Fatal Flaw

by William Lashner

  “Me?”

  “Smarmy and weak and definitely hiding something. I don’t like you much either, I’ve decided. I think you’re whiny and manipulative and not half as clever as you think you are, but I don’t really care about all that.”

  “Does that mean you’d go out with me?”

  “Somehow I have the strange sense that you’re looking for the right kind of outcome here. I have a sense, maybe, that you’re as interested as me in finding out what the hell really happened to Hailey Prouix.”

  “You don’t think Guy Forrest did it?”

  “The evidence points right in his face. But I have to admit that some of what you said in your opening had been on my mind from the start. Like he really was in love with her. Like he never was in it for the money. Like he doesn’t seem the type to end a fight with a bullet. But I’ve already told this to Jefferson, which is as far as my legal obligation goes. It is his decision whether or how to proceed. So it’s not the doubts I’m struggling with. What I’m struggling with is you.”

  “You have unresolved feelings and you find them threatening. I understand. It’s perfectly natural, really.”

  “You are in this deeper than you let on. You are in this up to your neck, though I can’t quite figure out how. You are in this in ways that give me serious pause and leave me struggling to figure out what to do with something I found.”

  “Something exculpatory? If it’s exculpatory, you have to turn it over. Brady v. Maryland.”

  “Now who’s the jerk throwing out cites? But what I have is nothing right now, though I have a sense you might be able to tell me enough to make it more interesting.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Let’s start with why you turned over the gun.”

  I paused for a moment, wondering what he had found, where he was going, whether or not I could trust him, even with a little bit of the truth. “I thought your possessing the gun,” I said slowly, “might further the ends of justice.”

  “That sounds like bullshit.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? That’s the way it is with lawyers and politicians both, we can make even the truth sound like lies.”

  “What did you find in Vegas?”

  “A story.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “A story about a boy who was killed a decade and a half ago in a little town in West Virginia.”

  “Hailey Prouix’s hometown.”

  “That’s right. He had fallen in love with Hailey, they had a stormy romance, and then he found out about something. He found out about something, and it made him mad as hell and put him at a crossroads. He was going to either run away with his love, Hailey Prouix, or hurt someone. And there he was, at the quarry on the south side of town, waiting to hear which way it was going to be, when the next thing he somehow falls off a ledge, cracks his head open, and dies in the water that had collected at the quarry’s bottom. The natural suspect was a guy named Grady Pritchett, rich man’s son, big man in high school who had been fighting with our dead boy just a few days before. All eyes turned to him, but he had an alibi, and a pretty convincing one at that. Hailey Prouix. Funny how it worked. And funny how after Hailey stood up for Grady Pritchett she got her college and law school all paid for so she could get the hell out of Pierce once and for all.”

  “How come I never heard any of this?”

  “You haven’t been asking the right questions.”

  “What kind of car does this Grady Pritchett drive?”

  “Why?”

  “Just asking.”

  “Doesn’t drive a car, drives a truck. A big black pickup.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Just a few towns down the road from Pierce.”

  “And you think this Grady might have come up here and killed that girl?”

  “Nope.”

  “You think he killed that boy fifteen years ago?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what the hell do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t yet figured it out, but there’s something connecting the two deaths. I met up with Hailey’s sister. She’s certifiable, in an actual asylum, treats some pop physics book as her Bible, but I took from her babbling that she, too, thinks the two are related. And if they are, I want to find out how. Believe this, Detective, all I want is for whoever killed Hailey Prouix to go straight to hell.”

  “Even if it’s your client?”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “She seduced him for the Gonzalez money. She set him up for it, met him at a bar, let their knees bang accidentally, and seduced him completely and absolutely. He fell stupidly in love and lost his bearings and gave up everything for her. Like I said in my opening, for him it was never about the money, it was about a love that was transforming, or maybe more precisely the hope for a love that was transforming. She set him up for the money, yes, but his hope was real, and he never could have killed that hope. Even when it all turned bad, he closed his eyes and kept it alive, because it was the hope he was chasing more than even her.”

  “And obsession couldn’t have turned to violence?”

  “Not with him, not with her. See, no matter what happened, he’d always remember the way he felt when their knees banged accidentally at that bar.”

  Maybe there was something in my voice that betrayed me, because he turned to stare at me with that wandering gaze of his and he said, “And how did that feel exactly?”

  “I’m telling you what I can.”

  “Maybe telling only what you can is not enough.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t explain the knocking of the knees and the way it had felt, the confusion and hope and lust all mixed together, I just couldn’t. I would be betraying more than myself, more than Guy, I would be betraying her, too. So instead I decided to say something else, something that would resonate. It is always in times of maximum stress, when all alternatives fail, that lawyers tend to turn to that most unlikely tactic, the truth.

  “I saw the body, Detective. I saw her on that mattress with a bullet through her chest. I saw the way her arms were crazily akimbo, I saw the way the blood contrasted with the pale of her skin. I’ve seen a few corpses, not as many as you, but a few, and they never fail to stun me with their abject lifelessness. It’s not like you can just breathe life back into them, it’s not like they’re sleeping, it’s something else, something distorted in a way that haunts the dreams. I can’t just let that go, I can’t just play my minor role and let the rest of you decide how it all gets sorted out. I saw the body, Detective.”

