The One Who Got Away

by Caroline Overington

  SEX! LIES! VIDEOTAPE!

  ‘I take it you’ve read this?’ I asked, holding up the newspaper.

  ‘I have. It’s an old copy of our local paper,’ said David.

  ‘For the sake of our audience, I hope you won’t mind if I read out some of what it says here?’

  ‘Do your worst,’ he said.

  I won’t quote it exactly, the text is online for anyone who wants to read it, but the story basically said that David had encouraged Lyric and others on staff to engage in orgies with clients, and that he’d taped the sessions.

  The suggestion was, of course, blackmail.

  David objected. ‘Wait, wait, wait … that’s what the story says, but look, those claims are just ludicrous. I was not running a brothel from Capital Shrine.’

  ‘But this report, it’s based on police sources.’

  ‘That’s what it says,’ said David sarcastically, ‘but it’s false. Because yes, it’s true that Lyric didn’t stop with just that one Big Fish. Yes, things did get out of control, and some of the people she lured into our office were in positions of power. Yes, there was a politician, and yes, a prominent businessman, but these were not orgies and there was no brothel.’

  ‘Well, if this article is wrong,’ I said, folding my hands into my lap, ‘perhaps you can tell us what did happen.’

  ‘I’m happy to do that, because I have nothing to hide. The first of the Big Fish wanted to see Lyric again. She told me he had called her the next day, with some nonsense about having forgotten to sign the forms. With no encouragement from me, she played up to him. She said: “Yes, I noticed that. And I’m glad that you forgot. Why don’t you come over and we can go over the whole thing again.” And she said things like, “No, not now. After hours. And perhaps some wine for you this time?”

  ‘And of course he did come to the office, and I stayed in my office, again with the blinds down, while Lyric worked her magic. And once that pattern was set, she just kept at it. We had so many recordings of Lyric with this Big Fish, it was ridiculous. Also, incriminating. Lyric would buzz this guy in, and he would go lumbering into her office, where she would be sitting without her skirt on. Heels, yes, but no skirt and she would hold out a glass of wine to him, and he would take it and there was absolutely no ambiguity about what was going on.’

  ‘But Lyric wasn’t seeing only that one Big Fish. She was seeing other clients?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said David. ‘He wasn’t a one-off and he wasn’t the only one. Lyric played her game with a couple of other clients. And, look, at the time, it seemed like a dream come true because none of these clients were inclined to withdraw their money. But there was no brothel. No group-sex sessions …’

  ‘But you did have another lover on staff.’

  ‘Not a lover. No. Look, I’m perfectly happy to be completely honest with you and your viewers. On one occasion, Lyric called Sunny into my office. This was during an inspection. I had no idea what she was up to. I leapt back from what I had been doing to Lyric. Sunny came in, and I suppose she had no idea either, but it wouldn’t have taken long to figure it out. Lyric swivelled towards her, on my desk – and she was wearing no underwear. Lyric said something like, “Leave if you want, but if you’re staying, close the blinds.” Well, that was a signal to the rest of the staff if I ever saw one.

  ‘And Sunny hesitated. She had been with me longer than Lyric. She was less experienced at probably everything in life. Her job was a simple one: answering phones, filing documents. She looked at me, sitting in my office chair, and I didn’t know what to signal to her – my mind was just blown by these events – but then she turned and went back towards the door and I didn’t know what she was going to do: leave, or quit, or whatever. But she pressed the button for the blinds and the blinds came down, and she came back to my desk, at which point, I lifted her onto the desk, and Lyric opened Sunny’s thighs, and displayed her underwear to me, saying: “Well, it seems that she’s been a good girl, Mr Wynne-Estes. She’s properly attired. You’ll be rewarded for that in a moment, Sunny, but remember, these inspections will be taking place regularly, and should you ever forget your panties, you can expect to be disciplined.”

  ‘Sunny said: “What does that mean?” and I demonstrated some of the discipline with a few slaps of my hand on Lyric’s behind. It was all a bit of a game. And Sunny didn’t seem to be at all concerned about it. I said: “You have passed the inspection, Ms Bechara, but let’s see how things look tomorrow,” and that was the end of it. The absolute end of it. There was no tomorrow.’

