Fatal Flaw

45

SO FAR it had been an ordinary sort of trial. Troy Jefferson was trying to make it seem a simple case of murder. I was complicating things, flogging my theory that the unnamed, undiscovered, unscrupulous lover had done it on the sly. Jefferson and I were in pitched battle, but we kept our interchanges formal, using the polite vernacular of the courtroom. The judge was refereeing with dyspeptic fairness. The jury was relatively attentive. There had been a few bold moments, a few comic interludes. The prosecution felt confident, the defense felt hopeful. All expectations were that it would play out as it had begun, one theory battling the other, decided by the jury as it mostly ignored the instructions of the judge and reached its verdict. So far it had been an ordinary sort of trial, but things were about to change.

Leila Forrest was in the courtroom that day, she was in the courtroom every day, standing by the man who had fled from her at first opportunity. I would have liked to have seen a little spite out of her, a little anger, but instead she sat behind Guy with concern etched on her face. Yes, it is always useful to have the loyal wife sitting behind the defendant, and in other situations I would have designed it just so, but not this time. I hadn’t asked that she sit there, like an ornament for the defense. I wasn’t even sure it was helpful. But there she sat, and in the breaks she and Guy talked quietly to themselves, maybe about the children, maybe about the past, maybe, God help her, about the future.

She had sat still with a stone face as her father testified, trying to bury the man who had married his only child and then deserted her. It was strong testimony, hard testimony, it made Guy look very bad, until I asked the question “How much did you make last year?” Such a rude question, and objected to, of course, but it was allowed, and the number was staggering, and the point was made: Guy was in line for a huge amount if he had stuck it out with his wife. Enough to make Guy look the fool for leaving, yes, a fool for love. But a man who killed for money?

The judge had not yet entered the courtroom on this day, so it wasn’t only Leila who was waiting. Behind the prosecution table sat the stolid figure of Detective Breger, along with his partner, Stone. Stone sneered at me with her smile. I caught Breger’s eye and signaled him I wanted to meet. He stood and left the courtroom. I followed.

“Any word on Bobo?” I asked when we had found a private nook in the hallway.

“He has disappeared. Flown. My coming out there was apparently enough to spook him.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Have you spoken to your client?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He says you’re being a hard-ass.”

Breger didn’t answer, he simply smiled.

“But he agreed. We’ll let you look at the logs, but only after.”

“After?”

“That’s right.”

“After what?”

“After it all plays out.”

“You mean after the trial? What good is that for me?”

“No, before the end of the trial, but after what happens today plays out. When I tell you what I want, you’ll understand.”

“And if it doesn’t play out like you expect?”

“We still have a deal.”

Breger closed his eyes. “I can live with that. What’s the word?”

“All you have to do is whisper it.”

“So you said.”

“In his ear, after the explosion.”

“The explosion is coming?”

“Oh, yes it is.”

“What’s the word?”

“‘Uncle,’” I said. “The word of the day is ‘uncle.’”

“ARE WE ready to proceed?” said Judge Tifaro from the bench. She was an efficient jurist, keeping the trial moving, witness after witness, brooking no delays as she pushed toward a verdict. No long, drawn-out, chatty proceedings for her, no months and months of keeping the jury in virtual lockup. She had set up a timetable and kept us to it. I liked that about her.

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Troy Jefferson. “But before we bring in the jury, we have some housekeeping matters that have already been agreed upon by both sides.”

“Excellent,” said the judge. “It’s gratifying to see you gentlemen working so smoothly together. What do we have, Mr. Jefferson?”

“A stipulation as to the admissibility of the ballistics report, People’s Exhibit Twenty-three.”

“Mr. Carl?”

“No objection.”

“The report will be entered. What else?”

“A stipulation as the admissibility of People’s Exhibits Six through Nine and Twelve through Twenty-two.”

“Mr. Carl?”

“No objection. We retain the right to object to Exhibits Ten and Eleven on the grounds of relevance.”

“People’s Exhibits Six through Nine and Twelve through Twenty-two are entered into evidence. Anything else?”

“And we also, Your Honor, have certain technical, factual stipulations that have already been agreed upon and that will speed up the trial considerably.”

“Let’s have them, Mr. Jefferson. Put them in the record now, and I will read them to the jury with the appropriate instruction.”

“Stipulation one: That the location of the killing subject to the indictment was 1027 Raven Hill Road in the Township of Lower Merion, Montgomery County, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

“Mr. Carl?”

“No objection.”

“Stipulation two: that on the date of the alleged crime the owner of the said property of 1027 Raven Hill Road, according to the deed on file in the County Clerk ’s Office of Montgomery County, was Hailey Prouix.”

“Mr. Carl?”

“No objection.”

“Stipulation three: that the cause of death, as reported by the coroner, was a single gunshot wound in the chest portion of the body that pierced the victim’s heart.”

“Mr. Carl?”

“No objection.”

“Stipulation four: that the gun in question, People’s Exhibit One, is a King Cobra.357 Magnum, registered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Guy Forrest, with a Social Security number the same as the defendant’s and an address given on the application as 1027 Raven Hill Road, Township of Lower Merion, Montgomery County.”

“Mr. Carl?”

“No objection.”

“Finally, Your Honor, stipulation five: that the murder victim found at 1027 Raven Hill Road, as stated in the indictment, was indeed Hailey Prouix.”

“Mr. Carl?”

“Well, Judge,” I said, “as to stipulation five, that the victim was Hailey Prouix, there we seem to have a problem.”

The explosion wasn’t loud, Jefferson had more control than that, but it was angry and sustained. Troy Jefferson did a classic double take, and then he let me have it.

“It was agreed to, Your Honor. We went over these stipulations carefully, word by word, Your Honor. Mr. Carl agreed, explicitly, and we relied on that agreement. He’s backstabbing us now, backstabbing us. There is no doubt who was the victim. We have the birth certificate. We have the death certificate. Mr. Carl himself saw her lying there. I don’t know what kind of crazy theory he is postulating here, but, Your Honor, he agreed, and he is bound by that agreement.”

And the whole time I was standing calmly, smiling, and letting him roar, until Judge Tifaro put a stop to it. “Mr. Carl, is it the wording you are concerned about?”

“No, Judge, it is the fact.”

“Did you agree?”

“Yes, Judge, but now I have questions that need answering, and so I am simply asking that the prosecution prove that the victim, as stated in the indictment, was Hailey Prouix and not just some woman who was going around using that name. It is a basic element of the case. He needs to prove it was her.”

“Can you do that, Mr. Jefferson? Can you prove it was Hailey Prouix who was killed?”

“Of course, Your Honor. This is just a cheap delaying tactic, just another low blow from the defense team.”

“Maybe it is, but don’t get mad, Mr. Jefferson,” she said with a note of sweetness in her voice, “get a witness. And preferably somebody who knew her well and long and who can link up the name on the birth certificate with the pictures of the corpse you’ve already admitted into evidence. Would that satisfy you, Mr. Carl?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Is there a parent?”

“Both dead,” I volunteered.

“A sibling?”

“One sister,” I said, “in a West Virginia insane asylum.”

The judge stared at me when I told her that and then, without taking her eyes off my face, said, “Identifying the victim is a pretty crucial step, Mr. Jefferson. You couldn’t have just expected the dead woman to identify herself. Can you get a witness?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You were going to rest next week, isn’t that right?”

“We planned to have the lab technician at the start of the week and a few other minor witnesses, and that was to be it.”

“I guess that won’t be it, will it? You’ll be allowed to amend your witness list as you require, and I’ll allow you additional time in your case due to the surprise, but I’ll want the witness here next week, understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Get the name of the new witness to Mr. Carl as soon as possible. Any questions?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Anything else? No? Excellent. Bailiff, let’s bring in the jury.”

I sat down as Jefferson gave me his “you’ll pay for that one, you bastard” stare before he spun around to talk with his team. I’m no lip-reader, but it didn’t take one to know what he was saying.

“Why the hell did he do that?” said Jefferson.

Only shrugs in response.

“Who can we get? Who’s our witness?”

More shrugs, heads turning one to the other to see who had an answer, and then Breger leaned forward. Then Breger leaned forward and put his lips close to Troy Jefferson’s ear and whispered. There were a lot of possibilities, a lot of names could have been pulled out of the hat to do what the prosecution needed to do, but it was Breger who leaned forward and whispered in Jefferson ’s ear.

Jefferson pulled back. “You sure he can do it?”

Breger nodded.

“Then get him, damn it. Get him now.”

The jury was just starting to enter when Breger stood, straightened his jacket, gave me a quick wink before he headed out the door of the courtroom.

Good, that was done. Now for the hard part.

46

THAT NIGHT, back at my apartment, I gathered together my brain trust. I like the sound of that – brain trust – it connotes images of men and women in stark suits and tense poses, talking on cell phones and working on laptops as they draw on the entire breadth of their mighty resources to solve the seemingly unsolvable. Of course, I didn’t have the resources or clout to have a brain trust that resembled a fashion ad in GQ, so I had to settle for Beth and Skink.

They hadn’t yet formally met. I had told them each of the happenings in Pierce, related to each the whole brutal story of love, perjury, blackmail, the defiant priest, the suicidal poet, the crooked poker game, and, finally, the murder of a boy on the edge of his manhood. I had told them each what I had learned about Cutlip but had kept them apart for obvious reasons. I didn’t want Skink spilling all he knew about Hailey and me to my partner, and I didn’t want my partner wondering what I was doing with a creep like Skink. But now I had to come up with some possibilities, fast, and they were, well, my brain trust.

“Do I know you?” Beth said when she entered the apartment and I introduced her to Skink, sprawled out now on my couch, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie loose, his shoes off, leaning back with a proprietary casualness.

“Not in a personal way, missy, no,” he said.

“What other way is there?”

Skink chuckled. “Let’s say I had the pleasure of helping yourself out of a tight situation.”

Beth stared at him bemusedly.

“Skink pulled you out of the car after the accident in Las Vegas.”

“You were the one,” said Beth to Skink. “I do know you. You were the one who saved my life.”

“Glad to be of service to a lovely young lass such as yourself, I was. No reward necessary, though if you’re considering buying me chocolates, think low-fat, please, as I gots myself a problem with cholesterol.”

Beth pursed her lips first at Skink and then at me and then again at Skink. “So why are you here tonight?”

“I thought he could be of some help,” I said.

“I am definitely confused.”

“Skink wasn’t in Las Vegas by chance. He was following us. At the time he was working for someone else.”

“Who?” said Beth.

“Can’t say, now, can I?” said Skink. “Disclosing that information would be a violation of my duties as a professional.”

“A professional what?”

“Investigative services, ma’am, specializing in the brutal, the debased, and the carnally depraved.”

“What are you, the HBO of detectives?”

“And now he’s working for us,” I said.

“Oh, is he?”

“Once again, I am glad I can be of service.”

“Victor,” said Beth. “Can I see you for a moment?”

“Go ahead,” said Skink. “Why don’t you two young folk head off into the other room and discuss this among yourselves. Don’t mind me.”

“Don’t worry,” said Beth. “We won’t.”

I stoically withstood the harangue, being as it was absolutely justified. We were partners, working together on the Guy Forrest trial, and all the time I’d had an investigator working on the sly. It made her wonder, she said. It made her wonder what the hell was going on. I could have tried to lie my way out of it, I could have squirmed like a worm to get free, but when you are dead wrong, it is not time to make excuses. When you are dead wrong, it is time to give a half smile and move right to the meat of it. So I let her blow up at me, get it out of her system, and then I tossed her that half smile and said simply, “He can help.”

“How?”

“He knows things. Before he worked for us, he worked for Hailey Prouix. He knows things. He won’t tell me all he knows, but he knows more than we do. He can help.”

“That’s good, Victor, because after what you pulled today in court, I think we could use all the help we can get.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“THE QUESTION,” I said, when my brain trust was reassembled in the well of my living room, “is why. Let’s assume that Cutlip sent Bobo out to do the killing. We still have to figure out why. Why? Why?” I turned to look at Skink. “Why? And how does it relate to what happened to Jesse Sterrett?”

“Maybe she was threatening to tell someone what had happened,” said Beth. “Maybe he had crossed some line and she was about to tell the whole story.”

“Not bad,” I said, “except there’s nothing to back that up. She was still taking care of him, was still apparently close to him. He was still the beneficiary on her insurance. There’s no indication she was ready to do such a thing.”

“Look at the money,” said Skink. “It’s usually about money, innit?”

“Yes, it usually is,” I said. “The insurance money was pretty high, and he seemed pretty damned interested in it when we came to visit.”

“But she was the goose laying his golden eggs,” said Beth. “Why would he kill her for money when she was giving him everything he wanted as it was?”

“Maybe he was worried it was running out,” I said. “Especially with Guy starting to raise questions about the missing funds. Or maybe he was sick of the place, Desert Winds, maybe he thought it was some sort of pre-morgue and he felt halfway already on the slab. Maybe she was using her support as a cudgel to keep him there, and he thought he could gain his freedom and a stake both with one fatal blow. He and Bobo would have themselves a hell of a time before the insurance money ran out and Cutlip’s body fell apart.”

“An interesting idea, that,” said Skink. “A man used to freedom, as was our Larry Cutlip, it must chafe like a pair of iron knickers to be supervised, sanitized, and anesthetized in a place like that.”

“You know him?” said Beth.

“Who, Cutlip? Yeah, I knows him. But the thing about your insurance theory there, Vic, is that he wasn’t even sure he was the beneficiary before she died and he got a gander at the policy. He was just hoping.”

“How do you know that?” said Beth.

“I just do, is all. I just do.”

“What’s he like?” she said. “I apparently met him, but after the accident I don’t remember a thing about it.”

“He’s a saint,” I said, “just ask him. Oh, he’s done some tough things in his life, gone through some hard stretches, but everything he’s done he’s done for the right reasons. He sacrificed his best years to take care of his nieces, and he did the best he could, and he needs you to know it. Anything that went wrong, it was some other person’s fault. The dead father, the meddling local minister, his sister, the girls themselves. But he provided a firm hand when a firm hand was needed. When he thinks tears will be effective, he’ll break down and cry. When he thinks he can bully you, he’ll get as vicious as a cornered rat. His surface is all ornery and hard, he doesn’t like Jews much, or lawyers, or, really, anyone, but he likes to have someone around who will stroke his ego and tell him how good, how strong, how important he is, even as he sits in a wheelchair in a sad desert boomtown with a line feeding oxygen into his withered lungs.”

