I’d like to say I took it with a profound stoicism, but that would be a lie. I begged, I cried, I threatened to kill her, I threatened to kill myself, I broke down, I refused to let it be over.

“Oh, it is,” she said. “Believe it. You need to make arrangements to move out as soon as you can.”

No, I told her. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. What about our future? What about Costa Rica? What about the money? The money, damn it. I shouted, I pleaded, I lost control. “There’s someone else, isn’t there?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Tell me who?” I said.

“Someone who fucks like a railroad engineer,” she said, smiling coldly. “It’s all aboard and then on to Abilene.”

That’s when I hit her. I leaned over and smacked her face with the back of my hand, and when I did, something snapped inside me. She just lay there and took it and curled her lips into that hard smile, but something had snapped inside me. I think maybe in that instant when my flesh smashed against hers, I saw, as if from a distance, the whole thing, the scene, the relationship, my folly, saw it all at a distance as if it were someone else hitting her, someone else who loved her, someone else who had given up the world for her.

I stood back in horror at what I had done.

With that smile still in place she rolled away from me and said simply, “Put out the light.”

So I did, without saying another word. I turned out the light and went into the bathroom and filled the tub with scalding water, as if I needed to be cleansed. I put Louis Armstrong into the Walkman and rolled myself a joint. I stripped and lit up and put on the headphones and slipped into the tub, turned on the water jets and thought about what I had seen from the distance as I hit her. I had seen a fool, desperate and lost. I had seen a runner who had run from everything and was still running. I sat in the tub and closed my eyes and thought my way through into a future without Hailey, without my family, without my career, without my money. In front of me was a door I couldn’t open and behind which was a life I couldn’t fathom. I felt a dark desperation overwhelm me, and I thought of dying, the freedom, the peace of death. But there was something about the music, something about the jazz, the brassy trumpet, the joyous spirit marching through hard times. I sat in the tub and smoked the dope and listened to Louis Armstrong, and I thought my way through the blackness, through the blackness, toward the door I couldn’t open. And I imagined myself putting my shoulder to it, pressing against it, breaking through it, crashing through the door like Pepito himself into something approaching equilibrium, and I felt strangely peaceful. And tired. Maybe it was the reefer, maybe it was that I hadn’t slept the night before, maybe it was the release of all those tightly clenched expectations, but I felt strangely peaceful and tired, and with the headphones on and the heat of the water soothing my bones, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was into a nightmare of blood.

19

I LISTENED to his story with horror, and when he stopped speaking I shook my head as if shaking myself back into the world. The room was the same as before, still gray, still lit by the fluorescent lights humming in the ceiling. The barred window still looked out upon another block wall. The room was the same, but the universe had shifted.

If life is lived in that normally narrow and disappointing region between expectation and actuality, then those moments that most change our lives play out in the great gaps where expectation and reality veer wildly apart. Listening to Guy Forrest tell his story was for me like falling headfirst into one of those gaps. I had expected the story to be self-serving, and it was that, though not to the degree I had thought, but I had also expected it to be a tale of Guy’s depredations, of Guy’s machinations, of one arrogant step after another that led, inexorably, to Guy’s moral disintegration and his explosion into murder. What I saw instead were the depredations and machinations of another.

It was the bumping of the knees that did it. The innocuous detail that sounded like a siren for me. They are at a bar, he is not sure what they are doing, not sure what he wants or why he is there. Betrayal is the unspoken message that swirls about them like the smoke from her cigarette. Their conversations approach and then veer away from the topic at hand, but as they drink and talk their knees touch, in a gesture both awkward and intimate, their knees touch, and the spark sends a complex wave of emotion through Guy. It is contact charged with meaning and yet maybe no meaning at all. It promises so much and yet it embarrasses him all the same. It is intimate, but is it, really? Or is it instead an accident? The uncertainty raises the level of everything it conveys, lust, confusion, desire, fear, all of it. I know, because the same accidental touching of the knees sent the same wave of emotion through me. The accidental touching that was not so accidental.