  ‘And do you know why not?’

  ‘I don’t. All I know is that Lyric somehow managed to co-opt Sunny into joining her at her apartment – not at work, at her apartment – when the Big Fish came to visit, and that was something I knew nothing about. Absolutely nothing. I know it happened. The police told me it happened. But I knew nothing about it.’

  ‘But you knew that Lyric was seeing your clients at her apartment?’

  ‘I knew that eventually,’ said David, stressing the point. ‘It was a while before I knew that. I assumed that Lyric was mostly seeing my clients in her office, and that she was recording them in her office. And, to be honest, I didn’t understand why she was recording them. I told Lyric, we don’t need to record them. We weren’t planning to blackmail them, or I certainly wasn’t. The idea was to keep them as clients, with their money still in Capital Shrine investments, so that I might buy some time.’

  ‘But wait just a moment,’ I said. ‘If we can just go back to this Big Dave email account … if I have the timing right here, it was around this time, or shortly afterwards, that you started telling Lyric that you loved her.’

  An assistant from Sally & Sons took a quick step forward.

  David said: ‘I—’

  ‘And that you no longer loved Loren,’ I said.

  ‘I—’

  ‘And that you wanted to leave your wife, but you were concerned about the financial wreckage.’

  ‘But not—’

  ‘And that you could not wait to start, and I quote, “a new life” with Lyric.’

  ‘Look,’ said David. His tone was angry. ‘If I could just be allowed to answer. Yes, it’s true I said those things. Some time after Lyric began seeing these Big Fish, she also began pressing me for a time frame to get out of my marriage. I didn’t want to lose Loren and the girls, but …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But like a fool, I began telling Lyric what she wanted to hear: that I would get out of my marriage as soon as I could. She asked me to set a date and I did. I said, okay, end of this year, but I had no intention of sticking by that date. It was a date I plucked from the air.’

  ‘But hold on,’ I said, ‘this email I have here clearly says: “Yes, I am in love with you. Yes, I want to be with you.”’

  ‘Not true,’ said David.

  ‘It’s not true that’s what it says?’ I waved the printout at him. ‘Or not true that you didn’t love Loren?’

  ‘It’s not true that I didn’t love Loren.’

  ‘But that’s what it says, David.’ I held the paper higher. ‘That’s what it says right here.’

  ‘I know that’s what it says. But that was written when I was trying to keep Lyric onside. When I would’ve said anything to keep her involved in my business. Because she was saving my business. I said those things to Lyric, but I loved Loren. I didn’t want to leave my wife, and I desperately didn’t want her to leave me …’

  ‘And yet,’ I said, ‘when Loren forced out the truth about your affair, you still didn’t tell her the whole truth.’

  ‘How so?’ said David, sounding confused.

  ‘The sex tapes. You didn’t tell Loren about the sex tapes. You told her about your affair. You told her about your financial problems. But you told her absolutely nothing about the fact that you had captured a number of powerful men having sex with your assistant on tape, did you?’

  ‘No, that’s true,’ said David. For th
e first time in our interview, he sounded grim. ‘You’re right. She had no idea.’

  * * *

  Of all the curious characters in David Wynne-Estes’s life, surely the most curious is his daffy marriage counsellor. As far as I can tell, Bette Busonne has no actual qualifications to work as a therapist, yet she commands around $350 an hour to guide her clients through what she calls the Busonne Method.

  What’s the Busonne Method? To my mind, it’s one of the craziest therapies I’ve ever encountered and I would have killed to get Bette on air talking about it, but on that score, we were out of luck.

  As part of our negotiations with David, my team had asked his team whether he objected to us heading out to see Bette.

  David had groaned at the very mention of her name. ‘She’s a quack.’

  ‘Then let us expose her,’ I argued.

  ‘Oh, be my guest,’ he said, ‘but I think you’ll find she’s gone to ground,’ and so it proved. My staff telephoned Bette’s office, and her home. We sent emails and letters by registered post. Finally, we turned up on her porch with a camera crew in tow.

