The Halo Effect

21

The next day was bright and sunny and hot, and Nina and I took a walk into Central Park at lunchtime. We entered through the zoo entrance and as soon as we left the traffic and the exhaust of Fifth Avenue, I took a deep breath, inhaling the fresher air. If you live in the suburbs you don’t understand how important a park becomes to city dwellers. Especially in the summer. Most of us know every inch of it, the way you know your own backyard.

“What’s wrong?” Nina asked.

“Am I that transparent?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You are just that good, right?” We both laughed. It was an old joke. She could see through me just as she had been able to see through my mother, no matter how dense the thicket of lies.

“Dulcie okay?” she asked.

“She’s at drama school. I’ve never seen her happier. She hasn’t argued with me about anything for days.”

“Okay, so it’s not Dulcie. Are you going to tell me or are you going to make me pull it out of you?”

“It’s a patient.”

She raised her eyebrows. “So someone’s gotten to you?”

I laughed sarcastically.

Since graduate school I’d endured the joke that my last name should have been Ice, not Snow. Of all the traps in being a shrink, I rarely, if ever, got too close to my patients. I hardly ever stepped over the boundaries. Almost never had countertransference issues, even though they were common with therapists and were, in fact, often a good way to stay in touch with your patients as long as you were aware of what was happening.

We’d reached the dead center of the park, where a huge abandoned amphitheater stood like a comforting parenthesis mark.

The ear, I had called this structure as a child.

I’d learned to ride my bike and use my roller skates on the esplanade just beyond this spot. And I brought my boyfriends here when I was in high school to make out in the shadows of the shell.

I filled Nina in on my concern over Cleo’s disappearance and my phone calls with Gil Howard and Elias Beecher. I explained who they both were, having more information now after talking to Gil a second time that morning.

“Elias is Cleo’s boyfriend. A white-glove lawyer. I’ve talked to him once. Not sure yet what I think of him. I’ve talked to Gil twice. He’s her business partner. They’ve been working together for five years. And I think they’ve also been lovers. He implied they still are lovers. In any case, he doesn’t know about Elias.”

“Do you think either of them have anything to do with her disappearance?”

“Gut reaction is no. They are both distraught. Going on instinct, their fears and distress appear heartfelt. But we both know that if either of them is a psychopath, they’d be able to fool me. The business partner could be upset about the book, knowing that if she does publish it, clients could very well stop coming to the club. It would be a terrible scandal.”

“And the boyfriend?”

“The police think he’s a suspect. Just because he is her boyfriend. And he knows that. He told me that right off the bat. But I don’t think he’s involved.”

“Why?”

I went into detail about Cleo’s sexual dysfunction. “She told me he’s been patient with her. Willing to work with her.”

“Or that’s how she wants to see it. You don’t really know. He could be insanely jealous of the other men she’s been with. How does he feel about the book?”

“I don’t know if he’s read it. She just finished the first draft. But she told me he was worried about the idea of it.”

“He could have gotten his hands on it and flipped out when he actually read about what she’s done with these men. It’s one thing knowing it in the abstract but another having read the details.”

We walked through the empty space, sending the assembled pigeons flying.

“There’s a third scenario,” I said. “Last night the detective who has been working on the Magdalene murders came to see me.”

I watched Nina’s face harden into an angry mask. Before she had a chance to say anything, I spoke. “This has nothing to do with what had happened with Sam. This is about a beautiful young woman.”

Nina was shaking her head. “You think that’s what’s bothering me? C’mon Morgan. You know why I’m upset. This is about ethics. I understand how worried you are about your patient. But there is a clear line here, and you know you can’t cross it.” She squinted. But the sun wasn’t in her eyes. She was looking at me hard. “You aren’t considering talking to the police about your patient, are you?”

“Of course not. I’d never do that unless I knew she was in danger and I had information that could save her.” My voice was tight.

“Do you have any information?”

There was a sudden fluttering of wings as a flock of pigeons settled on the stage of the amphitheater and began hunting for crumbs of food.

I explained that Cleo had given me a copy of the book and that I’d been reading it. “No. I don’t have any real information. Only that her boyfriend was right to be worried about her publishing it. Her clients are powerful and wealthy men who’ve trusted her with their…idiosyncrasies. Not one of them is going to be happy about this memoir. Even if she does disguise them.”

