Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (10 page)

“An interview?”

She leaned forward like she had a secret.

“Did you ever hear of a woman named Cleo Thane?”

I was not an actress. That was what my mother had done with her life. So it was an effort to keep my face expressionless.

“Who is she?”

“Only the most successful bitch in the business. A prettyas-a-picture princess who you’d guess lived in one of them
fancy-dancy high-rises on Fifth Avenue and did nothing but shop and work out all day.”

“She is a prostitute?”

“She is a prostitute?” Coffey mimicked me and laughed. “Yes. She’s the Patron Saint of Sluts.”

I laughed along with her, but something inside of me contracted and the skin on the back of my neck prickled.

“Funny moniker. How did she get it?”

“Yeah, well. You gotta understand how this bitch treats her girls. She gives them health insurance. Starts those retirement accounts for them. It matters to her that we get taken care of, do you know what I mean?”

It’s not often that you get to talk about one patient with another patient. You’re generally forced to accept the version the other patient wants you to have.

“And how does Tyson come into this?”

“He says he knows someone who knows her and that when I get out he will set up a go-see. She runs her place more like a modeling agency than a whorehouse. You gotta be able to speak and think and have insight to work for Cleo. But Tyson says I’ve got all that. And he says her girls are safe. The safest in the business. That the Saint just takes care of things right.”

Coffey was a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had stabbed one of her clients in self-defense when he pulled a knife on her and demanded that she make him come, blaming his own impotence on her failure. It was only then, with his knife at her throat, that he was able to finally ejaculate, and while he disappeared into a few pathetic moments of ecstasy, she pulled the knife out of his hand.

In the fight that ensued she cut him and he started to bleed. She had no way of knowing she had sliced through his carotid artery.

He died at her feet. His pants down around his ankles, his
sperm drying on his stomach. And now she was serving a sentence of six to thirteen years, hoping to get out in three.

“So you have a hero,” I said.

Coffey shot me a dirty look. “What the hell is wrong with me looking up to someone? Having a role model? Huh?”

“It’s not going to get you off the streets if you pick a prostitute to emulate.”

I said it without any inflection, but inside I felt as if Coffey had pierced me a little. Cleo was my client. I didn’t want to start thinking about her in any kind of demeaning way. That wasn’t my job.

Not back in Manhattan, it wasn’t.

But it was here.

Coffey was biting her thumbnail and looking up at me from under her eyes. Despite her battered face, you could see the strong bone structure and how good her skin was. Her hair was still thick and lustrous. But she hadn’t been in prison that long. She hadn’t hit bottom yet. This was her first fight, but there would be more. And they might be worse.

“Coffey, let’s talk about this. Isn’t there anyone else you can think of who you look up to?”

“You have a problem with me thinking the Saint is special?”

“Can you think of any reason I would?”

“Don’t you ever answer a question with an answer?”

“Fair enough. I think that there are other women who might be more positive role models for you. I want to help you realize that there are other jobs you can do besides being a prostitute.”

Coffey cackled. With one sound she’d gone from winsome, sad prisoner to witch.

“You don’t get it, sister. You have got to meet her. You have got to listen to her talk about what we all do for a living and why we deserve something other than undercover cops on our
tails all the fucking time. You keep talking about her like she is some low-down, dirty whore. She’s not. This woman is shining. She stands up against anyone who gets in her way. She wears Jimmy Choo shoes and fucking designer clothes. You should see her. There is not a hair out of place, not a crease in her jacket that doesn’t belong there. She’s beautiful.”

And then Coffey gave me one more big, openmouthed laugh that revealed the silver amalgam fillings in her back teeth.

“You remind me of her, Doc Snow. In fact, if you had blond hair like her, the two of you could be fucking sisters, you really could.”

I
was quiet as Simon drove away from the prison and headed the car toward the city.

The sky ahead of us was gray, streaked with clouds. The closer we got to the city, the darker the sky became, and as we crossed the George Washington Bridge, it started to rain.

Traffic was backed up. The rain turned to a downpour. The cars came to a standstill and humidity fogged the windows in Simon’s car.

Up ahead was the coffee shop we usually stopped at on our way back to New York. Simon parked and we ran from the car into the restaurant, only getting a little wet.

He ordered a Coke and a grilled cheese sandwich. I was used to him eating what I called “kid food” whenever he wanted. And envious. I ordered a salad and an iced coffee, and when the drink came I used artificial sweetener. Even though I tried to walk and go to the gym a few times a week, I always needed to lose ten pounds.

Finally he moved the conversation away from the light banter we’d been enjoying in the car. “What’s wrong, Morgan?”

“I know depression is anger turned inward, but I can’t seem to use that information to help myself as much as my patients.”

“You get angry for your patients all the time. It’s your Achilles’ heel. You feel for them. You want to solve their problems for them. You want to save them. And you know it’s not good for you.”

“There isn’t enough love in the world. Or enough compassion. Or even enough pity. There certainly isn’t enough time to give to all the people who deserve it.”

“You just have to remember that you deserve some of it, too.”

“I have a supervisor, thank you very much, Dr. Weiss.”

He smiled. “There’s more. Spill.”

“Cleo Thane. These girls look up to her.”

He nodded and watched the waitress set down our food. “I know. Is that why she’s getting under your skin?”

I ate a forkful of my salad and then answered, “I don’t know.”

“First thought.”

“She seems so tough. Except it’s all an act. She’s the best actress in the world and no one will ever know it except for a few dozen men.”

“Hmm. And who else could that be a description of?”

I nodded. It was too easy. When you are good friends with a therapist who really knows you, you speak in shortcuts. Between Simon Weiss and Nina Butterfield, I never had to stay confused for too long.

“You see your mother in her, don’t you?” he asked gently.