She had known about Juan Gonzalez’s prior medical condition from the first. “Don’t mention it,” she must have told the family. “I’ll take care of it,” and she did. The slow seduction, the promises of a future, the whispers of Costa Rica, all of it was the buildup toward the crucial moment when Guy discovered the fatal flaw in her case. It can take years, decades waiting for a case so rich to walk into your office. Negligence without massive damages is penny common and worth about as much. Cases with massive damages and clear negligence usually go to the big names with the big reputations. How does a young solo practitioner get her hands on a case like that? Luck. And if luck is not with you? Then make your own luck. Take a case with a fatal flaw and find a way to make the flaw disappear.

Hailey Prouix.

But what had she wanted from me? She had laid on me the same slow seduction, the same banging of the knees that made it seem it was I doing the seducing. But it wasn’t my doing, was it? She followed the script, for some unknown reason of her own devising. What was it that I could have offered her? Why was I worth using?

The questions came crashing down upon me, along with the realization.

“You didn’t kill her,” I said to Guy, as a statement not as a question, though he took it as the latter.

“No, I told you, no. I didn’t. No.”

I glanced at Beth with a nervous hesitation. I wanted to see if belief was on her face, too, and I wanted to see something else. Had she figured it out, the madness behind my method? Had she matched his chronology about Hailey’s secret lover with the bare bones she knew of my failed relationship? Had she matched the dates when both started and both flamed out, filled in the gaps and taken a guess at my motives? She was staring now at Guy and I could read nothing in her expression.

“Why not?” she asked Guy. “She had stolen your money, taken another lover, left you without your family, your career, without a cent or a future. She had used you like a rented mule. Why didn’t you kill her?”

He looked at her strangely, as if it were a question he never considered before. “Because I loved her?”

“Please,” I said loudly, in a voice overflowing with exasperation. “Who loved better than Othello? In the history of the world love has caused more murder than ever it stopped.”

“What stopped you?” said Beth softly.

He didn’t answer right off. He stared off to the side, his face twisted in puzzlement. I expected him to come up with something soulful and religious, something all surface, like the answer of a beauty pageant contestant. I didn’t kill her because I believe that love can make the world a better place and we should shower our fellow humans with affection, not violence. But that’s not what he said, what he said instead was:

“Because it never occurred to me.”

It never occurred to him? It never occurred to him? How could it not have occurred to him in this post-Holocaust, post-9/11 violence-saturated, blood-soaked-blockbuster age of ours? It never occurred to him? He had come up with the perfect answer, because it rang so true. It never occurred to him. Isn’t that what keeps us on the razor’s edge of the straight and narrow more often than not, that falling off never occurs to us? With that answer the vestiges of my doubts were routed. I now believed him. I now believed his entire story.

I had been wrong, wrong from the start, dead wrong.

I had been wrong enough to leap at a false assumption, wrong enough to chase a man through the wet streets of the city, wrong enough to seek to consign a friend to a life in jail or, worse, an execution. I had violated every precept of my lawyer’s oath, had tried to railroad a guilty man, to elevate justice over form, to sacrifice means to an end, and all along I had been flat-out wrong.

There’s the rub with taking the law into your own hands. There may be things upon which to stake your life, at least you should hope so, but upon what can you hold absolute enough to stake the life of another?

It is not enough to suspect, to surmise, to sort of kind of believe. It is not enough. Maybe that’s what due process is, a method, devised over millennia, to allow us to treat our guesses as certainties. We can put you in jail without absolute certainty after we’ve jumped through all the hoops and played the game as fairly as we know how. Due process is not a way toward certainty but a way to handle uncertainty, and when you forget that, you begin to forget that uncertainty is all we ever have.

To the question of how you can represent a man you are certain is guilty, I give this answer: Who the hell can be certain of anything in this world?

So here I was in a universe different than that into which I awoke, representing a man who I now believed was innocent and whose defense I had relentlessly sabotaged from almost the very moment of the crime. Now what was I to do, now how was I to save him, to save myself? Whatever it was, I had to do it quickly, before the wheels I had set into motion fell like a hatchet, smack on Guy Forrest’s head.

