The Venus Fix (3 page)

“Why do you think she’d laugh at you? Has she laughed at you before?”

“No.” Sharp. Decisive.

“Then why now?”

He shook his head.

“Anything that comes to mind.”

He shook his head again. We’d get back to that. Or I’d find another way in.

“What happened after she saw what you were doing?”

“She smiled at me.” Now he shook his head as if he was trying to shake away the image. “It was crazy. A crazy smile. Like she’d really lost her mind for a second. She just kept smiling. It was horrible. But the worst part was that even though I wanted to get up and hold her and promise her that I’d never do it again, I didn’t. I just sat there.”

Something was happening to Bob. His eyes were not as intense. His muscles were relaxing into a professional mask again.

“It couldn’t be more ironic,” he said in a more imperious, less-emotional voice.

“What couldn’t be?”

“Me. Going online—” He stopped midsentence.

I gave him a few seconds to continue. Then a few seconds
longer. We were at a critical juncture. I knew how careful I had to be to push but not too far.

“Did you say anything to her?”

“I tried to talk to her. I told her it was not a big deal. That I’d just stumbled on the Web site. I lied.”

There it was. That odd elation in his voice when he said he’d lied. I felt a rush of adrenaline. It doesn’t always happen that a set of circumstances occurs in your patient’s life at exactly the right time in his or her therapy to create an opening like this.

“Bob, how did you feel when you were lying?”

“Terrible.”

He didn’t. I knew he was lying. I could hear it in his voice, see it in the way he clasped his hands suddenly, hiding the wedding ring with the fingers of the other hand.

“Really? Terrible?”

“Yes. Lying is horrible. To lie to your wife…”

“Yes, but just because it’s horrible doesn’t mean it has to feel terrible.”

He was nodding. He knew. Was he going to tell me?

“It didn’t feel terrible, did it?”

He shook his head.

I lowered my voice. “How did it feel, Bob?”

He shut his eyes. He couldn’t do it. That didn’t matter. I knew he had consciously thought it. We’d get there. He was so close to understanding that he’d felt real pleasure.

“Did she believe you?”

“No. And she told me she didn’t. She asked me how often, and I lied again. I told her I mostly did it when she was out of town. I didn’t want to hurt her. It was killing me to hurt her. I love her.” It was a plea for me to stop, but I wouldn’t. Quickly now, before he could think about it, I asked again. “How did you feel lying to her?”

“Elated.” Once the word was out of his mouth he seemed confused by it.

I let out my breath. We’d just jumped a new hurdle.

“Why?”

“Why did it feel good?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know. Can’t you tell me? I tortured her and got pleasure from it? What kind of sick fuck does that make me? I broke every single rule and I didn’t care. I don’t understand.”

He rarely used the work
fuck.
He was using it a lot today. “You don’t have to understand everything now. You just need to be open to feeling it.”

He couldn’t tolerate his feelings, though. Even before he said a word, I knew he was stepping back. His expression and posture changed again.

“It is really very obscene.” His sounded as if he were observing the scene from a great distance. “My wife was standing in front of my computer, staring at a woman who was thrusting a dildo in and out of herself in time to some stupid rock song. When I reached out to shut it off, she yelled at me to leave it. For some insane reason I did. She stood there like a soldier and took it. Like she was being sentenced. I couldn’t stand it. Me. I was doing this to her. To my wife.”

I ignored the non sequitur and tried to follow where he was leading. “What happened then?”

“She leaned in, over my shoulder, and in a very low voice, she said,
‘Bob, you don’t think you fooled me, do you? I’ve known about what you do in here for weeks. For weeks and weeks and weeks, and I’m going to kill you for this.’”

D
etective Noah Jordain, of the NYPD Special Victims Unit, leaned against the Jefferson Parish courthouse. His cell phone was wedged between his ear and shoulder while he sipped a cup of real New Orleans coffee and waited for his partner, Mark Perez, to get back on the phone.

Watching the street traffic, he squinted against the sun’s brightness, put the cup down on the stone ledge of the building, pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket, and put them on.

