The Big Lie

by James Grippando

  “Then what is the point?” asked the judge.

  “Charlotte Holmes stipulated to having sexual relations with four men who were either legislators or on legislative staff at the time of the relationships. The testimony of Megan Holmes will disprove Charlotte Holmes’s claim that those sexual relationships had nothing to do with trading sex for votes.”

  “Judge, Charlotte and her sister have hardly spoken to each other in the last ten years. I don’t see how Megan could have any insight into the nature of Charlotte’s personal relationships.”

  “They’re sisters,” said Barrow, “and for a time they were roommates in college. Megan Holmes knows the defendant as well or better than anyone. We can listen to Mr. Swyteck argue all afternoon long, or we can give the witness a chance to be heard.”

  “The objection is overruled,” the judge said. “If at the end of the day the court decides her testimony is entitled to no weight, I’ll disregard it.”

  Jack accepted it, knowing that any hope the judge would disregard Megan’s testimony was utter fantasy.

  The attorney general returned to the lectern and continued her direct examination, breezing through more background before getting to the reason for the rift between the sisters.

  “Ms. Holmes, pardon me for having to ask these questions. But I understand you were sexually assaulted when you were in college. Is that correct?”

  “No, that’s not correct.”

  Barrow walked to the projector and displayed an exhibit on the large screen. It was an article from the local paper of record, dating back to when Charlotte and her sister were in college. “Ms. Holmes, do you see the headline that reads, ‘FSU Student Reports Sexual Assault’?”

  “I see it.”

  “The article doesn’t mention a name. Can you identify the ‘student’ referenced in this article?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Did you report to police that you were sexually assaulted?”

  “No. Why would I, if I wasn’t sexually assaulted?”

  “Good question,” said Barrow. “Did someone else report that you were sexually assaulted?”

  “Yes,” said Megan, her gaze drifting toward Charlotte. “My sister did.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “Objection,” said Jack.

  “Withdrawn,” said Barrow. “Let’s put this in context. Ms. Holmes, the night before this article appeared in the newspaper, who were you with?”

  “My sister and me went to a getty.”

  “What’s a ‘getty’?”

  “Before a party. A group of people getting ready to party.”

  “Getting drunk before you get to the party?”

  “There’s drinking. Not everybody gets drunk.”

  “Were you and your sister drunk before you left the getty?”

  “I was. I don’t know if Charlotte was or not. It’s kind of hard to tell with her. She holds her liquor like nobody I’ve ever seen.”

  “Where did you and your sister go after the getty?”

  “A party at someone’s house. I don’t remember whose. It was nothing special. Drinking, loud music, beer pong. All the things you’d expect around a bunch of college kids.”

  “Did you continue drinking at the party?”

  “Yes. Some kind of punch.”

  “Did you leave the party with your sister?”

  “No. She wanted to leave way too early. So she left without me.”

  “Who did you leave with?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I was very drunk. I remember getting into a pickup truck, riding in the truck, stopping somewhere. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital the next morning.”

  “How did you end up in the hospital?”

  “All I know is what my sister told me.”

  The judge leaned forward to address the witness. “You can testify as to what the defendant told you,” he said.

  “Okay. So, Charlotte got worried when it was two o’clock in the morning and I wasn’t back at our apartment. She called some friends who said I left the party before midnight. So she got in her car and went looking till she found me.”

  “How did she find you?”

  “Same way I would have. Just check the usual spots people go to after parties. Pickup trucks are, you know . . . multipurpose vehicles.”

  A collective chuckle coursed through the courtroom, and the judge gaveled it down. “Order, please.”

  The prosecutor returned her focus to the exhibit on the screen. “The article states that the unidentified student was found ‘partially clothed.’ Is that accurate?”

  “Again, all I know is from Charlotte. She said my jeans were missing. I was in my panties. She said she tried to wake me up, but I was blacked out. So she called nine-one-one.”

  “And when the police arrived, Charlotte Holmes told them that you had been sexually assaulted.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which was not the case?”

  “No.”

  “She assumed you had been sexually assaulted, when you had not been sexually assaulted.”

  “Correct.”

  “Your sister jumped to the conclusion that this was a sexual assault, correct?”

  “Objection,” said Jack.

  “Sustained. We get the point, Ms. Barrow,” the judge said.

  “Ms. Holmes, did you subsequently discover what really happened that night?”

  “Yes,” she said, sighing. “Two not very nice girls found me drunk on the couch at the party, walked me to their truck, dropped me off by the pond, stole my jeans, and left me there in my underwear. Ha-ha, very funny.”

  “This was the ‘sexual assault’ that your sister reported to police?”

  “Yes. And for the rest of my college days, I was known as the Pink Panty Road Tripper. Thank you very much, Charlotte Holmes.”

  Jack rose, not sure what to say, but he felt the need to say something. “Judge, this doesn’t bear any resemblance at all to the testimony Ms. Barrow promised in our sidebar. Obviously my client thought her sister had been sexually assaulted and acted accordingly. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  “Your client falsely reported a sexual assault to make herself a hero at her sister’s expense,” said Barrow, glowering. “The only thing more reprehensible is the false accusation she’s making against Mr. Scoville to cast herself as a victim.”

