The Rough Cut Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Douglas Corleone

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I: Viewer Discretion

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part II: Visual Evidence

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Part III: Objectionable Material

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  Also by Douglas Corleone

  The Kevin Corvelli mysteries

  ONE MAN’S PARADISE

  NIGHT ON FIRE

  LAST LAWYER STANDING

  The Simon Fisk thrillers

  GOOD AS GONE

  PAYOFF

  GONE COLD

  BEYOND GONE *

  Novels

  ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE JANSON EQUATION

  * available from Severn House

  THE ROUGH CUT

  Douglas Corleone

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and 2021 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2020 by Douglas Corleone.

  The right of Douglas Corleone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8986-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-726-2 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0447-9 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

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  ‘What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.’

  Robert Durst, The Jinx (2015)

  PART I

  Viewer Discretion

  ONE

  I like to watch. Always have. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of sinking into my grandmother’s paisley sofa, eyes glued to her thirty-inch Magnavox as witness after witness delineated in excruciating detail the collection, handling and testing of blood evidence in the O.J. trial. Nah, I didn’t know what the hell was happening onscreen, just knew the event was momentous, that it had millions of ordinary people riveted to their television sets midday, that a malleable concept called American Justice hung on the outcome.

  Frozen, unwilling to risk the sound of repositioning myself on the plastic covering the couch, I viewed the verdict through a haze of my grandmother’s cigarette smoke and whooped for joy at the words ‘not guilty’. My grandmother huffed, pushed herself off the sofa and stomped out of the room. Remained angry with me for days.

  What I didn’t know then but know now is that I was on the wrong side of the issue. Not only because the evidence against the Juice was overwhelming, but because of the color of my skin. Because my grandmother and the dozens of talking heads on Court TV told me so.

  Twenty-some years later I’m sitting in a hot, cramped editing room on South King Street in downtown Honolulu, logging hundreds of hours of footage from a two-week homicide trial – an enthralling face-off between two of the world’s preeminent criminal lawyers – that I recently observed live and in person.

  It’s a few minutes after midnight and I’ve been here since four in the morning. My dual role as director and editor of my first full-length film requires me to perform this tedious task, and the partner I chose in both love and labor requires I do it alone. Brody is back at our flat on Tusitala Street in Waikiki, probably smoking a joint and binge-watching the sixth season of Game of Thrones without me. He calls it work, says he’s studying the visuals, internalizing dialogue, dissecting storylines. Never mind that we’re making a true crime documentary, not an epic fantasy with witches and dragons and swordfights.

  But then Brody Quinlan has never been a paragon of ambition. Not when we initially stumbled across each other at NYU film school, not when we first moved in together, and certainly not since we moved to Oahu. Brody is chill and phlegmatic, the perfect transplant for Hawaii. Striking to look at, with an underlying intensity, not unlike the islands themselves.

  Still, in the six months since the murder he’s shown somewhat more initiative: scouting locations, lugging equipment, capturing on camera as much of the unfolding drama as he could. To say I couldn’t have taken on this project without Brody would be a drastic understatement, yet I can’t help but be irked by his utter lack of interest and participation in the postproduction process. Because every first-year film student knows that post is the period when mere footage actually becomes a film.

  Of course, looking at and logging footage sucks. Not only do you learn for the first time that the flawless film you envisaged isn’t the one that was actually shot, but that the visual evidence you accumulated over months doesn’t necessarily translate into the visual arguments you want to make. But you can’t reshoot a unique event, especially one as extraordinary as a murder trial. And you certainly can’t alter the ending. You can twist it and shape it, even spin it to some extent, but in the end you have to live with the result and its consequences just li
ke everyone else. As in every other facet of life, you have zero control over the past – and it aches.

