Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (19 page)

Even though I knew that Gil was a suspect himself, his words were reaching me.

“I couldn’t do that.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I mean that there is no way I could pretend to be…” I didn’t even know what to call it. I could no longer call Cleo a prostitute or a call girl. Or a sex worker. All those words came with attitudes and judgments attached. She was a woman who had feelings and thoughts and loved, even if she also played games acting out scenarios that brought pleasure to the men she worked with, who paid her too much money for what she did because it was not anything they could get anywhere else.

“You don’t have to pretend to be anything. Just meet them. Let them interview you. You interview them. Cleo always set up free first dates between the girls and the prospective clients. She didn’t want any man to pay two thousand for an evening with a woman who wasn’t what he wanted. All the guys know about the first-date policy. Of course, with the out-oftowners or the gift girls clients hired for their friends or associates, that wasn’t how it worked. But Cleo didn’t see those guys. Her clients, her regulars, the ones she saw herself, have been calling. They want to see someone else while she’s away—because that’s what I told them, that she was away. Her guys expect to have a date before they commit. They’re the heavy hitters. The ones who come in regularly. The ones who count on her. And the ones who have something to lose if they’re exposed. One of these men might be the one who has her.”

“You have to go back to the police, Gil. You have to give them these men’s names.” But even as I said it I knew how impossible that would be for him to do. Just as I couldn’t think of doing it. What if Cleo was really away on a trip? What if she wasn’t in danger?

If we gave out information that was not ours to give, we could destroy her.

“You know I can’t do that,” Gil said. “I’ve tried to figure out another way to do this. To set up Cleo’s clients with one
of the other girls and try to get the information that way. But they aren’t smart enough. Or intuitive enough. They’re college girls. Out-of-work actresses. None of them have any psychological training. None of them could find out anything.”

I shook my head. Even though I’d told Nina I wanted to do this, confronted with the real possibility, I knew I could never go through with it.

“I know it sounds crazy. But I promise, you don’t have to have sex with any of them. Just meet them. Just take their psychological pulse.”

I stood up. “Mr. Howard, I’m sorry, but there are ethical considerations here, and what you suggest breaks about every one of them I can think of.”

He stood up, too. And we faced each other. Extending his hand, he held out a white card. I took it. It was his business card, with the name and address of the Diablo Cigar Bar embossed in blood-red letters.

“That’s my private number. Just think about it, please.”

He paused as if he wasn’t sure he should say anything else. I tried to read his face. But whether it was grief, worry or guilt, I couldn’t tell.

“She told me when she met you that she felt as if she’d been lost and had finally found the person who was going to help her find herself. She came off as so assured and strong. But she wasn’t. She was vulnerable. Just another woman who didn’t understand her own worth.”

He left me standing there in the middle of my office.

The sun was out and the room was flooded with the morning light, but it seemed like the dead of winter to me.

Wrapping my arms around myself, I tried to stop shivering, but all I could think of were those damn words he had used. As if they were some kind of code.

But he couldn’t have known. Not about
The Lost Girls
.
There was no way Gil Howard knew how important saving those girls was. Even though the one who mattered most was long gone.

I
called Gil the next day and told him I was willing to proceed with his plan and that there were five men who, based on Cleo’s descriptions, I wanted to meet. Then I gave him their nicknames and some information I’d gleaned from the manuscript. It was too easy. He knew all but one from the nicknames alone—clearly she’d referred to them that way with him. The fifth, he said, he wasn’t sure about and would need to think about it. It might be someone she hadn’t seen in a long time and he’d forgotten who it was. We got off the phone after planning that I’d go to the Diablo the next evening at around seven-thirty for my first meeting.

I spent the rest of that day and most of the next trying not to think about that night. And when my last patient left, I shut the door and changed my clothes.

Gil had explained that the entrance to the Diablo Cigar Bar on East Fifty-fifth Street was through an unmarked door in
the lobby of a small and exclusive hotel called the Bristol-Trent.

