Eye of the Beholder (33 page)

“I made them bring in a chair, and I sat next to Cassie while they cleaned her teeth. She never let go of my hand. She squeezed it so hard. So hard, for such a little girl.”

I clear my throat. I think it might be best, for everyone’s sake, that he move on.

“I think all of her—I think all the health care group was in that building, too,” he adds. “I think it was all one wrap-up group.”

“Like her general practitioner, her ob-gyn, that kind of thing?”

He waves a hand. He thinks so, but he doesn’t know.

“Was she pregnant, Harland?” I ask in a gentler tone.

He takes a moment, then makes a noise, something between clearing his throat and chuckling. “As if she would have told me,” he says quietly. “That little girl who held my hand at the dentist? By the time she was in college, that girl was long gone. No, I had managed to alienate all of the women in my family.”

He runs his hand over the walnut desk, like he’s checking it for dust. Another way of looking at it might be that he’s avoiding my eye contact, which is not like him.

“Why am I here, Harland?”

He considers his fingernails. “You’re probably aware that I have a certain reputation with women.”

“I’m aware that you have excellent taste,” I answer. “If a little fickle.”

He likes that. “A little fickle. Yes.” He looks at me. “A little fickle. And I imagine you’ve heard rumors that I began earning that reputation before the end of my marriage?”

“I don’t listen to rumors,” I say, which is the same thing as answering yes. The word was that Harland was playing around for years on his wife, Natalia. My heartbeat strikes up again.

Harland turns toward the window. He’s turned on overhead lighting that illuminates my space, by the door, but leaves him in semidarkness, also allowing for a picturesque view through the window, lights sprinkled about the evening cityscape like a pinball machine.

“It’s a weakness, really,” he continues. “Younger women. Not
that
young, of course. I don’t mean teenagers:”

“Harland,” I say.

“Okay, all right.” He takes a moment, looking in my direction, then back at the window, before he spits it out.

“That weakness,” he says, “extended to Ellie Danzinger.”

 

BRANDON MITCHUM squirms in his bed, uncomfortable with the revelation he’s just laid on the detectives.

McDermott stares at the wall over Mitchum’s head, trying to see where this all fits in. “You’re telling me,” he says, “that Cassie thought her father was sleeping with Ellie Danzinger?”

Mitchum doesn’t answer, but there’s no doubt McDermott heard it right.

“When did Cassie tell you this?” Stoletti wants to know.

“Oh, right about the same time. Just a little before finals, maybe. May, June of that year. I know,” he adds, laughing nervously, “it’s pretty intense.”

Intense, is one way of putting it. But it matches Harland Bentley’s reputation, the wealthy playboy. And it seems that Cassie Bentley was having a rough semester. She thought her best friend was screwing her father, and she was pregnant.

“This was a suspicion,” Stoletti says to him. “Not a confirmed fact.”

“Right. Cassie thought it was true, but she never knew for sure. She said she was going to find out.”

“How do you know she didn’t?” McDermott asks. “How can you be sure she never confirmed it?”

Mitchum shakes his head slowly, causing himself some pain in the process. He touches the bandage on his face. “She would have told me,” he says confidently. “She would’ve
had
to tell me. I made her promise.”

“You made her promise?”

“Yeah.” Mitchum’s tongue runs over his dry lips. “I was afraid of what she might do. I wanted to be close to her, so she wouldn‘t— so she—” His eyes narrow, frozen in a sixteen-year-old memory.

McDermott says, “So she wouldn’t take her own life?”

“It—yeah, it had crossed my mind. Who knew
what
she might’ve done? ”

Mitchum’s head falls back against the pillow. McDermott looks over at Stoletti, wondering if she’s thinking about what, exactly, Cassie Bentley might have done.

Like confront her father, maybe.

 

A LONG SILENCE HANGS between Harland and me. I finally repeat the words, to be sure I actually heard them.

“You and Ellie were having an affair?”

“Oh, an ‘affair,’ I don’t know. But, from time to time, yes. She was so—so ...”

He doesn’t move from the comfort of the darkness on his side of the room. His head angles up. He sighs whimsically. Jesus, this guy really couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. He couldn’t keep his paws off Cassie’s best friend?

