True Crime Podcast

He confessed. Well, not entirely. Not in so many words. He didn’t say, “I did it,” or “I killed her,” or “her windpipe collapsed like a paper straw when my hands were wrapped around it.” 

But what he did say told me everything I ever needed to know. The comment he made about the tiles -- that seemingly random, offhand observation about the way her painted toenails matched the tiles on the pool deck -- put him at the scene, at the time and place where the State said she died. 

He has always said that he was never at the pool, that he was at church that morning. I believed him. I wanted to believe him. I believed that the fact that he’d never broken down and confessed was proof that he was telling the truth. 

I realize now that confessions are like drowning -- they are not nearly as splashy or dramatic as you expect them to be. Over the years, he has probably let thousands of these tiny confessions slip from his tongue…

Rebecca stopped reading. Ever since the awards gala, Rebecca had found herself re-reading that passage over and over again. It was the original script for the final episode of her true crime podcast. Hours before she went to the studio to record, she rewrote the script, leaving out any mention of Hunter’s confession. By now, millions of people all over the world had heard her say she wasn’t convinced Hunter was the killer and that the justice system had failed him.

The original script sat in a hidden file on her hard drive. It would spell disaster for her career if this unaired portion of her podcast ever came to light. She told herself she should delete the file. 

Instead, she closed it. She had a television interview to prepare for.

In the green room at the television studio, she stood in front of a brightly-lit mirror. She carefully traced her mouth with lipstick. It was pink like Barbie’s Corvette. Next to her dark hair and faux-tortoise shell glasses, the lipstick was all wrong, but there wasn’t time to change it.

In all her life, Rebecca had never found a lipstick shade that worked for her. It was either too pastel or too magenta or too red. No matter how careful she was in applying it, little flecks of it stuck to her teeth. She’d even tried white lipstick when she was a teen in the eighties, but that just made her look like she had rabies. 

The producer knocked on the door. “Five minutes, Ms. St. James.”

“Okay, thank you,” Rebecca said as she peeled her lips away from her teeth to make sure that her teeth were clean and found a little patch of pink on her incisor. She rubbed it, but it just smudged.

During Melina’s autopsy, the Medical Examiner made a note: “Victim is wearing blue toenail polish. Brand: Pop! Nails. Shade: ‘Corsica.’” 

Melina had received a bottle of “Corsica” blue nail polish by Pop! Nails just three days prior to her death. Her friend, Latoya, had given it to her as a birthday gift. 

The tiles on the pool deck were light blue. In the three days after her birthday, Melina worked at the pool only once: the day she was killed.

Melina could have worn blue toenail polish on some other day. Just because Hunter remembered her toenails matching the pool tiles doesn’t mean he was remembering them from the day she died. These are things I told myself, even though the churning in the pit of my stomach told me I was wrong.

I called LaToya. 

“Do you remember Melina ever wearing blue toenail polish before you gave her that bottle for her birthday?”

“No. She didn’t paint her nails very much. I only gave her that bottle because we had seen it at the mall and she really liked it. I think it had just come out.”

I called Pop! Nails and asked them when they first released the Corsica shade. They said they’d have to look through their archives and that someone would call back. While I waited, I hoped that LaToya was wrong. I looked through every single picture I had of Melina to see if she had on nail polish of any kind. I looked through yearbook photos and prom photos and family photos. I combed through all of the pictures that had been taken by various people at the pool that summer. Candid shots that caught Melina in her red swimsuit and lifeguard shorts standing on the deck overseeing the kids splashing each other in the pool, hands on her hips, brow furrowed, whistle around her neck, deltoids bronzing under the sun. 

One thing was clear: in none of the photos was she wearing blue polish.

An hour later, Pop! Nails called back. They confirmed that the Corsica shade was first released on August 1st, 1997. Just twelve days before Melina’s seventeenth birthday.  

Okay, so it was in the realm of plausibility that Melina had painted her toes blue using some other brand of nail polish and that Hunter had noticed it at some other point in time. Plausible, but increasingly unlikely. The nail polish had only been on the market for fifteen days, and Melina had only owned a bottle of it for three. There was no evidence of her wearing anything like it prior to receiving it from LaToya. 

