Fatal Flaw (32 page)

“Thank you, Officer,” I said. “That’s very helpful.”

AND SO
it continued, the trial of Guy Forrest, and so I continued with my witch’s brew of cross-examination to bring to light a gap in time and space big enough for a murderer to walk through. And as I worked, as carefully and methodically as Troy Jefferson, and as that primordial black hole became a presence ever more real, something strange happened that made me wonder if indeed the entire space-time continuum had shifted.

A friend of Hailey’s was testifying, which was strange, because I didn’t know Hailey had any friends, and she was talking about the woman she knew. It wasn’t such a flattering portrait, of a woman materialistic, casually cruel—I use the term “friend’‘ broadly here—but as she spoke, I could detect something slight in the air about me, so slight I almost missed it, something shimmering in the courtroom. I had maybe noticed something before, some small distortion as, bit by bit, the testimony of the neighbors, of the crime-scene officers, of the witnesses who one by one linked together suspect and murderer, began to paint a portrait through their words. But in the testimony of this witness, this friend, it became clearer and clearer, word by word. I looked around to see if anyone else had spotted it, but, no, it had come only for me, with its sharp cheekbones and pursed lips and the sadness in its eyes.

The friend testified at one time to being in Hailey’s office and hearing her speak, over the speakerphone, to a man she didn’t recognize. She had met Guy before, this friend, and so she knew it wasn’t he, but no names were used, and Hailey didn’t tell her who it was. Something about the Stallone matter was all she could get, but she could tell, this friend, that there was something going on between Hailey and the man, something intimate and strong. And, no, they hadn’t been fighting. And, no, there were no intimations of problems. And, no, she couldn’t imagine that the man on the other side of that phone conversation, the way he spoke so sweetly to her, could have been her murderer.

Before she had finished her testimony, I leaned over to Beth and whispered, “Why don’t you take this one.”

Beth was lovely on cross, strong, clear, making it obvious that from the conversation the woman could have no real idea whether the relationship had any future or whether or not the man on the other side of that line might have turned murderous when rejected. In fact, the only thing we could really glean from the conversation was the strong link between the two, a link that could easily have turned wrong. Jefferson had thought the testimony would defuse my theory, when all it did was make the missing lover more mysterious, more threatening, a disembodied voice able to wreak any havoc.

I concentrated as much as I could on the testimony, but as the vision of the specter grew stronger, my mind wandered. It was Hailey, of course, conjured by my alchemy from some strange place to remind me. I had been struggling so hard to save Guy and protect my secret that I had forgotten what had driven me from the start, but here she was, Hailey Prouix, come to keep me to the decision that had been made.

Over the dead body of my lover I had pledged that I would discover the truth behind her murder and that the truth I discovered would be served, whatever the price to be later paid. And what was I doing to learn what had really happened, to learn who had really pulled the trigger and bring that killer to justice? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That realization made me sick to my stomach as the testimony continued and the specter shimmered.

But just then a note was dropped in front of me as if out of the air. Without looking up, I opened it.

WE NEED TO TALK
.

We need to talk. Are there four more frightening words in the English language? For a moment I suspected the message had come from my personal specter, but when I looked up from the note, the spell had been broken and she was gone.

So who was it, who needed to talk with me? I searched around until I found him, looking at me with that strange, bent gaze of his, and I knew without doubt that I was in serious trouble.

Detective Breger, back from Vegas and now in search of the missing lover, wanted to have a chat.

40

IF THIS
had been a first date, there wouldn’t have been a second.

Breger sat next to me at the bar, but he wouldn’t look at me. He seemed uncomfortable, almost embarrassed to be meeting me without his partner, as if he were cheating. We talked a bit about the Eagles, we passed platitudes about politics. It was the kind of conversation bored strangers with real interest in nothing other than their booze suffer through. We were at the bar of a pizza chain out near the big suburban mall, a place that felt as empty of context as the huge shopping park in whose shadow it sat, a place that could have been anywhere in this great land, on the side of any highway, sandwiched between any two fast-food joints, a fine enough place to go only when there’s no place else to be. Breger had suggested this place with its yawning emptiness, a place where no one knew us or cared about what we had to say to one another. Both of us were drinking out of politeness, but neither of us was really paying attention to the beers in our frosted franchise mugs. I was waiting for him to get down to business, he was waiting for something else, though I couldn’t quite tell what.

“What’s up, Detective?” I said finally, when we had talked of the weather about as much as I could stand.

“I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on inside your head.”

“Not too much.”

