Fatal Flaw

by William Lashner

  “The Delaware cops were nervous. They didn’t know you could sleaze yourself out of tighter spots than that.”

  “Practiced as I am in the arts of deception and trickery.”

  “There you go. Did he tell you anything?”

  “No, not really.”

  “You mean he didn’t fall down on his knees and confess to the Hailey Prouix murder?”

  “I wouldn’t let him.”

  Jefferson’s head jerked up. “You wouldn’t let him? What the hell do you mean, you wouldn’t let him?”

  “You know how it is, Troy. Defense attorneys never want to know for sure.”

  “But you’re not his defense attorney.”

  “Old habits die hard.”

  “If he had actually confessed, it would have saved your client.”

  “My client is already saved.”

  “Don’t be so damn sure.”

  “You heard the judge. After Cutlip’s testimony she has doubts whether the case should even go to the jury. What happens now if I put Bobo on the stand during the defense case and ask him if he killed Hailey Prouix? He’ll plead the Fifth in front of the jury and kill your case.”

  “The judge won’t allow that.”

  “Oh, yes she will. It’s an acquittal, probably before the case goes to the jury. And rightly so, considering you have the wrong guy. Cutlip sent Bobo east to kill Guy Forrest and the kid screwed up. My client was the intended victim, not a perpetrator. You have the wrong man, Troy.”

  “You set me up.”

  “Maybe I did, and if I did, I must admit, it felt fine.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “But, Troy, no one else has to know about it. The press is going to want a statement from both of us after this. Either you can go in front of the massed media and admit to being played for the rube, or you can stand side by side with Detectives Breger and Stone and announce that your office had broken the case wide open and found the two actual killers of Hailey Prouix.”

  He turned his head and stared at me without saying a word.

  “If your office wanted to take credit for continuing the investigation even after the indictment,” I said, “for unearthing the crucial speeding ticket, for bringing Lawrence Cutlip into the jurisdiction and effecting the arrest of Dwayne Joseph Bohannon in cooperation with the Delaware State Police, I wouldn’t contradict a single word.”

  “You’d sit back and let us bask in the glory?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I’m a sweetheart, and because all I want is for it to be over. But you have to decide quickly. Guy shouldn’t spend another day in jail.”

  “What about the Juan Gonzalez fraud?”

  “Time served, no more. He’s through as a lawyer, and he’s paid enough penance for burying that file, trust me. Time served, no probation, he’s free to start his life over again.”

  Jefferson twisted his mouth into thought. “I’ll run it by the DA. He agrees, we’ll do it all tomorrow morning in court. Your boy will be out by noon.”

  “Good. And you ought to give Breger a commendation for his work in this case. In fact, the old man’s probably close to retirement. A raise in grade might raise his pension, too, make those golden years a little more golden.”

  “He doesn’t like to be called the old man.”

  “Best as I can tell, he doesn’t like a lot of things.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “But for everything to go down like we’ve agreed, you have to promise me one more favor.”

  “Aw, now, here it comes, here’s the payoff. All right, Carl, let me hear it. What’s your price?”

  “You need to show pity on Bohannon.”

  “Come again?”

  “He’s a screwed-up kid who fell in with someone truly evil and lost himself in the process. Cutlip bent him to his will and, in so doing, destroyed him. I’m not saying he shouldn’t pay for what he did, but he was just a tool that Cutlip used and tossed away without a backward glance. Bohannon was going to scratch himself to death out of guilt if we hadn’t shown up when we did. Give him a deal and take your venom out on Cutlip.”

  The cops came out of the room waving a plastic bag with the gun inside. It had been sitting atop the bed, just where Dwayne and I had left it for them to find.

  “I’ll think on it,” Jefferson said before leaving me to talk it over with the ranking uniform. It wasn’t hard to figure what would happen next. They would take Dwayne now to Dover and charge him with a firearms violation. They would take him to Dover, but he wouldn’t be in Dover long. Jefferson would extradite him to Pennsylvania, where he would be assigned a lawyer who would make a deal in exchange for his testimony against Lawrence Cutlip. I didn’t know how long he’d get, it would be a lot, and all of it deserved, but he would get some kind of a deal, and the Delaware firearms charge would undoubtedly run concurrently. He’d spend part of his life outside the prison walls, and that didn’t bother me one bit. It was funny how at the start of the case I had wanted nothing but the harshest vengeance visited upon the man who shot Hailey Prouix through the heart, and now I had done what I could to make sure the law went as easy as possible on her killer. But I had seen the writing on his skin.

  “You don’t look very happy,” said Detective Breger, coming up from behind me. “You should be dancing.”

  “I’m jitterbugging. Doesn’t it show?”

  “It looks like you ate one fried oyster too many. But you had quite the day, finding Bobo and, before that, breaking Cutlip like you did.”

  “I didn’t break Cutlip.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “No, Detective. He wanted us to know about him and Hailey. He was proud of it. As soon as he found out she had been keeping his letter with the others, that she never stopped loving him for some twisted reason, he wanted us to know. All I did was let him. The hemming and hawing, the tears, the hesitancy, it was an act, and I was his straight man, but he wanted to crow.”

