Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

  “I’ve had letters too,” Jack said. “The retrial will be a media frenzy anyway.”

  “That’s the thinking. Probably better if I head it up in the end, but I’m off until things settle. It’s not just me—everyone took at least a week. The office phone rings endlessly; we’ve had to switch it off. We’d unplug it for a day, plug it back in, and it would still be ringing. Another day, still ringing.” She swilled her glass, lowered her eyes. “You get the threats too?”

  i will fucking gut you

  Large, looping letters. Green pencil.

  you got kids tv boy?

  Child’s handwriting.

  He nodded. Took another tiny sip of his beer. Hated it. Alexis had drunk half of hers.

  “At least we get it from the ones that are locked up. Ted gets it from the public. His office is closed too.”

  “Threats?”

  “Someone spray-painted the doors. Pentagram. Don’t you read the papers?”

  Not if he could avoid it.

  “Don’t feel sorry for him—he just bought a mansion in Point Piper. He must be doing okay,” Alexis said.

  A phone rang. Alexis rummaged in her bag, pulled one out, looked blankly at the screen, put it back, and pulled out a second one. She declined the call and put it faceup on the table.

  “Still getting used to it. Two phones.” She smiled. “I feel like a spy.”

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “It might not be the best timing. Kind of a thing.” She tapped the phone. Jack saw her reassessing the empty bar, the reason they were there. It wasn’t entirely empty now; the afternoon drinkers were just starting to show up. “Sorry.”

  “Bad phrasing. I’m not trying to ask you out, no.”

  “I have standards anyway.” She flicked her hair. “I am a model now.”

  “Just pens though,” Jack reminded her. “I have standards too.”

  She chuckled into her beer. He’d brought her here to talk about a murder, and they’d wound up flirting? She saw crime every day, he supposed. This must be so normal.

  “So are you going to ask me something, or are we cutting to an ad break?” She nodded at the bar, wiggled her glass in optimism.

  “Do you think he did it?” Jack blurted out.

  There was the clacking of a billiards break from behind them. Nothing sunk. Someone swore.

  “Is that it? That’s why we’re here?”

  “Yeah.” Jack ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this lately. More than usual.”

  “So Jack Quick has brought me here with an ethical quandary. How juicy Woman’s Day will find this one.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m kidding.” She reached over and grabbed his wrist, shook it gently. “I’m a criminal defense lawyer, remember. I do my job right and sometimes killers walk right off the stand and out of that courtroom. They look you in the eyes as they go past. And you know.”

  “And Curtis?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “I haven’t figured him out yet.”

  “You defended him in court. You might take him to a retrial. You might get him out. And you don’t know?”

  “You made an entire TV show about him and it sounds like you’re not so sure either.”

  Good point, Jack thought.

  “I want to show you something,” he said, reaching for the yellow envelope and knocking over his beer in the process. Luckily, it missed everything on the table and flowed harmlessly onto the floor.

  “Shit, sorry.” Jack righted the glass and dabbed at the table with napkins.

  “Top up?” She lifted the pitcher, tilted it.

  “Still a third in this,” Jack said, waving a hand. “I’m fine.”

  “Not much of a day drinker?”

  “Not much of a drinker.” Jack tipped the envelope open. “I wanted to ask you about these again.”

  Crime scene photographs covered the table. Shoe prints, in grass and mud, of various sizes. Some were zoomed in, black-and-white rulers lined up beside them. Only some. Sloppy. Things missing. Tire tracks through others. Other prints were on a larger scale—press photos, taken from a drone, yellow vector graphics plotting points of significance. There, by the fence, the cluster of footprints. From the bird’s-eye view, he could see the parallel rows of vines. At the end of one of the rows, a higher density cluster of yellow. Lots of evidence there, where the body had been found.

  Alexis leafed through them without interest; she’d seen them before.

  “Uh-huh. Ted’s magical”—she curled her fingers in quotes—“‘victim placement.’ What do you want to know about them?”

  “How important are they? To any potential retrial.”

  “Well.” Alexis pointed to the larger picture. “This is probably the most important. It shows that a woman wearing size 9 ASICS was at the perimeter of the property some time—and that’s important too—within a week or so of the murder. The driveway is gravel, so it’s hard to know if she came in from the parking lot or the road or the house itself—which is what Ted proposes. That’s a leap though.”

  Jack marveled at her ability to switch off her cheery tone and dip straight into hard facts. She was, he reminded himself, a brilliant lawyer. No wonder the show had made her a semicelebrity.

  “Will Ted use this again? To place her at the scene?”

  “Probably not. Yeah, the victim wears a size 9, but we don’t know what shoes she was actually wearing. There’s no way to match the prints. It’s a public winery, so all he’d be proving is that a woman wearing size 9 was on the property. Big deal.” She slid the photos back to him. “Plus, as you said on TV at least a dozen times, it might be her brand of shoe. But there’s no way he can prove they’re actually hers.”

  “Why are they clustered?” He pointed to a smaller photo. There, the footsteps seemed to be jumbled around almost randomly.

