Fatal Flaw (20 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said, waving one of those big hands as if to cover his face. “It happens sometimes when I think, when I remember. I’m sorry. Sit down. It’s just it’s…it’s…” It appeared as if he were about to start again.

It seemed genuine, his grief, it seemed deep and painful and more than I ever would have expected, and it caught me off guard. I turned and frowned at Beth as we both sat again. She had taken off her sunglasses and was staring at Uncle Larry with deep interest.

“How were you and Hailey related, Mr. Cutlip?” she asked.

“She was my sister’s daughter,” he said as he wiped again at his eyes. “But I didn’t have nothing much to do with her until her daddy died in the accident.”

“When was that?” asked Beth.

“They was eight, the girls, when it happened. After that, I could see they was having troubles. After that, I could see they was near to starving. Little eight-year-old girls with no one much taking care of them, raggedy dresses falling off their bones.”

“What about the mother?”

“My sister Debra was a sweet, pretty thing, but she didn’t have what it took to do it all by herself, and when her husband died, she sort of broke apart. They needed somebody with them. So I moved myself in. Never had a steady job before, never needed one or wanted one, could always cadge a drink or find a game with a couple of fish that would keep me going for a spell. But I moved myself in with Debra and the girls and found a job and for eight years I didn’t miss so much as a day at the plant carving carcasses, grinding meat, stuffing casings. Stood ankle deep in blood just so I could help those girls be raised.”

I saw the image just then, Lawrence Cutlip as a younger man, tall, dark, broad, hip boots on, wading through a wilderness of blood as he hacked away at the carcasses passing by him on a conveyer belt of hooks, a wild man who had tamed himself so that two little girls who weren’t his own could have a decent start. The man wading through the blood, I knew, was the uncle that Hailey had told me about, the uncle who was the hero of her life and whom she had put up in this luxury nursing home as a way of offering thanks. My opinion of him shifted as fast as the image came and I felt a sudden swell of affection for the old coot. His grief had been real, his sacrifice true, his gruff, hard exterior a way to hide the caramel inside.

“That must have been hard, doing all that for them,” I said.

“It was, sure, but I ain’t never regretted it. It was the rightest thing I ever done in my life.”

“And looking around at this place, Hailey seemed to appreciate it.”

“Them girls, they needed a firm hand in that house. Now, Roylynn, she was a good girl, a little on the quiet side with all her big ideas, but Hailey, she was trouble, more than her mother could ever hope to handle. There was something about her that was catnip. No man could resist her. Those boys couldn’t walk close as five feet without losing control of they bowels and shittin’ themselves. They swarmed around her, like she was some kind of queen bee, and she let ’em. She let ’em. I tried to swat ’em away, but it wasn’t they fault, it was just the way she was.”

“Did she have boyfriends?”

“Course she did. She didn’t tell me things like that, personal things, she wasn’t one to kiss and tell, but sure she did, though they
never lasted too damn long. There was Grady Pritchett, who was older and I didn’t like him hanging around the way he was. And there was that Jesse boy, but he was kilt out near the quarry when she was fifteen. She and Jesse knew each other since grade school, and they was more like friends, not boyfriend girlfriend, but still, that was hard on her. After that there was that Bronson boy, the football player, but it was a halfhearted thing at best. Turned out he was more interested in standing over his center than being with Hailey, if you know what I’m saying. And he wasn’t even the quarterback. If you know what I’m saying.”

Old Bobo, standing still behind Cutlip, snickered, his twisted teeth catching bits of yellow light.

“But I can’t rightly say too much about that one. When the girls they was fifteen or so, I figured I was done, that they could make it on they own. Had some opportunity out here and I took it. I had a lot of drinking to catch up on and I did. Didn’t I, Bobo?”

Bobo nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It was party time.”

“Bobo was just a kid when I first met him, a runaway, come to sin city to make good. I showed him around, helped him out. Now I got him this job.”

“Mr. Cutlip’s been good to me.”

“That’s my Bobo. He’s from out your way, some beach town in Delaware, ain’t that right, Bobo?”

Bobo smiled and nodded. “Dewey Beach.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Inland from there.”

“But he ran into trouble and came out here and I sort of adopted him. I take care of him like I took care of them girls.”

“You kept in touch with Hailey, Mr. Cutlip?” I asked.

“I did, yeah. For a while, right after I left, I lost touch, but then she came out and found me. After that, we kept in touch. We was closer than the normal uncle and niece, you know, me and Hailey.”

“You ever visit her in Philadelphia?”

“Nah. I don’t travel much no more. I like it right here in the desert. Nice and hot, nice and dry.”

“Did she tell you about Guy Forrest?”