  I rapped on the door, using the old-style knocker. David had already told us that Bette’s consulting rooms were behind the lace curtains to the left of the front door as you face the house. I saw those curtains move. I didn’t see Bette – she is seventy-three years old, without a facelift, so I’m sure I would have recognised her – but her dogs started to yap.

  I put my face close to the window, saying: ‘Ms Busonne? It’s Liz Moss. I’m with Fox9. We’d like to talk to you about Loren Wynne-Estes.’

  She shouted back: ‘Go away or I’ll call the police.’

  I said: ‘I’d like to talk to you about the Busonne Method.’

  She shouted back again: ‘What goes on between myself and my clients is confidential.’

  I pressed a piece of paper to the glass. ‘I have a letter here from David, releasing you from your obligations in that regard.’

  ‘I don’t care what you’ve got,’ she said. ‘Go away.’

  We stayed until a patrol car arrived and the police asked us to leave, but if Bette thought that was the end of it, she was wrong. We staked her out for a few days, and eventually got footage of her shopping at Whole Foods. We also had David’s account of their sessions – a written statement – which we intended to place on our website for everyone to read. The statement said:

  As part of the process of restoring my marriage after my affair, I agreed to attend couples counselling. I don’t know where my wife first met Bette Busonne, but she told me that Bette had developed an unconventional approach designed to help couples heal.

  My wife held Bette in high regard and before the first session warned me that she expected me to follow all of Bette’s instructions to the letter.

  Bette’s approach is known as the Busonne Method. Her mantra is: The Whole Truth. Lies are toxic and will poison the path forward. Honesty As Policy.

  Loren was permitted to ask me questions and I was required to answer completely and honestly.

  Loren’s first question was whether I had ever told Lyric that I loved her. I had, so I said: ‘Yes, I did,’ and that hurt Loren deeply.

  I tried to explain, saying, ‘But I didn’t mean it, and I wasn’t serious,’ but Bette jumped in, saying: ‘And what else did you tell her? Did you tell her that you didn’t love your wife?’

  I said: ‘Yes, I did say that. But I didn’t mean that, either. This was a very complex situation.’

  I was prepared to explain, but Loren was already a weeping mess. I couldn’t see the point of making her suffer any further, but Bette’s approach is to be as hard as nails. I was happy to confess to the affair. I had already apologised and my instinct was not to go over things that could only hurt my wife.

  Bette snarled: ‘You don’t think she’s already hurting?’

  Yes, Loren was already hurting, because I had cheated on her. And now she wanted to see this counsellor in whom she apparently had great faith.

  So I said: ‘Lyric wanted me to get out of my marriage. She was a volatile person. She could explode with very little warning, which is why I had to tell her what she wanted to hear.’

  Bette said: ‘Loren, how do you feel, hearing that your husband told his mistress that he didn’t love you?’

  Well, I’ll never forget how Loren looked at that moment. She was curled into her chair with her feet tucked under her bottom, almost like a small child. Her face was streaked with mascara and her nose had started to run.

  I said: ‘Can we please stop? Look at my wife. She’s in agony.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure she is, but who’s to blame for that?’ said Bette, and then she sent us home with what amounted to an order to talk about the affair for a further twenty minutes after the girls had gone to bed, and not just that night but every single Thursday night for the next eight weeks.

  I was aghast. As I understood it, as soon as the girls were reliably asleep, I would have to take a seat in our sitting room while Loren would sit opposite and assail me with questions about the affair.

  ‘She can ask anything she wants,’ Bette said, ‘and you, David, will answer. Anything she wants to know. Specifically. About the affair. But only at that precise time of day and only for twenty minutes. After that, Loren, you must let up. You are not permitted to harangue David for hours on end. You get twenty minutes and then you stop. I expect you BOTH to stick to these rules.’

  I tried to object. ‘I don’t see what good can come of this. It’s like rubbing salt into a raw wound.’

  Loren swung around and cried at me, ‘I knew you would do this,’ meaning that I would try to get out of therapy, so I agreed to go ahead.

