Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  I catch myself. Listen to me, turning everything into an eviden tiary question. McDermott’s reaction was right. It’s in my blood, the law. It’s all I know. It’s all I want to do.

  I leave the police station and, this time, say nothing to the reporters.

  Not now, anyway. Maybe never.

  Wednesday

  July 6, 2005

  54

  SHELLY AND I are spending a week in the presidential suite at the Grand Hotel, ordering room service and walking on the beach and seeing the sights and eating delicious, rich food. We’ve managed some time for intimacy, too, but we’ve put a modern twist on the phrase sleeping together. We have done just that. We have averaged ten hours of shut-eye a day.

  Shelly is doing better now. You don’t just bounce back from being attacked in your home and abducted, even if your memory of it is foggy at best. She has had to adjust, more than anything, to the concept of fear itself. We’ve walked into the town and strolled the beaches, but only during daylight hours. Without either of us acknowledging it, I’ve led her back to the fourteen-acre estate of the Grand Hotel every night. This, I’ve come to realize, is not about seeing the sights. It’s about getting away.

  On our fourth day here, I awake around nine. Shelly has just come out of the Jacuzzi and is wrapped in towels. I open my eyes and catch her looking at me, watching, and I see it in her eyes, a sense of reserve, apprehension. I say “Good morning” and she reciprocates, but with her eyes diverted.

  There is a knock on the door and she jumps.

  “Oh. Room service,” she says, chuckling at herself without humor.

  I throw on a shirt and answer the door. I tip the bellhop on his way out. I put the fruit and granola in my mouth, chew it, swallow it, but I don’t taste it. She plays with a piece of toast and laughs appropriately at my jokes, but she is holding back. Shelly holding back is about as natural as the sun rising in the east. But now I feel it, more than ever, even more than when she broke up with me, because, at least then, I had hope that she’d return.

  I shower and dress in a short-sleeve shirt and slacks. I walk her down to the spa, where I have arranged a day of beauty for her. Massage, facial, the works. She demurred initially, and positively scoffed at the notion of a pedicure until they explained that a foot massage is included. She is not looking for pampering so much as relaxation.

  I walk her to the door of the spa, an act of chivalry, but she senses I’m being protective escorting her everywhere. She’s right.

  “What are you doing with your morning off?” she asks me.

  “I’ll think of something.”

  She nods and turns to the door.

  “Shelly.”

  She looks back at me casually, then reads my expression. When the pause becomes more than momentary, when she watches me struggle, she senses what’s coming and braces herself.

  “Let’s move up our flight,” I suggest. “Let’s take off tomorrow morning.”

  She looks into my eyes.

  “You need to get back to your life,” I add. “I need to get back to mine.”

  She struggles with that awhile, but, with every moment she doesn’t respond, she is answering. I know Shelly Trotter better than she knows herself. I know the difference between wanting to be with someone and the fear of never being with anyone. I know the difference between someone loving me and someone being in love with me.

  I retreat to my hotel room with that silence, painful but honest, hanging heavily.

  I STEP OUT ONTO the veranda with a folder I brought from work. I have a multiple-defendant fraud trial four weeks from now. I’ve fallen behind, but I don’t mind. The preparation is my favorite part, mapping out strategy and planning its execution. It’s a game, a competition, something between a contact sport and theater. My client probably should be convicted, seems to me. At best, he buried his head in the sand while the executives around him were playing fast and loose with the Medicaid regulations. At worst, he specifically directed the illegal action.

  But I think he’ll walk. We will argue that he didn’t know what was going on and couldn’t have known. And their best witness, the flipper, the guy who cut the quick deal with the feds and agreed to testify against my guy, is on bad paper. He lied to the feds initially and admitted to doing so, and it looks like he had a bit of a gambling problem, too. I will tear him to pieces in front of the jury. I’ll throw up enough smoke to blur the picture.

