Chapter One: Victorious

The case against me was a bad one. Amanda Bryce's family clearly had a lot of money, like 'nesting-yachts-on-both-coasts' a lot of money, and they were pulling out all the stops. They'd greased the wheels in the DA's office and scuttled the fairly favorable plea deal that Cousin Vince had negotiated for me. They'd hired at least three private investigators to find witnesses, pull security footage, interview people, and scrutinize my pretty (but not entirely) clean background. They'd spread enough nasty rumors about me to muddy the waters. In short, they'd done a good job of fucking me over. The prosecution and the Bryce family had all of their ducks in a row.

But they didn't have Cousin Vince.

My cousin, Vincent Warner, Jr., JD, had never lost a case. Not once in his eighty-three (to date) trials. He'd been out of law school and practicing for all of four years and was already a partner at Darrow and Pugh. Cousin or no, he'd only taken my case with some trepidation and lots of haranguing.

"I win a lot of cases, Martin," he'd said carefully.

"I know," I said. "That's the whole point. You'd be doing me a huge solid here if you took my case. Fuck if I know why, but the DA's looking to crucify me. Okay, maybe I'm being self-centered… I know it could hurt your career if you lost..."

Vince shook his head. "You're misunderstanding me, Martin. Of course I don't want to lose… but I probably won't. I'll probably get you off scot free, no matter how terrible the thing you've done is. I'd be letting a rapist walk free."

"I'm not a rapist," I stated.

I was a lot of things, not all of them good. I could be a sleaze and a horndog, to be sure. But a rapist, definitely not. I could get enough strange with consensual commingling, thank you very much. Try telling that to Amanda Bryce's parents, though. And they'd spread enough rumors about me that even Cousin Vince had doubts.

I was a loyal brother of Sigma Epsilon Alpha, the same as Vince, and perhaps not quite so mature as my cousin (who was only one year my senior). Sue me: I liked Greek life, and I never quite parted with it. There was something about being in an exclusive society, among peers who shared your interests and background, who shared your traditions and history, what I really liked. Plus, the parties were amazing. I still went to the occasional frat kegger when invited on as an 'elder' for initiation and ceremonies, and I still looked and felt young enough that it wasn't awkward to stick around for a while afterward to party and, if I was lucky, sow my wild oats with coeds. And I got lucky pretty frequently. More than I can rationally justify, actually, though I'd later discover that there was a reason for that. In any case, I had a pretty active and adventurous sex life. Many would consider it an undignified pattern of drunken rutting, but there was no harm in it, either. I was happily cruising through my mid-twenties, respectable during the week and going wild once or twice a month, until that night with Amanda Bryce.

+++++

It was a particularly epic end-of-semester party at the Sigma Ep house, and I'd soon spotted pretty little Amanda Bryce looking uncomfortable as hell in the back hallway. Her friends had wandered off and she was all alone, bewildered and five feet away from the thumping speaker, so I swooped in and took her to a quiet(er) spot outside to chat. There, much to my surprise, we really hit it off. I rolled my eyes at the Jade song playing over the sound system and then we joked with one another about how it was overblown electro-pop crap. Perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising - I was a smooth talker, and just about any girl I got face time with for a handful of minutes was putty in my hands. I hardly had to do anything. Even so, I was enthused when Amanda agreed to head back to my place.

"I can't believe I'm doing this," she said. She was, perhaps, a bit buzzed, but I gauged her well within her ability to back out. Two beers in, tops.

"I can take you home if you like," I offered, shutting the engine off.

"No, I want to," Amanda said with a smirk. "It's been a long semester, one week until finals, and I need to de-stress if you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, totally. Well... this is my place. Mi casa es su casa."

We proceeded to have, in my opinion, a really great time. She was just my type - cute, blonde, on the petite side, but with curves, and she had a cutesy little innocence about her that turned to howling, toe-curling, bed-bending lust in the sack.

I woke up before her the next morning and plodded over to the kitchen to make breakfast for us both. When I came back to rouse her, Amanda was already waking, and she quickly went from asleep to confused to freaking the fuck out.

"Oh my God... oh my God... what happened?" she'd said. She looked at me, her eyes growing wide. "You... you raped me!"

"What?" was all I could think to say. Yes, I'd fucked her, and she'd been a very enthusiastic participant.

"You fucking raped me!" she sobbed - apparently genuine tears. And then she hurled my bedside lamp at me and, as I dodged, rushed me.

