——Then how about touching yourself?
——No, we’re not allowed to do that.
——Be worth fifty to me if you took off your panties and showed me how you do yourself.
——I’m sorry, we’re not permitted to do that.
——Jenny does it for me.
——She’d get fired if anyone found out.
——Come on, who’d ever know?
——They make spot checks.
“How long were you doing this?” Frank asked.
“Only until I did the video.”
“What do you mean?”
“A photographer came in one night.”
“What’s his name?”
“Why do you have to know?”
“We don’t, Frank.”
“All right, we don’t. Tell us what happened.”
“He said I could make some very good money if I posed for a video.”
“This video?”
“Yes. As it turned out.”
“Did you know what kind of video it would be?”
“I had an idea.”
“When did you learn precisely what he had in mind?”
“He made it clear.”
“When?”
“That same night. The money was good.”
“What did he pay you?”
“A thousand dollars. For what turned out to be a half-hour’s work. He edited it down to fifteen minutes later. There were three other girls on the tape. I know them all, one of them is only sixteen.”
“When did he shoot the video?”
“That same week.”
“Where?”
“He has a studio not far from here. On Wedley.”
“Did he pay you the money?”
“In advance.”
“What did you think he was going to do with the video?”
“He said there were collectors for this sort of... well... specialty act, he called it. All of us... well... you saw the tape.”
“Apparently Brett saw it, too.”
“I don’t know how he got hold of it.”
“But he did.”
“Apparently.”
“And you say he didn’t show it to you?”
“No. But he showed me the holder. I knew he had the cassette, too. He wouldn’t have tried to blackmail me otherwise.”
“Do you know what the prosecution could make of this video? If they knew it existed? If they knew it was on the Toland boat the night you went there? The night he was killed?”
“Yes,” Lainie said. “I know what they can make of it.”
“They’ll say you killed him to get this damn tape!”
“Yes, but I didn’t.”
“They’ll say...”
“And I didn’t get the tape, either, did I?”
“She has a point, Frank.”
“Why’d you remove this from the boat, Matthew?”
“No reason I shouldn’t have.”
“No reason?”
“He’s right, Frank.”
“No reas—?”
“Thank you, Andrew.”
“How about tampering with evidence? How about obstruction of...?”
“How do you figure that?” I said. “Lainie’s already been indicted, the grand jury’s finished, no one told me I couldn’t remove evidence from the scene. Since when am I not allowed to gather evidence in support of a client’s defense?”
“Do you intend to submit this tape to the Court?”
“Come on, Frank. We’re under no obligation to turn over any evidence we don’t intend to use in our direct case.
“Which doesn’t change the fact that you removed this from the boat without prior permission and without...”
“I was gathering evidence at a crime scene. Is the S.A. the only one entitled to gather evidence? This is America, Frank.”
“Yeah, bullshit,” Frank said. “You removed this tape from the boat to make sure Folger wouldn’t get his hands on it.”
“No, I gathered evidence so I could present it to my client...”
“Bullshit.”
“...and question her about it. Which we’ve now done. Would you have preferred Folger surprising us with it later on?
“How the hell can he surprise us if he doesn’t even know it exists?”
Which suddenly worried me.
“Lainie?” I said. “I’m assuming there are other...”
“I’m sure there are,” she said at once.
“Huh?” Frank said.
“Copies,” she said.
“In which case,” he said, “what is that photographer’s name?”
9
The photographer’s name was Edison Alva Farley, Jr., and he told Guthrie at once that he had been named after Thomas Alva Edison, the man who’d invented — among other things — the incandescent lightbulb and the motion picture camera.
Farley’s great-grandfather — John Winston Farley — was living in West Orange, New Jersey, when the great man moved his laboratory there in 1887. The two men became fast friends, and John Winston’s son Arthur — who was twelve at the time, but who would later become Farley’s grandfather — had idolized the inventor. At the turn of the century, when Arthur was twenty-five, his young wife Sarah gave birth to a baby boy whom they promptly named Edison Alva, avoiding the more obvious Thomas Alva Edison, which when attached to the family name would have become Thomas Alva Edison Farley, a somewhat cumbersome handle. The first Edison Alva Farley later grew up to be the father of the current Edison Alva Farley, Jr.
“Such are the wonders of naming babies in America,” Farley told Guthrie, “though everybody calls me Junior now.”
Guthrie, no stranger to the transmogrification of given names, not to mention surnames, took the photographer’s extended hand, and said, “Everybody calls me Guthrie now,” which was true.
“So what can I do for you?” Farley asked. “A passport photo? A portrait photo to send to your fiancée in Seoul?” and here he winked. Guthrie winked back, though he didn’t get the joke.
“What I need, actually,” Guthrie said, “is some information about a video you made back in March sometime.”
“Was this a wedding?” Farley asked. “A graduation?”
“No. This was a private session with a woman. Just her and the video camera.”
Farley looked at him.
“Would you remember making a video such as that?” Guthrie asked.
Guthrie already knew that last March Farley had shot a video of Lainie Commins, aka Lori Doone, in a half hour interlude that could have been construed as compromising, not to mention dirty. He gave Farley a little time to think things over. It was always best to get the percolator boiling before you started pouring the coffee.
There was, in fact, a percolator bubbling away on the little hot plate in one corner of Farley’s studio, though the photographer had not yet offered Guthrie a cup. The studio was in what was called a “cluster unit” on Wedley and Third, close to the Twin Forks Shopping Mall in “downtown” Calusa, such as it was. The mall had been a disaster. There was talk of turning it into a huge multilevel parking lot that would service the entire “downtown” area, though everyone in Calusa knew there was, in reality, no true “downtown” now that all the shopping had moved further south on the Trail into far more successful malls than Twin Forks.
The studio was somewhat small, as was true of most spaces in these beautifully but sparingly designed cluster buildings that had become the vogue over the past few years. One entire wall was composed of floor-to-ceiling windows that slid open onto an interior courtyard spilling good northern light. Another wall was covered with standing bookshelves that held an array of cameras, boxed film, and a stereo system complete with a tape deck, tuner, CD player, turntables for both 78 and 45 rpms, and a pair of giant speakers. Guthrie had never been in a photographer’s studio that didn’t have its share of very expensive stereo equipment. Many junkie burglars broke into photography studios not to steal the cameras, which were often etched for identification, but to steal the audio equipment, which was easier to fence. Along a third wall a battery of lights was set up to illuminate a seamless backdrop against which a stool was positioned.