“Just that she had decided to marry. I told her it was a mistake.
The Hailey I knew wasn’t the marrying type. And when she told me they was fighting over the money she spent to put me in this place, I knew it would all go to hell. But Hailey, you could never tell her nothing. I would have told her to stop the fighting, to forget about the money, but I needed someplace. You ever hear of beriberi? It tears you apart from the inside, paralyzes you piece by piece as you swell to twice your size.”

“Beriberi?” said Beth. “Like sailors used to get?”

“That’s it. Strange to catch it in the desert, ain’t it? Nothing I could do, it came and ran through me and destroyed half my insides. I needed this place.”

“There are plenty of places,” said Beth.

“Yeah, I knowed. I was happy just out in that motel I was living at, but she said I deserved a place like this. Couldn’t talk her out of it. She said I deserved it, and said she knew how to get it for me. And she said I deserved having Bobo to push me around, and that I figured was all right, since I had pushed him around long enough.”

“Did she tell you about anyone she was seeing besides Guy?” I asked.

“There was someone else, she said. But she never told me who. Was it you, you Hebrew son of a bitch?”

“No,” I said, stunned and trying not to show it.

“You sure?” The old man stared at me for a moment, and I thought again I saw that snakelike flutter.

“I’m sure.”

“Good.” He smiled and then he turned to Beth. “It could have been him. It could have been anyone. To know Hailey was to want her, and even when she was with someone, they was always someone else. But she didn’t tell me things like that. Never did. From the time she was fifteen or something, she just closed right up and told me nothing.”

“Did she ever mention anyone named Juan Gonzalez?” said Beth.

“Is that the other fella she was sleeping with? Is that the fella, some Mexican? Had she fallen that low?”

“I don’t think that was the other man,” I said, relieved that his suspicions were so wild as to alight on any name tossed out.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” he said, staring at me again. “Never had no idea what kind of scum riffraff she’d end up with.”

“In your conversations before her death,” said Beth, “did she mention to you that she was scared of anyone?”

“No, Hailey wasn’t scared of no one.”

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to do her any harm?”

“Nope, none, except she was aiming to marry one man and sleeping with another and that’s a dangerous proposition in our part of country.”

“In our part of the country, too,” I said. I looked at Beth. She put her sunglasses back on. I slapped my thighs and stood. “I think that’s everything. Thank you for your help, Mr. Cutlip.”

He lifted one of those big hands and pointed at me. “You said you was going make the man who did that to my Hailey pay.”

“Yes I did.”

“Don’t be acting like a lawyer. You be true to your word there, boy.”

“Count on it, Mr. Cutlip.”

“I aim to.”

I nodded at Bobo, standing behind the man with a smile fixed dully on his face, and started heading for the door when Beth asked a final question.

“That boy, Hailey’s friend. You said he died out near some quarry?”

“Jesse was his name. Jesse Sterrett. That’s right.”

“How did it happen?”

“It’s a mystery, ain’t it? Don’t nobody knowed what he was doing there. All they knowed is that somehow he cracked his head and fell into the water sittin’ there at the bottom.”

“They ever find out who killed him?”

“Coroner ruled it an accident.”

“But no one believed that, did they?” said Beth.

“Don’t know what no one believed. Coroner said he slipped and cracked his head before he fell off the ledge they all used to hang out on. That’s what the coroner said, and how the hell you all the way over here fifteen years later can think something different is a goddamn mystery to me.”

“Just like that,” she said. “Fell off a ledge just like that.”

“That’s what he said, good old Doc Robinson. Best-loved man in the county. Good doctor, bad cardplayer. Ruled it an accident.”

“What did Hailey think happened?”

“She didn’t much say,” said Cutlip. “We done never talked about it. She wasn’t much interested in legal stuff then.”

“Only after. Thank you, Mr. Cutlip,” said Beth. “You’ve been a big help.”

24

OUR PLANE
didn’t leave McCarran International until late that evening, we were red-eyeing our way back to Philly, so I took the scenic route west toward Lake Mead. The narrow two-lane road, with shoulders soft and gravelly, twisted through hills and canyons. The desert here rose on either side in great piles of singed rock. There was a sign,
LAST STOP BASS
’
N
’
GAS
, there was a sign warning of the danger in an abandoned mine, and then just the road. In the desert, with the top of our convertible down and the wind rushing over our heads, the world seemed still raw and the Strip far, far away, even though at night its gaudy lights would fill the sky like a hundred thousand beacons.

Beth hadn’t said much during the drive, and that had been fine by me. There was much I had to think about, the young Hailey with tattered dresses hanging from her bones, the uncle exiling himself to the slaughterhouse to keep his nieces and sister fed, the boyfriend dead in the quarry, Hailey’s subsequent tepid relationship with the football player who preferred showering with his teammates to pitching woo with his girl, the long, improbable haul through college and law school, only to end at the wrong end of a gun. It all seemed to amplify the tragedy of Hailey’s story, turning the bare bones of what she had told me into some sad Gothic opera.