“Sounds like you didn’t like him much,” said Beth.

“Actually, I was suckered. Before I knew the truth, I admired what he had done. I bought into his act. I guess he didn’t spend fifteen years banging around Vegas without learning how to con gullible folk from back east. It was you who didn’t like him, not at all.”

“I didn’t?”

“For some reason I couldn’t fathom he terrified you, as if you had seen something in him that I completely missed. You said he reminded you of Murdstone.”

“Murdstone?”

“From David Copperfield.”

“The stepfather?”

“Yes, and you seemed particularly concerned with some of the things he said about Jesse Sterrett’s death. He called it an accident, but you kept asking questions. He didn’t like that, didn’t like that at all. It was those questions, in fact, along with the letters, that started me digging in West Virginia.”

“Wasn’t I the perceptive little thing?”

“And then, while we were riding out of Henderson, you said you wouldn’t be surprised if…”’

“If what?”

“I don’t know. It was just before the accident. You never got a chance to finish.”

“What I meant was that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Guy and not Hailey who was supposed to die.”

Skink and I looked at each other for a moment and then back at Beth. “How do you remember that?”

Beth herself look stunned. “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I was just listening to what you said about Cutlip and the beginning of the sentence and something slipped out of the recesses of my mind and became clear, and that was it.”

“What a strange idea,” I said.

“Is it, now?” said Skink. “Is it, now? Wouldn’t that change everything? We’re wondering here about motive, because why would Cutlip want to kill his loving niece? But Guy, now, that’s a different story, ain’t it? There are half a dozen blokes who wouldn’t have minded seeing Guy Forrest bite the proverbial big one. And wouldn’t Cutlip be one of them? Guy was starting to ask questions about where his money had gone. Guy was threatening his luxury existence. And the worst crime of all is that Guy was pumping it to Hailey – no offense, ma’am – pumping it to Hailey just like Jesse Sterrett was pumping it to Hailey. They was two men she was looking to marry. Maybe he killed them both.”

“Out of some raw emotion,” I said. “Something beyond him, something he couldn’t control.”

“Slow down,” said Beth. “She was on the mattress right in the middle of the floor. You couldn’t shoot her from outside the room, and you couldn’t step into the room without seeing her there, clear as day.”

“Really, now,” said Skink. “Clear as day, you say. Vic, you was the first one to see her after Guy, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Was the light on?”

“Of course, the overhead light.”

“Not a lamp or anything else, just the overhead.”

“As far as I remember, yes.”

“Guy told us,” said Beth, “that after he hit her, Hailey told him to turn out the light, and he did.”

“Then, what about if it was Guy himself who turned it on, that overhead light, not the killer?” said Skink. “Think about that. Maybe it was off when she was killed.”

“But still, even in the imperfect darkness,” Beth said, “it would be hard to mistake petite Hailey Prouix for a lummox like Guy.”

“Yeah, maybe, except our suspected shooter, Bobo, ain’t no Einstein, is he? If you wanted a killing to be messed up to hell, I suppose he’s the one you’d send to do it. And maybe there was another reason he made the mistake. You got the forensics reports hereabouts?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “the lab technician is testifying Monday.”

“Let me see it. And the autopsy report, too.”

“What for?”

“Just haul them out and let me have a look-see.”

The reports were in the trial bag I had brought with me from the office. Skink spread them out on the coffee table in front of the couch and riffled through them, one at a time, as he searched for the specific items he was interested in. It was a wonder to behold, Phil Skink in full calculating mode. His mouth twitched, his eyes blinked, he scratched his greased blue-black hair as if it were infested with lice – he looked like a deranged mainframe on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And the whole of the time he was letting out little verbal explosions. “Mmmmmbop,” he said, or “Blip, blip, blip,” or “Now, there’s something, innit?” or, most strangely, “Parlez-vous to me, you frog bastard.”

Beth and I stood back and let him at it, both of us afraid to get too close in case he blew up.

After a good twenty minutes he raised his head and said, “I think we got ourselves a G forty-eight.”

“G forty-eight? Is that an exhibit or something?”

“Don’t be daft. I’m talking those little balls what falls out of the cage. G forty-eight. G forty-eight. And you know what that gives us?”

“What?” said Beth.

Skink let a huge smile crease his battered face. “Bingo, mates. Bingo.”

47

“THAT’S RIGHT,” said the police technician from the stand, adjusting her glasses as she reviewed her report. “I determined that the gun was two to four feet away from the victim when it was fired.” She took off her glasses and looked up at me. “But as I said in my direct testimony, that’s only a rough estimate.”

“Let’s be as precise as possible about this, Officer Cantwell,” I said. “You are estimating the distance from the victim to the end of the barrel, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“With the arm outstretched, the killer’s eyes would have been considerably farther away. As much as two feet, isn’t that right?”

“It’s hard to tell how the gun was held, but that is certainly possible.”

“So the killer, when he fired, could have been as much as six feet away from the victim?”

“Yes, or closer.”

“Six feet. That’s pretty far away with the light off, isn’t it?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“But, Your Honor,” I said, “we have Mrs. Morgan’s testimony that the lights were out at some point before she saw Mr. Forrest on the steps.”

“Sustained.”

“And there is absolutely no evidence that the light was on at the time of the killing.”

“Argue what you want, Mr. Carl, at argument, but you haven’t laid a foundation to allow this witness to testify what can or can’t be seen in that room with the lights out. Continue, please.”

“Officer Cantwell, were you ever in that room with the lights out?”

“No.”

“With the lights on?”

“No.”

“You’ve never been in that room?”

“I am a lab technician, Mr. Carl. I work in a lab. I of course consult the photographs and the police reports, but my job is a scientific analysis of the evidence.”

“Then, Officer, let me ask you this. With any of your fancy lab equipment, your spectroscopes or infrared cameras, with your micron telescopes, with any of that stuff, is it possible for you to say whether the light was on or off at the time the shot was fired?”

“No.”

“Good enough. Let’s move on. Two to four feet from the end of the barrel to the victim, right?”

“That was my estimate.”

“And you made that determination from the gunpowder residue on the comforter, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Could you explain to the jury how the gunpowder residue ended up on the comforter?”

“A bullet is fired by the ignition of smokeless gunpowder, or nitrocellulose, in a cartridge. As the powder ignites, there is a violent expansion of gas, which propels the bullet through the barrel and then out into the world. In this case, through the comforter and into the heart of the victim. Under perfect circumstances all the gunpowder would be turned into the propelling gases during ignition, but as we all know, our world isn’t perfect. Along with the bullet, the expanding gases discharge unburned powder, partially burned powder, and completely burned powder, or soot. If the barrel of the gun is close enough to the target, then some or all of these are deposited on the target’s surface. An examination of the pattern of these discharges can allow for an approximation of distance.”

“Were all three types of powder found on the comforter?”

“No, not on the relevant portion. Generally, if a shot is fired within a foot, there is what is called both fouling and stippling. Fouling, which can be wiped away easily, occurs when the completely burned powder is found on the surface. Stippling occurs from the unburned and incompletely burned particles of gunpowder. These particles become embedded in the surface or bounce off and abrade the surface, and their effects are not easily wiped off. From beyond a foot the soot generally is dispersed into the air and so no soot deposit is made. From the distance of a foot to maybe three or four feet, there will be stippling without fouling. When we examined the comforter, we found embedded unburned and partially burned powder, which gave us our approximate distance.”

“How was this examination done?”

“Because of the color of the comforter, a dark blue, and the encrusted blood staining it, it was difficult to see the residue with the naked eye. We took an infrared photograph of the comforter, but that didn’t prove very helpful, which isn’t surprising, since infrared is better at revealing fouling than stippling. Then we made a search for nitrates using a Greiss test. We pressed a series of gelatin-coated photographic papers onto the comforter with a hot iron and then treated the papers to find the presence of nitrates, which would be found if there existed nitrocellulose on the comforter that had been incompletely burned. Nitrates were found in a wide, elliptical pattern, from which we concluded that the firing range was two to four feet.”

“All very technical, Officer Cantwell.”

“Most of our work is. That’s why we’re called technicians.”

“Now, you found these nitrates over a large part of the comforter.”

“Yes.”

“And what you found would qualify as stippling.”

“That’s right.”

“And this stippling would have been found not only over the comforter but also over the exposed surfaces of anything on the mattress.”

“I would assume so, yes.”

“Including the victim herself.”

“Yes.”

“And based on what you testified to earlier, this would have been clearly evident, as particles would be embedded in the skin or, in bouncing off, would have abraded the skin, isn’t that right?”

“That is what you would expect, but I didn’t examine the victim.”

“You examined her clothes, correct?”

“She was wearing a short nightshirt, a teddy, it’s sometimes called. We found blood and some nitrate residue around the bullet hole, what is known as bullet swipe.”

“But no stippling.”

“Yes, no stippling.”

“Now, let’s look at the autopsy report, shall we?”

“Objection. It is not her report.”

“The autopsy report was introduced through stipulation. I’m not asking her to lay a foundation, I’m asking her to use the information she has already provided to help us analyze the actual report.”

“Is this going somewhere, Counselor?”

“I hope so, Judge.”

“Let’s get there soon.”

“In the autopsy report Dr. Regent analyzed many of the organs of the victim in this case, including the skin, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“On the first paragraph on page four he mentions the bruise beneath her left eye, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“In the second paragraph he mentions the general condition of the skin other than the bruise, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“No other sign of insult to the skin, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that is what he wrote.”

“Nothing about particles of gunpowder embedded in the skin, is there?”

“No.”

“And nothing about abrasions from particles bouncing off the skin, is there?”

“Not from what I can see.”

“So, in fact, in reading the autopsy, there is no evidence of stippling.”

“That’s right.”

“No evidence that her skin was in any way exposed to the nitrates released by the handgun.”

“Maybe not.”

“Now, here is my question, Officer Cantwell. Based on the test you performed with the photographic paper and the comforter, and based upon the absence of stippling on the victim’s clothes or skin, isn’t it quite possible that all the stippling occurred on the comforter only because her entire body, including her face, was covered by the comforter?”

“That might be one explanation.”

“So, to summarize your testimony, the shooter might have been as far from the victim as six feet, you can’t in any way deny the possibility that it was dark in the room, and you maintain that it is quite possible that the victim was entirely hidden by her comforter.”

“Yes, I suppose…”

“With all that, Officer, isn’t it possible that the shooter didn’t even know who it was beneath that comforter? With all that, Officer, isn’t it possible the shooter murdered the absolute wrong person? Isn’t that possible?”

There was to be no answer, of course. This was one of those obviously objectionable questions that lawyers throw in just so they can sneak in some argument in the midst of a cross-examination. But the point was made. It was the first time the jury had heard the possibility that maybe Hailey Prouix wasn’t the intended victim, and they listened to the whole examination with admirable interest. And so, I could tell, did Troy Jefferson.

“I don’t think they bought it,” he said to me after Judge Tifaro had recessed for the day.

“They don’t have to buy it, they just have to buy the possibility of it.”

“So what are you going to argue, that the lover meant to kill Guy and killed his one true love instead?”

“A sad tale worthy of Shakespeare, don’t you think?” I said. “The tragic story of one who loved not wisely but too well and threw it away by trying to kill off the competition and mistakenly murdering the woman he loved.”

“Sounds like a movie of the week.”

“Yes, it does. Maybe after this is over, I’ll option the story to ABC.”

“We have a new witness to add to our list.”

“Someone interesting, I hope.”

“Oh, yes, interesting as hell. You should never have tried to backstab us like you did on that stipulation. We’re calling the victim’s uncle. He’s known her all her life and he is thrilled as hell to testify against the man who killed his niece. He’s going to identify her, and then he’s got a few more things to say, and I’m going to let him say them.”

“Really?”

“Count on it. He’s going to bury your boy.”

“I certainly hope not. I’d like to speak to him before he testifies, if that’s all right. You know where he’s staying?”

“He’s at the DoubleTree.”

“Nice.”

“But don’t waste your breath. He’s not going to speak to you. He’s not going to say a word until he’s on the stand.”

“It shook you a little, didn’t it?” I said. “The wrong-victim theory.”

“Not really. We had seen the possibility beforehand. We were just wondering what took you so long to figure it out.”

As he walked out of the courtroom, I began to wonder the exact same thing. It must have always been a possibility, a close examination of the forensics reports would have shown it to me as clearly as they showed it to Skink. And if there was to be a parallel with the Jesse Sterrett murder, then it only made sense. The boy Hailey was planning to run away with, murdered. The man Hailey was planning to marry, an attempt on his life. It was so obvious. Why couldn’t I see it?

Because of my obsession. I was obsessed with Hailey Prouix. Call it love, call it lust, call it what you will, but it was an obsession and it colored everything I had done in this case, for better or for worse. She was the focus of my interest, so I assumed she was the focus of the killer’s interest, too. My obsession had been like a set of blinders, but the blinders were off.

Right from the courtroom I called Skink on my cell phone. “He’s at the DoubleTree.”

“All right,” said Skink. “I’ll get my man on it.”

“Any luck?”

“Not yet.”

“You better hurry. He’ll probably go on tomorrow afternoon.”

“It ain’t so easy. It’s a big desert.”

“No excuses, Skink.”

“I understand, mate.”

And he did, we all did. It was no time for excuses, it was no time for sitting back and waiting, no time for mere hope. The blinders now were off and Roylynn had been right all along. There was indeed a primordial evil that had blown through Hailey Prouix’s life and caused a swath of destruction. And now, in a court of law, it and I were coming face to face.

48

“WE HAVE time for one more witness this afternoon, Mr. Jefferson,” said Judge Tifaro. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Your Honor. The People call Lawrence Cutlip to the stand.”

“Lawrence Cutlip? I don’t see a Lawrence Cutlip on your witness list, Counsel.”

“It’s a late addition, Judge, in light of Mr. Carl’s decision to abrogate his agreement on the stipulation about the identity of the victim. Mr. Cutlip will identify her as Hailey Prouix.”

“Ah, yes. Any objection, Mr. Carl?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“I thought not. All right, then, Mr. Jefferson, but keep it short.”

“I aim to, Your Honor, yes I do.”

The doors in the rear of the courtroom swung open and a cold breeze slipped in, followed by the decrepit remains of Lawrence Cutlip.

