Eye of the Beholder

“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.