Coming back to New Orleans, his hometown, had always been bittersweet, but since the hurricane it was also surrealistic. How could so much have changed? So much still be left to do? And yet feel the city’s spirit so alive?

Across the road a light-skinned man wearing jeans, a short-sleeved white shirt and sunglasses walked down the block for the second time since Jordain had been standing there. Something about the way he swaggered alerted the detective.

It was most likely nothing, but he couldn’t be too sure. The Hatterly trial had made a lot of people angry five years earlier, and now that the defendant’s lawyers had won an appeal, those same people were getting angry all over again. Much
of it was directed at Jordain, whose incriminating testimony had been critical to the prosecution before and would be again.

To be more precise, which Jordain always was, the papers were reporting that he’d been the nail in Louis Hatterly’s coffin. Everyone expected that same nail to be driven back in again.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Perez got back on the line and continued describing the brand-new nightmare where he’d left off. “All over the country, 911 operators started getting calls. According to the guys watching the Web cast, one minute she was playing with herself, the next she was sick. That lasted for about a quarter of an hour. Some of them were more specific about what
sick
meant, some less, but it sounded pretty brutal. Then she dropped offline.”

“How many calls were there?”

“Over 150. Jersey City operators took twenty-two. Dallas took thirteen. Syracuse, twelve. Eighteen in New York. You want me to keep going?”

“I don’t know, you want to keep going?”

“Not unless you have a while,” Perez quipped. “The calls started on Thursday night. Most of them were logged by Friday a.m. A few are still dribbling in.”

“Four days later?”

“Guilty consciences.”

“If calls were taken all over the country, we’re handling this out of New York why?”

“A few of the guys described the top of a building they could see out of her window. Three of the New Yorkers identified it as the Met Life tower.”

“And it took us until today to get this because…?”

“You don’t really want to go into that now. You’d much prefer I keep filling you in on the more important information. It’s just bureaucratic crap that will raise your blood pressure, and you have to go on the stand in a few minutes. Instead, I’m
going to tell you that no one has any idea who the girl is or where she is or anything about her except for the URL where the guys went to see her little show.”

“You getting details?” Jordain asked.

It was his most oft-repeated phrase and there were cops both in New Orleans—where he’d worked until five years ago—and in New York who called him Detective Details.

“The URL is registered to a porn site registered to a holding company, which is owned by another holding company, which is owned by a corporation in China, and communicating with them is taking some work. It’s all going to come back to some guy sitting in an office right here in Manhattan or L.A. or New Jersey. You know it is. But we have to circle the world first.”

“Is there anything that suggests foul play? Could the woman have just been sick? Or could it be suicide?”

“The descriptions of how the illness was presented suggest poison. Self-inflicted is possible, but unlikely. Add that to the sex angle and we hit the jackpot. Besides, they know that we have absolutely nothing else to do.”

“Funny, funny man. Okay. I’ll be finished here by two and should be on a five o’clock—” Jordain broke off. The stranger in the cap was walking down the street again, now for the third time. “I’ll call you and see if you need me to come in.”

“No need tonight. We don’t have enough.”

“Yet.”

The man crossed over and was heading toward him. Jordain’s hand moved to his waist and rested on his gun. It was an unconscious move.

Nothing happened, though. The man sauntered by, not even glancing at him. But while Jordain had been paying attention to the man in the glasses, he hadn’t noticed the woman who was now standing right in front of him.

“You aren’t ever wrong, are you, Detective?” Mrs. Hatterly, the defendant’s mother, was in her sixties, with white hair pulled back off a face that was deeply etched. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she was trembling. She stood so close to him that he could smell her sweet perfume.

“Perez, gotta go.” Jordain snapped the phone shut. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve had to go through, Mrs. Hatterly.” His New Orleans drawl made the word
sorry
stretch all the way out.

“What I’ve had to go through is nothing. It’s my son who is suffering. Because of you. Because you are so sure you’re right. Don’t you realize that your being right is what got my son convicted—”

A young man came over and put his hand on the woman’s arm. “Mom, let’s go inside.”

