The Rough Cut

by Douglas Corleone

  ‘I was a bit of a tomboy. At least at school. At home, around my father, I had to be all girl. Until it came to sports. Sports he liked. He fantasized daily about what his life would be like had I been a son.’

  ‘How did that make you feel?’

  ‘Sad, at least when I was very young. In middle school, I couldn’t begrudge him for it, because by then I was fantasizing what my life would be like had I been born to a different father.’

  ‘How would your life have been different then?’

  ‘I think I would have been able to express myself more, maybe make friends with similar interests. Instead, I was always the weirdo in a group I didn’t belong in.’

  ‘How would your life be different now?’

  I play with the ring around my finger as I’ve caught myself doing whenever I get nervous over the past few days.

  I say, ‘I think I’d be a few years farther along in my career. I think I would have gone to UCLA and majored in film, never taken a job with Big Pharma.’ I chuckle. ‘I’d probably be spending less time in your office.’

  She smiles. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d second guess every decision I make.’

  ‘Which decisions are you second-guessing?’

  ‘None in particular.’ As I say it – as if the psychiatry gods themselves have it in for me – my engagement ring slips from my finger and rolls under Dr Farrockh’s desk.

  She bends over, scoops it up, and hands it back to me.

  ‘Very pretty,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks.’ I shake my head to get back on-topic. ‘I just don’t trust my judgment.’

  ‘Is that true? You seem to trust your judgment when it comes to making a documentary.’

  ‘I feel like that’s something I can get right. Everyday life, that’s another story. I don’t make good day-to-day decisions outside of the editing room.’

  ‘You had a good teacher in the editing room. Not so much in the real world. How could you trust your own judgment, Riley, when during the most crucial years in your brain’s development, that judgment was constantly criticized by your father and supplanted with his own?’

  ‘I’ve been out of that house for almost as long as I was in it now.’

  ‘You bring up time again?’ She says it smiling. I only amuse my therapist accidentally. ‘You seem to believe the cliché that time heals all wounds.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not all wounds simply heal with time. Some, unless they’re treated, become infected, some fester. Others, unless you apply a tourniquet, will cause you to bleed out. The wounds your parents cause, they’re severe wounds. Not papercuts or scrapes on the elbows and knees. Depending on the parent, they can be more like gunshots. Often, we survive them; sometimes, they’re fatal.’

  ‘I thought children were resilient.’

  ‘They are. They can be downright stoic in the face of terrible things. But their adult selves often pay the price for that stoicism.’

  ‘Mental illness?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  I try my best to grin. ‘Am I mentally ill?’

  ‘I don’t know, are you?’

  I exhale. ‘Nicholas Church says we’re all mentally ill. Some of us just more than others.’

  As soon as we stepped inside, I could feel it – an indescribable force like a bitter cold or an oppressive heat permeating the entire suite. In the wee hours of the morning, the $17K-a-night penthouse felt like a cramped, dank basement that might or might not contain human corpses.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Marissa didn’t say.

  Instead: ‘He’s in the bedroom, but you can’t see him just yet. We need to talk first.’

  ‘Is Ethan here?’ I asked.

  Marissa shook her head. ‘That’s the last person in the world Nick needs to see tonight.’

  Brody and I followed Marissa to a sectional that probably cost more than my Jeep.

  ‘Our digital forensics expert faxed us his report a couple of hours ago,’ she said, once Brody had set up the camera and sat. ‘Ethan lied.’

  ‘About what?’ I asked.

  ‘About everything.’

  Brody and I shared a look. Onscreen, I knew it would appear as though we were perfectly in sync, as if the same thought bubble had materialized over our heads at the same time. Yet I was a hundred percent certain that he and I were thinking very different thoughts in that moment.

  ‘Additional emails were discovered,’ Marissa said, ‘ones Ethan apparently attempted to delete. He knew Piper was leaving Hawaii.’

  ‘When did she tell him?’

