It was time. I was ready. I waited for my erection to subside, and then I stood, taking hold of the gun as best I could, still as it was in its plastic bag. I took a step and then another toward the bedroom door. What was it Lenin had said about truth coming from the barrel of a gun? Well, maybe it wasn’t Lenin who said it, and maybe he wasn’t talking about truth, but you get the idea.
Guy had lied when he said everything was fine between him and Hailey, and if Guy was lying about that one crucial point, isn’t it likely that he was lying about everything? And if he was lying about everything, then he had killed her. He had killed her. She had told him that she was leaving, and he had reacted as she should have expected him to react, like a man about to lose his savior, like a man driven to the edge, with nothing to lose but his desperation, and he had killed her.
Guy’s decision had been made, and so had mine. His decision was to kill my love dead. My decision was to act as a perfect instrument of justice, to rely not on the tribunals of law whose imperfections I knew all too well, but to take matters into my own hands, to discover the truth and be certain it was served. I made my living spinning the lies that allowed desperate people to escape the just consequences of their unjust acts, but over the dead body of my lover a decision had been made, an implacable decision yet pure and right, a decision had been made that no lie would allow the killer of Hailey Prouix to escape the hard consequences of that heinous act. No lie, under no circumstances, whatever the price to be later paid.
He was asleep in my bed, in the sheets I had changed just so he wouldn’t recognize her scent upon the pillow. He was asleep in my bed, but not for long.
I held the gun, still in its bag, in my right hand and stepped toward the doorway. The gun had the heft of a grand jury subpoena, the precision of a syringe filled with sodium pentothal. It would serve as an intricate and powerful truth-finding machine. In the confused and frightening moments after he was awakened, he’d be most vulnerable to the truth. I had more questions to ask my old school chum, and the sight of the gun in my hand, that gun, his gun, the sight of the gun in my hand would compel his confession.
I grabbed hold of the knob. Slowly, silently, I turned the knob and opened the door.
In the indifferent light from the street I could see the bed, the sheets, a strange lump in the middle. It didn’t look right, he didn’t look right.
Without taking my gaze off the bed I grappled for the switch.
A harsh yellow light flooded the room, and then I could see what had happened. Then I could see.
The book was spilled disdainfully on the floor, the drawers had been ransacked, the gym bag was missing, and that lying bastard, that lying bastard, he was gone.
5
THE BEDROOM window was closed. I shoved it open and scanned the street, slick and black, still wet though the rain had stopped. Nothing. It was three flights down, a fierce jump with nothing to grab on to except the spindly branches of a struggling urban maple. The desperate leap to the sagging tree was not Guy’s way, though until tonight I would have said that murder, too, was not Guy’s way.
I performed a quick search of the room. I opened the closet, checked the bathroom, threw back the shower curtain. No Guy. He had disappeared from my grasp like a phantom.
How had he gotten away without my knowing? I couldn’t figure it until I remembered my remembrances of Hailey Prouix, a reverie that had faded into a dream. I ran back into the living room.
The chain latch of my front door, the chain I fastened each night out of habit, was hanging loose.
The chain latch was undone, as were my plans. I’d had him exactly where I wanted, and then I let him slip away while I was asleep. Damn it. Now he was on the loose, now he was fleeing to freedom. I shucked on my raincoat, stuffed the plastic bag with its gun into the pocket, grabbed my key, and headed out after him.
He could have gone anywhere, I thought at first, but as I sat in the driver’s seat of my car and considered each possibility, I realized that wasn’t true. He couldn’t go back to his wife. He couldn’t go to the offices of Dawson, Cricket and Peale. He couldn’t go to the police. His parents were dead, his brother lived in California, his friends had all sided with Leila. Where once the world had been open to him, now his options were completely limited. Who would still embrace him and take him in? Who had his love for Hailey not betrayed? I thought it through, went over one possibility and the next and the next until, suddenly, his destination became clear.
He was going to her, to Hailey.
The old saw holds that criminals always return to the scene of the crime and like most old saws, this one contains a portion of truth. Arsonists are often in the crowds surrounding the blazes they set; police routinely videotape the funerals of the murdered dead to see if they can spot a killer paying his final disrespects. A criminal, by definition, is defined by his crime, and which of us doesn’t return again and again to the crucial moment of our lives, where we married, where our children gamboled, where we spent an eventide of abandon that fuels still the fantasies that warm our cold, lonely nights. Guy Forrest had a family, a profession, a circle of accomplishment, but if you asked him about his depths, he would have said simply he was a man in love. If you asked me, I would have told you he was a murderer. Both the lover and the murderer were created in that house, in that bedroom, on that mattress on the floor. He was going back, he couldn’t not. And I was going, too.
The bloody night was on its way out, the darkness already cracked from the force of dawn. I must have slept longer than I had imagined. I must have been dead asleep. I drove as fast as I dared with a gun in my pocket. I wondered if Guy had seen the King Cobra on my lap as he skulked out of the apartment. Probably not, probably too busy skulking. He hadn’t turned on the lights, he hadn’t wanted to wake me. He had stayed as far from me as possible as he made his way out of the bedroom and through my apartment door. Who could have imagined he had developed the honed survival instincts of a cockroach?
I drove west on Walnut to Sixty-ninth Street, took a right, heading to Haverford Avenue. It was a familiar route, I had driven this way before on the nights when Guy was out of town. Is it cheating to cheat on a cheating bastard? I had felt bad about it at the first when we made our initial assignation, but it hadn’t lasted, the guilt, it hadn’t lasted past the first time I tasted Hailey Prouix’s tongue. Maybe Guy’s guilt over cheating on his wife had died the same sweet death. There were more cars on the road than I expected, the early shift heading into work, the occasional cab. That’s what he had caught, a cab. Maybe he even phoned for one from my bedroom before leaving.
“Where to?” had said the cabby.
“To the scene of the crime,” had said Guy.
I passed a cop car going the opposite direction, and I ducked. I ducked. I had never been afraid of the police before. Working with them or against them had always been simply part of my job, there had never been the fear that I felt now. But then again never before did I have a gun in my pocket. I was not a gun person. Or a cat person. The only time I ever before wanted a gun was to kill a cat. But here I was, heading out in the rain with a gun in my pocket and my quarry on the loose and I was ducking in my car when the police drove past. It was a strange, hard feeling, all of it. And I liked it. I liked it. It’s the only kind of feeling you want after you see your lover dead on a mattress on the floor.
Out Haverford Avenue, across City Line, into the twisting suburban streets, old trees leaning over the roadbeds, calm homes still asleep to the rising morn. Down this short road, left at that stop sign, right at the next, up the hill and to the left, and there it was, dark and solitary.