“I have to tell you this, Guy,” I said, trying to hide the desperation in my voice. “The evidence against you is overwhelming. Your gun, your fingerprints, the bruise, which you’ll have to admit to if you testify, your attempted flight. They don’t know yet about the money, but if they do, it becomes even worse. I don’t believe you did it, and I’m willing to defend you to the best of my ability, no holds barred, but it might be time to seriously consider their offer.”

“You said we should fight it.”

“Yes, but that was before I learned about Gonzalez. You might win the murder case, but you’d still be up on fraud on the Gonzalez case. You’d still end up in jail. Look. Troy Jefferson offered up man one. You’d serve eight to ten years. I might be able to shave some months off. And I’ll make sure it covers what you did in the Gonzalez case, too. It’s not great, but you’ll be out before you’re fifty, with nothing hanging over your head and a chance to start over.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“I know that, Guy. I believe that. But you did cheat the insurance company. And if you go to trial and lose, which with the Juan Gonzalez stuff is more likely than ever, they could keep you in jail for the rest of your life, or even kill you.”

“What about the other man?”

“We can argue he did it,” I said, “and we will. But it cuts both ways. It could also be a reason for you to kill her, jealousy, anger. It’s a dangerous game you want to play. Eight years is hard, but it’s not the end of your life.”

He turned to Beth. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a generous offer,” said Beth. “From what I understand, your father-in-law set it up to avoid a trial and the bad publicity. And to avoid any mention of Juan Gonzalez. I think it makes sense to pursue it.”

“Can I think about it?” said Guy.

“No,” I said. “There isn’t time. If Jefferson gets word of the Gonzalez mess, the deal will disappear. We have to decide now, this instant. Every second is dangerous. Give me authority to make a deal.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have the luxury not to know. You have to decide, now. I strongly suggest you make the deal. Beth strongly suggests you make the deal. It is your decision, but if you don’t decide now, it won’t be there later, and that could be the end.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I need an answer now, Guy. Now. Yes or no. What do you say? Yes or no.”

20

THE RECEPTIONIST behind the glass window made us wait in the waiting area.

Mr. Jefferson, the receptionist said, was still in his meeting.

I had called right from the prison and had been told by that selfsame lady that Mr. Jefferson was tied up. I told her it was important, I told her it was urgent, I told her it was about the Guy Forrest murder case and that Troy Jefferson would very much want to speak to me right away.

She repeated her demurrer: “Mr. Jefferson is unavailable at the present instant.”

“I’ll be right over,” I said. “Don’t let him leave before I get there.”

And now here I was.

The receptionist smiled from behind the glass like a civil servant at the end of a long day and told us to please sit and wait. So we sat and we waited.

The waiting area for the DA’s office was in the elevator lobby of the fourth floor of the courthouse. It was a stark and uncomfortable space. It appeared they had bought the furniture secondhand from the office of a failed dentist. You could almost hear the echoes of the screams. A single door with frosted glass, its lock controlled by the receptionist, led to the offices. I tapped my watch, tapped my foot. A heavy woman walked out of the elevator and was immediately buzzed through by the receptionist. I worked on the Jumble in the newspaper left out on the table along with a Newsweek months old. CEZAR was craze. THICY was itchy. But DUGAY,DUGAY. I was stumped on DUGAY. Where was Skink when you needed him?

“Gaudy,” said Beth, looking over my shoulder.

“Enough about my damn ties,” I said even as I filled in the blocks.

The door opened, a man in a suit with a briefcase the size of a filing cabinet stepped through.

“Could you tell Mr. Jefferson again that we are here?” I asked the receptionist.

“I’ve told his secretary,” she said.

“Could you remind her?”

She smiled at me. “She knows. She asked that I have you wait.”

I picked up the Newsweek. I read the review of a movie already out of the theaters. I read of a rising star already fallen. I read of a disaster in China already replaced in our finite capacities for horror by a disaster in Cental America.

The door opened, a small man in a suit stepped through, and I jerked to standing even as my heart sank sickeningly, like the NASDAQ on earnings fears.

“Peale,” I said.

