The Halo Effect

30

I called Gil the next day and told him I was willing to proceed with his plan and that there were five men who, based on Cleo’s descriptions, I wanted to meet. Then I gave him their nicknames and some information I’d gleaned from the manuscript. It was too easy. He knew all but one from the nicknames alone-clearly she’d referred to them that way with him. The fifth, he said, he wasn’t sure about and would need to think about it. It might be someone she hadn’t seen in a long time and he’d forgotten who it was. We got off the phone after planning that I’d go to the Diablo the next evening at around seven-thirty for my first meeting.

I spent the rest of that day and most of the next trying not to think about that night. And when my last patient left, I shut the door and changed my clothes.

Gil had explained that the entrance to the Diablo Cigar Bar on East Fifty-fifth Street was through an unmarked door in the lobby of a small and exclusive hotel called the Bristol-Trent.

There were other private clubs hidden behind unmarked doors in Manhattan-Raffles in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, for instance-so the location in itself wasn’t that unusual. An exclusive club tucked away inside another establishment protected a patron’s privacy. But certainly not all private clubs offered the same extras as the Diablo.

Cleo’s book had described the way Diablo worked in detail. Membership was a onetime fifty-thousand-dollar bond. Nonrefundable. There were yearly dues in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars, which was applied to drinks, cigars and light meals. Through the club’s concierge, men could book a room at the Bristol-Trent Hotel. And for an additional fee they could book an assignation through Cleo.

It was as safe and private as possible.

I stood across the street for more than ten minutes, staring at the hotel’s facade, trying to get up the nerve to finally cross the street. I was worried I didn’t know how to be the kind of woman I was expected to be. Acting out a charade wasn’t my trade.

Cleo Thane’s voice wasn’t the one I heard while I stood there. It wasn’t Gil’s voice or the voice of the detective who had asked for my help.

It was my daughter’s.

“But why aren’t you a real doctor?” she had asked me a year before.

“I am a real doctor, Dulcie.”

“No. You just talk to people about sex.” She made a face. “You don’t heal them.”

“I make them feel better. Doesn’t that count? I help them to make their lives better.”

She had shrugged. “I guess. But I wish you were the kind of real doctor who saved people.”

I crossed the street, feeling wobbly and ridiculous in my get-up.

My black skirt was shorter than the length I usually wore, my legs were encased in expensive hose, my heels were the highest and pointiest I could find. Remembering Cleo’s Jimmy Choo pumps, I’d run out at lunch and bought a pair of the ridiculously expensive stilettos, horrified at the price tag and wondering how I was ever going to walk in them.

I’d spent more time and money than I’d planned on the shoes, but after making that purchase, I stopped off at Victoria’s Secret and purchased lace underwear. Light green satin. If I was going to play the part, I wanted to feel the part; I remembered that from my mother. It might be easier to fake it if I was at least in character.

Except I felt like I was wearing a costume.

I smoothed my skirt down and noticed my hands. Damn. I hadn’t done a good job of preparing at all. My fingernails were unpolished. And of everything, that unsettled me.

How many other mistakes was I making? How silly was this whole charade?

I’d never pull it off. And besides, what did I hope to accomplish? Did I really think I’d be able to psyche out these men well enough to figure out if one of them had done Cleo harm?

The doorman opened the front door for me and I stepped over the threshold. Inside the mirrored lobby, just as Gil had described, was a door to the right, almost behind the concierge’s desk. Anyone could open it, but only the men who had enough money and cleared Cleo and Gil’s rigorous credit check and police-record check were allowed in.

Once through the door, I walked across a lovely Persian carpet trying not to trip. Overhead a crystal chandelier cast glints of soft light on the paintings of devils hanging on the walls.

“Can I help you?” the maître d’ asked.

“I’m here to see Gil Howard.”

“May I have your name, please?”

“Morgan White.”

Gil had suggested and I’d agreed to use another last name. Morgan Snow. White. Seven dwarfs. Exactly how many suspects I had. It had been easy to come up with the pseudonym.

“He should be right inside. Do you need me to point him out to you?”

“No, thank you. I can find him.”

The large room was smoky and smelled of cigars and whiskey. It was such a male scent that it caught me by surprise. I’d never been in a place that was so exclusively devoted to and created for men. And rather than find it off-putting, I was attracted to it. The walls here were wood-paneled. The club chairs had obviously been chosen for their comfort. The bar on the left wall was long and gleaming. Behind it was a delightful mural of nymphs romping in an enchanted forest, being chased by very cheery-looking devils with extremely long and pointed tails.

