“What suddenly brought to mind your old family dog?”
“He should take the plea.”
“It’s his choice.”
“It’s a good offer. He should take the plea. His lover theory isn’t bad, but something’s not right about the money.”
“I know.”
“He’s not telling us something.”
“I know.”
“And when they find out about it, and they will find out about it, it’s going jump up and bite him in the ass.”
I didn’t say anything, but I knew she was absolutely right. It was going to jump up and bite him in the ass, and all I had to do was figure out what it was. All I had to do was figure out what it was, and I knew where to start the figuring.
Juan Gonzalez.
“Funny thing about that dog,” said Beth. “It wasn’t until I was already in college that I began to wonder. If little Pom Pom was always locked in his crate, how did that car manage to drive into our mud room and squash him flat?”
13
JUAN GONZALEZ.
A name that meant nothing, except that Leila had mentioned it offhandedly and then Guy had made quite a show of knowing nothing about it. Too much of a show for me to leave it alone. A name that meant nothing except that it meant something, surely.
Juan Gonzalez.
Beth had said it for me: Something was not right about the money. Why had everyone thought there was once so much of it? Why had Hailey, who was startlingly unsentimental about love and romance, allowed it to be put into a joint account? To where had it disappeared? Something was not right about the money, something that would cause grievous harm to Guy’s cause if discovered, and so my number-one priority was to discover it. I didn’t know yet what it was, that secret, but I knew enough to lead me to its shelter. I knew its name.
Juan Gonzales.
First name Juan, John in Spanish. Family name Gonzalez, might as well be Smith. Juan Gonzalez. John Smith. How was it possible to find a connection between such a name and Hailey Prouix? Was it business or personal? Was he a lawyer or a client? Was he a friend or a relative. Was he a lover of Hailey’s or Guy’s or both? The possibilities were endless. All I knew for sure was that he wasn’t the ballplayer, but whoever he was, he was important enough for Guy and Leila to want to hide the truth, and so he was important enough for me to find.
“Never heard of him,” had said Guy. “I would have remembered. The name rings no bell.” When he told us this he was lying. Guy thought he had a secret without realizing that there is no such thing. There is always a trail, always a betrayal of some sort of another. To say you have a secret is only to say that you know something no one cares enough yet to figure out, But I cared, I cared like hell.
“Leila,” I said into the phone. “I have a question.”
“How is Guy?”
“About as you would expect.”
“Did you tell him what I agreed to do with the house? Did you tell him what I said?”
“Yes, I did. I have a question.”
“What did he say when you told him?”
“He shrugged, Leila.”
“He’s distraught still. He needs time.”
“Yes,” I said. He needs about thirty to life, I thought without saying. “Juan Gonzalez. You mentioned that name.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, you did. Who is he?”
“I don’t know, Victor. You said he was a ballplayer.”
“Not the ballplayer.”
“Then I must have misspoken.”
“You didn’t misspeak. Who is he?”
“Do you have those papers for me to sign? Does it look like he’ll be out of prison soon?”
“Leila, if I’m going to defend Guy, if I’m going to do right by Guy, I need to know everything. I need to know about Juan Gonzalez.”
“No, Victor. No you don’t. I heard the prosecutor made an offer.”
“Yes.”
“If he accepts the offer, when would he be out?”
“Somewhere between eight and ten years. Maybe less.”
“I’d be forty-five or so.”
“I need to know about Juan Gonzalez, Leila.”
“Tell him I’d wait. Will you tell him that?”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“He’s not taking my calls.”
“Isn’t that answer enough?”
“I have to go. I have to pick up Laura at school.”
“Juan Gonzalez.”
“Tell him what I said, Victor.”
In the Philadelphia phone book there were three listings for a Juan Gonzalez, five more for J. Gonzalez. I would call each one and ask if he knew a Hailey Prouix or a Guy Forrest. If that didn’t work, I’d expand my search to include the suburbs, then New Jersey, then Delaware, spreading out nationwide in a great arc of inquiry. There were also records to check, computer databases to consult, sources to pump. It would take days, weeks, it could tie up my office for months, but still I wouldn’t stop until I had the answer. And I would find the answer, I had no doubts, because Guy thought his secret was safe without realizing that no secrets are safe. A secret has weight, it feasts and swells, it fills voids, it invades sleep, it withers joy, it darkens the landscape and presses down upon the soul and grows ever larger until it is too great to be contained. Then it crawls out into the world, hiding in dark places, waiting to be found.
I would check the files and peruse the records and follow the slime trail. One by one I would turn over the rocks, one by one, until underneath some seemingly irrelevant hunk of granite there it would lie, like a fat, wriggling worm. A worm with a name.
Juan Gonzalez.
14
I WASN’T sleeping. I couldn’t figure what was the problem, but somehow my circadian rhythms had come undone, and I wasn’t sleeping.
At night, in my bed, I would feel myself slipping, falling delightfully into sleep. And then something would happen, something hard would seize my fall. I couldn’t figure what it was, but something would happen and I would end up staring at the ceiling, seeing the darkness separate into pinpricks of matter, each hurtling away from me with fierce velocity.
