In the lobby I stopped in front of the fish leaping out from the marble fountain. The fish’s fish lips were puckered and spitting out the nasty little stream. Someone, somewhere, thought the effect was pleasing, but who? How? Maybe that was the biggest mystery of all. I wrapped Jonah Peale’s red power tie tight around that ugly fish’s neck and stepped into the street.
17
“YOU KNOW if this leaks,” said Beth after I had told her of my discovery about Juan Gonzalez and my meeting with Peale, minus the bit about Skink, “it would devastate Guy’s defense. He wants us to pursue the lover as the killer. Fine. In a lover’s triangle it’s easy enough to point the finger at the missing member.”
“Speaking metonymically, of course.”
“But money trumps love. If the prosecution can show a monetary motive for Guy’s anger, like being cheated out of the money they had stolen together, they’ll have a much easier go.”
“I know,” I said.
“And if Troy Jefferson finds out what you found out, he’ll withdraw the plea offer in a second.”
“I know that, too.”
“Then maybe we should accept it before it disappears.”
“Maybe, but we need to talk to Guy first. We need to give Guy a chance to tell us his side of the story.”
“Guy stole the money, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And Hailey transferred it out of their joint account, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Then what is there that he could tell us to alter those fundamental facts? His explanation won’t change the government’s ability to turn that into motive. You add this to his fingerprints on the gun, the improbability of his story, the evidence of another lover, the lack of evidence of a break-in, you add it all up and the sum is a guilty.”
I avoided her gaze and shrugged. “Convictions happen.”
She stared at me. I refused to stare back.
“You look terrible.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s so sweet.”
“You have bags under your eyes the airlines would make you gate-check.”
“I’ve been staying up late reading.”
“Must be something good.”
“A classic.”
“I’ve been wondering why you haven’t pushed Guy to accept the plea. At first I thought maybe it was because you like appearing on the evening news and it had been a while since you had a case that put you there. Then I thought you just wanted to keep the case alive so you could bury yourself in work and forget your failed romance. But I never thought it was because you believed Guy is innocent. Do you, Victor?”
“What?”
“Believe he’s innocent?”
I turned my head to look at her straight on. “It shouldn’t matter.”
“But it does, doesn’t it? I can feel it in you.”
“Let me turn it around. How would you feel if you learned that Guy was absolutely guilty? How would you feel then about defending him? How would you feel then about getting for him a sweetheart deal?”
“I’d feel lousy about it.”
“But you’d still defend him to the best of your abilities?”
“Yes. I would. That’s the job.”
“I know the job. I’m not talking about the job. I’m talking about what you think of the job.”
“Sometimes I think it’s rotten.”
“There you go.”
“So you do believe he did it.”
“I’m saying it shouldn’t matter, but sometimes it does. I’m saying that I’m in a tough situation, but I’m doing the best I can. I’m saying that all I need from you is a little faith that I’ll do the right thing.”
“You usually do.”
“Thank you.”
“But sometimes,” she said, “you do it for all the wrong reasons.”
I didn’t want to ask her what she meant by that, so I ignored the comment. She scratched her neck and tilted her head as if she were trying to work it out, trying to find the missing piece that would explain everything. But she didn’t have it, I knew, and she wouldn’t get it if I had anything to say about the matter. What had been between Hailey and me was a secret, and even if Skink knew, that was where it would end. I had seen to that.
But I could still sense her unease. It was time to bring her tacitly on my side, time for her to see the absolute truth. It was time, finally, for Guy to confess, if only to his lawyers. Nothing admissible in a court of law, of course, but enough to get Beth working with and not against me. Time for Guy to tell the whole truth, and I knew just how to squeeze it out of him.
Juan Gonzalez.
IT WAS like cracking a walnut.
Guy again denied knowing anything about Juan Gonzalez. Guy again denied knowing the specifics of the case in which Hailey had won her big contingency fee. Guy again explained that the only reason Hailey’s money was in a joint account was that they were in love and that’s how lovers treat money. Guy again said he wasn’t really upset that some money from the account had been missing because most of it was Hailey’s money to begin with. Guy again claimed that he didn’t kill her, that he loved her and couldn’t have hurt her.
Beth and I listened to it all with straight faces, and then, slowly, I brought out the lever.
We placed the docket sheet for the Juan Gonzalez case on the table in front of him. He looked down at the paper, up at us, back down at the paper. His gray face turned grayer, the twitch in his lip became grotesque.
“Who knows about this?” he said in soft voice.
“Just us,” I said. “And of course your father-in-law.”
“Oh, God,” he said.
“Leave Him out of it.”
“I didn’t kill her,” he said.
“You can’t tell us that and then lie about the rest,” I said. “We don’t have time to play around anymore. We have to know everything. From the beginning. We have to know everything about you and Hailey.”
He stared down at the docket sheet and closed his eyes. Beth and I waited in silence. He kept his eyes closed for a long time, and when they finally opened, he said, “I made a decision. It turned rotten.”
I nodded. “Leaving Leila and your family for another woman.”
“No,” said Guy. “Before Hailey. The decision at the heart of it all, to become a lawyer.”
18
GUY FORREST
THERE IS a story I don’t want to get into, a story about a motorcycle, a guy named Pepito, who weighed, it must have been three hundred pounds, and a stripper from Nogales named CiCi. It’s a bad story and it makes no sense, just like the way I was living made no sense.
After college I lost seven years trying hard not to be ordinary, chasing something, I never knew what, falling into a squalor I can’t anymore imagine. I grew sick of the carelessness, the drugs, the greasy food, the bad grammar. There had to be a better way. Had to be. I was living then on the outskirts of a college town, and some kids we were dealing to were talking about the LSATs, and I figured I was smarter than they were, so I signed up, too. It was a lark, but it wasn’t a lark, because underneath I knew what it was pointing to. And I did all right, better than the college kids. So when Pepito walked through my door, just walked right through it, wood crashing down around him, waving a sawed-off shotgun in the air, misusing adjectives as adverbs, I knew it was time to change everything.
Law school was hard. I didn’t take to it like you did, Victor, too many rules based on imprecise language, too many leaps of twisted logic, but that’s not what made it so hard. It was hard because it wasn’t just a few years of professional training for me. I was reinventing myself. I knew what I would be falling back into if I didn’t make it. I worked harder than I ever thought possible, kept my nose clean, changed my whole way of living. I saw some of our classmates right out of college hanging in the bars, trying to act cool, and I just shook my head. I knew cool, I nearly froze to death in the desert from cool. That’s why I liked you. Beside the fact you could explain things to me, you weren’t trying to be something other than you were, you weren’t cool. See, every day I was pretending to be something less than I was. I kept everything buttoned, everything tight and grim. I was going the other route one hundred percent. I was keeping my head low, because any day Pepito could burst again through my door.