Fatal Flaw (23 page)

“And you’re not?”

I stared at him, he stared back.

“You’re a piece of work, ain’t you, Vic?” he said. “But you don’t think he did it no more, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Something switched in your head.”

“Like a light turning on.”

“What changed your mind?”

I picked up my wine, stared into the deep crimson before taking a drink. “Hailey changed my mind. I finally learned the whole sad story of her and Guy. She was in control. From the very first, when she met him in that hospital room, to the very last, on the night of her death, when she told him it was over, she was in control. Total control. Guy never had a chance.”

“Not much a one, no.”

“And you helped set him up, didn’t you? Hailey needed to know all about the man defending the Gonzalez case to lay her trap, and you gave her what she needed. And when Guy thought you were threatening her, you were really just giving her little tidbits to help her scheme.”

Skink didn’t answer.

“Well, if she was so much in control, how could she have ever let it happen? How could she have miscalculated so? Unless she didn’t and he didn’t. Tell you what I think, I think he was in thrall to her to the very end. I think he was too whipped to kill her.”

“Or maybe he fooled her like he fooled you. He’s a harder piece of work than he lets on. You should a seen how viciously he cut down the claims of the poor injured wretches what fell in his path. Not an ounce of mercy. He left his wife and kids at the drop of a skirt and stole a million in the process. That bastard is capable of anything. You was right from the first. It was Guy what done it.”

“Nope, it was someone else. And I have a pretty good idea where I need to go to find who.”

“Where’s that?”

“You much interested in history?”

“Julius Caesar?” said Skink. “The bloody fall of the bloody Roman Empire?”

“No, the recent past. Hailey Prouix’s past. I’m taking a trip, and
that’s where I’m headed.” I stared at his ugly mug for a moment, thought of his story and the tenderness behind it, and then said softly, “You coming?”

Skink tilted his head.

“I was looking through what you left me in the briefcase,” I said. “Keepsakes from her past. I have some questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“The usual. An idyllic childhood that might not have been so idyllic. An accidental death that might not have been an accident.”

“And you think all that has something to do with what happened to Hailey?”

“Now that you’re no longer a suspect, maybe I do. That’s what I’m taking the trip to find out. You coming?”

“Where to?”

“Pierce, West Virginia.”

“Her girlhood home.”

“You coming?”

“You won’t find nothing.”

“Sure I won’t.”

“It’s been too long.”

“Far too long.”

“Nobody no more knows nothing.”

“You coming?”

Skink sucked his teeth for a moment. “I charge two-fifty a day.”

“A hundred.”

“Two hundred.”

“One-fifty. Plus expenses.”

“I’ll need a retainer.”

“You got thirty thousand already.”

“Did I?”

“I need to settle a few things first. Take care of Beth, do some trial prep. But then it’s West Virginia ho. You coming?”

He paused a moment, reading my face as if reading the newspaper, and then he broke into a gap-toothed smile as wide as the Mississippi and reached out his hand.

I took it and shook it, but before I let go, I turned it over and checked the knuckles. Rough and hairy, each as ugly as a slag heap,
but no scrapes, no bruises. Still holding on, I said, “How’d you know the safe-deposit key was missing from her house?”

“Private sources.”

“You weren’t the lug in black who beat the hell out of that police technician?”

“Me? Nah, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“You understand if you work for me, your mouth stays shut. Our little secret remains our little secret.”

“Vic, sweetie, if we’re going to be partners, we need to trust each other.”

“I already have a partner,” I said as I finally let go. “And the idea of trusting you is enough to get my stomach roiling.”

“I seem to have that effect on you, don’t I?” said Phil Skink with a laugh. “Don’t worry, Vic, I’ll play it your way, all buttoned up, while you convince yourself that your friend really done it and deserves whatever he gets. Now, take care of the check and we’ll go on up and have ourselves a time. What say I teach you how to play craps?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not to worry, Vic. We’re sporting our lucky jackets. How can we lose? And better than that, I gots myself a system.”

29

I HAD
never imagined, before driving into it, how amazingly beautiful was West Virginia. The steep mountain faces, the slender valleys carved by winding rivers, the roads twisting like snakes, the lovely white churches sitting beyond every bend. When Skink and I dropped south out of the long left arm of Maryland into West Virginia, it was like dropping into the landscape of a purer age. Even the sound track was purer—all we could get on the car radio was gospel stations. There were houses all along the route, some fine, some trailers beautifully maintained, some out-and-out hovels, but all seemed to flow naturally from the contours of the landscape. We followed the main road as it crossed a green metal bridge and twisted low through a fertile valley dotted with livestock and then turned off onto a smaller route that started a slow, inexorable climb into the mountains.

