The Rough Cut

by Douglas Corleone

  Thing is, we don’t have much left, Brody.

  Don’t have much left? Rye, that man has nothing.

  Maybe I am the asshole in this relationship.

  ‘Let’s run through the evidence again,’ Church said as he approached the table, ‘most of which remains circumstantial.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jesse said through the speaker, ‘if you don’t count the DNA, fibers and fingerprints both inside the house and in the pool area outside, where the victim’s body was found.’

  ‘We’re not denying he ever stepped foot in her house. He practically lived there, right?’

  Ethan nodded. He looked tired, exhausted really. We all did. We’d already been here for several hours, ordered room service six times. I never dreamed I’d yearn for escape from a $17,000-a-night penthouse suite overlooking the Pacific, but you can only suffer so much Church and still maintain your sanity – which was why I knew from the start that he could never play the protagonist in my film.

  Church said, ‘Ethan could have sprayed every nook and cranny of that house with his own semen, and that doesn’t hurt us, got it?’

  ‘The blood does,’ Jesse said.

  ‘Yes, the blood does.’

  ‘Tests show that it’s not menstrual and that it was fresh.’

  ‘But its location isn’t terrible for us. Ultimately, I think it’ll be something the prosecution will have to explain. Because they’re going to have a hell of a time convincing the jury that Piper was killed in the upstairs bathroom.’ Church paused. ‘In the meantime, research whether hemorrhoidal blood is distinguishable from other blood.’

  ‘No more news on the footprint near the back fence,’ Jesse said. ‘Only that it’s too small to be Ethan’s. Unfortunately, we can’t prove that it was left that night.’

  ‘We’re not in the business of proof. We’re in the business of doubt. We know it rains like a bitch up there on the mountain and that it was raining most of the week. We argue that it would’ve been washed away had it not been left that very night.’

  Jesse said, ‘We still haven’t received anything on digital forensics.’

  Church turned to Ethan. ‘You’re absolutely certain there’s nothing on your laptop, tablet or phone that can hurt us? No Google searches for “Top Ten Suffocation Techniques” that I should know about? No porn downloads depicting erotic asphyxiation? No arguments with the victim via text or email?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Ethan said, irritably.

  ‘The fingerprints on the beer bottles in the pool area,’ Jesse said. ‘They pulled shards out of the victim’s scalp, and Ethan’s prints are all over the broken bottles.’

  ‘Shitty, yes, but Ethan could have drunk the beers and left the bottles around, and someone else used one of them to hit Piper over the head. The killer just didn’t leave a print.’ He pointed to Ethan. ‘You sure you didn’t have any beers that night?’

  ‘Absolutely positive. We ran out.’

  ‘You’d run out the previous day, correct?’

  ‘Yup, and I put out the recyclables that morning.’

  ‘So there shouldn’t have been a single beer bottle in that house?’

  ‘There wasn’t, not when I left for my meet.’

  ‘But you do drink Budweiser?’

  ‘I do drink Bud, yeah.’

  Jesse said, ‘We don’t know yet if any shards from the bottles were found inside the house, do we?’

  ‘No,’ Church said. ‘But that will be key in deciding our strategy. If Lau can prove the murder occurred inside the house, we can’t go with an unknown intruder.’

  ‘Wait,’ Ethan said, ‘why not?’

  ‘Because as of now, there’s no evidence of anyone but you being at the scene and there’s no sign of forced entry.’

  ‘But we know someone else did this, right? How can we go with anything but an unknown intruder?’

  ‘We leave all our options on the table, E-male. If the murder occurred inside the house, no forced entry simply means Piper had to have known her killer. If so, we’re going to have to give the jury a reasonable alternative to that killer being you.’

  ‘But who?’

  ‘Well, that’s what we need to figure out, Eazy-E. But Jesse and I didn’t know Piper, you did. Did she have any enemies?’

  ‘Enemies? No, she did weather forecasts, she wasn’t Scarface.’

