January Justice

by Athol Dickson

  “I can’t accept these things.”

  “You don’t need to accept anything, Mr. Cutter. The trust arrangement is quite clear. It’s already yours. And if I may say so, now that you’re feeling better, it would be wise for us to get together to discuss a few administrative issues. I’d like to introduce you to my partners and some key attorneys from our trust department. We would be very pleased to come your way if you’d rather not meet here in Manhattan.”

  I said, “I hope you haven’t told your partners or your trust department or anyone else about my marriage to Miss Lane.”

  “Why, no, of course not. She has a personal attorney there in California who knows, a Ms. Silverstein, who has worked with me on a few matters. But Miss Lane directed me to keep your marriage confidential, and of course, as her attorney I’m bound to do so. It’s only that I had assumed since she…well, given these new circumstances…”

  “Nothing has changed, Mr. Williams. I still want the marriage kept secret.”

  “I see. And of course I’ll do as you say.”

  “And there’s one more thing.”

  I paused. It was such a huge decision. I wanted just a few more seconds to be sure.

  “Mr. Cutter,” said the lawyer, “are you there?”

  “I’m here. Here’s what I want you to do. Set aside fifty thousand dollars for me. I want to sell everything else and give the proceeds to charity. I mean everything. Houses, cars, yachts, jets, and whatever else I own. And this is extremely important: I don’t want my name involved in any of the transactions. Nobody must ever know I inherited Miss Lane’s estate. Can you arrange all that?”

  “Are you sure you mean—”

  “Mr. Williams, can you do it nor not?”

  “Why yes, it’s certainly possible. We’ll need a little time to think through the details, but are you sure you—”

  “Good. Please figure out how to do that and get back to me as soon as you can.”

  8

  The sense of unreality was stronger than ever as I made my way back through the mansion to the kitchen. Teru and Simon sat at the table as before. I took a seat in the same chair as before. I said, “You guys mentioned a detective… Russo I think you said, right?”

  “That is correct, sir,” Simon replied.

  “He knows about our marriage?”

  “There was no way to keep it from him,” said Teru.

  “No. I suppose not.” I took a sip of the lemonade Simon had prepared for me. Condensation from the glass dropped onto the kitchen table. I set the glass back down on the ring of water it had left behind. I slouched in the wooden chair. It was as if the air around me had turned to lead, pressing in from all directions.

  The patients in the mental-health ward hadn’t been allowed to watch television or listen to the radio. The doctors said it would have been unsettling. And in the week since I had been out, I hadn’t been following the news. I had been avoiding it without really understanding why. But this was why. In my heart I knew the secret must be out, but as long as I avoided knowing that for certain, there was still a chance, a reason for slight hope. Now the time had come to face the truth. The thought of people knowing that Haley had been married to me made my stomach roil, but I had to ask the question.

  I said, “I guess the whole world knows about us now.”

  “No, sir,” replied Simon. “I believe your secret is still safe.”

  I sat up a little straighter. “You mean Russo didn’t tell anyone?”

  “It would appear not. At least there was no hint of it at the time.”

  “But… why not?”

  “Maybe he’s a gentleman,” said Teru. “When he interviewed me, I asked him to keep it quiet if he could. I explained that you and Haley wanted it that way. He said he’d do his best.”

  Simon said, “I told the detective the same thing, sir. He said he would keep your relationship to Miss Haley secret if the progress of his investigation allowed it.”

  I closed my eyes and said a little prayer of gratitude. If it was true, if the detective hadn’t revealed the truth about the marriage, then the only people who knew about Haley and me were a couple of her lawyers, Detective Russo, Simon, Teru, and Higgins, who was Haley’s closest friend. My grandparents in Texas also knew, but Haley had no family, so that was it. Eight people, plus me. Which meant there was still a chance that Haley’s reputation would be safe.

  “Malcolm, can I ask a question?” Teru said.