There were other private clubs hidden behind unmarked doors in Manhattan—Raffles in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, for instance—so the location in itself wasn’t that unusual. An exclusive club tucked away inside another establishment protected a patron’s privacy. But certainly not all private clubs offered the same extras as the Diablo.

Cleo’s book had described the way Diablo worked in detail. Membership was a onetime fifty-thousand-dollar bond. Nonrefundable. There were yearly dues in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars, which was applied to drinks, cigars and light meals. Through the club’s concierge, men could book a room at the Bristol-Trent Hotel. And for an additional fee they could book an assignation through Cleo.

It was as safe and private as possible.

I stood across the street for more than ten minutes, staring at the hotel’s facade, trying to get up the nerve to finally cross the street. I was worried I didn’t know how to be the kind of woman I was expected to be. Acting out a charade wasn’t my trade.

Cleo Thane’s voice wasn’t the one I heard while I stood there. It wasn’t Gil’s voice or the voice of the detective who had asked for my help.

It was my daughter’s.

“But why aren’t you a real doctor?” she had asked me a year before.

“I am a real doctor, Dulcie.”

“No. You just talk to people about sex.” She made a face. “You don’t heal them.”

“I make them feel better. Doesn’t that count? I help them to make their lives better.”

She had shrugged. “I guess. But I wish you were the kind of real doctor who saved people.”

I crossed the street, feeling wobbly and ridiculous in my get-up.

My black skirt was shorter than the length I usually wore, my legs were encased in expensive hose, my heels were the highest and pointiest I could find. Remembering Cleo’s Jimmy Choo pumps, I’d run out at lunch and bought a pair of the ridiculously expensive stilettos, horrified at the price tag and wondering how I was ever going to walk in them.

I’d spent more time and money than I’d planned on the shoes, but after making that purchase, I stopped off at Victoria’s Secret and purchased lace underwear. Light green satin. If I was going to play the part, I wanted to feel the part; I remembered that from my mother. It might be easier to fake it if I was at least in character.

Except I felt like I was wearing a costume.

I smoothed my skirt down and noticed my hands. Damn. I hadn’t done a good job of preparing at all. My fingernails were unpolished. And of everything, that unsettled me.

How many other mistakes was I making? How silly was this whole charade?

I’d never pull it off. And besides, what did I hope to accomplish? Did I really think I’d be able to psyche out these men well enough to figure out if one of them had done Cleo harm?

The doorman opened the front door for me and I stepped over the threshold. Inside the mirrored lobby, just as Gil had described, was a door to the right, almost behind the concierge’s desk. Anyone could open it, but only the men who had enough money and cleared Cleo and Gil’s rigorous credit check and police-record check were allowed in.

Once through the door, I walked across a lovely Persian carpet trying not to trip. Overhead a crystal chandelier cast
glints of soft light on the paintings of devils hanging on the walls.

“Can I help you?” the maître d’ asked.

“I’m here to see Gil Howard.”

“May I have your name, please?”

“Morgan White.”

Gil had suggested and I’d agreed to use another last name. Morgan Snow. White. Seven dwarfs. Exactly how many suspects I had. It had been easy to come up with the pseudonym.

“He should be right inside. Do you need me to point him out to you?”

“No, thank you. I can find him.”

The large room was smoky and smelled of cigars and whiskey. It was such a male scent that it caught me by surprise. I’d never been in a place that was so exclusively devoted to and created for men. And rather than find it off-putting, I was attracted to it. The walls here were wood-paneled. The club chairs had obviously been chosen for their comfort. The bar on the left wall was long and gleaming. Behind it was a delightful mural of nymphs romping in an enchanted forest, being chased by very cheery-looking devils with extremely long and pointed tails.

The devil motif was on the ashtrays and etched more subtly onto the heavy crystal glasses that I saw a waiter carrying.