The devil motif was on the ashtrays and etched more subtly onto the heavy crystal glasses that I saw a waiter carrying.

Ella Fitzgerald was belting out a song over the sound system.

There was nothing about the scene before me that was any different than what you would find at any restaurant in New York. Walk into the bar at the Mark Hotel or the St. Regis, and you’d find the same men, sipping the same scotch or martinis.

But while there are always some beautiful women in restaurants in New York, here there were nothing but beautiful women, and all of them were under forty. Many of them under thirty.

And none of the couples at any of the tables looked tired or bored or were arguing.

I found Gil in the corner at a table with two other men. He rose and welcomed me with a grateful and relieved hug.

“This is Morgan,” he said as he introduced me to Ted and Bernard. Like most of the club members, these two would have looked at home at any boardroom meeting. Polished, buffed and slightly tanned, Ted was in his early forties. Bernard was a bit younger, wearing a European-cut sport coat and a crisp white shirt, opened at the top. Both of them shook my hand.

And then I realized something: the men were openly staring at me.

I wasn’t used to it. In fact, I couldn’t ever remember being looked at that way except by Gil the day before in my office. People glanced at you all the time. They assessed you and judged you and made rash decisions based on those first impressions when their eyes swiftly swept over you. But this was not subtle. These men looked at me shamelessly and I felt naked.

There was something so frank about these appraisals that while they made me uncomfortable, I also appreciated the lack of pretense about them. They were just men staring at a woman. Intellectually, I may have had issues with mating dances, but sociologically I understood them. Men are hardwired to find women alluring by looks alone. And not just one woman at a time, but many women. And for good reason.

It is all about survival of the fittest. The men who were the most prolific at producing progeny were the ones whose genetic imprint was passed on. Just as the women who got pregnant often, and nursed and nurtured their babies best, were the ones whom we descend from.

Men thrusted. Women held. Of course in some cases it was reversed. Of course women could do what men could do. Intellectually we were, if not identical, then certainly equal.

But our most basic hormonal sexual selves were not always similar. Men were more excited about a woman they had never tasted or touched before than one they already knew intimately. A stranger whose pheromones a man had not yet become immune to was more desirable than a trusted lover.

But all this scientific jargon, this polite way to try to make the best of something that irks, pains and annoys women, didn’t make it any easier to do the dance.

Some enlightened men did more than pay lip service to the idea of change, could outsmart their instincts, but they were not at the Diablo Cigar Bar. Here, protected by a steel door with a fine wood veneer and armed guards who sat almost invisibly by the front of the room, there was no pretense. No wives or girlfriends allowed. This was a men’s club and every woman present was for sale.

And so, even though in any other circumstance I would have turned away from the stares, I could not do that here. Not even allow myself the indignant narrowing of my eyes. I could not shoot back a comment that would put the guys in their place. This was their place. I was either the interloper or the entertainment. And I had two seconds to make up my mind what it was to be.

If I chose one way, I would have to leave and be no closer to helping Cleo-if, indeed, she was in trouble. If, indeed, it was not already too late. The other way, I could stay and take my chances, betting on my ability to find something out.

And if I didn’t, there was no one else who could.

Gil excused us and took me off to the bar.

“What would you like to drink?” he asked.

“I’ll just have a sparkling water.”

“No. A drink. You look like a deer caught in the headlights. You need something. What’ll it be?”

“A vodka martini, then.”

“A Diablo martini, then.”

When the bartender put it down I took a sip.

“What is it?”

“Do you like it?”

I nodded, though I couldn’t quite figure out what made it taste just a little hotter and saltier than I was used to.

“A few red peppercorns dropped in for color, a splash of the brine from the olives.”

I took another sip.

“A dirty martini,” I said. And then smiled. “Appropriate.”

He gave me what was an attempt at a smile, but it slipped at the end and wound up marking his face like a wound.

“I appreciate your doing this,” he said.

“Don’t thank me yet. I have no idea if I can pull it off. And even if I do, there’s no guarantee we’re going to find out anything.”

“No, but it’s better than sitting and waiting. The police haven’t done a thing. It’s been over a week.”

“They don’t have any evidence that Cleo is-”

He interrupted me. “We shouldn’t talk about this. Not here. Not now.” He looked around. Besides his fear of our being overheard, I knew it wasn’t smart for me to be having this conversation. I was slipping back into being Cleo’s therapist, and I had to get out of that frame of mind if I was going to be meeting her clients and pretending to be a possible assignation.

“He just walked in,” Gil said as he got up to greet his client.