A group of kids Dulcie’s age came roaring down the aisle on bikes, hollering and listening to their voices echo off the bandshell.

“Does she name the men in the book?”

“No. Well, not quite. She goes into enough detail about several of the men she sees on a regular basis for me to guess who they are. But she doesn’t name them.”

“Is it incendiary?”

“If you knew who they were, for sure it would be. She talks about what they want from her…some of it sad, some dark. All of it potentially explosive. The question I keep asking myself is what if one of these men she’s written about knows that she is about to reveal his secrets? He’d worry she would leave in just enough detail so that someone close to this guy might recognize him. That could make someone desperate. And if that’s true, if I keep Cleo’s book and don’t turn it in, I could be preventing the police from finding her.”

“Not so fast. You don’t even know she’s in danger. And you don’t know that any of her clients know about the book.”

“Right. But I can’t just sit on the book and not do anything, either.”

“You have to. You understand that, don’t you, Morgan?”

I nodded.

We started walking back, taking a different route, one that led us past the Bethesda Fountain. A film crew was shooting and large trucks obstructed the view of the bronze statue.

“Nina, what if I’m the only-”

“You can’t solve everything, Morgan. You have to stop trying.”

I kicked at a fallen branch in my way. Took a step. Kicked it another few feet. “What if I tried to meet the men in the book and-”

“How would you figure out who they are?”

“Gil Howard-that’s Cleo’s partner and the guy who owns the Club-might be willing to help me. There are a lot of men in the book who have a lot to lose.”

Nina stopped, not saying anything right away. It was almost as if she was waiting for everything to line up in some order in her mind. “What would meeting them do? How would that help you figure out what happened to her? If anything has happened to her.”

We started up a small incline, past a playground on one side and a meadow on the other.

“I could assess them.”

Nina was shaking her head now. “No.”

“I have to do something.”

“Morgan, what if she just went away to get some space from her boyfriend? Or to get plastic surgery? Or she had some kind of psychotic break? What if you met the men, suspected one and then were to tell the police enough about him for them to figure out who he was, and what if the police exposed him and then it turned out your client wasn’t in any danger at all?” She shook her head again. “Not only would you have jeopardized Cleo’s business and her clients’ privacy, but you could also lead to her getting arrested. After all, prostitution is illegal. I know we aren’t supposed to make judgments and I’m not making one now, but you are dealing with someone who is breaking the law every single day. And if you give the police any information, you are giving them a key to arresting her.”

“Arresting her? But she might be in danger.”

A sly smile crossed Nina’s lips. “You sure? You really sure? I’m not. Do you remember what they did to Sam? They acted as if they were investigating some poor girl who was in trouble, but they weren’t. They were laying a trap for Sam. What if they’re laying a trap again? The police know about Cleo and her business. They have been watching her and waiting for just one slipup. And now they have a very convenient situation to play with. The boyfriend has told them she’s missing. Since when does the NYPD do anything about missing people? Thousands go missing in this city every single week. Without any sign that she was kidnapped or taken against her will, believe me, they do not investigate a case like this. What if they are using the serial murder to fool you into helping them nail Cleo? It could be just another sting.”

The kids, having made one huge circle, were back again and shouting too loudly for us to talk over them.

“That’s impossible,” I finally said. “You are mixing up your past with this present. That’s not what this is about. Not this detective.”

“You don’t think the police can be that duplicitous? You think that some detective you have never met before would hesitate to use you? Give me one shred of one reason that a woman like Cleo would allow herself to get taken in by a serial killer who meets with hookers in midpriced hotels? From everything you said, her clientele is about a hundred steps up the social ladder from that.”

Nina was right about that. I couldn’t see Cleo making that kind of mistake. Especially since she had been forewarned. But what if the man committing this crime was someone she already knew? What if he had relationships with several different kinds of prostitutes in the city?

“I understand what you are afraid of Nina, but Detective Jordain isn’t lying to me.”

“I know that for some reason you want to believe that, but you can’t be sure.”

“I am.”

“Just because you have that damn Geiger counter in your head that can measure bullshit doesn’t mean you can’t ever be wrong. People act all the time. And some of them are very good at it. Why can’t the detective just be an excellent actor?”

I didn’t have an answer.

But I knew he wasn’t.