The Rough Cut

by Douglas Corleone

  ‘Good afternoon, madam,’ Tahoma said after making the introductions. ‘Mind if we come inside and take a few minutes of your time?’

  Her name was Elanor and she’d been eying either Brody or his camera ever since she opened the door. Whichever it was, it convinced her to enthusiastically invite us inside for coffee.

  As we slipped out of our sandals (a Hawaiian custom and a real blow to my self-esteem due to my aforementioned stinky feet), I quietly asked Brody if he recognized our host from the news.

  He chuckled. ‘Yeah, that’s the woman who was on when I yelled, “Save the poem for spoken-word night, sister.”’

  When you live in a one-bedroom apartment and spend most of your time in a shoebox-sized editing room, most houses feel ostentatiously large, and this one was no different. Elanor Rigby (I shit you not, that is her name; crazy, but easy enough for a pair of pothead filmmakers to remember) motioned to a spacious living room appointed with island-style furniture, and told us to make ourselves at home while she put on coffee.

  ‘None for me,’ Tahoma said.

  Brody and I concurred.

  Elanor seemed disappointed. I suspected she hadn’t had visitors in some time.

  ‘Married?’ Tahoma asked her once she was seated in an oversized wicker chair.

  ‘Widowed.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Children?’

  ‘None on the island. They’ve all moved away.’

  She pushed back her thinning hair in a way that made me think she’d indeed been leering at the camera and not Brody. As Church would later expound: ‘Everyone sees their fifteen minutes in a good murder case.’

  ‘Did you know Piper Kingsley?’ Tahoma went on.

  ‘By sight, certainly. I didn’t know her personally.’ Her eyes shot to the camera. ‘We ran in different circles,’ she said.

  ‘How about her boyfriend, Ethan Jakes?’

  ‘I never saw him before, not until he was on television. Shame what he did to that poor young woman.’

  I jotted a note to use that soundbite. Beneath it I wrote: Presumption of innocence???

  Then underlined it. Twice.

  ‘So,’ Tahoma said, ‘you didn’t see Piper all that often, then?’

  ‘Oh, I saw her every day.’

  He smiled, a rarity but it brightened the room. ‘On the evening news?’

  ‘No, no, in the morning. Every morning, rain or shine, she jogged down Tantalus Drive and back.’

  ‘Rain or shine, huh?’

  ‘Rain or shine,’ she repeated. ‘She just wore one of those clear plastic ponchos you buy at ABC.’

  Behind the camera, Brody suffered one of his infamous coughing jags (he refused to switch from joints to the vaporizer) but turned down Elanor’s offer of water.

  Tahoma said, ‘You didn’t know any of her friends, though? Didn’t see anyone coming or going?’

  ‘Well, once a car drives past my house I can’t see where it goes. But I’ve driven by a few times.’ She glanced at the camera and quickly added, ‘To visit friends. I have friends up the mountain, you know.’

  ‘Of course. So you drove by Piper’s house and saw someone?’

  ‘Not someone. Just a car.’

  ‘A car?’

  ‘A nice one, really nice. Not Piper’s Jaguar though, something else.’

  ‘How many times have you seen it?’

  ‘A few times now.’ She turned her head in thought. ‘Maybe four or five times. Four or five times a month. For the past five or six months.’

  ‘You drive up to see your friends pretty often, huh?’

  Her face turned to ice and Tahoma immediately backed off.

  ‘So this car in the driveway,’ Tahoma said. ‘What color was it?’

  ‘White.’

  ‘A white car in Hawaii?’ Tahoma said dryly. ‘Really.’

  ‘But it was never parked in the driveway. At least never when I saw it. That’s what makes it stand out in my memory – it was always parked in the garage.’

  ‘Her garage door would usually be up?’

  ‘I’d say at least half the time. I don’t know whether she forgot it or what. Her car would always be parked right behind the white one when it was there.’

  ‘But you never saw the guy who drove it.’

  ‘No, never. I try to mind my own business, you know.’

  ‘You don’t like her much, do you?’ Tahoma said as we drove back to Hawaii Kai.