  “That’s an outrageous accusation,” said Jack.

  “It’s the truth,” said Barrow.

  Jack glanced at his client and then at the witness. True or not, it was clearly what Megan believed: Charlotte had embellished the story to cast herself as the hero who rescued her sister from sexual assault and got her to a hospital in time to save her life.

  “I’ve heard enough,” said the judge. “Ms. Barrow, you’ve made your point. But Mr. Swyteck also has a point. We’re getting way too deep in the weeds. I agree with the state’s premise that Charlotte Holmes is unfit to be an elector if, as a lobbyist, she offered sexual favors in exchange for legislative votes. I’ve heard nothing from this witness to support that premise.”

  “I’ll get right to it,” said Barrow.

  “Please do,” said the judge.

  The attorney general stepped closer to the witness. “Ms. Holmes, I know this sounds tawdry, and I’m sorry about that. But your sister stipulated to having had a sexual relationship with four different men while she was a lobbyist.”

  “Objection,” said Jack. “She was working as a researcher for a lobbying firm. She was not yet a registered lobbyist.”

  “Sustained.”

  “I stand corrected. Regardless, your sister and her lawyer claim that these relationships had nothing to do with her job. She claims that her sexual relationship with each of these men was purely personal.”

  “That’s not true,” said Megan.

  Jack felt his client’s fingernails in his forearm, but he was already on his feet. “Objection. Judge, as I mentioned at our sidebar, ther
e has been almost no communication between my client and her sister since college. There is no basis for Megan Holmes to testify about the nature of her sister’s personal relationships.”

  The judge rubbed his face, as if over the courtroom sex-capades. “This is not a jury trial, so let me just get to the nub of it,” he said. Then to the witness: “Ms. Holmes, how do you know your sister’s relationships were not simply a man and woman going out on a date and doing whatever it is people do after a date?”

  “I know because my sister doesn’t like men.”

  A collective gasp emerged from the gallery.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” said the attorney general, smirking.

  The judge pounded his gavel. “Counsel, in my chambers. Now!”

  Chapter 28

  Charlotte ordered room service for dinner and ate alone on the bed.

  Judge Martin had delivered both sides a tongue-lashing in his chambers and then adjourned for the day. Charlotte hated that her sister’s testimony would fester overnight, and Jack had argued nearly to his last breath that it was unfair to end the afternoon session on that note. But the judge was fed up. Charlotte would have to wait for her lawyer to clear things up when the hearing resumed in the morning.

  President MacLeod’s reaction was in the same news clip on every channel, a wisp of his dyed hair blowing in the breeze of the whirling propellers of Marine One.

  “Charlotte Holmes said she couldn’t vote for me because she cares about the truth,” MacLeod said with a gleam in his eye. “Finally, the truth is out: she’s the leader of the gay mob.”

  The gay mob. What next would come out of that man’s mouth? Cement shoes by Gucci?

  Her sister’s support for President MacLeod had come as no surprise to Charlotte. All of her siblings supported MacLeod. Charlotte had supported him, too, until the president’s five-million-vote deficit in the general election made it impossible for her to bear the weight of his lies. At bottom, though, Megan’s courtroom performance wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t even about the Pink Panty Road Trip per se. It was a lifetime of Megan messing up and Charlotte cleaning up. Charlotte was the female version of Ferris Bueller; Megan was the older sister caught making out with Charlie Sheen in the police station—over and over again. Charlotte had tried to explain it to Jack, but she wasn’t sure he got it. It was hard to relate if you were an only child, like Jack. When you were one of five, you just accepted the fact that, one day, one of them would stick it to you. Today had been that day. And unfortunately, it had been in front of the entire country.

  There was a knock at the door. Charlotte climbed down from the bed, went to the door and checked the peephole. It was Theo, so she let him in.

  “Jack’s parents are at their house on the Gulf,” he told her. “His stepmother’s not doing so well, so he’s going to see her.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, me, too. Anyway, he asked me to drive so he could work on the car ride. I just wanted to check on you before we left.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. In fact, I’d be whistling Dixie and telling the world I’ve never been better, if not for hashtag ‘Gay Mob.’”

  “I heard.”

  “Everybody heard. But this, too, shall pass. I’m fine here in my room. Y’all go.”

  “Okay. It’ll be close to midnight before we’re back, but call if you need anything.”

  “It’s a shame you have to turn around and come right back. You should visit during the day sometime. Beautiful.”

  “I might just do that,” said Theo.

  “Maybe when this is over, Jack can get his wife up here and we can all go. Beach all day. Great little cafés on the water. Gets nice and cool at night, so at sunset you knock back a few beers in the hot tub.”

  “I guess that would make it a . . . spa getty.”

  “Did you really just say that?”

  “I don’t think so. But, hey, if I did, it made you smile.”

  “A little,” she said, the centimeter between her thumb and forefinger saying how little. “Thank you for trying.”

  “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  They exchanged a smile. Charlotte let him out, closed the door, and turned the dead bolt.