Beside me Beth shuddered, as if she were thinking through the same things, and then she chuckled.

“So you’re the mystery man who was sleeping with Hailey Prouix,” she said.

I played it nonchalant. “Except when she was out on the town with Juan Gonzalez.”

“He looked at that moment when he made his wild accusation as if he wanted to strike you dead.”

“Like a protective papa bear.”

Beth didn’t reply.

We were driving slowly on the road, enjoying the scenery. A big black Lincoln, with its windows up and air conditioner undoubtedly blasting, blew by.

“I had this image when he was talking,” I said, “of him in the slaughterhouse, surrounded by carcasses, ankle deep in blood. It was something, what he did, sacrificing almost a decade of his life so his sister and his nieces could live decently. However he wasted his life before or after, and it seems he wasted it badly, at least he did that one noble thing.”

“Was it noble?”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t think,” said Beth, “I’ve ever met a more vile man.”

I was stunned by what she said. He seemed ornery, sure, small-minded and bigoted, with a foul word for everyone, but nothing worse than expected from a decrepit old goat. “You’re not serious.”

“Something about him, Victor, creeped me to the bone. His fake tears when you pressed him about being more concerned about the check than the death of his niece.”

“I thought they were genuine.”

“Please. And his little protestations of sacrifice, of how hard it was to take care of that family, of how much his firmness was needed.”

“You don’t think it was a sacrifice?”

“Do you remember in
David Copperfield
when David’s sweet mother marries Murdstone, and Murdstone comes in with his sister and takes over the house, bending everyone to his will until he destroys his new wife and forces David out?”

“Murdstone with the big black sideburns?”

“Yes. What did Uncle Larry say, the girls needed a firm hand in that house? I shivered when I heard that.”

“Your imagination is running amok. This explains her travel to Vegas. She didn’t go with a lover, she went to visit her uncle. And I was curious why Hailey transferred the bulk of her Gonzalez fee, after taxes, to Las Vegas, and now I know. To pay for the uncle’s nursing home.”

“But why?”

“Loyalty.”

“Maybe,” said Beth. “But if you ask me, there’s something else going on. Something that ruined him, too. Do you know what beriberi is?”

“Some exotic South Seas disease, it sounds like. How do you think he caught it in the desert?”

“Beriberi is not a virus. It’s a vitamin deficiency that sailors used to get because of unbalanced diets. You can also get it from drinking, but not just a little light tippling. They see it in drunks who drink so much that nothing matters but the drinking and the forgetting, who drink so much they forget to eat.”

A flight of warplanes flew low overhead, banking to the left, blowing away the soft rush of the wind with the roar of their engines, leaving thin trails through the pale blue as if the fabric of the sky itself had been ripped.

“Remember when I kept asking about the death of that boy?” she said. “What was his name?”

“Jesse Sterrett.”

“That’s right. You know what we should do? We should go back to Hailey’s old hometown and find out what really happened to him.”

“He said it was ruled an accident.”

“Maybe it was, if you can trust old Doc Robinson to know the difference between an accident and a murder.”

Behind us a white muscle car, its windows darkened, came up on us at a high rate of speed and shifted into the passing lane.

“If you ask me,” said Beth, “I’d guess there was a link between Hailey Prouix’s murder and the death of that boy. If you ask me,
there’s something malignant that was alive back then that still exists, just as strong, today.”

“You’re creeping me out, Beth.”

“He creeped me out, Victor.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Neither do I. But you know what? It gets me to wondering. It gets me to wondering if maybe we don’t have it all wrong. It gets me to wondering if maybe—”

Just then the white muscle car roared alongside us. It was a Camaro, the noise of its engine exploding without the restraint of a muffler. I expected it to zoom on past, but it didn’t, it stayed even with us, like a shadow.

I pulled my foot off the accelerator and slowed down to let it go on by, and it slowed down with me.

I sped up, and it kept pace.

I tried to peer inside but the windows were tinted so dark it was impossible to see who was driving.

I glanced at the road in front and saw a huge red pickup truck, hauling a motorboat, coming our way in the muscle car’s lane.

The truck blared its horn.

I sped up.

The muscle car veered away to the left and then, as if it were a yoyo on a string, came back and slammed us hard in the side.

The crash of metal, the crack of glass, the horn of the red pickup, and then a strange sound like the flap of a huge wing, followed by silence.

The straight road twisted sharply to the left, the soft shoulder tossed us, the great singed desert opened its arms to us, and, like children of the earth, we fell into them, spinning into the arms of the earth as the pale blue of the sky and the rocky surface of the desert revolved one around the other and became for us as one.