Mercy Read online

  Palma suddenly had the feeling that they weren’t really talking about Celeste at all. She suspected that her mother had been thinking about her divorce again. Palma would never forget the anguished look on the old woman’s face when she had to tell her that her marriage was over. The expression had had nothing to do with her mother’s own disappointment. Florencia knew her daughter too well, how long she had waited to marry, how much it must have hurt her when it came apart. Her expression had been one of complete, selfless empathy; her daughter’s pain was instantly her own. Palma had never needed her more than at that moment and the old woman knew this, even through the thickening fog of her senility, and she gave her daughter everything she had from the heart. It had been a crucial time for both of them, and it had been a lesson for Palma that even this late in their lives their relationship was still capable of becoming even richer than it was.

  “Anyway,” her mother said, “how’s it going with you?”

  Palma came from a family of interrogators. “I’m doing fine, Mama.” She urged the swing with her foot against the stones.

  The old woman nodded and let a brown hand go up to her hair, smoothing it back. “Good,” she said.

  They let the swing run its course from the push of Palma’s foot, the leather groaning on the oak, the little speckled dove occasionally reminding them of its presence with a low, moaning whistle from the catalpa. Palma thought of the woman on the bed, the pale length of her, the mutilation. What was he doing now, in the afternoon, waiting out the heat? How did a man who did things like that wait out the heat? She knew the answer to that. But she shoved it out of her mind. She didn’t want to think about it now, not here, with her.

  Palma asked a few questions about her brother and sister. They communicated mostly through Florencia. It wasn’t that they were not close, but they simply were not involved in each other’s lives. Palma herself rarely corresponded with them. They visited about Patricio’s advancement in the San Antonio police department and about Lina’s children, who were now in junior high school. After Palma inquired about her mother’s friends and they chatted about the neighborhood, Palma left her standing under the Mexican plums and returned back through the barrio to the expressways.

  She drove with her shoes off, one of the air conditioner vents under the dash directed to the floor, her skirt pulled up to mid-thigh. How had it ever happened that women came to believe they were not decently dressed unless they were wearing panty hose? It had been a bleak day for women south of the thirty-fifth parallel. Panty hose were nothing less than instruments of torture in Houston’s humid heat, and Palma had mentally threatened to adopt all kinds of alternatives, none of them acceptable, some of them indecent, but all of them considerably cooler. She hiked her skirt a little higher and checked on either side of her for that urban specialist, the freeway voyeur, who rode the city’s hot asphalt ribbons in a variety of high-riding trucks, vans, and pickups, keeping a keen eye out for women in lower cars seeking relief from the thermodynamics of panty hose.

  She took a deep breath and flipped down the sun visor. The traffic on the Southwest Freeway moved like a sluggish equatorial serpent, worming west under the moist glare of a moribund sun, a copper fire sinking through a hazy atmosphere of ninety-one percent humidity.

  Leaving the freeway at the Weslayan exit, she doubled back to the left under the overpass and within a few moments she was entering West University Place, a neighborhood of roughly two square miles that had been an incorporated city since 1925. Immediately west of Rice University, it was a village of older homes on quiet streets crowded with oaks, pecans, magnolias, cottonwoods, redbuds, and an occasional fat palm. The street signs were blue instead of the Greater Houston green, and the streets themselves were patrolled by West University’s own police force. Though they accepted gas, electricity, and telephone service from Houston, West University was otherwise fiercely independent, and whereas Houston was distinguished among American cities by having no building code at all, West University was dictatorially vigilant in maintaining its village atmosphere. Fast-food eateries and convenience stores, in fact almost all commercial endeavors, were relegated to the streets that bordered the village, facing the metropolis like jealous sentries holding back the poor taste of commercial progress and town home mentality.

  Palma lived on one of the better streets in West University, one of the Yuppie streets where the older homes were being bought up and remodeled or torn down and supplanted by larger “interpretations” of their styles. She sometimes felt a little out of place here, though she couldn’t really put her finger on the why of it. She pulled into the small circle driveway of the two-story brick home, its front door protected from the street by berms of yaupons and scarlet crepe myrtles, its brick drive bordered with flowering clumps of mondo grass. The yard had been made maintenance-free by a solid covering of Asian jasmine and decorative clusters of lantana. She had to admit she liked the way the place looked. Besides grooming himself, it was the one thing Brian had done absolutely correctly.

  But she had to admit, too, as she opened the front door, balancing an armful of files as she pulled the key out of the door and closed it with her hip, that the place was too big to live in alone. She laid the files and keys on a hall table and walked into the living room where she lowered the temperature on the air-conditioning thermostat, hesitating a moment, listening for the compressor to click on. She turned on a few lamps, kicked off her shoes again, and picked them up with one hand as she loosened her belt with the other. She walked through the dining room unbuttoning her dress, then back out to the stairway where she started up to her bedroom.

