Fatal Flaw

by William Lashner

She started coming home late, coming home half drunk, as I had come home half drunk when I started seeing her. I sensed she was becoming involved with someone else. Feeling desperate, I acted desperately. It had always been my plan to wed after the divorce, and so I set the scene with a hundred candles surrounding the tub. I filled the Jacuzzi and tossed rose petals onto the surface of the water and I waited. She looked at the scene strangely when she came home, as if disgusted at the overt romantic display. I told her milady’s bath was waiting. She sneered at the corniness of the line and then undressed as if facing an execution. She immersed herself so deeply I was afraid she would drown. When she came up for air, I fell to my knee and asked, and she said yes, a sad, stone-faced yes.

  But nothing changed. We still made no love, she still took her pills to get to sleep, I still lay beside her, my mind a riot. She was distant, distracted. There would be days when she disappeared entirely without explanation. I grew certain that she was seeing someone else. I snooped through her drawers, her effects, I found baggage receipts for the airport in Vegas. I imagined she had gone there with her new lover and it drove me crazy. Our relationship had turned into a nightmare even before I discovered that most of the money was gone.

  I won’t go blow-by-blow with you, how I found out, how I confronted her, how she reacted, and how I reacted back. There were arguments, bitter fights, threats, tears, more fighting. It wasn’t the money I was upset about, it was her. I was losing her. We fought about the money because it was easier than fighting about what was really happening. If I confronted her about her lover or Vegas, I feared it would be over, I feared she would throw me out, and so I kept it to the money only. But she never told me what she had done with it, what she had spent it on, and my shouts only strengthened her resolve to stay silent.

  I threatened to call the police about the theft. In response she threatened to turn over to them the Gonzalez medical file. “You destroyed it,” I said. “Did I?” she said. Her eyes narrowed when she said it and she grew cold, cold as ice, frighteningly cold. It was like she was another person entirely, somebody hard and damaged and capable of horrible things, and still, Victor, I was desperate not to lose her.

  I think by then it was not her I was afraid of losing but the vision of myself that she had liberated, the vision of a man wild, daring, brave enough to live his own life, a man eternally free. I couldn’t give her up because that meant giving up on that part of myself.

  TWO WEEKS before she was murdered, she disappeared, another of her jaunts with her lover, I supposed, but when she came back, things had changed. She was suddenly loving again. We had sex again, and it was as amazing as before, even if tinged with a strange sadness. She spoke of our future, our married life together. She asked when the divorce would be finalized. She even mentioned again Costa Rica. Have you ever been to Costa Rica, Victor? I hear it’s magical. She asked me to buy tickets to take us there for a vacation, and I did. I figured that she had been dumped by her lover, and I was thrilled. There’s the sign of how gone I was. I had projected so much onto her, had sacrificed so much, made so many choices based on our future together that I couldn’t imagine going on without her. It would mean facing what I had done to my family, my life, the false fantasies that had led me once again astray. Anything that kept me from facing my failures was reason for celebration.

  Then one night she came home late, very late, and acted strangely when she saw me, as if she didn’t know who I was or what I was doing there. She even gasped when she saw me waiting for her. It was peculiar, and a fear gripped me like a fist around my throat. I figured she was out drinking again, back with that other man again, or maybe someone new. That night she went back to her pills, even pricking the capsules to make them work more quickly. And the next night, when I came home, she was waiting for me.

  “There is no kind way to say this,” she said, “so I won’t try to make it kind. It’s over.”

  She was lying on the mattress, smoking, glasses on, staring at me as if I were a thief. I’d like to say I took it with a profound stoicism, but that would be a lie. I begged, I cried, I threatened to kill her, I threatened to kill myself, I broke down, I refused to let it be over.

  “Oh, it is,” she said. “Believe it. You need to make arrangements to move out as soon as you can.”

  No, I told her. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. What about our future? What about Costa Rica? What about the money? The money, damn it. I shouted, I pleaded, I lost control. “There’s someone else, isn’t there?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Tell me who?” I said.

  “Someone who fucks like a railroad engineer,” she said, smiling coldly. “It’s all aboard and then on to Abilene.”

  That’s when I hit her. I leaned over and smacked her face with the back of my hand, and when I did, something snapped inside me. She just lay there and took it and curled her lips into that hard smile, but something had snapped inside me. I think maybe in that instant when my flesh smashed against hers, I saw, as if from a distance, the whole thing, the scene, the relationship, my folly, saw it all at a distance as if it were someone else hitting her, someone else who loved her, someone else who had given up the world for her.

  I stood back in horror at what I had done.

  With that smile still in place she rolled away from me and said simply, “Put out the light.”

