Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (23 page)

“Here, let me show you,” Midas said as soon as the waiter was gone. He picked up my glass, and without taking his eyes off me, as if he were, indeed, offering some kind of blessing, he poured just a single splash of the dry wine into my mouth.

“Tell me how delicious that is,” he said.

I swallowed. “It is.” It was.

“Let me give you some more.” He held the glass up to my lips again and I sipped.

“What else would happen up in the room?” I asked.

“I’d feed you goodies. Caviar. Chocolate. Strawberries washed in cream. Whatever you liked.”

“Chocolate,” I said, remembering this part from the book. Cleo always chose chocolate.

He smiled.

I was two people at that table. One playing at being seductive with an older man who seemed to care about nothing but giving women pleasure, and the other, a psychiatrist making every effort to pay attention to the man’s every nuance.

“And then?” I asked.

“I would ask you to open your shirt for me.”

Cleo had written that this was all he wanted. For her to open her blouse so he could look at her lingerie. She said she never minded that. The lights in the room were low. She didn’t even have to get naked.

“And then I’d ask you to lie down on the bed. On the money.”

I flashed on the description that Noah had given me of the bills positioned at the crime scenes. Fifties always soaked in blood. I shivered.

What if Cleo’s disappearance and the murdered prostitutes were connected? Could this well-known and charitable man be the one to commit such deranged acts?

I couldn’t imagine it.

But was he capable of doing something to Cleo to stop her from publishing a book that would expose his secret? A secret he paid her so extravagantly to keep?

Maybe.

Secrets don’t come cheap.

And keeping them is often worth killing for.

“You would have to close your eyes, then.”

“I don’t know if I could do that.”

“You would have to. Close your eyes and tell me how much you like the money. Tell me what you are going to do with it. How much pleasure it’s going to give you. I need to know that I can give you pleasure.” He was slipping into his
fantasy. Even though we were just sitting in the bar, he was starting to imagine that we were actually in the room.

“If I gave you all that money, what would you do with it?” His voice was low and urgent. He sounded almost desperate.

“I don’t know…” I hesitated, not knowing what to say. And then I thought I should do what I had done before. Stay with the truth. He would think it was a lie, anyway. All that mattered was to keep him satisfied until he was lulled even deeper into his pornographic dream, when his guard was down, and I could look right into his face, right into his eyes, and ask him the question I had come here to ask and watch his reaction.

“It’s not what I am going to do with it. It’s that you think I am worth this much that makes me so happy. It’s the fact that your giving me money makes you excited. That I could be attractive enough, desirable enough, that you would want to give me all this.”

I hesitated long enough to listen to his breathing, which was now slightly labored.

“I have never been wanted five thousand dollars’ worth,” I continued. “And it makes me really appreciate you. It gives me pleasure.”

“Will you touch yourself? Just there on your neck?” He pointed to a spot under my chin. It seemed an innocentenough place, and tentatively I put my fingers there. I knew the scenario—all he wanted was the tease. And I could oblige him if it helped me figure him out.

My fingers drifted up and down the skin of my neck, not going anywhere near my breasts. The idea that someone was getting pleasure out of watching me, that I was arousing a man with just this little bit of foreplay, that I was almost starting to enjoy my amateur performance, was amazing to me. A small “Oh” escaped hoarsely from his throat.

“What else would you give me besides the money?” I
asked, using his distracted state to set my trap. “Would you give me pain, in addition to all that money, if it gave me pleasure?” I asked. “Would you hurt me?”

He looked startled.

“Hurt you?”

“Yes. Don’t you also like to inflict pain with that pleasure?”

He shook his head. “No. Not me. I’ve never done that.” He looked horrified at the thought. Was he bluffing or was he serious? His eyes did not flicker. The pulse point in his neck did not jump and throb. I only had a small window of time left. “Where is Cleo? Tell me,” I said.

“Cleo? I have no idea. Why are you asking
me
that?”