Cleo’s name for the first man I was going to meet was Judas. According to her book, he was fifty years old, married, with two grown children. His wife was a judge who heard children’s rights cases.

A client for more than two years, Judas had seemed like the best place for me to start because he had a lot to lose if Cleo’s book was published, and because, sexually, he was one of her least-demanding clients.

I’d only had a few sips of my drink when Gil returned to the bar with a man who looked familiar. Of course. I knew who he was from photos that had been in the newspapers and magazines over the years. Judas wasn’t only married to a high-powered woman, he was one of the leading fund-raisers for the Democratic Party in New York and was often seen at gala events and balls for the state senators, the governor and the administration.

“Morgan, this is Nelson.”

Unlike the two men I’d met minutes ago, Nelson-or Judas, as I thought of him-didn’t give me an immediate once-over. He was too practiced and political for that. I was still a stranger to him, and he was too used to meeting people to let go of the routine of shaking hands, focusing on your eyes and offering back a sincere look of comradeship for the introduction to have any sexual overtones. He could have been meeting me at a fund-raiser, instead of in a men’s club where high-class prostitutes discreetly took men to a room in the adjoining hotel and engaged in the ancient art of the courtesan.

“Well, let’s sit you two down so you can get to know each other a little bit,” Gil said as he led us over to a table against the wall, exchanged a little more small talk and then left us.

Almost immediately a waiter appeared with a beer in a frosted glass for Judas and what was still my mostly full martini.

For fifteen minutes we talked about politics. Judas made no pretense about what he did for a living. That was part of their attraction to being with one of Cleo’s girls. The men knew they could be themselves, however and whatever that meant, and trusted that not a word would ever get out. They paid for that privacy. Which was why Cleo’s deciding to write a book, no matter how well she ultimately disguised the men, would be such a betrayal.

Which was why she had been so very careful about whom she had told.

Was it even possible she would have confided in one of her clients? There might not be a single man among her regulars who knew that she had a brand-new laptop and had been typing out a tell-all tale of the sexual innocence and depravity of some of the richest men in New York, L.A. and the world. And if that was the case, this whole charade might be a waste of my time. But I had nothing more to lose than a few evenings. Dulcie was at her father’s for the week. I certainly wasn’t dating anyone. Working on Cleo’s disappearance this way was better than sitting at home alone, brooding about it and feeling helpless.

“Well, at least I know you’re a Democrat. That’s one hurdle we’ve jumped,” Judas said after I’d admitted to my political party affiliation.

“Is that part of your criteria?” I tried to tease with my voice. But I hadn’t flirted in a long time. And it was awkward for me to ask questions and lace them with attitude. As a therapist I did the exact opposite. I cleaned my questions up, erased the emotional tones and tried not to give away how I was feeling.

He smiled. I felt relieved. My question had been all right. Under the table I felt my legs shaking. This was never going to work if I was this nervous. But I had nothing to draw upon from my own life to help me with this. I had foolishly assumed that, because I wanted to figure out this mystery, I would be able to. What made me think I could just walk in here wearing a low-cut silk blouse, a skirt that was four inches shorter than I normally wore and shoes that were like nothing else I’d ever owned, and just pretend to be someone I wasn’t?

“I could never have any kind of meaningful arrangement with a woman who votes for an ass.”

Laughter, from both of us.

Dulcie had been telling me about her acting classes over the phone that afternoon. She’d had an assignment to be a liquid. Any liquid she chose. And act the essence of it. She’d chosen honey. She’d told me that she’d thought about how slowly it spilled and how she’d walked across the stage making each step take forever, all the while just thinking over and over that she was honey. How, after the first step, just lifting her foot had been such an effort that she hadn’t been sure she was ever going to get to the other side of the room. Finally she’d just slid to the floor. She couldn’t walk. Then she inched her way across, moving her arms, then her torso, then her legs, all separately. And when she reached the other side and the teacher told her how good a job she’d done, Dulcie had said that it had taken her a minute to remember she wasn’t honey and just get up normally.

If my daughter could do that, then how hard could this be for me?

I imagined Cleo. Her mouth in a tortured O, her eyes wide with some kind of terror. I didn’t know where she was or what was happening to her, but I could conjecture. I knew the kinds of sadistic things a man could do to a woman if he wanted to.

I tried to hear her talking to me, telling me how to act this part. What would she say? What kind of advice would she offer? She’d tell me to take my time. To be the honey that Dulcie had been. That her clients would like honey: heavy, sweet, golden, viscous liquid.

