The Halo Effect

15

I was quiet as Simon drove away from the prison and headed the car toward the city.

The sky ahead of us was gray, streaked with clouds. The closer we got to the city, the darker the sky became, and as we crossed the George Washington Bridge, it started to rain.

Traffic was backed up. The rain turned to a downpour. The cars came to a standstill and humidity fogged the windows in Simon’s car.

Up ahead was the coffee shop we usually stopped at on our way back to New York. Simon parked and we ran from the car into the restaurant, only getting a little wet.

He ordered a Coke and a grilled cheese sandwich. I was used to him eating what I called “kid food” whenever he wanted. And envious. I ordered a salad and an iced coffee, and when the drink came I used artificial sweetener. Even though I tried to walk and go to the gym a few times a week, I always needed to lose ten pounds.

Finally he moved the conversation away from the light banter we’d been enjoying in the car. “What’s wrong, Morgan?”

“I know depression is anger turned inward, but I can’t seem to use that information to help myself as much as my patients.”

“You get angry for your patients all the time. It’s your Achilles’ heel. You feel for them. You want to solve their problems for them. You want to save them. And you know it’s not good for you.”

“There isn’t enough love in the world. Or enough compassion. Or even enough pity. There certainly isn’t enough time to give to all the people who deserve it.”

“You just have to remember that you deserve some of it, too.”

“I have a supervisor, thank you very much, Dr. Weiss.”

He smiled. “There’s more. Spill.”

“Cleo Thane. These girls look up to her.”

He nodded and watched the waitress set down our food. “I know. Is that why she’s getting under your skin?”

I ate a forkful of my salad and then answered, “I don’t know.”

“First thought.”

“She seems so tough. Except it’s all an act. She’s the best actress in the world and no one will ever know it except for a few dozen men.”

“Hmm. And who else could that be a description of?”

I nodded. It was too easy. When you are good friends with a therapist who really knows you, you speak in shortcuts. Between Simon Weiss and Nina Butterfield, I never had to stay confused for too long.

“You see your mother in her, don’t you?” he asked gently.

“I see something of my mother in her.”

It was raining that day, too. We were living in that hellhole on the Lower East Side and the water was seeping in the windows through the space where the frame was pulled away from the glass. My mother was lying on the couch, her silk shirt wrinkled, her jeans loose on her lean frame. Her lovely black hair framed her pale face. My mother’s electric-blue eyes were half-shut, and her trained voice was slurred with the effects of the painkillers she popped like candy and the liquor she used to wash them down.

She had a friend there when I got home from school that day. Jim, she called him, and she held his hand.

When he pulled it away, she tucked something into her pocket.

Tell me a story, Morgan, she whispered after he had gone while she lay there on the couch.

And I, too young at eight to understand, thought that my talking to her would bring her back from almost dead and make her whole again.

“Once upon a time there were two lost girls…”

The rain stopped as quickly as it started, and the sun was coming out as we turned onto Sixty-fifth Street and pulled into the parking garage down the block from the institute. It was five o’clock. We had an hour and a half till our Thursday-night group-therapy sessions started.

Simon and I walked through the wrought-iron-and-glass doors and said hello to Belinda, the receptionist. And then we parted, he to his office, and I to mine. In the time remaining before the session started I wanted to call Dulcie, who spent Thursday nights with her paternal grandmother and grandfather.

I opened the door to my office and stopped on the threshold, sensing something was wrong even before I saw it.

A window must have been left open and the wind must have blown in. No…not just a wind.

Only gale-force gusts could have made this mess.

The cobalt-and-emerald carpet was hidden under a thick layer of papers, like litter in the street after a parade. I didn’t even know I had that much paper in my office. The top of my desk was clear and the file cabinets were all open, the drawers pulled out, empty and gaping like hungry mouths.

Scattered among the papers were my books.

My bookshelves had been dumped onto the floor along with everything else. Dozens of books lay open, their backs broken and their spines split. Illuminated by the late-afternoon sunshine coming through the windows, the sight was obscene.

No window had been left open. And there was no wind that could have caused this degree of destruction.

“Belinda?” I yelled. I knew I might be disturbing someone in session, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from bellowing out her name.

Footsteps came quickly; she had heard the urgency in my voice.

“Dr. Snow? Are you all right?”

She was at the threshold of the door to my office.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

“Did you see anyone come in here this afternoon? Did you let anyone in? Was my door shut all afternoon?” I knew this was hopeless questioning. She sat partway down the hall with her back to my office door. But maybe she had walked by. Maybe she had turned around.

“Open or shut?” I asked.

“It had to be shut. I would have noticed if it had been open. I walked by here at least four times since lunch. What do you think-”

“You’d better call Nina.”