  So I did, without saying another word. I turned out the light and went into the bathroom and filled the tub with scalding water, as if I needed to be cleansed. I put Louis Armstrong into the Walkman and rolled myself a joint. I stripped and lit up and put on the headphones and slipped into the tub, turned on the water jets and thought about what I had seen from the distance as I hit her. I had seen a fool, desperate and lost. I had seen a runner who had run from everything and was still running. I sat in the tub and closed my eyes and thought my way through into a future without Hailey, without my family, without my career, without my money. In front of me was a door I couldn’t open and behind which was a life I couldn’t fathom. I felt a dark desperation overwhelm me, and I thought of dying, the freedom, the peace of death. But there was something about the music, something about the jazz, the brassy trumpet, the joyous spirit marching through hard times. I sat in the tub and smoked the dope and listened to Louis Armstrong, and I thought my way through the blackness, through the blackness, toward the door I couldn’t open. And I imagined myself putting my shoulder to it, pressing against it, breaking through it, crashing through the door like Pepito himself into something approaching equilibrium, and I felt strangely peaceful. And tired. Maybe it was the reefer, maybe it was that I hadn’t slept the night before, maybe it was the release of all those tightly clenched expectations, but I felt strangely peaceful and tired, and with the headphones on and the heat of the water soothing my bones, I fell asleep.

  When I awoke, it was into a nightmare of blood.

  19

  I LISTENED to his story with horror, and when he stopped speaking I shook my head as if shaking myself back into the world. The room was the same as before, still gray, still lit by the fluorescent lights humming in the ceiling. The barred window still looked out upon another block wall. The room was the same, but the universe had shifted.

  If life is lived in that normally narrow and disappointing region between expectation and actuality, then those moments that most change our lives play out in the great gaps where expectation and reality veer wildly apart. Listening to Guy Forrest tell his story was for me like falling headfirst into one of those gaps. I had expected the story to be self-serving, and it was that, though not to the degree I had thought, but I had also expected it to be a tale of Guy’s depredations, of Guy’s machinations, of one arrogant step after another that led, inexorably, to Guy’s moral disintegration and his explosion into murder. What I saw instead were the depredations and machinations of another.

  It was the bumping of the knees that did it. The innocuous detail that sounded like a siren for me. They are at
a bar, he is not sure what they are doing, not sure what he wants or why he is there. Betrayal is the unspoken message that swirls about them like the smoke from her cigarette. Their conversations approach and then veer away from the topic at hand, but as they drink and talk their knees touch, in a gesture both awkward and intimate, their knees touch, and the spark sends a complex wave of emotion through Guy. It is contact charged with meaning and yet maybe no meaning at all. It promises so much and yet it embarrasses him all the same. It is intimate, but is it, really? Or is it instead an accident? The uncertainty raises the level of everything it conveys, lust, confusion, desire, fear, all of it. I know, because the same accidental touching of the knees sent the same wave of emotion through me. The accidental touching that was not so accidental.

  She had known about Juan Gonzalez’s prior medical condition from the first. “Don’t mention it,” she must have told the family. “I’ll take care of it,” and she did. The slow seduction, the promises of a future, the whispers of Costa Rica, all of it was the buildup toward the crucial moment when Guy discovered the fatal flaw in her case. It can take years, decades waiting for a case so rich to walk into your office. Negligence without massive damages is penny common and worth about as much. Cases with massive damages and clear negligence usually go to the big names with the big reputations. How does a young solo practitioner get her hands on a case like that? Luck. And if luck is not with you? Then make your own luck. Take a case with a fatal flaw and find a way to make the flaw disappear.

  Hailey Prouix.

  But what had she wanted from me? She had laid on me the same slow seduction, the same banging of the knees that made it seem it was I doing the seducing. But it wasn’t my doing, was it? She followed the script, for some unknown reason of her own devising. What was it that I could have offered her? Why was I worth using?

  The questions came crashing down upon me, along with the realization.

  “You didn’t kill her,” I said to Guy, as a statement not as a question, though he took it as the latter.

  “No, I told you, no. I didn’t. No.”

  I glanced at Beth with a nervous hesitation. I wanted to see if belief was on her face, too, and I wanted to see something else. Had she figured it out, the madness behind my method? Had she matched his chronology about Hailey’s secret lover with the bare bones she knew of my failed relationship? Had she matched the dates when both started and both flamed out, filled in the gaps and taken a guess at my motives? She was staring now at Guy and I could read nothing in her expression.

  “Why not?” she asked Guy. “She had stolen your money, taken another lover, left you without your family, your career, without a cent or a future. She had used you like a rented mule. Why didn’t you kill her?”

  He looked at her strangely, as if it were a question he never considered before. “Because I loved her?”

  “Please,” I said loudly, in a voice overflowing with exasperation. “Who loved better than Othello? In the history of the world love has caused more murder than ever it stopped.”

  “What stopped you?” said Beth softly.

  He didn’t answer right off. He stared off to the side, his face twisted in puzzlement. I expected him to come up with something soulful and religious, something all surface, like the answer of a beauty pageant contestant. I didn’t kill her because I believe that love can make the world a better place and we should shower our fellow humans with affection, not violence. But that’s not what he said, what he said instead was:

  “Because it never occurred to me.”

  It never occurred to him? It never occurred to him? How could it not have occurred to him in this post-Holocaust, post-9/11 violence-saturated, blood-soaked-blockbuster age of ours? It never occurred to him? He had come up with the perfect answer, because it rang so true. It never occurred to him. Isn’t that what keeps us on the razor’s edge of the straight and narrow more often than not, that falling off never occurs to us? With that answer the vestiges of my doubts were routed. I now believed him. I now believed his entire story.