  “The direction changes. If it were Eliza—which it’s not, by the way—she’s pacing back and forth. Deeper too. Stamping her feet to keep warm.” She slid a finger across the photo, back and forth, mimicking the footsteps, making them wander. Jack noticed she had long, slender fingers. Like honey hanging from a spoon. “My guess? She’s having a cigarette. No biggie.”

  “Okay, but because we made it look like the body was dumped, if he shows it wasn’t—”

  “We made it look like nothing, Jack. My defense was rock solid. Your show is your show. But that was the challenge for both Ted and me—placing the victim at the scene.”

  “And you think she was dumped?”

  “I think it’s hard to find contradictory evidence to that theory, yes. Come on, you back that up yourself.”

  “And if, for some reason, Ted were able to match the shoes. Would it change the case?”

  “Has he got something?” Her eyes lit up. That lawyerly passion for the chase, the pursuit. A battle begun.

  “Just asking.”

  “Okay.” Alexis eyed him cautiously. “Well, it would prove that Eliza had been to the property. It wouldn’t prove where she died, because these prints are so far away from the body and look like a casual stroll. For example”—she pulled the photo back and traced a finger in between one of the rows—“if the trajectory showed she ran down this aisle and then stopped”—she planted a finger on the second red mark on the aerial photo, where the body was found—“that would be fairly damning. But it doesn’t. Or, at least, not with the patrol car driving through the middle of it.”

  “So all it would do is prove she’d been on the property. Not that she died there?”

  “Which is a fairly safe assumption anyway. Like I said, it’s a public winery. Eliza worked for the Freemans. It wouldn’t be unexpected that she was in Birravale anyway.” She shrugged. “It w
ouldn’t put a huge hole in the case.”

  “And if she weren’t dumped? And he knew it?”

  “Well, I mean, if he had physical evidence—there’s DNA, fingerprints, the works to consider. But there’s no bare footprints of hers either, so someone definitely carried her, at least partly, but her resting place itself is a mishmash of prints and tire tracks. Everyone but hers. You did a good job disproving this yourself. Why are you asking me this?”

  Jack sighed. Looked into the dregs of his beer. A rat gnawed at his gut. Alexis was right; the prints themselves didn’t matter. The shoe didn’t solve anything. Yet there it stood, lodged in his mind. A symbol of the fact that his whole show might be based on mistruths. And now that Curtis was getting closer to a retrial and there was a very real chance that he could get out, it had played on Jack’s mind more each day. Public opinion was working for Curtis, and Jack had done that too. Eliza had followed him everywhere in the weeks since the finale. Her cold skin jumping out from TV sets and billboards, or the fuzzy family Christmas photo that the newspapers liked. Her smile, her silent pleading eyes. He might have butchered her chance at justice. He didn’t know how to explain this to Alexis.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said simply.

  Alexis, still holding his wrist, rubbed a thumb against the inside of his palm.

  “She’s just…everywhere.”

  “She’ll stay. That’s what they do.”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother you?”

  “Every case”—she pointed to her temple—“is lodged in there somewhere. Grisly stuff. Wouldn’t even tell you. They just become a part of you. Don’t worry. They get nudged down, it fades—you forget about it.”

  “With time?”

  “Or when something worse comes along.” She must have noticed Jack flinch. “Sorry.”

  “You can’t tell Woman’s Day this,” Jack said, and Alexis gave him a gentle laugh, more out of camaraderie than humor, “but the show…I made some choices. Editorially. What to show, what not to show. In search of the neatest storyline, the best entertainment.”

  Alexis said nothing. Took her hand off his wrist.

  “In the heat of the moment. You know? It’s a bubble, television, and this was a real career maker. And then I stepped out of that studio and back into reality, and Eliza is everywhere.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I guess I underestimated the real-world impact.”

  “You’re saying that you made a TV series petitioning Curtis’s innocence, and now you think he’s guilty?”

  “No, I don’t think he’s guilty.” He didn’t know what he thought.

  “But you’re afraid he might be?”

  Jack nodded. “What if he gets out?”

  Alexis paused, as if considering whether to chastise or console him. When she spoke, her tone had softened. “I had a colleague once. We went to university together. She was a ruthless lawyer, coldly focused on winning cases for her clients. Family histories, sexual escapades, everything was on the table in her courtroom. She broke families but won cases. Single-minded. She’s in jail now.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. Did she know what he had done? Alexis took a sip of her beer, quite relaxed. No. She couldn’t.

  “Prison witnesses are notoriously unreliable; they’ll give evidence against anyone if you offer them extra privileges: cigarettes, money, cable. She had an unwinnable case—knew the guy did it but couldn’t pin it to him. She won it. Later they discovered she’d bribed an inmate to say he’d heard something in the yard. Forty packets of cigarettes. She ruined her life for that.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You like winning. You’d make a good lawyer. No other reason.” Her eyes said otherwise. Not quite an accusation, but she was sizing up how close he’d flown to the sun. “On the other hand, sometimes it’s enough to do a good thing in a bad way. A small lie for a bigger cause. That’s really up to you.”

  Jack swirled his beer, took a sip, hoped that when he put it down, she would have stopped assessing him. She hadn’t.

