Fatal Flaw (10 page)

“They’ve been here?”

“Two detectives. An athletic woman, who might have been a swimmer herself. She did most of the talking. And another, an older black man, a Detective Breger, I think it was, who spent the whole time pacing the room, snooping into every corner. I’ll give you the same thing I gave them.” She stood, walked to the phone table, wrote down a number. “His name is Herb Stein, a very nice man. We had dinner in a Belgian place by the library that night. The mussel sauce splashed all over his tie. He wiped it spotless with a napkin.”

“Don’t be a snob, Leila, I wear polyester ties myself.”

“Well, then, Victor, you can date him. Or Ted Jenrette, with his nose hairs, or Biff Callender and Chip Cannon. What is it, Victor, with men who keep their nicknames from summer camp? My friends are so eager for me to start a new life, when all I want is my old one back. Not very Buddhist of me I know, but, hell, I was raised Episcopalian.”

“Did you ever think, Leila, that your current love for Guy, being completely unrequited, is as solipsistic a delusion as you said was his love for Hailey?”

“I have an appointment, Victor, that I just can’t miss. May I show you out?”

“I know the way,” I said. “I don’t mean to keep you. Can I ask one more thing?”

She glanced at her watch and nodded.

“What made you think that Hailey had enough money to be worth suing?”

“I just supposed. I guess I supposed wrong. You’ll bring those papers for me to sign.”

“I’ll bring the papers. But can I give you a word of advice, as a friend?”

“No.”

“Be careful what you risk on him, Leila.”

It was the best advice I could give, but she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening. All she wanted was for me to take my truths out of her life so she could pursue a past that had receded into fantasy.

Nostalgia is a fire fueled by failures of memory.

10

DRIVING HOME
through the narrow suburban streets, I wasn’t smelling the freshness of newly mown grass or marveling at the variety of roadside flora blooming with a fertile exuberance, azaleas and dogwoods, cherry blossoms, forsythia. Something blocked the sun of the afternoon from my sight, something turned the brightness into a gray murk that spread out from me in dusky waves. And in the midst of that gloom the memory that had invaded me at Leila’s returned to work its black magic in my consciousness, and this time I didn’t blink it away. This time, as I drove, I let it overwhelm me. I am smelling her perfume and tasting the salt of her shoulder, feeling the striae of rib beneath her breasts. She is in control, pressing her knees against my sides, licking my breast, her dark hair tickling my chest.

“Do you love him?” I ask.

She raises her head just quick enough to answer,”No.”

“Then why are you with him?”

“Must we?”

“Yes.”

“I needed him.”

“And now you’re going to marry him?”

“It’s what he wants. Suck my thumb.”

“No.”

“Just do it.”

“It’s because you don’t want to talk about him, isn’t it?”

She places her thumb in my mouth, scratches my tongue with her nail, fish-jerks my head to the side and bites my neck.

“How can you marry him if you don’t love him?” I ask later. She is facedown now on the bed, her knees beneath her. I am atop her, moving slowly, methodically, waiting for the train to come through and take control. It has become something akin to an addiction, that train, that strange locomotive of primordial emotion that roars through us and speeds us along on its frenzied uncontrollable ride.

“Last thing I ever want to be again is in love,” she says. It is a shocking statement. It stops short my rhythm.

“You’re lying. The whole world wants to be in love.”

“The whole world is wrong.”

“And you know better than the world?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I know.”

“Were you ever?”

“Yes.”

“And it ended badly?”

“Hiroshima.”

“Who was it? The halfback? The philandering partner?”

“It was the wrong man.”

“Maybe all you need is the right man.”

“Shut up, Victor.”

“Maybe all you need—”

“Shut up,” she says as she rolls away with a loud, sucking thwap and I am left dangling stiffly. “I’m done.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, then,” she says, her back now to me as she walks to the bathroom, “don’t let me stop you.”

Before she leaves the apartment, she stands over me as I lay still naked in my bed. She is fully dressed now, panty-hosed and powdered, buttoned up tight, tall in her heels, glasses on, her face holding the stoic impassivity of a suffering soldier. And she tells me something I remembered with utter clarity as I drove away from Leila’s house.

