Fatal Flaw (7 page)

IT IS
usually me who calls, who tells the receptionist it is Victor Carl to talk about the Sylvester matter. That is our code case, the
Sylvester matter, in honor of her silver-screen hero. It is usually me who calls, so I am surprised when I return from a court appearance to see a message in my box pertaining to the Sylvester matter. When I phone, she speaks to me in a whisper.

“Are you free for lunch?”

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

“When can you shake loose?”

“Now. Where do you want to meet? What are you hungry for?”

“Oh, pick a place, Victor. Any place, any place at all.”

She is waiting for me at the sandwich joint. There are little tables crowded into a long, narrow room, and the tables are filled with men and women talking loudly and stuffing corned beef specials into their mouths, strands of coleslaw hanging from their teeth. She is leaning back in her chair, arms crossed.

“What looks good?” I say as I sit.

“Everything,” she says.

“The corned beef seems to be it.”

“Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“The most wonderful thing,” but her voice is anything but gladdened. “What are we going to do, Victor, you and I?”

“Have lunch?”

“Is that all? Because lately that seems like all.”

“I’ve been following your lead.”

“Well, I’m a lousy dancer.”

“Did something happen between you and Guy?”

“Yes. Something happened.”

Just then the waitress comes to our table, her pad out. “Are you ready?”

“Victor, are you ready?” asks Hailey.

“I don’t know.”

“Can you give us a minute,” says Hailey. The waitress rolls her eyes before rushing off to grab an order in the kitchen.

“I’m not hungry,” she says. “Are you hungry?”

“Not anymore.”

“Then let’s go for a walk.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere you want.”

Outside, it is damp and chill and the temperature brings a rouge to her cheeks. She wears a gray overcoat atop her lawyer’s garb, her hands tucked into the pockets.

“Do you want a drink? You look like you could use a drink. I have some beers in my apartment.”

“Yes,” she says. “Let’s do that.”

“Is it about work?” I ask. “Is it about Guy?”

“Yes.”

“Which?”

“Aren’t you sick of talking? Aren’t you sick to death of talking? The more I talk, the less I know. The words are so fuzzy they turn everything into a lie, and then the lie becomes the new truth and I don’t know anything for certain anymore.”

I begin to say something, some comforting inanity, but the hungry look of tragedy in her eyes stops me midword, and so we walk in quiet through the noontime crowds toward my apartment.

It is a mess, like it is always a mess. I leave her standing in the living room as I gather up the clothes on the coach, the towel on the door, gather them up and dump them all into the hamper in my bathroom. She stands motionless as I work, still in her coat, hands still in her pockets. When it is almost presentable, I stop and look at her standing still in her coat, and the sadness that is always there is pouring out of her. I can see it, a dark blue pouring out of her. She looks at me, and her eyes beneath her glasses are moist, and the blue is pouring out of her, and I am helpless to stop myself from going to her and wrapping my arms about her and squeezing, as if I could squeeze out the sadness.

She feels thin beneath my arms, bones and nothing more. She smells of jasmine and smoke. I tell her it will be all right, even though I don’t know what is troubling her and I suspect it will turn out badly. I tell her it will be all right, and I touch my lips to the top of her head in a brotherly kiss.

“I’m so bad.”

“No you’re not.”

A brotherly kiss to the soft of her temple.

“I am. You don’t know.”

“I know what I need to know.”

A brotherly kiss to the soft ridge beneath her eye, and I taste the salt of a tear.

I pull away. She lifts her face to me. Her eyes are wet, her nose red, her mouth quivering. She is the picture of desolation, and I can’t help myself. I don’t want to help myself. Something has happened between her and Guy and that now is enough for me. I take her biceps in my hands and squeeze, even as I kiss her gently. Even as our lips barely touch. There is no mashing, no gnashing, just the gentlest touch. The gentlest touch. A saving touch, I think, I hope. Our mouths open slightly, the touch of our lips staying just as gentle, and nothing slips between them, no tongue, no moisture, nothing, but not nothing, because there is a commingling of spaces, a creation of something new, and in the enclosure formed between our gently touching mouths I feel an emptiness flowing and growing, hers, mine, ours.