  As I jot down the time code for the start of the prosecution’s opening statement, my eyes fall on the untouched container of chicken and broccoli from Lung Fung. Back at NYU, Professor Leary and I used to sit around the table in the editing room eating Chinese takeout and discussing the types of films I aspired to make. While so many of his other students were intent on saving the world by taking on such weighty subjects as guns and global warming, I never shied away from the fact that my true passion was tabloid justice: sensationalist coverage of criminal cases, with a glaring spotlight on the human drama. Titillating an audience, not by expounding on minutia like the penal code and rules of evidence, but by turning the camera on the players themselves, lifting the veil from their private lives, disseminating their deepest and darkest secrets, laying bare their hidden passions and fears. In other words, telling a story. The bloodier, the sexier, the better.

  Professor Leary didn’t necessarily encourage this route, of course, but he said I had an eye, that if I applied my talent I could be one of those precious few documentarians who make a living doing what they love. He even offered to mentor me after graduation. Only he died in his sleep less than three months before I bounded up the stage to accept my degree. Incredibly, in his Last Will and Testament, Professor Leary bequeathed to me a sum large enough to fund my first full-length documentary and then some. Having tossed the notion around for nearly a year, Brody and I finally decided to live in the islands until the perfect crime came along.

  Of course, never in my wildest dreams did I think the perfect crime would occur on Oahu; never in my most unnerving nightmares did I believe that an act this savage, this callous, this tragic could transpire right here in paradise.

  Let alone to someone I knew.

  TWO

  All good films open with an image, Professor Leary told me repeatedly. Following the initial fade, you have four or five minutes, tops, to seize your viewers’ interest, so there’s no time for fucking around with bland exposition or protracted dialogue. Open with an image, a visual that establishes a sense of place, of mood, of texture, a snapshot your audience has never seen before, something unexpected, something unsettling.

  Start with the crime scene.

  On the night the weathergirl died I’d forgotten to wear deodorant. Only registered that trivial fact when the dude drooping next to me at the bar commenced asking questions about my tattoos. I elevated my arm to give him an optimal view and was thumped in the face by a blend of Dove soap and body odor; that pungent and distinctive funk that only seems to accompany nights you’re sporting your sexiest tank-top. Not sure whether he noticed, but then I cracked wise about it, prompting him to abruptly lift my left arm and deposit his nose in the center of my pit. Already four rum drinks in, I was still trying to calculate the appropriate level of outrage to display when my iPhone began buzzing in my back pocket.

  I excused myself and took the call outside.

  ‘Where are you?’ Brody said, with an assertiveness that was rare for him.

  ‘Just down the street. Da Big Kahuna on Kuhio. Why don’t you come down for a drink?’

  ‘I’m in the Jeep.’ There was an urgency in his voice. ‘On my way up the mountain.’

  ‘Tantalus? What the shit for?’

  ‘Remember that police scanner I supposedly wasted our money on?’

  ‘My money on.’

  ‘Either way, the investment just paid off. Big time.’

  ‘How so?’

  His tone softened. ‘Riley, it’s Piper.’

  I only knew one Piper on the island. ‘Piper Kingsley? What about her?’

  Eight, nine, maybe ten seconds passed in silence.

  Then: ‘She’s dead.’

  As those two words sunk heavily in my chest, the pit-sniffer from the bar came up behind me, reached under my arms and, with his ten tiny digits, attempted something akin to tickling. Reflexively whirling around, I drove my left elbow straight into his mug, striking him square in the very pug nose that had violated my armpit a few minutes earlier.

  ‘Jethus,’ he cried nasally.

  Blood streamed freely from both his nostrils. There was blood, too, on my arm.

  ‘You bwoke my fucking noth.’

  Instinctively, I parted my lips to apologize, but stopped myself before making a sound. Footage of a young prosecutor named Nicholas Church rolled in my mind, his voice like an echo as he confronted one of the defense’s most critical witnesses on the stand: ‘Yet you apologized, didn’t you? You said you were sorry? Why would you apologize if, in your mind, you had done nothing wrong?’

  A Japanese family stood gawking fifty feet away, so I pointed at the pit-sniffer, hollered to them, ‘Self-defense. This man just attempted to sexually assault me.’

