Eye of the Beholder (50 page)

Natalia Lake, thus far, has escaped any criminal charges. The word is the county attorney is considering a charge for her role in covering up Cassie’s murder of Ellie Danzinger, but I think that’s just to placate the media feeding frenzy. It’s not going to happen. There’s no real proof that Cassie even killed Ellie—she did, of course, but knowing it and proving it are two different things—much less that Natalia actively covered anything up. And this is to say nothing of the fact that Terry Burgos has already been officially blamed, convicted, and executed for the murder of Ellie Danzinger.

Natalia’s statement to the police, of course, left out the part where she directed Leo Koslenko to move Ellie’s body from the apartment to Burgos’s house and directed him to keep watch over Burgos and report back to her. And I haven’t told the police any of that.

Not yet, anyway. And maybe never.

The taxi moves into a residential neighborhood, large estates built high up on the hills, with large fences surrounding them. I had thought about renting some estate for this week with Shelly, but hotels are much better in terms of security. Shelly didn’t need to be sleeping in some giant house with creaks and groans in a place thousands of miles from home.

And, besides, a partner of mine in my law firm said if you stay in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, you gotta stay at the Grand Hotel.

I pay the driver in euros sufficient to convince him to stick around. I walk up to a large gate, bordered by twin, white stone blocks, and push a buzzer embedded in a gold plate.

“Bon jour,”
a woman’s voice says through a speaker.

“Paul Riley,” I say, “for Gwendolyn Lake.”

“Ah.” She pauses to convert to English. “Mister—Riley?”

“Paul Riley, yes.”

“You have an appointment?”

“No. Tell her I’m alone, please.”

After a good ten minutes, a man walks down the long driveway toward me, looking tan and healthy and wearing all white. “Mr. Riley?”

“Bon jour.”
He opens a small gate and leads me into the estate. We climb endless, outdoor stairs, past well-kept, flourishing island plants and trees. The house itself is large but not monstrous, a two-level brick, full of windows that gleam in the bright sunlight.

Instead of taking me into the house, he leads me down a path that winds around the house, until we reach the back. There is a swimming pool as big as the one that was in my high school, a Jacuzzi off to the side, and a large deck area.

“Ms. Lake,” the man says.

The last time I saw her, she was ragged, in bedclothes and with flat hair, pouring out the beginning of a story to me in the parlor of Natalia’s home. Four hours later, she boarded an American Airlines flight, nonstop to De Gaulle airport in Paris.

Today, she is wearing a one-piece orange bathing suit with a white terry cloth robe over her shoulders, spread out on a lounge chair on the deck by her pool. Her skin is more tanned than the last time I saw her. Her hair has dried from a swim, hanging at her shoulders. She peeks at me over her sunglasses.

She says nothing to me, doesn’t offer me a chair or anything else.

“I don’t know what Natalia told you,” I say, “but I don’t see any charges sticking against her. She’s lucky.”

She places the book she’s reading to the side and sits up in the lounge chair, putting her feet on the deck.

“I’m surprised she even told the police about her daughter killing Ellie. She didn’t have to do that. I take it that was your idea?”

She remains still, looking off in the distance through her shades. I’m right, of course. Natalia never wanted anyone to know that Cassie killed Ellie. She’d have let Terry Burgos, Professor Albany—anyone else—take that blame.

“You told her if she didn’t tell the police,
you
would.”

Again, she doesn’t answer, or even look at me.

“You ran away before,” I say. “Back then. On Wednesday, the week of the murder spree. You flew to France.”

We’ve already been over this. I’m bringing it up for a reason and she knows it.

“France doesn’t extradite its citizens to the U.S.,” I continue. “Roman Polanski can tell you that. Which, I assume, is why you left back then.”

She doesn’t answer.

“And why you’re here now,” I add.

She looks up at me.

“You understand,” I say, “that the murder of Cassie Bentley remains unsolved. That case, technically, was never prosecuted. You know that, right?”

“I know that.” Her voice is flat, defiant. “Of course I know that.”

And yet she returned to the United States, anyway, albeit three years later.