Ella Fitzgerald was belting out a song over the sound system.

There was nothing about the scene before me that was any different than what you would find at any restaurant in New York. Walk into the bar at the Mark Hotel or the St. Regis, and you’d find the same men, sipping the same scotch or martinis.

But while there are always some beautiful women in restaurants in New York, here there were nothing but beautiful
women, and all of them were under forty. Many of them under thirty.

And none of the couples at any of the tables looked tired or bored or were arguing.

I found Gil in the corner at a table with two other men. He rose and welcomed me with a grateful and relieved hug.

“This is Morgan,” he said as he introduced me to Ted and Bernard. Like most of the club members, these two would have looked at home at any boardroom meeting. Polished, buffed and slightly tanned, Ted was in his early forties. Bernard was a bit younger, wearing a European-cut sport coat and a crisp white shirt, opened at the top. Both of them shook my hand.

And then I realized something: the men were openly staring at me.

I wasn’t used to it. In fact, I couldn’t ever remember being looked at that way except by Gil the day before in my office. People glanced at you all the time. They assessed you and judged you and made rash decisions based on those first impressions when their eyes swiftly swept over you. But this was not subtle. These men looked at me shamelessly and I felt naked.

There was something so frank about these appraisals that while they made me uncomfortable, I also appreciated the lack of pretense about them. They were just men staring at a woman. Intellectually, I may have had issues with mating dances, but sociologically I understood them. Men are hardwired to find women alluring by looks alone. And not just one woman at a time, but many women. And for good reason.

It is all about survival of the fittest. The men who were the most prolific at producing progeny were the ones whose genetic imprint was passed on. Just as the women who got pregnant often, and nursed and nurtured their babies best, were the ones whom we descend from.

Men thrusted. Women held. Of course in some cases it was reversed. Of course women could do what men could do. Intellectually we were, if not identical, then certainly equal.

But our most basic hormonal sexual selves were not always similar. Men were more excited about a woman they had never tasted or touched before than one they already knew intimately. A stranger whose pheromones a man had not yet become immune to was more desirable than a trusted lover.

But all this scientific jargon, this polite way to try to make the best of something that irks, pains and annoys women, didn’t make it any easier to do the dance.

Some enlightened men did more than pay lip service to the idea of change, could outsmart their instincts, but they were not at the Diablo Cigar Bar. Here, protected by a steel door with a fine wood veneer and armed guards who sat almost invisibly by the front of the room, there was no pretense. No wives or girlfriends allowed. This was a men’s club and every woman present was for sale.

And so, even though in any other circumstance I would have turned away from the stares, I could not do that here. Not even allow myself the indignant narrowing of my eyes. I could not shoot back a comment that would put the guys in their place. This
was
their place. I was either the interloper or the entertainment. And I had two seconds to make up my mind what it was to be.

If I chose one way, I would have to leave and be no closer to helping Cleo—if, indeed, she was in trouble. If, indeed, it was not already too late. The other way, I could stay and take my chances, betting on my ability to find something out.

And if I didn’t, there was no one else who could.

Gil excused us and took me off to the bar.

“What would you like to drink?” he asked.

“I’ll just have a sparkling water.”

“No. A drink. You look like a deer caught in the headlights. You need something. What’ll it be?”

“A vodka martini, then.”

“A Diablo martini, then.”

When the bartender put it down I took a sip.

“What is it?”

“Do you like it?”

I nodded, though I couldn’t quite figure out what made it taste just a little hotter and saltier than I was used to.

“A few red peppercorns dropped in for color, a splash of the brine from the olives.”

I took another sip.

“A dirty martini,” I said. And then smiled. “Appropriate.”

He gave me what was an attempt at a smile, but it slipped at the end and wound up marking his face like a wound.

“I appreciate your doing this,” he said.

“Don’t thank me yet. I have no idea if I can pull it off. And even if I do, there’s no guarantee we’re going to find out anything.”