Student Choice Award

Winner of April 2012 Contest

INCRIMINATING PHOTOS by Laura Loomis

I could have avoided all that trouble, if only I had remembered to pay my blackmailer on time.

Normally I write the check with the rest of my monthly bills, so my husband, Worthington Tolliver IV, doesn’t see the photos of me with the 26-year-old tennis instructor. But I got distracted last month as I was writing checks to the Ladies’ Follicle Society (which provides wigs to needy children with bad haircuts), and to my plastic surgeon, Dr. Barnabas, who put this lovely slope on my nose. I got to daydreaming about last week’s tryst in the pool house with my young man, and then Worthy came in looking for his favorite golf clubs, and I stuffed the check into the envelope for the other blackmailer, the one who’s been threatening to expose our illegal stock trades. You’d think that the stock-trade blackmailer could have sent a refund or something; did he think I was tipping him for good service?

Anyway, I’ve been forgetful like that lately. Especially yesterday morning, when Worthy got the express-mailed photos of me getting served by the tennis pro. On a purely aesthetic level, the pictures were marvelous; Dr. Barnabas really took the droop out of my buttocks. You’d never know it was a fifty-three year old woman’s bottom. Worthy didn’t care about that. Do you know, when he gets angry, it’s only the left side of his face that turns purple? Some sort of blood-circulation deficiency, I think.

It wasn’t so much the cheating, he said, but how could I not pay the blackmailer? “I pay my blackmailer every single month,” he fumed, “so he won’t tell you about my affair with the golf caddy!” Naturally we got in a huge fight over that, and I completely forgot that I had a taxi waiting downstairs with the meter running. After our quarrel and makeup sex, I finally flounced downstairs with my hair and makeup retouched, only to find that I owed the cab driver six hundred thousand dollars. I said that was outrageous and I’d be damned if I’d pay it. He said he’d get it out of me one way or another, and I told him I’d already said no to one extortionist recently (which wasn’t technically true, since really I’d just forgotten to pay), and I certainly wasn’t going to pay another.

So when he came back with the police, I tried to explain that it was all the fault of the blackmailer, but I was no longer messing with any of them, except the one who kept threatening to go the police about our illegal stock trades.

That turned out to be the wrong thing to say.

So anyway, Your Honor, that’s how I wound up here. I’m sorry about the taxi bill and the illegal stock trades and trying to claw the nice policeman’s eyes out, and everything. Next time I see a tennis instructor with nice thighs, I’ll go shoe-shopping instead. Or ask Dr. Barnabas for another tightening on my calves.

When my cellmate turned out to be my personal assistant, I thought at least I’d be comfortable in jail. Then I found out she was arrested for disseminating obscene photographs – of me and the tennis instructor! (Did I mention how good my thighs look in the pictures? Not lumpy at all.) Yes, my own assistant was the blackmailer. But only for my affair, not for my husband’s affair. She’d figured out that my husband’s blackmailer was the taxi driver, so she was trying to get some incriminating photos of him, which is how she got caught.

Have they found the taxi driver yet?

Anyway, I think I’ve seen enough of my assistant’s vacation pictures – she fancies herself quite the photographic artiste –and these orange jail uniforms simply won’t do.

Can I go now?

Ten years?

Did I mention that my assistant has some pictures of Your Honor at a beach in Southampton with a very attractive young law clerk?

Time served? How lovely.

Yes, you have a good day too.

___________________

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