Fatal Flaw (43 page)

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.