Hunter remembered Melina’s toenail polish because it was new and because it was the last thing he noticed about her before he choked her on the pool deck and rolled her unconscious body into the pool. 

I admit I wanted to believe he was innocent. I still want to believe that. But now, how can I?

One of the stagehands adjusted Rebecca’s lapel mic. Under the studio lights, her mauve blazer became a weird shade of yellow. It reminded her of her mother’s kitchen, with the “harvest gold” appliances and the wallpaper with the giant mustard-colored daisies. Rebecca once brought her a book of wallpaper samples and tried to convince her mother to redo the kitchen with more neutral colors, something contemporary, but her mother just waved her away. 

“Maybe you don’t like my kitchen the way it is,” her mother said, “but I do.”

The host of the show walked onto the stage and took a seat across from her. He wore a gray suit and a crisp, pistachio-colored shirt underneath. 

“Hey, how’s it going,” he said casually as he turned to face the camera. The producer gave them the cue to start. 

“Good afternoon, I’m Davion Blanks, and I’m here today with Rebecca St. James, host of the hit true-crime podcast, ‘Lifeguard.’ Rebecca, congratulations on the big award.” He grinned, revealing two rows of perfect teeth, snow-day bright. 

“Thank you, Davion. This project consumed a great deal of time and effort, so it’s an honor to be recognized for the work we did.” She’d practiced that line in the mirror for an hour the night before. 

“Recently, there’s been some backlash against you and your team. Some sources, who knew the victim and her convicted killer at the time of her death, say that your podcast was biased.”

Rebecca’s lips trembled slightly as she stretched them into a smile. The layer of pink lipstick suddenly felt dry and heavy. 

Thank God they emailed me the questions before this interview, she thought before she delivered her second rehearsed line. “As a journalist, I worked very hard to present a balanced view of the crime.”

Davion crossed his legs. Rebecca couldn’t help but notice that he had thighs like a linebacker. Then she remembered that he used to play for the Minnesota Vikings. “And is it a journalist’s job to say you think the guy should go free?”

Rebecca felt sweat break out on the back of her neck. That question wasn’t in the email. 

“I...don’t think I said that.” She pressed her lips together to stop the quivering, which was getting worse.

“Well, you did say you thought he should have been acquitted. And you gave an hour’s long interview to the lawyer who’s trying to get his conviction overturned.”

Rebecca made a mental note to dress down her assistant the next day. Skye was the one who had insisted that Davion only did softball interviews. Skye, with the blue hair and the ever-changing pronouns. These Gen-Z kids could barely read and yet Rebecca’s bosses were falling all over themselves to hire the brats. 

“I just meant that I thought the evidence didn’t quite meet the reasonable doubt standard. Nobody saw Hunter Landucci at the pool that day. There was no trace evidence to put him there, either.”

The image of Melina’s blue toenails flashed in Rebecca’s mind.

Davion uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “But his neighbors did see him walking west that morning, which was the direction he had to take to get to the pool.”

“Yes, but --” The back of her neck felt wetter. 

“And he did live very close to the pool where Melina Metaxas worked as a lifeguard.” The light caught Davion’s teeth. They had to be veneers. 

“I know --” When was this over? She glanced at the producer who stood behind one of the cameramen, wearing a headset, her arms crossed over her chest. Rebecca couldn’t make out her expression. 

“He knew her schedule. He knew she’d be at the pool alone. He knew there was no security there whatsoever. He lived close enough to the pool that he could get there without borrowing his father’s car. He had plenty of opportunity and he also had a motive. Melina had dumped him for another guy and he was pissed.” 

Rebecca’s hand was shaking now, too. She dug her fingers into the arm of the chair to make it stop. 

“The evidence against Hunter is all circumstantial. The state’s case is very weak,” she replied. She could feel the sweat beginning to gather on her forehead. She told herself it was just the lights.

“I must say, as a black man, if a prosecutor had nothing but circumstantial evidence against me, it would be enough to put me away for a long time.”