I WANT
it to be slow.

I had fantasized about the two of us together, often, incessantly, it had been my nighttime preoccupation since our first meeting, and it had always been hard, rough, full of laughter and grabbing, she seemed that kind of lover, but in the presence of her overwhelming sadness I want this now to be slow, as gentle as our first kiss.

I brush my lips again upon her temple, upon her cheek, take her lips gently in my teeth. We are naked now, kneeling on the bed, our hands gently brushing each other’s arms, sides, backs, thighs.

She is thinner than ever I thought, so thin and fragile and, without her glasses, so seemingly vulnerable, so in need of protection. And that is what I want to do, to protect her.

The afternoon light slices in through the blinds, her smell of smoke and jasmine is charged by the sharp edge of musk.

I slide closer. I am pressed up against the flat of her belly.

I glide my hand around the contour of her breast. I lift its weight in my palm.

I kiss her shoulder, I kiss the line of jaw, her neck. A tremor rises from her throat and with it a sound soft as a spring drizzle. I kiss
the bone of her clavicle, I kiss the hollow beneath the bone, the first swell of her chest, the soft skin, the excited pink areola. The sound rises, stretches, widens to fill every inch of space.

I want it to be slow, but suddenly there is a presence in the room other than the two of us. A hunger, a need. Something foreign and relentless, primordial, with a rhythm of its own, a breath hot and dank, a power, and I don’t know from whence it came. Is it mine, hers, is it an entity of its own invading our lives? I don’t recognize it, I don’t understand it, I’ve never felt anything like it before, this hunger, this need. It is brutal and violent and immortal, and before I know what has happened, it has taken control.

I want it to be slow, but what I want no longer matters.

And when it is over, she lies on her side, covered in sweat and sheets and I lie behind her, in a shocked silence, sore and uncertain, my arms wrapping her like a stole.

“That was insane,” I say.

“It always is.” There is a twang in her voice, a slight shift west and south into the hillocks of her West Virginia home, as if whatever it was that roared through us took her back into her past.

“No, it was a like freight train was in the room with us.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“So you felt it, too?”

“Shhhhhh.”

“What was it?”

“A vestige.”

My chest is pressed into her back, my hips are pressed into her thighs. She doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t understand what has happened. I hold her tight and feel the sadness and hold her tighter, but with the shift in her accent for a moment I am not certain anymore whom I am holding.

“What was the thing?” I say. “The thing you wanted to tell me about.”

“Nothing important.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing you should worry about. Nothing that affects you.”

I don’t say anything. I hold tight and wait. She wanted to tell me before, she wants to tell me now, so I wait.

“It was last night,” she says. “Guy. We were together in the Jacuzzi. There were candles, rose petals.”

“I don’t want to hear the details.”

“He thought it was romantic. The candles. Like a commercial or something.”

“Really, I don’t want to hear.”

“Then he asked me to marry him as soon as the divorce goes through. To marry him.”

She says nothing more, and I say nothing, and the silence swells and stretches until it is as taut as an overinflated balloon that I can’t help but prick with my words:

“And what did you say?”

“What could I say? I said yes.”

7

I COULD
barely look at Guy as he sat next to me at the defense table, still in the clothes of the night before, the clothes, like Guy, now rumpled and stinking. I could barely look at his puffy face, his red eyes, the way his hands trembled. I could barely look at the fear that overwhelmed him as he began to understand the abject consequences of his single moment of uncontrollable rage. Whenever I looked at him, I wanted to strangle him, so instead I looked around the courtroom, at the bailiff, the guards, at the bored reporters scattered in the otherwise empty seats, at the detectives sitting in the front row behind the prosecution table, Stone leaning back, arms stretched out, Breger hunched forward in weariness. It was still early, the judge was not scheduled to arrive for another quarter of an hour, but it pays to be prompt when they are arraigning your client for murder.

