He’ll shoot me, I assume, then Marissa and Church. Then he’ll shoot himself. His own tidy Shakespearean tragedy. His own Game of Thrones.
But instead of diving headfirst into oblivion, I hear Brody’s footsteps retreating toward the door.
And when I open my eyes, he’s gone.
I think of the gun and wonder.
And listen. To the sirens closing in, to the screaming of brakes in the lot.
It was too dark to see the gun.
Thirty seconds later, I hear four, maybe five rapid shots.
And I think of our conversation about the boy with the air rifle.
In my head, I hear Brody use the ghastly three words: suicide by cop.
EPILOGUE
At the end of Ethan’s set, he steps past his dozen or so new groupies and takes the seat I’ve been saving for him at the bar.
‘What did you think?’ he says.
‘I like the original stuff best.’
‘Of course you do.’
The bartender asks him what he’s having.
‘Another mai tai for her. I’ll have a bottled water.’
‘Staying off the sauce?’ I ask him.
He smiles and goes all Bruce Banner on me. ‘Don’t make me drink. You wouldn’t like me when I drink.’
I like him just fine when he drinks, but I won’t say so.
‘What’s next for you?’ he asks.
‘Still tinkering with the movie. I’m going to stick around the island until Marissa’s up on her feet again.’
‘That’s sweet of you.’
‘Well, she promised me notes on my film, and damned if I’m not going to get them.’
He laughs.
I fucking love his laugh. It’s a shame that everything Ethan’s been through – the death of a girlfriend, the heinous accusations and legal jeopardy, the betrayal by his brother – has propelled him straight out of my league.
‘Did you and Nate bury the hatchet?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know about that, but we did speak. He finally told me the story behind his elopement to Vegas. Nate had gotten a call from some two-bit lawyer out there, who said he needed money for our father’s defense. Our dad had gotten in with the wrong crowd – well, his crowd, I guess – and got pinched trying to pull off a smash-and-grab at a pawnshop. Nate knew I wanted nothing to do with our dad, which is why he didn’t tell me. He and Cheyenne tried to make the trip a positive by getting hitched.’
‘You knew about Zane Kingsley’s criminal past too, didn’t you?’
He bows his head. ‘It was one of the many connections I felt to Piper – we both had shit dads.’ He grins mirthlessly. ‘Probably one of Nate’s connections to her too.’ He shrugs it off. ‘Anyway, around the time I met her, Piper found out her dad had returned to that life, and she immediately wrote him off for good.’
I’m about to scrounge up another inane question when Ethan abruptly turns to another female demanding his attention.
Yeah, so, like, I’m single now. Back amongst the pit-sniffers of the world.
Did I forget deodorant tonight?
As inconspicuously as possible, I sniff my pits one at a time – a move that one underwear company publicly designated a ‘smelfie’. Thanks for calling attention, guys! What’s next? Shoes that emit tiny pastel stink lines whenever you have foot odor?
Another mai tai lands in front of me, and I go for the straw with my lips. Which means I’m at the ‘Hey! Look ma, no hands’ stage of drunkenness. Good to know.
My iPhone buzzes in my back pocket. I excuse myself (though unnecessarily) and head outside.
‘Where are you?’ Kyle Myers says with a seriousness that’s rare for him.
‘Lulu’s, watching Ethan play. Why don’t you come down for a drink?’
‘I’m at the station.’
My stomach drops. ‘The police station?’
‘No, the television station.’
‘What the shit for?’
‘Remember Piper’s diary? The one I told you about but the police never found?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I found it.’
‘What? Where?’
‘Remember the station manager I told you about? Hefty guy, losing his hair?’
‘Principal Belding.’
‘Well, Glen Belding, but close enough. Piper’s diary was in his desk. I accidentally found it while fishing for a cheat sheet to give my weekend replacement. The pervert must have snatched it as soon as he heard about Piper’s death.’
‘Tell me you haven’t gone through it,’ I say.
Eight, nine, maybe ten seconds pass in silence.
‘I could tell you I haven’t gone through it.’
As I take it all in, Ethan comes up behind me and kisses my head. Like you might a poodle before leaving to buy groceries at Safeway.
‘About to start the next set,’ he says. ‘Coming?’
Not tonight, I’m not.
‘Sorry,’ I tell Ethan, ‘I’ve got to run. But call me sometime.’ I make the universal phone signal with my thumb and pinky, even though I’m holding a real phone in the other hand.
Fortunately, Ethan thinks it’s a shaka and throws one back at me. ‘I will, Riley. I will definitely call you.’
I turn swiftly and start up the street.
‘You there?’ I say into my phone. ‘I need to see it.’
‘Hire an Uber. I’ll meet you here at the station. The television station, not police headquarters.’
Three days later I’m in the cafeteria at the Pali Momi Medical Center in Aiea. Church sits across from me, nothing in front of him but a tall can of Monster Energy Drink, which he no longer needs to conceal in a mug. I, on the other hand, have a plateful of roast pork with snow peas. Church appears offended by what I’m eating, by what everyone in the cafeteria is eating. He also looks as though he hasn’t slept since he woke from the dozen Klonopin with which Brody spiked his bourbon.
‘How is she?’ I ask.
‘Stable, with a fair prognosis.’
