Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (18 page)

M
y last appointment on Monday before lunch was with Gil Howard, Cleo’s business partner and the man she had put down on her chart as her emergency contact.

“Do you mind?” he asked, holding up his pack of cigarettes.

I did, but he was so distressed I told him it was all right. As he lit the extra-long, slim brown cigarette with a silverand-lacquer lighter, his hand shook and the sun bounced off the glass of his paper-thin Piaget watch.

Gil was older than I’d guessed he would be from his voice on the phone. About sixty, but rugged and in shape. He was wearing an exquisitely tailored suit, but with a white shirt open at the neck. It was a mix of the relaxed and the elegant usually reserved for those who are used to wealth. But I knew from Cleo’s book that he had only come into money in his late forties as a day trader on Wall Street. He had cashed out early, retired, gotten bored and then started the Diablo. He and
Cleo had met, she’d written in her book, when he’d hired her for the night.

“I’m at a total loss,” he said, tapping the nonexistent ash off the just-lit cigarette into the ashtray I’d put on the table in front of him. “She didn’t say she was leaving town.”

“Has she ever done anything like this before?”

“No. Occasionally one of her regular clients has asked her to go away with him. And usually, if the location is enticing enough, she’ll go. The money is usually too good to turn down. But we’ve known each other for years, and she’s never just disappeared before.”

He tapped the ash again. This time a quarter inch fell.

“You can imagine how upset I am. I even thought about going to the police, for Christ’s sake.” He laughed, and for a second I glimpsed the man he must be when he wasn’t stressed out and worried—friendly and easygoing.

“She likes you. A lot,” he said.

“I like her, too.”

“She told me you donate your time to the girls in prison. She does things like that. There’s no one like her.”

I nodded. I still wasn’t sure why Gil Howard had wanted to come see me, but I was glad he had. He’d saved me a trip.

“So,” he went on, “I know you were talking to her. But I don’t know how much she was telling you about what was going on with her. And I’m not asking.” Another drag of the cigarette, another tap on the ashtray. “But she was different the last few months. And I’m wondering if that has something to do with her being missing.”

“Is that what you would have told the police if you had gone to them?”

“This is all sort of tricky, you know? Our business is run legitimately. We pay taxes. And people know who Cleo is. Or at least they think they do. But she has never publicly acknowledged
what she does, and she’s never been arrested or caught in any kind of compromising situation.”

I nodded.

“So I’m in an awkward spot. I can’t compromise our clients. And I don’t want to get Cleo in trouble if she’s only…” He didn’t finish the sentence. “But the truth is, I don’t think she’s just taken off or is on some sudden vacation. I’m worried.”

“So how do you think I can help you? I’m in pretty much the same situation you are. I can’t talk to anyone about what Cleo and I discussed. It’s all privileged information.”

“But if you thought she was in danger, if you thought you had some information about where she was, would you be able to help her?”

“What are you asking—if I’d risk her privacy to save her life?”

He nodded.

“Only if I was sure that was what I was doing. Her privacy mattered to her. So much. What do you think she’d want?”

“She’s not embarrassed by what she does. Just cautious. But I don’t know.” He looked down at the cigarette. Then shook his head and, with an angry motion, ground it out in the ashtray. A thin plume of smoke rose into the air and dissipated somewhere above his head. He expelled his breath and ran a hand through his hair.

“Anyway, I never had to make the decision about going to the police. They came to me and—big surprise—I think I’m on their list of possible suspects. That’s fine. The boyfriend is always a suspect.”

“How long have you been together?” I tried not to act surprised by his admission that they were not only partners but lovers.

“For a while.” He was remembering. I could see it in the way his eyes glazed over and he looked out into the middle
distance of the room as if he could see something there. “I never thought, when I first met her, that I’d wind up with her. Never thought I could love someone, really love someone who does what she does. Do you think that’s strange?”

“I don’t deal with words like
strange
. I don’t believe in making judgments.”