  I opened my eyes to look at him. “Sure. Anything.”

  “Okay. You know I never asked why you wanted it to be a secret. It wasn’t any of my business. You two didn’t want me to speak to anyone about it, so I didn’t. But now that Haley’s gone, is there still a reason why we shouldn’t know the reason for the secrecy?”

  Simon and Teru sat silently while I trailed a finger in the puddle of condensation that had collected around the sweating glass of lemonade. I asked myself if there was still a reason not to tell them, but the only decent excuse to keep the secret had been buried with my wife. Still, I wondered what they would think of me when I was done.

  Simon said, “Mr. Fujimoto, perhaps we should leave Mr. Cutter to his thoughts.”

  “No,” I said, looking up at them. “No, it’s okay. You guys were Haley’s friends. You have a right to know.”

  I took a deep breath. It was very hard.

  “So… a few years ago I was on a road outside a village in the Kunar Province of Afghanistan, the middle of Indian country, about seven clicks from the Pakistani border. We were done for the day, heading back to base. I was in the last vehicle. I remember the temperature that day was a hundred and two. I was wearing a bandana over my lower face because the road dust was getting in my nose. The sweat was stinging my eyes too. I was in a lousy mood.

  “The MRAP ahead of me in the column took a direct hit from an IED, and then all hell broke loose. The enemy had mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Two more MRAPs lit up in the next ten seconds. They call those things ‘mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles,’ but the Taliban can open them up like sardine cans with antitank mines. They had us flanked from higher ground on both sides of the road. It was pretty grim.

  “I ordered the guys to fall out to a drainage trench beside the road. A couple of us got hit on the way over. There wasn’t much cover, even in the trench. They were picking us off with rifle fire until I called in a couple of Kiowas. The helicopters cleaned things up pretty quickly, but we had eight killed in action in those first five minutes.

  “My guys stewed about it overnight. The next morning we went back to the village. There was another firefight, but this time all the casualties were on the other side. There were a lot of KIAs in that village. Mostly Taliban, no question, but a few were women, and there were a couple of boys, maybe ten or eleven years old. Of course, that will happen when they come at you with AK-47s, but you feel pretty bad about it later.”

  I had slumped low in the kitchen chair. Teru was watching me closely. Simon was looking out through the window.

  I said, “I had been hit in the right thigh early on that second day, so I set up a command position in this little mud-brick house in the center of town and let our corpsman work me over while most of my guys went door to door through the village. They sent in a chopper for me and dropped me off at the battalion aid station. I lost a ton of blood, but otherwise it wasn’t too bad. They had me up and around in a week. I figured that was that. It was just a couple of bad days. There had been a lot of bad days, so I tried not to think about it too much. Then about a month later, my captain came over to the hooch one morning to ask questions about a video on the Internet.”

  I paused to look at Simon and Teru, wishing there were some way to avoid it. I said, “The village we went back to on that second day was Laui Kalay.”

  Neither of them reacted at first.

  Then Teru said, “Oh no.”

  Simon rose and carried his teacup to a sink. I watched as he carefully washed out the
cup with a soapy cloth. He rinsed the cup, then placed it on a wooden rack beside the sink. When that was done, he didn’t return to the table. He stood still, looking down into the sink.

  Teru said, “You were there? When they cut off all those fingers and knocked out all those teeth? You were really there?”

  I said, “The court-martial found me guilty.”

  “But I remember that video like it was yesterday. That marine with the knife, chopping off the corpses’ fingers for their rings. The others breaking out dead people’s teeth for gold. All those marines cracking jokes. They must have showed it a thousand times on television.” Teru looked at me. “You weren’t in it.”

  Still staring down into the sink, Simon said, “If memory serves, the sergeant in command was convicted of filming the unpleasantness with his cell phone, so of course he was not shown in the video.”

  “Holy mother of God,” said Teru. “You’re that guy?”

