matter?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Please describe in detail how you came into contact with Melanie Strum and everything that occurred thereafter, including how and why you killed her.”
Mull looked agonized. “For Godsake, Jordan-”
Ballston looked up for the first time. “Enough, Stan, enough! I’ve made my decision. You’re not here to get in my way. I just want you to be fully aware of everything I say.”
Mull shook his head.
Ballston seemed relieved by his attorney’s silence. He looked up at the camera. “How large an audience do I have?”
Becker looked disgusted. “Does it matter?”
“The damnedest things end up on YouTube.”
“This won’t.”
“Too bad.” Ballston smiled horribly. “Where should I begin?”
“At the beginning.”
“You mean when I saw my uncle fucking my mother when I was six years old?”
Becker hesitated. “Why don’t you start by telling us how you met Melanie Strum?”
Ballston leaned back in his chair, addressing his answer in an almost dreamy tone to a point somewhere high on the wall behind Becker. “I acquired Melanie through the special Karnala process. The process involves a branching journey through a sequence of portals. Now, each of these portals-”
“Hold on. You need to describe this in plain English. What the hell is a portal?”
Gurney wanted to tell Becker to relax, let the man speak, ask the questions later. But telling Becker what to do at this point could derail him completely.
“I’m talking about website links and passages. Internet sites offering choices of other sites, chat rooms leading to other chat rooms, always in the direction of exploring narrower and more intense interests, and finally leading to a direct one-on-one e-mail or text-message correspondence between customer and provider.” In light of the underlying subject matter, Ballston’s professorial tone struck Gurney as surreal.
“You mean you tell them what kind of girl you want and they deliver her?”
“No, no, nothing as abrupt or crude as that. As I said, the Karnala process is
“Satisfactory? In what way?”
“In the way of credibility. The people at Karnala become convinced of the seriousness of the customer’s intentions, and the customer becomes convinced of Karnala’s legitimacy.”
“What? Oh, I see your problem. I mean
Gurney was fascinated by the dynamics of the interrogation. Ballston, who was implicating himself in a capital crime for which he was bargaining to receive a less-than-capital sentence, seemed to be drawing a sense of control from his own calm narrative. Becker, nominally in charge, was the rattled one.
“Okay,” said Becker, “assuming that everyone ends up satisfied with everyone else’s legitimacy, what then?”
“Then,” said Ballston, pausing dramatically and looking Becker in the eye for the first time, “the elegant touch: the Karnala ads in the Sunday
“Say that again?”
“Karnala Fashion. Featuring the highest clothing prices on the planet: one-of-a-kind outfits, custom-designed for you, at a hundred thousand dollars and up. Lovely ads. Lovely girls. Girls wearing nothing but a couple of diaphanous scarves. Very stimulating.”
“What’s the relevance of these ads?”
“Think about it.”
Ballston’s creepy gentility was getting to Becker. “Shit, Ballston, I don’t have time for games.”
Ballston sighed. “I’d have thought it was obvious, Lieutenant. The ads aren’t for the clothes. They’re for the girls.”
“You’re telling me the girls in the ads are for sale?”
“Correct.”
Becker blinked, looked incredulous. “For a hundred thousand dollars?”
“And up.”
“So then what? You send off a check for a hundred grand, and they FedEx you the world’s highest-priced hooker?”
“Hardly, Lieutenant. You don’t order a Rolls-Royce from a magazine ad.”
“So you… what? Visit the Karnala showroom?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. The showroom is actually a screening room. Each of the currently available girls, including the girl featured in the advertisement, introduces herself in her own intimate video.”
“You talking about individual porno movies?”
“Something much better than that. Karnala operates at the most sophisticated end of the business. These girls and their video presentations are remarkably intelligent, wonderfully subtle, and carefully preselected to meet the customer’s emotional needs.” The tip of Ballston’s tongue ran idly across his upper lip. Becker looked like he might explode out of his chair. “I think what you’re failing to grasp, Lieutenant, is that these are girls with
“That’s what makes them worth a hundred grand?”
Ballston sighed indulgently. “And up.”
Becker nodded blankly. The man appeared to Gurney to be lost. “A hundred grand… for nymphomania… sophistication…?”
Ballston smiled softly. “For being exactly what one wants. For being the glove that fits the hand.”
“Tell me more.”
“There are some very good wines available for fifty dollars a bottle, wines that achieve ninety percent of perfection. A far smaller number, available for five hundred dollars a bottle, achieve ninety-nine percent of perfection. But for that final one percent of absolute perfection-for that you’ll pay five thousand dollars a bottle. Some people can’t tell the difference. Some can.”
“Damn! Here’s ordinary little me, thinking that a pricey hooker is just a pricey hooker.”
“For you, Lieutenant, I’m sure that’s the ultimate truth.”
Becker went rigid in his chair, his face expressionless. Gurney had seen that look too many times in his career. What followed it was usually unfortunate, occasionally career-ending. He hoped the camera and the presence of Stanford Mull, Esquire, would be effective deterrents.
Apparently they were. Becker slowly relaxed, looking around the room for a long minute, looking everywhere except at Ballston.
Gurney wondered what Ballston’s game was. Was he calculatedly trying to ignite a violent reaction in exchange for a legal advantage? Or was his laid-back condescension an effort to demonstrate his superiority as his life collapsed?
When Becker spoke, his voice was unnaturally casual. “So tell me about that screening room,
If Ballston heard it that way, he ignored it. “Small, comfortable, lovely carpet.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know. When I was picked up at Newark Airport, I was given a blindfold-one of those sleeping masks you see in old black-and-white movies. I was told by the driver to put it on and not take it off until I was informed that I was in the screening room.”
“And you didn’t cheat?”
“Karnala is not an organization that encourages cheating.”
