“Why me?”

“I don’t know. It was the first thing I thought about. Hailey had mentioned something.”

“Hailey?” I fought to keep the startle out of my voice.

“A couple days ago she had asked me a strange question. Who I would call if I was in serious trouble. I said I didn’t know, hadn’t really thought about it. She asked about you and I told her, yeah, Victor would be a good one to call. Aren’t all your clients in trouble when they call?”

“That’s right.”

“So I had it in my mind to get you.”

“Why not the police? Why not an ambulance?”

“She was dead, an ambulance wasn’t going to help. Victor, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in trouble and I called you. You were the only one I could count on, the only who would understand.”

I stared at him.

“You’re all I have left.”

If I was all Guy had left, he was totally bereft.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more. Why don’t we go to bed, get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll get you an attorney, and together you’ll figure out what to tell the police. I set you up with a towel and new sheets.”

“I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“No, you need your sleep. I’ll stay out here.”

“Victor, how much trouble am I really in?”

“More than you could imagine.”

“It’s hard to believe it could be worse than I imagine.” Pause. “Hailey’s gone. And I didn’t do anything. It’s not fair.”

“Fairness has nothing to do with it. They found her murdered on your shared bed. From what I could tell, there were no signs of forced entry. They’ll check fingerprints, but my guess is they’ll discover yours and Hailey’s, that’s it. By now they’ve found the money in the bureau, so they’ll rule out robbery. And then they’ll dig into your lives and find a motive. Had you been fighting?”

“No. God, no, we were in love.”

“No trouble in the relationship?”

He looked away as he said no.

“They’ll find a motive, Guy. There’s always a motive between a man and a woman: jealousy, passion, heat-of-the-moment anger. It doesn’t take much to convince a jury that one lover killed another. How were you and Hailey really?”

“Fine. Great.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“We were great.”

“Was there anyone else?”

“No. I had given up everything for her. We had been planning our future together just the other night. We were going to Costa Rica for two weeks. Why would I screw around with anyone else? Everything was rosy.”

I stared at him. He stared back.

“Rosy,” I said.

“That’s right. And then this nightmare. That’s what it is, a nightmare. And it’s only just beginning, isn’t it? Jesus.”

“Let’s get some sleep.”

“What am I going to say to them tomorrow?”

“You’re either going to tell the truth or you’re going to say nothing. Those are the options.”

“Which one am I going to follow?”

“It’s not up to me,” I said. “We’ll get you a lawyer tomorrow, and the two of you will figure it out.”

I helped him up off the couch, took him into the bedroom.

“Thanks, Victor,” he said as I stood in the doorway. “Thanks for everything.”

I nodded and closed the bedroom door behind me. Then I sat in the living room, outside the cone of light, and waited. The toilet flushed, the faucet turned on and off, the toothbrush scrubbed, the faucet turned on and off once again. I wondered if he would glance at the page in the novel I had left marked for him, but the light under the crack disappeared too quickly for that. I waited a while longer and then, when I heard no sound for a quarter of an hour, I stood and went to my raincoat, still hanging over the chair.

I took out the portable phone, the expired license, and the key and placed them in a kitchen drawer. I took out the marihuana and ran it, wad by wad, through the garbage disposal until there was nothing left of it. Then, with my handkerchief, I lifted the gun out of the raincoat pocket.

I lifted the gun out of the raincoat pocket.

The gun.

I took it to the kitchen, wiped the trigger guard where my fingers had touched it when I picked it off the step, and dropped it into a plastic sandwich bag.

It was a revolver, thick and silvery, a King Cobra.357 Magnum, so said the markings on the barrel. It felt heavy, solid. It felt just then like a serious instrument of justice. Even in its plastic sheath it was a comfort in my hand.

I brought the bagged gun with me back to the couch. I turned off the light, lay down with my head on the armrest, placed the gun on my lap. I had never much liked guns before, never even wanted to fire one, but, I had to admit, it gave one options. I lay down on my couch with the gun and tried to figure what to do about my old friend Guy Forrest. What to do about Guy. Because, you see, I had listened very carefully to everything he had to say about Hailey Prouix and her murder, listened to his whole sad story, and, at the end, I knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt at all, that dear old Guy was lying.

4

GUY FORREST and I attended law school together. Two kids from poor, dysfunctional families looking to reinvent themselves, we took to each other right away. I used to crack wise to him about everyone else in the class, laughing at all their elevated aspirations even when my aspirations were just as inflated, only more so, and he would smile tolerantly. I was in law school because I saw it as a way to make some real money in the future, something that had always been denied my father. Guy saw it as a lifeline out of a misspent youth. Through college and beyond he had lived wild; drugs, women, a scam out west that had gone bad, the details of which he never quite laid out for me but which had left him with a tattooed skull on his left breast and a crushing desire to go straighter than straight. To that end he strangled his wild inclinations with a grim seriousness that he thought appropriate for his new profession and never let go of his grip.

Guy worked harder than I did, he had a true grinder’s mentality – we all made outlines; he outlined his outlines – but I was the sharper student. In our first year, when they try to teach you a new way to think, I adapted pretty quickly, but Guy had troubles. He found it impossible to pull out the crucial differences in fact patterns that distinguished one case from another. Something in the way his brain worked made it difficult for him to prioritize. I think one reason Guy hung with me was that I could see order in what to him was a blizzard of meaninglessness. I hung with Guy because, in the bars where the law students scarfed wings and sucked beers, he was a chick magnet and I hoped to the catch the runoff.

Guy actually ended with better grades than mine, hard work does pay, but neither of us did well enough to guarantee our careers. At Harvard, middling grades will get you a freshly minted job at some hotshot Wall Street firm. Where we went to law school, middling grades leave you scrambling to find any kind of work. I applied to the best firms in the city, was rejected by each and every one, and was forced to hang my own shingle. I asked Guy if he wanted in on my fledgling enterprise but he turned me down, so I partnered instead with a sharp night-school graduate in a similar predicament, Beth Derringer. Guy was determined to find a respectable job, and he did, at a nasty little sweatshop called Dawson, Cricket and Peale.

Dawson, Cricket was one of the defense factories that burned out scores of young lawyers as it churned each year through thousands of cases representing insurance companies against a myriad of both worthy and unworthy claims. At Dawson, Cricket you were on the side of the doctor against the patient butchered by incompetence, on the side of the insurance company against the sick and the injured, on the side of money. It was not a place for lawyers with much social consciousness or joie de vivre. Up and out was their motto, and most of the young associates were sent packing after their youthful enthusiasm was torched by the brutal workloads and less-than-thrilling pay, but not Guy. The usual tenure for young lawyers at Dawson, Cricket and Peale was eighteen months; Guy stayed for eight years and was teetering on the verge of partnership. It helped that his billable hours were far and away the most at the firm. It also helped that he met, wooed, impregnated, and married Leila Peale, daughter of one of the firm’s founding partners. Guy had seen what he wanted, reached out to grab hold, and there it was, seemingly within his grasp.