David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

A mild breeze brings relief. This whole thing feels so weird. I’m questioning a witness on a boat. Home turf, I suppose, from Gwendolyn’s point of view.

“Did you know Burgos?” I ask.

She frowns and shakes her head. “God, no. But Ellie would talk about him. He really spooked her.”

“What else can you tell me about Brandon?”

“Well-like I said, he was a nice guy.”

“Nice-looking guy, I recall,” I say. “Anything going on between Ellie and him?”

She opens her hand. “I doubt it, but I don’t know. I would spend time with them when I was in the city, Mr. Riley, but I wasn’t in the city much. More likely, I’d be in Europe, or L.A., or-God, anywhere.”

I take a moment, run through my mental list. “Cassie and Ellie socialized with one of their professors. The one whose class Terry Burgos was in. A guy named Professor Albany.”

She nods uncertainly, then angles her head. “A professor, you said?”

“Yes,” I say. “Does it ring a bell?”

She looks off in the distance. “I don’t know-maybe.”

Maybe. Maybe this whole trip was a boondoggle.

“What about drugs, Gwendolyn?” I ask. “Cassie. Or Ellie. Were they into it?”

Her eyes cast down. She nods meekly.

“Cocaine?” I ask. “Pot?”

“Coke.” She frowns. “Oh, probably both. It was college.”

“You ever see them do it? Ever witness them doing drugs?”

She tucks her lips in. “I think I did drugs with them.”

“You think.”

Her eyes fix on me in anger. She doesn’t like the interrogation. “You ever try to block something out, Mr. Riley? You deny the memory for so long, until it’s not there anymore? So it won’t be there anymore? You stow it in some secret place in your brain and lock the door?”

I open my hands in compromise. “Gwendolyn-”

“Yes,” she spits out. “I’m sure I did blow with them.”

“ ‘Them’ being-”

“ ‘Them’ being Cassie and Ellie and-and sometimes Brandon, and sometimes Frank, and sometimes whoever the hell it was who had it at whatever party I was at. Okay?”

She stands up on the deck, the boat being heavy enough to support her without rocking once, and brings a hand to her red face.

“I had a rough childhood,” Shelly says. “I know what you mean. You don’t just turn the page. You close the book and throw it out.”

Gwendolyn takes a moment, then nods. “Exactly.”

“We didn’t want to come up here and bother you,” Shelly adds. “But we feel like we have no other choice. People are being killed.”

“Well-” She raises a hand, like stop, as she looks over the lake. “I am truly sorry about that. I really am. But it has nothing to do with me.” She gets behind the wheel and works some controls. “I’m going back to my restaurant now,” she says. “I’m going back to my life.”

Gwendolyn puts the pontoon into gear and moves us back toward the shore. She navigates under the canopy and kills the engine. She cranks that large wheel in the opposite direction to moor the pontoon.

She dutifully shakes both our hands and gives me a surprisingly gentle smile. The outburst was out of character for her, clearly, and she regrets it. But I’ve been treated a lot worse.

Shelly and I are quiet as we walk back to the car. I start the car and drive out of view before I ask for her opinion.

“She’s scared,” Shelly says.

That may be. At a minimum, she was dishonest. She went from not remembering Professor Albany to calling him “Frank.”

“I think she’s a good person,” Shelly adds. “But she couldn’t decide what to tell you.”

“I suppose that tells me something right there. But what? She’s protecting someone?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Shelly rolls down the window and faces into the wind. “She’ll get in touch with you when she’s ready.”

“Yeah?”

“Trust a woman.” She gives my hand a playful grab.

We drive in silence until I get back on the interstate. I put a lot of faith in Shelly’s judgment of people and I think she was right on here. Gwendolyn is a sincere woman, someone not prone to evasion who was being evasive. I only wish I knew what she was holding back.

I sense Shelly watching me again and I look over at her.

“Something was going on with Cassie back then,” she says. “You think so, too.”

I don’t argue. Instead, I search the roll call of numbers on my cell phone. When I was with the U.S. attorney, I worked a lot with a guy named Pete Storino with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He moved to Customs a few years later, and now he’s the top guy at the city airport for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I get him on his cell and he spends ten minutes giving me grief. The small talk over, I get to the point.

“I need a favor, Pete,” I tell him. “Passenger’s name is Gwendolyn Lake.”

HE’S NOT ANSWERING his cell phone,” Stoletti says. ”His secretary just said he’s out of the office.”

“Okay. We’ll get him soon enough.”

While he waits for what should be a very interesting conversation with Paul Riley, McDermott occupies himself with the reports thus far on Fred Ciancio and Evelyn Pendry. They have shit on Ciancio. The inventory looks meaningless. A complete lack of trace evidence. The only evidence they have, it seems, is the murder weapon and whatever they can discern from the body. He glances over the preliminary findings from the autopsy, which don’t tell him much, other than the fact that Ciancio’s body was ravaged with superficial wounds-

“What’s this?” he says, taking a closer look. He reads it again but he doesn’t recognize the term. “What the hell is a ‘tarsal phalange’?”

Stoletti comes over. “Huh?”

McDermott points to a line in the report, listing the injuries to Fred Ciancio:

Postmortem incision at the base of the fourth and fifth tarsal phalange.

“What’s a ‘tarsal phalange’?” Stoletti asks.

“I just asked you that.” McDermott sighs. “Sounds like a tail. You think Fred Ciancio had grown a tail?”

“Maybe, Mike. Maybe he was a space alien.”

McDermott looks up to see Tony Rezko, one of the CAT technicians. “Say, Tony, any idea what a ‘tarsal phalange’ is?”

Rezko pauses. “No.”

“Then you got something on those notes for me?”

“Something on the second note,” he says.

“Beautiful.” McDermott drops the autopsy report on the pile of evidence. “Let’s hear it.”

I DROP OFF SHELLY andreturn to my office around four. I ignore the blinking light on my voice mail and go straight to the regular mail. I find myself looking for another letter and find none. But then I take a look at the manila envelope at the bottom of the pile. It has my name written on it in Magic Marker, no address. No return address. I open it carefully. Inside is a standard-sized white mailing envelope with the same handwriting, just my name. All indications are, this is another one of these letters. I open the smaller envelope just as carefully. The single page that falls out reads:

Others that hunted ensured respect. Sinners know not our wrath. Our ultimate response shall ensure consequences, reviling ethical traitors.

“Am I even supposed to understand this?” I say to no one. “Betty!”

Betty pops in. “Oh, you’re back. Detective McDermott was looking for you.”

“This was delivered,” I say, holding up the manila envelope. “Not mailed?”

“It came in a delivery.”

“Timing,” I say. “He controls when it gets here.”