“She was so what, Harland? Young? Sexy? Forbidden?”

“Vibrant.”

“Oh, she was vibrant. Oh, that explains it, then.”

“If there is one thing I
don’t
come to my attorney for,” he says evenly, “it’s the passing of judgment. I come to my attorney for protection. I don’t want this to come out, Paul. It’s nobody’s business.”

He’s right, to a point, but that doesn’t stop my stomach from churning. I don’t like being left out of the loop, not when I’m prosecuting a case. He could have told me back then. We would have seen it for what it was—a nonstarter, an irrelevant detour. We caught Burgos red-handed, and it took only hours before he was admitting to killing all of the women. Ellie Danzinger’s extracurricular activities would have had nothing to do with Burgos’s guilt.

“Who knew about this?”

He clears his throat. “Ellie,” he says, “and me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Discretion is one thing we both understood.”

“I can’t believe this,” I mumble.

“I’m not concerned with what you can believe.” Harland emerges from the darkness of the corner. “You’ve defended murderers. You’ve defended executives who steal from their shareholders. You defended us, with that pollution problem in Florida. I’m guilty here of far less. So defend me, Paul. Keep all of this quiet.” He stands face-to-face with me now. “Or I’ll find someone who will.”

I stare at him. Again, he’s holding his money over me. He knows there are dozens of lawyers at my firm who would be on the street without his business.

“Find someone who will,” I say.

I see that I’ve surprised him, as much as Harland ever shows surprise. His eyes search my face for a break in my reaction.

“You’re afraid.” He nods his head once, slowly. “I’ve never seen that from you.”

He’s not talking about our relationship. He’s not talking about the millions of dollars of business he sends my way every year.

And he’s right.

“Who killed my daughter?” he asks me.

I say it quickly, “Terry Burgos,” but the answer surprises both of us, the speed of my response, the fact that the question is even remotely credible. Three days ago, it wasn’t.

His expression lightens a bit, amusement, he wants me to think. Like he’s not afraid of anyone.

“I’m going to find out what’s going on,” I tell him.

“Even if it proves you wrong.”

“Even if.”

I turn for the door. I navigate the hallway, my legs shaky. The British guard eyes me suspiciously as I push open the front door and head to the elevator.

 

“IT DIDN’T MATTER,” Brandon says. “What’s the point of ripping apart these people’s lives when it served no purpose?”

“I’m not asking why you didn’t tell the police back then,” McDermott says. “I want to know why you didn’t want to tell us tonight. And why we ‘didn’t hear this from you.’ You afraid of someone, Brandon?”

Brandon waves off the notion, trying to give the impression that McDermott’s off base. But he’s not. He can read it all over Mitchum.

“Harland Bentley,” he guesses.

Brandon’s eyes shoot to McDermott, then retreat. He might as well have said yes.

“Tell me about you and Harland Bentley, Brandon.”

“Look, it’s not just me.” He says it like it’s wrong, whatever it is. “Mr. Bentley is one of the biggest benefactors to the arts in this city. He gives money to a lot of artists.”

Oh. Right. Mitchum is an artist.

“He endowed a grant through the City Arts Foundation for me,” he concedes. “Okay?”

McDermott drops his head and peeks over at Stoletti.

“When did this happen?” Stoletti asks.

“When I graduated Mansbury. That was ‘ninety-two.”

“He gave you a grant in 1992?”

“Yeah. Well—it’s a continuing grant. He refreshes it every year.”

“How much does he ‘refresh’ it?” McDermott asks.

“Oh.” Brandon waves a hand. “Started out at twenty-five thousand. Now it’s seventy-five thousand a year.”

“Seventy-five
thousand?”
McDermott makes a face. “And what do you do for this refresher, Brandon? Why you?”

The coloring on the face of the young artist has changed to a light crimson. This is not a topic he enjoys. “He told me that Cassie would have wanted him to help. He said he appreciated that I was there for Cassie.”

