The Halo Effect

52

I dialed and heard the phone ring three times before he finally picked up.

“Elias, it’s Morgan Snow. I think I’ve figured something out.”

“You know who has Cleo? Where she is?” He sounded even more desperate than the last time we’d talked. I pictured him, eyes clouded with worry, hands trembling. This man was being pushed to the edge of a crevice and he stood there rocking with fear.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t know that.”

I was on Fifty-ninth Street and Madison. The summer night was warm and sultry, and at ten o’clock there were still more than enough people about that I wasn’t concerned about walking and talking on the phone, my concentration not on those around me but on the conversation I was having.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I just left the Cigar Bar. I don’t know where Cleo is, but I think I know which of the men she wrote about might be responsible. And I need to ask you if she told you anything about him. I’m getting in a taxi. If you give me your address, I can-”

“No, I’ll meet you.”

“Elias, I don’t want to talk about this in public.”

“How long will it take you to get here?”

“Ten minutes.”

He gave me his address.

In the taxi on my way to the Upper West Side I called in and checked my messages. There was one from Mitch telling me how upset Dulcie was and asking me to reconsider and please come to the audition. Or at least call him so we could talk about it. And then one from Noah saying that they had a big break on the case. I listened to his slow drawl.

“I’m on my way to the station. A woman, a prostitute, was approached this afternoon by a man who asked her to go to a hotel with him. Just outside he gave her cash and told her to go inside and check in by herself. He gave her a story to give the desk clerk. To say her bag had been stolen, but that she kept emergency cash in her pocket. Once she got the key, she was supposed to go back outside and get him.

“But he was carrying a small suitcase and she’d read enough in the paper about the Magdalene murders to make her nervous, so she took off. We’re bringing her in and we’ll work with her for as long as it takes to get a good composite done of the guy’s face. I should know what he looks like in a few hours. Be careful. Don’t go to the club tonight. If it’s Gil, if it’s any one of those men, he’s going to be disturbed and scared. He might be desperate.”

I shut my eyes and rubbed them. The pressure was relieved for a minute. He was still talking into my machine in the same tone of voice, but each word sounded amplified. My skin was tingling with fear. With relief. They were getting closer. They would have a drawing of him. Then they would know what he looked like. They’d find him. And it would be an end to the murders. If only finding Cleo were connected to that case.

Noah’s message abruptly became personal.

“Please call me, Morgan. You can’t take the easy way out about us. Well, I guess you can. But I don’t want you to.”

I was still holding the phone to my ear, listening to dead air, when the cab pulled up in front of Elias’s building.

The elevator opened on the seventh floor and I walked down the long hall to the right, as instructed. My feet were hurting. High heels with pointed toes were not what I was used to and I’d walked a long way in them. I wished I’d gone back home and changed, but I hadn’t thought about what I was wearing; I was too excited by what I thought I’d figured out. Buttoning the silk shirt up to my neck, I wiped the crimson lipstick off with the back of my other hand. It didn’t seem right to be going to see Elias dressed to attract the moths.

When he opened the door, he looked even worse than he had sounded on the phone. Bloodshot eyes, his hair standing up in unruly tufts, wrinkled clothes. There was nothing that made you think of a partner in a white-glove law firm when you looked at him. If he had walked up to me on the street, I would have held tight to my bag.

And there was a smell…

“Do you want something? Some coffee? I have coffee already made. It’s hot. Still hot.”

I recognized the way he was talking, textbook stuff. He was dissembling again, grief and worry affecting him so greatly that he couldn’t focus on the reality around him.

“Yes, that would be fine. Let me help you.”

“No. The kitchen is a mess. Let me get it.”

He left me in the living room and I sat down on the couch to wait for him.

You could tell the apartment had been done by a decorator. There was an air of perfection in the details. The gingerjar lamps with the bone lampshades. The chenille throw over the couch. The extra-large highball glasses and decanters on just the right chrome-and-glass cart in the corner. I stopped my critical assessment-I was being too hard on him. What else did I expect from an unmarried, wealthy man who lived in New York? Why shouldn’t he have a decorator make his apartment livable? Just because Noah’s apartment-I forced myself to abort the thought.

In front of me on the ubiquitous glass coffee table was a stack of art books that had probably never been looked at and an opened bottle of wine, the label facing away from me. Something about it struck me as odd, and I reached for it just as Elias came back into the room with two steaming mugs of coffee.

“Do you-” He stopped when he saw me reaching for the wine and there was panic on his face. As if he’d made a terrible mistake by not offering wine to me.

“I’m sorry. Would you rather have wine?” he asked quickly, putting down the coffee and grabbing the bottle. I was worried about him. He was in no state to help me.

“No. The coffee is perfect.”

As he walked away, I smelled that other scent again-not the coffee-but what I’d smelled when he’d opened the door. Familiar but foreign. A heavy scent. Sweet.

It would come to me.

He put the bottle down on the glass cart in the corner and walked back toward me.

Taking a seat in the matching leather chair, catercorner to the couch, he picked up his coffee mug. When he took a swallow it was as if he had not had anything to drink in days.

On the floor next to his chair was the briefcase I’d seen him carry before. It was larger than what most executives carried. And the leather was not as fine. He probably had too much paperwork to rely on a sleeker model. The case was open but I couldn’t see inside of it.

“Did you mean what you said about helping Cleo?” he asked.

“Helping her? You mean finding her?”

“I mean helping her get over her problems with making love.”

“Of course.”

“I think I need to tell you some things about her. If you are going to help her you should know about her stepfather. Do you know about him?”

“I can’t talk about that with you, Elias. I can’t tell you what Cleo told me any more than I can tell the police.”