In desperation, to pass the night, I’d pick up the book on my bed-stand. In college, how many how many times had I fallen asleep at my desk, my head resting on the pages of a book from my Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature class? Just a few philosophical diatribes from one Karamazov brother or another and I would be gone. But such was not the case with Crime and Punishment. I found all of it compelling, all of it enthralling, all of it somehow resonant. Taking a breath and pressing his hand against his thumping heart, he immediately felt for the hatchet and once more put it straight. Then he began to mount the stairs very quietly and cautiously, stopping every moment to listen for any suspicious noise. I thought it would put me to sleep, the old Russian master spinning out his words by the bushelful, but each night, after hours of the toss and turn, I lit the lamp and opened the book and dropped into old St. Petersburg. And what does it tell you about my state of mind that, even as I struggled to ensure Guy’s conviction, I was rooting for Raskolnikov to get away with murder?
Then, in the mornings, more exhausted than I was the night before, I would wash the sleeplessness from my eyes and step out into the dreary morning and head to the diner. It was at the diner, in the netherworld between my sleepless nights and my surreptitious days, that I found some respite. I’d sit undisturbed at the counter, spread my paper across the countertop beside me, eat my eggs and home fries, coffee up, read the sports page and comics. The front page was too depressing, but the Phils were winning and though “Doonesbury” had grown tepid over the years and “Family Circle” was too cloying to bear, there was always “The Piranha Club,” “For Better or for Worse,” and that bastion of old values, “Rex Morgan, M.D.” And then of course there was the Jumble.
So there I was at the diner, safe within my exhaustion, struggling to form a word from the letters TOZALE, when a man
in a brown suit, with a face like a battered hardball, sat down smack beside me.
“What’s good in this here joint?” he said. He spoke slowly, his voice soft and throaty, as if his larynx had been scarred by fire.
“About what you’d expect,” I said as I eased away from him so our elbows wouldn’t knock.
“What you got there, the eggs?”
I looked down at my plate, the yolks of my easy-overs broken, the yellow spread like thick paint over the home fries, and then looked past him at all the empty stools he had chosen to ignore when he set down next to me.
“Yes,” I said, turning back to my paper. “The eggs.”
Unless it is crowded at the counter of a diner, no one sits next to another patron. As the stools are left vacant and then occupied, the crucial spacing of two or three stools is maintained as if the rules were written on the blackboard above the swinging chrome door. People sit at the counter of a diner to stare into their plates, to read their papers undisturbed, to be left alone. I turned slightly, showing my back to the stranger, and leaned close to the paper.
“I used to love my eggs and bangers,” said the stranger, ignoring my body language, “toast sopping with butter. Every morning. But then my cholesterol, it shot higher than Everest, it did. My dentist told me it was time for a change. You might ask why my dentist, but I don’t gots no other doctor. The rest of me I let go to hell, but you gots to take care of the choppers.”
He smiled at me, showing off his bright whites, with a large gap between his two front teeth, before slapping on the counter for Shelly. When I said he looked like a battered hardball, I didn’t mean a sweet major league ball with one single smudge, I meant one of those ruined remainders we used to play with as kids, brown, misshapen, waterlogged balls we kept banging on even as the stitching came undone and the gray stuffing leaked from the seams. His face was flat and round, his ears stuck out like handles, his nose was the Blob, there was even heavy stitching on the line of his jaw. He was so ugly it was hard to look away from him. His face was like an accident on the side of the road.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he called to Shelly at the other side of the counter, “a bowl of oatmeal here. That’s right, with some skim milk and a joe. Thanks. Oatmeal, that’s what I’m reduced to. It’s a sorry sight when a man with teeth like mine is wasting bicuspids on oatmeal, innit? The dentist, she told me. It’s the fiber what cleans out the arteries, she said. That and garlic. I was eating the garlic raw for a while, but for some reason people stopped talking to me, so nows I take the pills. They say garlic does wonders. At least that’s what they say now. Next week they’ll be telling us something different, like the best thing for your heart is smoking stogies and wanking off.”
“Excuse me?”
“Smoking stogies and wanking off. Wouldn’t it be something if for once they tell us that the things what are actually good for you are the things everyone does anyway?”
“Not everybody,” I muttered, my face back in the paper.
“What, you don’t fancy cigars? Let me guess, you’re a lawyer, right?”
“That’s right.”
He slapped the counter. “I got you, didn’t I? First time, too. I got a knack for these things. Used to sell cars. Buicks, Olds. I got so I could pick out who was what just by the way they sashayed into the showroom. Lawyers would come in like they was daring you to try to sell them. And you never saw a lawyer come in and say ‘I’ll take it.’ The lawyer was always sniffing here, sniffing there, and then he’d check six other showrooms to see if he could save a nickel. If I spotted a lawyer walking through them doors, I’d say, ‘Joey, why don’t you take this one.’ And then Joey would waste his afternoon with the lawyer in the three-piece while I would grab the guy with the grease beneath his fingernails who would buy that big red Buick on the spot. Zealot.”
“What?”
“The word, in the Jumble you’re stuck on. TOZALE is zealot.”
