Fatal Flaw (19 page)

“Do you have a home here, Miss Prouix?” asked Mrs. Selegard offhandedly.

“No, I live in Philadelphia. But my parents live here and I keep some things for them.”

“I hope they’re in good health.”

“Still,” said Beth, rapping on the wooden desk.

“We have experts in estate planning if they’re looking for someone to talk to.”

“Thank you, but I think they have a lawyer here working on it.”

“Good, that’s smart. No reason for Uncle Sam to get more than he must. I see, Miss Prouix, that your license has expired.”

“Has it?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Selegard looked up at Beth. “A year and a half ago.”

“I gave up my car when I moved to Philadelphia, so I suppose I hadn’t noticed.”

“You should take care of that.” Pause. “It says here your eyes are blue.” She looked at Beth for a moment. “They don’t look blue.”

“In some lights they’re bluish,” said Beth.

Mrs. Selegard examined the ID again and then Beth’s face. “Well, in some lights,” she said, “I’m a size six.”

The ladies laughed at that, sharing a little piece of vanity among themselves. I could tell that Beth wasn’t a natural at playacting. She was giving too much information, seemed to have an answer to everything when answers weren’t required. If it were me with the fake ID, I wouldn’t have been chatty with the account-executive lady, I’d have acted as if none of it was any of her damn business. But I had to admit, the “In some lights they’re bluish,” line was genius.

“If you’ll just sign here, Miss Prouix,” said Mrs. Selegard, handing her the card. There were a series of lines on the card, with some signatures by Hailey, all duly dated. Without hesitation, Beth signed. She had been practicing all morning in the hotel room, writing out the name based on the signature on the license: Hailey Prouix, Hailey Prouix, Hailey Prouix. It wasn’t a perfect match, but the flourishes were the same, and it was close enough, and after their little laugh together Mrs. Selegard barely glanced at the card before standing from her desk.

“Is your friend coming, too?” asked Mrs. Selegard, gesturing in my direction.

“You mean Raoul?” said Beth. “Sure, why not?”

I tossed Beth a “what the hell are you doing?” expression as we followed Mrs. Selegard to the vault, but Beth, feeling good after having passed her test, only smiled.

The door was a foot thick, the vault itself a closet-size opening walled on either side with the fronts of boxes, two locks on each. Mrs. Selegard placed a key in one of the locks of Box 124, and Beth placed her key in the other, and they both turned at the same time. The metal box slid out of its opening. Mrs. Selegard handed the long, narrow box to Beth and led us to a small room beside the vault with two chairs and a narrow shelf. When the door closed behind us, Beth placed the box on the shelf and we both sat in front of it and stared.

“That went well,” said Beth.

“Raoul?”

“It just came to me.”

“I don’t look like a Raoul. I always thought when I turned gigolo my name would be something more like Giorgio.”

“I wasn’t thinking gigolo, I was thinking cabana boy. Aren’t you going to open it?”

“Sure. Soon. But suddenly it feels weird, doesn’t it, looking into a dead woman’s safe-deposit box?”

“You couldn’t have thought of that in Philadelphia?”

“But now we’re in Las Vegas, land of morality.”

“And all of it cheap. But I think maybe we should check it out before the smarmy Gerald Hopkins comes back from lunch.”

She was right, of course, and I stood again, but before I opened the box’s lid, I hesitated. It wasn’t that I thought I was violating Hailey Prouix’s last hiding place. Someone would eventually open this box, some investigator would eventually cotton to the knowledge that it existed and get some court order and scour it for clues, and so I rationalized that the initial scourer might as well be me. Who, after all, was working more in her interests than myself, sworn as I was to see her killer punished? But still I hesitated, and why was not a mystery to me even then, in the middle of the hesitating, when things suddenly seemed so confusing. “Last thing you want,” she had said, “are any surprises.” I used to think I knew what I needed to know about Hailey Prouix, I used to think I knew the basics, that maybe I knew her heart. But I didn’t think that anymore, and that’s what forced my hesitation. Because as that box with its secrets lay before me, I was deathly afraid of what it was I might learn.

“Go ahead, Victor.”

And go ahead I did. I slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. I took hold of the box. Slowly the top slid off, and there it was, Hailey Prouix’s safe deposits. What lay inside were clues to a whole brutal world I would just as soon had stayed closed to me forever, a world that told me more than I ever wanted to know about a woman named Hailey Prouix and the strange murderous past where were born both her sadness and her death.