  I had been wrong, wrong from the start, dead wrong.

  I had been wrong enough to leap at a false assumption, wrong enough to chase a man through the wet streets of the city, wrong enough to seek to consign a friend to a life in jail or, worse, an execution. I had violated every precept of my lawyer’s oath, had tried to railroad a guilty man, to elevate justice over form, to sacrifice means to an end, and all along I had been flat-out wrong.

  There’s the rub with taking the law into your own hands. There may be things upon which to stake your life, at least you should hope so, but upon what can you hold absolute enough to stake the life of another?

  It is not enough to suspect, to surmise, to sort of kind of believe. It is not enough. Maybe that’s what due process is, a method, devised over millennia, to allow us to treat our guesses as certainties. We can put you in jail without absolute certainty after we’ve jumped through all the hoops and played the game as fairly as we know how. Due process is not a way toward certainty but a way to handle uncertainty, and when you forget that, you begin to forget that uncertainty is all we ever have.

  To the question of how you can represent a man you are certain is guilty, I give this answer: Who the hell can be certain of anything in this world?

  So here I was in a universe different than that into which I awoke, representing a man who I now believed was innocent and whose defense I had relentlessly sabotaged from almost the very moment of the crime. Now what was I to do, now how was I to save him, to save myself? Whatever it was, I had to do it quickly, before the wheels I had set into motion fell like a hatchet, smack on Guy Forrest’s head.

  “I have to tell you this, Guy,” I said, trying to hide the desperation in my voice. “The evidence against you is overwhelming. Your gun, your fingerprints, the bruise, which you’ll have to admit to if you testify, your attempted flight. They don’t know yet about the money, but if they do, it becomes even worse. I don’t believe you did it, and I’m willing to defend you to the best of my ability, no holds barred, but it might be time to seriously consider their offer.”

  “You said we should fight it.”

  “Yes, but that was before I learned about Gonzalez. You might win the murder case, but you’d still be up on fraud on the Gonzalez case. You’d still end up in jail. Look. Troy Jefferson offered up man one. You’d serve eight to ten years. I might be able to shave some months off. And I’ll make sure it covers what you did in the Gonzalez case, too. It’s not great, but you’ll be out before you’re fifty, with nothing hanging over your head and a chance to start over.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know that, Guy. I believe that. But you did cheat the insurance company. And if you go to trial and lose, which with the Juan Gonzalez stuff is more likely than ever, they could keep you in jail for the rest of your life, or even kill you.”

  “What about the other man?”

  “We can argue he did it,” I said, “and we will. But it cuts both ways. It could also be a reason for you to kill her, jealousy, anger. It’s a dangerous game you want to play. Eight years is hard, but it’s not the end of your life.”

  He turned to Beth. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a generous offer,” said Beth. “From what I understand, your father-in-law set it up to avoid a trial and the bad publicity. And to avoid any mention of Juan Gonzalez. I think it makes sense to pursue it.”

  “Can I think about it?” said Guy.

  “No,” I said. “There isn’t time. If Jefferson gets word of the Gonzalez mess, the deal will disappear. We have to decide now, this instant. Every second is dangerous. Give me authority to make a deal.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have the luxury not to know. You have to decide, now. I strongly suggest you make the deal. Beth strongly suggests you make the deal. It is your decision, but if you don’t decide now, it won’t be there later, and that could be the end.”
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br />   “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “I need an answer now, Guy. Now. Yes or no. What do you say? Yes or no.”

  20

  THE RECEPTIONIST behind the glass window made us wait in the waiting area.

  Mr. Jefferson, the receptionist said, was still in his meeting.

  I had called right from the prison and had been told by that selfsame lady that Mr. Jefferson was tied up. I told her it was important, I told her it was urgent, I told her it was about the Guy Forrest murder case and that Troy Jefferson would very much want to speak to me right away.

  She repeated her demurrer: “Mr. Jefferson is unavailable at the present instant.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said. “Don’t let him leave before I get there.”

  And now here I was.

  The receptionist smiled from behind the glass like a civil servant at the end of a long day and told us to please sit and wait. So we sat and we waited.

  The waiting area for the DA’s office was in the elevator lobby of the fourth floor of the courthouse. It was a stark and uncomfortable space. It appeared they had bought the furniture secondhand from the office of a failed dentist. You could almost hear the echoes of the screams. A single door with frosted glass, its lock controlled by the receptionist, led to the offices. I tapped my watch, tapped my foot. A heavy woman walked out of the elevator and was immediately buzzed through by the receptionist. I worked on the Jumble in the newspaper left out on the table along with a Newsweek months old. CEZAR was craze. THICY was itchy. But DUGAY,DUGAY. I was stumped on DUGAY. Where was Skink when you needed him?

  “Gaudy,” said Beth, looking over my shoulder.

  “Enough about my damn ties,” I said even as I filled in the blocks.

  The door opened, a man in a suit with a briefcase the size of a filing cabinet stepped through.

  “Could you tell Mr. Jefferson again that we are here?” I asked the receptionist.