Cutlip, in his wheelchair, was dressed in his good jeans, with a fresh flannel shirt and clean white sneakers, all spiffed for the occasion. His thick grizzle was shaved close, and his wild ruff of white hair was combed back and fastened to his skull with grease. Even his dentures were in place, clean white pieces of plastic interspersed among the brittle natural teeth to which his gums still hesitantly clung. The oxygen tank was sympathetically hanging from the rear of the chair, its clear plastic line hooked around his ears and under his nose. Cutlip occasionally and noticeably wheezed as he was pushed forward by a large woman in short-sleeved nursing whites.

As the old man slid down the aisle between the benches and into the well of the court, he hunched in the chair, looking about himself suspiciously, not sure what to expect. When he saw Beth and me, he smiled awkwardly, as if we were old acquaintances of uncertain temper, and we smiled back warmly, as if we were old friends. We kept smiling even as the woman, biceps bulging, lifted Cutlip’s chair to the witness box, even as Cutlip raised his hand, even as Cutlip gave and spelled his name, gave his address, swore his oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing nothing nothing, so help him God, but the truth.

“Mr. Cutlip,” said Troy Jefferson, “how are you related to Hailey Prouix?”

“She was my niece, poor girl, the daughter of my sister.”

“Does she have any other family?”

“Well, her daddy was a Cajun boy who died when she was young, and her mama left off this earth not ten years back. That leaves just me and her sister, Roylynn. But Roylynn ain’t exactly all there, if you know what I mean, not even able to take care of herself. So that about leaves only me.”

“Were you close to her?”

“Yes, sir. You know, my sister wasn’t so disciplined, not really hard enough to get along in this world, so when her husband, he died in that lumber accident, she needed some help with them girls. I was living my life, minding my own business, but I saw that she and the girls needed me, and so I moved on in and supported them girls as best I could until they was old enough to take care of themselves.”

“That was quite a thing, Mr. Cutlip.”

“I couldn’t let them pretty little girls just drift away like that. The way I saw it, I never had no choice. I only done what I had to do. Anyone with half a heart would have done the same.”

“Did you stay close to Hailey through the years?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you aware that she was engaged to Guy Forrest?”

“Yes, I was. She told me all about him.”

“So you knew he was married.”

“Yes, with them kids, too. I told her it was a mistake to get involved with the likes of him. He didn’t seem the most stable, from what she told me, and from what he done to his wife and kids, not the most loyal neither. And then when she told me they was fighting over money, I got scared for her. I told her to get away from him, to get out before it was too late. There’s no telling what a man like that could do. I told her, I did, but when it came to boys, she never did listen to me. She never listened to nobody.”

Through the whole of this little speech Judge Tifaro was staring at me, giving me that look of hers, the stare that made you want to check your law license just to prove to yourself you didn’t pick it up along with a screwdriver and a fifty-foot garden hose at Sears. She was wondering why I wasn’t objecting from the first word, why I had done what I had done to let this man on the stand in the first place.

“No objection, Mr. Carl?” she said finally.

“No, Your Honor, but thank you for your concern.”

She stared, I shrugged, Jefferson continued.

“And then what happened?”

“What the hell do you think happened? She ended up dead.”

“I’d like to show you now a folder of photographs taken of the crime scene, People’s Exhibit Six, already entered into evidence, and ask you to look at it, please. I want to warn you, Mr. Cutlip, the pictures are terribly disturbing.”

Cutlip leaned forward in his chair as Jefferson brought him the folder. He opened the folder on the shelf in front of him and went through the photographs carefully, one by one by one. By the third his face was scrunched up as if against the cold and his upper lip was quivering. By the fifth he was in tears. By the ninth he was unable to look at them any longer and closed the folder. Only his soft sobs and wheezes could be heard in the courtroom.

“Mr. Cutlip…”

Cutlip wiped his eyes with the back of his big, slack-skinned hand.

“Mr. Cutlip. I have to ask you a question now. The pictures show a woman lying dead on a mattress. Do you recognize that woman?”

Cutlip gasped at the air and then said,”Yes.”

“Who is it, Mr. Cutlip?”

“It is my niece. Hailey Prouix.”

“Are you sure, Mr. Cutlip?”

“I knowed her all her life. I couldn’t be surer about nothing in this world.”

“I need to show you another set of photographs. People’s Exhibit nineteen, photographs from the autopsy. If you could just look at the first two, please.”

Cutlip nodded, the good soldier, and took the folder. He shuddered at the first photograph, winced at the second, closed the folder like it was a curse.

“Same,” said Cutlip. “It’s the same. It’s Hailey.”

“Hailey Prouix.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Mr. Carl,” said Judge Tifaro, “are you awake?”

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

“Any objection to that question?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Go ahead, Mr. Jefferson, ask it again.”

“Do you miss her, Mr. Cutlip?”

“Yes, I surely do. I’m in line for the insurance money, but I’d just as soon as toss it for how I’m getting it. She was like a daughter to me, more. She was taking care of me still, she was taking care of her poor sister, and then that there man killed her. He done this to me, and now my heart weeps tears of blood. I got no choice but to miss her, to miss her ever day, ever damn day of the rest of my sorry life.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cutlip,” said Jefferson, trying unsuccessfully to hide his grin. “I pass the witness.”

The judge’s stare of inquest aimed right at my skull continued even as she asked for Troy Jefferson and myself to approach the bench. She waited for the court reporter to set up right by her side before she spoke.

“Mr. Carl,” she said, “do you have any idea what you are doing in this trial?”

“Not really, ma’am, no.”

“I didn’t think so. You backed out of a stipulation which allowed this man and his tears onto the stand. I gave you opportunities to object at every step of his testimony, and still you ignored them. Is there anything you want to do now, any motion you want to make?”

“All I want, Your Honor, is the chance to pose a few questions to Mr. Cutlip myself.”

“You want to cross-examine?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have questions for this witness?”

“Just a few.”

“Are you sure? Don’t you think it was bad enough already? Are you certain that it might not make more sense just to leave him be, hope the jury forgets what he said, and let the prosecution rest its case?”

“Just a few questions, Your Honor.”

“Well, then, have at it, Mr. Carl. It’s time to recess for the afternoon. So tomorrow, first thing, you’ll get your chance. And do not say I didn’t warn you.”

49

ONCE BEFORE in my career, during its early, naïve stage, I had attempted to break a man on cross-examination. Carefully I prepared, laying out all my traps, hoping for the devastating blow. He was a city councilman, skilled in the use of language but hot of temper, and I believed I could make him blow. I was wrong. Oh, I brought forth flashes of anger and exposed to the jury with lovely clarity the brittle inconsistencies in his story, but that was all. He had murdered a man with his bare hands, proven later by a piece of physical evidence held closely by his wife, but on the stand I got none of that, and I felt my client’s guilty verdict deep in my gut.

It taught me a fine lesson. Cross-examination is a lovely tool for highlighting inconsistencies and evident falsehoods, for painting a witness as a hapless prevaricator or even an outright liar, cross-examination can be the death of a thousand cuts for the credibility of that witness or an opponent’s entire case, but it is not the place for the single crushing blow. There are too many formalities involved, too many safeguards. Compare the polite confines of a courtroom with a police interrogation room in the dank recesses of a precinct house, a place of intimidation, of psychological manipulation, of violence imagined or real. The interrogation room is the place to break a suspect. But Lawrence Cutlip would never submit to the interrogation room and, I suspected, in its confines, furry with sweat and fear, he would be comfortably at home, able to withstand all manner of the interrogator’s tricks. He was not the type to be badgered into confession. So there would be no interrogation here. I would have to make do with cross-examination, which, despite its fearsome reputation, is a gentler dance.

So how was I to proceed? Advice was more then plentiful.

Phil Skink: “Go right at him. Fast and furious. Get him on the ropes and don’t let up.”

“It’s not a boxing match, Phil.”

“No? You’re going in there to put him away, right?. It’s no time for subtle mercy. You need be to Jack Dempsey – hook, hook, hook, and then step into the right what breaks his jaw.”

“Have you found anything yet?”

“Don’t you think I’d have told you?”

“I need it.”

“I knows you need it, mate, and I’ll be getting it, too. But you remember what I says. Jack Dempsey. Hook, hook, hook, and then the right to the jaw. Drop him like a sack of potatoes, you will.”

Beth Derringer: “Be gentle, subtle. He can handle anger, he’s used to it, it’s all he’s ever known, but the soft emotions will confuse him.”

“Skink thinks I should be Jack Dempsey in there.”

“Guys like Skink only know one way. But there is another. Dance around the truth so he doesn’t realize what you’re getting at until it is too late. A little bit here, a little bit there. He’ll be expecting a masculine rush up the middle, a straight through line like a fullback off tackle. You should take a more circular tack.”

“Virginia Woolf as opposed to Ernest Hemingway.”

“Yes, yes. Exactly.”

“It sounds nice, but I didn’t know that the Bloomsbury group was a law firm. Woolf, Strachey, Forster, Keynes and Woolf.”

“Let me tell you something, Victor. Be glad you never met up with Virginia Woolf in court. Be very glad.”

Reverend Henson: “The thing with Cutlip,” he said when I called him for his share of advice, “is that he wants to think he is a good man, despite all he has done. None believe they are evil, even the evil. And, more desperately, he wants the world to think he is a good man, too. So he’ll deny everything, and deny it with a conviction that will be unassailable. But if he’s trapped, then he’ll change. He’ll turn ugly, turn irrational, search desperately for someone who can’t defend himself and lay the blame on him. As in the Bible, where Aaron was commanded to lay his hands upon the head of a live goat and confess over it all the sins of the Children of Israel. Leviticus sixteen, verse twenty-two: ‘And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.’ He’ll try to do the same to some poor soul, someone not able to defend himself.”

“I don’t understand how that helps us.”

“Because his efforts to hide his guilt through use of a scapegoat are necessarily futile. Hebrews ten, verse four: ‘For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.’ You can only create a scapegoat by following the biblical command to confess. It is a necessary part of the process. When he tries to shift blame onto his scapegoat, then will his sins be evident for all to see.”

To this counsel I added one piece more, lifted from the book I had been reading, Crime and Punishment. I often found literature of little use in the bare-knuckle world of the law, the psychological gap between the fictional and real is often so wide, but no one ever came as close to spanning that canyon as Dostoyevsky. In the book the investigating magistrate stalks Raskolnikov with an ingenious psychological method that I thought might be the only tactic to crack a hard nut like Cutlip. He patiently waits for Raskolnikov, guilty of ax-murdering two old women, to come to him. “He won’t run away from me, even if he had some place to run to,” says the investigator, “because of a law of nature. Ever watched a moth before a lighted candle? Well, he, too, will be circling round and round me like a moth round a candle. He’ll get sick of his freedom. He’ll start brooding. He’ll get himself so thoroughly entangled that he won’t be able to get out. He’ll worry himself to death. And he’ll keep on describing circles round me, smaller and smaller circles, till – flop! – he’ll fly straight into my mouth and I’ll swallow him!” And true to the method, 446 pages after the murders, Raskolnikov staggers into the St. Petersburg police station and exclaims, “It was I.” Cutlip seemed willing, almost desperate, to talk about his niece. He couldn’t help himself. It would be my job to keep him talking, to keep him circling, to find a truth to which he felt compelled to get closer, closer, closer, until that truth, no matter how ugly, became bright enough to burn.

I took the schemes of all my advisers and swirled them together into a single desperate strategy. I would force Lawrence Cutlip to confront his crimes, edging him subtly when possible, shoving and badgering him like a boxer when necessary, spiraling him closer and closer to the flame of truth until the fire grew so hot upon his soul that he was forced, not to confess, because that was not his way, but instead to do as the Reverend Henson said he would do, find a scapegoat and shift the blame. Onto whom would he shift it, I had no idea. Bobo? Guy? Jesse Sterrett? It wouldn’t matter, once it shifted, it would be apparent. And once it was apparent, the story would be over, Guy would be acquitted, and Cutlip would be under arrest. That was the upside. That was what I focused on as I prepared.

But there was a downside, too, a downside I couldn’t ignore. If I failed, if my cross-examination proved to be too gentle a dance to dent Cutlip’s armor, then consequences would befall my client and myself. Guy’s defense would be exposed as a fraud. It would seem he was trying to foist blame on the grieving uncle, who had sacrificed his youth to care for his young nieces. And once the phone records were disclosed and Breger connected all the dots, the pointed finger aimed at the unknown lover would look just as fraudulent. A life sentence, no doubt, possibly death, or, at best, a mistrial, declared by Judge Tifaro, based on my behavior. And as for me, well, my legal career would be over for sure, a good thing, considering, but still. Thrust headfirst and unprepared into the cold black street of capitalism, I would be forced to find some other form of income, accounting maybe, or the wonderful world of retail. I heard that the Gap was hiring, which was a great comfort, let me tell you.

So it was strategy that I focused upon, but not only strategy. I brought to my apartment everything I had found about this case, from the forensic reports of the murder to the notes I had taken of my trips to Pierce, West Virginia, to the notes of testimony already collected, to the contents of Hailey Prouix’s safe-deposit box. I examined everything, questioned every assumption, turned everything upside down and downside up, twisted back to front and vice versa. I reviewed my notes of Cutlip’s direct testimony, and as I did so, and examined everything else, something seemed not right, something seemed out of order.

And then it came clear, in a sudden burst of insight, something I had badly mislabeled, something that was very much other than what I had thought it to be.

Now I had something, something definite, something to work with, something that might just force Cutlip to come face to face with his past, force him to describe smaller and smaller circles around the truth, until – flop! – and that would be the end of him.

And it had been there, the crucial piece of evidence, been there almost the entire time, right in front of my face.

50

“MR. CUTLIP, this is my client, Guy Forrest,” I said, standing behind Guy with my hands on his shoulders. “Before this trial had you ever laid eyes on him?”

“No, I ain’t.”

“Ever spoken to him?”

“Nope, and can’t say I’m sad about it neither.”

“And yet it was your testimony that without ever meeting him or talking to him you were against your niece’s marrying him, isn’t that right?”

“After what he done to his family, walked out like a dog, yes, I was.”

“You told Hailey Prouix she was making a mistake with him, isn’t that what you said? You told her to get away from him while she could.”

“And I was right about it, too, wasn’t I?”