I reached out and touched the hairs on the back of Judas’s hand. Lightly. The way Cleo might. Not the way I ever would.

“I hope you aren’t too disappointed,” I said softly. “I know you were expecting Cleo.”

“Well, I’m certainly surprised.” But had he seemed surprised when he met me? I didn’t think so. Perhaps he meant when Gil had first told him, before he’d brought him over to meet me. But even if Gil had just told him, only a few moments had passed.

On the other hand, if he was involved in Cleo’s disappearance, he wouldn’t be surprised.

“I’ve been seeing Cleo for two years. I didn’t know she was taking a vacation. Last time she did that she told me in advance. Why wouldn’t she have told me this time?”

I gave a shrug. “I don’t know.”

I try to teach my patients the power of not always answering a question. There is no rule of the universe that you must respond to what people ask. You have every right to hold your thoughts inside and not reveal them. In a time when revelation was fodder for the constant news-and-talk-show-type entertainment, questions were usually answered. But in real life you didn’t have to do that. And I didn’t. And Judas, as I had hoped he would, just kept talking.

“But I can’t stay mad at her for too long.”

“Have you ever been mad at her?” I put my hand on his.

To anyone watching, it would look like my fingers were courting his hand, but I had the pad of my forefinger on his pulse and I was feeling the steady flow of his blood through his veins. My own, not very accurate lie detector test. It would never, like its more scientific sibling, be admissible in a court of law, but I knew that it was a good way to judge. When people are telling the truth their heart rate tends to stay consistent, but when they lie, especially about something that might be making them nervous, the rate can speed up.

“I don’t know if it’s fair to talk about her,” he said.

His pulse seemed slightly faster.

“I don’t mind talking about Cleo,” I told him. “She’s very special. I don’t expect to take her place. Just fill in a little while she’s gone if that’s what you’d like.”

“Fill in.” He gave me a wicked grin. And then it disappeared. “It’s not just what we do together that matters to me. It’s that she doesn’t judge me.”

His pulse was definitely more rapid now.

“There isn’t anything to judge. What makes us happy, what gives us pleasure, isn’t about other people’s opinions. It’s not up for debate. We’re really fragile inside our skin, and the reasons that some things excite us and others don’t is a very mysterious science.”

He was nodding, but I was horrified. I had just slipped back into jargon. Luckily, he not only didn’t seem to mind, he actually became more attentive. But I had to be careful. I knew Cleo was smart and knew that her clients would expect someone who was equally intelligent. But I also knew there was a difference between pleasing someone and pandering to their desires, and being their therapist.

“You know, this is ridiculous, but I actually missed her last week. And it surprised me.”

I nodded.

“Do you think it’s strange? That I could get attached to someone I see once a week?”

I almost laughed and I might have if my heart wasn’t pounding in my chest, because he had just reached across the table and pushed my blouse off my shoulder.

“No. I think you must be a very sensitive man. Of course Cleo can mean something to you.”

I had no idea what to do. Gil had said that these meetings were “dates” in order to give both the client and Cleo’s girls the opportunity to see if they wanted to do business together. All the girls had twenty-four-hour veto power. Cleo relied on them to follow their instincts about the men they met. She didn’t want anyone to go with a man she didn’t feel comfortable with. Certain girls didn’t mind going with strangers, but they were the ones who usually did the “outside” dates and trips.

I wouldn’t have to go to a room with any of these men; just meet them and get a sense of who they were and see if I could pick up on anything untoward, any hint that they were capable of harming Cleo. Then Gil would take it from there and go to the police with one name.

If, indeed, she was even missing. If she had not just decided to run away from her life and not tell anyone. The idea kept repeating like the notes of a song you can’t get out of your head.

Cleo was a very confused young woman in love with a man who had issues with her profession, a man she couldn’t make love to, and at the same time she was writing a book that she knew was going to create havoc and possibly cause a lot of pain. She was also a woman with two boyfriends, neither of whom, it seemed, knew anything about the other.

Judas trailed his fingers across the inside of my wrist and up my arm. It was an unfamiliar sensation. I wasn’t used to the feeling of having a man touch me like this.

For the last few years of my marriage to Mitch and all the nights we held each other, there had been love and there had been comfort, but there had not been much more. And now a total stranger was making me feel something that I hadn’t remembered forgetting.

