The Color Of Lies: A Dirk Malone Story

Written for Violet’s Literary Quote Challenge
where she asks us to include the following line
into our writing: “Things need not have
happened to be true.” Here’s my response.

The dame’s lipstick was the color of lies …. red enough to bleed, dark enough to hide behind. She sat across from my desk like she owned the joint, the smoke from her cigarette curling up to the water-stained ceiling of my office.

“My husband didn’t kill that man, Mr. Malone,” she said. Her voice was like 120-grit sandpaper, the kind of voice you get from too many late nights and not enough honest answers.

I leaned back in my chair, never taking my eyes off her. “Listen, sister. The cops found a dead body in your husband’s office. His gun had recently been fired and was covered with his fresh prints. His motives were plastered across every gossip rag in the city.”

“I don’t care what the so-called facts say!” She stubbed out the cigarette like she was crushing a bug. “Things need not have happened to be true.”

I’d heard a lot of excuses in my time. I’d heard wives swear their husbands were saints while I had photos of them playing footsie with the devil. But something in the way she said it stopped me in my tracks.

“Care to explain that?”

She opened her purse slowly …. she’d learned to move carefully around men like me …. and pulled out a worn photograph. It showed a crime scene, same as the one the cops discovered last night. Same angle. Same lighting but a different vic and a different room.

“What am I looking at?”

“That’s Chicago, 1938,” she said. “Staged for a magazine story Richard was writing about how easy it is to fake evidence. Someone saved that photo. And eight years later, they recreated it…..”

“…..and this time they made it real.”

The setup was too perfect, too familiar. Someone went to a lot of trouble to turn Richard’s magazine crime scene into the real deal. And whoever this someone was, they had it in for Richard Halloway …. enough to commit murder and pin it on him.

I pocketed the photograph. Sometimes the biggest lie isn’t that something happened; it’s making people believe it did.

This is “Little White Lies” by Frank Sinatra