Free Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller by Clifford Irving

Savannah to take depositions and meet with government informers in an interstate drug case. I would drive up on Sunday and spend the night, get an early start at the Effingham County Courthouse on Monday morning. It might take a couple of days.
    Toba said, “I love Savannah. I could ask your mom to baby-sit.” “Probably have to fly up to Chattanooga too, and that wouldn’t be fun at all. Let’s do it another time.”
    That was the worst part. I felt morally shriveled for a day or two and considered backing out.
    But didn’t.
    I will get this out of my system. I will feel sufficient shame never to do it again.
    Some of Connie’s decorator friends had a cottage on Cumberland Island, across the Georgia state line south of St. Simons Island and Brunswick. On Sunday afternoon I put my car in an underground garage close to the courthouse. Connie picked me up and we drove along the coast in the gray Mercedes. I was behind the wheel; she had handed me the keys in a calfskin wallet.
    “What did you tell your husband?”
    “That I needed a few days of R and R on my own.”
    “That was enough to say?”
    “We’ve been married for twenty-two years.”
    She seemed to think that was sufficient answer. And I didn’t press. There were certain things I didn’t need to know.
    I felt like a bumpkin, a cracker. I was thirty-six then. I asked myself, Did I really think that for the rest of my life I’d be with only Toba? Have no other women?
    I had simply never thought about it.
    When the ferry from the hamlet of St. Marys reached Cumberland Island, the sun was resting on the sawgrass marshes like a drop of blood on a leaf. A fitful rain had died away. The night insects gathered in a humming cloud. At the cottage, Connie drew me inside and shut the screen door quickly. It was a log cabin with a stone fireplace and colorful Miró prints in niches. She moved me toward the piney bedroom, where a many-colored patchwork quilt covered a king-size bed. She lit scented candles on the bedside tables.
    She didn’t seem the type for log cabins and patchwork quilts. This was no earth mother. I held her for a moment at arms’ length, studying the expressions that flickered in her eyes, not letting her come closer.
    “I don’t think I’m cut out for infidelity,” I said.
    “How do you know? You haven’t ever been unfaithful.” She laughed good-humoredly; she wasn’t angry at all. “What you can’t handle is the prospect of infidelity. You get over that hump, honey, it’ll be a different ball game.”
    “Honey” was what a whore would call you. But it aroused me. She slipped out of her clothes, and the smell of her, as well as the sight of her nipples jutting from her white breasts, turned me into a rutting primitive. I took her from behind. I rammed at her that first time with no foreplay and without finesse. The finesse could come later.
    Connie kept screaming with pleasure.
    We were on an island, the house had its own little inlet. Only the night birds and the marsh mosquitoes heard.
    The affair lasted seven months, until two months before Solly was murdered. Connie went with me once to Tallahassee, took me again to Cumberland Island, often to local motels in the late afternoon, and once to her house, when Solly flew to New York. Weekends were difficult, but I did manage a few. A friend down in St. Augustine loaned Connie a guesthouse. Once Connie came to the courthouse in the early evening; I locked the door to my office and fucked her on my metal desk. Indictments, sworn witness statements, and JSO crime reports were flung about like candy wrappers in a high wind.
    My sex life with Toba had not been better since we were kids at FSU. I was a bull, resurgent. I can do it all. I’m not in love with Connie, I concluded. That would be the end of everything. But like the beautiful lady in the poem, la belle dame sans merci had me in thrall.
    With time, certain things about la belle dame became clear to me.
    I was not the first. I