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“Poor bastard,” Birley said when she had finished. He drank his coffee and thought a moment. “This’s one bad dream he’s not ever going to wake up from.” He looked at Palma. “Did you believe him when he said he didn’t think the stuff was used for S&M?”

  Palma smiled to herself. Birley was good. “Yeah, I’m bothered by some things that I can’t quite pin down. Despite what he says, I wonder just how sensitive he really was to his wife’s sexual needs. I would almost bet money that the paraphernalia he found was not limited to autoerotic use, but Moser’s absolutely incapable of entertaining the idea of her infidelity. Under the circumstances most men’s imagination would run wild with something like this. Whatever she was into, it was so foreign to his concept of what she was all about that he has no idea what to do with the evidence to the contrary. There’s no doubt that the man’s a complete wreck over this, but a lot of stuff doesn’t add up. I mean, he didn’t find his wife’s cache of toys until after we had urged him to go through her things and cautioned him to be meticulous in doing so. We pointed out the importance of finding anything out of the ordinary. Then he threw the stuff away. I don’t know.”

  “Sure.”

  She looked at him. “What, he was ashamed of it?”

  “I imagine.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. But then why did he finally come across with the information? We’d never have known the difference.”

  Birley gave her one of his slow looks, and then turned his eyes to his desk, picked up a pencil, and played with the green feathers of a fishing lure stuck into the fabric covering the cubicle wall. “Well, you know, there’s a difference. On the one hand a guy admits the stuff was there, that it actually existed. He did the stand-up thing. On the other hand he gives the stuff to a bunch of detectives, a bunch of guys who’ll paw through it, handle it, look it over, joke about it, the actual stuff his wife had been…using.” Without looking at her, Birley jerked his head in a shrug. “Damn, I don’t blame him.”

  Palma remembered Moser’s reluctance to enumerate the items he had found in the black box, and she felt a pang of discomfort at not having been sensitive to the difference Birley had pointed out. She was so used to the veterans acting as though they didn’t have any emotions at all that sometimes they caught her off guard with their unexpected sensitivity, and in doing so made her realize just how frighteningly successful she had been in shutting out her own feelings.

  “A guy like that,” Birley added. “There’re things he’ll probably never tell us that would be useful to the investigation. But you have to let some things go.”

  “Like if he really knew if she might have been having an affair?”

  “Maybe. You don’t believe he was telling the truth about that either?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, exasperated. “I want to blame him for not being observant, for not being sensitive to…something.”

  “There may be some of that,” Birley conceded. “But I can tell you when it comes to deceit, neither sex of this species has got a corner on the market. If you want to deceive somebody bad enough you can do it. And for a long time, too. There must have been a lot about her he didn’t know, and maybe his ignorance wasn’t a result of his being a klutz. I’m guessing that Sandra Moser, in addition to being all the good things her friends claimed, was also a real piece of work.”

  “And what do you make of the fact that Andrew Moser knew Dorothy Samenov. At least had met her.”

  Birley shook his head. “Now that’s the one that interests me. It’s just the kind of thing that could be a fluke, something that seems so obviously a ‘link’ that it throws off the whole perspective of the investigation. Or it could be the real thing.

  Damn, what a coincidence. You’d almost have to believe it meant something.”

  “I need to talk to Cush and Leeland before they go over to Computron. They ought to know about this.”

  “Yeah, you should,” Birley said, looking at his watch. “And I need to get my tail over to Olympia, chat up the neighbors, go through the place, and talk to the pizza folks. It’s gonna be a great morning.”

  12

  It was almost eleven o’clock by the time Palma talked to Cushing and Leeland, took the VICAP forms and profile materials by the FBI offices, and drove out Westheimer to the street where Vickie Kittrie had listed her address. The apartment complex which occupied an entire cul-de-sac was a Mediterranean affair, two stories of white stuccoed arches and terra-cotta tile roofs, fronted by a crescent of tall palms interspersed with crepe myrtle and protected from the high crime rate by a high-tech wrought-iron fence that required security cards to open. Behind the crescent of palms she could see the obligatory swimming pool through a gap in the holly hedge growing against the wrought iron, and behind the pool the complex office.

