Eye of the Beholder (49 page)

McDermott doesn’t answer.

“He should have been incarcerated the rest of his life,” I say. “And treated. But he shouldn’t have been executed.”

McDermott’s in no mood to argue. He’ll let me beat myself up if that’s what I want. He walks over to me and shakes my hand. There was a time—really, only a couple of days ago—when I’d have never thought it possible that we’d be parting on cordial terms.

“None of my business,” he says. “But out of curiosity.”

“Shoot,” I say.

“You gonna stick with your million-dollar client, Mr. Bentley?”

A fine question. Harland’s conduct back then was disgusting. But he didn’t kill his daughter and didn’t have anything to do with the cover-up, either. Still, it seems hard to imagine we can just go back to business like nothing has changed.

“Hard to say if I even want to be a lawyer anymore,” I say.

He stares at me a moment, like he’s waiting for the punch line. “Yeah, right.” He waves me off. “Get lost, Riley. Take care of Shelly.”

I look back at the interview room, where Natalia Lake sits motionless. They might prosecute her, depending on media pressure. Maybe I would be a witness, too, because I have learned a good deal of information from her, Koslenko, and others. That would be hearsay, of course, but you could argue for an exception, statement of a coconspirator’s the best bet, if you could establish an overt act—

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.

S
HELLY 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 calling, 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.