Mercy (7 page)

She stopped. Dr. Broussard was quiet, finishing his cuticle, and giving her time. But she was through. He could tell by her mouth, which was her most expressive feature, that she was not going to pursue this any further. He doubted that she realized that she had reached a crucial juncture, or maybe she did and that was why she had stopped. And yet she seemed unmoved. She had spoken as if she had been reading from a book, as if the words had been someone else’s.

“What happened to your father?” He unobtrusively folded up the clippers and put them away. The question might have worked, though he had never been able to coax her.

Mary Lowe didn’t move or answer. She raised her right hand and looked at her watch. It was small and delicate with an annulus of tiny diamonds around the dial. She wore it with the face on the underside of her wrist.

“It’s five o’clock,” she said. She sat up and swung her legs around on the chaise facing him, her knees together, her stockinged feet spread apart to straddle her shoes which were side-by-side on the floor. Raising her arms she tucked at the strands of flax that had strayed loose at the nape of her neck. She bent down to slip on her shoes, and Dr. Broussard watched her breasts fill the top of her scoop-necked dress. She immediately looked up as if sensing what he was doing and met his gaze. He did not try to dissemble, nor did she pretend to be unaware or embarrassed or angered. Instead, she returned to her shoes, letting him look while she finished and maybe, he thought, he hoped, wishing for some sign of complicity, taking a little longer than was necessary.

“We made good progress,” he said as she sat up again. “It gets easier with time.”

She stood and smoothed her dress across the flat of her stomach. “Wonderful,” she said without feeling, looking at him as he stood also, putting his notepad facedown on his desk to conceal the fact that it was blank. She turned away and picked up her purse from the antique Oriental table near the door. Stepping around behind her, he reached for the doorknob to let her out, placing his left hand at the small of her back, flattening it out to touch as much of her as he could.

“See you tomorrow, then,” he said, feeling a stirring of excitement as he cupped his fingers to the curve of her torso. She allowed this, neither stepping forward nor turning slightly to finesse a disengagement. She hesitated a moment. He thought she was going to speak, but then she moved through the door and was gone.

5

T
he four of them stood in the chill of the bedroom with the naked and funereally posed Dorothy Samenov, who stared up into eternity from startled, lidless eyes, who would go to her grave wide awake, unable to receive that last token gesture that modern men have never exorcised from their archaic past—the closing of their eyes against the awesome unknown. Palma’s analytic focus was tested by the pale, lacerated body of this lonely woman upon the cold sheet. As they stood in a circle and talked, Palma was constantly aware of Samenov’s waxy, recumbent form in her peripheral vision, as if she were waiting patiently for them to redeem her from humiliation. Her death had cost her more than her life, and the pitifully meek gesture of her politely folded hands seemed to be all that she had been allowed to salvage of her dignity.

Palma had seen enough in her four years in homicide to recognize the distinctions between the particularly intense malevolence of sexual homicides as compared to homicides of other kinds. At first all killings appeared the same insofar as they were expositions of violence. The wounds might vary, but the energy that produced them had a common denominator. Yet the characteristics of sexual homicides quickly distinguished themselves. Though she might forget the details of the hundreds of shootings and stabbings and stranglings she would see during the course of her career, she would never forget the sexual homicides, not even the smallest minutiae. Nor would she forget the eerie intuition she had when she entered the presence of these victims for the first time, as if the mind that produced the horror had lingered behind with the corpse to await its final pleasure: observing the reasonable mind’s revulsion at its crime.

The question was one of the division of labors. If the cases were related, and they all believed they were, then Cushing and Leeland were, in a very real sense, behind in their homework. It was decided that the two detectives would stay with Birley, who would take them through the scene and compare its details with those in the case of Sandra Moser two weeks earlier. When it came time for the body to go to the morgue, Cushing and Leeland would follow and attend the autopsy. Birley would continue to go over the scene with LeBrun. Palma, having done most of the interviewing for the first killing, would interview Vickie Kittrie. When Cushing and Leeland got back to the station downtown, they would have to read the report and supplements on the Moser case. After that, the four of them would get together and compare notes.