“So it seems, but still I’m wondering,” he said. “Why do you keep fighting our attempts to examine your phone logs?”

“Attorney-client privilege.”

“I know how you keep us from looking, and the judge has backed you each time we’ve made the request, but I’m asking why.”

“Privilege is like a muscle, Detective. If you don’t exercise it, next time you turn around, it has become withered and weak.”

He gave a quick and dismissive glance at my biceps. “We’re still trying to figure out how Guy called you after he found his fiancée dead.”

“Let’s hope you get to the bottom of that mystery once and for all, save everybody a bit of worry.”

He shook his head, took a sip of his beer. He didn’t like my answer. I didn’t like that he was still asking the question.

“Did you win in Vegas?” he said.

“Vegas?”

“Yeah, Vegas. Did you win or did you leave your money on the craps table?”

I waited a moment, tried to figure how to play it, and then decided to play it straight. Sooner or later the fact of our little trip was bound to come out, and sooner had just stepped through the door. “Some guy I was with thought he had a system.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, but not a good system.”

“Find anything of interest in the safe-deposit box?”

“Safe-deposit box?”

“Hailey Prouix’s box at the Nevada One Bank, Paradise Road branch.”

“Who exactly are you investigating, Detective?”

“And tell me, how did you find West Virginia?”

“Wild and wonderful, just as the ads say.”

“Our office received a call that you were down there asking questions.”

“Yes, well, that’s what lawyers do. We ask questions.”

“But why there?”

“I was getting a little history.”

“And the man you were with down there, this Skink. It seems he also was in Las Vegas.”

“Just an investigator I have working for me.”

“We’d like to speak to him.”

“That wouldn’t be proper, considering he’s covered by the attorney-client privilege, too.”

“I am struggling here, Carl, struggling to figure out your side in all this. Stone doesn’t like you. She thinks you want to ask her out but are afraid, and she’s glad you’re afraid. Saves her from breaking your heart. She says you’re smarmy.”

“Me?”

“Smarmy and weak and definitely hiding something. I don’t like you much either, I’ve decided. I think you’re whiny and manipulative and not half as clever as you think you are, but I don’t really care about all that.”

“Does that mean
you’d
go out with me?”

“Somehow I have the strange sense that you’re looking for the right kind of outcome here. I have a sense, maybe, that you’re as interested as me in finding out what the hell really happened to Hailey Prouix.”

“You don’t think Guy Forrest did it?”

“The evidence points right in his face. But I have to admit that some of what you said in your opening had been on my mind from the start. Like he really was in love with her. Like he never was in it for the money. Like he doesn’t seem the type to end a fight with a bullet. But I’ve already told this to Jefferson, which is as far as my legal obligation goes. It is his decision whether or how to proceed. So it’s not the doubts I’m struggling with. What I’m struggling with is you.”

“You have unresolved feelings and you find them threatening. I understand. It’s perfectly natural, really.”

“You are in this deeper than you let on. You are in this up to your neck, though I can’t quite figure out how. You are in this in ways that give me serious pause and leave me struggling to figure out what to do with something I found.”

“Something exculpatory? If it’s exculpatory, you have to turn it over.
Brady
v.
Maryland
.”

“Now who’s the jerk throwing out cites? But what I have is nothing right now, though I have a sense you might be able to tell me enough to make it more interesting.”

“Tell you what?”

“Let’s start with why you turned over the gun.”

I paused for a moment, wondering what he had found, where he was going, whether or not I could trust him, even with a little bit of the truth. “I thought your possessing the gun,” I said slowly, “might further the ends of justice.”

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“It does, doesn’t it? That’s the way it is with lawyers and politicians both, we can make even the truth sound like lies.”

“What did you find in Vegas?”

“A story.”

“Go ahead.”

“A story about a boy who was killed a decade and a half ago in a little town in West Virginia.”

“Hailey Prouix’s hometown.”

“That’s right. He had fallen in love with Hailey, they had a stormy romance, and then he found out about something. He found out about something, and it made him mad as hell and put him at a crossroads. He was going to either run away with his love, Hailey Prouix, or hurt someone. And there he was, at the quarry on the south side of town, waiting to hear which way it was going to be, when the next thing he somehow falls off a ledge, cracks his head open, and dies in the water that had collected at the quarry’s bottom. The natural suspect was a guy named Grady Pritchett, rich man’s son, big man in high school who had been fighting with our dead boy just a few days before. All eyes turned to him, but he had an alibi, and a pretty convincing one at that. Hailey Prouix. Funny how it worked. And funny how after Hailey stood up for Grady Pritchett she got her college and law school all paid for so she could get the hell out of Pierce once and for all.”

