Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  “The murders happened in mid-June,” I remind her. “Can you relate it to then?”

  “No.” She looks up at me. “I don’t even remember when I left.”

  “Try.”

  I think back to what Pete Storino told me an hour ago. Gwendolyn left the States on Wednesday, June 21, 1989. Only days before Cassie was murdered.

  “Mr. Riley” She frames her hands on the table. “People measure time by days of the week if they work. They measure them by semesters or trimesters if they’re in school. I didn’t measure time any of those ways. I didn’t work and I didn’t go to school. Every day was a vacation to me, because—”

  “Gwendolyn, can you help me or not?”

  “June, I think,” she says, surprising me. “I’ve been thinking about it since you asked yesterday. Probably sometime in June, I flew back to Europe.”

  Okay, so that’s pretty close. I decide to test her some more.

  “Do you remember where you went when you left the States?”

  She shakes her head. “I would assume the Riviera. I have a place on Cap-Ferrat.”

  Okay. Storino had said she was born in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

  So maybe she’s straight after all.

  “So sometime in May or June,” I say, “Ellie told you that Cassie was pregnant.”

  She nods her head. “Cassie told her one night and was very upset.”

  “What else?”

  “There’s no ‘What else?’ That’s it”

  “Did you ask Cassie yourself?”

  She shakes her head, smiling. “Cassie and I weren‘t—she didn’t approve of how I lived my life. I was closer with Ellie.”

  “So you suspected that Cassie was having an affair with Professor Albany, and you understood she was pregnant. But you can’t confirm any of that.”

  She looks in my eyes. “You think I’m lying?”

  “So I take it, you don’t know for sure if Albany was the child’s father.”

  She thinks about that a minute. “Well, no, I don‘t”

  “Do any other possibilities come to mind?”

  She drinks her coffee, makes a face, and shakes her head slowly.

  “What about Brandon Mitchum?” I ask.

  “Oh, no. Not Brandon.”

  “Then who, Gwendolyn? Give me a guess.”

  She draws circles with her finger on the table. She has a name. I know she does.

  “There was this guy,” she starts. “He was a nice enough guy, I guess. He worked at the houses some, back then. Y‘know, Nat had her house, and my mother had ours, across town. Some of the staff sort of jumped around from one house to the other.” She sighs. “He did yard work and errands, and I think he was a driver, too. I always thought he had a thing for Cassie. You should have seen the way he looked at her. I used to tease her about it. Mostly, he was harmless. But sometimes I thought he—he could be a little scary.”

  I try to maintain calm, as much as I want to shake her. But I let her go, seeing the animation across her face, and something beyond excitement.

  Fear.

  “Leo,” she says. “His name was Leo.”

  From my jacket pocket, I remove the Xerox of the infamous photograph of Harland Bentley with reporters and the man in the background with the scar beneath his eye. The man who attacked Brandon Mitchum. The man who probably killed Fred Ciancio, Amalia Calderone, and Evelyn Pendry.

  “God.” Gwendolyn takes the photograph, then looks at me. “That’s him.”

  LEO LOOKS OUT THROUGH the sliding glass door in Shelly Trotter’s apartment, onto the parking pad below. It’s nearing nine o‘clock, work time. He hears footsteps on the floor below him, the shuffling of shoes as the occupant on the second floor leaves through her sliding glass door, bounding down the stairs. A moment later, she drives off, leaving only Shelly Trotter’s car out there.

  Leo unlocks the sliding glass door but doesn’t open it. He takes a quick look into the bathroom at Shelly Trotter’s body, then heads out the front door of the apartment, down the internal stairs. He finds his car on the street and drives it through the alley to the parking pad behind the brownstone.

  Let’s see whose side you’re on now, Mr. Riley.

  41

  HELL, YES, I want an APB. And get his name and photo all over the fucking media. Print, television, radio, Internet” McDermott punches out his cell phone and looks through the passenger window at the addresses of the gargantuan homes. When he finds the one he wants, he pulls up to a steel gate. McDermott shows his shield to the man in a booth. ”Mrs. Bentley is expecting me,” he says.