I could see it in his eyes. He was confused and he was telling the truth. And I felt a little bit sorry for him, sorry that I had lulled him into this erotic state only to shock him out of it with my questions.

“All I want is to give pleasure….” It was almost a cry.

I
met Elias Beecher the next afternoon at a Japanese restaurant near my office. When I arrived, he was sipping a sake and looked even more exhausted than he had the last time we’d met.

The dining room was quiet and the table he’d chosen in the corner created even more of an illusion of privacy.

“I feel guilty even trying to eat,” he said after the waitress took our order.

“I know, but it won’t do Cleo any good if you get sick. Have you slept at all?”

“I fall asleep okay. Sleep for about two hours and then I’m wide awake. Lying there, imagining… Oh, I can’t even tell you the things I start to imagine. There are so many disgusting people out there, capable of doing such violent, disturbed things, I…”

The haunted look in his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the way
he spoke just one level above a whisper, all pulled at me, and I put my hand out to cover his and then left it there.

He looked down at my hand on top of his as if it were a foreign object he’d never seen before. The touch was strange for me, too. Elias was halfway between a patient and a partner.

“We’re all alone in this. It’s just you and me looking for her,” he said.

“Gil is looking for her, too.”

His eyebrows arched and the soft look in his eyes hardened for a second. “Gil?” His voice had a derisive twist I hadn’t heard in it before. “I don’t trust him, Morgan. He’s as much a suspect as anyone else. That book could destroy his business overnight.”

“I know,” I said, and then told him about my conversation with Gil.

“You don’t really believe he didn’t know about Cleo and me, do you?” he asked when I was done.

“He didn’t seem to.”

“But if she told him, if she finally told him, he might have gone crazy. Did you see that movie…with Richard Gere and Diane Ladd,
Unfaithful?
When this mild, warm man finally is confronted with his wife’s betrayal he becomes capable of murder.” Elias was playing with his thin, wooden chopsticks, rubbing the tips against each other as if he could light a fire. “And the other movie like that was…”

He was starting to fragment and disappear into a list of films and books that would illustrate his point. I had to stop him.

“Elias?”

He looked at me, still lost for a moment and then reconnecting.

“I need you to help me. We need to find out more about all these men.”

“You’re meeting them, right?”

“Yes, I’ve met two, and so far I don’t think either of them were capable of doing anything to Cleo.”

“Then you have to move on to the next two. And then the next two.”

“I only identified four who had serious motives…” I hesitated. I was avoiding mentioning the fifth man.

“But there’s something else. What is it?”

It wasn’t the first time he’d been in tune with what I was thinking.

“Cleo was so specific in her descriptions. So many things are accurate. But there is one specific thing about each of the men I’ve met that she didn’t use to describe them. She used those things to describe a fifth man. It’s like he’s a composite of all of them.”

“But that shouldn’t matter, should it? You still know there are four men who have motives. Who would absolutely be ruined one way or the other if that book were published.”

The waitress came with lacquered plates of glistening sushi and sashimi, and while she placed them before us and poured puddles of soy sauce into porcelain dishes, we were quiet.

Elias returned to rubbing the chopsticks together, and the noise was like fingernails on a blackboard, setting my teeth on edge.

When she left, I broke my own chopsticks apart, lifted up a piece of tuna, dipped it in the soy sauce and put it in my mouth. There was enough wasabi to inflame my taste buds and make my eyes tear, but it was a good kind of burn.

Elias was dipping a piece of cucumber roll in his dish of soy over and over, and while I watched, it fell apart, the grains of rice no longer sticky.

“This isn’t going fast enough,” he said. “I know you’re
doing the best you can. But it’s still taking too long. Why won’t the police do something? Why won’t they help?”

I shook my head. “There’s no evidence for them to get involved yet.”

“Do you realize how ineffectual they are? How screwed up that is? I went to them and begged them to help, and they turned around, treated me like a suspect, and they still aren’t doing anything to find her. This is why I became a corporate lawyer. Dealing with law enforcement on the police level is far too frustrating.”

