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.

I was tempted to go in with you after law school, Victor, it would have been fun, but the law for me was not about fun. It was about security, about money, about gaining some status starting from nothing. It was about leading a different life. At Dawson, Cricket and Peale, straight was the only way to play it. I put my head down and sucked up the hours, the workload, the bland social obligations. When the thing with Leila came along, I figured it had happened, the change, that I was someone shiny and new. And in no time there we were with the big house, the country club, the kids, the life. The goddamn life. I’m not claiming to be a victim here, none of this was done to me, the whole thing was my choosing, but even so, something was wrong. The clue was, I suppose, that after eight years I still wasn’t comfortable in a suit and tie. I hated my job, hated the work, hated the firm, yet my grandest ambition was to become partner. The schizophrenia of it was tearing me apart. Do you know the word “anhedonia?” I suffered it, I was plagued by it. After eight years I looked up and realized I was living in black and white.

It was in a hospital room. There had been a bad result to a simple surgery. The doctor had notified the insurance company, Red Book, and they had notified us. In my briefcase was a contract that I was to have the wife sign, a contract that would guarantee the patient’s medical care in exchange for an agreement to arbitrate any dispute over his prior care and a waiver of any claims for pain and suffering. Hey, bad things happen, and some bad things that happen are nobody’s fault. That was our motto there at Dawson, Cricket and Peale. For a while I sat alone in the darkened room with the patient. He had intravenous lines leading into his arms, he had a catheter leading from his prick, he had a respirator tube snaking down his throat. The bellows of the respirator rose and fell, over and over, like a torture machine. Allow me to introduce you to Juan Gonzalez.

Once he had been a handsome man, he had played minor league baseball, he had raised a family by the strength of his hands. Now I looked at him lying near lifeless in the bed, and in a way I envied him. For him, at least, it was over, the maneuvering, the arguing, the rushing here and there for results that meant nothing. That was how far I had fallen – I envied the man in the coma – when Mrs. Gonzalez walked into the room.

She was a nice lady, sweet and terrified, devoted to her husband, worried about his future, her ability to continue his care. Her insurance had a limit, it would run out, it would run out, and then what would she do? I commiserated. In my job I had become excellent at commiseration. I was wearing a dark suit, an overcoat, polished black shoes. I must have seemed the bearer of very bad tidings, but I was there to help, I told her. In any way I could.

There was an order to things. You couldn’t just presume, you couldn’t just go in waving dollar bills. You needed to follow the order of things. If you showed any eagerness, they would want a lawyer of their own, and once they found a lawyer of their own, it became a whole different game. I learned that from my clever father-in-law, Jonah Peale himself. So I moved in slowly.

“Are you happy with the room?” I asked. “Are you happy with the care, the nursing? Anything we can do to help in this most difficult time, we will do. Just ask. Please. Anything. You shouldn’t worry about the limit on your medical insurance, Mrs. Gonzalez. I will personally make sure that no transfer takes place until you are satisfied that his care in the new facility will be as good as the care here. We want to take care of you. How are things at home without Mr. Gonzalez’s salary? Are you managing? If you need anything, I want you to call me. There are people who can help. I’m on your side. Tell me what I can do to help. Anything. Anything.”