The Halo Effect

42

We walked out into the sunshine and stood on the wide stone steps of the museum, both of us blinking and readjusting to the noise and the light. At the bottom of the staircase, where we should have broken off and gone our separate ways, Noah took my arm in an old-fashioned gesture and we walked toward the street.

“Come with me. Coffee, a drink, something. We’re up against nothing but dead ends and I need more of your fresh thinking. If we don’t get a break in this case…” He didn’t finish his thought. He didn’t have to.

I nodded. My concentration was on my arm where he was holding me. How was I supposed to know what kind of touch this was? Swinging between the tired embraces of my now ex and the few wildly overt connections with the men I’d met in the Diablo Cigar Bar, I just didn’t know how to judge this, and that left me feeling amazingly young and stupid.

“Why are you smiling so oddly?” he asked.

“I didn’t know I was.” Now I really felt foolish.

“Well, you are.”

“I’m just not walking on a street I know. And that’s an unusual feeling for someone who has been walking these streets her whole life.”

“I hope you aren’t identifying a little too closely with this case.”

I had to stop and think for a minute, and then realizing the unintentional pun, laughed. “That is in terribly bad taste.”

“I know. I’m overtired. I’m angry. Punch-drunk.”

We reached the destination that Noah had picked out and went inside.

Café des Artistes is a well-known landmark in New York. A lovely restaurant graced with a mural of luscious nude women from the early 1900s.

“You know, I’ve never been here, either,” I offered as we walked to a table in the bar area. It was just five o’clock and the crowds hadn’t arrived yet.

“You’ve lived here your whole life and I’m showing you new sights?”

I nodded.

As soon as we sat down, Noah got up. “I’m sorry, I need to call in. If everyone is running around the same maze and there’s no reason for me to go back, I can have a real drink, instead of coffee. Order what you’d like. I’ll be right back.”

I couldn’t read his face when he returned five minutes later.

“So is it the hard stuff or the soft?” I asked him.

“The hard stuff. They think they have a lead on the nun’s habits, and the guys working the videotape think they have a match on a man seen at two of the hotels. Blurry, a shot from the side. But it’s something. Everyone knows what to do and no one needs me looking over his shoulder. I told Perez to get out of there, too. We’ve both been working eighteen-hour days all week. Neither of us will be any good tomorrow if we just sit there another night, searching for a ghost on our computers.”

The waiter arrived and I ordered a dirty martini. Noah said he’d have the same thing, then sat back in his chair and almost relaxed. It was his fingers that stayed alert, at the ready. For what? I wondered.

“So you are a girl after my own heart,” he said, his New Orleans accent making heart sound longer and musical. I liked listening to him, experienced the odd sensation that his words were reaching out and touching my skin, as if he were stroking me with those drawn-out syllables.

Who was I here?

In session with a patient, I was probing and fearless, but flirting was virgin territory for me.

The drinks came and Noah raised his elegant martini glass to mine in a silent toast. The liquid was icy and sharp and just a little salty.

I told him about the umbrella and the man on the street, and he asked me a few questions to see if he could spark any other memory from me about what the man looked like or how he acted. But I didn’t remember anything else that was helpful. “At the time it occurred to me that he might be following her…the way a moth will fly to a flame. Just because he was so attracted to her. Every man she passed on the street watched her.”

Noah took another sip of his drink, just listening.

“Have you found out anything about the pink-diamond cross?” I asked him.

“Yes, we have.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and opened it to a page crammed with his loopy handwriting. He scanned one page, then another. “Perez just gave me this on the phone. We’ve identified two stores in the city that sell something like what you described. Graff-a place on Madison Avenue-and Cartier.”

I nodded, aware of them both. Two of the most exclusive jewelry stores in the city.

“And you were right. It is extravagantly expensive. More than $30,000 if it’s the same one you described. Sounds like it. Seven carats, total weight. Only five have been sold. By tomorrow morning we should have a court order to find out who purchased them.”

“How long will it take once you have that?”

“If we are lucky, sometime tomorrow. By Monday at the latest. The minute we find out, I’ll tell you. Do you know that much about Cleo’s life that you’ll recognize the name?”

“There’s a good chance I will.”

He looked surprised.

I took another sip of my drink and made a decision. “I need to confess something,” I said.

“I’m not a priest.”

“Thank God.”

We both laughed, the laughs still slightly hollow and weak but deeper than the way they were a half hour before.

“I’ve met some of Cleo’s clients,” I told him.

“You have?” All the relaxation in his face was gone. His eyes were focused on me and probing. He was thinking, working on a puzzle. I could see the pieces fitting together in his eyes. Did I know him that well already?

“Is that what you have been doing at the Diablo Cigar Bar?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Are you crazy? Who do you think you are that you should be doing that? You’re not equipped to go undercover.” A vein pulsed in his neck, and his eyes narrowed with a fierce anger. “No one else is taking her disappearance seriously. I have to do it myself,” I said accusatorily.

“There is no evidence of foul play, Morgan. For Christ’s sake. We have a tap on her cell phone. We’re watching her place. We can’t look for her when we have no reason to go looking for her.”

“You can when she is a prostitute and prostitutes are getting murdered every other day.”

“That is a very slim connection. She isn’t the kind he targets.”

“But she is missing, Noah. And she is my patient. And since I can’t tell you who her clients are or what their motives are, I’m doing the only thing I can do. In lieu of a formal investigation, I am conducting an informal one. I know enough as a therapist to know what I am looking for.”

“Damn. You might be smart. You might be ten times smarter than me. But you are not a member of the police department. You can’t just stage your own investigation. You could get hurt. Damn. Worse. You could get killed.”

