Don't Believe It

by Charlie Donlea

  Julian smiled. “Thanks. That’s why I wanted to talk with you.” He looked back over his shoulder to make sure Grace was occupied. She lay on a pool lounger and soaked up the sun.

  “About what?”

  Julian placed a small jewelry box onto the granite bar and looked at Ellie.

  Ellie stared at the box for a moment, then slowly asked, “What is that?”

  “I’m going to ask Grace to marry me. I need your help to pull it off.”

  Ellie also looked back toward Grace. She put her hand over the box and glanced around. The other patrons of the beach bar sucked piña coladas through straws and tilted bottles of Piton beer up to the sky.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Ellie asked.

  “Kidding? No, I’m dead serious.”

  “You guys just met.”

  Julian laughed in his casual manner, flashing his perfect teeth and sharp-angled jaw. “We met a year and a half ago, Ellie. We’ve been inseparable since.”

  Ellie leaned closer. “You go to school in New York, and she’s in Boston. That’s the opposite of inseparable. You’re actually separated almost all the time.”

  “We’ve been very good Amtrak customers.”

  Ellie rolled her eyes.

  “Every weekend we have free, one of us travels. It works for us. And next year, we’ll both be in New York. And then, during residency, yes, that will be a new form of inseparable.”

  “Listen, Julian, I’m happy for you guys. But why don’t you wait to see how things go before you jump into an engagement. I mean, what’s the rush?”

  Julian reached for the engagement ring. Ellie relinquished her hold on it and he slipped it back into his pocket.

  “Forget I asked,” he said.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I just want to make sure no one gets hurt.”

  “How will proposing hurt Grace?”

  “I don’t know, Julian. A lot has changed lately. Up until Match Day, Grace was looking at UNC and Duke for her residency. Then she matches with you in New York. She never told me any of this, and that’s fine. It’s her business. But for nearly four years, her plan was to go to North Carolina, and now suddenly she’ll be in New York for the next seven years. When you make these huge decisions without putting a lot of thought into them, you sometimes regret them later. I don’t want the same thing to happen with a proposal.”

  Julian nodded his head. He tipped his Piton back and drank the last third in one swallow. “We’ve actually put a lot of thought into this. All of it. Our residency and getting married. You see, Ellie, Grace and I talk a lot when you’re not present. I know it’s hard for you to imagine, but Grace does things in her life that don’t include you.” He put his empty beer bottle down.

  “No kidding. More and more, lately.”

  “At least, act surprised when she tells you.”

  Julian turned to leave. Ellie grabbed his wrist.

  “Wait, Julian.”

  He turned back. “What?”

  “I’m her best friend, so I’m only bringing this up to prove a point.”

  “Bringing what up?”

  Ellie took a deep breath, looked back over at Grace lying by the pool. “Has Grace told you about Daniel?”

  “Told me what?”

  “See. Maybe you guys don’t know each other as well as you think.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Friday, June 9, 2017

  THE PAST WEEK HAD BEEN A PRODUCTIVE ONE. HE LEARNED HOW TO control the bed and lower it to the correct height so he could gingerly slide his leg over the side and touch the ground without too much pain. Then, with his foot flat on the floor and his ass on the edge of the mattress, he pressed the control again to raise the bed back up to its original height, effectively placing him in a standing position. From here, and with the use of crutches, he could make it to the bathroom. Of course, venturing off on his own was strictly prohibited this soon after surgery, so his stealth operations always took place in the middle of the night when his bladder woke him at 3:00 a.m.

  Calling the nurses and playing the waiting game was no longer an option. And the tantrums he had staged for the past two weeks were quickly depleting his energy, which he needed for his physical therapy sessions. Having made it through the post-operative fog of narcotics and pain, he now had his eye on the end game: walking his ass out of this hellhole. With that goal in mind, he stopped fighting with the nurses. In fact, he stopped talking to them entirely. He made it through most days with grunts and head nods and waited for Friday afternoons when the weekend crew showed up. They were kinder and gentler than the Nazis that ran this place during the week. Riki, his overnight nurse, was his savior.