“Can I approach, Your Honor?”

The judge nodded.

“I’d like this marked Defense Exhibit Nine.” I gave a copy to Troy Jefferson and took the original to the court reporter to be marked before dropping it in front of Cutlip. “You recognize the man in this picture?”

“I never seen this picture before.”

“Just answer my question. Do you recognize the man in the picture?”

“Yeah, it’s him.”

“The record will indicate that the witness was pointing at the defendant, Guy Forrest. This, then, is a picture of the man who wanted to marry your niece and is accused by you and the state of murdering her. What do you feel about this man?”

“I hate his whole guts, what you expect? He killed my niece dead and stole my world like a thief.”

“Good. Now, here I’m handing you a black Sharpie marker. Cross out the picture of this man you hate so.”

“Why?”

“Indulge me.”

“What for? I told you I never done seen this picture. I’m just here to say the dead woman, she was my niece. I don’t understand.”

“It’s not up to you to understand, sir. It’s only up to you to do it.” I put a little juice into the “do it,” just enough to get his back up about it, and it did. I saw that lovely serpentine flicker of hate in his eyes. “Don’t be a coward, now, the picture’s not going to jump up and bite you.” That got a little laugh, which made him even angrier. “Just go ahead and do what I tell you to do. Cross it out.”

He gave me a slow, insolent stare and then went at the picture with the marker.

“Fine, thank you.”

I picked the photograph off the front rail of the witness stand and showed it first to Troy Jefferson and then to the jury, a fine color photograph of Guy Forrest with a ragged, violent zig-zag-zig running through it.

“So you never approved of Guy Forrest for your niece. Did you know she was seeing someone else at the time?”

“She said something or other like that, just to rile me.”

“Rile you? Why would that rile you?”

“I didn’t like her acting like no tramp.”

“She never told you who he was, this other lover, did she?”

“No, not exactly. But I heard things. I heard he was some Puerto Rican or something.”

“Puerto Rican?” I thought on that a moment, turned to Beth, who simply shrugged, and then I remembered. “You’re referring to Juan Gonzalez, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, right. I heard she got mixed up with him somehow, and I hated to hear it.”

“You rejected Guy Forrest as a suitable husband for your niece, without ever meeting or talking to him, and you were against her other Puerto Rican lover, so my question, Mr. Cutlip, is this: Of which of your niece’s boyfriends did you ever approve?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” said Troy Jefferson. “This is pretty far afield.”

“It goes to bias, Your Honor. It goes to credibility. The People opened this door in direct, opened a lot of doors in direct. It is not for Mr. Jefferson now to object when I walk through them.”

“I think that’s right, Mr. Jefferson. You did open the door. Go ahead, Mr. Carl, but very carefully.”

“I’ll repeat the question, Mr. Cutlip: Of which of your niece’s boyfriends did you ever approve?”

“None of your damn business.”

“Oh, I think it is. Answer the question, please, or I’ll ask the judge to compel you to answer it.”

Cutlip turned to look at Judge Tifaro, who was peering down at him through her half glasses like a librarian from hell.

“There was some, I suppose,” he answered.

“Who? Tell us.”

“Well, there was the football player, that Ricky Bronson she was with her last years in high school. I didn’t mind him so much.”

“Is that because, as you so wittily told me, he was more interested in standing over the center than he was in being with her?”

“Maybe. And he wasn’t even the quarterback.” He slapped the rail and laughed, his little staccato laugh, and some joined in, which made him laugh even harder.

“What about Grady Pritchett? You didn’t like him much, did you?”

“Oh, I didn’t mind old Grady.”

“You went after him with a shotgun, didn’t you? Want me to bring him up here from West Virginia to tell the court how you went after him with a shotgun?”

“He was hanging around too damn much. He was older than her and arrogant and like the rest of them only interested in one damn thing.”

“What was that, Mr. Cutlip?”

“Now you’re being cute. You know damn well what boys want in a girl like that.”

“And men, too.”

“Hell yes.”

“What about Jesse Sterrett? Did you approve of your niece’s relationship with Jesse Sterrett?”

“They was just friends, not boyfriend-girlfriend or anything like that.”

“Oh, they were more than just friends, weren’t they, Mr. Cutlip? They were out-and-out lovers, weren’t they?”

“No. You’re wrong. He was, maybe, less than a man, from what I heard. From what I heard, I’d more expect him to be interested in that Bronson boy than in her.” That same staccato laugh, but this time no one joined in.

“They were lovers and they wanted to spend their lives together and you hated that, didn’t you, just like you hated the idea of Hailey’s marrying Guy Forrest?”

“You’re flat-assed wrong about that.”

“I’d like this marked Defense Exhibit Ten,” I said, dropping a photocopy before Troy Jefferson and taking the original up to be marked by the court reporter. When it was marked, I handed it to Cutlip. “You recognize what that is?”

“No, I sure as hell don’t.”

“It’s a letter from Jesse Sterrett to your niece Hailey. Why don’t you start reading it out loud to the jury?”

“Objection. There’s no foundation for this letter to be entered into evidence or to be read to the jury. He said he couldn’t identify it.”

“I’ll link it up, Judge.”

“Will the purported author, this Jesse Sterrett, be testifying?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Then how will you link it up?”

“I ask for some leeway here, Judge. I believe I can lay the foundation for this document, but I’d like to do it in the order of my choosing. Remember, Your Honor, Mr. Jefferson chose to call this witness and have him point the finger of blame at my client.”

“Let me see the letter.” Judge Tifaro examined it and then examined my face to see if she could figure out what in the world I was trying to do. “How is this Jesse Sterrett relevant to this case?”

“You’ll see, Your Honor, but he surely is.”

“All right, Mr. Carl, pending a ruling later as to relevance and as to proper foundation, I’ll allow your examination to continue for now.”

“But, Judge-”

“That’ll do, Mr. Jefferson. You took enough liberties with this witness, I think it only fair I give Mr. Carl the same opportunity.”

“We take exception.”

“Exception noted. Go ahead, Mr. Carl.”

“Thank you, Judge. Mr. Cutlip, read the letter please.”

“Let me put on my glasses, then.” He fumbled in his shirt pocket and pulled out a set of reading glasses.

“Mr. Cutlip,” said the judge, “you didn’t put on your glasses when you were examining the photographs yesterday, did you?”

“Didn’t need them for that.”

“That’s encouraging. Go ahead, Mr. Carl.”

“Read the beginning of the letter out loud for the jury,” I said.

“’I am flying,’ it says, ‘I am floating through the air and I don’t never want to come down. Never.’ I told you he was like that, a sissy boy like that.”

“Who?”

“The Sterrett boy who wrote this.”

“Fine.” I glanced up at the judge, who smiled slightly at the admission as to authorship. “Now, go to the end, Mr. Cutlip, and read the last sentence, read that one to the jury.”

“Here it is: ‘I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight so I can wake up tomorrow and see your face and then after school and after practice run to the quarry so I can cover you in kisses till it’s dark and we have to go home and then do it all again the day after and then again and then again.”’

“And it is signed ‘J’ for Jesse Sterrett, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“And the quarry in Pierce, where you lived, is where the teenagers go to neck, or spoon, or make out, or whatever the word is now, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Is it still your testimony that Jesse Sterrett and your niece weren’t lovers, that they weren’t in love?”

“He might of been but she wasn’t. I know for damn sure she wasn’t.”

“If she wasn’t, why would she have kept this letter for fifteen years?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“All right, Mr. Cutlip. What happened to Jesse Sterrett?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do,” I said. “Tell the jury what happened to Jesse Sterrett, who loved your niece and couldn’t wait to go to sleep because it meant he was closer to waking and seeing her again and covering her again with his kisses? Tell them what happened to Jesse Sterrett sixteen years ago.”

Cutlip stretched his neck as if his collar were too tight. “He died.”

“Objection, Your Honor. This is too much. Counsel is dredging up something that happened years ago in another state. There is no evidence of a connection and so no relevance to this testimony.”

The judge peered down at Cutlip as he squirmed in the witness chair. “Where did this boy die?” asked the judge.

“In that there quarry.”

“How?”

“He slipped and fell and died in the quarry, and that was all.”

“His head was smashed in, wasn’t it?” I said.

“From the fall.” Cutlip stretched his neck again. “That’s what the coroner, he said.”

“Your poker buddy, Doc Robinson, your drinking and poker buddy, he was the coroner, right?”

“He said it was an accident.”

“And a few days later you left Pierce, West Virginia.”

“One had nothing to do with the other.”

“A few days after your niece’s lover Jesse Sterrett’s head was smashed in at the quarry, you left Pierce, West Virigina, didn’t you? You left your home, your nieces, your sister, you left and never came back again, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I left.”

“And you left because they found Jesse Sterrett dead. Isn’t that why you left?”

“Your Honor, I still have my objection.”

The judge continued to stare down at Lawrence Cutlip on the stand and said, “Mr. Carl, why should I not sustain Mr. Jefferson’s objection?”

“This witness testified that my client killed his niece. I am permitted under the rules of evidence to inquire about specific instances of conduct that may weigh on his truthfulness and credibility as to that issue. What happened to Jesse Sterrett, I believe, is one of those instances.”

“Objection overruled.”

“I’m done,” said Cutlip. “I got nothing more to say about that boy. I’m not feeling so well. I’m not a healthy man. I got problems. I got a weak constitution. I had beriberi. I been sick as a dog for the last seven years. I came here to tell you all that the dead girl, she was my niece and that this man kilt her, and now you’re asking me all kinds of questions about something that happened too damn long ago. I’m a carcass already near dead and now you’re trying to finish me off once and for all.”

“Take a moment, Mr. Cutlip,” said the judge, “to pull yourself together.”

I turned my back on Cutlip’s evil stare and leaned over the defense table to talk to Beth.

“How am I doing?” I whispered.

“Terrific,” she said. “You have him on the run, and you’ve kept my red marker busy.”

“What are we up to by now?”

“With his direct testimony, and with what you’ve done today, about a third.”

“What do you think we need?”

“It’s hard to say. Fifty percent would make it all pretty sure.”

“Let me know when we reach it.”

“You want me to signal you?”

“Yes.”

“Some secret signal?”

“Not too secret. Just call something out.”

“What, like Skink’s bingo?”

“Yes, exactly. Bingo.”

“Victor…”

“Just do it. Any word from Skink?”

“Not yet.”

I shook my head, stood straight, turned around. “All right, Mr. Cutlip. Something different, something less trying. Ms. Derringer and I met with you before this trial at the Desert Winds retirement home, isn’t that right? That’s where you live, isn’t it?”

“Sure do.”

“That’s out there in Henderson, Nevada, just a few miles from the Las Vegas Strip, isn’t that right?”

“Sure is.”

“It’s a nice place, that Henderson, the fastest-growing city in America.”

“So they say.”

“And the Desert Winds retirement home is lovely, isn’t it? The best of the best. The very lap of luxury.”

“I suppose it’s nice enough.”

“Pretty expensive place?”

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t pay the bills?”

“Was a lump sum deposited to take care of the bills.”

“Who paid the lump sum?”

“Hailey.”

“And you have your own personal attendant there at Desert Winds, don’t you?”

“Yeah. My man Bobo.”

“Bobo? Is that his real name?”

“That’s what I call him.”

“But his real name is Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know about the Joseph.”

“But the Dwayne and the Bohannon are right.”

“I suppose so.”

“Who pays for Bobo?”

“Hailey, though not no more after that man killing her and all.”

“Is Bobo in court today? Did he come to Philadelphia with you?”

“No.”

“So he’s still in Nevada?”

“Don’t know. He could be anywhere. He comes when he wants and goes when he wants. Lately he’s been a going.”

“Now, Bobo does all that traveling in a pretty nice car, doesn’t he? A white Camaro with Nevada plates.”

“That’s right.”

“Bought with Hailey’s money.”

“What he earned taking care of me.”

“How did Hailey afford the lump-sum payment for such an upscale retirement place?”

“She was a lawyer.”

“Yes, but so am I, and I couldn’t afford it, and Ms. Derringer here couldn’t afford it, and Mr. Jefferson here couldn’t afford it. So I’m wondering, how did Hailey afford it?”

“I don’t know. She said she had a case that came through, near drowned her in money.”

“A case? And this case came through when?”

“Six months or so before she died.”

“What kind of case, do you know?”

“Just a case. She said some guy went into a hospital for something minor and ended up like a stalk of celery.”

I turned to look at the jury. They were nodding, they knew the case even if Cutlip didn’t. “And after that money came in,” I continued, “the money from that case, she moved you to Desert Winds?”

“Yep.”

“And before that where were you living?”

“Around.”

“Around where?”

“Motels here or there, around Vegas, whatever I could afford at the time.”

“And Bobo?”

“He was in them motels, too.”

“So you and Bobo knew each other before Desert Winds.”

“That’s right.”

“Nice places, those motels?”

“Hardly. Some had bugs the size of rats, and then there was the rats. And for the prices we paid, they didn’t have no HBO.”

“Is there HBO in Desert Winds?”

“And Cinemax and Showtime.”

“How nice for you that must be. Now, you mentioned in your direct testimony that your niece told you she and Guy Forrest were fighting over money, isn’t that right?”

“That’s what I said, yeah. That’s when I knowed she was in trouble.”

“Did she tell you that the fight was over the money from the case that near drowned her in money?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“The same money that had taken you out of motel land, with its bugs as big as rats and no HBO, and into the lovely, luxurious, Desert Winds.”

“I suppose.”

“And so the thought of Guy taking back that lump-sum payment and sending you and Bobo back down to motel land was pretty terrifying, wasn’t it?”

“I could handle it.”

“Really? Without HBO? Wasn’t Guy Forrest, by complaining about the missing money, putting your whole luxurious existence at risk? Wouldn’t you have done anything to keep from going back to those motels?”

“Mr. Carl, I’m a broken man. I’m stuck in this damn chair, this is my first time out of Nevada in six years, I haven’t been able to keep down a drink in a year and a half. I got something in me that’s chewing me up. It’ll kill me, it will, and damn soon. I’m dying for damn sure, without nothing no one can do about it. My life is over already. What the hell do I care where I die? All I know is the only person in this whole damn world that ever did the least thing nice for me is dead, and I loved her pure, and to tell the truth I’m dying more of lost love than anything else. And nothing can happen to me from here on out, nothing you could ever dream do to me, could be any worse.”