  She broke into a smile. “But you’re not a lawyer. Of course you made concessions. Seven hours of TV. Pfft.” She flicked a hand. “That’s nothing. You built a case for entertainment. Real cases aren’t linear, neat, easily solvable. They’d never fit a TV narrative. I think you put a good deconstruction of the prosecution’s flimsy evidence out there and, in doing so, made me look like a bit of a superstar. Got me a foot into the lucrative stationery-catwalk industry too.”

  “I still can’t sleep.”

  She passed the photo back, serious again. “And there’s always one mistake that sticks with you. Let me guess. You simplified the shoe print evidence, right?”

  He’d told her too much. A timid nod.

  “If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. You know what your biggest mistake was? Thinking you could do this at arm’s length. That you’re just an observer. A man on the sidelines. You’re not. Not anymore. She’s with you now.” Alexis paused. “You regret it? The way you presented things in the show? You feel guilty?”

  “If Curtis is, I am.”

  “Bullshit.” She surprised him with her sharp tone. “Regret. Guilt. They don’t exist. What you’re really feeling is grief.”

  “Eliza’s been dead four years. I never even met her.”

  “You’re not grieving her, Jack. Whatever decision you made, whatever you think you regret, you thought you were better than that. And then, when it came to the crunch, you weren’t. And you know that now.”

  Jack understood: it was grief. But he was grieving himself. The person he thought he’d been. That better version of himself that he kept in his head, the one he thought would always rise to the occasion. His better self was gone now. Crumbled under pressure. Grief: for the dead parts of one’s own identity. How selfish.

  “A lesson like that only gets learned from experience,” he said, tracing his finger through the remnants of spilled beer on the table, not looking at her.

  “I’ve been around. Sorry, probably too dramatic for what you meant.”

  “If I’ve influenced the retrial, though—”

  “The retrial will be conducted by professionals. Don’t get me wrong—every piece of evidence is important. But we’ll assess everything on its own merits, not what some television series tells us is true. And we’ll double-check the shoe prints, but they’ll have little to no play. No one got enough evidence four years ago. Not enough to put him away. That’s the strategy: not really whether he did it or not but whether they were able to prove it. We’ve carefully examined all the evidence.”

  Not all of it, thought Jack. I can still place her at the vineyard.

  “Maybe I’m being too harsh on you. You told your story your way. That’s fine. I disagreed with some of it. Liked other parts. It was a good show, you made some money—probably a lot—but it’s just entertainment. Celebrity has gone to your head if you think people will take it that seriously.”

  “People seem to be taking it seriously enough to grant a retrial,” he said.

  “That’s exactly it. They aren’t, but they’re taken in enough by the story of it. It’s doubt that makes them uncomfortable.” Her phone rang. Again, she ignored it. “Look, I think it’s like this: the world is in a state of unrest at the moment. Look at the United States. The politicians in power, they make people unsure. Black kids getting shot by cops. Same here, but there’s less blood on the streets. But there’s still a sense of working against ‘the man.’ There’s an imbalance, a lack of a sense of justice. And do you know how the middle class responds to this?”

  “How?”

  “The only way they know how—by clamoring for the freedom of a white guy.”

  “Huh?”

  “This will sound coldhearted, but there are worse things going on in this country tha
n a murdered woman. But that’s what makes the news. It’s about what we’re comfortable rebelling against. Imbalance, Jack.”

  What had Curtis said on the phone? That he was a martyr. But he’d got the scope of it wrong. Curtis, the success of the show, was only the vicariousness of the middle class—too uncomfortable to fight for any real change, but just comfortable enough to speak out from a couch or keyboard.

  But he still felt guilt—grief, whatever—creeping through a hot lump in his gut every time he saw a newspaper and those smiling, alive eyes. He wasn’t an observer anymore; he was a part of it. And if Curtis got out, he was a part of that too.

  Alexis picked up her phone, read a message, and started gathering her things. “Sorry. I have to go.”

  “Of course.”

  “Two things worth remembering, Jack. The first is that the world is bigger than your show, bigger than any single court case. Any lawyer will tell you: you win some you shouldn’t, and you lose some you should. It’s okay to feel uncertain. Our job is uncertainty. I can turn a case on it just the same as you can spin a yarn. What Curtis did or didn’t do”—she stood up, hunched as the table trapped her legs—“that’s almost irrelevant. Now, I still owe you dinner. Don’t forget that either.”

  “A nicer place though.”

  “A much nicer place.” She sidled out of the booth. “I will tell you this. Eliza’s gonna stick with you. Some of them do. The guy my friend put away, he murdered a sixteen-year-old boy. Opened him up with a hunting knife. Cut him from neck to groin. Shit like that never goes away. You just do what you can to be okay with it. That’s why I told you about my friend. It’s about choosing between the lies you can live with and the lies you can’t.”

  She laid her hand on Jack’s as she said this. Her honeyed fingers circled the small rough spots on the back of his knuckles, those tiny healing scars. Sometimes, women knew those scars. Those lies you can live with. Her hands were soft, and she was smiling. They had ceded the debate, friends again.

  “And the second thing?”