Jonah Peale wore a pained expression like a mask. Behind him, holding the door, stood a smiling Troy Jefferson.

“I’m surprised to see you here, Mr. Peale,” I said.

“Priorities,” said Jonah Peale, nodding brusquely as he brushed by. I was too stunned to say anything, just watched him go.

“Are you ready for me, Victor?” said Troy Jefferson.

“Yes,” I said, though I suspected I was too late, too, too late.

Beth and I followed the prosecutor through the door, down a narrow hall, into his small office. He walked with a slight limp, still. In his office, exhibits and files were piled on the floor, maps were taped to the walls. Among the clutter were two flags, standing next to each another, the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. All the documents on the desk were facedown. Leaning against a file cabinet were our detective friends, Breger and Stone.

This was not good, I knew. This was not good at all.

“How’s it going there, Victor?” said Troy Jefferson after we all had situated ourselves in the proper seats. “You getting ready to rumble?”

“That’s what I came here to talk to you about.”

“Of course we’ll cooperate to the full extent required by law, give you everything you’re entitled to. But I must say, this case suddenly has my competitive juices flowing. I get the same sense of nervous anticipation before every trial as I had when I played ball. I still play, I suppose. I just play in a different court now. With justice as my goal.”

“We’re not reporters,” said Beth. “Save the patter for the press.”

He grinned and shrugged as if he were already in the statehouse.

“We met today with our client,” I said. “We discussed everything once again. He continues to profess his innocence, but, in light of the overwhelming evidence facing him, he asked I explore further the plea offer you made at the arraignment.”

“Yes, well, I am sorry about that,” said Troy Jefferson.

“Sorry?”

“When I made the offer, it was contingent on our finding no information that would indicate a motive other than the heat of passion.”

“That’s right,” I said. “But we’ve received no notice that you have discovered such information.”

“I faxed notice to your office twenty minutes ago.”

“Twenty minutes ago? We were in your waiting room twenty minutes ago.”

“Were you? We didn’t know.” He reached for one of the overturned papers on his desk, checked it, offered it to me. “Here it is.”

Without looking at it, I said, “We are accepting the offer.”

“I’m sorry, Victor, but it has been withdrawn.”

“You can’t.”

“We have.”

“Offer and acceptance. We have a contract.”

“I don’t think so. All material terms were never spelled out in full, the offer was at all times contingent, the contingency failed, and the offer was withdrawn well before you accepted. Pleas are not governed by the laws of contract but even if they were, your claim would fall.”

“We’ll see what the judge has to say about it.”

“I suppose we will.”

I stared at him. He grinned at me.

“What did you find?” asked Beth.

He leaned back in his chair, webbed his hands and placed them behind his head. “Juan Gonzalez.”

“The ballplayer?” I said, a false confusion in my voice.

“No, not the ballplayer,” said Jefferson.

By the file cabinet Stone laughed lightly. Breger, gazing up at the ceiling, kept his broad face free of expression.

Beth’s features betrayed her shock. I tried to replicate the expression, though it was hard. It was hard. The moment I saw Jonah Peale come out that frosted-glass door, I knew. Of course I knew. I had set the whole thing up.

“Mr. Peale will be added to our witness list,” said Troy Jefferson. “He’s an interesting man, Jonah Peale, with an interesting story to tell.”

“He’ll ruin his practice,” I said.

“Yes, I expect his testimony might do serious damage to his law firm, but still, he feels compelled to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. At one point he wanted to avoid publicity but now he is interested only in seeing that Mr. Forrest suffer the full force of justice.”

“I don’t understand,” said Beth.

“It seems, somehow, that Mr. Peale learned his daughter wants her husband back. Imagine that. Mr. Peale would prefer to lose his business than to allow a murderer to move back in with his daughter and grandchildren.”

I closed my eyes, fought back the nausea. This was all my doing, I had just destroyed my client’s chance to live at least part of his life out of jail. “He didn’t do it,” I said.

“And you’ll have every chance to prove it, Victor. But what we really have now is a simple case of fraud where the co-conspirators fell out over money. Stone here has checked out the finances.”