  Loren had already told Bette that questions about my affair swirled around in her head all day. Where did we meet? What did we do? Did we talk about Loren? What had I told Lyric about my sex life with my wife? How many people in Bienveneda knew about the affair?

  Bette’s theory was that Loren would keep obsessing until she had answers to these questions. I didn’t necessarily accept that, but if the Busonne Method was going to save my marriage, I was determined to give it a go. And at first, it wasn’t too bad. Talking about the affair in a tentative, almost curious way did seem to give Loren some relief. She would cry and sometimes she would attack me, but the twenty-minute limit on question time meant that I was soon off the hook.

  By the third week, Loren had exhausted most of the more basic questions and had begun demanding intimate details of what had gone on. Would I kiss Lyric before sex and if so, what kind of kiss? Would I kiss Lyric on the neck? Would I kiss Lyric on the breasts? Did we have oral sex? If so, was I performing oral sex on Lyric or the other way around? My role was to answer these questions and that was extremely difficult because, whatever I said, Loren would sob or fly into a rage. Week after week this went on and I began to doubt the wisdom of it.

  I asked Bette: ‘How does hearing the intimate details of my sexual encounters with another woman help Loren heal?’

  She said: ‘What’s your alternative? That you and Lyric keep your secrets to yourselves?’

  So we carried on, with Loren asking questions in a more or less obsessive way. She was particularly interested in those occasions where Lyric had ‘invaded her space’, by which she meant those times Lyric had come to our home, or ridden in our car. It’s no exaggeration to say that Loren craved explicit detail about these encounters.

  We had three main cars: my Porsche, which I call Middy, for Mid-Life Crisis; Loren’s SUV, which the girls called the Lady Bug; and the BMW sedan that we used as a family car, which we called Beep. In one of our very early sessions with Bette, I had confessed to having had a sexual encounter with Lyric in Beep. Later that night, during what I called the ‘mandatory reporting’, Loren demanded details of that encounter, so I told her. I had been at a lunchtime function with Lyric at the Bienveneda Golf Club. For some reason, I was driving Beep. Lyric jumped in the passenger seat to get a l
ift back to the office. At some point, I felt her hand massaging me. This was near the beginning of the relationship when I was still sex-starved, so I allowed her to unzip my trousers. Loren insisted on knowing what happened next and I had no choice other than to tell her that Lyric had performed oral sex on me while I was driving.

  I relayed this episode to Loren in the starkest, plainest detail possible. She got up from the sofa, went into the garage and attacked Beep with a golf club. I remember thinking: ‘This is very Tiger Woods; everyone in the street is going to know what’s going on.’ Also, because we were under considerable financial pressure, I couldn’t get the car repaired. Unbeknown to Loren, I had by then allowed the insurance premiums on all the cars to lapse, so I had to park the car towards the back of our garage and place a cover over it so that visitors and the twins couldn’t see the damage.

  Another time, Loren asked if I had ever had sex with Lyric in our family home. I had been dreading the question, because Lyric visited our house twice. Our homes were actually quite close together, separated mainly by the Lemon Grove, and there had been a few occasions when I’d slipped out after Loren fell asleep, and cut through the Lemon Grove to get to Lyric’s apartment. But that wasn’t good enough for Lyric. She wanted to visit me in my home. My reaction, when I first heard that, was no way. Never. But I had gotten reckless, and Lyric was complaining quite a lot about feeling like a second-class citizen in our relationship.

  I decided to wait for a day when I knew Loren had no staff on, and when she had plenty of appointments: committee-work, banking, manicure, and so on. My idea was to sneak Lyric into the house in something like a two-hour window. It was dangerous but doable. We drove from the office. I didn’t tell her where we were going. She was amazed when I pulled into the garage. I had turned off the security cameras so there would be no evidence that she was ever there. I showed Lyric inside.

  Lyric remarked how huge the place was. I suppose it was. She looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece. Pictures of Loren and our girls. She went into the master bedroom and sat on the corner of the bed and used my tie to pull me towards the bed, and although I hadn’t planned on having sex with her, we ended up having sex on the bed.