And Hailey Prouix, what did she see when she looked into the dark, handsome eyes of Guy Forrest? Her soul mate? Her future? Or a terrible, terrible mistake? I’ll take door number three, Monty.
Was I guessing? Yes, of course, but not as wildly as you may imagine. Guy confided in me during the storm of his relationship with Hailey. We were at that age when most of our contemporaries are either married or contemplating such and therefore not receptive to the strangled yearnings of a man breaking free through infidelity. But I was alone, and lonely, and for some reason Guy mistakenly thought I was vastly interested. And as for how Hailey Prouix felt about it all, well, she had told me herself, the very afternoon before the evening of her death, told me that she and Guy were good as through.
She is looking into a mirror, fixing her makeup, painting her lips with the shocking red she favors. Her heels, stockings, her gray checked skirt are all in place, but her white blouse is unbuttoned and untucked as she stands before my mirror. I lie in the bed, arms behind my head, and watch her left breast as it slides and bounces ever so slightly while she works. And it is there, then, while she stands in my bathroom and makes up her face, that she tells me she is going to finally, unequivocally, end it with Guy.
She has told me this before and each time after has backed away for some reason she wouldn’t explain, but this time I sense is different. She has been tense now for days, ever since she came back from a business trip, tense and angry and more lost than usual, but this day she bursts into my apartment as if the weight of a hundred pasts has been lifted off her shoulders, and she makes love with a joy that hasn’t been there before. Ever.
She is a woman in perpetual trouble, it was obvious from the first, it is much of what draws me to her, she is a woman in perpetual trouble, but this day she seems less in trouble than before. This day there is from her the rarest of things, an unironical smile. And forgive me, but I feel as if I have helped, as if I have been a source of succor in her time of need. For weeks now I have been urging her to take control of her life. Things are not preordained, I have told her. Your life is full of choices, not imperatives, I have told her. I have given her the existentialist creed. It isn’t missionary work, there isn’t much missionary involved in what we do on stolen afternoons, but certainly all along I have seen a pain in her that I feel compelled to salve. She is a woman in perpetual trouble, and I want to help, and if her taking control of her life meant I would take Guy’s place upon the mattress on the floor, all the better.
What are we looking at when we are looking at love? What did I see when I looked into my lover’s eyes? Was I deluding myself to believe I saw Hailey Prouix clear? Was I no different from Guy, falsely projecting my hopes and aspirations upon that trim, lithe body? Guy was looking for a savior, I suppose I was looking for someone I could save. Were we, both of us, fools? I couldn’t know then that the answers, brutal as they were, would come after me with a vengeance, answers that haunt me to this day, as they haunt also Guy. No, this I could not know, but there was one thing I believed I could know, one thing of which I was then absolutely certain.
Lying on my couch with that gun on my lap while Guy Forrest lay asleep in my bed just a doorway away, I closed my eyes and I could see her, standing at the mirror with her shirt open, telling me of her determination to be free at last from Guy, from her past. And I could see her press her lips one upon the other to set the lipstick and dab at it with a tissue folded thin. And I could see her turn to look at me and toss her hair and smile that dazzling, strangely sincere smile. And she comes right over to the bed and sits down and tells me how happy she is that she knows it now will be over in the right way. In the right way, whatever that means. I reach out and with my fingertips brush that lovely breast, the breast that just a few minutes before I had suckled while she writhed and bucked above me, with my fingertips I brush that lovely breast and feel the softness, the firmness, feel the soft pulse of her blood beneath the white of her skin. And I tell her, with a trill of laughter to belie the seriousness, that I love her. But I do, in all seriousness, love her, of that I am certain, of that I hold no doubt. Maybe it is twisted and wrong. Maybe it is based on my perception of her needs and my abilities, perceptions that were, both of them, spectacularly misjudged. Maybe it is, by the very misconceptions at its core, doomed to fall apart at the slightest touch, like a spider’s web. Still, there it is. And even though she doesn’t make the rote response, even though she scrupulously avoids that word with me, always, I believe in my naïveté that she does, that she does. And my fingertips still move softly upon the surface of her breast, back and forth, up and down, circling her taut nipple. And she takes her own hand and presses my fingers into her breast, presses them hard, and as she does she arches her neck ever so slightly, but enough for me to know, for me to be certain. And I could still feel her hand over my hand, her breast pressed beneath my fingers, the jaggy beat of her heart, still feel it even as I awoke, startled, my erection tenting my suit pants just above where lay the gun.