Leaving them in the bedroom, Palma passed Wendell Barry coming back in, and walked into the living room where the two patrolmen were keeping their distance from the back of the house. She supposed they had done their ogling of the naked woman before she got there and were maintaining this uncharacteristic lack of curiosity for her sake. Sometimes she ran into a peculiar kind of chivalry among the younger men, especially among the patrolmen who didn’t often see naked dead women. If the victim was sexually attractive, they were startled to find that death didn’t necessarily change anything in that regard, and the inappropriateness of their unexpected arousal could be distinctly disconcerting. Some of them became grave or formal or aloof, or simply stayed out of her way as if they were somehow accomplices with the offender by virtue of their sex and their own poorly controlled chemistry. It took them a while to learn to ignore it, to shut it out, and when they couldn’t do that, to joke about it. There were a lot of ways to handle it, but you couldn’t afford to take it to heart. Not every time.

“Neither of you are VanMeter?” she asked, approaching them and glancing at their name tags.

“No, ma’am,” one of them said, the stocky one. “He’s outside…he’s got a red mustache.”

Outside, the late-morning heat was excruciating after the icy condo, and the sweat popped to the surface of Palma’s skin as if she had stepped into a sauna. VanMeter was easy to find, standing with his shift sergeant on the thick turf of manicured lawn in the solid shade of a magnolia. A gas lamp burned needlessly in the Texas sun nearby. Neither man was talking, though it was obvious they had been once. As Palma approached she noticed half a dozen cigarette butts against the street curb.

“VanMeter?” she asked, stepping up to the young man and extending her hand. “Detective Palma.” He was incredibly young, and the blue eyes and fair skin didn’t age him any. His handshake was tensely brittle. She shook hands with the sergeant too, and remembered that they had been on a scene together a couple of months earlier. She turned to VanMeter, who was lighting a cigarette.

“You were the officer who found her?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Palma waited for him to explain.

“Just tell her the way it went down,” the sergeant said to VanMeter. He glanced at Palma, and she realized the kid was fresh out of the academy.

“Basically I just responded to a welfare check,” VanMeter said. His mustache was neatly trimmed, and it suited him. He blew a stream of smoke to the side, away from her, and it hung in the still heat a moment and then vanished. Kittrie had told him her story as Cushing had related it earlier to Palma, and VanMeter had asked Kittrie if she knew of anyone who had a spare key to the condo. Kittrie didn’t, but she said Samenov kept a spare set of keys hidden in her car, but the car was locked and she couldn’t get into it to look for them. VanMeter had then used a door opener from his patrol unit to get into Samenov’s Saab where, after a brief search, he found the spare key and used it to enter the condo.

“You went in first?” Palma asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I went in and asked her to wait in the living room while I looked around. I went straight to the bedroom, I don’t know why…the door was open, and I found her.” VanMeter’s Adam’s apple worked uncontrollably, and he swallowed, then took another long drag from his cigarette.

“Did Kittrie see her?”

“Yeah, well, I must’ve said something, you know, surprised to find the dead woman, and she heard me and came running in. I had taken a couple of steps into the bedroom, and when I turned around she was standing in the doorway right behind me.”

“That’s when she saw her?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you remember her reaction?”

He nodded. “She fainted, dead out. Like she’d been dropped with a hammer. I had to carry her…I got her out of the house. Laid her down right over there in the shade. A couple who live across the street,” he tossed his head toward a condo directly across from them, “must’ve been looking out the window. They came right over and the lady had a damp washrag or something and we got her to come around. When she got her to her feet they took her over there.”

“Is that where she is now?”

“Yes, ma’am. I didn’t get her name.”

Palma thanked VanMeter, noticing the mist of perspiration that had accumulated on his forehead. She wanted to reassure him, but she knew better than that. Instead, she started across the street to the Mediterranean-style condo with its dun bricks and its front courtyard filled with frondy sago palms among banks of orangey snapdragons.