  Four of the five family members nodded their heads. Good enough; at the very least a hung jury. But then, the pit-sniffer was twice the size of me. No one with eyes would ever convict me of battery.

  Doubled over, the pit-sniffer staggered back toward the bar, muttering, ‘Thomeone call the poleeth.’

  I swiftly turned and started up the street. Held the phone up to my ear.

  ‘You there?’ I said. ‘What are they calling it?’

  ‘Probable homicide. You remember where Piper lives?’

  ‘It’s been a few years, but yeah, I can find it.’

  ‘Hire an Uber. I’ll meet you there.’

  I first spotted the flashing red and blue lights careening up the mountain from the backseat of a Hyundai Elantra at a stoplight on Ala Wai Boulevard.

  ‘Blow the light,’ I told the driver.

  He was an older man, mid-sixties I’d have guessed. Bald, with a beard, a beer belly, and an open aloha shirt I recognized from Target.

  ‘You kidding me?’ he said in a gruff smoker’s voice. ‘Not for the dough I make.’

  ‘This light takes forever.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not risking a ticket.’

  I reached into my pocket and offered him a crumpled hundred.

  ‘And I’ll pay the ticket,’ I said.

  His eyes fixed on mine in the rearview. ‘I would, sweetheart, but I don’t want to risk a DUI.’

  My buzzing brain must have screwed up my facial muscles in a way that looked to him like I was about to explode.

  ‘I’m kidding,’ he said, and turned and took the hundred from my hand. Barely scanning a single direction, he then accelerated through the intersection, almost causing a three-car collision.

  As we climbed the mountain in the jackass’s burgundy coupe, the pressure in my eardrums built to the point I feared they would burst. I pinched my nose and swallowed hard, stretched my jaw in a yawn to no avail.

  Drunk and flushed, I pressed my cheek against the chilled window. Watched the psychedelic tropical flowers and greener-than-green hanging vines go by for miles.

  Though jolted and jostled from hanging one sharp left turn after another, I couldn’t help but think that Tantalus Drive would make a phenomenal setting for my film. Just picture it: the road a ten-mile squiggle through an enchanted jungle that always appears on the verge of coming alive.

  The first time I rode up Mount Tantalus was roughly four years earlier, a month after my parents died in a freak kayaking accident back home, off the Oregon coast. I’d been just a couple of years out of college, a couple of years into my career as a lackey for Big Pharma: a sales rep who held her nose and toed the company line, dispensing disinformation about little things like cost, the severity of side effects, and whether the drug actually worked.

  I spent my days carting samples around Portland because as any good pharmaceutical sales rep will tell you: samples help doctors decide how well their patients might do on a particular drug; samples provide time cushions for patients to get to their pharmacy; samples make patients more eager to see their physicians because, hey, free drugs.

  Of course, we only left samples o
f the newest, priciest medications. A supply just robust enough to get a promising number of the physician’s patients onto the drug. But the drugs were really only half the product I placed on display day to day. The other half consisted of what little cleavage I owned and a generous length of my legs. Not to say there weren’t benefits to playing cat and mouse with physicians; there were gifts, there were dates, even all-expenses-paid vacations. Not to mention signed blank prescription slips on demand. I suppose the real downside to the game was that in the two years I hawked pharmaceuticals, I flirted with so many doctors I forgot which ones I genuinely liked.

  Ironically, it was my dad who’d pushed me into that job, said I had to get off my ass and find work. Hell, I’d already graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in finance two and a half weeks earlier. What was I sitting around for?

  So I got off my ass and found a job, tossing away, at least temporarily, my dreams of becoming a filmmaker. It wasn’t the first time my father had taken charge of my life because I ‘didn’t know how to live’.

  At nine, I abandoned art for volleyball. At fourteen, gave up boys for church. At seventeen, I chose Oregon State because, hey, in-state tuition rates, never mind that we could afford UCLA. And, of course, once I got to college, my major was chosen for me because ‘the arts are for hippies and hobbyists, but there’s a real future in finance’.