“Were you aware of the withdrawals by Miss Prouix?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know where the money went?”

“Attorney-client privilege forbids me from saying anything. But I can say that my client was aware that money had been withdrawn and he had no problem with it.”

Breger snorted.

“Sure,” said Stone. “What’s a million bucks among friends?”

“We believe,” said Troy Jefferson, “that we finally understand what happened. They stole the money together, she transferred it out of the joint account for her own purposes without telling him. In a rage over the stolen money, and her dalliance with another, shown by the DNA, he killed her. It happens all too frequently, a sad tale often told. And we’ll tell it well.”

“It’s not the truth,” I said.

“It’s as close as we need to get. I hope your preparation is moving apace, Victor, because the stakes have been raised. Man one is off the table. Tomorrow we’re filing the Commonwealth’s Notice of Intent to Seek the Death Penalty. The game is on, my friend. Oh, yes, the game is on.”

AFTER THE meeting I stepped out onto the courthouse steps, blinking at the bright sun shining through the perfect blue sky. The air was fresh, spring was strutting its stuff, and for the first time in a long time I noticed it. I noticed it all.

“What are we going to do?” said Beth.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do.” I took a deep breath, let the oxygen soak into my lungs like an elixir, and then loosed a great yawn. “But I think what I’m going to do is go home and take a nap.”

“Victor? Are you all right?”

“I’m just a little tired. Just a little. I haven’t been sleeping. I’ll drop you at the office first and then I’m going home. Could you tell Guy the bad news?”

“Victor?”

“I would do it myself, except I need to close my eyes. Just for a few minutes.”

It was still afternoon when I got home, stripped off my suit, slipped between the covers. It was still bright outside, sunlight was leaking through the gaps between my window and my shade. I stared at the ceiling for a moment. It didn’t break apart, it was inert, safe. I closed my eyes and slept like a dead goat.

When I awoke, it was dark and silent and I knew exactly what I needed to do. I might not have known what the hell I was doing before, I had never before contemplated doing what I had contemplated doing to Guy, but now I was on more comfortable ground. A girl was dead, my lover was dead, and she left me now a mystery to solve, a simple mystery. Who the hell had killed her? To save Guy and enact my vengeance both I needed only to unlock the mystery, ferret out the motive, and find the murderer. And I believed just then I already had the key.

I was wrong, of course. There was nothing simple about the mystery of Hailey Prouix’s death, just as there was nothing simple about Hailey Prouix herself.

But damn if I wasn’t right about the key.

21

“FIRST PHILADELPHIA, Market Street Branch, Allison Robards speaking.”

“Hi, Allison. Tommy, Tommy Baker, over at First Philadelphia, Old City. How you doing today?”

“Fine. Tommy, is it?”

“That’s right. Tommy, Tommy Baker.”

“Tommy Baker, that name is familiar. Did I meet you at the Christmas party?”

“Remember the fellow in the checked jacket dancing that dance?”

“The bald one?”

“I’m not bald, I’m follicularly challenged.”

“I thought the name was familiar. Tommy. Tommy Baker. How are you, Tommy?”

“Great. Doing great, except for our computers. Are you guys up, or is the whole system down?”

“No, we’re up. What do you need?”

“I got a police detective in here asking about one of our accounts. The name is Hailey Prouix.”

“Hailey Prouix? Isn’t she…?”

“Exactly. But with my computer down, and it’s been happening a lot. Someone is screwing up. Who’s the vendor, you know?”

“Not my department.”

“They said her office was near your branch, so I thought you might be able to help.”

“Okay, sure, Tommy. What was the name again?”

“P-r-o-u-i-x. Hailey. With a suburban address.”

“Here it is. Account number 598872. We are the home branch. She opened the account here two years ago.”

“All right, great. What’s the balance?”

“One-oh-three-four-two and fifty-six.”

“Any recent activity?”

“Checks, nothing strange. Except…”

“Go ahead.”

“A wire transfer about two months ago, February eighteenth. Big amount. Whoa. Four hundred thousand.”

“You don’t say. Where to?”