“How about Bobo, could he handle it?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“I’d like to mark this Defense Exhibit Eleven for identification. Do you know what that is?”

“It looks like a traffic ticket of some sort.”

“Objection, Your Honor. Foundation. Relevance.”

The judge took the ticket and examined it carefully for a long moment before frowning. “No, I’m going to allow this,” she said. “I assume you’ll lay the foundation for this in your case, Mr. Carl.”

“The ticketing officer has already been subpoenaed to testify.”

“Fine. Continue.”

“Where is this ticket from, Mr. Cutlip?”

“It says here City of Philadelphia.”

“What’s it for?”

“Looks like speeding.”

“On City Line Avenue, isn’t that right? Could you tell the jury the make and license of the car?”

“A Camaro, white, Nevada plates.”

“And who is it issued against?”

“It’s hard to read the handwriting.”

“Try.”

“Looks like Dwayne Joseph Bohannon.”

“Bobo.”

“Suppose so.”

“What was Bobo doing not six blocks from Hailey Prouix’s house the night before the murder?”

“Don’t know. Ask Bobo.”

“Objection.”

“I’d be delighted to ask him, Mr. Cutlip,” I said over the objection, “but he seems to have disappeared, so I am forced to ask you.”

“Objection, Your Honor.”

“Sustained. The jury will disregard that question and please remember, questions are not evidence. Evidence can come only from the witnesses. Anything more, Mr. Carl?”

“Yes, Your Honor, I’d like to mark four photographs for identification, Defense Exhibits Twelve to Fifteen.”

I gave the first to Cutlip to examine.

“Do you recognize the people in that picture?”

“Where’d you get this?”

“Just answer my question. Do you recognize the people in that photograph?”

“That’s my sister and her husband and them two girls.”

“They look pretty happy there don’t they, a happy family?”

“Sure they was. Why not?”

“How old were the girls there?”

“Seven maybe. Tommy died when they was eight.”

“Tommy Prouix?”

“That’s right.”

“Where was he from, this Tommy Prouix?”

“New Orleans. I met him down there in a bar. He was a wild-eyed Cajun looking for work. Told him there was lumber mills up West Virginia way that was hiring. He drove up, stayed with my sister till he settled, and then settled down with her.”

“And this next picture, can you tell us what that is?”

“That’s me and my sister and the girls.”

“When was this taken?”

“After he was kilt, when I was forced to move in.”

“You were forced to move in?”

“They needed something in that house, they needed a man. The girls had that Cajun blood in them and they was running wild, and Debra, my sister, she never really recovered from Tommy’s dying.”

“And she asked you to come back.”

“I was traveling like before when I heard Tommy was dead. I came for the funeral, saw what was happening, and stayed. Them girls, they needed a firm hand, and so I did what I could. I found a job that paid decent in a local slaughterhouse and I cut down on my drinking so they’d have money for clothes and such.”

“And you provided the discipline they needed.”

“Yes I did.”

“The firm hand.”

“That’s what they needed. I know I needed it, and my daddy never flinched. Never once. Them girls needed it, too, especially Hailey.”

“And like your daddy, you never flinched.”

“No, sir.”

“And so you laid your hands on them.”

“When I had to. Never so it hurt, just so they’d know what they done was wrong.”

“The girls, do they look happy in that picture?”

“It’s hard to tell. I suppose they was happy enough. They was eating regularly, I know that.”

“Let me show you another photograph.”

“Where did you find these pictures? Where did you find that letter?”

“The same place, Mr. Cutlip, both in the same place. Do you recognize the two girls in that photograph?”

“It’s Roylynn and Hailey.”

“Your two nieces. How old are they there?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen or so.”

“They look very much alike in some respects. Can you tell them apart?”

“Well, it’s not too hard. Hailey was always the one dressed like a slut.”

“Was this picture taken before or after Roylynn tried to kill herself?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“Why did your niece, Roylynn, try to kill herself when you were in the house?”

“She ain’t the one that was murdered.”

“Please answer my question. What was going on in that house that caused Roylynn to want to die?”

“Nothing. She was crazy, is all. She still is. Was mental all her damn life.”

“What was going on in that house, Mr. Cutlip?”

“They needed a firm hand, is all.”

“What was the dark secret of that house, Mr. Cutlip?”

“There was no secret. We was just like everybody else.”

“This last picture, Mr. Cutlip, who is that?”

“Where’d you get this?”

“It was with all the others.”

“She kept all this crap?”

“Is that Jesse Sterrett?”

“I suppose.”

I stepped up to the witness box. Cutlip flinched, but all I did was take the pictures. “I’d like Defense Exhibits Twelve to Fifteen placed in evidence.”

“Objection, relevance.”

“Overruled. Exhibits so entered.”

One by one I showed them to the jury, the “before” and “after” pictures of the family, the pictures of the twins, and, finally, the picture of the sad, serious Jesse Sterrett. I handed this last to a woman in the front row, and as she examined it, I said,

“Another letter. I’ll mark this Defense Exhibit Sixteen. Look it over closely, Mr. Cutlip. Do you recognize it?”

“No.”

“You ever see it before?”

“No.”

“You sure, Mr. Cutlip? It’s got a jagged line through it, doesn’t it, as if someone wanted to cross it out?”

“Yeah, so?”

“I want to show you the picture of Guy Forrest you crossed out this morning. I want you to compare the cross-out lines. Are they great large Xs, Mr. Cutlip?”

“No.”

“They’re like Zs, aren’t they? Both of them.”

“Yes.”

“They look alike, these Zs, don’t they, as if they were made by the same hand?”

“Maybe they do.”

“Your hand.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Objection.”

“This is a letter from Jesse Sterrett to your niece Hailey, written on the day of his death,” I continued, over the objection. “Read the first paragraph of that letter, Mr. Cutlip.”

“Objection, Your Honor. This has gone too far. There is no foundation for this or the other letter presented.”

“I think there is, Mr. Jefferson,” said the judge. “Mr. Cutlip earlier identified the author of the letters as Jesse Sterrett. He has now admitted that the zigzag mark on the letter is possibly his. The jurors can compare the mark on the picture of Mr. Forrest with the mark on the letter to see if they find a match. There is a sufficient foundation laid for Mr. Carl to continue with this line.”

“Again we take exception.”

“Exception noted. Continue, Mr. Carl.”

“Read the first paragraph, Mr. Cutlip.”

“I got nothing more to say.”

“Read the first paragraph.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Read it.”

He glanced at the judge, who was staring down at him with no pity. He squirmed in his seat and began to read. “’I am so angry I could strangle a porcupine, and scared too, so scared, impossibly scared. I love you so much, want you so much, but now I have learned that secret you’ve been hiding, my anger burns least as bright as the love.”’

“What was the secret, Mr. Cutlip? What was Hailey’s secret?”

“There was no secret.”

“In the letter Jesse tells Hailey either he will run away with her or he will take out his anger on the man who inflamed it. He says there will be blood, no doubt about it. He tells Hailey it is up to her. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“Now read the last paragraph.”

“No.”

“Tell the jury where he planned to meet Hailey to figure it out.”

“No.”

“The last paragraph.”

“Read it, please, Mr. Cutlip,” said the judge.

“’I’ll be at the quarry tonight, I’ll be waiting for you. If you trust me enough to come I’ll dedicate my every waking hour of the rest of my life to making you happy, I will. I swear. But if you don’t come, if you won’t run away with me, then I’ll do it the other way. I’ll do what I need to do to protect you and whatever consequences that come my way I’ll bear gladly because I’ll be bearing them for you. Tonight, I’ll be waiting. Tonight.”’

“And he was at the quarry, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He died there that night at the quarry, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“And only two people knew he would be there, Hailey and the man who intercepted the letter, the man who tried to cross it out with a zig-zag-zig as clear as a signature.”

“He was going to steal her away from her family.”

“And that’s why you killed him.”

“I didn’t.”

“And that’s why, just a few days later, you left Pierce for good.”

“I told you, it just happened like that.”

“No, it didn’t, Mr. Cutlip. You told us an untruth. It was only after meeting with the Reverend Henson in the church that you left, wasn’t it? After he threatened to disclose everything, wasn’t it?”

“That’s a lie.”

“He’s here, just outside the courtroom, the good reverend. He remembers everything.”

“You’re making that up. He’s most likely dead by now.”

“Should we bring him in and ask him?”

“You’re bluffing.”

“This isn’t poker, Mr. Cutlip.”

I turned around and nodded to Beth. She stood, left the courtroom for a moment, and then came through again, accompanied by the Very Reverend Theodore H. Henson.

Cutlip pushed himself to standing in the witness box when he saw the clergyman, and his face turned crimson, and I feared he would collapse right there with a heart attack. He raised his hand and pointed at the reverend and said,

“Ever thing he told you is a lie, ever damn thing.”

“But still, it was after your confrontation with the reverend in the chapel of his church that you left Pierce forever.”He dropped down heavily into his chair. “I was ready to go anyways, and I didn’t need him spreading his lies, getting ever one’s tongues a wagging.”

“Like the way you cheated at poker.”

“Lies.”

“The way you killed Jesse Sterrett.”

“Lies.”

“The things you did to Hailey.”

“Lies, lies, and damn lies.”

“Bingo,” said Beth.

I stepped back as soon as I heard Beth relay our subtle signal. I stepped back and stopped and took a few breaths. This was it, now or never. I had made progress, strong progress, I had tied that bastard to a murder sixteen years ago, but still there was only accusation and denial, still there was no direct evidence relating to the death of Hailey Prouix. I had set the stage, and now was my chance, my one chance. I wanted to stop, take a break, I wanted to hold on to the hope for a little longer before it turned to hard reality, either way, but now was not the time for timidity. I faced the jury.

“I have one more letter,” I said.

It was lying there, with my other papers, on the podium. Beth had two copies on transparencies, with certain of the phrases on one of them now underlined.

“Let’s have this marked Defense Exhibit Seventeen,” I said as I dropped still another copy before Troy Jefferson. “It’s just a torn piece of envelope with a message on it, and I give it to you, Mr. Cutlip, and I ask you if you’ve ever seen it before?”

I stepped up to the witness box and placed the torn piece of envelope in front of him. He was startled to see it, I could tell. He read it slowly and shook his head as he read it and said nothing.

“Have you ever seen this before, Mr. Cutlip?”

“Where’d you get this?”

“It was with the others.”

“She kept it?”

“All these years. Yes.”

Cutlip put his hand on his chest and struggled for breath. “She kept it.”

“Yes, she did, Mr. Cutlip. All those many years after you wrote it.”

“I… I… No, this isn’t…”

“This is your writing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wrote this to Hailey years ago, immediately after you left Pierce.”

“I don’t… I…”

“I originally thought this, too, was written by Jesse Sterrett. The other letters were typed, but this was handwritten, so I couldn’t really compare. But now I know it was written by you. Everyone’s voice is unique – word choice, expressions. I had Ms. Derringer underline all the expressions in this letter that matched the very expressions you used in your testimony. Should I have her put it up on the screen, Mr. Cutlip? Over half the words are parts of the same sentence constructions used in your answers yesterday and today. Should I have her put it up on the screen?”

“No.”

“It’s your letter, isn’t it?”

“She kept it.”

“You wrote this, didn’t you? You wrote this to her.”

He sat there staring at the torn piece of envelope, not moving, not moving, but all the while I could see him psychologically getting closer, closer, a moth circling a flame, getting closer, closer. And then, slowly, he nodded.

Flop.

“Let the record reflect,” I said, “that the witness nodded yes.”

“Record will so reflect,” said the judge.

“Read your letter to the court, please.”

“I can’t.”

“Read it, Mr. Cutlip, read your desperate note to your fifteen-year-old niece.”

“I won’t.”

I took hold of a copy of what I had given Cutlip and read it out loud myself.

“’It’s killing me ever day, ever damn day, that we’re not together. My heart weeps in the wanting. I’m less than a man without you, a carcass already near dead, dying of lost love. You done this to me, you stole my world like a thief. Don’t listen to what they are saying, it’s nothing but lies, lies and damn lies.’ ”

“Stop.”

“’I’m sorry for what I done but I never had no choice, I only done what I had to.’”

“Stop it, damn it.”

“’Never a love been so fierce or fearsome, never has it cost so high or been worth the entire world.’”

“She kept it, don’t that prove nothing?” he said. “She kept it, don’t that prove it all? You just a fool who don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand, Mr. Cutlip?”

“It wasn’t like that, not something dirty. It was love, real and hard, the truest in the world. Fearsome and fierce, like I said, but also something alive, more alive than anything you’ll ever see, like it had a mind of its own. And it wasn’t my doing, it was her doing. It wasn’t me that started it, it was her that started it. She seduced me. I had no choice in it. Whatever she wanted, she got. I had no choice. She seduced me.”

There it was, the shift I was looking for, the shift of blame. I was wondering where it would fall, and I now I knew. The person he was scapegoating would be Hailey herself. I turned to look at Reverend Henson, who had prophesied what Cutlip would do. He stared back at me, his eyes glossy, but he was nodding. He had seen it, too. They all had seen it.

I turned back to that cur on the stand. I could barely stand to look at him, he disgusted me so, but still, along with the disgust I couldn’t help feel a drop of empathic pity for the man. He was right, in his way, when he said that whatever Hailey wanted she seemed to have gotten. And what girl doesn’t try to seduce her father, or the substitute that comes in to take his role? The poor fool, I almost believed it when he said he had no choice in it – almost – because there is always a choice. When you have the power, the responsibility, when you take hold of a child’s hand, there is always a choice. And he made his. And in so doing he took from Hailey Prouix something she maybe didn’t even know she had, but something she spent the rest of her life struggling again to find. “How old was she?” I said in a voice so soft the jury leaned forward to hear. “How old was she when she seduced you, Mr. Cutlip?”

“I got nothing more to say.”

In a voice still soft, weary with resignation, I laid out the charges. “You were jealous of Jesse Sterrett, weren’t you, Mr. Cutlip? And you weren’t going to let him take Hailey away from you, so you killed him.”

“I want to go home.”

“And you tried to kill Guy for the same reason, because he was taking Hailey away from you, and also to quiet his complaints about the money.”

“I’m sick, I’m dying.”

“And by accident, by tragic mistake, the killer you sent, your man Bobo, ended up murdering Hailey Prouix instead.”