  ‘Elanor Rigby? Why wouldn’t I like her?’

  Brody was nodding off in the backseat, while I drove and Tahoma rode shotgun.

  ‘Not her. Marissa – you don’t like Marissa.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to say it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, I read people. That’s my job, yeah? I’m an investigator.’

  ‘I suppose you know why I dislike her, too?’

  ‘You’re jealous.’

  ‘What?’ I nearly lost control of the Jeep.

  ‘I just don’t know what you’re jealous of. You got a thing for Nick?’

  I scoffed. Tahoma quickly looked at Brody asleep in the backseat.

  ‘Oops,’ he said, ‘sorry. I forgot he was there.’ He rolled down his window and pulled out a cigarette. ‘You mind?’

  ‘Light it,’ I said, ‘and I’ll personally burn you alive.’

  I press STOP. Maybe Brody’s right, maybe this scene doesn’t need to be here. It’s extraneous. He’s outside hitting the vaporizer; I declined the invitation for the usual reason. What if I have an epiphany in the ten minutes we take for a vape sesh? But, no. It’s been eight already, and nothing. I consider moving the footage to the first half of the movie, but ultimately decide it would only slow things down. Better just to show pieces of her testimony at trial, if anything at all. Same difference, right? Better here to show post-Australia Tahoma tell the defense team all he learned about Zane Kingsley in Melbourne.

  While Naomi Lau may have done her homework on Nicholas Church and Piper Kingsley, she sure crapped the bed when it came to ol’ Zane.

  ‘Small-time criminal,’ Tahoma said in Church’s suite. ‘He has a sheet – drugs, guns, assaults, even stalking. But no major violent crimes. No rape, no homicide.’

  Church, who had been quietly rehired after publicly quitting the defense team, leaned forward on the table. ‘You talked to the local cops?’

  ‘Of course. They said the sheet pretty much tells the tale.’

  ‘When was his most recent arrest?’

  ‘Twelve, thirteen years ago.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Fraud.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A small score. Equivalent maybe to thirty grand here.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘Piper’s parents were loaded.’

  Tahoma shook his head. ‘Piper’s mother was loaded.’

  ‘But they never separated, at least according to Piper.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean she didn’t keep him on a short leash,’ Brody threw in. ‘Was there a prenuptial agreement?’

  ‘One the size of a James Michener novel,’ Tahoma said. ‘I forwarded an electronic copy to Nick.’

  ‘I went through it,’ Church said. ‘Zane had every incentive to stay with Piper’s mom. He would’ve walked away with nothing in the divorce.’

  ‘But he got it all in the will?’ Marissa asked.

  Tahoma shook his head. ‘A chunk of it went to charity. Most went into a trust for Piper. Australian law doesn’t allow you to disinherit a spouse entirely, but to the extent you can, she did.’

  ‘What was the mother’s cause of death?’ Church said.

  ‘Went down as natural causes. The local cops I spoke to said they immediately anticipated homicide and liked Zane for the murder. But the autopsy didn’t support a finding of homicide.’

  Church said, ‘Which doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a homicide. But, given the content of her will, he had even less incentive to kill her than
to divorce her.’

  ‘What happened to him after his wife’s death?’ I asked.

  Tahoma said, ‘Piper bought him a house, but nothing like the home he and his wife had been living in.’

  Church added, ‘Piper’s bank statements show she was essentially paying her father an allowance, up until last year.’

  ‘That must have been when they had the falling out,’ I said.

  Church folded his arms and leaned back in his seat. ‘If the mother’s will had left a substantial part of her estate to Piper’s father, we could have fed the jury enough of this line to arouse suspicion, but without it …’

  ‘What about Piper’s falling out with him?’

  Church shook his head. ‘Not enough. It might be enough if he were on the island at the time she was killed, but he wasn’t. He was in Melbourne.’

  ‘Could have hired someone,’ I said.

  ‘True, but this doesn’t have a whiff of a professional hit. It’d be too much of a stretch for the jury to buy in without linking him to the mother’s death. If the will were favorable to him, we’d have something to build on, but—’

  ‘How about the next best thing?’ Tahoma said. ‘Local cops said, couple of nights after his wife died, he went berserk in a pub, busted up a couple of tourists’ faces. They didn’t pick him up for it because his wife had just died.’