“It’s more than the sex. Except it’s hard to separate the sex from the rest. With Cleo almost everything is tinged with sex. Just the way she leans forward to listen to you talk or the way she puts a hand on your arm when she is about to say something. It’s not like other women, who are just who they are all the time and then in bed get a little sexy. Or a lot sexy. And it’s not like Cleo is some sex symbol. Not like some show-off with implants and a Brazilian bikini wax. Cleo is just a completely sensual creature. That’s what makes it so easy for her to take a man to bed.”

He stopped to light another cigarette. I didn’t say anything. Not wanting to interrupt him and break his mood. No matter who he was to her, this man was in love with my patient, and he deserved to be able to talk about what he was feeling. And I wanted him to. Suddenly there was a motive for Cleo’s disappearance. Two different men thought that she was in love with them. Had she run away from both of them? Had one of them been so jealous of the other that he’d done something about it?

If, for instance, Gil
had
been her lover and now she had a new lover, then there was every possibility that he could have struck her in a rage.

“I never thought I’d be able to forget about the other men she was with for work when we were in bed. But she made me. It wasn’t just what she did for me, but what she let me do to her. She was shy. Can you believe that? She was actually shy with me. But I relaxed her. I was good for her. She
told me that she could separate it all—that what went on at work was work, but what we were like was different.”

What was he saying? That she was able to separate what she did with Gil from what she did at work? That didn’t sound right. Cleo had told me that she had serious problems making the leap from work to love and was uncomfortable in bed with Caesar. Was “shy” to Gil “uncomfortable” to Cleo? Or was she fine with Gil because she wasn’t in love with him? Was that problem reserved for Elias Beecher?

“Of course I can believe that she was shy with you. And you were happy with that?”

“Yes. And happy because she was letting me see another side of her. And most of all because I was able to make her happy.”

“Was? You’re saying it all in the past tense.” I couldn’t imagine I’d caught him on anything this obvious, but I had to ask.

“A few months ago, something started to change. She pulled back. Not sexually. The sex stayed fine. She still needed the sex. Or wanted it. Whatever. But emotionally she wasn’t…I don’t know…present. We stopped spending as much time together. Then it got worse. In the last eight weeks I hardly ever saw her except at work. She blamed it on the book. But why would the book have made her so—” he groped for a word “—distant? What could it’ve been, Dr. Snow?”

“How else did her distance manifest itself?”

“Mostly she wanted more time alone. You know, since she’s been missing, I’ve tried to reconstruct the last two months. Hell, I can’t even remember the last time we were together. It wasn’t abrupt. And I’ve busy, too, with the club. Opening another branch in Las Vegas. I wasn’t around. I was jet-lagged. I was haggling with architects and interior designers.
But now, looking back at it, she seemed relieved I was preoccupied.”

“Any other changes?”

“Yes, she started spending more money on herself. She’s never been frugal, but she’d never bought herself the kinds of things she started buying. An Hermès bag. A Cartier watch. A diamond thing around her neck. That’s not hundreds of dollars—that’s tens of thousands. I asked her if it was a client buying the stuff for her. But she said it wasn’t. So I figured she was just treating herself. And I figured she deserved it. But how dumb am I? What if it
was
someone else? Maybe there was a client who was more involved with her than I knew. Maybe he has something to do with her being gone.” His voice had become more and more rushed as he talked about the possibility of another man.

And maybe he knew there was another man and couldn’t handle it. What better way to put off suspicion than asking for help?

While I waited for Gil to keep talking, I realized that I had seen those things—the bag, the watch, the diamond thing, as Gil called it, around her neck. She had told me that Caesar had bought the necklace for her. So if that was the truth—and there was no reason I could think of for Cleo to lie to me about who was buying her gifts—then there was another man. Gil wasn’t Caesar, but Elias Beecher was.

But why hadn’t she told Gil she was seeing someone else?

Why hadn’t she ended things with him? Maybe she was hedging her bets, afraid to end something with a man she was sure of while the new relationship she had begun was still so fraught with problems. Or maybe she knew Gil was so jealous he wouldn’t be able to handle it. Was that it?

“She told you all about the book, right? She gave you a copy of it?” he asked.

I couldn’t tell him. The book might be yet another motive.