  ‘Women can have enemies, right, Riles?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘See, Ethan? Riles has enemies.’ He turned and started pacing again. Somehow Church appeared as fresh and alert as when we arrived that morning. If anything, he spoke even more rapidly the later the hour became. ‘The autopsy is ambiguous,’ he said, ‘which is both good and bad. Good, because the jury is going to want to know precisely how the murder was committed before they convict. Bad, because it gives the prosecution tremendous freedom in speculating how the murder was committed.’

  ‘Manner of death is asphyxia,’ Jesse said. ‘There are bruises on her throat but no injury that appears severe enough to be fatal. In any event, we can rule out accidental death, suicide and natural causes. Unless we can point at another tangible suspect, what we’re left with is insanity, diminished capacity or self-defense.’

  ‘Wait,’ Ethan said, his face filling with color, ‘all those mean I’m guilty, right? That I did it?’

  Church held up a palm. ‘We’re just going through our options, E-mo.’

  ‘Well, then, strike those out,’ Ethan shouted, as he practically ejected himself from his chair and slammed his hand against the table, ‘because they’re not options. I did not do this. I did not kill Piper.’

  Ironically, that moment marked the first time I genuinely thought him capable of it.

  When we stepped into our dark apartment in Waikiki following the defense meeting, my thoughts were racing. At the arraignment, I’d agonized over the possibility that I’d sabotaged Ethan’s defense. Now I thought maybe my interference had had just the opposite effect, that maybe Church was a little too good at what he did, that I was helping put not only a killer, but my friend’s killer, back on the street. A tornado of anxiety ripped through my center. I immediately went to the medicine cabinet for a Klonopin.

  ‘Got an extra one?’ Brody called from the hallway.

  Brody knew how badly I needed my benzos, so he rarely asked.

  I held out a pair of yellows. ‘The indica not doing it for you tonight?’

  He popped the tranqs under his tongue. ‘Real world’s more stressful than I imagined. No wonder I avoided it so long.’

  I followed him into the living room. ‘What’s stressing you?’

  ‘You kidding?’ He ran his hand through his beard as he collapsed onto the couch. ‘You were there.’

  I detoured to the fridge, popped open a Diet Coke. ‘You mean the pineapple?’

  The autopsy report revealed that Piper’s last meal had been pineapple, which creeped me the hell out because pineapple was also what they found in JonBenét’s stomach. But then, as Church said, ‘We’re in Hawaii, Riles. If you sliced open the island’s entire population, I bet you’d find pineapple in the stomachs of at least half.’

  Brody’s eyes widened as I stepped back into the living room.

  ‘Riley,’ he said, as though I were a stranger, ‘the fact that Piper was pregnant.’

  ‘Only six to eight weeks,’ I said as I sat and searched for the remote. ‘She wasn’t even out of her first trimester.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So …’

  ‘She didn’t choose this, Rye.’

  I leapt to my feet. ‘I know!’

  While the frosty aluminum bit into my fingers, the air stilled the way it does immediately following a good shouting match. My mind, fogged with a few glasses of wine and exhaustion, searched for some way to flip this conversation in a different direction but went blank.

  A few seconds later, as my breathing slowed, I noticed the remote in my hand and wondered how long it had been there. I pointed it at the tele
vision and hit the power button. When the television didn’t blink on, I recalled the batteries dying this morning during California’s afternoon shows.

  I sank back into the couch with a huff. Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t going to save us tonight; if anyone was going to salvage this evening, it was me. So I dug deep for some words and spewed the first that I found.

  ‘I just think we need to distance ourselves emotionally from the case,’ I said. ‘We need to look at every aspect, including the pregnancy, from a single standpoint: how do we present this visual evidence so that it has the maximum emotional impact on our audience?’

  Brody remained silent.

  ‘On the one hand, the pregnancy adds intrigue,’ I said. ‘On the other hand, after Scott Peterson, it feels kind of clichéd, don’t you think?’

  Brody pushed himself off the couch. ‘Would you listen to yourself, Rye?’