  Church sat up straight in his seat, excited. ‘Police had to have a better reason than that, especially if they still liked him for his wife’s murder.’

  Tahoma smiled for maybe the second time in the investigation. ‘They did. They had him under surveillance from the day his wife died.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he went berserk at that pub because he’d just learned he wasn’t the beneficiary of his wife’s life insurance policy. Apparently, he and the missus had purchased a pair of policies years ago, with each other named as beneficiaries. But the wife went behind his back and changed the beneficiary from her husband to her daughter.’

  ‘How long before she died?’ Church asked.

  ‘Three days,’ Tahoma said. ‘If you count the weekend.’

  At home that evening, Brody and I sat on opposite ends of the couch and watched the news. Devastation in Syria, grave threats against Seoul from North Korea, Russian hacking, the past year the hottest in recorded history, again. Back on the US mainland, an NFL star was about to go on trial for murder; another committed suicide, with a gun to the chest, in order to preserve his brain for scientific study. In Georgia, a police officer had shot a black teenager carrying an air rifle that could conceivably be mistaken for a real weapon. Witnesses provided conflicting accounts. Numerous individuals had captured the aftermath on their smartphones, but the incident itself went unrecorded.

  ‘Why would a kid raise an air rifle at police?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t know that he did.’ Brody fired up his bowl, blew out a tight stream of smoke. ‘But if he did, it could be a case of suicide by cop.’

  ‘It looks like a gun, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Somewhat,’ he said. ‘The question is whether it would look so much like a gun if it were being held by a pair of white hands.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘I don’t know. And it would take one hell of a risky experiment to find out.’

  The following morning, I met Kyle Myers for coffee. We’d been trying to hook up for some time, but, as Piper’s replacement, he’d been working seven days a week until the station chose his own replacement. Which happened just yesterday.

  ‘Piper knew she was a sugar mama,’ he said, as he put his lips to the triple venti, half-sweet, non-fat caramel macchiato, which he’d already sent back twice. ‘We commiserated over it often. I was a sugar mama, too, for a brief stretch of her tenure at the station. But I’ve since given up dating broke motherfuckers.’

  His smile was devilish and I immediately felt as though I’d known him forever.

  ‘Ethan doesn’t give me that impression,’ I said. ‘In fact, he seems proud and super-independent.’

  ‘That’s because the individual he was dependent on is gone.’

  ‘Did you know Ethan personally?’

  ‘From a few station functions, and one time a bunch of us from the station went down to Waikiki to watch him perform.’

  ‘Was he any good?’

  ‘Not my cuppa, but I didn’t have to cover my ears or anything.’ He took another sip from his steaming cup. ‘Crazy attractive, I’ll give him that.’

  ‘Did you ever meet his brother?’

  ‘The Nathan from the news, yeah. As a matter of fact, he was there the night we went to Waikiki to see Ethan perform.’ He leaned forward. ‘Does that lawyer who announced that the whole case is over, simply because police discovered an errant pubic hair, truly believe that? Or was that strategic?’

  I felt vindicated. ‘Not very effective that assertion, huh?’

  ‘Oh no, it was extremely effective. I mean, I wasn’t swayed but you should read some of the tweets the station received, and the hundreds of Facebook comments. People only read the headlines now. Overwhelmingly, our viewers are convinced that Ethan didn’t kill Piper, and that his brother did.’

  ‘Anyone you know personally?’

  ‘If you’re asking if I hang around idiots, my answer would be, “I only date them.” Since I’m currently single and in the midst of a sexual drought, though, my answer is no, I don’t know anyone personally. But we’re talking about the unwashed masses here, not a Friday night crowd at Skye Bar.’

  ‘Did you hang with Piper outside of work at all?’

  ‘When she first arrived at the station, yes. As difficult as it was.’

  ‘Why was it difficult?’

  ‘She took the job I’d been dying for. But the station manager prefers vaginas, what can you do?’