Rebecca’s grip on the chair eased. She straightened her spine. This was her chance to turn the interview around. “That’s my whole point. We need to hold our criminal justice system to a higher standard. To ensure that there are no more wrongful convictions, we need police and prosecutors to rely on hard evidence, not circumstantial evidence. It’s the only way we’ll have justice for people of all races.”

Davion smiled. Then, he cocked his head slightly and said, “It’s my understanding that most criminal cases are based on circumstantial evidence. If we started following your standard, wouldn’t a lot of killers and rapists go free?”

“Not if our police get better at collecting evidence.” Rebecca’s fingers and lips relaxed. 

“Marios Metaxas recently released a statement on behalf of Melina’s family. He says, ‘the only thing more painful than reliving my sister’s death is seeing so many people become convinced that the bastard who killed her is innocent.’ He goes on to say, ‘when Rebecca St. James and her team reached out to me, I declined to be interviewed for her podcast. I did not want to discuss my sister with a stranger. But now I wish I had spoken to her, because now everyone thinks they know the facts, and they don’t. I wish I had set the record straight.’ How do you respond to that?”

Rebecca gritted her teeth. She had seen Marios Metaxas’ letter before, but the email from the producers hadn’t mentioned it. Whose idea was this ambush?

“We have to balance the needs of victims and their families with the rights of the accused. No one ever said that would be easy. But if we are going to have justice in this country, that is what we have to do, even if it is painful sometimes.”

A lame answer, a dodge. She hoped it would at least serve as a decent soundbyte. 

“Alright, that’s all the time we have. Rebecca, thank you for stopping by today.”

“Thank you for having me.”

Davion shook Rebecca’s hand. The producer signaled that they were finished recording.

Davion turned to her and said, “Hey, you were a great sport, thanks,” then got up and walked offstage.

Stunned, Rebecca took off her lapel mic and handed it to the stagehand, then stood up slowly and made her way back to the green room.

When Hunter told me he harbored no hard feelings toward Melina after the breakup, I believed him. When he told me he was never jealous of her new boyfriend, I believed him. But now I realize I believed him simply because I wanted to. 

That night, Rebecca couldn’t sleep. She thought about Hunter, about how she wanted to feel his large, calloused hands on her body. She imagined his lips grazing her neck, his green eyes burning intensely as he thrust inside her. 

The first time she interviewed Hunter, she met him face-to-face at Stillwater prison. Something about his broad shoulders made her want to kiss him all over his chest. Her face flushed and she tried to push the thought out of her mind, but the more she resisted the fantasy, the more intense it became.

She should have walked away from the podcast right then and there. But there was a lot of money at stake -- enough to pay off the loans she took out when she enrolled in J school at Columbia. She convinced herself that her feelings for Hunter wouldn’t affect her work. 

Her head throbbed. She got out of bed and poured herself a glass of water. She turned on the TV and flipped around until she landed on Turner Classic Movies just in time to see the final scenes of The Music Man.

Marian the Librarian held a stack of pages containing the damning proof that Professor Harold Hill wasn’t who he claimed to be. 

“I meant to use it against you, but now I’m giving it to you with all my heart,” Marian said, her eyes shimmering. Her lips quivered as she sang the opening lines to “‘Til There Was You,” and Professor Harold Hill stared at her like he didn’t know whether to kiss her or throw himself off the footbridge. 

Rebecca remembered that The Music Man was one of the first VHS tapes her mother bought after her father came home with a VCR. Rebecca was in high school and hadn’t wanted to watch it, but after watching it with her mother one Saturday night, she secretly watched it alone every day after school for a week.

“I can’t go, Winthrop,” Rebecca recited along with Robert Preston. “For the first time, I’ve got my foot caught in the door.”

As the angry mob dragged Professor Hill in front of his rag-tag band of juvenile musicians, a spidery feeling raced over her skin. 

“Think, men,” Professor Hill said, imploring his ersatz students to employ his method of playing music through self-deception, “THINK!”

Rebecca snatched the remote and snapped the TV off. She went to the kitchen and took a bottle of Grey Goose out the refrigerator. She took a juice glass from the cupboard and filled it. She drank enough vodka to feel the burn in her throat, then went to her computer. 

She polished off the vodka as she waited for it to boot up. She located the file containing the unaired segment and hit “delete.”