The Halo Effect

39

That night at the bar was disappointing. The third man I met with seemed incapable of having anything to do with Cleo’s disappearance because he had Parkinson’s disease and walked with the help of two canes. I couldn’t imagine he’d have the strength to hurt anyone. But what was on my mind the next day was that something particular to him was again part of Cleo’s description of the fifth man: the Healer.

This last client had a scar on his right cheek-another detail that she attributed to the Healer. It was a small, inconsequential thing on its own, but along with the money clip and the taste for Cristal, the deception was curious.

Why had she only mixed up the details when she was writing about the Healer? Was it a writerly technique she had been playing with and hadn’t gotten around to fixing? Was she just trying harder to protect his identity? Or was it more complicated than that? Why describe the others, but not this client?

During my eleven o’clock session, Elias called. The machine answered and he left a message asking me to call back. When I did, only twenty minutes later, he sounded frantic and desperate.

“Can you meet me?” he asked.

“If you want to come to the office I have an opening in a half hour.”

“That’s tight. I have a meeting. Do you have anything later?”

I told him I could meet him at two-forty-five at the Starbucks near my office on Lexington Avenue.

He was already there when I walked in. I had an hour before an appointment farther downtown with an antique dealer who was helping me find a special birthday present for Dulcie.

I watched him as I approached his table. The circle of people who cared about Cleo were all walking wounded. And Elias was at our center. He looked haggard and exhausted. Eyes that were huge pools of sadness, fingernails bitten down to the quick and furrows in his forehead that seemed deeper and more pronounced than even a few days ago.

“If I don’t do something to help find her soon, if I can’t get more involved somehow, I’m going to go crazy,” he said.

I knew how hard it was to be forced to sit back and feel helpless when someone you loved was in trouble.

I went to get some coffee, and when I came back he was playing with half-a-dozen sugar packets, fashioning them into patterns on the table.

As I sat down, I smelled a familiar scent coming from him, but couldn’t place it. A cologne that someone I knew had worn? A popular spice? I tried to sniff the air without attracting his attention.

It was a heavy scent. Not a cologne at all. Not a woman’s perfume, either. Not a usual scent, but I’d smelled it before. I knew I had, and I frowned in concentration. Where-

“Dr. Snow?”

It was Belinda from my office. She was standing next to my chair and I smiled at her. She looked from me to Elias. He froze.

“Hi, Belinda,” I said.

“You coming back to the office?” she asked.

“No. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She waved, held tight to her iced latte and walked off.

Once she was gone, Elias seemed able to breathe again and launched into more theories about Cleo and where she might be and what the police needed to do to find her. All the while he kept arranging and rearranging the sugar packets in random patterns.

“Will you talk to them? Will you tell them some of my ideas? Maybe if they came from you, the detectives would pay attention.”

I nodded. “How are you doing?” I asked him.

“How could I be doing? I look at her things. At her robe hanging on the back of the door. At her makeup in the medicine cabinet. At her toothpaste. At the teabags she bought that are in my kitchen cabinet. I can’t stop feeling like she’s looking over my shoulder. Whispering to me-come and get me, please. Just come and get me. But what am I supposed to do?”

“Are you going to work every day?” I asked him.

“Yes. But I’m distracted.”

“Are you sleeping at all?”

“A few hours. From midnight to about four.”

I nodded again. “That’s about the time anxiety wakes us up. Do you want me to recommend a psychiatrist you might see? Someone who could put you on medication? An antianxiety pill, or an antidepressant.”

“This isn’t some problem I have because my mother dragged me to church too many times every week. This is because the woman I am engaged to, the woman I want to marry, is missing, and the only people who can really help not only won’t do anything, but are sure that if anyone is involved, it’s me.”

My cell phone rang. I picked it up and looked at it. “It’s my office,” I said to Elias. “Just one second.”

It was Belinda. “Hi. Your daughter just called. She only had two minutes and called here first. She said she didn’t have more time to call you on your cell, but she asked me to tell you that she has to cancel meeting with you later at the museum. She said the rehearsal won’t be over in time.”

“Damn.”

“At least she calls,” Belinda said. “Mine never even bothers.”

I laughed. Elias looked at me as though my making that kind of noise was blasphemous.

“Morgan, that man you’re with, do you know he’s one of Simon’s clients?”

I tried not to glance at Elias, not wanting to alert him that we were talking about him.

“As a patient?”

“Yes. A while ago. Maybe a month. Two months. I recognized him when I saw you with him. I thought it was weird that someone would see two therapists.”

“Okay. Thanks, Belinda. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I hung up.

Across the table, Elias was staring off into space, a frown creasing his forehead.

I was suddenly unsure of what was going on. Why hadn’t he told me? I felt a shiver of fear. Why had he not mentioned this just now when I’d suggested he see someone?

“Elias? Have you already been to see Simon Weiss? My associate?”

He nodded.

“When?”

“About five weeks ago. Maybe six weeks ago. Why?”

“When I asked you a minute ago if you wanted me to suggest someone so you could get some meds, why didn’t you tell me that you’d already seen someone? That you’d been up to our offices.”

His expression hardened. “Not you, too? I recognize the look, the suspicion. Christ. You all look so deep beneath the surface, you miss the surface itself. Yes, I saw him and he told me that he didn’t think he could help me. I didn’t bring it up with you because I didn’t want to say anything negative about one of your co-workers. Besides, none of it has anything to do with finding Cleo. But since you’re asking, I’m more than happy to tell you. I went to him to talk about Cleo’s problems. I thought I should know about them from a professional point of view. To see if there was anything I could do on my end to help. You don’t understand what it’s like to love someone with all your heart and not be able to help her. No, worse. To be part of her problem. To cause her pain because of your very existence.”

“What happened with Simon?” The suspicion I’d felt was dissipating. Elias was so earnest about his pain, his guilt about not being able to help his lover, that I was only feeling empathy. I did know what it was like to love someone who couldn’t love me back, at least not in a way that would have kept us together.

“He told me it would be better if I saw a therapist with Cleo. And as you know, I was open to that. In fact it was something Cleo and I had discussed and were planning to do…with you…but before…”

That pained look returned to his eyes, and he went on. “She has to be out there. And someone has to find her. Please. There must be something I can do to get the police to look for her. To get them to take her disappearance seriously. What if I had a note from a kidnapper?”

“Do you?”

“Would that make them take Cleo’s disappearance more seriously?”

“Of course, and if you have something like, that you need to tell them about it.”

A sudden excitement flashed in his eyes.

“Don’t,” I warned.

“Don’t what?”

“Try to fake it. It will only get you in serious trouble if they find out. It’s a felony. You’ll be arrested.”

“I don’t care. Not if it helps them find her. Not if it makes them start looking for her.”