“I’m sleeping with one man,” says Hailey Prouix, her voice an emotionless monotone, “engaged to another, emotionally entrapped with a third, mourning forever a fourth. I have no illusions about the tragic mess of my life. But I tell you, Victor, everything I have become has been forged by a love so fearsome it has seared my soul. Don’t waste your time trying to understand it, because it is mine and it still baffles me, but don’t for a minute think I want anything like that to happen to me again. Only the deranged want to be struck by lightning twice. In the end you’re no different from Guy, you desperately want love while having no idea what it is. You say love and you think something else, you think of affection tinged with desire, you think of friendship, comfort, you think of someone to cuddle while you watch videos, to help you choose your linens, someone to make you the man you hope to be. That’s all fine, nothing wrong with that, but don’t pretend such watered milk to be love. We fuck and I like it, and maybe I like you better than Guy, and maybe if I were free to choose I’d choose you to watch videos with and help me pick out towels for the master bath, but don’t delude yourself that it is love, Victor, because it is not, thank God. If you knew what love was, what it could do, if you really knew, you wouldn’t want it either. In love there is no choice, no freedom, no dignity, no happiness, no joy, nothing but hunger and burn that eats away at the flesh. Who in their right mind would want that? I’d sooner die than go through it again. I’d sooner you shot me through the heart.”

It was not the kind of declaration you forget, Hailey’s confession of the fearsome love that had singed her soul, but it was not the kind of thing you let get in the way of a healthy sexual obsession either. I wanted Hailey and so I played deaf, assuming her hard stance was merely another attempt to deflect my attempts at intimacy. Who knew better than I all the tricks of the trade in keeping emotional distance? Who knew better than I what soft yearnings lay behind the pose of unconcern? But coming back from Leila’s, after Guy’s wife had spoken to me of the secrets she had learned about Hailey and Hailey’s inability to return Guy’s love, I began to wonder if maybe Hailey had been spilling more of the truth than I had realized. In her lawyer’s garb, in her unimpassioned voice, without
the least hint of her cynical smile, maybe she was opening up more than ever I had realized. What had happened in the past, I wondered as I drove through the suburbs and onto the expressway, to wound her so badly? And how did that past intersect with the moment when Guy had aimed his gun and shot her, just as she wished, right through the heart?

11

“SO WHAT
do you think?” said Beth.

I was sitting in my office, remembering Hailey as compulsively as if I were worrying a loose tooth, when Beth strolled in and collapsed into the client chair opposite my desk. A document of some sort was clutched in her hand.

“Think about what?” I said.

“About whether Guy killed Hailey Prouix.”

“It’s not our job to figure that out.”

“I know, I know, I know, but still.” Her eyes widened. “What do you think?”

“I think he’s presumptively innocent,” I snapped, pretending to concentrate on something on my desk. “I think we should leave it at that and not act like amateurs.”

“Don’t get snippy about it, Victor. Are you okay? You look like hell. Maybe you need a break. Maybe you should make a date with that mysterious woman you’ve been seeing.”

My head jerked up and I stared at her, bewildered.”Who?”

“I thought you were in the middle of a big romance, sneaking out of the office in the early afternoons, coming back all bleary-eyed and full of sated smiles. You didn’t say anything, but I could tell.”

My nerves contracted in on themselves as I tried to look calm. I
had, of course, never told Beth about Hailey, I had never told anyone—there were reasons in the middle of our affair and there were stronger reasons now—but how could I not have figured that she had known I was at least seeing someone?

“It ended,” I said. “Badly. She wants to be friends.”

“Oooh, that’s hard.”

“And not even good friends, more like distant acquaintances who, if we happen to see each other in a theater, nod but make no effort to say hello.”

“That’s really hard.”

“Just to be sure, she changed her number. I think she might have even changed her name. Last I heard she was on a tramp steamer to Marrakesh, which is pretty much a distance record to avoid seeing me again.”

Beth laughed, which was what I wanted. Both of our love lives were in perpetual states of ruin and we liked to comfort one another by detailing our most recent disasters. “Didn’t one of your old girlfriends join the Peace Corps?” she said.