  “Mrs. Lake.” The man picks up the phone and makes a call. “Detective, follow this road around the curve, please.”

  The home, like many homes of the megarich, is set back on the grounds. McDermott cruises past a fountain and an elaborate garden until the road curves around to the front door of the mansion.

  No one deserves this much money. This place has three front doors.

  A woman dressed all in white, her hands clasped behind her, stands under the awning between two ornate pillars. She greets him warmly, and seems unsure what to make of the files he’s carrying in his hands. “I’ll hang on to these, thanks,” he tells her.

  The foyer is not surprising, a long, angled staircase, chandelier, antique furniture. His escort takes him into a parlor with more of the antique thing going on. McDermott’s wife was the decorator in the family. All he’d requested was a comfortable couch.

  He declines a beverage, and the woman leaves him sitting on something uncomfortable, staring at a baby grand piano. They wanted Grace to be musical. Talked about piano lessons. He’s going to have to follow up on that. He’ll have to find a used upright piano somewhere.

  He’ll have to find some money, too, to afford it.

  “Detective.”

  McDermott gets to his feet. Natalia Lake is tall and fit, dressed in a sleeveless turtleneck. Her gray hair is pulled back slick against her skull. Her skin is tanned and artificially tight. Her eyelids, though, are a darker shade.

  “Forgive me if I’m a little out of sorts,” she says. “I do not sleep well on overnight flights and we just landed two hours ago. I’ve barely had time for a bath.”

  “Sure,” he says. “How was your flight?”

  “Turbulent.”

  “What airline?”

  She blinks her eyes. “Airline?”

  “Oh.” Right. She has her own jet.

  “I’m so sorry I’ve been unavailable,” she says. “I did cut my stay short”

  McDermott scratches his nose. “Yeah, I appreciate that. Italy, right?”

  She takes a seat on the couch opposite McDermott. “I have friends in Tuscany who absolutely insist that I take a few weeks every summer.”

  “Oh, absolutely.” McDermott reaches into a file and pulls out the photo of Harland Bentley and the man standing behind him whose name he now knows.

  “Mrs. Lake, can you identify that man in the background?”

  “Please, it’s Nat. Oh.” She recoils, probably upon seeing her ex-husband. “In the back?” She puts on her eyeglasses and looks again. “Oh. Is that Leo? This is an old photograph.” She looks at McDermott. “Leo—Leo Koslenko,” she says.

  “Do you know where he is now, Mrs. Lake?”

  “No, I don’t.” She shakes her head. “I haven’t seen Leo for years. I don’t think I’ve seen him since—since Cassie died.”

  “You haven’t spoken to him, either?”

  She stares at him. “Oh, no,” she whispers. “Leo’s done something ?”

  McDermott deflates, waves a hand. “Let’s back up,” says McDermott. “Who is Leo Koslenko?”

  She sighs, raises her chin. “Leo’s family in the Soviet Union was close with mine. Leo had some trouble, and his family felt he would be better off here, in the States.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She shakes her head dismissively. “Disciplinary, I assume. I don’t know. His family asked
if I would take him and I did.”

  “And when was this?”

  Koslenko’s sheet showed that he immigrated to America in 1986. He wants to hear Mrs. Lake’s answer.

  “Mid-eighties,” she answers. “During the Reagan administration.”

  He nods. “And he came to live with you?”

  “Yes.” She crosses her leg. “He worked for us. His quarters were here, in fact” She gestures with her hand. “This was my sister Mia’s home, originally. I lived on the other side of town.”

  “Where Mr. Bentley still lives.”

  She smiles weakly. “We’re both too stubborn to move.”

  “Leo, you called him—Leo lived here?”

  “Yes. There is a coach house.” Her eyes run over him. He imagines she has made many judgments of many people with those eyes, most of them unfavorable. “Am I to assume that Leo is under suspicion? They mentioned a homicide over the phone.”