  There were times now when coming home to the empty house was the hardest part of the day. She had done it for many years because that was the way she wanted it. Educated and independent, she was very much aware of being a woman of the new age, and even though she dated regularly she relished her independence and had never had a live-in boyfriend. The idea had never appealed to her, for a variety of reasons. And then there was Brian and their marriage and those few good months together before everything turned absolutely wrong. That taste of shared life, of making a forever commitment to someone who loved you enough to make that same promise, of knowing that no matter what else happened in life that other person whom you held so dear would be there to help you endure it or celebrate it, the giddy pleasure of simply being loved by someone who mattered to you more than anything else in the world—all of that had been dangled in front of her just long enough for her to realize it was something she desperately wanted.

  And then it was gone. Now there was no hiding from the fact that she missed him—not Brian, but the man he could have been, the man he should have been. It was the most painful experience she had ever been through. Jesus, just to have someone to sleep with, not even the sex, but just someone to bend into when you curled up at night. She really missed that.

  And somehow she couldn’t tolerate the idea of boyfriends. Not now, not yet, not for a long time.

  She bathed and washed her hair and put on a thin cotton sundress without underwear. She combed out her hair, but left it wet, and then went downstairs to the kitchen and poured a strong scotch and water before she walked outside to the backyard. It was actually a spacious brick courtyard with islands of yaupons, an abundance of rain lilies in clay pots, surrounded by a tall privacy fence, and totally shaded by a high canopy of oaks that let through dappled sunlight in the middle of the day. It was a refuge, and even when the weather was almost unbearably hot she would sit out here in the late evenings dressed in practically nothing, sipping a cold drink. It almost made the loneliness bearable.

  Sitting in a lawn chair, she propped her feet up in another, and hiked her dress above her knees. The drink was tall and had lots of ice in it. She sat a moment, thinking, before she picked up the packet of documents she needed to fill out for VICAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a nationwide computer information center located in Quantico, Virginia, t
hat collected, collated, and analyzed data on specific violent crimes. With a little luck, the data she fed VICAP regarding the Moser and Samenov killings might trigger a computer “hit” of similar kinds of homicides occurring somewhere else in the nation. If so, she and the detectives covering those cases could exchange information and possibly cut short the career of a serial killer. It was a remote possibility, but one she couldn’t very well afford to ignore.

  Starting at the front of the blue printed crime analysis report form, she read from the first page, not bothering to respond to any of the nearly two hundred items of requested information. Most of the data were case specific, and she would have to refer back to the case report before she could complete it. But she wasn’t at it long. When she came to “Section VII: Condition of the Victim When Found,” she stopped. These were images that were not likely to be far from Palma’s consciousness for a long time to come. In fact, she could hardly keep them suppressed.

  Suddenly she had no stomach for dispassion or objectivity. It seemed almost a crime itself to grasp these familiar reins of self-control, to use them as an excuse to avoid an emotional investment. She didn’t even know why disassociation was a virtue in cases such as these; she didn’t believe it was. Not this time, at least, not when she was still numbed by the pale, naked image of a man hunched over Dorothy Samenov’s stomach, his face and teeth buried in her navel, not when she could almost feel the lips around her own navel and could see the gnarled ripple of the man’s curved spine as he curled in a fetal crouch, knees against her hips, suckling at her stomach with poisoned ardor.

  It was too dark to read by the time Palma shook herself loose from such thoughts. She had forgotten her drink, and when she reached for it the tall, sweaty glass was standing in a puddle of its own condensation, the ice having long ago melted, leaving behind an unappealing, warm, off-color liquid. She heard the tremulous purl of a screech owl somewhere in the dense trees of the neighborhood and swatted a mosquito on the side of her knee. She needed to eat something. In a few hours she would have to talk to Andrew Moser.

  10

  When Palma got to the diner ten minutes early, Moser was already sitting in a booth next to the front windows overlooking the front parking lot. As she walked inside the diner she was relieved for Moser’s sake to see that the place was sparsely populated. It was too late for the dinner crowds that characteristically came to this reincarnation of a fifties diner, and it was still too early for the equally faithful late-nighters. Moser was nursing a chunky cup of coffee, looking slightly apprehensive.

  He stood as Palma approached his booth. He was a tall, thin man, always neatly dressed, but not a clotheshorse, tending toward Houston’s tropical version of the Eastern post-collegiate simplicity. He had a long face and the kind of physiognomy that retained its youthfulness beyond its allotted time and which his wife, had she lived, eventually would have found difficult to compete with.

  “Have you got something new?” he asked quickly. The waitress was just on her way over with the coffeepot and an extra cup.

  “We don’t think so,” Palma said, putting her purse down beside her and crossing her legs under the table. She paused while the waitress poured her coffee and Moser looked at her with puzzled anguish. He was still taking his wife’s death very hard, and it didn’t help that the circumstances were as strange to him as if she had been swallowed by a python in their church choir.

  “You don’t ‘think’ so?” he said, leaning toward her as the waitress left. “What’s that mean?” He was agitated, impatient.

  “Something has come up in another case and we’re wondering if it’s related in some way to the circumstances in your wife’s death.”

  “Like what? What ‘circumstances’?”

  “Let me ask you this,” she said. “When you were going through your wife’s things, did you come across anything that you hadn’t known about? Something that she possibly had kept secret from you, that might have seemed totally out of character for her?”