“Do I have a clear picture of Cassandra Alexia Bentley?” I ask. “The destructive affair with her professor. The mood swings. Finding out Harland fathered the girl she thought was her cousin. Harland’s affair with Ellie. And then she snaps. It’s too much. She storms into Ellie’s apartment, after seeing Daddy come out, and she gives her one on the brain. Is all of that true?”

A tear appears beneath the sunglasses. She wipes at her face, her mouth contorted into a snarl, but she remains motionless otherwise.

“Look at me,” I say, “and convince me that everything I’ve just said is true.”

She stares into the ground. She is choking up a bit, sniffling and clearing her throat. After a time, she removes her sunglasses and looks up at me with red, wet eyes.

“Okay,” I say. “And there was no pregnancy. No abortion. That was a natural assumption. The break-in to the Sherwood Executive Center. Everyone thinks it was to steal a pregnancy test, or abortion records, or paternity records. That’s all crap, right?”

She says nothing.

“But it’s believable,” I say. “Evelyn Pendry assumed it. The cops assumed it. Hell,
I
assumed it.” I take a breath. “And then I fed it to you when I came to see you at the lake.”

She’s smart enough to stay silent.

“And once I put that idea in your head,” I continue, “you took it and ran with it. You and Natalia, you got your stories straight afterward. The next day, you both came to us ‘voluntarily’ and told us how Cassie Bentley had been pregnant and had had an abortion. You wanted us to believe that. You wanted us to believe that because it made Professor Albany look guilty. That had been Natalia’s plan all along, right? If anything went south? Blame Professor Albany.”

“But that was all just a lie. Right?”

Her eyes drift off as she considers her answer.

“The truth,” I demand. “You have to convince me that I’m doing the right thing.”

She laughs with a tinge of bitterness. “ ‘The right thing.’ You think you know who killed Cassie—”

“No, that’s not going to work,” I say.

She watches me carefully, a slight tilt of her head, narrowing of the eyes. She’s getting the picture now. The walls of this impressive estate are beginning to close in.

She gets out of the chair, turning in all directions as if seeking shelter from this. Finally, she turns to me, regarding me in a different light. Newfound respect. Maybe newfound fear.

“Did you like what Koslenko pulled with Shelly?” I ask. “The chain saw? The poor girl in the bathtub?”

She looks away. Otherwise, she doesn’t respond, but she must have appreciated the irony.
Old habits die hard,
she must have been thinking.

It took me a while to figure it out, I admit. But I can connect a dot or two.

The murder in the bathtub—the unidentifiable mass of bones and tissue—was one.

Koslenko’s note, for another:
If you behave, she will live, too.

Too.
As in,
also. As in, like others lived.

And Koslenko’s explanation about how Ciancio figured everything out: At the Sherwood Executive Center that night, Ciancio had given Koslenko the keys and left him to commit his burglary. Ciancio only figured it out afterward, Koslenko told me, when the police came to that building on the Burgos case.

But there was only one reason the police came to that building after the bodies were discovered.

“A couple weeks ago,” I say, “I was talking to Harland. We were chasing this red herring about the Sherwood Executive Center. I asked him if his daughter’s doctors were at that building. You know what he said?”

She freezes. She has no idea, of course, but it seems she’s interested.

“I figured he’d have no idea about his daughter’s medical care. But you know what? He did. He remembered taking her there to have a cavity filled when she was a little girl.”

Her face contorts. A fresh tear falls. Her shoulders begin a slow tremble.

“You helped out, too,” I tell her. “When you were describing Cassie’s reaction, seeing her father walk out of Ellie Danzinger’s apartment.”

In the midst of her sobbing, she nods. I imagine, in hindsight, she realized that, too.

You can’t imagine anything so revolting, so disgusting,
she had said. A little too personal, too heartfelt, for a secondhand account.

“Natalia sent you off to Paris,” I say. “Wednesday of that week. I assume it’s not entirely different from how you described it—you were a mess. A basket case. You had no idea what was happening. You had no idea what was
going
to happen.”