  The middle-of-the-night mission to the Promised Land, which took the better part of an hour to complete, combined with a double physical therapy session on Friday afternoon, had left him depleted. He crashed as soon as they settled him in bed. When he opened his eyes Friday evening, for a moment he believed it was again the middle of the night. His bladder was screaming and he wasn’t sure he’d have the energy to get himself to the bathroom.

  “Hey, there he is,” Riki said in her pleasant voice. “You’ve been sleeping ever since I clocked in. Howya feelin’? Jason told me you had a heck of a therapy session today.”

  He nodded. “That kid’s the second coming of R. Lee Ermey.”

  “Who?”

  “Full Metal Jacket. You’ve never seen it?”

  “No, what is it?”

  “Never mind,” Gus said. “Listen, I’m very sorry to greet you like this, but I need to get to the bathroom right away or I’m going to make a damn mess of myself.”

  “No problem. Do you need help with the urinal?” She held up the plastic bottle he loathed.

  “That thing and I don’t get along. It steals my dignity, and I’ve barely got any left, as it is.”

  Riki smiled. “Let’s get you out of bed, then.”

  He closed his eyes. Thank God for Fridays.

  “Crutches or walker? I can help you attach your prosthesis, but it’ll take a few minutes.”

  “I don’t have a few minutes, and I haven’t put that thing on yet. Let’s go with the crutches.”

  With Riki’s help, the round-trip from his bed to the bathroom and back again took nearly thirty minutes. But the layover, during which he stood and enjoyed the easily forgotten luxury of urinating while standing on his own, was worth the effort.

  When he was settled back in bed, the nurse asked how his pain level was.

  “Eight-ish.”

  She scrolled through the computer at the side of his bed. “You haven’t had morphine today. Actually, you haven’t had it all week.”

  “I’m trying to get away from it. It screws up my mind.”

  “The pain will slow you down. I’m all for tapering off the pain meds, and there’s a plan in place for that. Cold turkey is too hard on your recovery. Let me give you a dose that will help you through the night.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t think straight with that stuff. My body’s for shit, excuse my French. All I’ve got left is my mind, and when they dope me up with that stuff, my mind goes to shit as well. And between you and me, I think the weekday nurses are too liberal with the morphine and use it as a way to shut me up. The regular crew and I don’t . . . see eye-to-eye. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Fair enough. How about we go with half your typical dose. It’ll take the edge off. It’ll make you loopy just after the dose is administered, but you’ll come around faster. Sleeping will be easy tonight, and by morning, you and I will be having coffee together.”

  “You buying?”

  “No, sir. Coffee is on you, but I’ll deliver it.”

  “Deal,” Gus said, grimacing at the burn in his hip.

  Riki disappeared and returned a few minutes later with the sterile-dressed cart. She clicked on the television. “Here, watch this. I know you don’t like needles.”

  He looked up at the television. On it, a woman stoo
d in front of a hospital in New York and spoke into the camera.

  “Julian Crist had just two days to live,” the woman said. “St. Lucian police argued that during her entire stay at Sugar Beach, Grace was ruthlessly planning to kill her lover on the very night he was to propose to her.”

  Riki adjusted the port in his arm and emptied the syringe of morphine into his bloodstream. The smoldering in his hip melted away like ice water poured over the orange coals of a campfire. Gus kept his eyes on the screen.

  The woman took a few steps along the sidewalk with the glass façade of Bellevue Hospital behind her.

  “Why?” she said. “Because Grace was actually in love with another man? Because her relationship with Julian was moving too fast? Because Grace discovered that Julian was involved with another woman? The prosecution made all these arguments during the trial, but the alleged motive was not what brought a conviction. Hard forensic evidence is what convinced the jury to hand down their sentence. We’ll dive into that next time, taking a closer look at the forensics that played such a crucial role in the trial.” The woman stopped walking. “That’s next time on The Girl of Sugar Beach.”