When she rang the doorbell the door opened immediately, and a middle-aged man with a head of longish frizzy hair that was thinning toward the front stood looking at her. He was wearing a baggy Hawaiian shirt outside a pair of faded blue jeans. His nose was rather broad, but in a handsome way, and he had extraordinarily long eyelashes.

“I’m Detective Palma.” She held up her shield. “I understand Vickie Kittrie is here.”

“Of course, sure, come on in.” He shook hands with her. “I’m Nathan Isenberg.” He backed away to let her in. “She’s up here.” He closed the door behind her and preceded her up the steps of the sunken entryway, talking, motioning with his hands. “Kid’s had a hard time. Jesus. Can you imagine?” He stopped, turned to her, and put a concerned hand on Palma’s arm. “Pretty bad over there?” His face was twisted in a pained contortion, anticipating her answer.

“Pretty bad,” she said.

“Oh, God!” he hissed, keeping it just between the two of them. “Poor kid.” He bit his lower lip and shook his head, his wirey hair drifting above him, and then turned and led her on up the steps into a living room separated from the entry by a huge terraced planter of philodendron and monstera. A woman wearing a sarong and the top to a bikini swimsuit had been sitting by Kittrie on the sofa and stood when Palma came in.

The man introduced her as Helena and then introduced Kittrie, who remained seated, red-eyed and clutching a handful of wadded pink tissues. There was an awkward moment, and then the woman, running a pretty hand through her hair, a black bob shot through with gray, asked if she could get anything for Palma, who declined. The man and woman excused themselves, and as they walked out of the living room Palma noticed there was no outline of the bikini bottom under the thin material of the sarong.

Vickie Kittrie was dressed very smartly in a businesswoman’s sharkskin blazer of silvery gray rayon and linen and pleated trousers with black heels. A collarless fuchsia blouse of crepe de chine was tucked into the trousers. She was sitting on a sofa behind a coffee table of glazed gold ceramic tiles, kneading the wad of tissues and looking up at Palma with swollen eyes and tear-matted lashes.

“You feel up to talking with me for a few minutes?”

Kittrie nodded readily. “Of course,” she said, and quickly wiped at her nose.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Palma said, sitting in a tapestry upholstered chair opposite the coffee table. Kittrie nodded. She had ginger hair with red highlights and a pale Irish complexion. She had cried so much and wiped her face so often with damp tissues that her makeup was disappearing, and a light spattering of freckles was now visible trailing across the top of her nose, disclosing an air of youthfulness that seemed incompatible with the mature clothes she had chosen to wear. She started tugging anxiously at the wad of tissues, her hazel eyes riveted to Palma’s. “Do you have family or friends who can come get you, maybe stay with you?”

“I have friends…at the office. I’ve already called them.” Palma was a little surprised at her tone, which had a sharp edge to it.

“Ms. Samenov was a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you known her?”

“A long time.” Her voice cracked, but she got control of it. “Four years, maybe three…or four. We worked at Computron together.”

“Was she married?”

“Divorced.”

“How long?”

“Uh…maybe…I don’t know…five, six years.”

“Does her ex-husband live in the city?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know his name?”

It took her a second. “Dennis…Ackley.”

“Did she see him very often?”

She hunched her shoulders. “It wasn’t that kind of a divorce. It wasn’t friendly.”

“Do you know where he works, or where he lives?”

“He works…I think…at a paint store.”

“Do you know the name?”

She shook her head. “I only remember her saying that’s what he was doing now.”

“Do you happen to know if he was ever in the military?”

Kittrie closed her eyes and shook her head again.

“What about relatives? The coroner’s office has to notify someone.”

“There’s nobody in the city. I wouldn’t bother with Ackley. She’s from South Carolina. She was away from home.” Kittrie’s eyes were still closed, her hands holding the tissue without fidgeting.

This last remark seemed an odd choice of words in light of the fact that Samenov was obviously in her mid-thirties, had been married a number of years, divorced a number of years, and certainly had lived in Houston long enough for it to be regarded as her home. The phrase would have seemed more appropriate in reference to a college student.