But Mrs. Hatterly wasn’t done with Jordain yet. “You’re so sure. But what if you are wrong? Haven’t you ever been wrong? Haven’t you—”

Her son pulled her away just before her angry fists reached Jordain’s chest.

He sighed. Other cops claimed they got used to people’s pain, and he envied them for that. But becoming hardened took its toll in other ways.

He watched until she was gone from sight, and then he, too, headed toward the courtroom.

It took some effort. And not because it was so hot out and the air was so heavy. He loved that air. No, that wasn’t why. This case had been bad enough the first time. Having to go through it all again was bringing back ghosts, because during the last trial, his father, Detective André Jordain, had died.

Jordain had been back to New Orleans often since moving to New York. He’d been to the cemetery where his dad was buried. But this was different.

He couldn’t stop the memories from washing over him. The defendant’s mother had shook him up, and whenever he was unnerved, the dam he’d erected to keep the past from seeping into the present leaked.

Jordain passed through the cool lobby and proceeded to the courtroom. He stopped in the hallway and looked in. Five years earlier, Jordain had been on that stand when his lieutenant had walked in and stood, as if at attention, at the back of the room. Noah had wondered why he was there. But he didn’t find out until after he had finished his testimony: His father had died.

He stared at the spot where he’d been when he’d heard. The ghosts were demanding their time.

A
t noon, Nina Butterfield popped her head into my office. She was dressed in a three-quarter-length, copper-colored fur coat that matched her hair, and was holding up a pair of ice skates, swinging them in the air.

“You want to take a break?” she asked, her amber eyes sparkling.

I did but, preoccupied with Bob, told her I didn’t think I should.

“You never need to get out more than when you don’t think you should. I know these things. I’m a therapist. Now, come on. I cleared your schedule with Allison. She said you’re free.” It sounded like a suggestion but it wasn’t. More often than not, she knew what was best for me. More often than not I recognized that.

At least twice a week Nina and I went out together at lunchtime. Sometimes to eat, but usually to walk, either in Central Park, which was only two blocks west of the institute, or wherever we wound up, exploring stores that we’d never noticed before, taking in exhibitions at museums or shows at art galleries. In the winter, when strolling in the street wasn’t as enticing, we went ice-skating.

Outside, we pulled on our gloves and buttoned up our coats. Someone else might have turned back because of the snow and gray sky. Not Nina. She was fearless about venturing out into a potential storm.

She’d taught me how to skate when I was an eight-year-old without a mother and she was a childless divorcée who hadn’t yet realized she’d inherited me. Then years later, she’d taught my daughter.

“Dulcie hasn’t been skating at all yet,” I told her as we walked into the park and headed west toward the rink. Since my daughter had been appearing in The Secret Garden all of our old routines had changed.

“I’d imagine with six performances a week on Broadway, she’s overwhelmed.”

“Do you really think it’s a good idea that a thirteen-year-old works so hard? She’s missing out on so much.”

“Is she happy, Morgan?” She sighed.

“She seems happy,” I said, and heard the wistfulness in my own voice.

“You’d know if she wasn’t.”

Since she was a baby, I’d sensed Dulcie’s emotional and psychic temperature even if we both weren’t in the same room, or the same building as each other. Miles away, I’d get a sudden pain in my stomach or hand or back, only to find out when I arrived home that she’d been sick, cut herself or fallen. When something wonderful happened, I’d feel a sudden lightness for no reason. It had been going on so long that none of us found it odd.

Nina glanced over at me. She had it too—that sense when something was wrong with me—but in her case, it was exceptional insight as a therapist.

“Are things back to normal?”

Weeks earlier, my daughter and I had an argument about
her being offered a three-week part in a television series. She’d wanted to do it and I’d been adamant that appearing in a play six times a week was more than enough work for her. We fought. And then, of course, she brought her father into it. I’d already talked to Mitch, and he had backed me up on the decision. Nevertheless, when I’d gone to pick her up from his apartment that weekend, she’d refused to come home with me. She said she knew that if I’d said yes, her father would have said yes, too. That he was more fair. That he wanted her to have a career. That I wanted to hold her back. And finally—the coup de grace—that she wanted to live with him.