  ‘She didn’t. He learned it some other way. But that’s not important right now. What’s important is that he knew. He knew about the pregnancy, too. And the prosecution can prove it.’

  If Ethan lied about these things, I thought, he not only lied to Church, he lied to the police. He lied to me.

  ‘But that’s not the worst of it,’ Marissa said.

  Heart, meet throat.

  ‘The Craigslist ad for “roofing tar”,’ she went on quietly, ‘and the email address Ethan received the instructions from – they both originated from Piper’s desktop at home. Both within forty-eight hours prior to the murder.’

  My jaw fell, my eyes froze in shock. As something vile rose and swelled inside me, a dense fog appeared at the edges of my vision.

  Marissa said, ‘Forget about murder two or voluntary manslaughter. Forget about any affirmative defenses. Forget about professional hits and unknown intruders. This is clear evidence of premeditation by someone with access to her computer.’

  Marissa’s lips continued moving but I could hear only white noise. In my anarchic head, I tried to separate my feelings for Ethan with the impact this evidence would have on his case. Meanwhile, another part of my brain, a part not known for its patient silence, shamelessly considered what this meant for my movie. Would this film die with a plea bargain after all? Would Lau even make an offer with this material evidence now on the table? A plea could help Ethan avoid decades in prison. But if he pled guilty, the sound of the gavel at sentencing would be the death knell for my film.

  ‘So what’s Nick’s plan?’ Brody asked.

  ‘That’s the even bigger problem,’ Marissa said.

  ‘Is Nick in the bottle again?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, yes. But that’s not the problem. If it were, it would only take a few days, maybe a week, to dry him out. What’s going on with him now, that usually takes a hell of a lot longer to turn around.’

  I’d been catching bits and pieces but only now were things beginning to register. ‘What are you saying?’ I asked.

  She took such a deep breath, I briefly feared we were in competition for the oxygen left in the room. She said, ‘Remember in The Prosecutor, Nick is always either carrying around a thermos of coffee, or drinking from a steaming cup, offering his opinions on various roasts?’ She paused. ‘Well, Nick hates coffee. Hasn’t touched a drop since college. In fact, he doesn’t consume any caffeine at all, not even the occasional soft drink, not even mixed with liquor.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Why would he make believe he’s a coffee connoisseur?’

  The enveloping silence made me feel like an idiot, even though I knew my brain just desperately needed sleep.

  ‘To conceal something else,’ Brody finally said, so quietly I barely heard him.

  Before I could ask Brody what he meant, he and Marissa were up and headed toward Church’s bedroom. Marissa wouldn’t allow us to bring the camera, and once we stepped inside, I understood why. Even in the dim light, the enormous room was a sty. Not like a bachelor pad, not even like a fraternity house. This was tornado damage. This was earthquake devastation. This was post-apocalyptic. There were pants covering the windows, curtains being used as table cloths. One corner of the room looked as though it had been on fire.

  Church himself, naked but for a washed-out pair of yellow boxer shorts, lay sprawled across the kin
g-sized bed, which was now diagonal in the center of the room. Brody and I approached him. His eyes were bloodshot, the flesh around them red and swollen. His breath smelled like a blend of cheap cigars and expensive bourbon. He somehow appeared as though he hadn’t shaved or showered in a week, even though I’d seen him only a few hours earlier.

  ‘Your stomach feeling better, BQ?’ Church asked, in a voice usually preserved for Vito Corleone impressions and last words.

  ‘Yeah, Nick. Thanks.’

  ‘So it is booze,’ I said.

  Marissa shook her head, condescendingly. ‘It’s not that simple. The drinking is just a symptom.’

  ‘What are we talking about here?’

  She ran a hand across her forehead. ‘This is just the culmination of what’s been happening over the past few weeks. He’s cycling.’

  ‘I have no clue—’

  ‘The coffee,’ Brody said softly, making me feel like Daphne from Scooby Doo, ‘it wasn’t to mask his drinking. It was so people would think he was constantly overcaffeinated.’

  Marissa nodded.

  I still didn’t get it.