It was time. I was ready. I waited for my erection to subside, and then I stood, taking hold of the gun as best I could, still as it was in its plastic bag. I took a step and then another toward the bedroom door. What was it Lenin had said about truth coming from the barrel of a gun? Well, maybe it wasn’t Lenin who said it, and maybe he wasn’t talking about truth, but you get the idea.
Guy had lied when he said everything was fine between him and Hailey, and if Guy was lying about that one crucial point, isn’t it likely that he was lying about everything? And if he was lying about everything, then he had killed her. He had killed her. She had told him that she was leaving, and he had reacted as she should have expected him to react, like a man about to lose his savior, like a man driven to the edge, with nothing to lose but his desperation, and he had killed her.
Guy’s decision had been made, and so had mine. His decision was to kill my love dead. My decision was to act as a perfect instrument of justice, to rely not on the tribunals of law whose imperfections I knew all too well, but to take matters into my own hands, to discover the truth and be certain it was served. I made my living spinning the lies that allowed desperate people to escape the just consequences of their unjust acts, but over the dead body of my lover a decision had been made, an implacable decision yet pure and right, a decision had been made that no lie would allow the killer of Hailey Prouix to escape the hard consequences of that heinous act. No lie, under no circumstances, whatever the price to be later paid.
He was asleep in my bed, in the sheets I had changed just so he wouldn’t recognize her scent upon the pillow. He was asleep in my bed, but not for long.
I held the gun, still in its bag, in my right hand and stepped toward the doorway. The gun had the heft of a grand jury subpoena, the precision of a syringe filled with sodium pentothal. It would serve as an intricate and powerful truth-finding machine. In the confused and frightening moments after he was awakened, he’d be most vulnerable to the truth. I had more questions to ask my old school chum, and the sight of the gun in my hand, that gun, his gun, the sight of the gun in my hand would compel his confession.
I grabbed hold of the knob. Slowly, silently, I turned the knob and opened the door.
In the indifferent light from the street I could see the bed, the sheets, a strange lump in the middle. It didn’t look right, he didn’t look right.
Without taking my gaze off the bed I grappled for the switch.
A harsh yellow light flooded the room, and then I could see what had happened. Then I could see.
The book was spilled disdainfully on the floor, the drawers had been ransacked, the gym bag was missing, and that lying bastard, that lying bastard, he was gone.
5
THE BEDROOM window was closed. I shoved it open and scanned the street, slick and black, still wet though the rain had stopped. Nothing. It was three flights down, a fierce jump with nothing to grab on to except the spindly branches of a struggling urban maple. The desperate le
ap to the sagging tree was not Guy’s way, though until tonight I would have said that murder, too, was not Guy’s way.
I performed a quick search of the room. I opened the closet, checked the bathroom, threw back the shower curtain. No Guy. He had disappeared from my grasp like a phantom.
How had he gotten away without my knowing? I couldn’t figure it until I remembered my remembrances of Hailey Prouix, a reverie that had faded into a dream. I ran back into the living room.
The chain latch of my front door, the chain I fastened each night out of habit, was hanging loose.
The chain latch was undone, as were my plans. I’d had him exactly where I wanted, and then I let him slip away while I was asleep. Damn it. Now he was on the loose, now he was fleeing to freedom. I shucked on my raincoat, stuffed the plastic bag with its gun into the pocket, grabbed my key, and headed out after him.