A doctor comes into the room and wants to know if they’re done. McDermott says he needs five more minutes. Mitchum, it seems, was hoping for a reprieve. The doctor stands next to McDermott to let him know the clock is ticking.

“There’s nothing wrong with accepting a grant,” Mitchum says.

McDermott nods at him. “You and Mr. Bentley ever discuss what we’ve just discussed?”

He shakes his head. “Never.”

Stoletti asks, “You think he knew that
you
knew about Ellie and him?”

“No,” he insists. “I don’t know if there’s even anything
to know.
It was just a thought that Cassie had. See, I knew you’d try to make this look bad. He gives millions a year to the arts. I’m one of many. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The doctor moves between the detective and the patient. “That’s enough for tonight, guys. Really.”

“We’ll have a guard at your door,” McDermott tells Brandon. “You think of anything, I want you to call me.”

They step out into the hallway. Stoletti digests the conversation while McDermott checks for messages on his cell phone. None.

So Cassie is pregnant and having unpleasant conversations with whoever the father is, who seems to want to deny it. Then Cassie is murdered. Then someone gets Fred Ciancio to help break into the building where Cassie’s medical records are located. None of this, save Cassie’s murder, is confirmed. But it makes sense.

Nor can it be confirmed that Cassie’s father was playing around with Ellie’s best friend. But if he was, then Cassie was having a pretty rough time right before she was murdered.

“You think Cassie confronted her daddy?” Stoletti asks. “He marries into a billion dollars, and he’s afraid of his wife finding out that he was screwing their daughter’s best friend?”

“And,” McDermott adds, “we have another someone who doesn’t want Cassie’s pregnancy to come out. Professor Albany sure looks good for the ‘fucking father.”’

“And just about this time,” she replies, “Ellie and Cassie conveniently turn up dead.”

Right. But they don’t have proof that Cassie was pregnant, and they don’t have proof Harland Bentley was stepping out with Ellie Danzinger.

Only one way to find out. He’s supposed to see Natalia Lake Bentley, who is returning from vacation tomorrow morning early. And they have Harland Bentley at ten.

“We’ll need to add the professor to our social calendar tomorrow,” he says.

M
cDERMOTT MAKES it back to the station after leaving the hospital. Grace is already asleep when he calls. His mother says she had a good night. It’s only the third night since Joyce died that McDermott hasn’t put her to bed and read to her. He misses it. It’s part of his pact with her.

What would he do without his mother, Grace’s gramma? A nanny on a cop’s salary would almost break him. His mother, seventy-four next month, is the one now holding this together. She’s healthy as a horse, but he can see she’s slowing down. He thinks about it every day. What would happen to Grace without her?

He shakes away the thought. He pushes out the memory of Joyce lying dead on the floor, the bathroom floor and rug soaked with her blood. He turns from the sight of Grace, huddled in the bathtub, her eyes shut, hands over her ears.

He pretends he didn’t say those things to Joyce, the night before her death.

Joyce was sick, and it had become too much for a husband who worked ten-hour days. Worse yet, there was Grace. If something had happened to her under Joyce’s watch, he’d never forgive himself. Joyce loved Grace more than life, but that wasn’t the point. Sickness was sickness. You can love your daughter with all your heart, but what good does that do if you’ve locked yourself upstairs while your three-year-old daughter is downstairs, wailing for her mommy?

That’s when he’d made the decision, after arriving home late from a double homicide, after gathering his hungry, soiled daughter in his arms as he searched the house for his wife, his heart rattling against his chest in anger and terror with such fury that he could hardly push the calls to his wife out of his lungs. He found her in the spare bedroom, in the corner, wrapped in a ball, weeping quietly. She’d lost track of time, hadn’t any sense of whether Grace had eaten dinner or whether she’d had a nap. She was losing control.

It was time—past time—to institutionalize her.
To get some rest,
as he put it to her later that night.

He’d consulted an attorney the week earlier. Involuntary commitment was an option. But he wanted so badly for Joyce to agree with him. He wanted her to feel like part of a solution, not a prisoner being locked up.
Just give it a try,
he pleaded. It’s
nothing permanent.
The point, he emphasized, was to get her full-time attention and get her on the road to recovery.