23

HENDERSON, NEVADA,
used to be a little desert town between Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam. I say “used to be” because now it’s a boomtown, in the truest sense of the word, its growth fueled not by a discovered silver mine or a new technological industry but because the Boomer generation is looking for someplace to retire, and tens of thousands have decided that Henderson is it. It’s got sun, it’s got Lake Mead, it’s got the Las Vegas Strip not six miles away. Henderson is now growing so fast they can’t print maps speedily enough to keep up with the newest walled developments. It is growing so fast it is now the second-largest city in Nevada, leaving Reno in the dust. They’ve trucked in palm trees by the thousands to line the boulevards, housing prices are rising like helium, people are moving there at the rate of twelve hundred a month. And it’s not as if the city has discouraged the grand influx. Seattle’s motto might just as well be “Stay the hell in California because we don’t want you here.” Henderson’s motto is “A place to call home.”

I suppose that was the idea behind Desert Winds, a huge, first-class assisted-living facility built on the edge of the vast desert that leads to Lake Mead. Located on a flat spread of desert rubble with wide pathways and small patches of green grass, more intimations of lawn than lawns themselves, Desert Winds consisted of a series
of large buildings in the ubiquitous Spanish Colonial style, with red asphalt roofing and barred windows. The campus was Disney-fascist, a relentlessly upbeat place to wither and die. Despite the evident number of rooms, the landscape was deserted. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe the intended clientele hadn’t yet ripened. The Boomers moving to Henderson weren’t ready yet for a nursing home. They wanted developments like Sun City, where the houses were built side by side and the residents could drive their personal golf carts to the clubhouse and the card games and the golf course and the pool. They had come for the active lifestyle promised in the brochure. The Boomers moving to Henderson weren’t ready yet for a nursing home. Not yet. But it was only a matter of time. In that great Nevada tradition, the owners of Desert Winds were betting on the come.

The office was in a separate building in the center of the campus.

“Are you here for a tour?” chirped the cheery receptionist as I signed in.

“No,” I said. “We came to visit one of your residents.”

“How wonderful. Our members so love to have visitors. Are you expected?”

“No, not exactly.”

“If you tell me the name of the member, I’ll see if a visit can be arranged.”

“Lawrence Cutlip.”

“Oh, my, isn’t Mr. Cutlip having a busy day. Sit down, Mr.”—she turned the book around to check my name—“Mr. Carl, and I’ll see what we can arrange.”

“Should we go to his room?”

“That won’t be necessary. Many of our members have private aides to help them during their event-filled days here at Desert Winds. Mr. Cutlip is one of the lucky ones.”

Lawrence Cutlip. It was a name in a file I had taken from Hailey’s safe-deposit box and put into my briefcase. I had taken a lot of things from that box. I had taken old photographs; I had taken letters, love letters not addressed to me; I had taken a maroon folder with the medical file of Juan Gonzalez, surprise, surprise; I had taken cash—not all the cash, and there was quite a bit there, over
eighty thousand, but enough to provide a retainer for my defense of Guy. Taking the cash was only fair, I figured, since the money was undoubtedly part of the funds transferred out of Guy and Hailey’s joint account by Hailey’s unilateral act, but I left even more cash than I took to allay suspicion. When the detectives eventually searched the box, they’d have to assume nothing was taken. I mean, what kind of jerk would empty a safe-deposit box and accidentally leave fifty thousand dollars?

The file in which I had found Lawrence Cutlip’s name contained two life insurance policies, the very policies Guy had been searching for. One was made out in the name of Guy Forrest, with Leila Forrest as the main beneficiary. Accompanying that policy was a copy of a change-in-beneficiary notice that made Hailey Prouix the new beneficiary to the extent the law allowed, since some funds would still, by law, go to Leila, the wife. The other was a policy made out in the name of Hailey Prouix, with the sole beneficiary being not Guy Forrest, as Guy had expected, but one Lawrence Cutlip. Who was this Lawrence Cutlip, important enough to Hailey Prouix to be the sole beneficiary on her life insurance at the expense of her fiancé? Lawrence Cutlip. I had never heard the name before but I had a guess who he was. And I also had a guess as to exactly where I’d find him, a guess confirmed with a quick phone call. Which was why Beth and I had taken the convertible east on Interstate 215 to Henderson and the Desert Winds retirement home.

