The Halo Effect

35

I met Elias Beecher the next afternoon at a Japanese restaurant near my office. When I arrived, he was sipping a sake and looked even more exhausted than he had the last time we’d met.

The dining room was quiet and the table he’d chosen in the corner created even more of an illusion of privacy.

“I feel guilty even trying to eat,” he said after the waitress took our order.

“I know, but it won’t do Cleo any good if you get sick. Have you slept at all?”

“I fall asleep okay. Sleep for about two hours and then I’m wide awake. Lying there, imagining… Oh, I can’t even tell you the things I start to imagine. There are so many disgusting people out there, capable of doing such violent, disturbed things, I…”

The haunted look in his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the way he spoke just one level above a whisper, all pulled at me, and I put my hand out to cover his and then left it there.

He looked down at my hand on top of his as if it were a foreign object he’d never seen before. The touch was strange for me, too. Elias was halfway between a patient and a partner.

“We’re all alone in this. It’s just you and me looking for her,” he said.

“Gil is looking for her, too.”

His eyebrows arched and the soft look in his eyes hardened for a second. “Gil?” His voice had a derisive twist I hadn’t heard in it before. “I don’t trust him, Morgan. He’s as much a suspect as anyone else. That book could destroy his business overnight.”

“I know,” I said, and then told him about my conversation with Gil.

“You don’t really believe he didn’t know about Cleo and me, do you?” he asked when I was done.

“He didn’t seem to.”

“But if she told him, if she finally told him, he might have gone crazy. Did you see that movie…with Richard Gere and Diane Ladd, Unfaithful? When this mild, warm man finally is confronted with his wife’s betrayal he becomes capable of murder.” Elias was playing with his thin, wooden chopsticks, rubbing the tips against each other as if he could light a fire. “And the other movie like that was…”

He was starting to fragment and disappear into a list of films and books that would illustrate his point. I had to stop him.

“Elias?”

He looked at me, still lost for a moment and then reconnecting.

“I need you to help me. We need to find out more about all these men.”

“You’re meeting them, right?”

“Yes, I’ve met two, and so far I don’t think either of them were capable of doing anything to Cleo.”

“Then you have to move on to the next two. And then the next two.”

“I only identified four who had serious motives…” I hesitated. I was avoiding mentioning the fifth man.

“But there’s something else. What is it?”

It wasn’t the first time he’d been in tune with what I was thinking.

“Cleo was so specific in her descriptions. So many things are accurate. But there is one specific thing about each of the men I’ve met that she didn’t use to describe them. She used those things to describe a fifth man. It’s like he’s a composite of all of them.”

“But that shouldn’t matter, should it? You still know there are four men who have motives. Who would absolutely be ruined one way or the other if that book were published.”

The waitress came with lacquered plates of glistening sushi and sashimi, and while she placed them before us and poured puddles of soy sauce into porcelain dishes, we were quiet.

Elias returned to rubbing the chopsticks together, and the noise was like fingernails on a blackboard, setting my teeth on edge.

When she left, I broke my own chopsticks apart, lifted up a piece of tuna, dipped it in the soy sauce and put it in my mouth. There was enough wasabi to inflame my taste buds and make my eyes tear, but it was a good kind of burn.

Elias was dipping a piece of cucumber roll in his dish of soy over and over, and while I watched, it fell apart, the grains of rice no longer sticky.

“This isn’t going fast enough,” he said. “I know you’re doing the best you can. But it’s still taking too long. Why won’t the police do something? Why won’t they help?”

I shook my head. “There’s no evidence for them to get involved yet.”

“Do you realize how ineffectual they are? How screwed up that is? I went to them and begged them to help, and they turned around, treated me like a suspect, and they still aren’t doing anything to find her. This is why I became a corporate lawyer. Dealing with law enforcement on the police level is far too frustrating.”

He picked up another piece of sushi, went to dip it in the soy sauce, noticed that the round dish was full of rice and put the piece back on his plate.

“Haven’t you found out anything you can take to them to get them to stop putting all their effort into me as a suspect and instead into whoever really has taken her? Why would I take her, anyway? We were together. She’s in love with me. Why haven’t they connected her disappearance with those Magdalene murders? Every time I ask, the detective acts as if I am just trying to throw him off track. ‘We need something to go on, Mr. Beecher, just one lead, and we’ll jump on it. But in the meantime there is no connection.’” He was mimicking Detective Jordain’s New Orleans accent. I was about to ask him not to, but why did I care if Elias made fun of Noah’s way of speaking?

“If I thought it would get them moving in the right direction, I’d tell him that I did it,” Elias continued, his voice taking on a desperate intensity. “That I killed those three women. I’d tell them that I am responsible for all of those women being murdered and that Cleo is absolutely part of the plan. Maybe that would get them off their asses and onto the case. They’d have to find her. And then they would give her back to me and you would finish helping her and she’d get better. She’d be fine then. Whole. Finally, holy.”

He pushed away the soy sauce dish filled with the uneaten sushi. He had not eaten a single morsel of his food.

I noticed that he’d used the word holy, instead of whole. An obvious mistake because he was talking about the Magdalene murders. He was still talking, almost ranting now, the words tumbling out faster and faster and running together in pools of ideas.

“If you’d had more time with her, if you’d had another two or three weeks, what would you have done to help her? What would you have said to her? Could you have fixed this problem she was having? Could you have made her better? How would you have done it? What would you have done?”

“I don’t fix problems.”

“Yes, you do. That’s why she went to you,” he argued.

“I help people to work things out.”

“Well, what would you have said to her to help her work things out?”

“I can’t talk about that with you,” I said as gently as I could.

“You can. I love her. You know how I love her. You can talk to me easier than you can talk to anyone else. Do you think you really could help her? Really?”

I nodded.

“How?”

“Just by getting her to talk about what had happened to her-” I stopped. He had almost lulled me into talking about my patient, and that was something I could not do. Would not do. Even with him.