Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (28 page)

Noah took another sip of his drink, just listening.

“Have you found out anything about the pink-diamond cross?” I asked him.

“Yes, we have.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and opened it to a page crammed with his loopy handwriting. He scanned one page, then another. “Perez just gave me this on the phone. We’ve identified two stores in the city that sell
something like what you described. Graff—a place on Madison Avenue—and Cartier.”

I nodded, aware of them both. Two of the most exclusive jewelry stores in the city.

“And you were right. It is extravagantly expensive. More than $30,000 if it’s the same one you described. Sounds like it. Seven carats, total weight. Only five have been sold. By tomorrow morning we should have a court order to find out who purchased them.”

“How long will it take once you have that?”

“If we are lucky, sometime tomorrow. By Monday at the latest. The minute we find out, I’ll tell you. Do you know that much about Cleo’s life that you’ll recognize the name?”

“There’s a good chance I will.”

He looked surprised.

I took another sip of my drink and made a decision. “I need to confess something,” I said.

“I’m not a priest.”

“Thank God.”

We both laughed, the laughs still slightly hollow and weak but deeper than the way they were a half hour before.

“I’ve met some of Cleo’s clients,” I told him.

“You have?” All the relaxation in his face was gone. His eyes were focused on me and probing. He was thinking, working on a puzzle. I could see the pieces fitting together in his eyes. Did I know him that well already?

“Is that what you have been doing at the Diablo Cigar Bar?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Are you crazy? Who do you think you are that you should be doing that? You’re not equipped to go undercover.” A vein pulsed in his neck, and his eyes narrowed with a fierce anger. “No one else is taking her disappearance seriously. I have to do it myself,” I said accusatorily.

“There is no evidence of foul play, Morgan. For Christ’s sake. We have a tap on her cell phone. We’re watching her place. We can’t look for her when we have no reason to go looking for her.”

“You can when she is a prostitute and prostitutes are getting murdered every other day.”

“That is a very slim connection. She isn’t the kind he targets.”

“But she
is
missing, Noah. And she
is
my patient. And since I can’t tell you who her clients are or what their motives are, I’m doing the only thing I can do. In lieu of a formal investigation, I am conducting an informal one. I know enough as a therapist to know what I am looking for.”

“Damn. You might be smart. You might be ten times smarter than me. But you are not a member of the police department. You can’t just stage your own investigation. You could get hurt. Damn. Worse. You could get killed.”

I waved off his words and took another sip of my drink. “I am well protected. I only meet them in public…well, in a private public place but with lots of other people around. I know some self-defense. I learned when I was a teenager. It was something I needed. An extra sense of protection.”

“Weren’t you protected as a kid?” His eyes softened for a moment.

“My mother…” I hesitated. We were stepping into the quicksand of my past and I didn’t often bring anyone to that place with me.

I stopped. It didn’t make sense to be sitting in a restaurant on a Friday evening, sipping a martini, alternately worrying sick about my patient and talking about my personal life with a man hunting down a crazy sicko whose actions may or may not have any bearing on why someone I cared about was missing. But his eyes pulled me in. Again.

Some people just have perfectly nice eyes, lovely colors,
aesthetically pleasing shapes, but they don’t express all that much. Not so with Noah. His eyes talked. No matter what he was saying with his words, his blue eyes spelled out other things.

I had thought his eyes were too small when I first met him. But now that I knew him better, now that I had looked at him long enough and experienced the intensity of his gaze, I was glad they were not any bigger. It would have been like looking into glaring headlights. His eyes would have blinded me.

“Tell me about your mother,” he said softly.

“She was an actress. And she started working when she was young. She also got addicted to diet pills when she was young. When she broke her collarbone on a set, she got addicted to painkillers. Somewhere in there she found liquor, too. Painkillers, diet pills and alcohol. She was one of the Lost Girls.”

“Too many of them out there.”

