Once A Liar. A.F. Brady

       THEN

      I left the club that night before Marcus did, sick to my stomach by his behavior with the dancer. Marcus’s cruelty was deeply etched in his treatment of others, and as I walked home that night, I feared that Juliette’s words were truer than I had given them credit for. I walked downtown, the air cool and fresh, my head filled with contradiction.

      I had come to New York to become the next Marcus Rhodes. My ambitions were materializing before me, and I couldn’t allow myself to be held back professionally because I took personal issue that my mentor turned out to be cruel and inhumane. I always knew I’d have to temper my soft side to succeed in this business, but I wouldn’t allow myself to become like Marcus. He was just teaching me a lesson with the dancer, I told myself. A lesson I would be sure to learn sooner rather than later.

      It took every ounce of my energy to dig up the dirt on the Bogovian accuser. On the surface, she seemed picture-perfect. I asked around at her high school and her university down in North Carolina. I called everyone who might be willing to throw an old friend under the bus. A college roommate proved to be just the person I was looking for.

      The case was making headlines well before we went to trial. Bogovian was portrayed horrifyingly, if accurately, in the press, and my job became harder as I was forced not only to deliver a case that would produce sufficient doubt, but also surmount the image the media had disseminated. Jury selection was a nightmare; everyone in New York had heard of Stu Bogovian and everyone had an opinion. Finding peers without preconceived notions proved incredibly difficult. I was meticulous in my preparations, acutely aware of Marcus’s expectations of me.

      The trial itself didn’t take more than a couple of weeks. The alleged victim had a roommate in college who was willing to testify that she was into kinky sex. The roommate had told me a story about the girl being left tied to the bedpost in an encounter gone wrong, and she simply lay there, naked and spread-eagled, waiting for the roommate to find scissors to remove the binding. It started to seem plausible to me that this woman was nothing but a money-grubbing slut, like Marcus said she was, looking to extort a wealthy man. She had probably asked to be tied up, I told myself.

      I brutalized the girl’s reputation in court. I brought up every name, every story, every sexual encounter I could verify. After closing arguments, there was nothing to do but wait while the jury deliberated.

      Marcus stood by me, reminding me to temper my sense of remorse for publicly destroying the intern’s credibility. But mostly it felt like he was just trying to relieve me of human decency.

      It took the jury four days of deliberation to come back with a verdict. When the jurors filed back into the courtroom and we all stood to listen to their decision, my confidence was so high, I had my celebratory cigar unwrapped and clipped in my jacket pocket. I had discredited the accuser. I had poked holes in the prosecution’s timeline and evidence. Although I struggled with the moral depravity, I’d had to do what I’d done to get the win. I knew we would come out on top.

      The foreman walked the paper to the judge, and as he read the verdict to himself, he looked directly at me. I could see the traces of a smile upturning the corners of his mouth. My confidence grew even more.

      I stood up and pulled Stu’s chair out for him. “Here we go,” I whispered. Stu smiled and shook my hand.

      The foreman returned to the bench, looked at the victim’s lawyer as he spoke and refused to make eye contact with me or with Stu. “We, the jury, in the above entitled action, find the defendant Stuart Bogovian guilty of assault in the first degree.” They went on to find him guilty of first-degree attempted rape.

      The room suddenly felt warm and claustrophobic. I turned to look at Stu, who fell back into his seat and grasped his greasy hair with his sweaty palms. He tugged the bottom of my suit jacket and pleaded with me to do something. “What the fuck, Caine? I thought you said we had this in the bag?”

      I couldn’t choke out a word, watching Harrison and Eric Gordon explode with excitement as cheers rose from the crowd. My head felt stuffy and faraway, like I was watching the verdict on an old television through layers of static. Everything felt like it was moving quickly around me, but I was trapped in some slow-motion underwater world where I couldn’t move or react.

      The bailiff put Stu in handcuffs and court officers led him away while I stood, disoriented and confused, wondering if what was unfolding around me was really happening.

      Stu struggled as the officers opened the door to exit the courtroom, and he screamed accusations and profanities my way. “You’re a fucking fraud, Caine! You’ll never succeed in this town, mark my words!” The door slammed behind him as Harrison and Eric walked across the aisle to gloat in my face, unable to contain their satisfaction.

      Eric, smirking at me, extended his hand, clearly a faux-professional gesture.

      “Can’t win ’em all, eh, Peter?” He laughed.

      I gathered up my papers and briefcase, nodded his way and muttered, “Well played.”

      Harrison, for his part, didn’t even attempt to shake my hand or show any dignity. He just slapped his ADA on the back and led him away, looking at me with judgment plastered all over his face.

      The reporters waiting outside the courthouse were merciless. Shoving cameras and microphones in my face, hollering questions as I shielded myself from their torments, walking quickly to the curb and jumping into the back of a cab.

      Once home, my mind finally cleared, and the realization of what just happened began to sink in. The sickening taste of defeat didn’t sit well with me. I poured myself two fingers of scotch to wash down the bitterness in my throat and turned on CNN to find Eric and Harrison on-screen. Harrison stood larger than life behind his ADA, and Eric took the microphone to speak. Before I could hear what he had to say, my phone rang, and I snatched it up immediately.

      “Angry?” Marcus asked me from the other side of the line.

      “Furious,” I responded, though I was still more bewildered than angry.

      “Good. That’s the kind of fuel you need.” He drew in a deep drag of his cigarette and I could almost hear him grin.

      Just as I was about to respond, I suddenly understood what was happening. “You did this...you did this on purpose? You knew we would lose?”

      “Of course we would lose, Peter. This was a completely unwinnable case. I’ve always known what you were capable of, and I’m not talking about legal skills.” He sucked in another drag. “You needed to get your ego in check and you needed to access the useful parts of yourself.”

      “The useful parts?” A rapid succession of visuals passed through my head, and I remembered watching Marcus Rhodes, my legal hero, a god to my classmates in law school, gutting his opponents in courts without mercy or pity.

      “The useful parts are the cold ones, Peter. The unsentimental, remorseless, brutal parts. That’s what you need in your career. Put that sympathetic bullshit behind you and embrace the fury you feel right now.” He was a monster, and I had sold my soul. Juliette’s warning that afternoon in Central Park flashed like a neon sign in my head.

      As Marcus instructed me to accept my spite and anger, I struggled to reconcile my thoughts. I couldn’t accept that Marcus would set me up to fail and damage my pristine reputation, the one thing I wanted so badly to maintain. I looked