I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And luckily, he just laughed, too, not finding my reaction to his comment all that strange.
After he got up and left, I looked into my hand to see what he had put there. Tightly rolled up were ten one-hundreddollar bills. I looked at my watch. I’d been with him for fortyfive minutes. It was the most I’d ever gotten paid for a session.
50
I’d met all but one of the men described in the book, four of the five people I had thought might have a reason to hurt or abduct Cleo. I might never meet the fifth. The identity of the Healer was still a mystery.
Unless it was Gil himself, I thought.
I was sitting at the bar while he finished talking to a customer.
If Cleo published her book, then Gil would be ruined. He’d have nothing left. Sure he had the building and the bar, but without Cleo supplying the women, what was the place but another restaurant?
I shivered. Had I told Gil too much? Had I revealed anything I shouldn’t have? Was he the fifth man? Had Cleo written about him and given him attributes of all the others to disguise him?
He turned to me. His face was hard. It was late. He had circles under his eyes and deep lines like parentheses around his mouth. It was as if he was seeing my thoughts. No. Ridiculous. He couldn’t.
Was Gil capable of creating this elaborate ruse of introducing me to these men to throw suspicion off himself? If I weighed what everyone had to lose, he was up there with all the other men I’d met here. The club had made him a rich man, given him power and prestige. He would not want a book to threaten that.
Nina was right. Noah was right. I was in over my head. Being a good therapist did not qualify me to figure out if someone was capable of being a kidnapper or, worse, a killer. I was someone who talked to people about their problems, not a mind reader, not a diviner of sick souls.
“Another Glenlivet, please, Gil,” a customer said.
Was Cleo in this building? Was she locked in a room somewhere? Had Gil hidden her away to try to convince her not to write the book? Of course it was him.
Cleo would never have told her clients she was writing a book. And of the two men I knew she had told, Elias had nothing to lose. He didn’t want her to publish it because he was worried for her. But that’s not the kind of concern that would lead him to harm her to stop the publication. But Gil did have something to lose. He had everything to lose. Plus he was jealous of Elias. Of course he knew about him. And he must have been furious that he’d lost his girlfriend to him.
I had to find some kind of proof to take to Noah, to make him believe me, to make sure that he would investigate this.
Before Gil could turn to me, I got up.
“’Night, Gil,” I called out.
“Wait a second, Morgan,” he called back, urgency in his voice.
But I didn’t.
Out on the street, I walked to the corner as fast as the high heels allowed.
What could I do? How could I get someone to believe me? Who would help me figure it out?
And then I knew. The one person who cared about finding Cleo even more than I did. Elias. He’d called earlier when I’d been in session and I hadn’t called him back. I’d been avoiding him since he’d told me about the ransom note. I hadn’t wanted to tell him that I’d alerted the police to the fact that it was a fake. I looked at my watch. It was only ten o’clock.
I dialed his number on my cell phone.
51
“Have you been thinking impure thoughts?” he asked.
She answered.
“I can’t hear you.”
“No, Father,” she said, trying to talk louder. But she was confused. The days and nights were drifting into one another. She wasn’t sure if she was ever herself anymore, or if the actress was taking over all the time now. She hardly ever opened her eyes anymore. All she wanted to do was sleep.
And now she was angry that he had woken her up to go through this ritual again. Twice a day. Every morning and every night. Which was it now? Night, she thought, remembering that she could tell these things if she looked beyond him at the light. It was bluish low light, which meant day.
“Cleo?”
His voice came to her from a distance and she fought it. She hated hearing his voice. It crawled on her skin like a snake, slinking up, never losing contact, sinuous and cold. She knew if she didn’t answer him he would just get angry. And when he got angry he did not let her use the toilet.
“Yes?”
“I asked you if you have been thinking impure thoughts.”
“No, Father.”
“How have you been purging yourself of them?”
“I have been praying.”
“I think we should pray together.”
She shivered. This, too, was part of the ritual. And she hated it almost as much as his withholding her bathroom privileges. She heard the door open and felt a whoosh of colder air come in with him. He walked behind her, unlocked the handcuffs and, then holding her hands tightly, brought them in front of her, where he put the cuffs back on. It was such a relief to have her arms in front of her. She could do more with her arms like this. Her shoulders ached. Not her shoulders, not her hands. The actress’s shoulders ached. She had stepped in. She had to step in. Because of what he was going to make her do. Cleo wouldn’t stay for this.
He unzipped his fly and pulled his erection out, placing it in her hands, slipping it up through her fingers so that he was ensconced in her hands as he would have been if he was inside her. But this was better, she thought. Less disturbing, less repugnant.
She shut her eyes and started to move her hands up and down his shaft, swaying just a little, moving to a silent rhythm. He moaned. Once. Twice. Again. She hurried her movements.
“I don’t want to do this to you,” he said. He always said this. Now he would tell her that he loved her.
“I love you.”
Next he would talk about how this impurity was only because of her impurity.
“If you were pure I would not want to defile you like this.”
She knew all the lines. They had performed this play so many times that she had lost track. He wanted…no, he needed to believe that this was something she forced him to do. And she didn’t care. Her hands were in front of her now, her shoulders relaxed.
“You know what I want?” he asked.
She nodded and opened her mouth, positioning it so that when he came, he would shoot up and into it.
“It is holy,” he intoned.
She nodded, moved her hands faster. When he started to talk about the religious value of what she was doing to him, she knew he was getting closer.
“You will be blessed. I will be blessing you. It will make you pure.”
She nodded.
“Cleo? Do you believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost?”
“Yes, Father.” This was confusing her. She was an actress. Her name was not Cleo. She didn’t know why he kept calling her that. Her name was-
“Can you feel the spirit enter you? Can you feel how you are being cleansed? When there is no more that is impure about you, when all the filth is gone, then I will be able to make love to you the right way. The way you want. The way that will make you come, too. You want that, don’t you?”
The woman wearing the nun’s habit, with her wrists handcuffed together, who was being starved, the woman who used to be Cleo and wore designer clothes and expensive shoes, and had men pay her enough money so that she had to find ways to invest it, nodded to the man who was the one she had been wrong about.
“Tell me what you want, Cleo. Tell me what it will be like. Tell me.”
“I want you.”
“You want to make love to me?”
“Yes,” the actress answered. It was the same drill again.
“You want to make love to me?”
She moved her hands faster. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“Yes, I want to make love to you. On a bed, with you naked, with your arms around me, kissing me and loving you in holy matrimony.” All he needed were those two sentences. They worked every time. She shut her eyes again and tried to move away at the last minute, lest the semen get near her mouth or on her skin.