Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

  “Okay,” Clipboard Lemming said, straightening. “Everyone, this is live TV. Once we go up, that means you can’t say ‘fuck.’ But that was really good. We want to lead with that exchange, okay? Sets up the tension between the two of you. Can you do it again?” She stepped off the stage and stood next to one of the cameras.

  Vanessa smiled at them both. “Make it look natural. Just the start, then we’ll be live. Play nice.”

  “Live in five,” called the lemming, hand up, fingers splayed. “Phones off.”

  Ted rummaged in his pocket, pulled his phone out, switched it to silent. “Sorry. Always forget,” he mumbled, pocketing it.

  The lemming’s fingers surrendered one by one until she had a fist.

  Before Jack could say anything, the music had started and Vanessa was talking. He knew that was key: to plunge them into it, catch them off guard. On his left, a monitor showed the current framing. To his right, over Ted’s shoulder, Vanessa’s intro scrolled up the teleprompter in black and white. Jack found himself reading it, rather than listening to her.

  VR: I’m here today with the lead prosecutor in the Wade case, Mr. Theodore Piper. And the filmmaker who blew this case wide open, Jack Quick. Gentlemen. This is, perhaps, a bit different from what you’re used to. Shall we put your hand on a Bible, make you feel more at home? *elegant laugh*

  All Jack could think about was how fast they’d been able to put their spontaneous banter into the teleprompter. That, and how terrifying an *elegant laugh* from Vanessa Raynor would be. World leaders have been eviscerated on this stage, he reminded himself. Better men than you. Worse men too.

  Then he heard Ted say, like the suck-up he was, “I always tell the truth,” and realized everyone was looking at him. Clipboard Lemming Number Two, by camera 3, spun her fingers in a wheel. Hurry up.

  “Mate, it’s fucking television,” Jack said. Forgot the rest.

  Clipboard Lemming shook her head, mouthed at him: Don’t say “fuck.” He felt a scurry of activity behind him as people dived for radios to tell someone to hit the censor button.

  Vanessa shot Jack the look he’d seen before from the techie and the makeup girl but took it in her stride. “Excuse you, Mr. Quick.”

  “Sorry. I’m a bit nervous.” He laughed. Elegantly.

  “We do have a delay. Only seven seconds though. We’ll have our fingers on the button, just in case.” She smiled at the camera, not at Jack, reassuring the families at home. “But please do keep in mind that we are a family-friendly show.”

  “Right.” Jack nodded. “Noted. Let’s crack on with discussing the torture and strangling of Eliza Dacey then, shall we?”

  Before Vanessa had even thrown to the footage, he knew where they’d start it: on a thunderous Sydney day, in the parking lot of the Long Bay Correctional Complex.

  On the monitor behind Vanessa, the footage started to play. It showed a beautiful, slowly setting sun, casting the gathered crowd in a gentle ochre. It looked serene, but it had been freezing, Jack remembered; he had worn a scarf and an overcoat. The wind had whipped off the sea and climbed the cliffs. You couldn’t tell on the screen, but a rolling mass of gray lumbered over the bay. It would have been colder still inside the prison.

  It had been noisy too. A large crowd, everyone chattering. Cameramen spat on lenses, reporters primped hair, shifted so the light wouldn’t ruin the shot, but the frame captured a smidgen of the high concrete walls, the guard tower over their shoulders. Hopefully, a man with a rifle would wander into shot. Add some gravitas.

  Vanessa had probably been there, Jack thought, though he couldn’t remember seeing her. He remembered Ted, who had only gone because a rival network had paid him enough to film his reaction. The man who could get you on was there. So were the Wades: the sister, Lauren, and father, Vincent, leaning heavy on a cane. In retrospect, Jack could see the illness waning him. At the time, Jack had thought it was the stress, the grief of a parent struggling with his son’s guilt, but he could see it more clearly now. Cancer. Took him fast. Grabbed ahold and shook the bones from him. Five weeks later, he was dead. They’d only buried him a week ago. Jack hadn’t been there, but he’d okayed the network’s call to send a second unit. The family had gone with a clichéd headstone: Rest in Peace. A bit rich, Jack thought, seeing as he planned on interrupting the funeral footage with commercials. Thirteen minutes of ads per hour was both the legal maximum and the network minimum. Rest in 78 Percent Peace would have been more apt.