“But you can listen. You can let me talk about it. And you can tell me theoretically about someone like the person I will describe.”

“I suppose I could do that. But why?”

“Because it will help her.”

I didn’t say anything. He was becoming more and more agitated, and I feared he might be having a psychotic break.

“If someone who was hurt and still angry got over her anger, she might be able to reconnect to her feelings,” he said. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. This is what I know about Cleo. When she was fifteen years old, her mother went back to work, which required her to sometimes travel, and that left Cleo alone with him.”

“Elias, I can’t-”

“Just listen.” His voice was suddenly louder. I knew that the best thing to do was humor him. Let him talk it out. So I nodded. I wouldn’t break any confidences with my patient. I’d let Elias talk and then I’d call Simon Weiss and get Elias some help.

“Her stepfather had been her father substitute. He’d been married to her mother since Cleo was five. She trusted him. But she didn’t understand that he was just another disgusting man who followed his cock. So when he came to her, she was confused. She didn’t understand. She was a virgin. She hadn’t even had a boyfriend yet.”

Elias looked as if he might cry. Or scream. He was torturing himself.

“Don’t do this. We don’t need to talk about this now,” I said.

“Yes. We do. We have to talk about it.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

He needed to tell me her story, to unburden himself, to let me know that he knew her horror. As much as I wanted to rely on professional ethics and stop him, I also wanted to hear how she had told it to him. To see if she had told us both the same way. Because it would be significant if she had told it to us differently.

“He was a needy bastard, and what he needed was disgusting. He made her take off her nightgown. He buried his head in breasts that weren’t even fully formed yet. He put his head between her legs. He pushed his thick penis between her thighs. That first time he used her legs tightly pressed together as a makeshift vagina. He didn’t penetrate her. Not the first time. Not the second. Weeks went by. He bought her presents. He was contrite. She was scared. Her mother was away. Excited about her work. They had never been close. Cleo couldn’t tell her. And then he finally did it. He broke her. He pushed through her virginity. He desecrated her. He took her for himself.”

Elias was lost in the telling of this nightmare, which he had obviously often visualized. I looked away. The pain on his face was hard to watch.

I stared at a print of an iris, a blue-black photograph-exquisite, erotic, sensual-that hung on the wall. Not, not on the wall. It hung in the middle of a door that was to the right of the kitchen. The print might have been a Mapplethorpe, I wasn’t sure. But it was that good. The petals of the flowers were pressed tightly together. Like hands in prayer. Like a young girl’s legs pressed together.

“Even though he was committing a mortal sin, he did this selfish thing. He violated a fifteen-year-old girl in her own bed with her stuffed animals next to her,” Elias continued.

I had heard stories like the one Elias was telling me too many times before. And, despite all my professional training, these were the ones that brought up the bile. This was what I could not reconcile. When Noah touched me, it was connected to men like Cleo’s stepfather. It was the same act. Only the intent was different. All my listening had damaged me. Except that, for a few minutes in Noah’s arms, I felt that I could be healed, too. That like Cleo, I could find a new and clean place for my own feelings, untouched by what I knew and what I had seen.

Now I’d never know if I’d been right.

Elias’s voice was like a chorus in the background. I wasn’t sure why I needed to listen anymore. A feeling of ennui flooded over me, as if I were drugged. As if my blood was thickening and flowing more slowly through my veins. He was talking about a little girl. A lost little girl. Only three years older than Dulcie. Only seven years older than me when my mother died.

“How did she feel, Dr. Snow? When he left her in her bed all those nights, sheets damp with his sweat and his semen, her thighs red with the pressure of him on top of her. Please tell me how she felt. How it made her like this.”

“A child would become damaged and angry, furious.” I was giving him textbook answers, but he didn’t seem to care. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, absorbing every word. “She would blame herself for this happening precisely because she was a child. She wouldn’t know better than to think that.”

It was all right. I could talk this one out, because I was not talking about Cleo per se. I would give him generalities. But I knew that it was Cleo we were talking about, and this was key to why she couldn’t separate herself from her trauma and make love to Elias the way he wanted her to. The way she wanted to.

“A young girl who lived through that trauma would have several paths to follow. She could break. Or she could finally tell someone and with help she would be able to deal with what had happened to her,” I explained.

“But what if she didn’t do either of those things? What if she didn’t tell anyone and just went on? Would she, might she, become a prostitute to perpetuate that kind of action?”

“Yes, it would give her control over men. By charging for sex, by having the ability to stop it or start it, she would be in total control. Everything she did in her work would ultimately be insulting toward men. Every time she took another client on she would be getting her revenge.”

“And what would make her better?” he asked.

“In therapy, if she was in therapy, a therapist could bring her through that period of time again, help her get in touch with her rage. Help her recognize she only had limited power as a child, but she is not a child anymore. I’d encourage her to vocalize her anger and give her mother the blame she deserves. We’d work through the trauma.”

“And then?” He was nodding as if memorizing what I was saying.

“Then the need to humiliate men would start to go away. By being a prostitute, by getting paid for sex, she turned it into a job and kept her feelings at a distance. She’d have to learn to reconnect to the positive feelings of sex. Once she realized that she didn’t need that motivation, that angry control over men anymore, she might be able to stop loving from a distance. She’s afraid of being vulnerable. She’s been drastically betrayed. She doesn’t trust intimacy. She can’t share much of her real self. She taught herself not to talk about herself or share her real self. It’s love from a distance.”

“And the book? Why would she be writing a book?”

I couldn’t tell him. But I knew. She’d been writing a book because she was still so angry at men that she needed to expose them.