I couldn’t imagine it.
But was he capable of doing something to Cleo to stop her from publishing a book that would expose his secret? A secret he paid her so extravagantly to keep?
Maybe.
Secrets don’t come cheap.
And keeping them is often worth killing for.
“You would have to close your eyes, then.”
“I don’t know if I could do that.”
“You would have to. Close your eyes and tell me how much you like the money. Tell me what you are going to do with it. How much pleasure it’s going to give you. I need to know that I can give you pleasure.” He was slipping into his fantasy. Even though we were just sitting in the bar, he was starting to imagine that we were actually in the room.
“If I gave you all that money, what would you do with it?” His voice was low and urgent. He sounded almost desperate.
“I don’t know…” I hesitated, not knowing what to say. And then I thought I should do what I had done before. Stay with the truth. He would think it was a lie, anyway. All that mattered was to keep him satisfied until he was lulled even deeper into his pornographic dream, when his guard was down, and I could look right into his face, right into his eyes, and ask him the question I had come here to ask and watch his reaction.
“It’s not what I am going to do with it. It’s that you think I am worth this much that makes me so happy. It’s the fact that your giving me money makes you excited. That I could be attractive enough, desirable enough, that you would want to give me all this.”
I hesitated long enough to listen to his breathing, which was now slightly labored.
“I have never been wanted five thousand dollars’ worth,” I continued. “And it makes me really appreciate you. It gives me pleasure.”
“Will you touch yourself? Just there on your neck?” He pointed to a spot under my chin. It seemed an innocentenough place, and tentatively I put my fingers there. I knew the scenario-all he wanted was the tease. And I could oblige him if it helped me figure him out.
My fingers drifted up and down the skin of my neck, not going anywhere near my breasts. The idea that someone was getting pleasure out of watching me, that I was arousing a man with just this little bit of foreplay, that I was almost starting to enjoy my amateur performance, was amazing to me. A small “Oh” escaped hoarsely from his throat.
“What else would you give me besides the money?” I asked, using his distracted state to set my trap. “Would you give me pain, in addition to all that money, if it gave me pleasure?” I asked. “Would you hurt me?”
He looked startled.
“Hurt you?”
“Yes. Don’t you also like to inflict pain with that pleasure?”
He shook his head. “No. Not me. I’ve never done that.” He looked horrified at the thought. Was he bluffing or was he serious? His eyes did not flicker. The pulse point in his neck did not jump and throb. I only had a small window of time left. “Where is Cleo? Tell me,” I said.
“Cleo? I have no idea. Why are you asking me that?”
I could see it in his eyes. He was confused and he was telling the truth. And I felt a little bit sorry for him, sorry that I had lulled him into this erotic state only to shock him out of it with my questions.
“All I want is to give pleasure…” It was almost a cry.
35
I met Elias Beecher the next afternoon at a Japanese restaurant near my office. When I arrived, he was sipping a sake and looked even more exhausted than he had the last time we’d met.
The dining room was quiet and the table he’d chosen in the corner created even more of an illusion of privacy.
“I feel guilty even trying to eat,” he said after the waitress took our order.
“I know, but it won’t do Cleo any good if you get sick. Have you slept at all?”
“I fall asleep okay. Sleep for about two hours and then I’m wide awake. Lying there, imagining… Oh, I can’t even tell you the things I start to imagine. There are so many disgusting people out there, capable of doing such violent, disturbed things, I…”
The haunted look in his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the way he spoke just one level above a whisper, all pulled at me, and I put my hand out to cover his and then left it there.
He looked down at my hand on top of his as if it were a foreign object he’d never seen before. The touch was strange for me, too. Elias was halfway between a patient and a partner.
“We’re all alone in this. It’s just you and me looking for her,” he said.
“Gil is looking for her, too.”
His eyebrows arched and the soft look in his eyes hardened for a second. “Gil?” His voice had a derisive twist I hadn’t heard in it before. “I don’t trust him, Morgan. He’s as much a suspect as anyone else. That book could destroy his business overnight.”
“I know,” I said, and then told him about my conversation with Gil.
“You don’t really believe he didn’t know about Cleo and me, do you?” he asked when I was done.
“He didn’t seem to.”
“But if she told him, if she finally told him, he might have gone crazy. Did you see that movie…with Richard Gere and Diane Ladd, Unfaithful? When this mild, warm man finally is confronted with his wife’s betrayal he becomes capable of murder.” Elias was playing with his thin, wooden chopsticks, rubbing the tips against each other as if he could light a fire. “And the other movie like that was…”
He was starting to fragment and disappear into a list of films and books that would illustrate his point. I had to stop him.
“Elias?”
He looked at me, still lost for a moment and then reconnecting.
“I need you to help me. We need to find out more about all these men.”
“You’re meeting them, right?”
“Yes, I’ve met two, and so far I don’t think either of them were capable of doing anything to Cleo.”
“Then you have to move on to the next two. And then the next two.”
“I only identified four who had serious motives…” I hesitated. I was avoiding mentioning the fifth man.
“But there’s something else. What is it?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d been in tune with what I was thinking.
“Cleo was so specific in her descriptions. So many things are accurate. But there is one specific thing about each of the men I’ve met that she didn’t use to describe them. She used those things to describe a fifth man. It’s like he’s a composite of all of them.”
“But that shouldn’t matter, should it? You still know there are four men who have motives. Who would absolutely be ruined one way or the other if that book were published.”
The waitress came with lacquered plates of glistening sushi and sashimi, and while she placed them before us and poured puddles of soy sauce into porcelain dishes, we were quiet.
Elias returned to rubbing the chopsticks together, and the noise was like fingernails on a blackboard, setting my teeth on edge.
When she left, I broke my own chopsticks apart, lifted up a piece of tuna, dipped it in the soy sauce and put it in my mouth. There was enough wasabi to inflame my taste buds and make my eyes tear, but it was a good kind of burn.
Elias was dipping a piece of cucumber roll in his dish of soy over and over, and while I watched, it fell apart, the grains of rice no longer sticky.
“This isn’t going fast enough,” he said. “I know you’re doing the best you can. But it’s still taking too long. Why won’t the police do something? Why won’t they help?”
I shook my head. “There’s no evidence for them to get involved yet.”
“Do you realize how ineffectual they are? How screwed up that is? I went to them and begged them to help, and they turned around, treated me like a suspect, and they still aren’t doing anything to find her. This is why I became a corporate lawyer. Dealing with law enforcement on the police level is far too frustrating.”