The Montgomery County Courthouse was an old Greek Revival building with porticoes and pediments and a great green dome, all set in the county seat of Norristown. They had put us in Courtroom A, the building’s largest room, with its high ceilings and wood paneling and big leather chairs at the counsel tables that squeaked with righteousness. The courtrooms in Philadelphia are fresh and spanking new, modern and streamlined, with a sense of the assembly line
about them, and so it felt good to be in a place with heavy wooden benches and red carpeting, a place that exuded harsh justice of the old sort. That’s the kind of justice I was hoping to find.

I let my partner, Beth Derringer, coach Guy through the procedure so I could stew blissfully in my own emotions. “This is just a formality, Guy, you know all this,” she said quietly. “We’ll waive the reading of the indictment, plead you not guilty, and get started building your defense.”

Beth was not just my partner, she was my best friend. Sharp, faithful, absolutely trustworthy. So of course I couldn’t trust her with all that had happened between Hailey and me and what had been decided the night before.

And what exactly had been decided? Justice, vengeance, take your pick, they both felt the same to me.

It all would have been simpler had I been able to go it alone, but this would be a trying case, I would need assistance, and so I had asked Beth to assist. And having Beth on my side had another distinct advantage. She could be my canary in the mine shaft. If I could keep her in the dark about what had happened and what I had decided to do about it, I believed I could keep everyone else there, too.

“What about bail?” said Guy. “I’ve got to get out of here. Do you have any idea of what it’s like in prison? Do you have any idea of the way those animals inside look at me?”

“No,” said Beth. “I don’t. We’ll try to get you out, Guy, but it’s a murder charge, and you were trying to run. The judge will grant either no bail or one absurdly high. But how much could you put up if bail is set?”

“I don’t know. There’s money in the account, there’s Hailey’s life insurance, there’s the house. It’s worth a mil or so.”

“Whose house?” I said while still looking away.

“Mine. Leila’s. Our house.”

“That’s not your house,” I said.

As soon as I said it, Guy understood. We sat side by side in Property Law, I cribbed off of his notes for my outline. In Pennsylvania, when any real estate is owned by a married couple, neither spouse has any individual property interest, it is owned by the couple itself, and any disposition of the property must be agreed to by both spouses.

“Will Leila agree to put it up for bail?” asked Beth.

“Yes, of course. To get me out of jail, of course. Let me talk to her.”

“Do you think she’d put up your children’s house to give you a chance to run and leave them homeless?” I said without looking at him so he couldn’t see the expression twisting my features. “Do you really think her father would let her?”

“Talk to her, Victor. You can get her to sign.”

“I’m not that persuasive.”

“Talk to her for me.”

“All right.”

“And tell her I want to see the kids. I need to see the kids.”

Before I could respond, Beth continued. “You mentioned an account. What kind of account?”

“A brokerage account.”

“In whose name?”

“In my name. And Hailey’s.”

I turned suddenly and stared at him, his pleading eyes, his mouth, jerked now and then by a twitch that had never marred his features before his arrest. Not so handsome anymore. “How much?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Depending on the markets, maybe half a million.”

“Where the hell did you get half a million dollars?”

“Hailey had a big case before we got together. Medical malpractice. The settlement was huge.”

“If it was Hailey’s money, why was your name on the accounts?”

“Because we were in love. We were going to be married, so we put all our money together. I added some, too. Part of it was mine.”

I stared at him, suddenly even angrier than before, and then turned away in disgust.

“Do you know where the account is?” said Beth.

“Schwab. Hailey did some trading online. I let her keep track of everything. I didn’t even know the password.”

“That’s okay, Guy. We’ll find out exactly what’s in there.” She reached into her file and pulled out a piece of paper. “We’d like you to sign this power of attorney. It will allow us to access information about your financial accounts. It doesn’t provide us the power to
withdraw funds, but it will let us learn what we need to make bail or to convince the judge to set something reasonable later on.”