  “Spa getty?” she said, hoping that Theo wasn’t kicking himself too hard over that effort. But then she realized that she was the one who’d embarrassed herself. Oh, let’s be couples and all go down to the beach like real heterosexuals. See? I do like men.

  Charlotte climbed back onto the bed. Her dinner was still warm, which was a problem, because it was a Greek salad. Some knucklehead in the kitchen had put the plate on a warmer in the room-service cart. Wilted lettuce. Yum. She reached for the phone to order ice cream. Chocolate. Two scoops. She had the room phone in hand when her cell vibrated on the nightstand.

  A text message.

  It was a number she didn’t recognize, not a spoofed caller ID to trick her into thinking that the text was from “Theo Knight” or someone else in her contact list. Charlotte took it as the sender’s arrogant way of signaling that he knew he had her attention—he knew she would read his message no matter what number it came from, no need for technological games.

  And he was right. He did have her attention.

  Charlotte lifted her cell from the nightstand and stared at the message bubble: “Clyde’s. 10 p.m. Out front.”

  Clyde’s was a popular bar on Adams Street. By itself, the designated meeting place was enough for Charlotte to hazard a guess as to the sender. Then the phone vibrated in her hand with a follow-up message from the same number.

  “I dare you,” it read, erasing all doubt in Charlotte’s mind as to the sender’s identity. He was serious. He wanted to meet. Tonight.

  “You idiot” was all she could say.

  Chapter 29

  An hour into their drive from Tallahassee, Jack checked the time on the dashboard.

  Most of the trip down I-10 had been in silence, with Theo behind the wheel and Jack working nonstop on his laptop in the passenger seat. Jack had known time to fly while deep in his thoughts, but never had he seen time stand still. They’d left the hotel around 6:30 p.m. Yet the clock was telling him that it was only 6:31 p.m. A vague recollection of high school physics crept into his mind, something about the slowing of time as objects approached the speed of light.

  “How fast are you driving?” Jack asked.

  “Faster than you would,” said Theo.

  Jack checked the upcoming exit sign and saw they were at Blountstown, population 3,500. Mystery solved. Blountstown and everything west of the Apalachicola River was the reason networks never declared a winner in a Florida statewide election sooner than one hour after polls closed from Key West to Tallahassee. As if to make sure the “Southern Alabama” moniker stuck, the Florida Panhandle had been in the Central time zone for more than a century.

  “So what’s the story with Charlotte?” asked Theo.

  Jack looked up from his computer screen. “The story?”

  “What her sister said in court. That she doesn’t like men.”

  “Oh, that,” said Jack, closing his laptop. “She kissed a girl. When she was eighteen.”

  “Seriously? That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Theo snickered. Then he started laughing. Soon, he was laughing so hard that Jack thought he might crash the car.

  “Can you get control of yourself, please?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Theo, wheezing with laughter. “She pulled a Katy Perry, kissed a girl when she was a teenager, and now she’s the leader of the gay mob?”

  Jack knew he wasn’t laughing at Charlotte. It was one of his “gallows fits,” as Jack called them, which were triggered by random episodes of institutionalized absurdity, unleashing the residual anger Theo harbored against a system that would put an innocent man on death row. It manifested itself in laughter, the way Theo—d
own to his final appeal, his head and ankles shaven for effective placement of Ol’ Sparky’s electrodes—had laughed out loud at the corrections officer who, in all sincerity, wanted to know if his last meal of fried chicken should be “extra crispy.”

  “I guess it’s funny on some level,” said Jack. He gazed out the passenger-side window. There was only darkness. “Except that sixty-five million voters believe it.”

  Jack squeezed in another hour of preparation for Megan’s cross-examination, as Theo followed the moon toward the waterfront. At the end of a sandy road, well off the highway, was a tin-roofed cottage with the name swyteck on a sign hanging from a turtle-shaped mailbox. Harry had bought the place while a state legislator, when Jack was still in law school. It had survived dozens of hurricane seasons, having narrowly dodged disaster when Hurricane Michael chose to obliterate Mexico Beach to the east, sparing dozens of other beach towns that would have fared no better in a direct hit. A driveway of crushed seashells crackled as the car pulled up and stopped at the front porch. Jack inhaled the fresh gulf breeze as he climbed out of the passenger seat and stretched his legs. His father came out to greet them.

  “Thanks for coming, son.”

  “Of course.”

  “And thank you for driving, Theo.”

  “No problem.”

  Harry invited them in, but Theo chose to wait outside, settling into a white wicker rocking chair on the porch. Years had passed since Governor Swyteck’s signing of Theo’s death warrant, but that kind of awkwardness never fully evaporated. This was a family matter, anyway.

  “We won’t be too long,” said Jack, and then he followed his father into the cottage. Jack looked around. It felt familiar, but only because he knew his stepmother’s tastes in decorating. He’d actually visited only twice before. Far from Miami in so many ways, geography the least of them, this cottage was all Harry and Agnes, nothing to remind anyone that Jack’s biological mother had ever existed.

  “I’ll let Agnes know you’re here.”

  Jack waited in the Florida room, which was cozy enough, decorated in the usual beach motif of driftwood, old fishing nets, and floral-patterned couch and armchairs. But he couldn’t get comfortable.