I knew the story already. Had it laid out for me in detail around nine hours ago by Dell. Even so, I wanted to hear it from the client. There were always multiple versions of every story. We are our own little planets, and invariably we can only see things from our own perspective, which includes our prejudices, our vices, our talents, and our limited perceptions. No two people see the same thing. When you add that any one person will give differing accounts of the same circumstances, depending on whom they’re talking to, it gives you an idea of how unclear versions of events can be. A person will tell the same story differently depending on whether they’re talking to a man or a woman, a college professor or a cabdriver, a cop or a lawyer. We unconsciously tailor our speech and body language so that we can gain empathy and understanding from the listener. Trouble is, you need all of the information to make a judgment call on what really happened. And that’s without considering whether or not your storyteller is even telling the truth to begin with.
There are simple techniques that are designed to get the raw data, not the spin.
I used the simplest of those techniques to get David Child talking. We were sitting in a cramped gray consultation room. A dark mahogany table separated us. The table bore the scars of paper clips, knives, and pens, which had been used to dig the names of past felons into its flesh.
I’d just sat down. I hadn’t told Child anything about my talk with Judge Knox.
“So, what happened?” I said.
“What did the judge say?”
Leaning back in my chair, I said nothing. My hands rested on my thighs. It was important not to fold my arms, to keep an open body posture. So that I remained subconsciously on “receive.”
“What’d he say?”
My head tilted to the right.
“Mr. Flynn?”
A few seconds passed in silence. Child looked at the floor. It’s pretty hard to maintain silence when somebody is patiently waiting for you to start talking. His head popped up and he met my gaze with a pleading stare. I raised an eyebrow.
“What happened, David?” I repeated.
He nodded a few times, then put his hands up in surrender.
I didn’t ask Child why he’d been arrested, or why he’d been charged with murder, or what evidence the cops had on him. The question I asked was as open and wide as possible so that I’d get a lot more information.
“Jesus,” said Child, running his hands over his head. “I loved Clara. I’d never met anyone like her. She was perfect. So perfect. Why the hell she ended up with an asswipe like me, I’ll never know. Jesus Christ forgive me, but right now I wish I’d never met her. She’d still be alive.”
He began to cry. Tears flowed freely, and from the swelling around his eyes it appeared as though he’d been crying a lot in the last few hours. Even so, he bent over and his back rocked with huge intakes of breath that he forced out in guttural cries. For all his supposed financial worth and power, right then, with the snot and salt tears on his face, he looked like a miserable boy.
I said nothing.
I didn’t put my arm around him. No words of comfort or reassurance. I remained relaxed and silent.
If I sympathized with him, I’d be doing him no favors. I’d spend my remaining eight minutes watching him cry and blow his nose. Quickest way to make somebody stop crying and start talking is to remain silent. People get embarrassed about letting out that flood of emotion to a stranger.
Child hefted the bottom of his shirt and wiped his face.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said.
I said nothing.
Seven minutes left.
“What happened, David?”
He rolled his neck, blew out a few times to regulate his breathing, and gave me my answer.
“She’s dead because of me,” he said.
As he spoke he didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes low, on the table. The words came out matter-of-factly, like he just told me his address or his date of birth. It wasn’t a heartfelt confession, but a simple statement.
Lawyers don’t usually question whether or not a client is telling the truth. That way lies madness. You do what you have to and trust the system. So, the guilty plead guilty. The innocent fight their case and the jury decides. If a by-product of that process is the emergence of the truth, then so be it, but the truth is not the aim of the process. The verdict is the aim. Truth has no place in the trial because no one is concerned with finding it, least of all the lawyers or the judge.
However, in my former career, before I was a lawyer, the truth was always my goal. As a con man you live and die by portraying the absolute truth to your mark. Not the real truth, of course. No, a version of the truth that suited the con, but that story, that line, that whatever it was, had to look and feel and taste and become the truth for that mark.
With my experience I could normally spot a lie a mile away. I expected Child to be an excellent liar, a man I would have to study before I would be able to spot his tells. I’d underestimated him. He was a mass of nerves, shock, and guilt. That made him damn near impossible to read. So I had to rely on my gut instead.
My first impression—this guy was no killer. But I’d been wrong before.
Six minutes.