Eye of the Beholder

“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”