Case of Lucy Bending Read Online Free PDF

Three-B Law?" Holloway asked.
    "Bullshit Baffles Brains. Every time. So I figured I'd sing a song for those mob guys. I told them they were trying to invest in my weakness, not in my strength. I told them I know shit-all about the production of porn. But when it comes to processing, I know as much about it as anyone south of New York. I'm talking about the conversion of film to tape, the reproduction of tapes into cartridges and cassettes, the technology of video disks, and so forth. So why not, I said, get someone else to shoot the goddamn stuff, do the actual production, and I'd take over the technical end."
    "There goes my dream of stardom," Turk Bending said.
    "I figured this way," Empt went on. "In case the law did move in, I'd be in a hell of a better position if all I had was a factory full of automated machines than if I had a studio full of naked creamers sucking every cock in sight, including Dobermans and donkeys. That makes sense, don't it? I could even claim I didn't know what was on the tapes; I just took them in and made copies. Who the hell has the time to inspect every negative they develop? Bill, what do you think?"
    "I don't know," Holloway said slowly. "I don't know all that much about obscenity law. I think you're probably right that as merely a processor, your culpability would be less than that of the producers and sellers. But there'd still be risk."
    "Of course there'd be risk. But the money!"
    "Better talk to a lawyer, Luther," Bending advised.
    "I did," Empt said. "But that's getting ahead of my story. Come on, drink up. All this gabbing makes me thirsty."
    The moon was high now, to the south, sailing through a serene sky. Occasionally they saw the lights of an airliner letting down for the Fort Lauderdale airport. Occasionally a cloud, no larger than a puff of smoke, drifted, dissipated, vanished.
    They were not conscious of the noise of waves slapping the beach, or the rustle of palm fronds. The tropical world was there, but they didn't feel it, didn't sense it.
    "They looked at each other," Luther Empt continued. "The mob guys. That's when we went to Palm Beach for dinner. They picked my brain, and I let them. Technical stuff. Video cassettes versus video disks. They wanted to know which I thought would be the most popular. I told them I didn't know, and no one else did either. In my business, I'm getting ready to go both ways. I told them that in their business, they better hope it was video disks because tapes are too easy to pirate. Any garage mechanic can copy a TV tape. They laughed and said they had some experience with guys pirating their eight- and sixteen-millimeter films, making duplicate prints from the original, but they said those problems had been solved."
    "Oh sure," Turk Bending said. "And the guys who tried it are now walking around on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean wearing cement boots."
    "Probably," Empt said, shrugging. "Those guys play hardball. But I told them that the big problem with video tapes wouldn't be with pirates trying to peddle copies; it would be with the average joe who buys a porn cassette. Then he calls in a neighbor who's got a player, too, and it's the easiest thing in the world for the neighbor to rip off a copy on a blank tape. Get it? You buy porn, and I copy it for my library. Then I buy, and you tape my cassette. There goes your billion-dollar market. So I told these guys they better pray that video disks make it big, because it's practically impossible to copy a disk—for the average guy anyway. Now you're getting into laser technology and expensive equipment.
"Anyway, that's mostly what we talked about at dinner. Technical stuff, and how I'd be the sole processor of then-east coast production. They said the proposition sounded good to them, and they'd present it to their people and get back to me. And that's how we parted. They paid for the dinner. I had a great red snapper."
There was a pause.
"Is that the end of it?" William Holloway asked,