Nina and I stood in the middle of the room assessing the mess. There was nothing of monetary value in the office except for the computer-which was still sitting in the middle of the desk-and the carpet. But we were both worried about the patient files. What if someone had taken any of those? Each file had private and sensitive information in it. While no one even blinked anymore when you said you were going to a therapist, when you said-if you even said it aloud-that you were seeing a sex therapist, people inched closer. They wanted to know, even if they didn’t dare ask, what the problem was. Impotency? Frigidity? Lack of desire, too much desire? Worse? Some deviant fetish?

We are still such a puritan society.

“Let’s try to make some sense of this mess and see if anything is missing. Do you have a group?” Nina asked.

I nodded.

“Well, let’s hurry, then. We have an hour. Forget the books-let’s work with the papers and see what’s what. This could be a disaster.”

As we shuffled through the papers and I saw the names of past and present clients on my notes, I grew more and more concerned.

“Most of these notes are fairly cryptic, but if someone wanted to blackmail a husband or a wife-or if someone is in the midst of a child custody case-there’s stuff here that they could use.” My voice was rising toward a hysterical pitch. “There’s no way for me to know what’s missing. Anything could be missing. Someone could have taken just one piece of paper that could upset a-”

Nina came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. We were the same height and she looked right into my eyes. I remembered when I had been a lost little girl and she had been a grown-up. She’d ignored my smelly clothes and matted hair, ignored my mother lying on the bed beside me, half out of her mind on painkillers, and she had just lassoed me with her amber eyes and held me in a kind embrace.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Morgan.” Thirty years later she was still the only one who could tell me that and make me believe it.

I took a breath. The way she had taught me. Square breathing. It calmed you right down. Inhale, one, two, three, four, hold it, one, two, three, four. Exhale, one, two, three, four, hold it, one, two, three, four. And again.

“Should we call the police?” I asked.

Nina shook her head. I knew she wouldn’t want to do that. While I had worked with the police a few times over the years as an expert witness and had a good working relationship with the D.A.’s office, Nina didn’t.

In 1996, her husband of only two years and founder of this institute, Sam Butterfield, had been arrested and charged with running an illegal prostitution ring. He was a brilliant, aging hippie who had a child-of-the-sixties hatred of the police. As a radical revolutionary who believed America was backward and puritanical when it came to sexual attitudes, mores and rules, he broke laws and made up new ones without fear.

The police used a writer named Julia Sterling in a sting operation to infiltrate the institute. Six months later, Sam was convicted. He died of a heart attack the second week he was in prison.

Nina, who had always had a healthy skepticism balanced with respect for law enforcement, became embittered. She blamed the police and the slick and effective sting operation they had put in place for Sam’s death.

All they had to do, she’d said more than once, was come out and tell Sam what they’d wanted from him. Investigate him out in the open. But instead, they had gone undercover. Paid lip service to the idea of justice. And the shock of that, Nina said, was what did him in. And now she mistrusted the police as much as her husband ever had.

“What I want to know is how the hell did anyone get in here? Was your door locked?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I never lock my door.”

“When was the last time you were in here?”

“Yesterday, around five.”

“There were half-a-dozen groups here last night. That’s more than fifty people between 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Someone could have slipped in without the receptionist noticing.”

“Belinda would have noticed,” I said.

“She wasn’t here last night. We had a temp on the front desk. Serena something. I don’t remember her last name.”

Nina walked over to the windows and tried first the one on the left and then the right. Only one of them was locked. My office was on the second floor. At night, in the dark, during the few hours when New York City’s residential neighborhoods really do go to sleep, it might have been possible for someone to climb up the stone wall and steal into the building.

“Do you lock the windows and the balcony door at night?”

I was searching, sifting through the papers, but I wasn’t focused. Was this the act of an angry ex-patient? Had someone broken into my office looking for valuable information that would allow them to destroy one of my patients?

“Yes, of course,” I said. But had I forgotten to?

“Do you have any idea which one of your patients might be at risk for blackmail?” Nina asked.

“Which one? It’s more like which ones. I have one patient who has finally decided to ask her husband for a separation. He’s been sexually abusing her and has even been here with her several times. I guess he might be angry enough to do something like this. He’d know the layout of the office. And he might have gotten in. Anyone might have gotten in with a temp at the front desk.”

“Who else?”

“There are dozens. I don’t even know where to start.” I felt overwhelmed by the mess and confusion everywhere I looked.

“I’m going to talk to the temp and look through the appointment books. There has to be a way to make sense of this.”

A half hour later, she was back in my office.

“Have you noticed anything missing?” she asked as she began picking up the books off the floor and putting them back on my shelves.

“No. But who knows? It could be one single sheet of paper with my notes on it. Did you find out anything?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Too many options. We had sixtyfive people in here last night between single appointments and groups. Five first-timers. We also had someone from the phone company working here. And about five messengers delivered packages. Any one of them could have stayed behind in a bathroom. We’re going to have to keep track of all the new patients who came in yesterday but don’t come back.”

“That will only work if the person used his or her own name. If not, we might never be able to figure out who it was. Or what they wanted.” I smoothed the end pages of a book on Freud’s whore-madonna complex before I returned it to the shelf.