Maybe she was just dashing toward the door to 'escape'. That was the most probable explanation. But I'd just dodged the lamp cracking against the wall, dodged right into the doorway, so it looked to me like she was charging to attack. Right before she collided into me, some combination of fear and rage flitting through her eyes, I gave her a shove to keep her from causing me bodily harm. It was intended to be in self-defense, but Amanda was a lot smaller than me and the push sent her tumbling into the dresser, which she hit face-first and then collapsed to the ground.

Our brief interaction was a lot more dramatic than I'd intended. I rushed to see if she was okay and gasped - Amanda Bryce was dead… or at least I thought she was. I moved her hair back and empty eyes stared up at me. I felt beneath her nostrils but felt no breath, felt her chest and felt no heart beat, and blood oozed from a sizable gash on her forehead. I wasn't thinking my clearest at that moment, so I fled my apartment, leapt into my car, and drove for four blocks, half-thinking that I might hit up the local Work Source hardware store to pick up some supplies for body disposal. I shit you not - for a minute, I was fully prepared to dispose of Amanda's body to hide the evidence of my misdeeds.

Fortunately, I did the smart thing, instead. In a bind? Call Cousin Vince. So I called him up, explained my problem, and he did me a solid with some good advice:

"Don't say another fucking word to me, cuz. Not one iota," he said. I thought he was going to hang up on me, but he didn't. "Drive back to your place. Call the police. Call the paramedics. And don't say anything to the police until you call your lawyer. Are we clear?"

"Um... aren't you my lawyer?"

"Not unless you hire me," he said. "Which you haven't. And once we're under privilege, I'll decide if I take your case or hand it off to somebody just as good."

That was a lie, and he knew it - there's nobody as good as Vince Warner. Not in Palm Beach County, not anywhere in Southern Florida. The number as good as Vince anywhere you could count on one hand. But there were plenty of lawyers a tier or two down, and he could direct me to the best one I could afford. Ultimately, though, I didn't need to. Charming guy that I was, I convinced Vince that I hadn't done the deed, and he took my case as a family favor.

+++++

I returned to my place, returned to the scene of the crime, and discovered that the body of Amanda Bryce was nowhere to be found. Maybe she hadn't been quite dead. There was a puddle of piss, a palm-sized blot of blood, and no Amanda on my bedroom floor. Five minutes later, as I wracked my brain over what the fuck had just happened, as I pondered another call to Cousin Vincent, the cops made my choice for me. They showed up at my place, burst through the still-ajar door, pressed my face right into Amanda's piss as they cuffed me, and hauled me off on rape and attempted murder charges.

After our tête-à-tête, I had Cousin Vince convinced I was innocent, but the Bryces weren't and neither was the DA. And the Bryces were richer than Croesus… they must have blown a million dollars trying to get the charges to stick. And they had lots of sticky evidence.

They had the rape kit, for instance. It was positive for intercourse, of course. We'd fucked consensually, enthusiastically, and repeatedly. And then there were the bruises and the one laceration caused by her tumble into the dresser. That was my fault, but not unprovoked. No other signs of conflict or struggle.

"That's not at all atypical," the prosecution's witness said. "One head wound is enough to make somebody woozy, and after that they might not fight much."

But the wound was clearly from that morning, and not from the night that the alleged rape took place. Why hadn't she struggled then? The prosecution argued that she was too drunk to consent or to know what she was doing. They even found video evidence from a security camera nearby that showed grainy black and white footage of the two of us strolling to my car. Amanda stumbled (too much to drink, the prosecution alleged), I caught her, and we proceeded to my Subaru. Then Cousin Vincent went to the spot, took pictures of the ground, and then recovered the security footage of the Bryce's private investigators clearing the decorative rocks away from the boundary of the yard. He had people who could help, but Vince was working pro bono, so it was all him, and he'd come through like a champ. Amanda had tripped on a rock in the dark, and they'd tried to cover it up.

Then there was the testimony of Brianna Forrest. She was Amanda's friend and she testified that Amanda spoke of 'a creepy guy' matching my description who'd been hitting on her, and then that she saw the two of us leaving together, with Amanda very obviously distressed and trying to resist me. None of that had happened, of course, but she sure put on a show for the jury.

"She doesn't appear to be distressed in the video we just played. And why didn't you call anybody? Why didn't you get help for your friend?"

"I was scared. I was drunk and didn't want to get in trouble with my sorority for being there... look, I should have stopped him from kidnapping and raping Amanda, but I was scared. But I know what I saw!"

"Is that a fact?" Cousin Vince asked. "Did you know what you saw last fall at Villa Buena University?"