“Yeah, but she was assigned to Guatemala, which is at least in this hemisphere.”

“Maybe that’s why you’ve been acting like you’ve been acting,” she said.

“How have I been acting?”

“A little strange, a little mysterious. Doing things no one would expect from you, very un-Victor-like things.”

“Like what?”

“Like taking this case without a retainer.”

“He’s a friend. He said money would be no problem.”

“Is that what he said? And you believed him?”

“I’ve a trusting soul.”

“Right. And Emily Dickinson was a party girl. And then you up and turned the murder weapon over to the detectives.”

“I was obligated,” I said. “I’m an officer of the court and I held material evidence.”

She leaned forward, stared at me as if she had those X-ray spiral glasses they advertise in the back of Archie comics. “And far be it from you ever to mess with your obligations as an officer of the court.”

“Far be it. What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know, Victor. What should I be getting at?”

I shrugged, but my canary in the mine shaft was making like Pavarotti. If she suspected something, she who knew me best, someone else might, too. I had to get a grip, I had to start assuaging suspicions, I had to start now.

“I’m sorry if I was short,” I said, as sweetly as I could. “I’ve been on edge about this case, but I shouldn’t take it out on you. Maybe I think Guy’s really in trouble. Maybe I’m feeling pressure because he’s a friend. Maybe I’m not handling it as well as I should. You want to know whether I think Guy did it? Well, I think his story about the headphones and the Jacuzzi and hearing nothing is well neigh unbelievable.”

“What about the gun? Maybe it was silenced, maybe he couldn’t hear it.”

“The gun was a revolver,” I said. “You can’t silence a revolver. And anyway, the biggest trouble is that nobody else seems to have a motive.”

“What about his wife? Hailey stole her husband. Is there a better motive than that?”

“Well, she was angry, for sure. She was even suing the victim.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but that works against her doing it, doesn’t it? I don’t think you just off the object of your lawsuit. You already have an outlet for your anger, and it makes it hard to collect damages. But there’s more. I just got off the phone with a Herb Stein. He was with Leila on a date the night of the murder, at a place called Cuvée Notre Dame on Green Street.”

“Good mussels.”

“So he said. I don’t think we can pin it on her and, frankly, I don’t know who else, besides Guy, might have been involved enough to want her dead.” I leaned back in my chair, stared at the ceiling. “Except, of course, Guy doesn’t have much of a motive either. It’s the weakest part of the government’s case. The why. Why would he be so angry at her as to shoot her through the heart? As long as they don’t have an answer, Guy has a chance.” I took a quick glance at Beth. “That’s why I advised him to reject
the government’s offer. There is means and opportunity, sure, but you also need motive.”

“Interesting, because the coroner’s report came in while you were out.” She waved the document in her hand. “Bullet through the heart, like we knew, a bruising on her cheek, like we knew, tubes tied, like we could have expected.”

“Really?”

“And there was one thing more, one quite interesting thing more.”

I raised an eyebrow and waited.

“They found traces of semen inside her.”

“No surprise. She was living with Guy.”

“Yes, except that they did preliminary tests on the sample pending DNA typing. It turns out the semen came from a secretor, so they could do a quick determination of blood type. Type A.”

“That’s common enough. What is it, a third of the population?”

“Forty-two percent, according the report. But we don’t care about the general population, we’re not representing the general population, we’re representing Guy. And that’s where it all starts looking hinky. Guy is type B.”

I bathed my face in false surprise.

“She was cheating on him, Victor. There was another man.”

I stared at her, fighting to remain impassive. “Did he know it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose we’ll have to find out.”

“I suppose we will. But, Victor, Hailey
was
cheating on him, that is a fact. He can deny knowing it all he wants, but no one has to believe him. Hailey was cheating on him and there, Victor, on a fine silver salver, is your motive.”

I stared at her, stared at her as the case against my client strengthened immeasurably right before my very eyes, based ironically on my own blood antigens, stared at her as Guy Forrest took three giant steps toward a life sentence, and the whole time I was fighting the urge to smile.