  He breathed in quickly through his nose, or was it a snort? I couldn’t tell. He stared straight ahead for a long moment before downing his beer and swiveling away from me. He reached into his jacket and tossed something onto the bar, a dollar or two for the beer, I supposed, and without saying a further word he climbed off his stool and headed out the door, right out the door.

  Gone.

  A despair flitted over my shoulders in that instant, a despair that filled me with a shocking sense of hopelessness. There was something about Breger I found comforting, something solid. He had shown faith in me, kindness, too, in his way. I admired how fairly he had handled the case, and I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to understand and say that I had done right, that everything would be okay. For some reason, from him, it would sound like the real thing. But he had instead just snorted at me and climbed down and walked away, a gesture that let me know with utter clarity that I had not done right, that everything would not be okay.

  I was sitting at the bar, feeling the despair, when I noticed a piece of paper in front of me. It looked like a bar tab. When I scanned the bar for the money Breger had left, there was nothing else, and I figured Breger had stuck me with the check. But then I looked at the paper more closely and saw that it wasn’t a bill. It was something else.

  A speeding ticket issued by the Philadelphia Police.
>
  Left on the bar, for me, by my good friend Detective Breger.

  I stared at it for a long moment, the name of the driver, Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, which I didn’t recognize, the make and style of the automobile, the state and number of the license plate, the location of the violation, the date. The date. I stared at it for a moment and then a moment more, and then I took out my phone.

  First I called Beth and told her that she would have to handle the next day of the trial all by herself.

  “What should I do?” she asked.

  “Vamp,” I said. “With all your heart.”

  Then I called the airline and made a reservation for two on the first flight out the next morning headed for Charleston, West Virginia.

  “Will you be needing a rental car at the airport?” asked the reservation man.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Yes indeed.”

  41

  FALL HAD come to Pierce with a suddenness that stunned. How long had I been away, how long had the trial of Guy Forrest been going on? It seemed I had lost my temporal bearings. When I had driven into the little town before, it felt as though the promise of spring had just given way to the relentless summer. Now the dry colors of autumn had taken hold, the bright yellows and oranges heralding the death of a season. Right now it was a riotous bounty of color. In a few weeks all would be bare in Pierce.

  We walked up the hill, through fallen leaves, their desiccated bodies crumbling beneath our feet as we made our way to the church.

  Inside, our footfalls echoed about the plaster and wood of the main chapel. We knocked on the door of the rectory, and Reverend Henson bade us enter without asking first who we were. His face, when he recognized me, was distressed but not surprised, as if he had been expecting me to return all along. As if the only thing that surprised him was that I had waited so long and had brought with me someone new.

  “Reverend Henson,” I said, “I’d like to introduce Oliver Breger, a Montgomery County homicide detective. Hailey died in Montgomery County and he is investigating her death. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought it important to bring him along.”

  The reverend smiled thinly at Breger. “A little out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it, Detective?”

  “Mr. Carl said it might be interesting.”

  Breger wasn’t looking at Henson as he spoke, his gaze instead was slipping around the small room with its cherry paneling and shelves filled with prayer books and theological texts. Behind the door hung the reverend’s vestment, flat and black and surprisingly frail, pinned as it was, limp and small, to the wood. It was a comfortable room, a place to read and prepare sermons, a place to have the pro forma talk with the bride and groom before the wedding or to hear stories from the family about the dear departed before the funeral, a comfortable room, but not lush. No, the Reverend Henson did not live a posh life in Pierce, it was clear. Whatever he had gained in the bargain he had brokered, it had not been his own material gain.

  Henson shifted in his seat and asked us to sit. He wasn’t happy having a homicide detective in his church, I was sure. I suppose he wasn’t happy having me there either, but I hadn’t come to make the good reverend happy. Something had happened in Pierce sixteen years ago, something rotten that the reverend was in the middle of, something that bore directly on the trial of Guy Forrest. The speeding ticket given me by the detective had shown with utter clarity that the deaths of Jesse Sterrett and Hailey Prouix were indeed related. To demonstrate that to a jury, I was going to need the reverend’s testimony. And I would need something else, something maybe Breger could help me get if I convinced him I was right. That something else was what had prompted me to ask Breger along. His own innate curiosity, so vital to the makeup of a first-rate detective, was what prompted him to agree.

  “I’ve come again,” I said, “to talk about Jesse Sterrett.”

  “Of course you have. But I’ve told you all I can, Mr. Carl. I have certain…responsibilities.”

  “You’re talking about privilege, aren’t you? Priest-penitent. Oh, I know about privilege. Detective Breger could tell you all about my reliance on privilege.”

  “I’ve thought about this ever since you left, I considered all my options, read what I could on the subject. It is a balancing act, to be sure, but I have done that balancing in my head, over and over, and I believe there is nothing I can do. I am truly sorry.”