  “More than one homicide.”

  “More than—Oh, dear God.” She touches her face, her hand trembling. “Leo was a sweet boy, but—well, he’d been in therapy. I thought he’d come along quite well.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to him or saw him?”

  “Oh, quite some time ago.” Her eyes cast off. “Well. Cassie died in June of 1989. I left Harland almost immediately afterward. It was—oh, it was—it was rather chaotic, to say the least.” She picks absently at a fingernail, shaking her head slowly.

  McDermott watches her but keeps silent. In his experience, the best Q and A’s are long on the A’s.

  She clears her throat with some difficulty and continues. “When I left,” she says delicately, “I never went back. I moved in with my niece Gwendolyn, and I no longer wanted our staff to intermingle. I wanted Harland’s staff to be Harland’s and ours to be ours. I wanted the separation to be complete.”

  He nods. “And Leo?”

  “Leo probably should have stayed with us, with me,” she says. “But he didn’t.”

  “Did Leo stay at Harland’s place?”

  Natalia closes her eyes. She brings a hand to her forehead, pushing back hair that is already pushed back. “You would think I would know that answer,” she says. “You would think someone who took responsibility for Leo would see to it that he was doing all right.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  She offers the tepid smile again. “After my daughter’s death, I was hardly functional for a good year. I’ve had some abuse problems of my own, if you didn’t know.”

  He shakes his head no.

  “Yes, well—my daughter had been the best antidote.” She sighs, and continues in a flat tone. “I was not sober for at least twelve months after they found Cassie. So no, Detective, I did not know what became of Leo.”

  McDermott scribbles some notes on his pad.

  “Could you tell me what’s become of him?” she asks.

  “I wish I could. Can I ask—the reason for your divorce? So soon after Cassie’s death?”

  “You can ask.” She removes a gold case and produces a cigarette. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s the only vice I’m allowed.” She lights the cigarette and holds it close to her face, her elbow held high.

  McDermott opens his hands.

  “Is that really important to your investigation?”

  “It might be,” he says.

  “I can’t imagine how.”

  “Mrs. Lake, in my job sometimes you don’t know what’s important until you discover it.”

  The smoke billowing around her face, Natalia picks at her lip with a long fingernail. “That’s rather evasive of you.”

  “I’d like the answer, please. I’m in a hurry.”

  She smokes her cigarette a moment, as if she’s deciding whether to answer. McDermott thinks she’s deciding how to answer.

  “My husband,” she says, “had an ongoing struggle with fidelity.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere. He thinks of the note found in Koslenko’s house, the reference to Harland’s relationship with Ellie Danzinger.

  “Anyone in particular?” he tries.

  She taps her cigarette with earnest in a fancy ashtray. “I suppose the point is that it’s no one in particular.”

  McDermott stares at his notepad. At the top of the small page, he has scribbled a few bullet points, a cheat sheet. This line of questioning seems to be hitting a dead end.

  “Mrs. Lake, how well did you know Cassie’s friend, Ellie Danzinger?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” She shields her eyes, as if she’s avoiding sunlight. “Mr. McDermott, if you already knew, you could have simply told me and spared me the embarrassment”

  “You’re talking about Ellie.”

  Her hands fly open, her face ashen. “Well, isn’t that the point of this—this dancing around? Yes, Detective, yes—Harland was sleeping with Cassie’s best friend. She was just another beautiful young woman he couldn’t resist. Forgive me,” she adds, her tone softening.

  McDermott stays quiet a moment. He’s not good with emotions, especially from women. But this is too important to back off.

  “I’m sorry to ask these questions, Mrs. Lake. I’m trying to solve a series of murders. Murders that haven’t stopped. This—affair—was something you discussed with Harland?”

  “Oh, God no. Of course not.” Her body is now entirely turned away from McDermott. “Harland would never have wanted me to know about his extracurricular activities.”

  McDermott waits her out, but when she doesn’t elaborate he starts, “Then how—”

  “Well, Cassie of course.”

