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September 2nd, 2012
The phone moved across the coffee table as it buzzed. The table was a buffet of bad ideas: straws and foil, wads of cash, plastic baggies licked clean. A silver Zippo, a golden 45, a Courvoisier bottle beside an overturned snifter. Aureate incandescence from a high cathedral ceiling.
Cain Carter splayed on the reclining couch in his sumptuous living room, a thirtysomething black man with a lean physique and high-top locs, wearing week-old black kimono pajamas. The leopard-fur trim was crusty and the silk shorts stank of piss.
He was trying to see who was calling, but his lids drooped and his eyes were slow to focus.
A TV took up most of the wall, a hundred inches of 8k ultrapixel. The screen showed a naked blonde woman about three hundred pounds, arguing with someone offscreen in a foreign language. A live chat ran in the corner. The volume was ear-splitting loud.
The phone rang on. Cain, squinting one eye shut, thought he could read the name. Asher.
The woman onscreen quit yelling, and laid down on the bed behind her. Navel-gazing, self-exploring. She lit a cigarette and made duck-lips at the camera.
The phone went quiet. But then the call came again. Must be serious. Cain couldn’t take any more serious. The floor had fallen out from under him when Asher called to say Cornelius was dead. They’d known it was coming. Hadn’t made it easier.
Terry had been there, in the hospital when he passed, and had told them all how Cornelius had given him his blessing. The Board vote would be just a formality. Terry would do a fine job carrying the old man’s torch.
But then Terry had followed Cornelius into the afterlife, not two weeks later. And Cain had gotten his second horrible call from Jacob.
"One of them was bound to kill the other," Asher’d said. "But Will won’t get away with this." Cain had mumbled something, who knows what. He was already dissociating, already drifting like a balloon. He was pale when he hung up the phone. The girls had wanted to know what was wrong.
Instead of explaining, he’d sent them home. Paid them all in cash from the safe. His ears were ringing and his heart was thudding and only Courvoisier from the bar could calm his shakes. He knocked back the first three fingers all at once, then refilled his snifter and flopped on the couch.
For a while, he just sat in blank horror. Then he tried to make it make sense. But he just couldn’t picture Will killing someone. Not even Terry. Cheerslaughter was cold and ambitious. But he wasn’t a murderer. Was he?
Cain had been pondering this question for three days now. In and out of the bottle, in and out of consciousness. Courvoisier had turned to fentanyl and coke just as Netflix had turned to porn.
He’d wanted to call someone, had wanted to gush his grief aloud. But there was no one to call. Not even Jacob. Asher swore it was no big deal, that it didn’t change a thing between them. But Cain should’ve known better than to borrow money.
The phone rang, Asher again. Suddenly he didn’t want to answer. Curses come in threes, after all, and he’d already gotten two horrible calls from Jacob.
A weird feeling came over him, like maybe something bad was about to happen. The fat woman on TV arched her back and lowed like a cow.
A splitting crack, and the front door crashed in. A thunder of jackboots and a gale of voices, LA’s finest in riot gear, blitzkrieg through the living room. Guns in his face. Get up, hands on your head, turn the goddamn TV down.
Cain gurgled at them. Tried to ask what this was all about. His eyes crossed and his head lolled. They saw there was nobody home. He heard clinking chains, glimpsed German Shepherds. Men led them on long leashes through the house. Someone muted the porn, but didn’t shut it off, so the fat lady climaxed in pantomime while the cops tore Cain’s house apart.
"Why," he managed to mumble, at a hardjaw Latina detective. She looked down her nose at him, hands on hips, in slacks and a pinstripe blouse beneath a body-armor vest.
"You are under arrest," she said, and Cain felt men lift him by the arms, "for the murder of Terence McMahon."
Cain gurgled harder in protest, and his feet dragged on the carpet as they frog-marched him out the door. He lost one silken slipper as he stumbled over the threshold into the chilly predawn air. Nobody stopped to pick it up for him.
They left him in a two-man cell with three other guys, on a mat on the floor, listening to the big dude in the bottom bunk snore like broken plumbing. Then the drugs started leaving his system, and he was bent over the toilet til dawn.
That was when they came and got him. They pulled him off the toilet, steered him through a warren of concrete hallways, and cuffed him to a table in an interview room.
"Look, jest git it over with," the fat cop said. Cain wondered at his Deep South drawl. "We found yer burner phone. We got all yer texts with Terry. We know it was you. Ya might as well confess."
"What phone?" The bulb overhead threw down light the color of illness. His vision doubled and cleared as waves of nausea crashed. He squinted to keep the room in place.
"Well, how’d it git in yer house, then, bud?" Detective Billy Sunday showed a wide grin full of itty-bitty teeth. His fat pink neck and head were tightly shaved, but for a little brown swish on top, like a tiny bowl cut. He smiled easily through a red mouth and ice-blue eyes. He sipped from a clear plastic cup of iced tea, complete with a lemon slice.
"Somebody’s tryin a set me up." He still wore the kimono and the one silk slipper. His feet danced a junkie jig on the concrete floor. His eyes were bloodshot and his dark face was pale. The sweats had come when the drugs had gone. A cold waterfall ran down his back; salty beads hung in his hair and under his nose.The detective surveyed all this.