  “You need to know, Reverend Henson, that it didn’t end with Jesse Sterrett. It isn’t over.”

  “There is nothing I can do.”

  “He killed Hailey.”

  “No, no, he didn’t,” he said. “I checked as soon as I heard the terrible news. He never left the state.”

  “He sent someone else to do it. And that’s not all. He tried to kill me, too. An attempt on my life is something I take pretty personally, especially when it is my partner who ends up in the hospital, dazed with a concussion, her wrist snapped like a twig. The doctors are still trying to put it back together.”

  Henson startled behind the desk and then looked away. “I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t over, Reverend. No one paid the ultimate price sixteen years ago, no one was convicted of murder in his stead, Hailey saw to that, but if you ask Grady Pritchett, a price was paid nonetheless, a price almost more than he could bear. And now my client is on trial for his life. If he loses, they will kill him. I know you can’t allow that. I know you can’t allow a man to die for something he did not do.”

  “I’m sure it won’t come to that. I’m sure you can pull it out with some dashing legal maneuver. I’ve heard about you Philadelphia lawyers.”

  “Oh, I have some tricks up my sleeve, yes I do. But so does the prosecutor, also a Philadelphia lawyer, with flashier moves than mine. And really, all I can tell you with certainty after a decade of practicing law is that no one knows what a jury will do. And here’s the thing, Reverend. You coming in after the fact might not be enough. The appellate court might not believe you, or might decide you are speaking up too late. The court might let the verdict stand. You might end up in the prison parking lot, fists balled in frustration, as an innocent man dies for someone else’s sins and for your silence.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re mistaken. What proof do you have?”

  I stared at him for a moment. I could see the wavering in his eyes. Yes, he had been thinking about it for the weeks since I left, and they had not been easy weeks.

  “I could sit here and try to prove it to you, Reverend. In my briefcase I have all manner of evidence, but, to be honest, none of it is conclusive. It is all wildly circumstantial. But you don’t really need proof, do you? Your mind is asking for the evidence, but in your heart you know. In your heart you’ve known from the instant you learned of Hailey’s death. You knew this moment was coming, and though you’ve been reading the texts and debating what to do, your heart’s known what you needed to do all along.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’m responsible for accusing Guy Forrest of murder,” said Breger, his words soft and comforting but his unsettling gaze now straight on the reverend. “In all my years I believe I’ve never been involved in the conviction of an innocent man. It would haunt me to the day I died if ever I was. If you have information that might convince me I am wrong about that man, I need to hear it.”

  “What happened to Jesse Sterrett sixteen years ago?” I said.

  There was a long silence. The trees outside the window lost more of their leaves, a darkness came and passed as a cloud drifted overhead. There was a long silence, and then Reverend Henson said, “I don’t know for sure. That’s the thing, Mr. Carl, I’ve never known for sure.”

  “Then tell us what you do know.”

  “All I know is suspicion and surmise, and the anguished cries of a poet who died before either of the Prouix twins was born. That is all I know. But even so, Mr. Carl, even so, it remains a story to tear at your heart.”

  42

  REVEREND HENSON

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p; SHE CAME around shortly after I arrived to take over for the Reverend Johannson.

  He had been a formidable figure in the community, the Reverend Johannson, with his great leonine head and deep voice. They said around town that listening to his uncompromising sermons was like listening to a prophet of God. As you can see, I was quite a change. I’m more squirrelish than leonine, and no one ever confused my squeak of a voice with the voice of God. Following the Reverend Johannson, I thought I’d be a great disappointment to the congregation, but that turned out not to be exactly so. I suppose some thought I wasn’t up for the job, that I didn’t project the image of stern righteousness they had come to expect in Pierce, but then again others greeted me with much warmth, as though I were a welcome antidote. ’Tis a hard thing, I suppose, to bring what seem to be our petty little problems to a prophet of God, even when sometimes they’re not so petty.

  When first I arrived, there was an initial period of greeting in the community and I was taken up in a gratifying whirl of activity. But then, of course, the invitations slowed appreciably, and I settled into the more peaceful rhythms of a small-town rectory, with much time on my hands. That was when Hailey came around to see me.

  She was a lovely-looking girl, that was clear, with a sadness that was unmistakable and made her, somehow, intriguing to me. And she was provocative, too. She would dress a certain way and act a certain way and hold herself a certain way, all designed, I could tell, to get my heart to beating. And it did a bit, I admit, I’m only human, and I wasn’t yet married. And she did keep wearing shirts the bottoms of which never seemed to reach the top of her pants. And her smile was truly a dazzling thing. She was fishing, almost desperately, daring me, it seemed, some of her comments were on the wrong side of salacious, but I steadfastly refused to take the lure, or even to much react beyond a disapproving rise of the eyebrow. I might not be as good a man as I could wish, but I saw before me a girl in some sort of trouble, and I knew exactly what she didn’t need from the likes of me. So I didn’t take the lure, and it was as if by not doing so I had passed her little test. Slowly I saw her manner ease and her provocative ways cease.