We were directed to one of the large buildings off to the side and then led through a hallway with a thick blue rug and no smell of piss or green beans. That was how you could tell for sure it was an upscale old-age joint. It smelled instead like a summer meadow, it smelled of daisies, it smelled like a preview of coming attractions.

“What exactly are we doing here?” asked Beth as we followed our guide.

“Hailey Prouix transferred the money missing from her and Guy’s account to the bank we visited this morning. In addition, she made a number of calls to right here, undoubtedly to this Lawrence Cutlip.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have my sources,” I said. “They’re very flexible as to payments
here at Desert Winds. You can either pay your exorbitant monthly bill in advance, or pay an even more exorbitant lump sum up front, which works like an annuity. My guess is that the Gonzalez money went into a lump-sum purchase of Cutlip’s spot at this lovely facility. And he’s the main beneficiary on her life insurance instead of Guy. I want to know why.”

“To what end?”

“To save Guy, we need to find a killer. To do that, we need to learn what we can about the victim, to see if there was something in her life that caused her death.”

“Blame the victim.”

“Or find someone else to blame, anyone but Guy.”

“We already have the mystery man she was sleeping with.”

“When it comes to suspects, it’s like the invitation list to a college keg party: the more the merrier.”

We were led outside the building to a little walled courtyard with a flooring of red brick. It was a sunny day, as relentlessly sunny as the staff was relentlessly cheerful, and Beth had put on her sunglasses, but with a few well-tended trees and bright umbrellas, much of the courtyard was in shade. We sat at a small table beneath the ethereal leaf network of a twisting mesquite tree and waited. It was quiet, remarkably so. No wind in the flora, no calls or hoots from the fauna. All of Henderson was quiet, I had noticed, as if exuberance had been outlawed by the city fathers as nonconducive to further growth. We sat at the table and waited until a swinging door swung open and a tall, snaggletoothed man with long blond hair and bad skin wheeled what was left of Lawrence Cutlip into the courtyard.

You could tell that at one point in his life Lawrence Cutlip had been an imposing man, tall of limb, broad of shoulder, with a heavy jaw and stern dark eyes, but he wasn’t imposing anymore. He slumped in his wheelchair like a sack of bones, his stockinged feet resting on the risers like lumps of clay. A thin plastic line lay just beneath his nose, feeding oxygen into his nostrils from a tank attached to the rear of his chair, and his mouth was perpetually open, as if the effort to close it was too much now to bear. In the ugly open maw could be seen irregular clumps of yellowed teeth. But despite
his evident decay, his eyes were still stern and dark and very much alert. Hailey’s uncle, I assumed.

“Leave it here, Bobo,” said Cutlip in a gruff country voice, wheezing all the while, as the attendant placed his chair facing us.

Bobo, remaining behind the chair, began scratching at one of his wrists. Both of Bobo’s arms were covered with scabs from his fingertips to the short sleeves of his white shirt, as if he had a colony of chiggers breeding like crazy beneath his skin.

“You here to see me?” said Cutlip.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What can I do you for?”

“We came to talk to you about your niece.”

“Which one?”

“Hailey.”

“Yeah, well, she’s dead, ain’t she?” Cutlip fought to catch his breath even as he spoke, and his wheeze grew louder. “What else is there to know?”

“I wondered if you were aware, Mr. Cutlip, that you were named beneficiary on her life insurance policy.”

His eyes widened for a instant and then he smiled. “Course I knowed. I was wondering when one of you clucks from the insurance company was going to show ’round here with the check. Hand it on over.”

“I don’t have your check.”

“What the hell’s keeping it, then? I been waiting days and days.”

“I suppose nothing’s going to happen with the check until they figure out exactly who killed her.”

“They arrested that bastard boyfriend of hers, didn’t they? I told her he was no good, I told her she was making a mistake.” He coughed and fought for a breath and his coughing calmed. “She wasn’t the marrying kind, Hailey. I don’t know what the hell she was thinking. Then again, I never did know with her. But I ain’t surprised that he kilt her. She could drive men crazy, Hailey could, drive ’em straight out of they right minds. I almost feel sorry for what he walked into. Almost. And now I hear he got himself some smart Jew lawyer that’s aiming to give him a walk.”

“That would be me,” I said.

“Son of a bitch.”

“My name’s Victor Carl, and yes I am.”