  That’s my job now, to smudge the picture, to mess with the prosecution’s case, to make adverse witnesses unlikable and untrustworthy while my client sits peacefully, smiling gently and sweetly and silently. That’s the game. It’s about winning. It’s not about truth. It’s not my job to make it about the truth.

  It used to be. But I’ll never be a prosecutor again.

  I lean over the veranda’s railing, the warm wind curling under my T-shirt, the rays of the sun warming my face, images of Leo Koslenko and the Mansbury victims and, most of all, Terry Burgos swimming through my mind. I think of him strapped in the electric chair, chubby and disheveled, looking into my eyes as the prison guard called out that Burgos had no last statement.

  I’m not the only one, he’d mouthed to me, his final words. Was he simply quoting Tyler Skye’s lyrics? Or did some part of his brain know his words to be true?

  I use my cell phone. The number has been programmed in, at the governor’s insistence. I didn’t plan on using it.

  I get an aide, who patches me through quickly.

  Governor Trotter’s initial reaction is one of concern. I put him at ease, tell him we’re doing well here, Shelly’s enjoying the break, she’s getting a massage right now. We do a little small talk, but neither of us thinks I’m calling to shoot the breeze.

  There is a small pause, and I clear my throat.

  “As you requested, Counselor,” he says, “I put in a word for this detective, McDermott. I think he can be expecting a promotion soon.”

  “I appreciate that, Lang. Very much.”

  “But that’s not why you called,” he adds. “And it’s not to ask me for Shelly’s hand in marriage, either.”

  “No,” I agree, not elaborating on just how correct he is.

  “It’s not to ask me to put in a good word for you with Harland, either.” He laughs. “From what it sounds like, he wants me to put in a word for him with you.”

  Before Shelly and I left for vacation, Harland Bentley showed up at my office. It was the first time he had ever come to me. He apologized for keeping information from me during the Burgos prosecution. He asked me to stay on as his attorney. He said he needed me and would accept any terms I demanded.

  I don’t kid myself that I’m the only lawyer who could handle Harland’s legal work. I’m a good face to put at the top, and, when necessary, I step in, but there are many lawyers who could do the work, and who could grow into the necessary leadership role. I do believe that Harland values my contribution, but there’s no question that his plea to me was born, in no small part, out of guilt. He feels like he owes me one.

  I introduced Harland to Jerry Lazarus, who has been one of the lead partners I’ve utilized on his litigation. I told him Jerry, a young, aggressive, and smart lawyer, was the man he wanted. He agreed, mostly, I think, because I asked. So the firm will not be laying off lawyers. It will not lose Harland Bentley’s business. The only difference will be the name on the law firm’s door. Shaker & Flemming will be just fine.

  “Vacations, getting away—it gives you space,” the governor remarks. “Gives a man time to step back and think about his life. Think about the future.”

  I don’t respond to him. But I smile.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Paul. I was a prosecutor for many years. A man confesses to murder and has forensics all over his house. And he still killed most of those women. Hell, his own lawyer thought—”

  “Thanks, Governor. I appreciate that. It’s a little late, unfortunately.”

  “Is that why you’re calli
ng, Counselor? Because it’s too late?”

  He knows why I’m calling. I can’t change what happened, no matter how much I wish I could. But I want to believe, I have to believe, that it’s not too late to do some good.

  “I suppose you heard—last week, Judge Benz announced she’s stepping down,” he says. “She was a credit to the federal bench. She’ll need an equally worthy replacement.”

  Lang Trotter is a very smart man. A good one, too.

  I thank him and close the cell phone.

  I CATCH A TAXI outside the hotel and give the man the address. I rest my head against the seat and look out along the coastline, the magnificent beaches and the eternal, ice blue sea, as the cab navigates the narrow roads.