  I tried to replay the quarrel in my head, but I was so fucking tired and had been so fucking laser-focused on my movie all day that I felt like the only subject on which I could concentrate, the only topic about which I could coherently converse, was what we’d learned in the past twenty-four hours and its implications for Ethan’s defense.

  The pregnancy, for instance, would likely play a small role since Ethan claimed to have known nothing about it. There was frankly no time to debate whether Piper’s potential offspring should be treated as a second victim or the embryo that it was. Such extraneous details could be decided in post.

  Brody headed toward the bedroom, closed the door behind him. In that moment, the world seemed intensely surreal, though I wasn’t sure whether it was a symptom of sleep deprivation, or whether the world simply was surreal these days.

  While I stared into the black flatscreen, I finally rewound the footage of today’s meeting in my head and stopped at the point where Church had broken the news about Piper’s being pregnant. I scanned the penthouse suite in my memory and noted each of the players’ faces.

  Nate immediately turned green, Brody blue ice.

  On Ethan’s face, though, nothingness. Not a whiff of surprise. The same reaction he had when we broke the news that Piper was planning to leave him.

  Even though he adamantly denied knowledge about either.

  Was he telling the truth?

  Church bluntly laid out the consequences of lying: ‘If the prosecutor discovers evidence to the contrary, E-trade, knowledge of either fact constitutes motive.’

  SIXTEEN

  I like being on my back. On the beach, next to Brody, watching the toned, bronzed bodies wade into the surf. We deserve this, don’t we? Brody stayed true to his word and worked with me in the editing room all day every day last week. Today, we need some light, we need some air, we need some ocean. This morning is for straight-up relaxation, tonight for drunk-high-sexy fun. Because we’re now at that pivotal stage of postproduction where we’re working with the best footage we shot. This is the period of post when I warn friends and family not to phone the police if I don’t emerge from the editing room for a few months.

  This is when I switch from Diet Cokes to Monster Energy Drinks.

  ‘I think we should avoid villainizing Lau and Fukumoto,’ Brody says out of nowhere as we lie atop a pair of matching SpongeBob beach blankets on one of the less crowded patches of Waikiki Beach.

  ‘I have no intention of villainizing them,’ I say, ‘but where they were wrong, I’m sure as shit going to point it out.’

  ‘Fine,’ he says, rolling onto his side to face me, ‘but obviously, there has to be a villain. There has to be an antagonist in this film, don’t you think?’

  I inhale, exhale, adjust my oversized sunglasses but refuse to face him. ‘I know what you’re going to say—’

  ‘You don’t, though.’ In his voice, there’s a verve I haven’t heard since he phoned me on his way to the crime scene six months ago. ‘What if our villain is …’ He pauses for effect, just one of many maddening attributes he picked up from Church during trial. ‘What if our villain is the Truth?’

  I literally bite my tongue, yet still say, ‘Maybe you should limit the mornings you wake and bake, Brody.’

  Undeterred, he goes on: ‘You know that powerful scene where Church turns to you and says, “That’s the trouble with seeking the truth – sometimes, you find it.” That – that should be the overall theme of our movie.’

  ‘This is your idea,’ I ask, ‘or Church’s?’

  ‘We all want the same thing, don’t we? To make a movie every bit as absorbing, as provocative, as intoxicating as the murder case itself.’

  Beneath my sunglasses, I close my eyes, I stay silent.

  ‘Rye, don’t you want to make something we can truly be proud of, something we can show our kids in twenty years?’

  Our kids again. The first time he mentioned children I was more shocked than if he’d started belting out the lyrics to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ backward in German. Now he can’t seem to gab about them enough.

  It’s what I wanted, though. I’d written so in my damned journal soon after we moved to Oahu, when Brody, the quintessential homebody, started spending most of his days and nights out and about in Waikiki, and exploring the island. The life Brody describes these days is exactly the one I wanted then, the same one I dreamed of achieving when I first fell in love with him in New York.

  ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ he asks. ‘Seems every time I mention kids you go silent.’

  I’m going to eventually say yes, why not just say it?

  ‘Sorry,’ I tell him, ‘I was just thinking about what you said, about Lau and Fukumoto.’