The car struggled until it reached the top of Point Mountain, with its inevitable white church just off the peak, and then fell as the road switched back and forth down, down. After a few minutes, to our left, we could catch glimpses through the leaves of something green and narrow and far beneath us, something that seemed, from that distance, more legendary than real. A valley, busy with farms and houses and lumber mills, isolated and lovely in its crevice in the
western reaches of the Appalachians. We shared the road with pickups and beat old logging trucks as we continued down into the heart of that valley. Here and there, where the map showed a town, were mere scatterings of houses, a church, a lumber mill, clouds of sheep, another lumber mill, a collection of commercial buildings, a food mart, a Laundromat, a Chrysler-Dodge dealership. This was not a wealthy county, and there was the occasional shack, the rusted-out frame of a swing set, the boarded-up store, but still it was undeniably beautiful.

And then the valley widened and the road rose from the tumbling river and we saw a wooden frame, studded with the signs of the Lions Club, of the Kiwanis Club, of the Chamber of Commerce and the VFW and the various and sundry churches. On the frame, beneath the signs, the following words were affixed:

WELCOME TO PIERCE, POPULATION
649.

From the moment of Hailey’s murder I had assumed that Guy, somehow, was at the heart of the story leading to her death. He was my contact in, my secret rival, the third point of our triangle of betrayal, and so I couldn’t conceive of his somehow not being to blame for her murder. But after hearing Guy’s story I suddenly had
a different sense of it all. Guy was a pawn, so was I, and the master strategist was Hailey herself.

So my focus now was where it should have been from the start, on Hailey. The answer to her death lay somewhere in her life, and she had given me a map to its most significant moments. In her safe-deposit box she herself had chosen what I would see. The photographs and documents that she had left for me would be my lever to pry open her past. And included among them were the letters, mash notes typed or scribbled by a boy long dead, words that bristled still with raw emotion.

Along with the letters in the box were the photographs, heartrending because I knew how it all turned out, how but not why. There was a picture of two girls, young girls, just kids, arm in arm, blond in their shifts, frowning both. I could see her face in the picture, Hailey’s face, the cheekbones not yet pronounced, the eyebrows not yet arched, the lips not the full buds they would become, but there it was, her sad face—twice. I knew she had a sister, I never knew she had a twin. Roylynn and Hailey.

I didn’t glimpse the pictures once and quickly, like moving through a friend’s photo album. Instead I thumbed through them often, obsessively, time and time again. It was a strange sensation, this examining of the photographs, unseemly in a way, like pawing through the dresser drawers of some other family’s memories. But they were a part of my route into her past. Roylynn had stayed in
West Virgina and Hailey had left, Roylynn was still alive and Hailey was dead. How had that happened? They had shared each other’s features, but what else, what history? I wondered if the pictures would provide a clue. I stacked them and restacked them, I shuffled them randomly and went through them again, trying to find, in the differing orders, a sense behind them, trying to divine the story.

Here was one, the nuclear family, twin girls, still just babies with their mother and their father, their poor doomed father, short, swarthy, his forearms thick and meaty. What little girl wouldn’t feel safe in those forearms? They were smiling, the parents, in that picture, and the babies had that satisfied contempt on their shapeless faces that marked them as happy. This was the “before” picture. Another, burned into my memory, Hailey dead and bloody on the mattress thirty years later, was the”after.”

A photograph of the father, alone now, in a uniform of some sort with a peaked cap, his truck driver’s uniform. Smiling, cocky, gladiator of the road, master of his destiny, hero of country-and-western song, off to haul his cargo of lumber until a load shifted and a brace failed to hold and he was gone.

Where was the sense in the order?

I shifted them around, and now the father was replaced by another. It was a picture of one of the girls holding the hand of a man, not the father, a tall, rawboned man with a grizzled beard. Oh, I recognized him, yes I did. Lawrence Cutlip, younger and harder, not a man to be messed with for certain, but there, holding on to that girl when she needed him most. Who was the girl, Roylynn or Hailey? I couldn’t tell, but there she stood, the girl in the picture, her father gone, squeezing, as if for dear life, the hand of the man who now was her sole protection against an oblivious world.