Eye of the Beholder (37 page)

Is it just bad grammar? Am I taking the ramblings of a nut job and inferring too much?

“Shit.” Something about this is wrong.

My phone rings, an internal call, but not from anyone in the office—their caller ID would show up. It’s not from Betty because she’s not here. It’s a call from outside, being routed through the directory to me.

“Paul Riley,” I say.

“Mr. Riley, this is Gwendolyn Lake.”

Speak of the devil. I don’t say anything. If she has something to tell me, she has to want to do it.

The phone line goes quiet. There is background noise, someone shouting an order, people talking. She’s at her diner, presumably.

“I wasn’t honest with you yesterday,” she says.

“I—” I decide not to comment.

“You figured as much.”

“I had my suspicions.”

“I said I didn’t want to help. But I do. I want to talk to you.”

“I’m free now.” I sit back in my chair.

“Good,” she says. “I’m across the street.”

 

McDERMOTT STEPS OUT INTO the fresh air for only the second time in six hours. He savors it, despite the thick humidity. The neighbors and press have gathered around the police tape surrounding the perimeter of the property. An officer, taking statements, walks over.

“This guy’s a friggin’ ghost, Mike. Neighbors say he stayed in his house practically all the time. He’d leave at night sometimes, at most. Hardly ever saw him. Said he orders pizza or Chinese food every night, and him answering the door was about the only time anyone laid eyes on him. He even paid someone to mow his lawn. Neighbors said they kept their kids away from his property. Looks like he creeped everyone out”

“Keep talking to ‘em,” McDermott says. He turns to Powers, one of the detectives. “I want Professor Albany at the station,” he says. “I don’t care what he’s doing. Grab the ACA”—the assistant county attorney assigned to the station house—“and start with affidavits for warrants. We’re moving this morning.”

“Got it, Mike.”

He grabs his arm. “And do the same thing for Harland Bentley.”

He uses his cell phone to call Sloan, one of the detectives on the case, the same one who called him earlier.

“Hang on, Mike:” Sloan takes a minute, giving instructions to someone. “Okay. So here’s what we have so far. The Vicky is one Brenda Stoller. Grad student and part-time model. Found in her SUV, backseat, in the parking lot of E-Z Days Hardware. Her throat was slashed.”

“And?”

“And yeah, a guy came in yesterday asking for a Trim-Meter chain saw. We got the store vids and an ID from the salesman. It’s our offender. Why this lady, Mike? She walks in and buys some lightbulbs and this happens?”

“Hell if I know. She got in the way somehow.” He thinks about that a moment. “Describe her to me, Jimmy.”

“Young, pretty, dressed to the nines.”

“Describe her outfit”

“Oh, hot pink shirt, black pants, heels. Nice body. I mean, this was a very pretty lady”

“Any chance she could be confused for a pro?”

“A
pro?
Well, shit—I
guess
so. Pretty sexy outfit, but not
that
—oh, yeah, I suppose. Why you asking?”

“I’m not sure.” He wipes the sweat off his forehead. The basement turned into a sauna, once everyone was down there working on it. “Something about this guy and prostitutes. Run a sheet, just for the hell of it. Anything from the vids in the parking lot?”

“Not yet, but we’re working on it”

“Get me the car he was driving, Jimmy. His own car is in the garage. He’s using a rental. Get me plates. He’s on the run.”

“Got it”

McDermott sighs. They were so close to getting this guy. “Tell me about the other one.”

“The male vic is one Ray Barnacke, the owner of Varten’s Tools and Construction. His neck was broken. And you were right, Varten’s was one of the distributors of Trim-Meter chain saws. One of the employees says there’s a Trim-Meter missing from the wall.”

“Shit.” McDermott shakes his head. “He was supposed to call us.”

“No vids, either. Place had no cameras.”

“Great. And it was a broken neck? That’s it?”

“That’s it. No signs of torture. No signs of any of the other weapons from the song. But obviously, now he’s got the saw.”

“Yeah. Jesus Christ. Listen, Jimmy—have them check the victim’s left foot, between the pinkie toe and the fourth toe, for an incision.”

“Huh?”

“Just have them check, Jim.”

“Okay. Left foot. Okay. So you have a motive for this guy yet? You find anything good?”

McDermott squints into the sunlight. “I’m beginning to wonder if there is a motive. That assumes we can apply rational thought to this guy.”

“Okay. I’ll get back to you, soon as I have anything. What are you doing now?”

“I’m going to brief the commander,” McDermott says. “And then I’m going to see Harland Bentley’s ex-wife.”

 

I MEET GWENDOLYN LAKE at the diner across the street from my office. She is sitting in a booth with her hands around a cup of coffee.

“I don’t like being here,” she says, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t want to be here.”

Like an alcoholic returning to a bar, I suppose she means. This is where she lived when she started self-destructing. She even looks like she doesn’t belong, at least in the commercial district, wearing a soft blue T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Her hair is hanging, as before, straight past her shoulders. Her bright green eyes peer sadly through her glasses at me.

“It took me so long to wipe the grime off. Y‘know?”

I tell the waitress I’ll have some coffee, because I could use the boost. “I’m not your psychiatrist, Gwendolyn.”

She smiles, her face blushing. She takes a deep breath and says, “I pretended I didn’t know who Frank Albany was. That wasn’t true. I do.”

That much, I’d already suspected, when she slipped up and referred to “Frank” during our conversation after claiming not to know him. Okay, so score one for her.

“What a creep.” Her lips curl inside her mouth. A hand comes off the counter. “Hanging out with college girls. Girls in his
class.”

“Tell me,” I say.

“I can’t say for absolutely certain. But I thought that—I thought that the two of them—”

I take a sip of the coffee put in front of me, burning my tongue.

“Professor Albany and Cassie were having an affair. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I thought so.” She looks up at me. “Ellie thought so, too.” She gauges my reaction before continuing. “I’d have thought you, of all people, would know this.”

“And how in the hell would
I
have known that?” I ask, de fensively. “Ellie was dead, you were gone, and Professor Albany wasn’t going to publish that information.”

Gwendolyn moves her hands around the coffee cup, as if she were molding pottery.

“Okay” I cool down. No point in going backward. “What else, Gwendolyn?”

She continues with her nervous, fidgety hands. “Ellie told me that Cassie was pregnant”

I close my eyes. A suspicion confirmed. The lawyer in me is thinking through admissibility problems, the hearsay rule.
Cassie told Ellie told Gwendolyn.
“When?” I ask.

She shrugs, still staring at the countertop. “Sometime during the school year, is the best I can tell you. When it was warm. May or June.”

“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.

H
ELL, 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?”