“Whatever Bobo done, I had nothing to do with,” said Cutlip.

I stopped and turned to the jury. I watched their eyes as they watched him. It is often hard to read a jury, but I could read those eyes.

“Will the court reporter please read back that last answer?” I said.

As the reporter was reviewing the tape spit out by her stenographic machine, Cutlip spoke up.

“Maybe I want a lawyer,” he said.

“One moment, Mr. Cutlip,” said the judge as she waited for the court reporter.

The court reporter read from her tape in a halting monotone. “Question: ‘And by accident by tragic mistake the killer you sent your man Bobo ended up murdering Hailey Prouix instead.’ Answer: ‘Whatever Bobo done I had nothing to do with.’”

“I ain’t saying nothing no more without a lawyer,” said Cutlip.

“You are refusing to answer any more questions?” said the judge.

“I want a lawyer. I got rights. I’m asking for a lawyer. I’m not saying nothing no more without a lawyer. Do I get a lawyer or not?”

“We’ll see, Mr. Cutlip,” said the judge. “We will see. This court is in recess. Bailiff, keep an eye on Mr. Cutlip and see that he does not leave the courtroom. Counsel, in my chambers. Now.”

51

“IMAGINE,” SAID Judge Tifaro, leaning back in the chair behind her desk, sucking on the earpiece of her reading glasses, “all this from a failure to agree on a stipulation.”

“We were set up,” said Troy Jefferson.

“Yes, you were, Mr. Jefferson. And I must say, Mr. Carl, it was far easier to believe you were screwing up royally out of sheer incompetence than to believe you cleverly arranged everything so you could grill this Mr. Cutlip on the stand.”

“Thank you,” I said, “I think.”

The judge shook her head with a disgusted admiration. The two sides had fully assembled in the judge’s chambers, not a wood-paneled old-school type of place but, instead, a soft, pleasant room filled with country French furnishings. Beth sat with me. Along with Troy Jefferson and his other lawyers were the tag team of Breger and Stone. The court reporter had set up her machine just to the left of the judge and was taking down every word for posterity.

“Do you have any more questions for this witness?” said the judge.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you think you’ll get any more answers?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I am going to appoint a lawyer to represent Mr. Cutlip, and my expectation is that he will be advised to say nothing more and will follow that advice. So what do we do now?”

“Put him back on the stand,” I said. “Let me ask the questions and let him plead the Fifth in front of the jury. That’s what we ask.”

“Of course you do. Mr. Jefferson?”

“We are asking instead,” said Troy Jefferson, “on the record, that Cutlip’s entire testimony be stricken.”

“He was your witness, Mr. Jefferson.”

Jefferson turned and frowned at Breger. “Yes, he was, but you repeatedly ignored our objections and allowed Mr. Carl to run roughshod over the rules of evidence while dredging up a death and unsavory happenings of fifteen years ago that have nothing, nothing to do with the present case. Reading letters into evidence without proper foundation; using the threat of extrinsic testimony to badger the witness into all manner of confession, even knowing such extrinsic testimony to be not admissible; using a comparison of scrawl marks sixteen years apart to authenticate documents – all of this is contrary to the spirit and letter of the rules of evidence. With all due respect, you were wrong to permit it over our objections, Judge. Allowing in this inflammatory and irrelevant testimony was hugely prejudicial to our case. The testimony should be stricken and the jury instructed to ignore everything they heard.”

“I don’t think that would be possible, do you, Mr. Jefferson?”

“Then we ask for a mistrial. A mistrial based on misconduct on the part of the defense so that jeopardy does not attach and we can try this sucker again.”

The judge turned to me. “Mr. Carl?”

“If the question of the trial is who killed Hailey Prouix, then I could hardly imagine any testimony more relevant, Your Honor.”

“Testimony about abuse of the victim a decade and a half ago at the hands of this witness?” said Jefferson.

“Yes.”

“Testimony about the death of that boy in that quarry?” said Jefferson.

“Absolutely.”

“It all seems rather distant, Mr. Carl,” said the judge.

“Exactly, Your Honor,” said Jefferson.

“Still, Mr. Jefferson, the question of relevancy is solely a question of whether the evidence makes some fact of consequence more or less likely to have occurred. Do you think that the testimony of Mr. Cutlip has no bearing on the question of whether it was the defendant who killed Miss Prouix?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Really. The testimony raised no doubts?”

“Not reasonable doubts, Judge. And as to the question of prejudice-”

“The question is not prejudice, Mr. Jefferson, but unfair prejudice. My guess, Mr. Carl, is that your new theory is that Mr. Cutlip, out of fear of Mr. Forrest’s complaints regarding the money, and with the added spur of jealousy, sent… Bobo, is it?”

“Yes, Judge.”

“Sent Bobo to kill Guy Forrest and that Bobo, by mistake, because of the low light and the comforter covering the whole of the victim’s body, killed Hailey Prouix instead. Will that be your theory in closing?”

“Yes, Judge.”

“What about the mysterious lover?” sneered Jefferson.

“A minor detail wrong,” I said.

“I find there is sufficient evidence to support that argument,” said the judge. “I also find the testimony of Mr. Cutlip relevant to the new defense theory and, though certainly prejudicial to your case against the defendant, not unfairly prejudicial in any way. I also find that a sufficient foundation was laid for the introduction of the letters read into testimony, foundation based on the testimony of the prosecution’s own witness. My only question, Mr. Jefferson, is why aren’t you bringing this Bobo in for questioning right now?”

“We’re looking for him, Judge,” said Detective Breger. “He has apparently disappeared from his home in Henderson. The Nevada police have put an APB out on his car.”

“The white Camaro.”

“Yes, Judge. The white Camaro.”

“If you want a warrant to bring him in, I’ll sign it.”

Just then there was a knock on the door, and the judge’s secretary poked her head into the office. “There’s a phone call for Miss Derringer.”

“Excuse me,” said Beth as she stood. We all watched as she left the office.

“Telemarketers,” I said. A soft spurt of nervous laughter died at the judge’s impatience.

“Mr. Jefferson, my expectation is that you will immediately put this witness into police custody and inform the proper officials from the state of West Virginia of what happened in court today. At the same time I will have an attorney appointed for his benefit. I will not, however, put this witness back on the stand simply to plead his Fifth Amendment privilege. That would be unfairly prejudicial. I suppose we’ll have to wait to see exactly what his new lawyer advises before continuing. Now, Mr. Jefferson, one more question.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you really think, after hearing what they heard, the jury will convict Mr. Forrest of murder?”

“The evidence against Mr. Forrest remains very strong.”

“You think so, do you?”

“He was the only one in the house, it was his gun, his fingerprints are on the gun, there is a strong monetary motive-”

“Yes, yes, yes, but what about Mr. Cutlip’s admissions?”

“I believe that Mr. Carl is a skilled attorney, practiced in the arts of deception and trickery, who was able to badger and twist an old man to say pretty much anything he wanted the man to say.”

“Thank you,” I said, “I think.”

“Maybe your opinion of Mr. Carl’s skills is higher than mine,” said the judge, “but I don’t think that old man said anything he didn’t want to say. You haven’t yet closed, your case is still not complete, and Mr. Carl here can always screw things up, I have no doubt, but you understand that a certain threshold has to be met before I can even allow a case to go to the jury.”

“I understand the law, Your Honor. We believe we have already met that threshold.”

“I suppose you’ll find out for certain when the defense makes its motion at the close of your case.”

The door opened, and Beth came back into the chambers, but instead of returning to her chair, she stood at the door. “Can I see you for a moment, Victor?” she said.

Judge Tifaro nodded. I stood and walked to her and leaned over, letting her whisper in my ear as all watched.

“Judge,” I said, “could you excuse us? Something has turned up to which we need to immediately attend. Mr. Jefferson and the detectives will want to come along, too. It might be better if we just recess everything until tomorrow morning.”

“What is it, Counselor? What have you found?”

“Bobo.”

52

THE SEABRIGHT Motel squatted on a desolate commercial section of Route 1 leading to the Delaware shore, surrounded by outlet centers and strip malls. The exhaust and sound from six lanes of traffic covered the two-story cement block like a fulsome blanket. The only sign of the bright sea still twenty miles away was the aqua painting above the lit neon VACANCY. It was a weekday and summer was over and most of the spaces in front of the building were empty. Those cars still parked were battered and old, their shocks sagging from the weight of sad, rambling stories. Except for the white Camaro in the corner, the white Camaro with the silver Nevada plates and the right side dented in all to hell.

Bobo had fallen back into motel land, and he had fallen back hard.

We came down in a caravan: a black unmarked van, carrying Beth and me, Jefferson, one of his assistants, Breger and Stone, followed by two Delaware State Police cars we had teamed up with in Dover, their lights off and their sirens silent.

Slowly we passed the motel and then parked in the lot of a huge discount store next door to the SeaBright. The six of us, along with four uniformed state troopers, congregated at the edge of the high chain-link fence separating the two properties. Two of the troopers held shotguns at the ready.

“So what do we do now?” said Troy Jefferson. “Has the Delaware judge signed that warrant?”

“Not yet,” said one of the troopers. “They’ll radio us when he does.”

“You want us to go in anyway?” said another of the troopers. “We can knock and ask if he wants to talk.”

“He’s probably jumpy as it is,” said Breger. “I don’t think the sight of four uniforms is going to calm him any.”

“Let me wander over and see if he’s still there,” I said. “He spots me, I’m just a guy in a suit. My man’s waiting for me on the other side of the fence. Once we know the situation, we’ll be better able to figure something out.”

“Just find out where he is,” said Jefferson, “and where we can all stand unobserved, and then come right back.”

“Fine.”

“Don’t be a cowboy,” said Stone.

“No threat of that,” I said. “I’m too smarmy to try anything brave.” I winked at her before I skulked around the fence to the corner of the motel’s lot.

In the shadow of a large sign advertising a mini-golf just a bit farther down the strip, I found Skink waiting for me. He was wearing his brown suit and fedora, leaning against the sign pole, tossing something up and down in his hand, looking every inch the insouciant private dick out of a different era.

“I finally figured out where you find your wardrobe tips,” I said as I eyed his getup. “From the colorized versions of old detective movies on TNT.”

“You took your time showing up.”

“Just a little distraction called a murder trial. He still here?”

“Yes he is.”

“We’re lucky he didn’t leave.”

“Yes we are,” he said. And then I noticed that the thing he was tossing up and down in his hand was a spark plug.

“How’d you find him?”

“Outgoing call from the DoubleTree this morning.”

“Did he make you?”

“Nah. He wasn’t here when I first showed up, gave me a fright, it did. But then he came roaring back into the lot with a bag of McDonald’s and a bag of booze. He’s up on the second floor, two-oh-nine, emptying them both. I don’t know which bag will kill him first.”

“Why is he here of all places?”

“Had to go somewheres, didn’t he? But he grew up only a few miles down the road. Might still have pals around to help him out while he waits for it all to blow over.”

“Two-oh-nine?”

“The room above the car.”

The door was closed, the window was curtained, the room looked dead. And inside was the man who had murdered Hailey Prouix.

“Cutlip almost confessed to everything on the stand today,” I told Skink while I stared up at the room. “Killing Jesse Sterrett, his abuse of Hailey, even her murder. Almost.”

“Who’d he blame?” said Skink.

“He said the Sterrett boy asked for it and Hailey seduced him.”

“Bugger all. We ought to tell Mr. Sterrett when we gets a chance.”

“I’ll drive you back down if you want, let you meet up with your old pals Fire and Brimstone.”

“Maybe we’ll call.”

“You know what his last words were before he finally took the Fifth and refused to answer anything more? He said, ‘Whatever Bobo done, I had nothing to do with.’”

“Loyal bastard, isn’t he?”

“How’d you ever get hooked up with him in the first place?”

“He found me,” said Skink. “Hailey left him my name in case of trouble.”

“There are four cops with shotguns behind that fence. I want you to hold on here while I head up to Bobo’s room. As soon as I get to the door, go over and tell everyone waiting on the other side where I am.”

“Are you sure you want to go alone? You don’t want me along, or one of the cops?”

“I don’t know how he’ll react to a crowd, and I don’t need anybody reading him his rights either. I see trouble, I see a gun, I’ll disappear and let our cops shoot the bastard to bits. But right now it’s better all around if it’s just me that goes up. Tell those clowns in the uniforms that they can bring their cars into this lot and put on the lights and cock their shotguns if they want. It won’t hurt if Bobo sees them out there once I’m inside. But under no circumstances are they to rush the stairs and start firing. If they spook him, there’s no figuring what he’ll do. Can you manage all that?”

“I’ll try.”

I patted Skink on the shoulder. “You did great.”

“I always does great.”

I returned his gap-toothed smile. We had a moment, one of those touching no-touch male moments, a glance, a nod, an urge to hug stifled. Who would ever have expected that I’d have to stifle an urge to hug Skink? To strangle his ropy neck maybe, but not to hug him. We had our moment, and then I headed off for Bobo.

The stairs were outside the building, at the end opposite Bobo’s room. I strode quickly through the lot and around the tiny fenced-in swimming pool to reach them. I must have looked a sight, a man in a blue suit hurrying across the asphalt, his gaze steady on a second-floor window as he moved, but I reached the steps without so much as a twitch of that curtain. Slowly I climbed, stepping softly so that my footfalls barely registered on the metal stairway, and then, carefully, my back to the brick, I made my way along the portico to the corner room.

I stooped down below the level of the peephole as I passed the door to Room 209. His door. Something tickled my neck as I passed it. I reached out a hand and brushed the door with my fingertips. It was hot, sizzling, as if there was a strange, evil fire raging inside.

Past the door, I squatted at the window. Between the curtain and the sill closest to the door was a slight opening. Carefully I placed an eye at the opening and gazed inside.

It was a small, filthy room. My view was tightly constricted, but still I could see the bed unmade, the floor littered with fast-food wrappers, emptied beer cans, the crumpled cellophane of cookie packs and potato chip bags. A flickering blue light filled the room with an uneven glow, a television light, but I heard no sound over the incessant roar of the highway. And strangely, even as I could see the action of the screen play on the scuffed block walls, there was something else, some other change in the light, as if something was moving, circling, spinning between the light source and the wall.

And then that thing moved, circled, spun into view, and my breath caught in my throat like flesh on barbed wire.