  “He pretty much confessed to murder on the stand.”

  “That was the price for his bragging rights. I’ll bet right now that bastard is smiling. I’ll bet right now he’s talking about her to his fellow inmates. How supple she was, how fine she was. How she was the sweetest twelve-year-old ever to sashay down a junior high corridor.”

  “Stop it. You’re beating yourself up over something you weren’t even in the same state to stop. All you did was clean up the resulting mess. You have nothing to be sick over, you did swell.”

  “I don’t feel swell, I feel dirty.”

  “Guys like that, even locking them up makes you want to take a shower.”

  I kicked at the cement.

  “You did well, son,” said Breger.

  “Are you turning sweet on me, Detective?”

  “No. In my book you’re still an obnoxious punk. By the way, we need you to sign off and let us examine those phone logs.”

  “What?”

  “The phone logs. To your home phone. We still want them.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Really, we do.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes, yes we do. We need to tie up all the loose ends. That was the deal.”

  “You don’t want those phone logs, trust me. Jefferson will make an offer, Bobo will confess, both he and Cutlip will end up in prison. Put them away, swallow the key to Cutlip’s cell, and end it.”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “No phone logs.”

  “All along I’ve been right.”

  “The case is over, our deal is null and void.”

  “The thing that puzzles me, Victor, is how in the hell you thought you’d get away with it.”

  “But I did, didn’t I.”

  He stared at me for a moment, his strange gaze playing across my face, and then he burst out in laughter, a deep, bellowing laughter, the first I’d ever heard from him. He burst out in laughter and slammed me in the back
. “Maybe you did at that,” he said, walking away, and then he burst into laughter again.

  I walked over to Beth and Skink, who were standing together in a corner of the lot.

  “What went on in there?” said Beth. “We were scared out of our skulls for you.”

  “It’s over. The case is over. Jefferson has to okay it with his boss, but it looks like Guy’s getting out tomorrow.”

  “You were up there for an hour and a half.”

  “It seemed longer,” I said.

  “Did he do it?” said Skink.

  “I wouldn’t let him tell me, but, yeah. He did it.”

  “What went on in that room for an hour and a half?” said Beth.

  “I had some questions, and he answered them, and that was it.”

  “You don’t want to talk about it.”

  “No I don’t. Ever. Never. But I’ll tell you this: What he told me will haunt my dreams to the day I die. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We turned away from the scene at the motel, the three of us turned away and started heading down the road, our shadows marching before us like soldiers.

  “There’s a crab shack on the bay what I know of,” said Skink, “where they gots them fat and covered with spice. You interested?”

  I looked at Beth. She shrugged.

  “They serve beer?” I said.

  “Longnecks, mate.”

  “Music?”

  “A jukebox from heaven. Nothing from after 1967. Five plays a buck.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said.

  So that’s what we did, the three of us. Skink drove us down to some red-painted shack on the bay with brown paper on the tables, where we pounded on the hard shells with our hammers and ate till our fingers bled. Skink lit a cigar and told us stories, Beth cracked jokes, I drank beer enough so the sea shifted and the land heaved and the sun dropped low over the water. It was a night of celebration and camaraderie, of noisy arguments with the blowhards at the next table, of sadness and hilarity, of Skink baring his teeth in laughter. Elvis was on the jukebox, and so was Louis Armstrong, blowing the blues, and by the end the brown paper was covered with bits of red shell and long-necked bottles, cobs shorn of corn, a cigar butt, all in an evocative pattern that would have made Joseph Cornell proud. It was a lovely evening, proof that life could be more than the sordid adventure we had just passed through, a lovely evening, perfect enough to almost make me forget.

  Almost.

  54

  I AWOKE with a start from my sleep. I sat up on the living room couch, scratched, looked around. In the dim city light slipping through the slats of my shade, the apartment looked old and hard, lonely. I had been there too long to be objective enough to figure what it said about my life, but somehow, now, it seemed lonelier than it should.

  Then I noticed that the chain latch of my front door, the chain I fastened each night out of habit, was hanging loose.

  Guy had done it again, left me like a thief in the middle of the night. This time I didn’t scour the apartment frantically for him, this time I didn’t desperately work out where he was headed. This time I knew. I rinsed my face in cold water, I put on a pair of jeans and a white tee shirt, my raincoat, took a six of Rolling Rock out of my fridge, and headed out after him.

  He had just been released and didn’t know yet where he wanted to go, so I had volunteered my place for a few nights while he decided. He was through as a lawyer, his felony conviction on fraud would see to that, and his marriage was broken, though not irretrievably, as Leila remained forever stalwart. There were more questions than answers in his future, which might have been the best thing he had going for him. But he seemed dazed when he stepped out of the prison, justifiably confused and angry, having been accused of murdering his lover and forced to defend himself without ever yet having been given the opportunity to mourn. He just needed time, he told Leila, who was standing outside the prison yard with me, and I assumed that after having spent six months sleeping on a prison cot, he needed a full-size bed, too. Which is why I was sleeping on the couch when I awoke with a start to discover him gone.