He picked up another piece of sushi, went to dip it in the soy sauce, noticed that the round dish was full of rice and put the piece back on his plate.

“Haven’t you found out anything you can take to them to get them to stop putting all their effort into me as a suspect and instead into whoever really has taken her? Why would I take her, anyway? We were together. She’s in love with me. Why haven’t they connected her disappearance with those Magdalene murders? Every time I ask, the detective acts as if I am just trying to throw him off track. ‘We need something to go on, Mr. Beecher, just one lead, and we’ll jump on it. But in the meantime there is no connection.’” He was mimicking Detective Jordain’s New Orleans accent. I was about to ask him not to, but why did I care if Elias made fun of Noah’s way of speaking?

“If I thought it would get them moving in the right direction, I’d tell him that I did it,” Elias continued, his voice taking on a desperate intensity. “That I killed those three women. I’d tell them that I am responsible for all of those women being murdered and that Cleo is absolutely part of the plan. Maybe that would get them off their asses and onto the case. They’d have to find her. And then they would give her back to me and you would finish helping her and she’d get better. She’d be fine then. Whole. Finally, holy.”

He pushed away the soy sauce dish filled with the uneaten sushi. He had not eaten a single morsel of his food.

I noticed that he’d used the word
holy
, instead of
whole
. An obvious mistake because he was talking about the Magdalene murders. He was still talking, almost ranting now, the words tumbling out faster and faster and running together in pools of ideas.

“If you’d had more time with her, if you’d had another two or three weeks, what would you have done to help her? What would you have said to her? Could you have fixed this problem she was having? Could you have made her better? How would you have done it? What would you have done?”

“I don’t fix problems.”

“Yes, you do. That’s why she went to you,” he argued.

“I help people to work things out.”

“Well, what would you have said to her to help her work things out?”

“I can’t talk about that with you,” I said as gently as I could.

“You can. I love her. You know how I love her. You can talk to me easier than you can talk to anyone else. Do you think you really could help her? Really?”

I nodded.

“How?”

“Just by getting her to talk about what had happened to her—” I stopped. He had almost lulled me into talking about my patient, and that was something I could not do. Would not do. Even with him.

G
oing to the police station where Noah Jordain worked wasn’t how I wanted to spend the rest of my afternoon, but I’d made a commitment to meet him and look over what he and his team had collected.

I found Detective Jordain in a big room with a large cork wall covered with a collage of photographs of the victims and evidence. The table that dominated the center of the room held piles of papers, videotape cassettes and more photographs.

Noah was standing, rifling through a stack of computer printouts when I got there. Hearing my footsteps, he turned, and then made no effort to hide his smile.

“Well, it’s certainly nicer to see you than another detective with more bad news.”

“I could have bad news.”

“It wouldn’t be as bad coming from you.” He pulled out two chairs. “Sit down. Do you want some coffee? It’s fresh.
Made it myself. Have to. Boy, do most cops make bad coffee.”

“Sure, I’d love some.”

He poured me a cup. I asked him about his investigation, and as I listened to him describe the small progress made so far, I sipped the strong, bitter but surprisingly delicious coffee.

He was wearing a blue-and-black-striped shirt that made his blue eyes even more striking. But there were deeper shadows under them than there had been on Sunday night.

None of us were sleeping well anymore. Not Gil, not Noah, not me.

That was something to remember. The man involved in these crimes was probably not sleeping well anymore, either. He would be on a high from his rampage. Peaceful rest probably eluded him. I told Noah that and he made a note of it.

“But I don’t think that he’s getting a thrill from the murders,” I said. “These are not glory killings. If they were, he’d be doing more to alert the press. He’d be playing some games, making sure the bodies were discovered sooner so he’d get the attention from the crimes. That’s not what is going on here. He’s got some real need to kill these women.”