  9

  Teru, Simon and I sat silently in Haley’s kitchen. The silence was awkward. I had no doubt they were both trying to figure out what to say to a convicted war criminal. I was trying to figure out how I would answer. Finally, Teru said, “So that’s why Haley didn’t want the marriage to come out. She didn’t want the public to connect her with the Laui Kalay atrocities.”

  I stared at him. The brown color of my irises is almost as dark as the black of my pupils. Some say they look like a pair of empty holes. I’ve been told they seem to take in everything and give very little away. Teru looked down and shifted in his seat.

  Simon raised a fist to cover his mouth and quietly cleared his throat. He said, “Mr. Fujimoto, may I suggest that you more carefully consider the situation? A woman comes as if from out of nowhere and rises to the pinnacle of fame, not only because she’s beautiful, but also because she’s one of the finest actresses on the planet. As it happens, she is also very skilled with money. She receives as much as twenty million dollars for each motion picture. She invests well and turns her tens of millions into hundreds of millions. But her riches and her fame have left her isolated and lonely. Indeed, she finds herself so much alone that the only people she considers friends are her gardener and butler.

  “Naturally, when she marries her chauffeur, a chap fifteen years her junior, she knows the world will assume she is a fool, one of those aging, desperate movie stars who trades precious dignity for a worthless fantasy of youth. They will say he is a gold digger, a gigolo, a scoundrel who seduced her for her money. And to make matters worse, the chauffeur has a disgraceful past well known throughout the world. So she agrees to marry him, but she refuses to be seen with him in public, except when he performs his role as her humble driver. She refuses to acknowledge the true nature of their relationship. She insists that they pretend this chap is no more to her than a mere servant.”

  Simon walked over from where he had been standing by the kitchen sink. He sat with us and adjusted the crease in his slacks. He gazed across the table at Teru. “Mr. Fujimoto, does that sound like our Miss Haley?”

  Teru frowned and looked at Simon. He shook his head. “Of course not.”

  “No,” said Simon. “I should think not. Because our Miss Haley was in love, as you know. She was in love, and no power on the earth could have stopped her from shouting it from the rooftops, except for one.”

  I saw understanding dawn on Teru’s face. He turned to me. “It was your idea.”

  I nodded. “It was the only way I would marry her. She said she didn’t care, but I knew if news of our marriage had gotten out, it would have destroyed her career and all the good she was doing. She would have become the heartless egomaniac who married one of the butchers of Laui Kalay.”

  Teru reached over and laid his hand on my forearm. “I’m sorry. I should have known she’d never be ashamed of you.”

  I shrugged and offered a weak smile. “Don’t worry about it, buddy. We couldn’t have pulled it off without you.”

  It was true. Without the loyal silence of Teru and Simon and Haley’s old friend Higgins, there was no way Haley and I could have kept our marriage out of the press for more than two years. Marriage licenses are public records in most of America, but in California, couples can get a confidential marriage license from a specially authorized notary public, and a court order is required to unseal the document. So Rita Silverstein, Haley’s personal attorney, had applied for the necessary legal authority.

  One morning I had walked over to the rear entrance of the mansion at El Nido, crossed the kitchen and the morning room, and strolled along the gallery to the front living room, where Simon, Teru, Higgins, and my grandparents were already waiting. Haley had been angelic in a white-silk shift, with her hair golden like a halo, and I had been carefully shaved and wearing a new suit. We held hands while Rita confidentially married us by the power vested in her by the State. Then my grandfather spoke a few words about the Lord and said a prayer of blessing, and Haley and I became husband and wife in the eyes of God and California.

  We hadn’t exchanged rings. We had no honeymoon. We knew reporters could find out about our little wedding if they had a reason to go looking, so we gave them no reason to look. We went to great extremes to maintain the employer-employee fiction. We avoided all physical contact unless we were alone together in a room. Haley continued to pay me by check every two weeks. She often attended gala events and public functions with male actors, producers, directors, and other business associates. And the greatest sacrifice: I never actually lived under the same roof with my wife.

