He left me standing there in the middle of my office.
The sun was out and the room was flooded with the morning light, but it seemed like the dead of winter to me.
Wrapping my arms around myself, I tried to stop shivering, but all I could think of were those damn words he had used. As if they were some kind of code.
But he couldn’t have known. Not about The Lost Girls. There was no way Gil Howard knew how important saving those girls was. Even though the one who mattered most was long gone.
30
I called Gil the next day and told him I was willing to proceed with his plan and that there were five men who, based on Cleo’s descriptions, I wanted to meet. Then I gave him their nicknames and some information I’d gleaned from the manuscript. It was too easy. He knew all but one from the nicknames alone-clearly she’d referred to them that way with him. The fifth, he said, he wasn’t sure about and would need to think about it. It might be someone she hadn’t seen in a long time and he’d forgotten who it was. We got off the phone after planning that I’d go to the Diablo the next evening at around seven-thirty for my first meeting.
I spent the rest of that day and most of the next trying not to think about that night. And when my last patient left, I shut the door and changed my clothes.
Gil had explained that the entrance to the Diablo Cigar Bar on East Fifty-fifth Street was through an unmarked door in the lobby of a small and exclusive hotel called the Bristol-Trent.
There were other private clubs hidden behind unmarked doors in Manhattan-Raffles in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, for instance-so the location in itself wasn’t that unusual. An exclusive club tucked away inside another establishment protected a patron’s privacy. But certainly not all private clubs offered the same extras as the Diablo.
Cleo’s book had described the way Diablo worked in detail. Membership was a onetime fifty-thousand-dollar bond. Nonrefundable. There were yearly dues in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars, which was applied to drinks, cigars and light meals. Through the club’s concierge, men could book a room at the Bristol-Trent Hotel. And for an additional fee they could book an assignation through Cleo.
It was as safe and private as possible.
I stood across the street for more than ten minutes, staring at the hotel’s facade, trying to get up the nerve to finally cross the street. I was worried I didn’t know how to be the kind of woman I was expected to be. Acting out a charade wasn’t my trade.
Cleo Thane’s voice wasn’t the one I heard while I stood there. It wasn’t Gil’s voice or the voice of the detective who had asked for my help.
It was my daughter’s.
“But why aren’t you a real doctor?” she had asked me a year before.
“I am a real doctor, Dulcie.”
“No. You just talk to people about sex.” She made a face. “You don’t heal them.”
“I make them feel better. Doesn’t that count? I help them to make their lives better.”
She had shrugged. “I guess. But I wish you were the kind of real doctor who saved people.”
I crossed the street, feeling wobbly and ridiculous in my get-up.
My black skirt was shorter than the length I usually wore, my legs were encased in expensive hose, my heels were the highest and pointiest I could find. Remembering Cleo’s Jimmy Choo pumps, I’d run out at lunch and bought a pair of the ridiculously expensive stilettos, horrified at the price tag and wondering how I was ever going to walk in them.
I’d spent more time and money than I’d planned on the shoes, but after making that purchase, I stopped off at Victoria’s Secret and purchased lace underwear. Light green satin. If I was going to play the part, I wanted to feel the part; I remembered that from my mother. It might be easier to fake it if I was at least in character.
Except I felt like I was wearing a costume.
I smoothed my skirt down and noticed my hands. Damn. I hadn’t done a good job of preparing at all. My fingernails were unpolished. And of everything, that unsettled me.
How many other mistakes was I making? How silly was this whole charade?
I’d never pull it off. And besides, what did I hope to accomplish? Did I really think I’d be able to psyche out these men well enough to figure out if one of them had done Cleo harm?
The doorman opened the front door for me and I stepped over the threshold. Inside the mirrored lobby, just as Gil had described, was a door to the right, almost behind the concierge’s desk. Anyone could open it, but only the men who had enough money and cleared Cleo and Gil’s rigorous credit check and police-record check were allowed in.
Once through the door, I walked across a lovely Persian carpet trying not to trip. Overhead a crystal chandelier cast glints of soft light on the paintings of devils hanging on the walls.
“Can I help you?” the maître d’ asked.
“I’m here to see Gil Howard.”
“May I have your name, please?”
“Morgan White.”
Gil had suggested and I’d agreed to use another last name. Morgan Snow. White. Seven dwarfs. Exactly how many suspects I had. It had been easy to come up with the pseudonym.
“He should be right inside. Do you need me to point him out to you?”
“No, thank you. I can find him.”
The large room was smoky and smelled of cigars and whiskey. It was such a male scent that it caught me by surprise. I’d never been in a place that was so exclusively devoted to and created for men. And rather than find it off-putting, I was attracted to it. The walls here were wood-paneled. The club chairs had obviously been chosen for their comfort. The bar on the left wall was long and gleaming. Behind it was a delightful mural of nymphs romping in an enchanted forest, being chased by very cheery-looking devils with extremely long and pointed tails.
The devil motif was on the ashtrays and etched more subtly onto the heavy crystal glasses that I saw a waiter carrying.
Ella Fitzgerald was belting out a song over the sound system.
There was nothing about the scene before me that was any different than what you would find at any restaurant in New York. Walk into the bar at the Mark Hotel or the St. Regis, and you’d find the same men, sipping the same scotch or martinis.
But while there are always some beautiful women in restaurants in New York, here there were nothing but beautiful women, and all of them were under forty. Many of them under thirty.
And none of the couples at any of the tables looked tired or bored or were arguing.
I found Gil in the corner at a table with two other men. He rose and welcomed me with a grateful and relieved hug.
“This is Morgan,” he said as he introduced me to Ted and Bernard. Like most of the club members, these two would have looked at home at any boardroom meeting. Polished, buffed and slightly tanned, Ted was in his early forties. Bernard was a bit younger, wearing a European-cut sport coat and a crisp white shirt, opened at the top. Both of them shook my hand.
And then I realized something: the men were openly staring at me.
I wasn’t used to it. In fact, I couldn’t ever remember being looked at that way except by Gil the day before in my office. People glanced at you all the time. They assessed you and judged you and made rash decisions based on those first impressions when their eyes swiftly swept over you. But this was not subtle. These men looked at me shamelessly and I felt naked.
There was something so frank about these appraisals that while they made me uncomfortable, I also appreciated the lack of pretense about them. They were just men staring at a woman. Intellectually, I may have had issues with mating dances, but sociologically I understood them. Men are hardwired to find women alluring by looks alone. And not just one woman at a time, but many women. And for good reason.
It is all about survival of the fittest. The men who were the most prolific at producing progeny were the ones whose genetic imprint was passed on. Just as the women who got pregnant often, and nursed and nurtured their babies best, were the ones whom we descend from.