"I’d love to believe you. But you just don’t strike me as a very innocent man."
"Man, where’s Will? He's the one you gotta talk to."
"Will Cheerslaughter was home the night of the murder, with his wife and his little daughter. Are you callin’ that sweet little girl a liar?"
"I wanna talk to a lawyer."
The detective leaned forward. "Ain’t no lawyer can save your ass, Carter. We got you cold. Now, a confession might make me like you. Might make the DA believe you regret your heinous bloodlust, and want to go easy on you. But we can put you away without a confession."
Cain stammered, tried to think of something. "I didn’t kill anybody." A weak protest. He laid his head down on the table.
The detective peered, trying to catch Cain’s eye. "Give it up, bud. Just admit what ya did. You’ll feel so much better! Trust me. The truth will set you free."
"I didn’t kill anybody!"
His shout echoed off the grimy walls. His whole body flexed with it. The detective leaned back, and gave Cain a look of fury. Very carefully, he reached up to wipe the tip of his pug nose.
"The next time you spit on me," he said, one slow word at a time, "I’m gonna fuck you with a potted cactus." Cain stared at his hands. "Alright, we tried bein nice. But bein nice has failed. So now we gon try some’n else."
Detective Billy Sunday gulped the last of his tea. He ate the ice and crushed the cup in a ham fist. He shambled for the door.
"Wait." The cop turned. He blinked, waiting. He had long, feminine eyelashes.
"I…" Cain faltered. He forced his mouth to say words. But the words just didn’t exist. "Uh…"
"You got nothin," Sunday said, through a mouthful of ice. And just like that, he was gone. The door clanged shut and Cain was left alone with his thoughts. They left him a long time.
When the door finally opened again, the men who entered the room were unfamiliar. They surrounded Cain. He watched through wide eyes.
They pounded him like a sacred drum, until his reason had broken, and he confessed. How he tricked Terry into meeting him on the roof; how he pushed him off in a blind rage. How Terry was racist and never respected him; how he settled the score once Cornelius was dead. How he was sorry and he was crazy and it was the drugs that made him do it.
"You shouldn’t have done that," the lawyer said. He sat across from Cain, looking at the transcript of his confession. At least they’d taken the cuffs off.
"Done what?" Cain rubbed at his wrists, at the places where the steel had bit.
"Confessed," the lawyer said. "I can get it dismissed. But you shouldn’t have done that." This wispy-haired white man who claimed to be on his side. Cain’s assets frozen, Jacob had hired him; he was some distant Asher relation.
Cain flared. "Like it was my idea."
"Don’t get mad at me," the guy droned, a mosquito in every way. "I’m just telling you. Talking to the police without an attorney present is just asking for trouble. You should have asked for a lawyer right away."
"I did ask for a… man, they broke in my house! They beat me up! I thought you sposed to be my lawyer?"
"He is your lawyer," Jacob Asher said. He sat kitty-corner at the table in a folding chair, legs crossed at the knee, watching like a mother hen. Cain’s nausea had receded some. But he still hadn’t slept. Which only made it all feel more like a nightmare.
"He’s good," Asher said, "trust me."
"Erybody want me to trust them lately."
Asher laughed, a sympathetic sound. He wore a blazer over jeans, and Birkenstock sandals over socks. Warm brown eyes blinked behind round silver glasses, under a sandy jew-fro like a lion’s mane. "We’re fighting this to the very end. No way we’re letting him get away with it. Not what he did to Terry, and not what he did to you."
The way he said it made Cain want to believe it. But a deeper part of him suspected otherwise. Even as Asher went on.
"We can countersue. Excessive force, wrongful arrest—"
The lawyer cleared his throat, and Asher leaned back. He zipped his lip with his fingers. Cain caught it and smiled, for the first time since Terry fell.
"The prosecution has asked for no bail." Cain’s anger flared.
"What?!" But he caught Asher’s eye and quieted.
"They say you’re a flight risk. You’ll run to your place in Switzerland."
Cain stared.
"It’s their job to be assholes. Don’t let it get to you. That’s what they want. Hear him out."
"You gotta get me outta here. These cops try to kill me."
"So if we do get a bond, it’ll be high."
"My assets are froze."
"I’ll take care of it."
"Man, you can’t keep doing this—"
"But we're not taking any deals. You’re innocent and Will’s guilty and we’re proving it in a court of law."
"Yes," the lawyer buzzed. "You’ve made it very clear that’s your position." He held up a hand for quiet. "The way I see it, our best option, if you want to go to trial, is to posit an alternate prosecutorial theory."
"Meaning?"
"Try to show you were framed."
"It was Will," Jacob said. "I mean, who else would it be?"
Cain was shaking his head. "Did he frame me, too? Did he plant that shit in my house? Is he even capable—"
"Cheerslaughter’s wife vouched for him." The lawyer glanced at papers. "Told the detectives Will never left the house. The girl corroborated, said her parents just fought all night. Nobody went anywhere."
"How is that possible?" Cain looked at Jacob.
"He made them lie. I’d bet my life on it."
"Actually," Cain said, "you’re betting my life."
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The Rosy Mirror owes a debt of gratitude to Michael Rondeau for his trumpet rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license as part of the Werner Icking Collection. We acquired his recording via the Petrucci Music Library, and used it to create this episode.
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