  That day at the prison, Lauren had seemed more grown-up too. She’d been a teenager during the case (high school must have been a joy) but was now around twenty. Jack remembered her as a quiet sixteen-year-old, seated in the back of the courtroom with her father. The first day, she’d been puffy eyed and petulant; the second, less so. Every day from then, there was a bit more of the world in her face. By the end of the case, she sat stoically, as if the horrors of her brother’s crime had leaded her very skin. Though they kept away from everyone else, the Wades had two police officers with them.

  He’d seen Alexis there too. She’d shaken his hand before heading into the throng to be interviewed. She didn’t command as high a fee as Ted or himself, but she’d gotten plenty of bookings. They’d made her partner at the firm too. Jack thought he’d even seen her on the side of a bus, wearing spectacles.

  Vanessa Raynor shifted in her chair, and Jack slipped out of the memory and back into the room. After this interview, he was going to give Alexis a call. See what she was up to. She owed him dinner, after all.

  On-screen, milling in the prison parking lot, was the same crew as at the trial, the appeals, the retrial. This ragtag group of journalists and producers, interns and camera operators had managed to become a strange little family themselves over the last few months. A traveling circus following the ghost of Eliza Dacey through the courts and jails of Sydney.

  There had been a roar from inside. As if a football game had just been won. The prisoners must have been allowed out in the yard. Today was a special day. Then it was quiet, the wind picking up the cheer and whisking it away, as if the hope inside the walls was forbidden from escaping.

  But the people outside the prison were quiet now too. Because there were two figures behind the glass door entryway, talking. It was hard to see what they were wearing, but it appeared neither were in the green tracksuits of the inmates. Cameras were turned on. People craned their necks. Reporters started talking, variations of the same phrase—“first exclusive”—crossing over each other. A “this-just-in” lasagna.

  We are live and seconds away from what we believe to be…

  The figures shook hands. And then one of them walked to the side, held his pass against the doorframe, and the doors slid open. A few small raindrops began to fall.

  Curtis Wade, in civilian clothes—cheap jeans and a plain hoodie—stepped into the dusk.

  A free man.

  He’d gotten fat.

  People either get fit or chunky in prison, and Curtis had opted for sedentary imprisonment. Maybe he’d been treated better the last few months, on account of the show, and that could’ve porked him up too, Jack supposed. Four years had aged him a decade. Curtis had gone to jail just north of thirty, but he’d come out with gray hair and a rough, white beard. His eyes seemed set far back, sockets punched in like fingers in dough. He walked slowly, almost with a limp but not quite. It was more a slow method of discovery; he was savoring new steps. Four years was a long time to run laps—or not, as seemed evident—in a yard.

  After a few seconds of stunned silence, everything happened in a flurry. The cops, previously with Lauren and Vincent, rushed forward and fell into step on either side of Curtis. Reporters broke ranks like kids at the starting pistol of an Easter egg hunt, running left and right, yelling instructions at the camera operators. One bypassed Curtis entirely and knocked on the door to the prison. Jack had a camera jammed in his face a
nd was asked for his opinion.

  “No comment,” he said, turning away.

  “Fucking hell, man.” The operator lowered his camera, pissed he’d traded a better shot coming over. “Why are you even here?”

  “Make a path!” one of the cops yelled as she guided Curtis through the pack. “Come on, you know how it works. Back up!”

  Eventually, when they realized he wasn’t going to give any of them an interview, the pack thinned out, and Curtis was free to pick his way through to his family. (At the time, Jack found it odd that Curtis’s sister and father hadn’t rushed straight up to him either, but on viewing the footage again now, he could see that Vincent was well past rushing anywhere.) But then Curtis changed direction. He pushed into the middle of the throng, looking left and right, scanning for something. Someone.