He could have gone anywhere, I thought at first, but as I sat in the driver’s seat of my car and considered each possibility, I realized that wasn’t true. He couldn’t go back to his wife. He couldn’t go to the offices of Dawson, Cricket and Peale. He couldn’t go to the police. His parents were dead, his brother lived in California, his friends had all sided with Leila. Where once the world had been open to him, now his options were completely limited. Who would still embrace him and take him in? Who had his love for Hailey not betrayed? I thought it through, went over one possibility and the next and the next until, suddenly, his destination became clear.
He was going to her, to Hailey.
The old saw holds that criminals always return to the scene of the crime and like most old saws, this one contains a portion of truth. Arsonists are often in the crowds surrounding the blazes they set; police routinely videotape the funerals of the murdered dead to see if they can spot a killer paying his final disrespects. A criminal, by definition, is defined by his crime, and which of us doesn’t return again and again to the crucial moment of our lives, where we married, where our children gamboled, where we spent an eventide of abandon that fuels still the fantasies that warm our cold, lonely nights. Guy Forrest had a family, a profession, a circle of accomplishment, but if you asked him about his depths, he would have said simply he was a man in love. If you asked me, I would have told you he was a murderer. Both the lover and the murderer were created in that house, in that bedroom, on that mattress on the floor. He was going back, he couldn’t not. And I was going, too.
The bloody night was on its way out, the darkness already cracked from the force of dawn. I must have slept longer than I had imagined. I must have been dead asleep. I drove as fast as I dared with a gun in my pocket. I wondered if Guy had seen the King Cobra on my lap as he skulked out of the apartment. Probably not, probably too busy skulking. He hadn’t turned on the lights, he hadn’t wanted to wake me. He had stayed as far from me as possible as he made his way out of the bedroom and through my apartment door. Who could have imagined he had developed the honed survival instincts of a cockroach?
I drove west on Walnut to Sixty-ninth Street, took a right, heading to Haverford Avenue. It was a familiar route, I had driven this way before on the nights when Guy was out of town. Is it cheating to cheat on a cheating bastard? I had felt bad about it at the first when we made our initial assignation, but it hadn’t lasted, the guilt, it hadn’t lasted past the first time I tasted Hailey Prouix’s tongue. Maybe Guy’s guilt over cheating on his wife had died the same sweet death. There were more cars on the road than I expected, the early shift heading into work, the occasional cab. That’s what he had caught, a cab. Maybe he even phoned for one from my bedroom before leaving.
“Where to?” had said the cabby.
“To the scene of the crime,” had said Guy.
I passed a cop car going the opposite direction, and I ducked. I ducked. I had never been afraid of the police before. Working with them or against them had always been simply part of my job, there had never been the fear that I felt now. But then again never before did I have a gun in my pocket. I was not a gun person. Or a cat person. The only time I ever before wanted a gun was to kill a cat. But here I was, heading out in the rain with a gun in my pocket and my quarry on the loose and I was ducking in my car when the police drove past. It was a strange, hard feeling, all of it. And I liked it. I liked it. It’s the only kind of feeling you want after you see your lover dead on a mattress on the floor.
Out Haverford Avenue, across City Line, into the twisting suburban streets, old trees leaning over the roadbeds, calm homes still asleep to the rising morn. Down this short road, left at that stop sign, right at the next, up the hill and to the left, and there it was, dark and solitary.
There was no yellow tape. I thought there would be yellow tape. There was no yellow tape, there were no police cars, there was no police presence whatsoever. In the city the place would have been swaddled in yellow caution tape like a newborn in its blanket. But this was the suburbs, no reason to make a spectacle for the neighbors, no reason to place property values at risk. The sight filled me with anger. They were going to screw it up, they were going to let him off. It was up to me. All along I had known it was, all of it, up to me.