  ‘You think you got passed over because Piper slept with the station manager?’

  ‘Think? No. Know? Yes.’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘He told me. He was so desperate to brag about his conquest, I’m surprised he didn’t produce a segment about it.’

  ‘Mostly females at the station?’

  ‘Well, in the good jobs, yes. There are cameramen and grips, but other than me, an anchor and the sports guy (of course), all of the on-air talent menstruates.’

  ‘What’s the station manager’s name?’

  ‘Glen. Glen Belding. B-E-L-D-I-N-G, like the high school principal on Saved by the Bell. Kind of looks like him too. Maybe a little thicker, a little balder.’

  ‘Could Belding have been lying about sleeping with Piper?’

  ‘Sure, but once it goes through the rumor mill, it becomes fact. Perception is reality. You know that – you’re in television.’

  ‘Little different scene,’ I said. ‘Did Piper tell you she was pregnant?’

  ‘Actually, I asked her. She looked a little green when she came into the station one Saturday. A few minutes later she walked out of the bathroom and immediately asked me for Altoids.’

  ‘What did she say when you asked her?’

  ‘She said, “Great timing, too.” Which I took to mean that the father was here and she was weeks away from departing for the mainland.’

  ‘You assumed Ethan was the father?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t make assumptions like that anymore, and from the look on her face, I knew better than to ask.’

  ‘Did she say how Ethan took the news about her moving to the mainland?’

  ‘I know she wanted to put off telling him, and our female anchor agreed.’

  ‘Put off telling him for how long?’

  ‘Until she was safely on the mainland, I assume.’

  I hesitate, unsure if I want the answer. ‘Was she afraid of him?’

  ‘I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but let’s put it this way, she wasn’t not afraid of him. He has a temper, as illustrated on our evening broadcast recently, with the footage from Breakers’ parking lot.’ />
  The footage of that evening replayed in my mind, as it had unremittingly since I first saw it.

  After another half-hour of chatting, I said, ‘You’ve been incredibly helpful, Kyle. I don’t know how to thank you.’

  ‘Oh, no worries. Happy to help in any way I can. Besides, I don’t think I’m betraying any confidences here. I doubt I told you anything Piper didn’t put in her diary.’

  ‘Her diary?’ I asked, as we both rose from our seats.

  ‘Or journal, or whatever people are calling it these days. But yes, she was constantly jotting down her thoughts in it, and she guarded it like a rabid Rottweiler would a pound of raw meat.’

  He paused, scanned my expression, then bent his carefully manicured brows inward.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘did the police seriously not find it?’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I like the first time. But I like the second time better. Especially when the first time is in the front passenger seat of a Jeep.

  My first time with Brody was all but professionally coordinated. Third date, dinner first, back to my place, sit up in bed, ostensibly to watch a terrible movie on one of the premium channels. Watch for ten minutes, shoulders joined, pondering the logistics of it all, until finally he turns to speak, says nothing, our eyes meet, then close, lips touch, then kiss, while as smoothly as possible we attempt to get into a comfortable position for the next step in our questionable relationship. Foreplay, but not so extensive as to risk overexcitement and early release. Awkward undressing, especially the pants, especially jeans, especially tight ones. Then the sex (don’t overthink it), good but brief, and understandably so; after all, he did wait for the third date, and had harbored a visible hard-on since the opening credits of the Zoolander sequel.

  In the editing room, I’ve queued up our visit to the crime scene less than four weeks before trial, but the memory of that day makes my stomach twist. My second time with Ethan was the evening before that visit to Piper’s home on Mount Tantalus. Since our first time at Kaena Point months earlier, I’d been lusting after Ethan in a way I’d never lusted after anyone, and all intimations were that this intense longing was reciprocated. But we knew it was too chancy to do it again. Police were likely still watching him, fingers crossed that he’d fuck up in some way and strengthen their case. I didn’t know the intricacies of the attorney–client privilege, and because I was always so preoccupied with the film, never bothered to do the research. But Marissa’s warning rang true, and we couldn’t afford to dance in the gray areas of the law where Ethan’s case was concerned.