I watched out of the corner of my eye as Guy reviewed the document. He had said the fee would be no problem, I wanted to make sure. I watched until he signed and handed it back to Beth, and then my disgust forced me to turn away again.

“And you said there was insurance?” asked Beth.

“Life insurance. I already had a policy where I switched my secondary beneficiary to her. She took a policy on herself and named me the beneficiary.”

“Where are the policies?”

“I don’t know. Hailey had them, maybe in her office or something.”

“Okay,” said Beth. “We’ll find them, too. After the arraignment they’re going to take you back to the county lockup, so we won’t be able to talk right away. We’ll set something up as soon as possible. What we need to know right now is if you have any idea who might have done this, if you have any leads you think we ought to investigate?”

I swiveled my head slowly until I was staring straight at him once again. This time he looked at me as if he were pleading for some answers. I had none, at least none he would like.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Everyone loved her. She was great. No one wanted to hurt her.”

“Had there been anything unusual? Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in the past few months?”

“No. Nothing. There were some calls at the house, you know, calls I answered and then the caller hung up. Stuff like that. They ended about a month ago, but maybe something was going on. Maybe there was someone else I didn’t know about.”

I stood and left the table so he wouldn’t hear the snort of disbelief that came unbidden from my throat. It was all too much to take, Guy professing his innocence, casting about for suspects, especially the thing about the phone caller who kept hanging up when he answered, since the phone caller who kept hanging up when he answered was me.

In the peanut gallery behind the bar, a tall man with a suit and a
briefcase was standing in the aisle, talking to Breger and Stone. I took him to be the prosecutor and I stepped over to make the introductions. We were going to be a good team, I was sure, he and I, working together as we were toward a common goal.

But as I got closer, I realized the prosecutor and two detectives weren’t talking so much as arguing. Stone was keeping her voice low, but her disgust was evident. Breger looked away, his mouth set with a disappointment that seemed expected yet still painful, like a kid on Christmas morning who finds beneath the tree a puzzle and not a pony. When Stone saw me approach, she stopped talking and gestured to the prosecutor. The tall man with the suit and briefcase turned around.

“You’re Victor Carl?”

“That’s right,” I said. He was a handsome man, lean and athletic, and I thought he looked familiar but I couldn’t be sure.

“Yeah, I recognize you from the paper.” He was talking about this morning’s
Daily News
. Beneath the headline—
SHOT THROUGH THE HEART
—was my picture, hand out warding off the camera, looking as guilty as a politician in a strip club.

“They didn’t get my good side,” I said.

“Well, you were facing the camera,” said Stone.

Breger, staring now down at the floor, bowed his head sadly at his partner’s impudence even as his shoulders shook with stifled laughter.

“Now, is that nice?” I said. “Here I am, trying to be pleasant, trying to forge a working relationship with the officers of the law, and you return my overture with insults.”

“That wasn’t an insult,” said Stone, showing off her healthy teeth. “If I was meaning to insult you, I would have started with your tie.”

“What’s wrong with my tie?”

“Please. It’s like you and Breger frequent the same thrift shop.”

“I was just about to compliment Detective Breger on his neck-wear. It’s rare to find a man brave enough to wear a plaid jacket and a plaid tie to go with it.”

“If I may interrupt the soirée,” said the handsome man in the aisle. “I’m Troy Jefferson, chief of the trial division in the DA’s office here. I’ll be prosecuting Mr. Forrest.”

I looked up at him. “I saw you play,” I said. “I saw you light us up for thirty-five when you could barely walk.”

“You went to Abington?”

“I did.”

“Did you play yourself?”

“No. I was barely coordinated enough the climb the bleachers.”

“That’s one game I’ll never forget. I had an operation the next week and was never the same.”

“You were a beautiful player.”