“Of course I didn’t.” She looks at me. “ ‘Basket case’ is a good description. I was confused and scared and, by that point, overmedicated. I was a zombie when I got on that plane.”

I believe her. I can’t imagine otherwise. “You didn’t wonder about the passport?”

She shakes her head. “I—I probably should have—but, no.”

And so there she was, safe in France, secure in the knowledge that a French national couldn’t be extradited.

Natalia Lake, I see now, was quite masterful throughout all of this. She had Koslenko move Ellie’s body to Burgos’s house, she cut a quiet deal for mutual silence with Professor Albany, and she got lucky, very lucky, when Burgos began a weeklong murder spree.

But Natalia Lake did more than just cover up a murder. She also
ordered
a murder, an order that Leo Koslenko obeyed, beating the poor girl beyond recognition and planting her, like Ellie, on Burgos’s back doorstep.

And then she had my boss, the county attorney, drop the charges on that murder so no one would take too close a look.

Cassie saved me,
Burgos had said. He’d thought the final murder in the first verse meant he had to kill himself. That was what the lyrics suggested—
stick it right between those teeth and fire so happily
—and Tyler Skye had played it out that very way when he put a gun in his own mouth. But Burgos, clearly, didn’t want to kill himself. He delayed the move for two days. Maybe he was never going to do it. But then, suddenly, God was giving him a reprieve: Terry found a badly beaten corpse outside his back door, the same place God had left Ellie Danzinger. He couldn’t reconcile this development with Tyler Skye’s citation to the Leviticus passage, so he leafed through the Bible until he found a verse relating to stoning, which was the most apt way to describe what had been done to the woman on his back porch. He crossed out the Leviticus passage on his list and wrote in the one from Deuteronomy. And then, as if to keep consistent with Leviticus and the lyrics anyway, he put a bullet through the corpse’s mouth.

Like everyone else, Burgos thought that corpse lying on his back doorstep was Cassie. Why wouldn’t he? Even with the beaten, crushed face, there was the driver’s license and credit cards in her pants pocket belonging to Cassandra Bentley.

We didn’t stop at identification found on the victim, of course. A family ID is the minimum we do. And Natalia, of course—not her husband—made that identification at the morgue.

Nor did we stop there. With a beaten face like that, and no fingerprints in a database to match, you go to the obvious next step.

You pull the dental records.

When I woke up in the hospital that Saturday after we found Shelly, I put in a call to my dentist, Dr. Morse. He explained that, in 1989, most dentists didn’t have computerized or digitalized dental records. They simply had hard copies of the X rays sticking out of a pouch with a person’s name assigned to them.

Yes, he agreed, back in 1989, if someone broke into his office in the middle of the night and switched dental records from one pouch to another—say, swapping one half sister’s records with the other‘s—nobody would be the wiser. You might have to switch some labels around, but it would be easy, and no one would know.

Fred Ciancio, working his security post at the Sherwood Executive Center the week after the bodies were discovered, must have scratched his head when he saw the police march up to the dentist’s office for the records of Cassie Bentley. Did that have anything to do with Koslenko? he probably wondered.

Then, shortly after that time, he saw a photograph in the newspaper of that same man—Koslenko—standing in the background with an eye on Harland Bentley. He put Koslenko together with the Bentley family and he was probably pretty sure of what had happened. He called the reporter covering Burgos, Carolyn Pendry, but thought twice about it and clammed up. Carolyn finally gave up on Ciancio, and the whole thing stayed quiet.

This June, something brought it all back for Ciancio. Probably it was the special he saw, Pendry’s thing on television, expressing sympathy for Burgos. He managed to find Leo Koslenko and told him it was time for a second installment on the payoff. Somewhere along the line, he also called Carolyn’s daughter, Evelyn. Who knows? Maybe he was debating between coming clean and getting some extra retirement money. He must have given Evelyn some kind of a taste—mentioning the Sherwood Center, probably—but didn’t fully clue her in.

I wonder if Ciancio ever actually figured out the entire truth. Things must have looked hinky to him, but did he know exactly what had happened?