  He jots another note. This is getting interesting. Cassie knew that Harland was carrying on with Ellie.

  “I need some kind of time frame, Mrs. Lake. When did Cassie tell you about Mr. Bentley and Ellie? When was this happening?”

  Natalia stands by a window, a hand cupped under her elbow, the cigarette burning near her nose. “You mean,” she asks, “was it near the time Cassie died?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “Yes. It was that school year. It was within a month of—of when she died.” She turns and looks at McDermott, speaking in a controlled, angry tone through clenched teeth. “One of the last things my daughter learned was that her father was—was intimate with her best friend. You understand why, after her death, I could not be with him.” Her eyes are fiery, her mouth bent in anger.

  McDermott takes some notes. A painful sound comes from Natalia’s throat. Her head drops in despair.

  “Let me ask about Cassie, if I could,” he says.

  Natalia weeps softly. McDermott thinks of his daughter, Grace, and how a child’s pain hurts the parent even worse.

  “One of the recent victims was asking questions about Cassie. We think maybe those questions got her killed. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Still unable to speak, she gestures for him to continue.

  “Were Cassie’s doctors at the Sherwood Executive Center? It’s a building in Sherwood Heights. It’s on—”

  “Yes,” she says with a hoarse voice, taking heavy breaths. “Yes, that’s where her doctors were. Why?”

  One of the hard parts of these conversations is that they aren’t really conversations. It’s not his job to answer questions. “Ma‘am, was Cassie pregnant?”

  The meager restraint Natalia has mustered fails her now. She buries her face in her hands and weeps openly. McDermott looks away, feeling like an intruder, but his adrenaline is surging.

  “Ma‘am?” It’s the woman in white, standing at the threshold of the room, bouncing on her toes. Natalia holds out a hand, shakes her head as she composes herself. “I’m fine, Marta, thank you.” The woman disappears.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Natalia says.

  “No need, ma‘am. I’m a parent, too. I wouldn’t want my daughter’s privacy violated, either. But, Mrs. Lake—something strange was happening back then. It looks like someone orchestrated some kind of break-in into that buildi
ng. The man who orchestrated it is now dead. The woman who was asking questions about it is now dead. And, ma’am, it’s our understanding that Cassie wasn’t pregnant when she—when she died.”

  The room goes quiet. He hears sounds from what he assumes is the kitchen, plates and pots clinking together, a faucet running. Better not to push here, he decides. She’ll come around.

  Natalia takes a deep breath. “All right, Detective.” She nods her head. “All right. But I want your promise that this information will stay confidential unless you absolutely have to use it” She looks at him. “Do I have that promise?”

  “Of course you do. As a cop and as a parent, Mrs. Lake.”

  He hates making a promise he won’t keep.

  “Very well.” She struggles again momentarily, as if having second thoughts. But she’s already given McDermott the answer.

  “Yes,” she says. “Cassie was pregnant that year. And you are correct that she was not pregnant at the time she died. She had that procedure,” she adds tersely, preempting a follow-up, “but I didn’t know about it until it was over. Cassie only came to me after it was done. Because she knows I would have talked her out of it.”

  “And who—”

  “I do not know who the father was. It would be an understatement to say that I tried to find out from her. In fact, I probably focused too much on that issue and too little on how the entire thing was affecting my daughter. That is something I have to live with every day”

  He thinks again of the note found in Koslenko’s house, the reference to Professor Albany and Cassie. This time, he won’t front the name, like he did with Ellie. “Can you give me any possible names? Boyfriends or anything?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. She absolutely refused. She was very protective of this person.”

  McDermott watches the expression on her face. “But.”

  She makes eye contact with him, the anger rising in her again. “Of course I had certain suspicions. She seemed to have a rather unique relationship with one of her professors.”

  McDermott starts. His reaction is not lost on Natalia.

  “You know, don’t you?” she asks, emitting a bitter laugh. “This is another time you are asking me something you already know. This is what you do. You tell people—”