  Brody, recognizing the WTF look on my face, said, ‘It’s mania.’

  ‘He’s manic?’ I asked, still perplexed.

  Marissa shook her head, said, ‘Not anymore. Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  In the editing room, I wrestle with how to execute this final turning point before Act III, this unmitigated disaster on what’s commonly (if not accurately) called the eve of trial. At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Church’s illness. Maybe I’d read a paragraph or two about bipolar in my Intro to Psych class first year of college. Other than that, the word itself conjured only varied images of the conventional comedy and tragedy theatrical masks. Those, and maybe a loony bin. If viewers shared my ignorance, a significant aspect of the movie would be grossly distorted.

  I can almost hear Professor Leary in my ear: ‘Show the story with images; don’t tell it with interviews.’ I don’t want to use a single scene even resembling an interview. But I can’t simply show the illness. That would do both the illness and Church a tremendous injustice. Because a few cutaways to his manic behavior and devastating depression cannot tell the whole story. Only Church himself can tell it.

  ‘Want to know how I really decide whether to take on a homicide case?’ Church says.

  Onscreen, dawn arrives, the sun more distant than I’ve ever seen it. Church, in his hoity-toity Four Seasons bathrobe, and I sit alone on his terrace, staring off into the Pacific, while a camera standing on a tripod a few feet away captures us as clearly as any footage we’ve shot. I’m reminded now how lucky we were that morning. Church initially refused to discuss his illness on camera but, in a woeful turn of irony, his depression ultimately drained him of his wherewithal to object.

  He says, ‘I don’t need to know, after studying the evidence, that the prospective client is innocent.’ He paused, finally turned to look at me. ‘I just can’t know that he’s guilty. I need to have a reasonable doubt.’

  ‘Hasn’t this ever happened to you before? New evidence is discovered in cases all the time.’

  ‘Nothing close to this. I thought I knew exactly what was on those computers. Ethan seemed intelligent enough to know better than to lie to me. I explained to him, the earlier I know the evidence against you, the more I can do to suppress, undermine or discredit it.’

  ‘This is what triggered the depression?’

  He shrugs, speaks so much slower than usual, it’s like I’m sitting with another lawyer altogether. ‘Probably a combination of factors. Stress of the upcoming trial. Marissa, most likely; she’s usually to blame, even when she isn’t.’

  Still processing it all, I ask, ‘How did you get away with it so long?’

  ‘Get away with what? My illness? I dropped the whole coffee charade years ago. I was ready to take the stigma head-on. Hell, when I’m good and grandiose, I still fancy myself becoming the Martin Luther King Jr. of the mentally ill.’

  ‘But no journalist ever asked you about it?’

  ‘The Prosecutor put the idea into people’s heads of an eccentric, overcaffeinated Church. Once something’s in people’s heads …’

  ‘So it’s not going to affect your ability to try the case?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ He pauses, makes a visible effort to find his next words. ‘Ever have one of those days where you just want to drink yourself into the ground?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘Well, for me, once I’ve cycled into depression, that’s a good day. At least drinking myself into the ground is a meaningful objective.’

  ‘But when you’re manic …’

  ‘Barely controlled chaos that gives the illusion of brilliance.’

  ‘Aren’t there medications?’

  ‘A few. I’ve tried them all. Some my body rejected, others my head. The drugs affect different people in different ways. Lithium turns me into a zombie on ketamine, watching a Ken Burns documentary, while listening to Adele sing a lullaby.’

  ‘I never thought for a second …’

  He manages a half-grin. ‘The signs are there, Riles. C’mon. I fell in love with the woman who fired a guided missile at my legal career. My best and only friend is a speaker box from the seventies. I occasionally demonstrate complete breaks from reality.’

  ‘What caused it?’

  He lifts a shoulder. ‘Genetics are part of it. Life events trigger the actual illness. Abuse and neglect in childhood, toxic marriages, bad break-ups, too many Woody Allen movies.’

  ‘Which was it for you?’