  We endure several seconds of unquiet silence while Brody determines whether to accept the swing in subject or further escalate the ongoing argument.

  Ultimately, he says, ‘Fukumoto’s finally retiring, I hear. The Jakes case was his swan song.’

  I’m unmoved. ‘He jumped to conclusions from that very first night, never had any intention of looking past Ethan. Church basically elicited as much from him on the stand.’

  ‘See, this is precisely what I’m talking about, Rye. We can’t twist the detective’s words or take them out of context in the film. What Fukumoto said at trial was that he went where the evidence led him, just as he’s done the past thirty-five years of his—’

  ‘Listen, Brody.’

  The rise in my voice occurs unexpectedly. I prop myself on my elbows and scour the immediate area to ensure no one’s listening – a practice inevitably ingrained in you during a high-stakes criminal trial. ‘Jurors could be lurking anywhere,’ Church cautioned me one day at the courthouse. He pointed down the second-floor hallway. ‘Juror Number Seven could be right around that corner, masturbating or scarfing down a Buffalo chicken sandwich, we just don’t know.’

  I say, ‘Fukumoto decided he liked Ethan for Piper’s murder on his way to the crime scene, we know that. Then he searched for evidence that fit his theory of the crime.’

  ‘And found what? Ethan’s prints on the beer bottle used to smash the victim over the head.’

  ‘Her name was Piper,’ I say (yes, with feigned indignation).

  ‘You were the one in the early days who suggested we remain emotionally unattached to the case.’

  Brody’s so fucking good at throwing my own words back at me, and I so fucking hate it.

  ‘And we failed badly on that front,’ I remind him.

  ‘Whose fault is that? I’m not the one who became attached to—’

  ‘You didn’t become attached to Nicholas Church?’

  Brody sighs, shakes his head, exasperated in a way only I can make him. ‘Why have you turned on him?’ he says. ‘What happened between the two of you?’

  I loathe what I look like when I scoff but can’t help myself. ‘Church and I weren’t exactly besties through the investigation and trial, you realize.’

  ‘No, but since the verdict – or since we entered post, I suppose, depending on your perspective – you’ve been throwing a whole n
ew level of shade in his direction.’

  ‘We’ll discuss it once he’s back on the mainland, all right?’

  ‘He’s not returning to the mainland anytime soon. He’s heading over to Maui until he finds his next case, or his next case finds him. There’s a super-posh Four Seasons in Wailea.’

  My jaw muscles tighten. ‘Is Marissa going with?’

  ‘Is she who this is about?’

  ‘Is she going?’

  ‘Yeah, I think they’re going over together. They had this trip planned. They were supposed to go months ago, but the case kept them from it.’

  I roll onto my stomach, unhook my bikini top. I’ve recently been pondering a move back to the mainland but until now had been afraid to say so. ‘We can edit this anywhere, you realize. Why don’t we finish postproduction in LA? That’ll also give us a shot at making some connections before we shop the film.’

  As anticipated, Brody deflates. ‘We’ve got another few months left on the apartment lease.’

  ‘We can sublet,’ I say, as the Hawaiian sun massages my sore shoulders in a way no masseuse could. ‘The apartment’s in the heart of Waikiki with a million-dollar view. If we Craigslist it tonight, we’ll have a tenant or serial killer in there by next Thursday.’

  ‘What about the lease for the editing room? To say nothing of the fact that we may need to shoot additional B-roll before we finish the final cut.’

  ‘I just want to move on,’ I say, shifting, inadvertently providing the awkward twelve-year-old to our left his first glimpse of side boob.

  As I bury my face in my arms, I can feel Brody’s eyes on me, scanning my body for language, an incredulous look on his still-naked face.

  ‘Suddenly you’re not happy here in paradise?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I tell him. ‘I just have island fever. I need to get on a freeway and drive somewhere for more than an hour without simply circling back to my point of origin.’

  ‘You hate road trips, Rye.’

  ‘I hate a lot of things, Brody. That’s the whole fucking point, OK?’