  The houses all along the fine suburban street where I found him were well lit, all but one. Their outside lamps were shining, and within the ambit of those lights families were sleeping, parents were holding one another, kids were snug in their beds, all asleep, all preparing for the next day of their lovely lives. Work, school, friends, family, good food, fast food, noisy triumphs, quiet defeats, hope, hope. Life was waiting for those asleep in the confines of those houses, all but one.

  Hailey Prouix’s house was dark as death.

  Guy Forrest sat on the steps in front of her house, the same step, in fact, on which I found him the night of Hailey Prouix’s murder. I didn’t say a word as I walked up, sat down beside him, twisted a beer free from its plastic noose. He didn’t say a word when he took it, just gave me a glance like he had been expecting me. I took a beer for myself. Two soft exhalations as we popped the tops. We sat there together on the steps and quietly drank.

  Her house had been scrubbed of blood, and scrubbed again, and still it lay fallow. But not for long. With the trial now over, a sign would soon sprout on its lawn and a lockbox with a key would blossom from the knob of its front door. Realtors would drive their Lexuses to the curb and bring their clients in for a look. The first few might come with a morbid interest, getting a glimpse for themselves of where the mattress lay on the floor, where the woman lay on the mattress, from where the shots were fired. But then the curiosity seekers would disappear and the young couples would arrive. They’d hear the whispers and smile, knowing that an unsavory past would lower the price. One of those couples would discuss it long and hard and then make a lowball offer that would be quickly accepted. After closing, the couple would scrub it down for the umpteenth time, strip the floors, paint, lay wall-to-wall and buy a big sleigh bed for the master bedroom where they’d make love with the wild freedom allowed young marrieds with no children to knock late at night on their bedroom door. Later they’d paint the second bedroom a sweet powder blue, buy a crib, set up a black-and-white mobile to catch their new baby’s attention. They’d bring the bundle home and spend their nights pacing the upstairs hallway in a vain attempt to get the baby to sleep, and in their love and exhaustion the warmth of family would fill the house and scrub away the blood far more efficiently than the toughest wire brush or harshest chemical cleanser.

  But all that awaited still in the future. Now, as Guy and I sat on the steps, Hailey Prouix’s house was dark, dark as death, and for that I think we both were grateful.

  “I dream about her,” he said softly, finally, after a long silence. “I dream I’m holding her, I’m kissing her, I’m making love to her. Sometimes in the middle of the night I smell her in the air, and my heart leaps.”

  “I know.”

  “You do, don’t you, you son of a bitch?”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

  “Let me have another.”

  The scrape of his nail on the metal top, the quick exhalation of the gas. The desperate gulping, as if there were something more than beer in the can.

  “What am I going to do?” he said.

  “You can stay with me for as long as you need to.”

  “And then what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Or nothing.”

  “Guy. You have to move forward.”

  “Forward to where?”

  “It’s up to you. Remember the old proverb, ‘In crisis there is opportunity.’”

  “That’s what you have for me, some old Chinese proverb?”

  “I think it was Kennedy who said it, actually.”

  “Shut up.”

  “But he was indeed speaking of the Chinese word.”

  “Just shut up.”

  “All right.”

  “I thought she would save me, Victor. I thought it would save me. I sacrificed everything I had for love, absolutely everything, my family, m
y future. It demanded everything, and that’s what I gave it, and I thought then it would save me.”

  “Well, there was your problem right there.”

  “You don’t believe in love?”

  “I suppose I do, like I believe in television, or the interstate highway system, but neither of them is going to save me, and I don’t expect love to either.”

  “You’re just being a hard-ass.”

  “You abdicated your life to love because that meant you didn’t have to take responsibility for your own failures. You thought this thing you craved would swoop down and save you.”

  “It wasn’t a thing.”

  “There’s no difference. A big TV. An SUV. Someone new to love. It’s still something outside yourself, so it will never be enough. There is always more to crave, and more and more. That’s the secret, Guy, the terrifying secret. There is nothing big enough to fill the gap. Nothing is coming along to save you. Your only chance is to save yourself.”

  “How?”

  “Figure it out. Your whole life has been a series of blind reactions. The Wild West life leading to the strictures of law, and marriage leading to abandonment of everything for love. Maybe it’s time to quit reacting. Maybe it’s time to sit down and stop running from where you are and decide instead where it is exactly you want to go.”

  “Simple as that, is it?”

  “Sure. But whatever it is, I have a pretty good idea it starts with your kids.”

  “I love my kids.”

  “Then show it. Show them.”

  “But that means going back to Leila.”

  “It doesn’t have to.”

  “I don’t know if I can go back to her, back to that life.”

  “Make it new.”

  “If you have all the answers, why are you so damn miserable?”

  “Faulty execution.”

  We both laughed and then sat quietly for a long moment.

  “God, but I was happy with her,” he said, his sigh coming like an explosion. “There was a time with Hailey when my happiness was perfect. That’s what I miss, that feeling, still young, free, in love. It was like a drug. How do I get it back? I need to get it back.”