I smiled. “No, I meant that she was one of the two actresses in a TV series called
The Lost Girls
. Three seasons back in the fifties. But you were right, too. She was lost and I was lost with her for a while. When I was seven she left my dad and took me with her. A year later she overdosed and lapsed into a coma. I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I knew she was in danger. So I called my father and then I talked to her and told her our stories until he came. But she didn’t wake up. And I never saw her again. She died. When I was eight. Did I say that?”

He nodded. Then he did more. He leaned over and put his big hands on either side of my face and pulled me in to him. I held my breath but I didn’t shut my eyes. Frozen, I watched his face get closer and closer and then I felt his lips on mine. At first it felt like a whisper of a kiss, just enough to be there, to connect me to him. I think that was all it was intended to
be. A comforting kiss, light and fleeting, as if one of those butterflies we’d seen had brushed me with its wings.

“Poor baby,” he said. There was nothing condescending about it. It was Southern and slow and like another kind of kiss. I was smelling him, discerning all the different scents at once: a green scent that was woodsy and musky with an undernote of leather, and beneath all that, the salty scent of his skin.

It bypassed my head and went right to my senses, stirring me. There was not a single note that assaulted me or insulted me. I closed my eyes and saw sunlight filtering through tall pine trees and dust motes dancing on the air. He smelled the way a bolt of maroon velvet fabric falls when you let it loose to show off the nap; he smelled the way the horizon disappears at night and you don’t know where the water ends and the sky starts; and he smelled the way a fire sparks up from the first embers, slow and then violent.

He smelled like something I had been waiting for.

“You are sniffing me.” He pulled back from the kiss, laughing for real for the first time all afternoon. Almost as if the case and my confession and all the awful things that were sitting on his shoulders and weighing him down had lifted. And his laugh lifted something in me that I had not even known was so heavy.

“Well, you smell good,” I said.

“You smell too much.”

“It’s this sensitivity I have.”

“I’d bet there isn’t anything about you that isn’t sensitive.”

There was a glimmer, playful and sexy, in his eyes.

Then he came at me again, and we both dove into another kiss.

When we pulled apart he grabbed the check. “I have a date. Every Friday night. Do you want to come?” he asked as he put some bills down on the table.

My eyebrows went up. “I’ve never gotten an invitation quite like that.” I was trying to keep it light, but I was confused.

“Don’t look at me that way. You are the most transparent woman I have ever met. You’ll love her.”

“Me, transparent? You have got that wrong. I studied opaque. I learned from the masters. My patients complain that they can’t figure out a single thing I’m thinking. And that’s important to me. I work for it.”

“But I am not, thank the good Lord above, your patient. You couldn’t go on a date with me if I was. You certainly couldn’t go home with me afterward if I was a patient. And then you’d miss out on chicory coffee and homemade beignets. Have you ever had a homemade beignet?”

I shook my head. We walked out the door onto the crowded street.

“Covered with powdered sugar. And I’ll serve it to you on a silver tray—damn, I don’t have a silver tray. Well, I’ll serve it to you on a bamboo tray and the powdered sugar will get all over you here—”

He reached out and brushed his fingers over my lips. I shivered.

“And I’ll just have to kiss it off…and then lick my lips.”

He bent down and kissed me once more. We stood there on Central Park West with the traffic going by and the lights changing and people passing us by and I kissed him back.

The date was with a piano, in a restaurant in the Village. I sat at a table for two and listened to him play and stared at his fingers making love to the keys and imagined how they would feel if they ever played me.

His music was like his voice. Jazzy, full of riffs, slow and sexy and then dark and sad. And if there had been any question before of whether or not I was going to go home with him
afterward, if he still invited me, it was answered while I watched him at the piano.

