“Yes.” Now the look on Jules face was a mix of disbelief with a touch of gleeful eureka. “Oh, my God.” He stood up to look at Sam’s timeline—at the date in which Gavin LaCrosse had been added to Devonshire’s payroll. Less than a week after the accident. And then, within the year, LaCrosse was producing and directing.
“What’s the date that video was leaked?” Jules asked even as he moved back to his laptop.
Robin pushed himself out of his chair to go and look over Jules’s shoulder at the computer screen. Jules quickly googled the video, checking more than one source to be certain—it looked as if it had been leaked first to channel five, and then most of the at-that-time major local networks had also picked it up.
“Well isn’tthatinteresting,” Jules said.
He stood up to write the date on the timeline, and apparently the video had been leaked close to exactly when Gavin had started getting his monthly payments. Both were in that same segment of the paper-towel roll that represented the slightly less than month-long period between Marina Santana’s hit-and-run death and Milt Junior’s guilty plea, but Robin still couldn’t quite make it make sense.
“What did I say that was so right?” he asked Jules as he looked back at the video clip that was playing, muted, on the laptop. “What did you just figure out?” He glanced over at Sam who shrugged.
“I’m pretty sure it was you who figured it out,” Jules said, pulling back the chair in front of the laptop and nearly pushing Robin down into it. “Watch this video. Not the news-anchor-talking part, but the leaked footage.” He leaned over and used the computer’s trackpad to scroll through the video’s play-line, finding the start of the security video. He hit pause, then the little button for full-screen, and then play.
Robin leaned in to watch the black and white video filmed with a grainy, low-res camera. A sportscar sat not quite in the center of the frame but slightly over to the right a bit as an apron-clad woman emerged into the static shot. She was older, wearing a dress with sensible shoes beneath that apron. Her face was round and sweet, but surrounded by powder grey helmet-hair—short curls that were hair-sprayed into an immovable hat. She was only in the frame for a few short moments as whatever she saw in the car made her react with obvious dismay. Like most security videos, this one had no audio track, but it was clear that she was making some noise as she dashed away, back from whence she’d first come.
Presumably into the house.
The camera’s time code was centered at the top of the video’s frame in an old-school, computer-type white font that wasn’t the easiest to read. It showed the date with the year first, then month and day as a clock in military time read 06:23:45, the seconds chugging along. The woman returned with a man who was dressed in what looked like pajamas beneath a silk robe. He went straight to the driver’s door of the sportscar, opened it, and pulled another man—young and skinny, presumably seventeen-year-old Milt the Junior—out from behind the steering wheel.
Milt the Junior immediately gifted him with vomit. It was kind of clear that wasn’t his first regurgitation of the morning—the front of his shirt was a nasty mess.
The older man—Mr. PJs—naturally stepped back, trying and failing to get out of projectile range. In doing so, he let go of Milt the Junior, but the kid was unable to stand on his own. He turned into jello and hit the deck, or in this case the driveway, melting into a puddle of limpness.
“Yeesh,” Jules said. “The video I first watched cut that part out.” He put his hand on Robin’s shoulder—warm and steady—because yeah, this shit was teeth-grittingly triggering since Robin had been exactly that kind of a total blackout drunk himself, in those dark before-Jules years.
On the video, Mr. PJs was trying and failing to hide his disgust. He gingerly knelt down behind Jello-Boy as he rather obviously fired off commands for Apron Woman to call for help. She rushed out of the frame as PJs pushed and pulled the boy onto his back to... check for a pulse?
Really?
The kid had just made a major deposit to the vomitron—which kinda meant his heart was beating effectively. The up doesn’t chuck without a heartbeat, Dad.
Also? When blackout drunks threw up, it was kinda badform to turn them onto their backs. Best position to avoid asphyxiation-from-additional-vomit was on the stomach, head turned neatly to the side.
More info Robin knew a little too uncomfortably well.
But yeah, on that video, Mr. PJs was taking his son’s pulse, which gave the security camera full access to the boy’s face—in fact, the energy in the older man’s body, particularly his shoulders, made him seem almost ridiculously, uncomfortably posed. Like one of those old-fashioned performance art things that people used to do in merry old England, back before TV or even radio, what were they called...?
“Tableau vivant,” Robin said aloud.
“Huh.” Jules said—half laugh, half agreement. “Yeah.”
“Like helping his son is not his primary goal,” Sam chimed in, his voice laced with Texas-accented judgment. “I see that, too, but I thought he was just a fuck-up.”
Robin glanced up to see that the former SEAL had come to watch the video again, too, and when he looked back at the laptop’s screen, the channel five news-team had hit pause on the video and punched in for a grainy but legible close-up still of Milt the Junior’s unconscious teenaged face.
Punched in.
Hmm.
It was the video term for cropping the frame. Punching in was used to zoom in for emphasis or focus—the way the channel five editors had done.
But punching in was also used to cutoutunwanted information. A boom mike that dangled too low could be removed from the top of the frame with that type of easy edit—but doing so would mean you’d lose some of the images on the sides of the video frame, too, often messing with the cinematographer’s intended balance of the shot. That was thebasic math of any kind of cropping, be it video or photographic.
Robin used the computer keyboard to scroll back, halfway through the security video they’d just watched. He hit play again right after the vomiting incident—no need to see that magic again, thanks a million—but then paused right after Milt Senior dropped to his knees and shifted his son’s body to take his pulse. While... pulling him back slightly to be... more centered in the frame? Yeah, he definitely did that, which was strange.
Although... When the boy had first fallen, his body was right at the very bottom edge of the video. Robin backed it up to the kid’s initial tumble and replayed the father’s movement then, too. PJ Milt absolutely wasn’t just flipping Drunk Milt onto his back to “take his pulse,” he wasmovinghim, too.
Robin rewound and watched it again. And again.