Bobo, ghostly thin, pale, in jeans but shirtless, one hand gripping the neck of a bottle, the other the butt of a gun, his lank blond hair spinning around his face as he slowly danced in loose circles to a music I couldn’t hear. Bobo. Circling ’round and ’round. Like a moth ’round a flame. Circling. But it wasn’t the mere sight of him circling like a moth that caught my breath, or the sight of his gun either.

When I had seen him in Nevada, his hands and arms had been scratched and scabbed as if infested with colonies of vile insects, but now it was as if the infestation had moved in marauding armies beneath his skin to cover the whole of his body. The entirety of his arms, his shoulders, his neck, his back as far as could be reached with his nails, on all of it the skin was ripped and flayed, raw, the wounds open and wet, oozing, the blood and pus running in narrow streaks from wound to wound.

It was as if Bobo, for some reason, for some reason that I could very well imagine, Bobo was trying to tear himself apart.

There is always a moment of shock when we catch a raw glimpse of another’s utter humanity. We don’t want to see it, we don’t want to gaze beyond the surface of this clerk, of that cop, of that acquaintance, of that murderer, we don’t want to be confronted with the deeper truth. But when we are, when against all our best efforts it is pressed into our consciousness, it never fails to shock us or to change us. And the shock is even greater when in our arrogance we believed that our understanding had reached beyond the mysteries of the other’s soul. Here, now, peering through that crack between the curtain and the sill, seeing the wet wounds of Dwayne Joseph Bohannon’s self-flayed skin, his suppurating hair shirt of septic gouges, I received such a shock. He was a cruel tool, stupid and violent, someone who had found his level with Lawrence Cutlip, that was what I knew for sure before I climbed those motel stairs, and there was an undeniable truth in all of it. But having made that climb, I saw a side I had never before considered. All the failures of his life, the disappointments, the desertions, everything he ever wanted and had been refused, everything he had never wanted but had gotten stuffed down his throat, the boy he had been and the man he had become, the entire breadth of his sorrow was written there on his flesh as if in a script of blood. I read it all, and like some great biblical passage it reached into my soul, and something changed, something changed, something dark went out of me.

I turned from the window. It was too much to bear, but the change had happened just that quickly.

The police cars were already in the parking lot, the officers crouched behind them, shotguns at the ready. Breger and Stone and Troy Jefferson were standing in a clot of law enforcement behind the crouching uniforms. And standing together, still farther behind, was my brain trust, Beth and Skink. And each of them, every one of them, was staring at me, wondering what the hell I was doing up there. I had planned on retreating if I saw a gun, I had planned on running and letting it play out as I knew it would. There would be a knock, an order, a demand. There would a shot fired and then another and then a fusillade that would rip Dwayne Joseph Bohannon apart. He would be ripped apart and would disappear from the earth as surely as if he had fallen into one of Roylynn’s black holes, another of Cutlip’s victims. It would play out just like that, except I couldn’t let it play out just like that anymore, not after the glimpse I had caught of that boy’s inner torment. The inevitable gunplay at the end was not inevitable.

I glanced back at the force arrayed in the parking lot and then knocked on the door.

“Dwayne,” I said through the metal door, hot, I now knew, not from his evil but from the sun. I was standing in the gap between the window and the door, protected, I hoped, from anything fired from the room. “It’s Victor Carl. We met in Henderson. You ran me off the road, tried to kill me. We need to talk.”

No answer.

I knocked again. “Dwayne. It’s no use. The police are already here. But I can help. I forgive you for what you tried to do to me. I’m here to help you.”

I pressed myself against the wall and waited for the curtain to be pulled aside. It was.

A voice came muffled from behind the door. “I have a gun. Tell them I have a gun.”

“They have bazookas, Dwayne.”

“Really?”

“Let me in. I’m a lawyer. I can help you. I want to help you.”

There was a long moment when I heard nothing, nothing, before, slowly, the door opened a sliver and then a sliver more, until the chain was taut. Dwayne Joseph Bohannon stood in the doorway, the gun in his hand, his face in shadow, a dirty tee shirt, stained with his blood, hiding the most hideous of his wounds.

“Thank you,” I said.

He leaned forward. The light hit his face. I had to look away.

“Will you let me in?” I said.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Let me in and we’ll figure it out together.”

There was a hesitation, and then the door closed for an moment before opening wider. I reached into my pocket, turned off the tape recorder, stepped inside.

Ninety minutes later I walked out that door with Dwayne Joseph Bohannon by my side. He was wearing a clean shirt, a jacket, his arms were outstretched in front of him, palms up, fingers open.

He followed me along the portico, down the stairs, past the police cars and the uniforms, all the way to Troy Jefferson, standing between Breger and Stone.

Dwayne glanced at me. His face was hideous, scabbed and scratched, infected and bleeding, but still I smiled and nodded him on. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his jacket.

“I want to tell what happened,” he said in a slow, stuttering voice. “Everything. I want to tell. I do. I want to. But first, Mr. Carl here, he told me I need a doctor. A skin doctor. To stop this itching. I’m itching like crazy. I need a doctor. Then I need a lawyer. A different lawyer than him. He told me I have the right and that I ain’t gonna say nothing until I do.”

Troy Jefferson just stared at him.

“Oh, yeah,” said Dwayne, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and handing it to Jefferson. “Mr. Carl, he also gave me this.”

53

“YOU WERE in there for an hour and a half,” said Troy Jefferson as he looked over the subpoena I had served on Dwayne Joseph Bohannon. Bohannon himself had been cuffed and placed, into the back of one of the patrol cars while the cops searched the motel room. “Have a nice conversation?”

“It was hard to go deep, you calling up to the room every ten minutes or so, though I was touched at your concern for my welfare.”

“The Delaware cops were nervous. They didn’t know you could sleaze yourself out of tighter spots than that.”

“Practiced as I am in the arts of deception and trickery.”

“There you go. Did he tell you anything?”

“No, not really.”

“You mean he didn’t fall down on his knees and confess to the Hailey Prouix murder?”

“I wouldn’t let him.”

Jefferson’s head jerked up. “You wouldn’t let him? What the hell do you mean, you wouldn’t let him?”

“You know how it is, Troy. Defense attorneys never want to know for sure.”

“But you’re not his defense attorney.”

“Old habits die hard.”

“If he had actually confessed, it would have saved your client.”

“My client is already saved.”

“Don’t be so damn sure.”

“You heard the judge. After Cutlip’s testimony she has doubts whether the case should even go to the jury. What happens now if I put Bobo on the stand during the defense case and ask him if he killed Hailey Prouix? He’ll plead the Fifth in front of the jury and kill your case.”

“The judge won’t allow that.”

“Oh, yes she will. It’s an acquittal, probably before the case goes to the jury. And rightly so, considering you have the wrong guy. Cutlip sent Bobo east to kill Guy Forrest and the kid screwed up. My client was the intended victim, not a perpetrator. You have the wrong man, Troy.”

“You set me up.”

“Maybe I did, and if I did, I must admit, it felt fine.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“But, Troy, no one else has to know about it. The press is going to want a statement from both of us after this. Either you can go in front of the massed media and admit to being played for the rube, or you can stand side by side with Detectives Breger and Stone and announce that your office had broken the case wide open and found the two actual killers of Hailey Prouix.”

He turned his head and stared at me without saying a word.

“If your office wanted to take credit for continuing the investigation even after the indictment,” I said, “for unearthing the crucial speeding ticket, for bringing Lawrence Cutlip into the jurisdiction and effecting the arrest of Dwayne Joseph Bohannon in cooperation with the Delaware State Police, I wouldn’t contradict a single word.”

“You’d sit back and let us bask in the glory?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I’m a sweetheart, and because all I want is for it to be over. But you have to decide quickly. Guy shouldn’t spend another day in jail.”

“What about the Juan Gonzalez fraud?”

“Time served, no more. He’s through as a lawyer, and he’s paid enough penance for burying that file, trust me. Time served, no probation, he’s free to start his life over again.”

Jefferson twisted his mouth into thought. “I’ll run it by the DA. He agrees, we’ll do it all tomorrow morning in court. Your boy will be out by noon.”

“Good. And you ought to give Breger a commendation for his work in this case. In fact, the old man’s probably close to retirement. A raise in grade might raise his pension, too, make those golden years a little more golden.”

“He doesn’t like to be called the old man.”

“Best as I can tell, he doesn’t like a lot of things.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“But for everything to go down like we’ve agreed, you have to promise me one more favor.”

“Aw, now, here it comes, here’s the payoff. All right, Carl, let me hear it. What’s your price?”

“You need to show pity on Bohannon.”

“Come again?”

“He’s a screwed-up kid who fell in with someone truly evil and lost himself in the process. Cutlip bent him to his will and, in so doing, destroyed him. I’m not saying he shouldn’t pay for what he did, but he was just a tool that Cutlip used and tossed away without a backward glance. Bohannon was going to scratch himself to death out of guilt if we hadn’t shown up when we did. Give him a deal and take your venom out on Cutlip.”

The cops came out of the room waving a plastic bag with the gun inside. It had been sitting atop the bed, just where Dwayne and I had left it for them to find.

“I’ll think on it,” Jefferson said before leaving me to talk it over with the ranking uniform. It wasn’t hard to figure what would happen next. They would take Dwayne now to Dover and charge him with a firearms violation. They would take him to Dover, but he wouldn’t be in Dover long. Jefferson would extradite him to Pennsylvania, where he would be assigned a lawyer who would make a deal in exchange for his testimony against Lawrence Cutlip. I didn’t know how long he’d get, it would be a lot, and all of it deserved, but he would get some kind of a deal, and the Delaware firearms charge would undoubtedly run concurrently. He’d spend part of his life outside the prison walls, and that didn’t bother me one bit. It was funny how at the start of the case I had wanted nothing but the harshest vengeance visited upon the man who shot Hailey Prouix through the heart, and now I had done what I could to make sure the law went as easy as possible on her killer. But I had seen the writing on his skin.

“You don’t look very happy,” said Detective Breger, coming up from behind me. “You should be dancing.”

“I’m jitterbugging. Doesn’t it show?”

“It looks like you ate one fried oyster too many. But you had quite the day, finding Bobo and, before that, breaking Cutlip like you did.”

“I didn’t break Cutlip.”

“Sure you did.”

“No, Detective. He wanted us to know about him and Hailey. He was proud of it. As soon as he found out she had been keeping his letter with the others, that she never stopped loving him for some twisted reason, he wanted us to know. All I did was let him. The hemming and hawing, the tears, the hesitancy, it was an act, and I was his straight man, but he wanted to crow.”

“He pretty much confessed to murder on the stand.”

“That was the price for his bragging rights. I’ll bet right now that bastard is smiling. I’ll bet right now he’s talking about her to his fellow inmates. How supple she was, how fine she was. How she was the sweetest twelve-year-old ever to sashay down a junior high corridor.”

“Stop it. You’re beating yourself up over something you weren’t even in the same state to stop. All you did was clean up the resulting mess. You have nothing to be sick over, you did swell.”

“I don’t feel swell, I feel dirty.”

“Guys like that, even locking them up makes you want to take a shower.”

I kicked at the cement.

“You did well, son,” said Breger.

“Are you turning sweet on me, Detective?”

“No. In my book you’re still an obnoxious punk. By the way, we need you to sign off and let us examine those phone logs.”

“What?”

“The phone logs. To your home phone. We still want them.”

“No you don’t.”

“Really, we do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes, yes we do. We need to tie up all the loose ends. That was the deal.”

“You don’t want those phone logs, trust me. Jefferson will make an offer, Bobo will confess, both he and Cutlip will end up in prison. Put them away, swallow the key to Cutlip’s cell, and end it.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“No phone logs.”

“All along I’ve been right.”

“The case is over, our deal is null and void.”

“The thing that puzzles me, Victor, is how in the hell you thought you’d get away with it.”

“But I did, didn’t I.”

He stared at me for a moment, his strange gaze playing across my face, and then he burst out in laughter, a deep, bellowing laughter, the first I’d ever heard from him. He burst out in laughter and slammed me in the back. “Maybe you did at that,” he said, walking away, and then he burst into laughter again.

I walked over to Beth and Skink, who were standing together in a corner of the lot.

“What went on in there?” said Beth. “We were scared out of our skulls for you.”

“It’s over. The case is over. Jefferson has to okay it with his boss, but it looks like Guy’s getting out tomorrow.”

“You were up there for an hour and a half.”

“It seemed longer,” I said.

“Did he do it?” said Skink.

“I wouldn’t let him tell me, but, yeah. He did it.”

“What went on in that room for an hour and a half?” said Beth.

“I had some questions, and he answered them, and that was it.”

“You don’t want to talk about it.”

“No I don’t. Ever. Never. But I’ll tell you this: What he told me will haunt my dreams to the day I die. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We turned away from the scene at the motel, the three of us turned away and started heading down the road, our shadows marching before us like soldiers.

“There’s a crab shack on the bay what I know of,” said Skink, “where they gots them fat and covered with spice. You interested?”

I looked at Beth. She shrugged.

“They serve beer?” I said.

“Longnecks, mate.”

“Music?”

“A jukebox from heaven. Nothing from after 1967. Five plays a buck.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.

So that’s what we did, the three of us. Skink drove us down to some red-painted shack on the bay with brown paper on the tables, where we pounded on the hard shells with our hammers and ate till our fingers bled. Skink lit a cigar and told us stories, Beth cracked jokes, I drank beer enough so the sea shifted and the land heaved and the sun dropped low over the water. It was a night of celebration and camaraderie, of noisy arguments with the blowhards at the next table, of sadness and hilarity, of Skink baring his teeth in laughter. Elvis was on the jukebox, and so was Louis Armstrong, blowing the blues, and by the end the brown paper was covered with bits of red shell and long-necked bottles, cobs shorn of corn, a cigar butt, all in an evocative pattern that would have made Joseph Cornell proud. It was a lovely evening, proof that life could be more than the sordid adventure we had just passed through, a lovely evening, perfect enough to almost make me forget.

Almost.

54

I AWOKE with a start from my sleep. I sat up on the living room couch, scratched, looked around. In the dim city light slipping through the slats of my shade, the apartment looked old and hard, lonely. I had been there too long to be objective enough to figure what it said about my life, but somehow, now, it seemed lonelier than it should.