The combination of his sensitivity to the music, to me, the cool glance he gave most of the world around him and the hot one he bestowed on me, the insouciant, almost arrogant walk, the certainty that he knew how to do his job but the curiosity about what he didn’t understand, and the hard-edged, pianoplaying detective who carried a weapon and liked to cook Cajun food was about as compelling as it was possible to be. That scared me. And I wasn’t sure I’d ever been afraid of a man before.

H
e was coming. She could hear the footsteps. She knew that there would be thirteen of them and then he would be on the other side of the window, and that with him would come light.

What was worse? When he came to her or when he left her alone for hours in this darkness? She did not know how many hours passed, but she had tried to count the minutes before her mind drifted off into a horror fantasy about what was going to happen to her.

She knew something was eventually going to happen. He would not keep her here indefinitely. He couldn’t. Someone had to be looking for her. There were people who cared about her. She knew that, too. She counted them. She said their names over and over in her head in the hours that he left her inside this confessional. She would have prayed that they would come and get her, but she didn’t believe in prayer.
There was no way any God would let her be locked up like this inside a holy place for so long.

She heard the door open.

“I’m back, back for you, back to help you,” he said. His voice was smooth, calm, soothing. Not to her, but in the abstract, she knew it was a soothing voice.

Was it better when he was away or when he was here?

She was confused. She had been here so long she didn’t know what she was supposed to think anymore. The things she craved were different from what she’d craved ten days ago. Or was it eleven? She wasn’t sure. Like the minutes, she’d lost track of the days.

Now she wanted ice water. Not the lukewarm water he left for her on the floor with the tall straw sticking out of it. He left two glasses every morning. One of water. One of some thick drink that he told her was full of nutrients. But she didn’t want liquids when he was gone because they would only make her go to the bathroom, and of all the terrible things about being in this terrible box, she could not stand the thought of soiling herself. He seemed almost disappointed when he came to see her in the middle of the day—around one o’clock, she’d guessed—and brought her the makeshift toilet and found that she had held her water.

She was too fastidious to do anything but starve herself during the day so that she would not have to go to the bathroom. At night she drank as much as he would give her and ate every bit of the solid food he offered. There was no problem eating at night. She knew that she would be able to go to the bathroom in the morning before he left—a real bathroom. He took her to the small white-tiled room with her eyes blindfolded, hands bound, but once she was there he unbound her hands, removed her blindfold and let her have the bathroom to herself for fifteen minutes.

During those hours while he was gone and she sat on the
bench or stood against the wall and stared at the wire-mesh window that she could not see beyond, she craved peaches. Or sweet strawberries. She knew it was summer; she could imagine the fruit in the store, in the little wooden baskets, jewel-toned ruby raspberries. And she wanted ice. Cubes of ice to suck on and keep her lips wet, because they were parched. In the small, darkened closetlike space that was not made for a human being to live in, she tried to keep herself sane by picturing the manuscript pages of her book and rewriting them in her mind. To work on the words. But it was hard to concentrate. The cravings took over. What did sweet summer air actually smell like? How did a breeze feel?

The door opened and he came inside. The light was so strong it blinded her. He took the tape off her mouth. Her lips were torn by now and dry, and when she moved them, the pain was excruciating.

And then he was gone again, shutting the door behind him. She heard the sound of wood scraping wood and knew he was pulling the chair up to the door. He would now sit down on the other side of the mesh. Ready to listen to her sins. Ready to absolve her. And to torture her more.

“Have you thought about your sins?” he asked.

“I have.” She knew the drill by now, and it was far easier to go along with it than to try to be logical or outwit him or even make an attempt to figure out what was going on. She didn’t know. He was waiting for her to say something specific. But what? She might be able to figure it out if she wasn’t so confused.

“Tell me your sins,” he said.

She was Catholic and had grown up confessing. But that had been simple. She and her girlfriends used to get together right after confession and compare what they had offered up, what they had held back and what the priest had demanded of them in terms of penance. Usually Cleo got off the lightest.
Not because she had done the least, but because she had lied the most. And she could lie now.