  He locked eyes with Jack.

  Fifteen cameras swiveled in Jack’s direction. Reporters scattered out of the way so as not to impede this reunion. If you could call it that. It was the first time they’d ever actually met in person.

  Curtis walked over. Held out his hand.

  Fifteen lenses and millions of eyes watched as Jack reached out and shook it. But Curtis wasn’t having that and pulled him tightly into a hug. His beard was stiff and scratched at Jack’s neck, his nose wet against his ear. Curtis was crying. Jack put his spare arm around him and patted him on the back. Watching it again while Vanessa shuffled her notes and readied for questions, Jack remembered that image well. His slight frame dwarfed by Curtis’s red-eyed bear hug: it had been blown up on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

  But it was what Curtis said next that really stuck with him. Watching it again in Vanessa Raynor’s studio, Jack saw it play out again in almost sickening slow motion. Curtis pulled away slightly, then bent down and spoke, low and quiet, his breath hot on Jack’s ear: “Eliza Dacey thanks you for justice.”

  Six perfectly chosen words. Essentially meaningless. But just odd enough to feel provocative. Chilling. And not whispered, but said with a quiet sincerity, just loud enough that the mics would pick it up. Clever. No, not clever: shrewd.

  That was the first time Jack realized he had underestimated Curtis Wade.

  Chapter 6

  “So…” Vanessa snapped Jack from his reverie, brought him back to the present. “Tell us how you got Curtis Wade out of jail?”

  An easy start. That was one of the preapproved questions.

  “To be honest, I didn’t think anything would happen, legally speaking. I wasn’t trying to get anyone anywhere. I was just interested in telling the other side of a story, the side that gets skipped, slips through the cracks. I wasn’t prepared for the public response; I don’t think anyone was. Australia set him free—I just opened up the conversation.”

  He thought that was most of what his publicist had written down.

  “And what drew you to this story?”

  “I just found the circumstances around his sentencing so unclear. I felt someone needed to step in and sift through the evidence again. Try and have a clear view. Start again, from the beginning.”

  “That’s the detectives’ job though, isn’t it?” Ted cut in. “You know, professionals.”

  Vanessa made a small pat downward with her hand. Settle, you’ll get your chance.

  “Normally, I’d agree,” said Jack, “but Curtis was up against it, in a town that disliked him—”

  “Because of what he did to the Freemans’ winery?”

  “Yes, we can come back to that. But he was a victim of a biased police force, a biased jury, and not to mention a vitriolic prosecution campaign.” Jack looked Ted in the eyes. “Set up by, you know, professionals.”

  “So you wanted to give the little guy a voice?” Vanessa said.

  “I think everyone deserves to be heard.”

  “And Eliza’s voice?”

  That was not a preapproved question. He faltered. Almost heard his publicist’s head thunk on the desk from the green room.

  “But, Mr. Piper”—Vanessa switched the momentum—“you felt you had a pretty strong case?”

  “Of course we did.”

  “So where did it all go wrong?”

  “These guys—I want to say this now so it’s out in the open—are just a gaggle of filmmakers. They are not professional investigators; they’re not lawyers. They aren’t bound by chain of evidence, they aren’t bound by duty to the court.”

  “We had consultant—”

  “You had retired police detectives consult, that’s true. Retired. May I finish?”

  Jack waved a hand dismissively.

  “It’s a TV show. I’m not denying you made some convincing arguments—you did. But you edited your arguments into existence; you moved things around. There are hundreds of hours in the trial alone, and your show was only seven. You’re not even a documentary crew.” Ted directed his accusation at Vanessa, as if Jack wasn’t even worth the vitriol. “You know, these guys, what they’re making, it’s classified in the network’s budget as a drama. A drama. Fiction.”

  “That’s just a label for the number crunchers. Everything we showed was true.”

  “It’s what you didn’t show that concerns me.”

  A shoebox, pushed to the back of Jack’s closet, flickered in his mind. He shut it out.

  “So what you’re saying is…?” Vanessa guided the accusation.