“Thank you.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

I smiled at him. He smiled at me. I reached out my hand and he shook it. Troy Jefferson was the basketball star in our conference when I went to high school. He was fast, aggressive on the dribble, with a sweet jumper from the top of the key. He had led his team to a state championship as a junior, and before his knee collapsed on him had been talked about as the surest thing since Wilt. He played college ball, I remembered, but was never the same as before the injury and went undrafted. I had heard he played in Europe for a few years before going to law school and becoming a prosecutor. Word was he was waiting for the right moment to turn political and leap into some public office, maybe attorney general, maybe higher. He had been a high school superstar, I had been a high school nothing, and now here we were, face to face in a courtroom, each of us smiling. We were going to like one another, Troy and I, we were going to be best friends. Who would have thought it a decade and a half before?

“Have you already entered your notice of appearance?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good,” said my new friend Troy. “Do you have a minute, Victor? I have something I want to talk to you about.”

I glanced at Breger and Stone, who glared not at me but at Troy, and then followed him out of the courtroom. We found a private perch on the marble stairway in the courthouse atrium, beneath a green stained-glass ceiling.

“I just wanted you to know that we’re going to oppose any bail in this case,” said Troy Jefferson.

“I expected as much.”

“That thing with the suitcase and the passport sealed it. And we’re still debating whether to ask for this to be a capital case.”

“That’s your decision,” I said, being as helpful as possible.

“The evidence against your client is overwhelming, and a lot of people, including the detectives in this case, think we should push for death. They don’t like the fact that she was hit before she was shot. Neither do I. And in case you didn’t know, the only fingerprints we could lift from the gun you handed over were your client’s.”

“He picked it up after the killing,” I said perfunctorily, because, as a defense attorney, I was supposed to say things like that, but I must say I admired Troy’s righteous indignation. Juries respond well to righteous indignation.

“Can we keep this conversation absolutely confidential?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Good.” He looked up and down down the empty staircase. “Victor, we haven’t finished our investigation by a long shot, and a lot of people want us to wait before we do anything. But this appears to me to be a crime of passion. Your client and Miss Prouix were fighting, there was a scuffle, your client couldn’t control himself, and he shot his fiancée. It’s a common enough story, and it’s sad, truly, but it’s not worth death. Right now, to me, it appears like nothing worse than man one. Something in the ten-to fifteen-year range. I’ve talked this over with the DA, and we’d be willing to accept a man one plea right now. Your client could be out, with good behavior, in eight to ten years.”

“That’s generous of you,” I said. And it was, shockingly.

“But you should know, Victor, that as our investigation continues, there is no telling what we might find. Stone and Breger are not happy with the offer and they are going to scour the landscape looking for more of a motive. You don’t want them to find it. If they dig up even the hint of a motive beyond the heat of the moment, I’m going to have no choice but to yank the offer and go for murder one with death as a possibility. I know it’s a lot to think about, and you don’t need to decide today, but you don’t want to wait too long either.”

“I understand.”

“So talk it over with your client and let me know.”

“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”

“It was nice meeting you, Victor. Breger said favorable things about you, which is rarer than you can imagine. Let’s see if we can work something out.” He smiled his charismatic Troy Jefferson smile, patted me on my shoulder, and headed back into court. I watched him go, trying to hide my shock.

What the hell was he doing? A woman was murdered in cold blood by a smarmy asshole and he offers up man one, ten to fifteen years, out in eight to ten? Where was the justice in that? I had half a mind to read Troy the riot act. I wouldn’t, of course, it was not the place of a defense attorney to complain of an offer as being too lenient—but still. But still. I had no choice now but to present this abomination to Guy, with the chance that he might just accept. And any normal murderer would accept, would jump as if for a lifeline, which, in fact, this offer was. But this was not a normal murderer, this was the killer of Hailey Prouix. It was a good thing I was not a normal defense attorney either. I would present the offer, yes I would, but I would also use all my powers to present it in such a way that Guy would turn it down. It wouldn’t be so hard, it was all in the presentation. They don’t have the evidence, Guy, they’re running scared, Guy, we can beat the charge, Guy, we can give you back your life, Guy. If I couldn’t turn an offer of man one into a first-degree murder conviction, then I might as well hand in my ticket to practice law and become a dentist.