  Leonid Koslenko, it turns out, had murdered his sister, Katrina, when he was fifteen, insisting to his family afterward that she was a spy bent on destroying their family and country. His parents had connections with the politburo and got him institutionalized instead of criminally prosecuted. And while accounts are still sketchy, it sounds like someone in the KGB became impressed with Koslenko’s physical skills and, after he’d spent two years in a mental institution, recruited him for some dirty work. About two years after that, his disapproving family pulled some strings and cut a deal with the Soviet government—probably spreading around plenty of money in the process—that allowed Koslenko to leave the Soviet Union as a “political dissident.” It was, apparently, a fairly easy sell, because it was widely known that the Soviets locked up political enemies in mental institutions.

  But Leo Koslenko was no dissident. He belonged in an institution.

  In Koslenko’s mind, his days as an assassin-spy never ended. The United States was just a new assignment, with Natalia Lake Bentley as his mother superior. He continued in treatment for paranoid schizophrenia and took his medications. No one knows what was in his mind during that time—whether he was awaiting orders or whether he was conducting “missions” of his own—but, as far as we know, he managed to stay out of trouble, living fairly comfortably at Mia Lake’s home, working as a ranch hand, so to speak. He came to know Cassie, who was far and away the most approachable, sincere member of the Lake-Bentley clan.

  But he was ready when his orders came—the day Cassie murdered Ellie Danzinger in a fit of rage and despair. When Natalia called on him, he sprang to duty.

  From what he was mumbling to me about Burgos—He was one of us—it seems that, after watching Burgos dispose of Ellie’s body so efficiently, he came to believe that Burgos was working with them, too. That, in his mind, was why Natalia had directed him to move Ellie’s body to Burgos’s house. He was another spy, a comrade. And when he watched his comrade Burgos kill the prostitutes, he came to believe that prostitutes were the enemy, acting out covert missions, using their occupation as cover.

  No one knows how many prostitutes Leo Koslenko murdered after the Burgos affair. Streetwalkers disappear all the time and people rarely look very hard for them. The prostitute he’d been accused of murdering a few years back, it turned out, had the incision between her fourth and fifth toes on the left foot. Police have opened files on other hookers who were found dead; three of them so far have the same signature mark. Others, however, would have to be exhumed, and it’s unlikely anyone will go to the trouble.

  That’s why he killed Amalia Calderone, the woman I escorted out of the bar. He thought he was saving my life. He wrapped my unconscious hand around the tire iron, the murder weapon, not to frame me but to get me involved, to wake me up to the fact that help was needed again. He also killed a woman from a hardware store who was not a prostitute but who was very attractive and provocatively dressed and whom his tortured mind took to be a hooker—read spy.

  He’d also used a Russian prostitute who went by the name of Dodya to substitute in as Shelly’s double in the bathtub. Turns out, the comradska imported young Russian women into the city and kept them in a warehouse where anyone with enough cash could make use of them. Koslenko had purchased the girl outright for eight thousand dollars, killed her, took her to Shelly’s apartment, and did what he did to her.

  He’d been unhappy with me up to that point. I hadn’t responded to his notes. I’d thwarted his attempt to kill Brandon Mitchum. I wasn’t being a comrade. His trick in Shelly’s apartment was intended to get me on board—I had a day or two, at best, before blood tests and other testing would have established that Shelly was not the woman in that bathtub. I think the idea was, if I didn’t clean up the mess—if I didn’t behave—in a day or so he’d kill Shelly for real. In the meantime, no one would be looking for Shelly because everyone—except for me—would think she was dead. He was sure I would know differently.

  Natalia Lake, thus far, has escaped any criminal charges. The word is the county attorney is considering a charge for her role in covering up Cassie’s murder of Ellie Danzinger, but I think that’s just to placate the media feeding frenzy. It’s not going to happen. There’s no real proof that Cassie even killed Ellie—she did, of course, but knowing it and proving it are two different things—much less that Natalia actively covered anything up. And this is to say nothing of the fact that Terry Burgos has already been officially blamed, convicted, and executed for the murder of Ellie Danzinger.

  Natalia’s statement to the police, of course, left out the part where she directed Leo Koslenko to move Ellie’s body from the apartment to Burgos’s house and directed him to keep watch over Burgos and report back to her. And I haven’t told the police any of that.