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

Guy had done it again, left me like a thief in the middle of the night. This time I didn’t scour the apartment frantically for him, this time I didn’t desperately work out where he was headed. This time I knew. I rinsed my face in cold water, I put on a pair of jeans and a white tee shirt, my raincoat, took a six of Rolling Rock out of my fridge, and headed out after him.

He had just been released and didn’t know yet where he wanted to go, so I had volunteered my place for a few nights while he decided. He was through as a lawyer, his felony conviction on fraud would see to that, and his marriage was broken, though not irretrievably, as Leila remained forever stalwart. There were more questions than answers in his future, which might have been the best thing he had going for him. But he seemed dazed when he stepped out of the prison, justifiably confused and angry, having been accused of murdering his lover and forced to defend himself without ever yet having been given the opportunity to mourn. He just needed time, he told Leila, who was standing outside the prison yard with me, and I assumed that after having spent six months sleeping on a prison cot, he needed a full-size bed, too. Which is why I was sleeping on the couch when I awoke with a start to discover him gone.

The houses all along the fine suburban street where I found him were well lit, all but one. Their outside lamps were shining, and within the ambit of those lights families were sleeping, parents were holding one another, kids were snug in their beds, all asleep, all preparing for the next day of their lovely lives. Work, school, friends, family, good food, fast food, noisy triumphs, quiet defeats, hope, hope. Life was waiting for those asleep in the confines of those houses, all but one.

Hailey Prouix’s house was dark as death.

Guy Forrest sat on the steps in front of her house, the same step, in fact, on which I found him the night of Hailey Prouix’s murder. I didn’t say a word as I walked up, sat down beside him, twisted a beer free from its plastic noose. He didn’t say a word when he took it, just gave me a glance like he had been expecting me. I took a beer for myself. Two soft exhalations as we popped the tops. We sat there together on the steps and quietly drank.

Her house had been scrubbed of blood, and scrubbed again, and still it lay fallow. But not for long. With the trial now over, a sign would soon sprout on its lawn and a lockbox with a key would blossom from the knob of its front door. Realtors would drive their Lexuses to the curb and bring their clients in for a look. The first few might come with a morbid interest, getting a glimpse for themselves of where the mattress lay on the floor, where the woman lay on the mattress, from where the shots were fired. But then the curiosity seekers would disappear and the young couples would arrive. They’d hear the whispers and smile, knowing that an unsavory past would lower the price. One of those couples would discuss it long and hard and then make a lowball offer that would be quickly accepted. After closing, the couple would scrub it down for the umpteenth time, strip the floors, paint, lay wall-to-wall and buy a big sleigh bed for the master bedroom where they’d make love with the wild freedom allowed young marrieds with no children to knock late at night on their bedroom door. Later they’d paint the second bedroom a sweet powder blue, buy a crib, set up a black-and-white mobile to catch their new baby’s attention. They’d bring the bundle home and spend their nights pacing the upstairs hallway in a vain attempt to get the baby to sleep, and in their love and exhaustion the warmth of family would fill the house and scrub away the blood far more efficiently than the toughest wire brush or harshest chemical cleanser.

But all that awaited still in the future. Now, as Guy and I sat on the steps, Hailey Prouix’s house was dark, dark as death, and for that I think we both were grateful.

“I dream about her,” he said softly, finally, after a long silence. “I dream I’m holding her, I’m kissing her, I’m making love to her. Sometimes in the middle of the night I smell her in the air, and my heart leaps.”

“I know.”

“You do, don’t you, you son of a bitch?”

I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

“Let me have another.”

The scrape of his nail on the metal top, the quick exhalation of the gas. The desperate gulping, as if there were something more than beer in the can.

“What am I going to do?” he said.

“You can stay with me for as long as you need to.”

“And then what?”

“Anything.”

“Or nothing.”

“Guy. You have to move forward.”

“Forward to where?”

“It’s up to you. Remember the old proverb, ‘In crisis there is opportunity.’”

“That’s what you have for me, some old Chinese proverb?”

“I think it was Kennedy who said it, actually.”

“Shut up.”

“But he was indeed speaking of the Chinese word.”

“Just shut up.”

“All right.”

“I thought she would save me, Victor. I thought it would save me. I sacrificed everything I had for love, absolutely everything, my family, my future. It demanded everything, and that’s what I gave it, and I thought then it would save me.”

“Well, there was your problem right there.”

“You don’t believe in love?”

“I suppose I do, like I believe in television, or the interstate highway system, but neither of them is going to save me, and I don’t expect love to either.”

“You’re just being a hard-ass.”

“You abdicated your life to love because that meant you didn’t have to take responsibility for your own failures. You thought this thing you craved would swoop down and save you.”

“It wasn’t a thing.”

“There’s no difference. A big TV. An SUV. Someone new to love. It’s still something outside yourself, so it will never be enough. There is always more to crave, and more and more. That’s the secret, Guy, the terrifying secret. There is nothing big enough to fill the gap. Nothing is coming along to save you. Your only chance is to save yourself.”

“How?”

“Figure it out. Your whole life has been a series of blind reactions. The Wild West life leading to the strictures of law, and marriage leading to abandonment of everything for love. Maybe it’s time to quit reacting. Maybe it’s time to sit down and stop running from where you are and decide instead where it is exactly you want to go.”

“Simple as that, is it?”

“Sure. But whatever it is, I have a pretty good idea it starts with your kids.”

“I love my kids.”

“Then show it. Show them.”

“But that means going back to Leila.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

“I don’t know if I can go back to her, back to that life.”

“Make it new.”

“If you have all the answers, why are you so damn miserable?”

“Faulty execution.”

We both laughed and then sat quietly for a long moment.

“God, but I was happy with her,” he said, his sigh coming like an explosion. “There was a time with Hailey when my happiness was perfect. That’s what I miss, that feeling, still young, free, in love. It was like a drug. How do I get it back? I need to get it back.”

“You don’t listen, do you?”

“Tell me about the sister.”

“Who? Roylynn?”

“Where is she now?”

“West Virginia.”

“Does she look like Hailey?”

“The spitting image.”

“What was it like, seeing her?”

“Strange. Affecting. Sad. False.”

“Maybe I should meet her, talk to her.”

“Why?”

“Just to be considerate. I mean, she lost something, too. I think I should pay my respects. I think I ought to. What do you think?”

“I think you’re pathetic.”

“Maybe. But still, I don’t know. Just to see her. Just to talk. I think I should.”

“She’s in another world, Guy. That bastard damaged them both, and I don’t know who was damaged more, Roylynn in her asylum or Hailey. You have to move forward, you have to find a new life.”

“I want what I had.”

“You forget quickly, don’t you? What you had was dead already.”

“You don’t know that. I’ve been thinking about it. We had problems, yes, but I think we could have worked them through.”

“Your love was a con from the start.”

“Shut up.”

“She seduced you for the money. She seduced you because she knew all along that Juan Gonzalez had a preexisting condition that would have destroyed her case.”

“Shut up, you bastard.”

“Don’t you understand what Cutlip did to her? He hurt her so badly, took something so precious from her, that she never recovered. He put a flaw in her heart. She couldn’t love, not the way you thought she could. It was never there for her, only for you. It was all in your emotions, not hers.”

“You don’t know a damn thing. It was real, and it would have lasted. I wouldn’t have allowed it to disappear. We would have worked it out.”

“Let it go.”

“I don’t want to let it go.”

“Move on.”

“I don’t know how.”

He was right, he didn’t know how. But I knew how for him.

I don’t know if I would have done it without Roylynn. I remembered her, so heartbreakingly beautiful, sitting in the golden glow at her asylum, and I remembered how I felt when I saw her. He would feel it, too, I was certain. If he found her, which wouldn’t be so difficult and which he seemed inclined to do, he would feel it, too. She’s in me, she had said about her sister, she always has been. I can feel her breath in my breath, her touch in my touch. When I look into a mirror, I see two faces. When I speak, I hear two voices. What would happen if he went to Roylynn? What would it draw out of him? Whatever he felt would have nothing to do with the lovely woman with her slim black physics book, but it would be real to Guy, and the damage it could cause was hard to predict. Reverend Henson had told me to leave her be, and though I had ignored him, he was right. She didn’t need to be further haunted by the ghosts of her sister’s past. And neither did Guy.

“Remember our theory, the other-lover theory?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Remember how neatly it worked? The other lover had been given a key for assignations. The other lover had been shown your gun so he knew where it was. It explained all the facts in evidence, how the killer could do what he did.”

“I remember. It was my theory. I almost had to throttle you to get you to argue it. So?”

“So, since we know that Bobo was trying to kill you and instead killed Hailey, how do we explain those facts now?”

“Who cares?”

“There was no break-in, so how did Bobo get a key? There was no evidence of a mad search of the closets, so how did Bobo know where to find the gun? How did Bobo know to climb the stairs in the dark and turn to the left in the dark and find the mattress right there, on the floor, in the dark, the mattress where you would have been sleeping if you had been sleeping? How did Bobo even know where you lived?”

“Cutlip must have known.”

“How? He’d never been to Philly.”

“What are you trying to tell me here, Victor?”

“I’m trying to tell you to think it through.”

“I don’t want to think it through.”

“You want to live your life turned around, wallowing in the past. Fine. Wallow. Think it through.”

“Stop it.”

“Think it through, Guy, and then tell me how true and perfect was the love you had with Hailey Prouix.”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a word.”

“Don’t take my word on it,” I said. “Just think it through.”

The questions I had just asked him were the same questions I had climbed the stairs of the SeaBright Motel to put to Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, and why I had wanted to go in there alone. At first I intended to trick him into a confession. That was why I had brought the tape recorder. But the sight of his gentle circling and self-flayed flesh had changed my plans. It wasn’t a confession anymore I was seeking when I entered that room, but still I had questions that needed answers. I was hoping for some explanation other than the one I had developed, desperate for some innocuous answer that had been eluding me. Instead he showed me a scene different from what I imagined, more painful, more pathetic, more heartbreaking. It chokes me now to even conjure it.

Henderson, Nevada. A private room at the Desert Winds. Cutlip sits in his chair, sitting as tall as his withered frame will allow, staring down. Dwayne stands beside him. And curled on the floor, like a little girl lost, in tears, like a girl facing punishment, curled on the floor is Hailey Prouix. I remember her always so strong, in control, always the master of the situation, so I find this tableau incomprehensible. I had expected to find Hailey the manipulator, the plotter, the Hailey that I knew, but I believed Bobo, every word, and so she is on the floor, in tears, begging. Begging? Begging that he not demand this of her. Begging him to leave her finally alone. But Cutlip isn’t listening, like he’s never listened. You been a bad girl, he tells her, like he’s told her before, hundreds of times before. You done let it climb out of control. And now there’s trouble, and someone need clean up the mess. He’ll take ever thing we have, ever damn thing. But I know how to handle peckerheads like that. You’ve been a bad girl, and once again I need clean up your mess. Like before. For twenty-five years that’s all I done. But this is it, no more after this, I’m too tired, too sick. My love can only stretch so far. No, don’t be going on like that. I always know’d what you needed before, and I know this time, too. Now, you tell Bobo here where he hides that gun you told me about. You tell Bobo what we need know and your daddy’ll take care of it, just like I always done before.

Hailey Prouix.

Even before Bobo confirmed it, I knew in my heart that Hailey was part of the plot to kill Guy. A final sacrifice, a final offering to the destructive love, the Shiva of her emotions, that incomprehensible thing between her and her uncle that warped her and defined her at the same time, one final unspeakable act to end it once and for all.

She was so happy that last day of her life, so relieved. The night before, I was to be her alibi. She had expected to return home and find Guy dead on the mattress. Guy had said she was startled to see him at home, and I’m sure she was, having braced herself for the sight of her bloodied and dead fiancé. And then, assuming that Bobo had backed out of the killing, relief fell upon her like a prayer. Then and there she decided to leave Guy, to do the right way what she was letting Cutlip do the worst way – the troubles, the money, the scandal be damned. That was why she was so happy that last day, why our lovemaking was so joyful and expectant, why the possibilities seemed suddenly so verdant.

And so she had ended it with Guy, that very night, and was lying in bed with a fresh bruise and a fresher future, when she heard the front door of the house open, and she knew, immediately, who it was. Bobo. He hadn’t given up, he had simply gotten the day wrong or, scared off by the traffic ticket, had delayed a day, not thinking it mattered. And now here he was searching for the gun. And now here he was coming toward her step by step. And now the past that she had thought she had shucked forever just the night before was climbing up the stairs.

It is impossible to know what was darting through her mind at that very moment. Sadness, fear, disgust, despair, relief? Was she thinking of her father and the way he deserted her those many years ago by his death? Was she thinking of the dark nights when her uncle crept into her room? Was she thinking of Jesse Sterrett and the way he was murdered and how she protected her uncle while she used her lover’s death to get herself out of Pierce? Was she thinking of me? It is impossible to know what was darting through her mind, but we do know what she did as Bobo approached. She didn’t shout, she didn’t rise and send him away, she didn’t pull Guy from the bathtub to protect her, she didn’t call for the police. What she did instead was lift the comforter high over her head so that Bobo wouldn’t know for sure who was beneath, so that Bobo would think it was the original target, so that Bobo would take the gun and fire into the mattress and end it all.

She wasn’t the first Prouix sister to try to kill herself, but she was the one who succeeded.

There were moments when I had imagined I understood Hailey Prouix, and, to be fair, not all of those moments were in the depths of sex when understanding flows like cheap champagne through the overheated synapses of the brain. There were moments when I felt a deep connection with her, moments when I believed I caught a glimpse of the interiors beneath her lovely shell. There were moments, God help me, when I thought the solution to Hailey’s sadness might just be me.

And now, sitting in the dark on the steps of the house in which she died, sitting beside another of her lovers, all I knew with certainty was how little of her I understood. What is love when it is based on myth, on a false image, on the lies we tell ourselves? What is love when the imagined object of the emotion bears no relation to actuality? Can that even be love at all?

I didn’t have any answers, but by believing I loved her I had convinced myself I understood her, and in so doing I had failed her. If I had the least inkling of what she’d been through, maybe I could have done something, said something, forced something, maybe I could have changed everything. But of course I did not. I had deluded myself that I understood, when in reality I understood nothing.

Nothing.

“Oh, my God,” said Guy in a moan of recognition. He was thinking it through, we were thinking it through, and it would take us both a very long time.