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all. The next one, SORIAL, is sailor. I used to do them Jumbles every day. I was like the Michael Jordan of the Jumble. It’s a talent I got for taking things that are all mixed up and putting it in an order that makes sense. That’s how I got into my new line. But I still got friends in the car biz. Hey, you looking for a new car? I could set something up.”
“All I want is to finish reading the paper in peace.”
“Yeah, I notice a lot of guys come to places like this to be left alone, but I never understood that. I want to be alone, I’ll eat my oatmeal standing by the sink in my skivvies. It’s like in the car business. When I was working the shop, no one wanted to be jammed by a salesman right off. They wanted to be able to browse around la-di-da on theys own. But I figure, why come into a sales center if you don’t want to be sold? You let the bastards browse around on theys own, next thing you know they’ll be browsing their way over to the Toyota place across the street.
“Thanks, sweetheart, and more coffee when you can. Javalicious. Hey, could you pass the sugar? This one is all lumped up. Yeah.
“Funny thing about them lawyers in the salesroom, though. When it came down to negotiating a deal, they was like virgins in a sailors’ bar. They would do theys research, sure. They’d come in loaded with papers, figuring they knew everything they needed to know, when really they knew nothing. Because what was important wasn’t all the crap they brought in, it was how much the dealer was paying in the first place, how desperate was the cash-flow situation, what the boss’s girlfriend was whining for that week, all stuff that ain’t in Consumer Reports. Is the slurping bothering you? Good. The oatmeal is better with the milk, makes it like a soup. Anywise, the lawyers would bypass the salesman and sit down with the assistant manager, which is like bypassing the pilot fish to deal directly with the shark. Frigging lawyers. By the time they got finished with the assistant manager and with the F&I guys, they was getting it up the arse, down the throat and in both ears.”
By now my face was out of the paper and I was staring at the man beside me. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
“You know what they should teach you first thing in law school?” he said. “They should teach you that maybe you don’t know everything you think you know. They should teach you that if a deal for some reason seems too good to be true, then maybe you should jump off your arse and grab it afore it disappears. Maybe sometimes you should take the damn deal before something bad happens, before something awful happens that will absolutely ruin your day. What the hell do you think of that?”
“What line did you say you were in now?” I asked.
“Nowadays I solve bigger puzzles than the Jumble. Things what don’t add up, I find the sense of the things and make them add up in a way that everybody wins. Even me. Especially me.” He reached into his jacket pocket for a wallet, took out a five, and slapped it on the counter. Calling to Shelly, he said, “Here you go, sweetie. You keep what’s left.”
“You got a card?” I asked.
“Nah, those what need me know where to find me.”
“Can I ask you a favor?”
“Shoot,” he said.
“Next time you want to send me a message, do it by fax.”
He stared at me for a long moment, the geniality leaking out of his face. “Don’t get too smart on me, I’m liable to change my whole opinion of the profession.” Then he let out a belch that shook the plates on the counter before us. “There’s the problem with the oatmeal, right there.”
“What do you want, Skink?”
“A bowl of oatmeal. A cup of joe. A chance to pass a few friendly words. I’m doing you a favor here by giving you an honest piece of advice. Forget your snooping around about this Juan Gonzalez. He ain’t important. What’s important is that you do the right thing. Take the deal. It’s a good deal. It ends everything and keeps everybody happy.”
“Who sent you?”
“See, here’s the thing, Vic. You think you knew her, but you didn’t know the first thing abou
t her. You think you understood her, but you understood nothing. She was like a fancy gold watch, she was, simple and slim on the outside, but inside was wheels within wheels within wheels. And you never had the frigginest.”
“And you did?”
“Me and her, we understood each other. Me and her, we got along like long-lost pals. We had things in common. She talked to me.”
“About what?”
“You know. About her affairs and such.”
I didn’t say anything, I just stared. He smiled and leaned so close I was glad he had stopped eating his garlic raw, leaned so close his whisper was like a roar.
“I know,” he said.
“Know what?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Your little no-no.”
“My no-no?”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “Yes I does. I know.”
I stood abruptly, as if the secret itself propelled me off my stool. I stood, but I didn’t say anything and I didn’t leave. I stood and listened.
“She told me so herself,” said Skink. “I assure you, Vic, I’m not here to hurt you, I’m here to help. It’s safe with me, your little secret. I got no wish to spread it around like butter on a stack of flap-jacks. But don’t be like those lawyers in the showroom with their lawyerish ways. Take the deal. It wasn’t no picnic getting Jefferson to go for the plea. Don’t think we can keep it on the table forever. Forget about Juan Gonzalez. Take the deal, put everything right, so no one ends up knowing nothing and we all go home happy.”
He nodded at me, pushed himself off his stool, and headed for the door. He had a strange, waddling walk, like he’d just jumped off his horse after riding for a fortnight. Then he stopped, turned, and waddled back.
“You was in the house alone after she was doffed, wasn’t you?”
I said nothing.
“An item is missing, a small item. No bigger than a key, if you catch the drift. It wasn’t logged in by the police detectives, and it seems no longer to be in the house.”
Fatal Flaw Page 11