At the hands of Brody Quinlan, Marissa Linden suffered a skull fracture, a broken nose, three cracked ribs, and various internal injuries which Church refused to enumerate for me when I first met him at the hospital following the incident.
‘For what it’s worth,’ I say, ‘Piper had intended to stay in Hawaii to raise the child with Ethan. She planned on breaking things off with Nate when she met him on the day she was killed. Instead they wound up in bed together.’ I shrug. ‘Been there. It does happen.’
‘She was going to ditch Nate even before she knew for certain who the father was?’
I nod. ‘Ethan didn’t know about Nate, and Piper never planned on telling him. She figured Nate had his own reasons to remain silent.’ I shovel a spoonful of peas into my mouth. ‘Anyway, after all the lies Nate told her, she didn’t trust him anymore. In the end, she realized the good brother was the broke musician, not the wealthy scumbag attorney.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Whose idea was the threesome?’
‘According to Piper’s diary, Captain Morgan is to blame for that. Piper wrote that it was understood by all parties to be a one-time thing, but after that night, Nate continued pursuing her. She initially resisted, but then Nate convinced her to go out for coffee. One thing led to another … You know the rest.’
‘Who did she love?’ Church asks.
‘For a half-year, she genuinely loved them both.’
He nods. It’s maybe the first thing about this case that makes perfect sense.
‘So you read the whole thing?’ he says.
‘Every page.’
‘You’re just the worst kind of person.’
‘I know.’
Although I realize that it was an unforgivable invasion of her privacy, I don’t regret reading Piper’s diary. Those pages filled in so much of the background of the one player I knew so little about. Turns out, for instance, Piper did not sleep with Glen Belding to get her job at the station. In fac
t, much of the prose in her diary was devoted to making a record of Belding’s sexual harassment over the years. Whether Belding stole the diary because he feared what was inside it, or – as Kyle insists – for some sort of creepy sexual gratification, we’ll never know. But Kyle did anonymously send copies of the relevant pages to Belding’s higher-ups – and, yes, got the big, bald perv shit-canned from the station. Hashtag MeToo.
Church leans back and sighs deeply.
I say, ‘How are you holding up?’
He tries a smile but it doesn’t fit.
I say, ‘Please don’t tell me you intend to quit the law.’
He shakes his head. ‘Nah, what else would I do with myself? I’m too fucking crazy for any other profession. Just the right amount of crazy for this one. I’m not leaving the law until I die, or some ethics committee kicks me out of it. Whichever comes last. Because fuck them.’
I grin. ‘So you’re going to wait for that next “big case”?’
Church scans the cafeteria, says quietly, ‘Truth is, Riles, I only handle one major case at a time because, emotionally, it’s all I can handle.’
I smile, say, ‘Maybe it’s for the best. Because I can only film one documentary at a time.’
I’ve decided to play the audio of Brody’s confession (as recorded by Jesse) over the footage captured by a handful of tourists and a pair of police body cams outside the Four Seasons. It’s so damn difficult to watch; there are moments when I just want to scrap the whole project. Maybe film a documentary about Hawaii’s endangered wildlife (like the monk seals) or modern-day Pearl Harbor.
Funny, early in post, I thought referring to Piper as the ‘weathergirl’ would help distance me from my friend’s murder. Although I may not have realized it at the time, I wanted her, needed her, to be only a player. Maybe my two and a half decades of watching true crime granted me the ability to do that for as long as I needed to complete this film. But what’s clear from the tears I shed over the past several days – over Brody, over Ethan, over Piper – is that true crime hasn’t completely desensitized me. Not in the way a surgeon becomes accustomed to blood, or a cop to corpses. Like Church and his ‘crazy’, true crime has fucked me up just enough to allow me to do my job. I finally feel like a documentarian.
Since this film is about Piper more than anyone else, about the life cut short and the selfish, despicable reasons for it – and since Piper always loved the title and who am I to argue? – my movie is now called The Weathergirl.
‘How sexy is that job title,’ Piper once said over tequila shots. ‘And in the end, no matter what else we do on this earth, don’t we all just really want to be remembered as sexy? If that’s possible, of course; if not, you find something else.’ She laughed at that, fired back another shot, then added somberly, ‘Maybe that’s why so many beautiful people in this world die young.’
‘By the way,’ Church says, ‘I was very sorry to hear about your professor.’
Smothering leaves no marks on its victim unless the victim puts up a struggle. Which is the real reason Brody killed Professor Leary in his sleep, not out of compassion. Because of the professor’s age and the fact that there were no external bruises or other signs of a struggle, there was no autopsy. But now that there’s a confession, there’s no question: Professor Leary was killed by a coward while he slept.
But I’m not going to let this past year make me jaded. At least not any more jaded than I already am. And I’m not going to veer from the damaged and vulnerable of this world. Because it’s so often not their fault – and because they need us the most.
‘You OK?’ Church asks me.
‘Yeah, I was just thinking of how this all came to be so bizarre, and how that will affect viewership and/or ticket sales.’
He purses his lips. ‘I suppose the more bizarre the world becomes, the more bizarre our stories should be.’
‘But will people watch?’
‘People will watch,’ he says with his usual confidence.
‘I like when people watch.’
The Rough Cut Page 27