His face grew red and he struggled for air. “Let’s get out of here, Bobo.”

“I think you’ll want to talk to us, Mr. Cutlip.”

Bobo started to pull back the chair, but Cutlip raised his hand. “Why the hell is that?”

“With me is my partner Beth Derringer. We represent Guy Forrest, and we have some questions.”

“What makes you think I got any answers I’d be willing to share with a peckerhead like you?”

“Because I figure we’re both after the same thing, trying to find out who it was who really killed your niece and make sure he’s punished.”

“They done found him already.”

“No, they didn’t. They’re wrong.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you, a lawyer?”

“A Jew lawyer to be precise, and yes.”

“How the hell?”

“Because I knew her, Mr. Cutlip. I knew her before she was murdered. What happened to her was wrong and needs to be punished.”

I saw something just then, something in those stern, dark eyes, just a flutter come in an out, like a snake’s tongue slashing in the air. I stared at him, and he stared at me, and the thing in those eyes got brighter and glowed until he turned away from me and looked at Beth.

“I thought this was all up and finished already,” he wheezed out. “I thought you was going to take the plea and put the son of a bitch in jail so we can all rest easy?”

“You knew about the offer?” said Beth.

“Of course I knowed about the offer. I ain’t blind out here in the desert. It’s damn generous, that offer, too damn generous. I thought it was a done deal.” So he, too, had been anxious for me to accept Troy Jefferson’s offer. That was more than passing strange. Didn’t it make sense for Hailey’s uncle to want the greatest measure of justice for the murderer of his niece? You would think. And wouldn’t
a trial with a punishment of death waiting at the end be more to his liking? You would think. But that’s not how he was acting. Instead he said, “I don’t know why the hell you folks ain’t snapping at it.”

“Because it’s been pulled,” I said.

“Is that a fact?” he said, a smile growing. “I guess now they’re going to go through with a trial and kill that sumbitch.”

“Our client says he didn’t do it,” said Beth.

“I can’t do nothing about the lies he tells you.”

“The story I heard was that you were a gambler, Mr. Cutlip,” I said.

“Is that the story?”

I looked around at the lovely courtyard. “You must have read the odds pretty damn well to be able to afford this place.”

“Oh, I could, yes I could, when I wasn’t drinking, though that wasn’t much time total, was it, Bobo?”

The attendant smiled and nodded stupidly.

“But that’s not how I can afford this. Hailey paid for it. And she paid for Bobo, too. What with her being a lawyer, it wasn’t too much a strain.”

I looked around again at the high-toned surroundings. “I’d expect it would be a strain for anyone. And she called you frequently?”

“Sure she did. We was close, we had a bond. Hailey and me, we had history. It warn’t no picnic raising her and her sister after the father died. Warn’t no picnic at all. We had us some tough times, some times we both of us would rather forget. But we can’t, can we? I mean, the past it just jumps out and bites you in the ass whenever it gets itself real good and hungry, don’t it?”

“What kind of past, Mr. Cutlip?”

“I don’t know, the past. The past. Maybe it’s best it’s just forgot. What about my check, my insurance check? When’s that coming?”

“You’ll have to ask the insurance company, Mr. Cutlip. But I’m glad to see you’re not so overwhelmed with grief that you can’t keep your mind focused on the more important matters, like your check.”

He stared at me. His lips quivered. “Why you son of a…” came out of his throat until it was choked back by an acute breathlessness
and a rising flood of anger that filled those dark eyes until they swelled with something else, something else, and then I could see that the something else they swelled with was tears. Whatever salty anger he had been aiming at me disappeared as if dissolved by the tears, and he came apart in front of us, his once huge body shaking with sobs, gasping for breath, the back of his still-large hands trying to wipe his cheeks dry and failing. And out of his trembling lips came one sentence, over and over again.

“My Hailey. My Hailey. My Hailey.”

Bobo leaned over the wheelchair and whispered in Cutlip’s ear and Cutlip nodded before tossing Bobo a withering glance. Bobo jerked back and stood straight. Beth and I glanced at each other and rose from our chairs, about to leave Cutlip with his grief, when he raised a hand in the middle of his sobs to stop us from leaving. Slowly the jag subsided, the tears abated, his breaths slowed and then deepened, the loose flesh of his palms pulled away whatever wetness still lay on his face. He coughed loudly as he slowly gained control.