“Don’t know, location isn’t listed here. It’s number WT876032Q. You’d have to check Wire Transfers for specifics.”

“Okay, that’s great, thanks. And as the home branch, you guys have her safe-deposit box, too?”

“Let me look. Hold on a sec, I’ll have to check the cards.”

Long pause.

“No, no, we don’t have a safe-deposit box registered in her name.”

“All right, thanks a load.”

“No problem.”

“And, Allison. Have a nice day.”

THE KEY.

It sat on my desk, the little chunk of metal, one end rounded like a clover, the other jagged like the teeth of one of the winos on North Broad Street. And stamped into its head the words./. Canton, Ohio, the birthplace of football and home to the pro football hall of fame. Also the home of Diebold, Incorporated. From the moment I first laid eyes on it in Hailey Prouix’s desk drawer, I knew what it was. Diebold didn’t make just any old lock and key. Diebold didn’t make filing cabinets or desks or padlocks or cars. Diebold made vaults, bank vaults. This was the key to Hailey Prouix’s safe-deposit box, the hiding place for her secrets, both personal and financial. A man in black had searched the house after the murder, apparently looking for this very chunk of metal. And in my vomitous encounter with Skink, he had told me that he knew I had it and that he wanted it, wanted it badly enough to let me know he wanted it. I had taken it on a whim but suddenly, in my desire to save Guy’s life, I had a great need to know what was inside its box.

I used the phone I had given to Hailey, to keep the records off my office line, and geared myself up for the role, shaking my neck, jiggling my arms, breathing like a prizefighter about to enter the ring. What I needed was the right voice. A job like this depended on voice. With the right voice you could work wonders. Tommy, Tommy Baker. With my rumpled suits, my spreading rear, my comb-over. I had risen fast at the start, but then my career had stalled, along with my life. My wife had gained thirty pounds, my daughter had pierced her tongue, my car smelled like a cat, and I was trying to make that new teller but she didn’t seem interested. My weight was high, my blood pressure higher, I drank too much because by my age my father was dead. What I needed was a tone of overt jocularity covering a vast sea of despair. The jocularity I could fake, the despair I didn’t need to.

“FIRST PHILADELPHIA, Ardmore Branch.”

“Hi, this is Market Street. Who am I speaking to?”

“Latitia Clogg.”

“Hi, Latitia. This is Tommy, Tommy Baker. Allison Robards over here suggested I give you a call.”

“Allison?”

“She said she had some questions for you before and that you were a great help.”

“Allison? Oh, yeah, Allison. Pretty little blond girl.”

“That’s the one. Look, I have something you might be able to answer. I have been getting some information requests from Legal about account number 598872, which was opened by a Hailey Prouix in this branch about two years ago.”

“Isn’t she…?”

“That’s right. What was the Daily News headline: SHOT THROUGH THE HEART? What do you think of that, huh? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Wonder about what?”

“Fate. Life. The price of bananas. Who knows? But Legal, man. You should see the mess of forms they want us to fill out. It’s going to take a week.”

“I bet. First thing let’s kill all the lawyers, right?”

“Who said that?”

“Wasn’t it like Nixon or somebody?”

“Probably. Look, Latitia, they’ve been asking us, in addition to the account information, whether there was a safe-deposit box in her name. We’ve got nothing here on that, but I understand she was living not too far from your branch, so I was wondering if you could check whether she had a box there or not.”

“Of course, Tommy. Just wait a minute, I’ll check the cards.”

Long pause.

“Nope, nothing. Sorry.”

“No, that’s good, that’s easier. Thanks, Latitia. By the way, I have to check out some other things, too. You know anyone in Wire Transfers I could get to help me out?”

“Kelly Morgan.”

“She knows her stuff?”

“Oh, yes. Tell her Latitia sent you.”

“Thank you, you’ve been great. Did I meet you at the Christmas party?”

“I was there with my husband.”

“Why is it, Latitia, that all the good ones are already taken?”