  “Are you keeping up with this?” Gus heard the nurse ask. “It’s addictive.”

  Gus strained his eyes against the dozing effect of the morphine and tried to bring the television into focus. A promo flashed on the screen, and he watched a woman climb up a heavily wooded path that reminded him of a rain forest. She came to a bluff, which overlooked the ocean. The voice-over faded and Gus wasn’t able to understand the words. But he saw the ocean and the sun and dreamed about being on a beach, able to walk freely through the sand and dive into the surf. He closed his eyes. The water was cool against his skin; the salt stung his eyes, but felt wonderful at the same time. He turned in the ocean and floated on his back with no effort at all.

  “I don’t think she did it,” he thought he heard the nurse say.

  Gus grumbled something in reply, but stayed comfortably in his morphine-induced oasis, which had placed him in the warm Caribbean sun, floating weightlessly through the ocean and kicking through the current with both his legs and no pain.

  CHAPTER 21

  Tuesday, June 13, 2017

  IT WAS THE FOLLOWING WEEK AND SIDNEY AND DERRICK TOOK A CAB to the Lower East Side. A light mist fell, just enough to crystalize the lights of New York and cause the driver to flash his wipers every few seconds. Brake lights and stoplights smeared across the roads in red streaks. It was Tuesday, close to 10:00 p.m., and Derrick was not happy to be running around so late.

  “Why can’t he meet us during the day?”

  “He just got off work, said this was the only time he had. Take it or leave it. I took it, because I need his testimony for Friday’s episode. If you can frame it and Leslie can cut it before our deadline.”

  “Who is he? There are hundreds of cops we could ask.”

  “Don Markus. He did some work for my first documentary. I trust him. Plus, he has no issues being filmed. Signed everything.”

  Derrick looked at his watch. “I’m coming in late tomorrow, just letting you know.”

  “No, you’re not. We’ve got to get this to production by noon to make the deadline.” Sidney leaned forward in the cab. “Up there on the left,” she said to the driver.

  The cabbie pulled to a stop outside the bar. Sidney dropped money over the seat and stepped into the misty Manhattan night. They found Detective Markus inside with a sweating highball of scotch resting on a wrinkled napkin in front of him.

  “Hey, Sid,” he said when she entered.

  “Hi, Don. Thanks for meeting me. This is Derrick, he’ll record for me.”

  “Drink?”

  “Sure. Casamigos on the rocks.”

  Don pointed at Derrick, who shook his head. He ordered Sidney’s tequila and another scotch for himself.

  “Probably better to do this in a back booth,” Sidney said.

  They took their drinks to the back of the bar. Derrick turned on the light of the Ikegami and the back corner of the bar came to life under the brightness. A few patrons turned to look, but quickly lost interest.

  “You’ve read through the case,” Sidney said. “What are your thoughts on the way the investigation was handled?”

  Don smiled. “It was handled like a bunch of rookies who didn’t know their asses from a hole in the ground.”

  Sidney pouted her bottom lip. “Thank you, but I probably can’t use that on prime time. Try again.”

  Don paused, took a sip of scotch. “In my twenty-five years on the force, and thirteen years in Homicide, I’ve never seen a case mishandled as badly as this one.”

  “Much better. Why? Expand on what you read, and how you would do it differently.”

  “Let’s start with the interviews. Not only were they conducted incorrectly, but possibly fraudulently. If you compare the list of people interviewed to the hotel’s registered guests, you’ll see right away many guests were never interviewed at all. So people who were present at the hotel the night Julian Crist died were never asked basic questions about what they saw or what they heard, or about their own whereabouts that night. Out of one hundred eighty-eight guests, only one hundred four were interviewed. What happened to the other eighty-four?