“I see something of my mother in her.”

* * *

It was raining that day, too. We were living in that hellhole on the Lower East Side and the water was seeping in the windows through the space where the frame was pulled away from the glass. My mother was lying on the couch, her silk shirt wrinkled, her jeans loose on her lean frame. Her lovely black hair framed her pale face. My mother’s electric-blue eyes were half-shut, and her trained voice was slurred with the effects of the painkillers she popped like candy and the liquor she used to wash them down
.

She had a friend there when I got home from school that day. Jim, she called him, and she held his hand
.

When he pulled it away, she tucked something into her pocket
.

Tell me a story, Morgan, she whispered after he had gone while she lay there on the couch
.

And I, too young at eight to understand, thought that my talking to her would bring her back from almost dead and make her whole again
.

“Once upon a time there were two lost girls….”

The rain stopped as quickly as it started, and the sun was coming out as we turned onto Sixty-fifth Street and pulled into the parking garage down the block from the institute. It was five o’clock. We had an hour and a half till our Thursday-night group-therapy sessions started.

Simon and I walked through the wrought-iron-and-glass doors and said hello to Belinda, the receptionist. And then we parted, he to his office, and I to mine. In the time remaining before the session started I wanted to call Dulcie, who spent Thursday nights with her paternal grandmother and grandfather.

I opened the door to my office and stopped on the threshold, sensing something was wrong even before I saw it.

A window must have been left open and the wind must have blown in. No…not just a wind.

Only gale-force gusts could have made this mess.

The cobalt-and-emerald carpet was hidden under a thick layer of papers, like litter in the street after a parade. I didn’t even know I had that much paper in my office. The top of my desk was clear and the file cabinets were all open, the drawers pulled out, empty and gaping like hungry mouths.

Scattered among the papers were my books.

My bookshelves had been dumped onto the floor along with everything else. Dozens of books lay open, their backs broken and their spines split. Illuminated by the late-afternoon sunshine coming through the windows, the sight was obscene.

No window had been left open. And there was no wind that could have caused this degree of destruction.

“Belinda?” I yelled. I knew I might be disturbing someone in session, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from bellowing out her name.

Footsteps came quickly; she had heard the urgency in my voice.

“Dr. Snow? Are you all right?”

She was at the threshold of the door to my office.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

“Did you see anyone come in here this afternoon? Did you let anyone in? Was my door shut all afternoon?” I knew this was hopeless questioning. She sat partway down the hall with her back to my office door. But maybe she had walked by. Maybe she had turned around.

“Open or shut?” I asked.

“It had to be shut. I would have noticed if it had been open. I walked by here at least four times since lunch. What do you think—”

“You’d better call Nina.”

* * *

Nina and I stood in the middle of the room assessing the mess. There was nothing of monetary value in the office except for the computer—which was still sitting in the middle of the desk—and the carpet. But we were both worried about the patient files. What if someone had taken any of those? Each file had private and sensitive information in it. While no one even blinked anymore when you said you were going to a therapist, when you said—if you even said it aloud—that you were seeing a
sex
therapist, people inched closer. They wanted to know, even if they didn’t dare ask, what the problem was. Impotency? Frigidity? Lack of desire, too much desire? Worse? Some deviant fetish?

We are still such a puritan society.

“Let’s try to make some sense of this mess and see if anything is missing. Do you have a group?” Nina asked.

I nodded.

“Well, let’s hurry, then. We have an hour. Forget the books—let’s work with the papers and see what’s what. This could be a disaster.”

As we shuffled through the papers and I saw the names of past and present clients on my notes, I grew more and more concerned.

“Most of these notes are fairly cryptic, but if someone wanted to blackmail a husband or a wife—or if someone is in the midst of a child custody case—there’s stuff here that they could use.” My voice was rising toward a hysterical pitch. “There’s no way for me to know what’s missing.
Anything
could be missing. Someone could have taken just one piece of paper that could upset a—”

Nina came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. We were the same height and she looked right into my eyes. I remembered when I had been a lost little girl and she had been a grown-up. She’d ignored my smelly clothes and matted
hair, ignored my mother lying on the bed beside me, half out of her mind on painkillers, and she had just lassoed me with her amber eyes and held me in a kind embrace.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Morgan.” Thirty years later she was still the only one who could tell me that and make me believe it.

I took a breath. The way she had taught me. Square breathing. It calmed you right down. Inhale, one, two, three, four, hold it, one, two, three, four. Exhale, one, two, three, four, hold it, one, two, three, four. And again.

“Should we call the police?” I asked.

Nina shook her head. I knew she wouldn’t want to do that. While I had worked with the police a few times over the years as an expert witness and had a good working relationship with the D.A.’s office, Nina didn’t.

In 1996, her husband of only two years and founder of this institute, Sam Butterfield, had been arrested and charged with running an illegal prostitution ring. He was a brilliant, aging hippie who had a child-of-the-sixties hatred of the police. As a radical revolutionary who believed America was backward and puritanical when it came to sexual attitudes, mores and rules, he broke laws and made up new ones without fear.

The police used a writer named Julia Sterling in a sting operation to infiltrate the institute. Six months later, Sam was convicted. He died of a heart attack the second week he was in prison.

Nina, who had always had a healthy skepticism balanced with respect for law enforcement, became embittered. She blamed the police and the slick and effective sting operation they had put in place for Sam’s death.

All they had to do, she’d said more than once, was come out and tell Sam what they’d wanted from him. Investigate him out in the open. But instead, they had gone undercover. Paid lip service to the idea of justice. And the shock of that,
Nina said, was what did him in. And now she mistrusted the police as much as her husband ever had.

“What I want to know is how the hell did anyone get in here? Was your door locked?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I never lock my door.”