ALONG WITH the key, I had taken Hailey Prouix’s expired driver’s license from the desk in the room of her murder. It was the only picture I had of her: guilt-ridden lovers don’t take snapshots. In my office, the door closed and locked, I looked hard at the tiny photograph on the card, but it was like looking at a stranger. There had been a wonderful plasticity to her face, her mouth always teetering on the edge of a smile or a frown, her eyes widening or contracting, her face alive with the currents of emotion flowing beneath the surface, but all that aliveness was missing on the photograph. She looked plain, even mousy on the license, her hair pulled back, her glasses hiding the sharp ridges of her face instead of accentuating them. She looked like no one I had ever known. The raw statistics were there, birth date, sex, her height was listed as five-two, her eyes blue, but she was missing.

I closed my eyes and tried to conjure her. I had been haunted by the specter of Hailey Prouix from the moment I discovered her corpse – it had driven me first to exact a punishment from Guy and now, having discovered his innocence, to search for the real killer – but just then, sitting at my desk between calls, I couldn’t see it. The image was blurry. I thought I knew her, we were intimate in more than one way, I thought I knew her, better than her fiancé, I was sure, but now her image was blurry. What was causing the distortion?

Every damn thing. From the moment of her death I had been learning more and more about her. Detective Stone had said that of all those who knew her, the words “nice” and “sweet” had never been mentioned. Leila had told of her spitting out the most vile slurs. I always thought she was hard, but that hard? And then a slime like Skink thought he knew her better than I did, and I suspected he was right. Wheels within wheels within wheels. The final twist was Guy’s own story, which showed how she had used Guy for her own corrupt purpose and then, for some other purpose, used me. It was as if whatever I thought I knew about her was shattered by the revelations of a darkness deep within her character that I had never before glimpsed. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure her and failed. Who was Hailey Prouix?

I suspected that behind that answer crouched a murderer.

“WIRE TRANSFERS.”

“Hi, I’m looking for Kelly Morgan.”

“One moment, please.”

Soothing music.

“Kelly Morgan.”

“Kelly. Hi. Tommy, Tommy Baker, from the Ardmore branch here. Latitia Clogg said if I had some questions I should get hold of you. Said you were the only one up there who knew what the hell was going on.”

“She’s right about that. How are you doing?”

“Good, better than good. I got – let me see – five hours left and then I’m out of here for a week’s vacation. And let me tell you, Kelly, I could use it.”

“Couldn’t we all, Tommy, couldn’t we all.”

“Here’s my problem. Before I get out of here, I have to finish up a ream of paperwork sent to me by Legal. You ever get mixed up with that crew?”

“I try not to.”

“I hear you, Kelly. Well, there’s this account they’ve got questions about. It’s that Hailey Prouix, you hear about her?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Girl shot in the heart out here in Ardmore?”

“Oh, yeah, the boyfriend did it, didn’t he? What was he, married to someone else and he shacks up with her and then kills her?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Nice guy. Sounds like the ones I end up with.”

“Not you, Kelly.”

“You don’t want to know, trust me. What do you need?”

“Apparently she wire-transferred some funds out of her account on February eighteenth of this year. Account number 598872, wire transfer number WT876032Q. Legal wants to know where they went.”

“Hold on a second, let me see here. Account number…?”

“ 598872.”

“Yeah, I see it. Went to a bank in Las Vegas, something called Nevada One. Into account number 67ST98016. The branch address is Paradise Road in Las Vegas, 89109.”

“That is so great, Kelly, thanks.”

“Anything else?”

“No, this is enough to get Legal off my back.”

“Enjoy your vacation, Tommy.”

“Believe you me I will.”

OUR LIFE stories are always lies. How could we be the heroes of our lives if all we told was the truth? We shade an incident here, invent a rationale there, leave out the telling detail that changes everything. Is there anything less reliable than the memoir? Eichmann was following orders. Clinton did nothing wrong. Our life stories are our great fictions, and so I knew to take, even as I was hearing it, Hailey’s life story with a bucket of salt. Oh, I could fill in some of the gaps. Her high school years were probably not so idyllic – are anyone’s? College was not the grind she claimed – college girls who look like Hailey don’t live hermits’ lives. And I could imagine that the affair with the partner at her first law firm was more torrid, more painful, and ended with more difficulty than she let on. Oh, I had no trouble believing that her life story was more fiction than truth, considering she herself told me not to trust anything she said.