I waved off his words and took another sip of my drink. “I am well protected. I only meet them in public…well, in a private public place but with lots of other people around. I know some self-defense. I learned when I was a teenager. It was something I needed. An extra sense of protection.”

“Weren’t you protected as a kid?” His eyes softened for a moment.

“My mother…” I hesitated. We were stepping into the quicksand of my past and I didn’t often bring anyone to that place with me.

I stopped. It didn’t make sense to be sitting in a restaurant on a Friday evening, sipping a martini, alternately worrying sick about my patient and talking about my personal life with a man hunting down a crazy sicko whose actions may or may not have any bearing on why someone I cared about was missing. But his eyes pulled me in. Again.

Some people just have perfectly nice eyes, lovely colors, aesthetically pleasing shapes, but they don’t express all that much. Not so with Noah. His eyes talked. No matter what he was saying with his words, his blue eyes spelled out other things.

I had thought his eyes were too small when I first met him. But now that I knew him better, now that I had looked at him long enough and experienced the intensity of his gaze, I was glad they were not any bigger. It would have been like looking into glaring headlights. His eyes would have blinded me.

“Tell me about your mother,” he said softly.

“She was an actress. And she started working when she was young. She also got addicted to diet pills when she was young. When she broke her collarbone on a set, she got addicted to painkillers. Somewhere in there she found liquor, too. Painkillers, diet pills and alcohol. She was one of the Lost Girls.”

“Too many of them out there.”

I smiled. “No, I meant that she was one of the two actresses in a TV series called The Lost Girls. Three seasons back in the fifties. But you were right, too. She was lost and I was lost with her for a while. When I was seven she left my dad and took me with her. A year later she overdosed and lapsed into a coma. I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I knew she was in danger. So I called my father and then I talked to her and told her our stories until he came. But she didn’t wake up. And I never saw her again. She died. When I was eight. Did I say that?”

He nodded. Then he did more. He leaned over and put his big hands on either side of my face and pulled me in to him. I held my breath but I didn’t shut my eyes. Frozen, I watched his face get closer and closer and then I felt his lips on mine. At first it felt like a whisper of a kiss, just enough to be there, to connect me to him. I think that was all it was intended to be. A comforting kiss, light and fleeting, as if one of those butterflies we’d seen had brushed me with its wings.

“Poor baby,” he said. There was nothing condescending about it. It was Southern and slow and like another kind of kiss. I was smelling him, discerning all the different scents at once: a green scent that was woodsy and musky with an undernote of leather, and beneath all that, the salty scent of his skin.

It bypassed my head and went right to my senses, stirring me. There was not a single note that assaulted me or insulted me. I closed my eyes and saw sunlight filtering through tall pine trees and dust motes dancing on the air. He smelled the way a bolt of maroon velvet fabric falls when you let it loose to show off the nap; he smelled the way the horizon disappears at night and you don’t know where the water ends and the sky starts; and he smelled the way a fire sparks up from the first embers, slow and then violent.

He smelled like something I had been waiting for.

“You are sniffing me.” He pulled back from the kiss, laughing for real for the first time all afternoon. Almost as if the case and my confession and all the awful things that were sitting on his shoulders and weighing him down had lifted. And his laugh lifted something in me that I had not even known was so heavy.

“Well, you smell good,” I said.

“You smell too much.”

“It’s this sensitivity I have.”

“I’d bet there isn’t anything about you that isn’t sensitive.”

There was a glimmer, playful and sexy, in his eyes.

Then he came at me again, and we both dove into another kiss.

When we pulled apart he grabbed the check. “I have a date. Every Friday night. Do you want to come?” he asked as he put some bills down on the table.

My eyebrows went up. “I’ve never gotten an invitation quite like that.” I was trying to keep it light, but I was confused.

“Don’t look at me that way. You are the most transparent woman I have ever met. You’ll love her.”

“Me, transparent? You have got that wrong. I studied opaque. I learned from the masters. My patients complain that they can’t figure out a single thing I’m thinking. And that’s important to me. I work for it.”

“But I am not, thank the good Lord above, your patient. You couldn’t go on a date with me if I was. You certainly couldn’t go home with me afterward if I was a patient. And then you’d miss out on chicory coffee and homemade beignets. Have you ever had a homemade beignet?”

I shook my head. We walked out the door onto the crowded street.

“Covered with powdered sugar. And I’ll serve it to you on a silver tray-damn, I don’t have a silver tray. Well, I’ll serve it to you on a bamboo tray and the powdered sugar will get all over you here-”

He reached out and brushed his fingers over my lips. I shivered.

“And I’ll just have to kiss it off…and then lick my lips.”

He bent down and kissed me once more. We stood there on Central Park West with the traffic going by and the lights changing and people passing us by and I kissed him back.

The date was with a piano, in a restaurant in the Village. I sat at a table for two and listened to him play and stared at his fingers making love to the keys and imagined how they would feel if they ever played me.

His music was like his voice. Jazzy, full of riffs, slow and sexy and then dark and sad. And if there had been any question before of whether or not I was going to go home with him afterward, if he still invited me, it was answered while I watched him at the piano.

The combination of his sensitivity to the music, to me, the cool glance he gave most of the world around him and the hot one he bestowed on me, the insouciant, almost arrogant walk, the certainty that he knew how to do his job but the curiosity about what he didn’t understand, and the hard-edged, pianoplaying detective who carried a weapon and liked to cook Cajun food was about as compelling as it was possible to be. That scared me. And I wasn’t sure I’d ever been afraid of a man before.