  Not yet, anyway. And maybe never.

  The taxi moves into a residential neighborhood, large estates built high up on the hills, with large fences surrounding them. I had thought about renting some estate for this week with Shelly, but hotels are much better in terms of security. Shelly didn’t need to be sleeping in some giant house with creaks and groans in a place thousands of miles from home.

  And, besides, a partner of mine in my law firm said if you stay in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, you gotta stay at the Grand Hotel.

  I pay the driver in euros sufficient to convince him to stick around. I walk up to a large gate, bordered by twin, white stone blocks, and push a buzzer embedded in a gold plate.

  “Bon jour,” a woman’s voice says through a speaker.

  “Paul Riley,” I say, “for Gwendolyn Lake.”

  “Ah.” She pauses to convert to English. “Mister—Riley?”

  “Paul Riley, yes.”

  “You have an appointment?”

  “No. Tell her I’m alone, please.”

  After a good ten minutes, a man walks down the long driveway toward me, looking tan and healthy and wearing all white. “Mr. Riley?”

  “Oui.”

  “Bon jour.” He opens a small gate and leads me into the estate. We climb endless, outdoor stairs, past well-kept, flourishing island plants and trees. The house itself is large but not monstrous, a two-level brick, full of windows that gleam in the bright sunlight.

  Instead of taking me into the house, he leads me down a path that winds around the house, until we reach the back. There is a swimming pool as big as the one that was in my high school, a Jacuzzi off to the side, and a large deck area.

  “Ms. Lake,” the man says.

  The last time I saw her, she was ragged, in bedclothes and with flat hair, pouring out the beginning of a story to me in the parlor of Natalia’s home. Four hours later, she boarded an American Airlines flight, nonstop to De Gaulle airport in Paris.

  Today, she is wearing a one-piece orange bathing suit with a white terry cloth robe over her shoulders, spread out on a lounge chair on the deck by her pool. Her skin is more tanned than the last time I saw her. Her hair has dried from a swim, hanging at her shoulders. She peeks at me over her sunglasses.

  She says nothing to me, doesn’t offer me a chair or anything else.

  “I don’t know what Natalia told you,” I say, “but I don’t see any charges sticking against her. She’s lucky.”

&n
bsp; She places the book she’s reading to the side and sits up in the lounge chair, putting her feet on the deck.

  “I’m surprised she even told the police about her daughter killing Ellie. She didn’t have to do that. I take it that was your idea?”

  She remains still, looking off in the distance through her shades. I’m right, of course. Natalia never wanted anyone to know that Cassie killed Ellie. She’d have let Terry Burgos, Professor Albany—anyone else—take that blame.

  “You told her if she didn’t tell the police, you would.”

  Again, she doesn’t answer, or even look at me.

  “You ran away before,” I say. “Back then. On Wednesday, the week of the murder spree. You flew to France.”

  We’ve already been over this. I’m bringing it up for a reason and she knows it.

  “France doesn’t extradite its citizens to the U.S.,” I continue. “Roman Polanski can tell you that. Which, I assume, is why you left back then.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “And why you’re here now,” I add.

  She looks up at me.

  “You understand,” I say, “that the murder of Cassie Bentley remains unsolved. That case, technically, was never prosecuted. You know that, right?”

  “I know that.” Her voice is flat, defiant. “Of course I know that.”

  And yet she returned to the United States, anyway, albeit three years later.

  “Do I have a clear picture of Cassandra Alexia Bentley?” I ask. “The destructive affair with her professor. The mood swings. Finding out Harland fathered the girl she thought was her cousin. Harland’s affair with Ellie. And then she snaps. It’s too much. She storms into Ellie’s apartment, after seeing Daddy come out, and she gives her one on the brain. Is all of that true?”

  A tear appears beneath the sunglasses. She wipes at her face, her mouth contorted into a snarl, but she remains motionless otherwise.

  “Look at me,” I say, “and convince me that everything I’ve just said is true.”