“How come I never heard any of this?”

“You haven’t been asking the right questions.”

“What kind of car does this Grady Pritchett drive?”

“Why?”

“Just asking.”

“Doesn’t drive a car, drives a truck. A big black pickup.”

“Where does he live?”

“Just a few towns down the road from Pierce.”

“And you think this Grady might have come up here and killed that girl?”

“Nope.”

“You think he killed that boy fifteen years ago?”

“Nope.”

“Then what the hell do you think?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t yet figured it out, but there’s something connecting the two deaths. I met up with Hailey’s sister. She’s certifiable, in an actual asylum, treats some pop physics book as her Bible, but I took from her babbling that she, too, thinks the two are related. And if they are, I want to find out how. Believe this, Detective, all I want is for whoever killed Hailey Prouix to go straight to hell.”

“Even if it’s your client?”

“He didn’t do it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“She seduced him for the Gonzalez money. She set him up for it, met him at a bar, let their knees bang accidentally, and seduced him completely and absolutely. He fell stupidly in love and lost his bearings and gave up everything for her. Like I said in my opening, for him it was never about the money, it was about a love that was transforming, or maybe more precisely the hope for a love that was transforming. She set him up for the money, yes, but his hope was real, and he never could have killed that hope. Even when it all turned bad, he closed his eyes and kept it alive, because it was the hope he was chasing more than even her.”

“And obsession couldn’t have turned to violence?”

“Not with him, not with her. See, no matter what happened, he’d always remember the way he felt when their knees banged accidentally at that bar.”

Maybe there was something in my voice that betrayed me, because he turned to stare at me with that wandering gaze of his and he said, “And how did that feel exactly?”

“I’m telling you what I can.”

“Maybe telling only what you can is not enough.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t explain the knocking of the knees and the way it had felt, the confusion and hope and lust all mixed together, I just couldn’t. I would be betraying more than myself, more than Guy, I would be betraying her, too. So instead I decided to say something else, something that would resonate. It is always in times of maximum stress, when all alternatives fail, that lawyers tend to turn to that most unlikely tactic, the truth.

“I saw the body, Detective. I saw her on that mattress with a bullet through her chest. I saw the way her arms were crazily akimbo, I saw the way the blood contrasted with the pale of her skin. I’ve seen a few corpses, not as many as you, but a few, and they never fail to stun me with their abject lifelessness. It’s not like you can just breathe life back into them, it’s not like they’re sleeping, it’s something else, something distorted in a way that haunts the dreams. I can’t just let that go, I can’t just play my minor role and let the rest of you decide how it all gets sorted out. I saw the body, Detective.”

He breathed in quickly through his nose, or was it a snort? I couldn’t tell. He stared straight ahead for a long moment before downing his beer and swiveling away from me. He reached into his jacket and tossed something onto the bar, a dollar or two for the beer, I supposed, and without saying a further word he climbed off his stool and headed out the door, right out the door.

Gone.

A despair flitted over my shoulders in that instant, a despair that filled me with a shocking sense of hopelessness. There was something about Breger I found comforting, something solid. He had shown faith in me, kindness, too, in his way. I admired how fairly he had handled the case, and I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to understand and say that I had done right, that everything would be okay. For some reason, from him, it would sound like the real thing. But he had instead just snorted at me and climbed down and walked away, a gesture that let me know with utter clarity that I had not done right, that everything would not be okay.

I was sitting at the bar, feeling the despair, when I noticed a piece
of paper in front of me. It looked like a bar tab. When I scanned the bar for the money Breger had left, there was nothing else, and I figured Breger had stuck me with the check. But then I looked at the paper more closely and saw that it wasn’t a bill. It was something else.

A speeding ticket issued by the Philadelphia Police.

Left on the bar, for me, by my good friend Detective Breger.

I stared at it for a long moment, the name of the driver, Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, which I didn’t recognize, the make and style of the automobile, the state and number of the license plate, the location of the violation, the date. The date. I stared at it for a moment and then a moment more, and then I took out my phone.

First I called Beth and told her that she would have to handle the next day of the trial all by herself.

“What should I do?” she asked.

“Vamp,” I said. “With all your heart.”

Then I called the airline and made a reservation for two on the first flight out the next morning headed for Charleston, West Virginia.

“Will you be needing a rental car at the airport?” asked the reservation man.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Yes indeed.”