  “Plus, the staff at the hotel were interviewed in groups. This is gross mismanagement. All potential witnesses and suspects should be interviewed separately. This is done for many reasons, but the most common is to confirm individual accounts of the night in question corroborate with each other. Interviewing witnesses and suspects individually also helps create a timeline of events. Many members of the staff were interviewed in groups of two and three, which allows their stories to change based on what each interviewee is hearing during the course of questioning. Gross, gross incompetence.”

  “Have you read through the interview of a guest named Ellie Reiser?”

  “No, I have not. To the best of my knowledge, this person was never interviewed by the St. Lucian investigators.”

  “Ellie states, in letters to me and in a recent interview, that police did question her on the day Julian’s body was discovered.”

  “If so,” Detective Markus said, “there’s no record of it.”

  “Ellie claims she was in Grace Sebold’s room the night Julian Crist was killed. She says her testimony was not allowed at Grace’s trial because she was intoxicated during the day and her accounts of the evening could not be relied upon to be accurate.”

  “I don’t know if she was drunk or not,” Markus said. “But if she provided a clear alibi, and if this had happened in the States, the judge would have allowed her to testify and allowed the defense to cross-examine her. Then a jury would decide if she was a reliable witness. However, with her interview never being formally logged by the investigators, it disappeared from existence. This shows me that the detectives were looking for information that matched their suspicions, not allowing the information they found to lead them to their suspicions. A very backward way of running an investigation. From what I read, they decided early on that Grace Sebold was guilty, and then set out to prove it. Tried to make everything fit that narrative.”

  Sidney referred to her notes.

  “A shoeprint was found near the bluff where Julian fell to his death. Forensics matched the print to a shoe found in Grace Sebold’s room. Soil analysis shows that the shoe held dirt that came from this location. How accurate is the forensics, in your opinion?”

  “Very. It means Grace Sebold, or someone wearing that shoe, was on the bluff at some point in time. What I find interesting is that there were six other prints found at the bluff, but investigators never bothered to look into them or find out who they belonged to. And it was documented that the day before Julian Crist was killed, the entire wedding party had hiked together to the summit of Gros Piton. So there you go. The shoeprint could have been created during that hike and not when Grace Sebold supposedly went back to the bluff to commit a murder. What
’s worse is that the detectives sequestered twelve pairs of shoes from hotel guests. Photographed the tread and ran ID analysis on them to come up with the make and manufacturer. But once they got a hit on Grace Sebold’s shoe, they stopped there. They didn’t bother to see if any of the other prints on the bluff matched the shoes they collected. This is called selectively investigating. They didn’t want it formally recorded that any other matches were discovered on the bluff, because the defense would have used it at trial.”

  Sidney referred to her notes again and took a sip of tequila.

  “Julian’s blood was found in Grace Sebold’s cottage at Sugar Beach,” she said. “As was bleach. The suggestion was that the bleach was used to clean away the blood. How accurate again is the method by which this evidence was collected.”

  “Very,” he said again. “Basic swab testing after luminol application. Squirt the luminol, turn on the black light. Bleach and blood, invisible to the naked eye, glow blue. The DNA results of the blood discovered matched to Julian Crist. It’s accurate.”

  Detective Markus looked over at Derrick.

  “Turn that off a minute.”

  Derrick took the camera off his shoulder.

  “Listen,” Markus said to Sidney. “I think they targeted her. I think they convicted her early on in the investigation and too narrowly focused their energy on proving that she did it. They conducted too few interviews, and did them in an ass-backward manner that would never fly in the States, and they disregarded evidence that didn’t match their theory. The consensus, when I asked around about this case, was that a murder on a small island is bad for business. Especially if a local islander murdered a U.S. tourist. An American killing an American?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Not so much of a problem, and won’t have an effect on tourism, as long as the case is closed quickly.”

  “Even if there were clearly things that pointed to Grace’s innocence?”

  Markus took another sip of scotch. “You know what prosecutors say around here? Any D.A. can convict a guilty man, but it takes a special D.A. to convict an innocent one.”