Fatal Flaw (42 page)

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.