I parked across the street and waited. The lights were off. I didn’t know if he hadn’t yet gotten to the house or if he was already inside, doing whatever he was doing in the darkness. I parked across the street and waited. There was no rush. If he wasn’t yet at the house, he would be, and if he was, which I suspected, he wouldn’t be there long. He would do whatever he felt compelled to do and then he would leave, he would run, he would take the keys from the desk drawer and head straight for one of the cars, his or Hailey’s, parked out front. Hailey had driven a new Saab convertible. Guy drove a new black Beemer. Both cars were on the street, waiting for his great escape, and so was I.
Waiting. Waiting. And then waiting no more.
He came out from the back, his shoulders hunched, his black coat turning him almost invisible, his head swiveling this way and that as he checked the empty road for watchers. He carried a large, hard shell suitcase. He was making for the BMW.
I climbed out of my car and stuck my hand in my raincoat pocket so that it gripped the hard hunk of metal. Then I headed off to intercept.
“Guy,” I called out.
He looked up at me, startled, before setting his shoulders in a posture of determination and continuing to the car.
“Guy,” I called out again, shuffling as quickly as I could toward him. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“Don’t try to stop me, Victor. I’m getting out of here.”
“Why?”
By now he had just about reached his car and I had just about reached him. As he tried to stick his key in the slot, I pulled at his arm. Keytus interruptus. He stared up at me with an unfathomable fear.
“They’re going to kill me,” he said. “You told me that yourself.”
“No, I did not.”
“In so many words, yes, you did. They’re going to arrest me and throw me in jail and kill me. I’m not going to sit around and let them. I didn’t do anything.”
“And this is going to convince them of that? Come back with me to my apartment.”
“Forget it.”
“You can’t run, Guy.”
“Watch me,” he said as he pulled his arm from my grasp and slid the key into the lock. I tried to grab him again. He swung at me with his suitcase, I raised my hand in defense. The suitcase banged into my shoulder. I fell back hard onto my side. The butt of the gun dug into my hip.
He slammed the door, locked himself inside, started the engine.
I spun onto my back, tightened my grip on the gun.
Suddenly another car, boxy and brown, just missed running over me as it pulled alongside Guy’s Beemer and stopped dead, blocking him in.
Guy slammed on his horn, but the brown car didn’t move.
Guy tried to pull forward, hopping the curve and riding on the sidewalk, around a parked car, and back onto the
street to get away, but another car, boxy and black, pulled up suddenly and blocked him in again.
From out of the black car jumped Detective Stone, who quickly drew her gun and aimed it at Guy.
Detective Breger calmly exited his vehicle, ambled over to Guy’s BMW, and peered in the window. He gestured for Guy to open the lock. As he patiently waited, first one, then two, then three police cruisers appeared on the street, their flashing lights painting acres of aluminum siding red and blue.
I rose from the ground, my hand out of my raincoat pocket. Breger calmly motioned me away, and I stepped back.
Guy did nothing, did nothing, and then, finally, he electronically unlocked his car. Breger opened the passenger door and leaned inside.
“Going somewhere, Mr. Forrest?”
Guy tried to say something, but Stone, gun still drawn, swung open the other door and cut him off. “Step out of the vehicle, please.”
Guy began again to speak.
“Step out of the vehicle, please,” repeated Stone.
Guy slowly climbed out, looking at me helplessly for a moment before Stone holstered her gun and jammed him roughly up against the Beemer’s side, cuffing his hands behind him.
“You are under arrest for the murder of Hailey Prouix,” said Stone when the cuffs were in place. She spun him around and began to read him his rights.
“I’m a lawyer,” said Guy halfway through.
“Good,” said Stone. “That means there won’t be any misunderstandings.” She continued.
I walked over to Detective Breger, who, with surgical gloves in place, was rifling through the contents of Guy’s suitcase.
“What are you doing?” I said.
Fatal Flaw Page 4