  He puts a glass of iced water to his lips. ‘It took Marissa six years of hate-fucking me before I told her, so don’t hold your breath.’

  ‘When did it start?’

  ‘I can’t pinpoint it. I’ve always been reckless. Impulsive. Always abused substances. I figured I was just a really fun guy.’

  ‘When did you realize you were ill?’

  ‘First year of law school. Professor Kara O’Hara’s criminal law class. She was smart, beautiful, and I genuinely liked the subject. Hell, I loved it, even planned on making a career of it. Yet I couldn’t sit there. I couldn’t sit in any class. I had people sign my name to attendance sheets, I had to cram a semester’s worth of information into a couple of weeks right before final exams. Frankly, that I got through law school, passed the bar exam and was licensed to practice law made me lose every scintilla of confidence I had left in American jurisprudence.’

  ‘That’s why you’ve been held in contempt so much? Why you’re under investigation by ethics committees in six states?’

  Scratching the stubble on the right side of his cheek, he says, ‘Yeah, well, that sounds as good an excuse as any.’

  ‘So this has cost you a lot.’

  ‘Me? I’ve gotten away easy so far. With this illness, you’re lucky if you get away with croaking of natural causes. Lifetime risk of suicide is one out of five. You have better odds playing Russian roulette.’

  Onscreen, there’s a visible lump in my throat. ‘Have you ever … tried?’

  He looks at me with those sad, terrified, bloodshot eyes, suddenly glistening in the orange hue of the sunrise.

  ‘Just about every night.’

  PART III

  Objectionable Material

  THIRTY-THREE

  I like playing dirty. Always have. So much so that by trial, my anticipation that Church would employ some of the filthiest tactics in the history of American criminal justice had ballooned to such an extent that I half-expected to float away before opening statements. One week before jury selection, however, Church burst that bubble with the sobering news that, although he was in no way above tampering with a jury or otherwise obstructing justice, he wouldn’t be utilizing any such measures in this case.

  ‘These days,’ he says, ‘the risk far outweighs the reward. One of the greatest casualties of the modern
world is honor among thieves.’

  Onscreen, Church and I sit alone on his deck, heavy trade winds playing havoc with the audio, to say nothing of our hair. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he says, ‘a lawyer offers a juror a bribe, the juror either takes the money or goes straight to the judge. At the millennium, a lawyer offers a bribe, the juror either takes it or haggles for more. Today, the juror immediately demands more, takes the money, then comes back and extorts you because she recorded the entire transaction on her phone.’

  In the editing room, I attempt to decipher how to illustrate scenes I never even imagined we’d be shooting until later that day when Church sat us (sans Ethan) down in his suite and declared that cases are won or lost in jury selection.

  From every courtroom drama and true crime documentary I’d ever watched, from every litigator I’d ever spoken to, I had been thoroughly convinced that jury selection was bullshit, that the first twelve were as good or as bad as any other twelve. Some criminal lawyers I knew from past projects regularly waived jury selection altogether. Others swore by tired stereotypes related to race, ethnicity, gender, age, education and social class. Still others insisted the only two purposes of jury selection were to educate the pool on your theory of the case, and to persuade as many people as possible to like you. Many lawyers even professed to relying solely on their gut instincts.

  ‘Going with your gut makes about as much sense as going with your asshole,’ Church says, standing before a whiteboard onscreen. ‘Trying to get the jurors to like you, attempting to convince them that your theory of the crime is the correct one – a complete waste of time. Trial lawyers think a comfortable voire dire is a successful voire dire. My rule is, if at least one prospective juror doesn’t leave the courtroom in tears, I haven’t done my job.’

  From the speaker box in the center of the table: ‘That’s hyperbole.’

  Church frowns. ‘If you’re not careful, Jesse, we’re going to cut you out of the film altogether.’

  ‘Good!’ Jesse cries.

  ‘Or, we just might play Kenny G in the background every time you speak, so that viewers think he’s who you’re jamming to in your mom’s basement.’