“Why do you care?” she asks me as we lie side by side in the bed where we pass our stories like kisses atop the pillow, the shades pulled to keep out the afternoon light, her scent swirling about me like a drug.

“I want to know you,” I say.

“No you don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“All you want is to confirm what you already believe. Last thing you want are any surprises.”

“Are there any?”

“Do you want them?”

I think on that for a moment. Do I want the surprises? Do I want to peer at the sad, unvarnished hollows in her heart? It all comes down to what are we doing in that bed? Are we playing out a fantasy in our otherwise reality-drenched days, or are we looking for a piece of the real in a life of artifice?

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Then there aren’t any.”

And she laughs, as if my indecision justifies everything.

But now she was dead, and the mystery of her death had become my new reality, and I very much needed to learn every secret, every truth, everything she had never wanted me to know. It was time to go behind the lies.

“NEVADA ONE, Paradise Road Branch. How may I direct your call?”

“Customer Service.”

“One moment, please.”

“Gerald Hopkins here.”

“Hi, Gerald, this is Tommy Baker at First Philadelphia Bank and Trust. I wonder if you could help me. I have a client sitting right here at my desk who also has an account at your bank. She had us wire in some funds on – what was it? – oh, yes, February eighteenth of this year, and she wants to be sure everything worked out. Could you check that for us? Her name is Hailey Prouix and her account number with your bank is 67ST98016.”

“What was the date of that transfer?”

“February eighteenth.”

“All right. Let me check that out for you.”

“What’s the weather like out there?”

“Hot. Spring here lasts about a week. Okay, yeah, here it is. We got the transfer on February eighteenth. Money went in that day, went out a few days later. Everything looks fine.”

“You have a balance on that account, Gerald?”

“Yeah sure. Twenty-seven thousand, six hundred and sixty seven.”

“Good, that matches what she expected. One last thing, she wants to know if the fee on her safe-deposit box is overdue? She doesn’t want to miss a payment.”

“Let me see. No, it’s fine. The fee was paid last month out of the account.”

“Perfect. Thanks, Gerald.”

“Oh, and Tommy. Give Ms. Prouix my regards. I remember her well, I personally opened her account for her. How is she doing?”

“Fine, great. I mean, I can’t say anything about her personal life, but she looks like a million bucks.”

“That she does.”

“I’ll send along your regards, Gerald. Thanks.”

I STARED for another long moment at the picture of the stranger on the driver’s license. It didn’t look like Hailey, but it looked like someone. I didn’t know who, but it surely looked like someone. I told Ellie I’d be right back and I stepped out of my building and into the bookstore right next door. From the rack of reading glasses I searched among the pairs until I found one that matched, somewhat, the glasses in the photograph. Then I went back up to my floor and entered Beth’s office.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Pull your hair back and bind it with a rubber band.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

She looked at me like I’d gone over the edge and then went into her drawer and took out a rubber band. Beth’s hair was black and shiny and fell down about to her shoulders, so she was able to make a short ponytail of it.

“All right,” I said, “now put these on.”

She took the glasses and peered at them for a long moment. “What’s this all about?”

“Humor me,” I said.

When the glasses were on, I compared what I saw with the picture. It wasn’t a perfect match by any means. Beth’s eyes were green, not blue, and she was slightly taller. But there was a resemblance, an undeniable resemblance.

“How are you feeling, Beth? You a little tired?”

“No.”

“Worn down by your frantic pace? At the end of your rope?”

“No.”

“Are you feeling overwhelmed by life?”

“Not at all.”

“Funny, I am, too. You know what we should do? We should chuck it all for a bit and get out of here. Not just the office but the city, the state. Aren’t you sick of the East Coast?”

“Victor, what are you talking about? We have a trial to prepare for. Did someone spike your morning coffee? Are you sane?”

“Actually no, but that’s not what’s going on. Clear the weekend, partner, because you and I, we’re taking a road trip.”