Double Tap by Steve Martini

thinking. If the judge allows the DA to play that tape in front of the jury, moving pictures in living color of the defendant—who is now charged with murder—screwing the victim—who is now dead—chances of the state getting a conviction will go up about a thousand percent. And it won’t really matter who was on top.
    “I take it this wasn’t part of the security contract,” says Harry.
    Ruiz laughs. “No. It just sort of happened. Call it an after-hours thing. Off the books, you might say. Fact of the matter is, as I remember it, I was on my back, counting ceiling tiles, before I knew what she was doing.”
    “She raped you,” Harry says. “There we go. We have a defense. The murder was a crime of revenge.” Harry looks at me and smiles.
    “You’ll have to excuse my partner. He believes if you can’t defend a good murder case and have some fun in the process, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
    “I see his point. The fact of the matter is, while I don’t exactly remember how it happened, I don’t remember saying no as I was laying there, either. And it’s not a case of repressed memory.” He says it before Harry can say anything.
    “Oh, well,” says Harry.
    “Not that it bothered me much. Consenting adults and all.”
    “Still, you have to assume your employer might take a dim view,” I tell him.
    “You, I suspect, must have a knack for business”—Ruiz points at me with the smoking cigarette, holding it between two fingers—“because that’s exactly the point Madelyn made when she came back for seconds a few days later and I said no.”
    “She threatened you?”
    “Not in so many words. She just wondered out loud what the people at Karr, Rufus would say if they heard I wasn’t servicing the contract to her satisfaction.”
    “She said that to you?”
    “In so many words, yes.”
    “And what did you do?”
    “We both laughed, and then she got on top.”
    “I had an uncle was a night watchman,” says Harry. “He was always complaining it was such a boring job.”
    “He didn’t work executive protection at Isotenics,” says Ruiz.
    “So the prosecution is going to say that you had an affair with her and probably try to build on it from there.”
    “How is that?” he asks.
    “The usual scenario,” I say. “She tried to break it off. You refused. The jilted lover. A woman with lots of money. Fill in the blanks.”
    “It was nothing like that.”
    “Well, we’ll have our chance to tell the jury. But that’s likely to be their theory. That is, unless they have some other motive that’s better. Is there any other reason you might have wanted to kill her?”
    “I didn’t kill her.”
    “That’s not the point. The question is, did you have a motive?”
    “No.” He shakes his head. “I liked her. Why would I want to kill her?”
    “We could try a stipulation,” says Harry. “Admit that they had sexual relations. Specify the number of times this occurred. Try to sanitize it. Make it sound like an accountant’s audit report and hope we can glaze over the eyes of the jury. Try to keep the tape out of evidence.”
    “I haven’t seen the tape, but I can’t imagine it’s all that bad,” says Ruiz.
    “Fancy yourself a porn star, do you?” Harry quips.
    “No, no. It’s nothing like that. I guarantee you, there’s nothing kinky on the tape unless somebody dubbed it in.”
    “You’re thinking the federal government again?” Harry asks. “Do they have a federal office that does that kind of thing?”
    “Come on, gimme a break,” says Ruiz. “We had a fling. A romp in the hay. I didn’t love her. She didn’t love me. Two adults, we enjoyed the moment. She went her way, I went mine. That’s all there was to it.”
    “The problem is, she’s dead,” I say, “and somebody killed her.”
    “But I didn’t do it.”
    “Yeah, well, put that aside for the moment,” says Harry. “The more immediate problem is that videotape no doubt captures only a brief period in