Skin is alive. It breathes. It is made up of nerve endings. It is sensate. His fingers were doing something to me that had nothing to do with our knowing each other or liking each other or even caring if we ever found out anything more about each other. My skin didn’t care that this was obscene, that I was playing a very dangerous game. My skin was enraptured by the ever-so-slight pressure of a man’s fingertips sailing across its expanse. I shut my eyes, not pretending, not being coy, but rather finding myself in this unusual place, sitting across the table from a successful and nice-looking middleaged man who liked to touch women’s skin and knew how to do it with exactly the right pressure.

The rest of my body was jealous of that thin line of skin. It hadn’t been touched lately, either. It hadn’t touched. There was a war going on between my mind/body and sensation/intellect.

I moved away. “Not yet,” I said as coyly as I could but not really sure what coy sounded like.

“I know I’m being bad. But your skin is so luscious.”

“Should I know anything about your being bad? Is that something you do? You need to tell me. I have to make sure that I can be who you want.”

There were things I knew from the book that had made me nervous about Judas. He was conflicted. He cared about his wife and their children and his life. His professional stature was immensely important to him. But he was sexually impotent unless he felt that he was doing something wrong. It was the thrill of danger and deceit that turned him on. Not only was it something he didn’t know how to explain to his wife, the judge, but out of every possible scenario of what could turn him on, the need to be bad-to do illegal things-this was the worst.

“I like to be afraid.”

“Of what?” I whispered.

“Of being found out.”

I nodded. “What else?”

“To know I’m doing something that could blow the whole fucking lid off my life,” he said.

I wanted to ask him why. To get him to talk about that. I wanted to help him. But I was the honey, not Dr. Morgan Snow. I didn’t have those two letters before my name in here. I didn’t even have a last name. I was just Morgan. Someone whose job was to figure out how to give pleasure.

This was far more confusing than I had imagined. But I couldn’t stop. I needed to understand what kind of danger he meant. How far that danger would go. Would it translate into taking a woman and hiding her away somewhere, or to hurting her, or to making her tell him if she really was writing a book and if he was in it?

It was strange to know things about Judas that he didn’t know I knew. To have read about him and studied his psychology as Cleo had laid it out.

“If it would be okay with you, can you tell me what you’d want me to do? So I can figure out if I’m right for you? If I’m not I can find someone who would be.”

He leaned forward. Even closer. “I’d like to tell you. But first you have to take this.” He pulled out a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off five one-hundred-dollar bills.

The soft light from the small lamp on the table shone on his money clip, which was in the shape of a snake, curling around itself. The sinuous creature had a small tongue-black enamel-and two tiny ruby eyes. It was unusual, yes, and worth looking at on its own, but what stopped me was that I had read a description of this money clip in Cleo’s book.

But not in the part about Judas.

In Cleo’s book, the money clip belonged to a man she called the Healer-that fifth man, whom Gil hadn’t recognized-and she had described seeing it every time he took it out of his pocket. That fifth man had handed her bills exactly the way Judas had just handed me bills, putting the money in my palm, then closing my fingers around it.

There wasn’t supposed to be a charge for this evening. Gil had explained that. “What is this?” I asked Judas.

“If I am going to give you my secrets, I need to make sure you have an incentive for keeping them.”

If only I could have told him how safe his secrets would be with me. But the question on my mind was, did he trust Cleo with them or was he worried that she was going to tell on him?

I shook my head. “You don’t have to.” I handed the money back to him.

“I want to. Please.” He pushed it back at me.

I didn’t want to make a fuss over the money and disrupt any confidence he was about to share, so I took the bills and put them in my bag. I would figure out what to do with them later.

“You were going to tell me what you liked,” I reminded him with what I hoped was an inviting smile. But what the hell was an inviting smile? How was I ever going to get through meeting four of these men? Or five, if Gil ever figured out who the Healer was.

Judas smiled. “What I like to do is go places. In public. Places where other people are.”

I nodded.

Cleo had listed a few of the places where he had taken her. Into his wife’s chambers once at night. Into the dressing room of a men’s department store in New York. Into an empty room off the stage at the opera the night of a huge fund-raiser while his wife was sitting in their season box. He had gotten Cleo a ticket and a date and had arranged to meet her there.

But I wanted to hear him tell me about it. See if, since Cleo had written about him, he had changed any, if he now needed to push his fantasy, to go closer to the edge of his boundaries.

“Where was the last place you took Cleo?”

The smile on his face wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t suffused with pleasure the way it had been a minute ago when he was giving me money. What was I seeing? Was this a deeper darkness of someone who didn’t have any boundaries?

“I took her to the bank. To the vault. I gave her money. It gave me pleasure. I miss her.” His voice was suddenly thick. He lowered his eyes.

“We all miss her,” I said.

We did. And we were all worried about her. Very worried.