Fatal Flaw (14 page)

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

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

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

“What are you talking about?”

“Your daughter wants him back.”

“Of course she doesn’t.”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t understand.”

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

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

“She really wants him back?”

“As soon as I acquit him.”

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

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

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

17

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

“Speaking metonymically, of course.”

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

“I know,” I said.

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

“I know that, too.”

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

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

“Guy stole the money, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

She stared at me. I refused to stare back.

“You look terrible.”

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

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

“I’ve been staying up late reading.”

“Must be something good.”

“A classic.”

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

“What?”

“Believe he’s innocent?”

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

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

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

“I’d feel lousy about it.”

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

“Yes. I would. That’s the job.”

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

“Sometimes I think it’s rotten.”

“There you go.”

“So you do believe he did it.”

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

“You usually do.”

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

Juan Gonzalez.

IT WAS
like cracking a walnut.

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, God,” he said.

“Leave Him out of it.”

“I didn’t kill her,” he said.

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

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

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

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

18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not anymore,” said the woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She did.

Hailey Prouix.

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t want another drink.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

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

“That’s all we are,” I said.

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

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

“Go home to your children.”

“They’re already in bed.”

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

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

“Then make love to her.”

“When I do, I think of you.”

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

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

“Then hurry home.”

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

She shook her arm free.

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

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

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

IT WAS
Paris after the liberation.

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

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