As Nina and I had discussed, what if Gil was afraid that if the book was published, the men Cleo wrote about would stay away from the club? And what if other men, afraid that their privacy would be compromised in the future, stayed away also?

My skin goose-bumped. Was that it? But if it was, why was Gil here? To find out how much I knew? To set up some kind of psychological defense?

“Mr. Howard, I can’t talk to you about what Cleo and I discussed or if I have or have not seen a book.”

“But she might be in danger.”

“I know that. But that doesn’t change anything about my responsibility to my patient.”

“But what if she
is
in danger? And what if one of her clients is responsible?”

“I’m terribly worried about that. But I still don’t understand how I can help you.”

“If I could read the book, then I might be able to figure it out. If I could read what those different men asked of her, what kinds of tricks they wanted, what they were into, then maybe I could figure out which one of them was crazy enough to do something to her.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

The conversation was making me afraid. Not for myself, but for Cleo. As worried as I had been, there was something much more frightening now that this man was sitting in front of me, chain-smoking, nervously tapping his cigarettes against my ashtray. Dropping dead ash into the bowl.

“But you have the information,” he insisted. “I know you do. I know she gave you the book. And I think you’re the only one who has a copy. I went to her apartment. I have the keys. I’ve always had the keys. And her laptop is gone. All her notes for the book were in there. There were no paper copies of the book. She worked on her pristine white laptop late
at night while I lay beside her, the glow of the monitor shining on her face. She told me she was going to let me read it when it was done. She was proud of it in a way that she wasn’t proud of anything else she had ever done. It was going to set her free, she said.”

I nodded. There was nothing I could say to him. But he had more to say to me. And I was not at all prepared for it.

“You know, you are very beautiful.”

I heard his words on more than one level. I was a therapist listening to a distraught man, I was a psychologist helping the police, and I was a woman who could not really remember the last time anyone had told her that.

I knew I was attractive enough. You don’t grow up in the past few decades of the twentieth century and not know what you look like. You judge yourself against every other woman you meet. Confronted with a culture that puts more value on how your features are arranged on your face than on the quality of your thoughts or your accomplishments, you are aware of how you measure up. But I had been married to the same man for more than fourteen years. A man who was my closest friend and who was the father of my daughter. But not someone who looked at me the way a stranger does.

Under Gil’s scrutiny, I felt my cheeks grow warm, and rather than try to understand that, I focused instead on the psychology of this man, who was worried about the woman he loved, telling me that I was beautiful.

“You could help Cleo.”

The segue was nonsensical.

“I have already told you, Mr. Howard, that I’m not at liberty to talk to you or anyone else about anything Cleo and I talked about. Not as long as there is a possibility that she is alive.”

This last part made him cringe. And unleashed something
desperate in him. He sat forward, his arms on his legs, pleading with me.

“You can meet her clients. I can introduce you to them. You can pretend to be someone she’s asked to fill in for her while she’s away.”

He’d come up with the same idea I had. I didn’t say anything, but I nodded. Gil continued.

“I know you have a copy of the book. Knowing Cleo, she had to give you a copy. You’ve read it. You can meet those men and you can test them. You can look at them and listen to them and judge them and try to figure out if any one of them could have been the man who has taken her away. Just the way you are doing with me.”

This last comment startled me.

“I’m a therapist, not a mind reader,” I said, surprising myself that I hadn’t just said no. Even though when I’d talked to Nina, I’d brought up the possibility of doing just this, it had only been an idea. Gil was making it all too possible.

“I’m not asking you to be a mind reader. Dr. Snow, Cleo told me that you knew things about her that she didn’t even know about herself. She said that you knew more about human nature and human sexuality than anyone she’d ever met. And Cleo knew people. She was damn good at knowing what men wanted. At knowing how to touch them, even the ones like me who were made of ice before they met her. It was this way she had of making you feel as if your happiness mattered to her. As if she got transfusions of happiness from doing these things. It wasn’t just the sex, it was the way she could listen. And it’s the same way you listen. As if all that matters is that I am here and I have something to say.”