  Our only compromise had been the decision that I would live in the guesthouse on her Newport Beach estate, exactly three hundred and twenty-two steps away from her bedroom. This had seemed reasonable for a man who was not only Haley’s driver but also her bodyguard.

  The thought that Haley might suffer because of my past had been only one of my concerns. No matter how often she denied it, I also worried that she might think her fortune was at least partially responsible for my being there. So in addition to insisting on the secrecy, I had asked for the prenuptial agreement. Haley had refused. She said she trusted me completely. I had insisted again. We argued gently about it more than once. I was resolute. It was her heart I craved more than anything else on earth, the humble, kind, and lofty spirit in her. I craved a chance to prove the purity of my love.

  Finally I refused to marry Haley unless she agreed to my two conditions—the secrecy and the prenuptial. I told her, “I couldn’t live with myself if my past caused you harm. And I can tell you a million times that your money doesn’t matter, but as long as the money is still there for me, there will always be the possibility it isn’t totally true. This is the only way to settle it, once and for all. I have to go into this marriage with just our love at stake, and nothing else.”

  At last she understood what it meant to me, and she had agreed to the prenuptial. Or so I thought.

  Sitting there between Teru and Simon in Haley’s kitchen, everything I saw reminded me of her. I thought of what she wrote on that prenuptial agreement in place of her signature. I thought of the “Luckiest Girl Alive,” driven mad by a massive overdose, driven off a cliff above a city with four million of her admirers. Every one of them could grieve publicly for her. Only I could not. Only I must pretend a detachment from my heartache. The love of my life had been murdered in my presence, but I had to hide my grief. I had to find a way to live with that.

  Or not.

  “I can’t inherit anything from Haley,” I said.

  The gardener and the butler stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  Teru said, “I thought we went over this before. You’ve already inherited her estate.”

  I took a deep breath. “Look. Because of my job, I had a believable reason to be around Haley most of the time when she was alive. It was risky, but it was possible to pull the marriage off without destroying her reputation. And she really wanted to be married, so okay, I agreed to that. I would have done anything to make her ha
ppy, and I could see that it was just barely possible.

  “But inheriting her estate is just impossible. One of the butchers of Laui Kalay can’t suddenly be worth hundreds of millions of dollars without making news. Even if I sold this place and all her other stuff and took the money off to Italy or someplace to buy my own houses and jets and yachts, after Laui Kalay, people would always want to know where I got the money. They wouldn’t rest until they knew. The marriage would come out, and that would destroy her memory, her legacy. All the good she did—the hospitals, the homeless shelters, the orphanages, the medical research—everything we all worked so carefully to protect would end up tainted by association with me after all. I won’t let that happen. I have to make sure the world will always remember Haley as she really was, not as someone who got married to a monster, not as someone who didn’t care about the things they say I did, but as…as the kindest, the most caring…”

  I had to stop. I wiped my eyes. I reached for the glass of lemonade before me on Haley’s kitchen table. I picked it up. I saw my hand was shaking. I put the glass back down. I realized I was terrified at the possibility that my past might hurt her even now, in death.

  Beside me, Teru was slowly nodding, and Simon said, “Yes, I see.”

  They allowed me a moment to compose myself. Then Teru said, “So…what? You plan to give it all away?”

  I nodded. “Most of it, anyway. I think Haley would want me to keep a little, just enough to get started on my life again without her. And she’d want you guys provided for. And Maria. She kept house for Haley a long time. But yeah, I’ll tell the lawyer who wrote her will to make it look as if she left most of her estate to her charities, and then I’ll just disappear.”

  “Sir, Miss Lane was quite generous to me in her will,” said Simon. “I shouldn’t think it would be necessary to be ‘provided for,’ as you phrase it.”

  “Me, either,” said Teru. “Haley left me a bundle.”