Silence. It turned out that Forrest was Brianna's mother's name, that she'd legally changed it only recently. Before that, she'd been Brianna Raines and, as a freshman at Villa Buena, she'd accused three men of rape and another man - a professor - of sexually harassing her friend, before contradicting evidence turned up and she was forced to recant (and was subsequently expelled for trying to blackmail the professor). And, confronted with this, Brianna Forrest broke down on the stand and admitted that the Bryce's investigators had pressured her, one of them offering her money to tell them what they wanted to hear.

"Objection!" the prosecutor shouted.

"To what?" the judge said. "Please continue, Mr. Warner."

"Is it safe to say, Ms. Forrest, that the account you've provided in your testimony isn't entirely accurate."

"Yeah," she admitted eventually. "I mean it might be true. I thought saying that stuff would help Amanda."

And, finally, there was the testimony of Mr. Grigoryan next door, who looked annoyed at the whole affair (to be fair, he looked annoyed at just about everything). The defense brought him onto the stand and got him to state that he'd heard loud noises and shouting on the night in question and that he'd always been suspicious of me.

"You say you've long been suspicious of my client, Mr. Grigoryan. Can you tell me how?" Vincent asked him.

"Yeah. He's been killing my house plants with that loud music. I'm pretty sure that's on purpose."

"I see. I'm sorry about your plants, sir. And you've stated that you heard loud noises on the night in question. I take it this wasn't loud music?"

"No, it wasn't music. It was 'oh God, oh yes' this and 'fuck me harder' that. The girl was so loud I had to sleep on the couch with headphones on."

"So it didn't sound like she was being brutally raped?"

"Sounded like she was having a hell of a time. Look... I recorded it on my phone to play for the super. You know, for a noise complaint."

Mr. Grigoryan proceeded to play what were clearly consensual sex sounds of masculine grunting and mumbling (my own) and the keening, climaxing wails of Amanda Bryce. The prosecuting attorney watched on in disbelief as yet another witness disintegrated before his eyes. The whole time, Amanda Bryce's father had his gaze fixed on me, staring ice-blue bloody daggers into me from across the courtroom. For her part, Amanda's expression throughout the proceedings went from venomous hate to uncertain anger to startled confusion. It was pretty clear she thought she'd been raped (for whatever reason), and the evidence was starting to make her doubt her own memory.

In the end, the jury took fifteen minutes to return a not guilty verdict on all charges, and I'm pretty sure they took that fifteen minutes just to maintain decorum. Vincent Warner was victorious yet again and I was a free man, my name clear in the eyes in the law. But not in the fury-blasting eyes of Mr. Bryce. Vince warned that I probably had a civil suit coming my way.

+++++

Maybe a civil suit was coming, but for the moment, I was victorious and vindicated. It was time to celebrate. Vincent had never lost a case and, assuming he'd continue his success, some of my friends and Sigma Ep brothers had set up a Martin Warner Exoneration Celebration in the 3,000 square foot executive suite in the beachfront Marchioness Hotel. I invited Vince, of course - he'd won the case, after all. He slapped my back and shook my hand.

"Yeah, of course!" he said. Then his phone buzzed. "Shit... I'll catch up with you later, Martin. An urgent matter with a VIP client's come up and I need to put in a few hours to get this thing on ice. Have a toast to me, yeah?"

"We'll have two toasts to you," I said. "Thanks a million, Vince."

That was the last I saw of Cousin Vince. From what little I can remember, it was an amazing party. There was a live band. There were pole dancers at the back of the suite. Two pole dancers - twins, lithe and sensual. There had to be a hundred guests there, including my brother and sister, who'd driven up from Miami to congratulate me and get a little drunk.

"I knew you didn't do it," Allie said. She hadn't sounded so sure over the phone last week, but I was willing to let bygones be bygones.

"The next drink's on me," Trevor said.

"It's an open bar, asshole!" I laughed.

"All the better!"

I drank. I schmoozed. I looked around for Cousin Vincent periodically. I said a toast to him but wanted to leave the second until he was actually in attendance after his VIP thing at work. But he never showed. It must have been three hours into the party and I was coasting up to a nice warm buzz when I felt a smooth caress against the small of my back.

"I hear congratulations are in order," she said. "Are you the man of the hour?"

I turned to face one of the stippers - beautiful, young, lithe, Asian... and those had to be implants. I looked for her sister and, sure enough, she slid through the crowd and handed me a drink.

"Drink up, big guy! You deserve it!" she chirped.

"I sure do," I laughed, putting an arm around her slim shoulders.

I took a sip. At least I think I did - it must have been the drink. That moment was the last bit of my old life that I would remember. Drinking bourbon at a party in my honor, already slightly drunk and with two beautiful, scantily-clad women doting on me. Not a bad way to go out.

OvidLemma

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