  Andrew Moser was not naive. One of the peculiar things about being a homicide detective was that your encounters with the survivors of a homicide victim often took on an intimacy normally reserved for one’s doctor, clergyman, or spouse. This was even more likely if the victim was a member of the white middle class, which was rarely touched by such things, and if the murder had sexual overtones, as did Sandra Moser’s. The ordeal was so far removed from the normal experience of such persons that the shock of it rendered them emotionally vulnerable for a long time afterward. The homicide detective becomes the “expert” to whom they can turn for help, from whom they hoped to hear answers to questions they had never dreamed they would have to ask.

  Andrew Moser had already had to confront the numbing fact that his wife had probably gone voluntarily to the hotel in which she was found dead. This kind of discovery was not the sort of thing many people ever had to face, and it was not the sort of thing many people would be able to face without extreme emotional strain. Moser had run the gamut of emotions during the last two weeks, and Palma had been with him during much of that time. Even now, he still looked haggard. His wife’s mother, a widow, had come from out of state to stay with the children while Moser tried to pick up the pieces and carry on with his life. But the unknown circumstances of his wife’s death, the realization that in all likelihood she had had some kind of other life behind his back, were taking their toll on the man.

  Still leaning forward, Moser stared at Palma with his expression of impatience frozen on his features, his eyes opened inquiringly, his head cocked slightly to one side. In the ensuing silence between them, while the cook far off in the kitchen began singing a vibrato rendering of Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful,” while the voices of a man and woman a few booths away rose slightly in argument and then subsided, while the waitresses across the room gathered near the glass-fronted pie cabinets and rested their tired hips against the Formica counter, Andrew Moser’s face slowly changed from defiance to defeat as tears welled in his eyes and all the innocence of what he once had thought his life to be passed away from his memory in the dark shadow of disillusion.

  “Jesus.” His voice cracked, and his mouth drew tight, betraying the strain he felt as he struggled for self-control. “Jesus,” he repeated, and it was almost a sob, but he caught it, and sat against the back of the booth and quickly looked away as his eyes suddenly spilled over. He wiped them quickly with his fingers and stared stupidly at the glittering lights of the traffic that passed by on either side of the diner.

  “I’m not going to have anything left,” he said. “Nothing. I don’t even know who the hell she was anymore.”

  Palma ached for him. The man had been dying by degrees, one or two a day for nearly three weeks, drying up inside so that every moist piece of his fiber was growing brittle and crumbling, changing him forever. Cruelly, Palma kept her silence. He had to talk to her, and he had to hurt before he would talk.

  He was breathing heavily, almost wheezing, and then he cleared his throat. But he kept his eyes toward the window.

  “In any other context they would have been common items,” he said. “But when I found them together…in a black lacquer box, for Christ’s sake, I knew. A string of large pearls. Small…clips, rubber-coated. An electric massager…with an attachment. I don’t know…do I have to go through all of it?”

  “No,” Palma said. “No, it’s not necessary. What did you do with them?”

  “I threw them away. The box…all of it.” His head was still turned away. He couldn’t look at her. His Adam’s apple was working to keep back the sobs building in his chest.

  Damn, sometimes what she had to do seemed really just too cruel. “Can you tell me,” she said, trying to sound controlled, but not dispassionate, “did you have the impression that these things were…did any of them seem to be intended for sadomasochism?” She couldn’t imagine how that might have sounded to him, and she didn’t want to think about it too much.

  He di
dn’t react with any particular emotion. Maybe the well was dry; he had already taken a lot out of it. He shook his head wearily and continued to shake it seemingly unaware that he was doing it.

  “No, not really,” he said. “I didn’t have that feeling. Just the feeling that…you know, that…” His voice thickened. “Why didn’t I know? Why…would she keep it…? We weren’t prudish about sex. It was good. I mean, I don’t think I ever…denied her anything in that way. Jesus! I’ve been over it and over it. I can honestly say…as far as I know…that it was very good.” He finally turned to Palma. “I mean, as sincerely as I can evaluate it, it was good for her. She never, ever, indicated the slightest…discontent about it. And I was attentive. I mean, I was aware of the indictment, you know, about men’s selfishness in that, and I tried to be sensitive about that. I didn’t have my head in the sand about those sorts of things. I…honest to God…I thought everything was…very good in that area.”

  He stopped and took some paper napkins from the dispenser on the table and rubbed his eyes. He said “Jesus” again and took a drink of coffee.

  “You told us before that you haven’t any idea who she might have been seeing. Has that changed now?”

  “Hell, no,” he said without anger. “If I was in the dark about this…then I’m really at a loss on who she might have been seeing. If you’d found me dead in that hotel room you could have found people willing to speculate. Little flirtations people might have seen at the office or something. I mean, you could have made a case that I might have been seeing someone. But with Sandra, no. And as I say this I realize how it must sound, that it can’t carry much weight in light of what I didn’t know about her. But I can’t think of a single possibility there. I just can’t. I’ve never even seen her come on to anybody. It just wasn’t her way.”