  “I’m saying you made it up. And you got lucky,” Ted said.

  “Lucky? Your evidence didn’t hold up in the appeals court, I don’t need to remind you. On top of that, Curtis Wade was retried by a jury of unbiased peers.”

  “Unbiased? Everyone in the country has seen your show. Everyone has had your opinions beamed into their homes as facts. There aren’t twelve people in this country I could make an unbiased jury out of.”

  “You’re just mad because everyone in the country saw you be an arsehole.”

  “Family show, Jack,” Vanessa cut in.

  “Yes, of course.” Jack tried to remember what his publicist had told him; he had to time it right. “You’re forgetting something. We didn’t actually present any evidence. All we did was show that yours was not up to scratch. You hack-jobbed him. Reasonable doubt is for everybody.”

  “You’re forgetting something too. You got a killer out of jail. You have to live with that.”

  “No blood, no matching footprints.” Jack counted on his fingertips, becoming more animated. The exaggerated defense of someone who knows they’re wrong but hopes to get by on bravado. “No motive—”

  “We had motive,” Ted cut in. “Eliza left a voicemail with a journalist at Discover! magazine. She had something she felt might be illegal, that could be newsworthy.”

  “She found something”—Vanessa tapped her ear, fed some fact by a producer—“weird, I believe was her wording.”

  “Discover! is a tabloid,” Jack said. “If it had been a severe enough motive for murder, she might have gone to the police. Or at least the Sydney Morning Herald.”

  “She wanted money,” Ted said, comfortable in this area of discussion, “so she made a mistake and called the wrong magazine. That doesn’t mean she deserved to die.”

  “Of course she didn’t deserve to die,” Jack sniped. Control, he reminded himself. Don’t be drawn into emotion.

  “But she knew something she shouldn’t. This much is clear.” Vanessa stepped back in, switching sides again to whichever argument would stir the most drama. “We agree on this, gentlemen, correct?”

  Jack nodded. “But that motive is all but useless without context, which you do not have. If I may return to my original point? There wasn’t a shred of physical evidence, yet somehow you posited that she’d been killed on the property.”

  “And that was a contentious point?” Vanessa asked.

  “Of the appeals? Yes. It
came down to whether her body had been dumped or not.”

  “We proved that the cord used to strangle her was the same cord Curtis had spools of in his barn—”

  “My team tested the same cord at hardware stores across the country and got eleven identical fiber profiles to the one you used to convict him. Eleven serial killers, then, according to you. Better go round them up. All of them work at Bunnings Warehouse stores—should be easy to find. Grab me a sausage while you’re down there.”

  “Explain”—Vanessa pointed at the camera—“for the viewers at home?”

  “Simply,” Jack said, “there was no DNA evidence on the rope in Curtis Wade’s barn. The brand of rope—quite a common brand—had matching fibers in Eliza’s neck, but that’s it.”

  “It all seems very convenient,” Ted said. “That he even owns the same brand of rope. He got rid of her clothes, her shoes, he cleaned up her blood; it makes sense he would have got rid of the murder weapon. We weren’t positing that it was the exact murder weapon, just that it came from the same spool.”

  “Just like you can’t ascertain that the shoe prints were actually hers?”

  “Again, we proved that it was likely,” Ted said. “I don’t know why it bothers you so much that a murder victim’s footprints are at a crime scene. That’s what happens, you know.”

  “I agree. A lot of the evidence was”—Jack pulled his fingers into air quotes—“convenient.”

  “Easy evidence is more a sign of a sloppy killer than a corrupt police force,” Ted shot back.

  “That might have been good enough the first time. The absence of evidence is not evidence. Your excuse that he cleaned it up is not good enough. There’s no blood on my car outside; how many people do you think I ran over on the way here?”

  “I hope you have a good libel lawyer.” Ted was fuming. “You’re making it sound like I’m the one that framed him.”

  Jack shrugged.

  “If I may,” Vanessa cut in again, “we have limited time left here, so let’s try not to get too personal. So, Jack, it’s agreed in the courts—”