Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(97)
Cowper wasn’t used to his clients taking over, and seemed to lack the toughness to rein Farquist in. Instead, he sat back, stunned. Arthur felt sorry for him, and apologized. “Please excuse the lack of timely disclosure, George, but this video just came to hand. It might be wise to give Ms. Blair a break while we watch the rest of it.” There was no advantage to putting more of this on the official record before they talked settlement.
He turned to Sarah Blair, whose face was glowing with embarrassment, and suggested she spend the next couple of hours preparing transcripts. Cowper lifted a limp hand in assent, and Blair gathered her equipment and hurried off without a look back.
Arthur half-expected Margaret to join her, but she seemed bolted to her chair. Her fingers dug into his thigh.
“Let us resume,” Arthur said.
And the video played on. Bondage and humiliation on an Oriental carpet. In background, a blazing fireplace, a wall of rough-hewn logs, an iced-over lake. Action in the foreground, Svetlana trading her quirt for a massive dildo, her client trying to buck her off like a rodeo bronco, all the while pleading for mercy.
Arthur had first viewed this rollick on Sunday morning, and subsequently another half-dozen times, mesmerized. Lou’s pirated copy, on a USB drive, remained in a locked drawer in his home in Porcupine Plain, but he had uploaded the file to the cloud, and was able to recall its complex password. In every detail, it matched what Margaret had witnessed early in June. Sabatino’s twelve-page affidavit detailed its provenance and history.
On the laptop, seconds passed soundlessly after the dominatrix and her masochist piggybacked off screen. Cowper’s junior was showing signs of illness, his face slightly green.
“Is that it?’ Farquist demanded.
Then his image reappeared in full frontal view, in lounging pants, pulling on a turtleneck pullover, then ambling out of the frame.
Farquist held a steely silence. His eyes flicked to Arthur, then back to the screen.
Several seconds later, Glinka appeared, still bare-breasted but in skirt and leggings, advancing quickly toward the lens. A close-up of her blue-eyed baby-doll face as she reached up and turned off her camera.
A hoarse laugh from Farquist. “Nice try. Got to give Sabatino credit for balls if not brains. Fabricating that piece of film fiction — the staging was patently amateurish. They used an actor, of course, for their opening scenes, or maybe some tramp off the street. Except at the end, where they spliced me in.”
He wasn’t even sweating. Arthur couldn’t help, in a paradoxical way, admiring the man: his toughness, his control, his straight face, his unshakeable tenacity in bluffing his way through this ordeal. He was one of the staunchest witnesses Arthur had ever encountered, and there’d been thousands. Maybe it wasn’t some cocaine-like pharmaceutical. Maybe it was straight-out sociopathy.
“You’ll have noted the date stamp,” Arthur said. “January sixth, Ms. Glinka’s first visit to your chalet. She regularly filmed her initial encounter with a client. In case of hanky-panky, as she explained to our independent witness, Mr. Sabatino.” To Nanisha: “The affidavit.”
From her briefcase, she drew two copies of Sabatino’s sworn statement, one for Cowper, the other for Farquist.
“You’ll want to take some time going over this.” Arthur rose. “We’ll be close at hand.” He held the door for Margaret, who was gaping at Farquist and would have walked into the door frame had Nanisha not caught her arm.
“Oh, and here’s a copy of the video.” Arthur pulled a memory stick from his pocket and passed it to Cowper’s junior, who put it down like a hot ember, rose, mumbled something about a bathroom break, then dashed outside.
§
Nanisha led Arthur and Margaret to a nearby courtroom, unlocked, empty. They took padded seats at the back, and Arthur stretched out, feeling the invigorating tingle of apprehension that courtrooms always stirred in him. He imagined scenes of forensic combat at the distant counsel table, the room packed, the prosecutor objecting, the judge sternly reprimanding Arthur for yet another sucker punch. Farquist finally cracking under the onslaught.
Arthur had felt constricted in that cell of a discovery room. With its namby-pamby rules denying old-fashioned, no-holds-barred cross-examination. Here, in a courtroom, was where the real dramas played out. It seemed sad, wrong somehow, not to be confronting Farquist on that witness stand.
He imagined how it could have been. Playing that explosive video in a crowded courtroom. The gasps from the gallery, the howling complaints, the threat of a contempt citation. How he would have enjoyed that.
Nanisha, on her phone, elbowed him out of his reveries. The only words he caught were, “A runner will pick them up.” Arthur gathered she was talking about the draft opinions from the experts. Rush jobs, but Cowper mustn’t be allowed another complaint about lack of notice.
Margaret slipped her hand into his. She was smiling at him, her silver eyes shining with either relief or excitement, or maybe love. “Fuck propriety,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth. He put his arm around her. Held her.
CONFIDENTIALITY CLAUSE
“What I wouldn’t do for strong drink right now,” Cowper said.
“I know the feeling well.”
“Sorry, I forgot, you’re . . .”
“An alcoholic. In recovery. Oddly, I’ve always felt I was a better lawyer in my boozy era. Maybe less inhibited.”