  After showing her badge and assuring the manager that Kittrie was in no way crossways with the “law,” she received a map of the complex with a penciled x marking Kittrie’s apartment. She followed the woman’s directions through a series of courtyards with elevated redwood walkways, on either side of which palmettos and banana plants glistened in the almost visible humidity. She passed one of several hot tubs indicated on the map and finally entered a courtyard dominated by rose bushes blooming in every shade of pink and red. A pathway of herringbone-patterned bricks crossed the redwood boardwalk. To her right was the wrought-iron fence braided with roses, and the cul-de-sac; to her left was Vickie Kittrie’s front door. She had not called to see if Kittrie was there, but she had checked in at Kittrie’s office and learned she had not shown up for work.

  Kittrie answered the door after only three rings, which surprised Palma, who had expected to have trouble getting Kittrie to talk to her. The girl stood in the doorway in a crisp, white percale summer robe, squinting into the bright noon light. Her curly ginger hair was casually bunched up on her head in no particular style and held in place with pins. She wore no makeup, nothing to disguise the fair skin and spatter of freckles across her nose. No one would ever have doubted she was Irish.

  “Hi,” she said. She stood, half behind the door, leaning on the edge of it. She didn’t seem to have a feeling one way or the other about seeing Palma standing there.

  “Do you have a little while to talk to me?” Palma asked. She studied Kittrie’s face. “I’ll try not to take any longer than necessary.”

  “It’s sooner or later, isn’t it,” Kittrie said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Come on in.” She stepped back and Palma walked into the front room of the apartment. It was immediately clear that all the amenities of the apartment complex were in the landscaping. The inside of the apartment could have been interchangeable with any of the millions of cookie-cutter complexes scattered throughout the city. The front room was small. It had a fake fireplace and a moderate-size window that looked out into the courtyard. A bar separated the living room from the kitchen, and a hallway led back to the bedroom. Kittrie had done her best to decorate this Spanish-Mediterranean-style apartment with an art deco flair, but it was apparent she didn’t have the same size budget to work with that Samenov had enjoyed. But Palma remembered the dress Kittrie had worn the previous day. Like many working girls her age, almost everything she made went into her clothes. Looking good was right up there near the top on her list of priorities.

  Palma sat in an armchair next to the inexpensive, bookless shelves facing the television. To her left was the window looking out to the courtyard and under it a sofa where Kittrie sat down, tucking one of her legs under her and ignoring a man’s sport coat of beige raw silk thrown over the pillows at the opposite end. To Palma’s right a breakfast bar looked into the kitchen—a Houston Astros baseball cap lay upside down next to a toaster—and in front of her was a glass coffee table scattered with magazines, a bottle of fuchsia nail polish, a pack of Virginia Slims, and an ashtray.

  “You’ve got a nice place here,” Palma said. “Do you live alone?”

  Kitt
rie nodded and reached for the ashtray and cigarettes.

  Something in Kittrie’s manner made Palma decide not to treat the girl as a “sister.” This one wasn’t going to let you be friends with her; it didn’t seem like the right approach. She got right to the business.

  “Yesterday when you were telling me about having stopped off for drinks at Cristof ‘s, you said that besides you and Samenov there were three other women: Marge Simon, Nancy Segal, and Linda Mancera. Did all of them work with Dorothy?”

  Kittrie shook her head and exhaled her first breath of smoke. She was holding the ashtray in her lap, and a long pale leg was exposed to mid-thigh by the parting percale robe.

  “No. Actually, only Nancy works at Computron, in the Tenneco Building. Marge and Linda work across the street in the Allied Bank Plaza—at Siskel and Weeks. It’s an ad agency. Sometimes we all meet at the same deli in the tunnels for lunch, and that’s how we got to know each other. We all get off work at the same time. Nancy’s the only one, and she doesn’t even work in the same department as Dorothy.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do, yeah.”

  “Do you ever see any of these other women at any time other than at lunch or for a drink after work?”

  “Not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Kittrie frowned defensively. “What?”

  “What does ‘not really’ mean? You don’t see them or you do?”

  “Well, sure, some, but I mean not all the time.”

  “In what context do you see them?” Palma couldn’t tell if Kittrie was dense or giving her a hard time.

  “Sometimes we date…I mean, you know, with guys, to a club or something, or for dinner. Sometimes we might just go to a movie together. It’s not all that often.”

  “But you did see Samenov more often?”

  “Well, yeah. I work in the same office with her, we had exercise classes together, we don’t live that far apart. There were times…” Kittrie had to take a drag on her cigarette, but it had nothing to do with smoking. She was checking her emotions. Palma was a little surprised at this. Kittrie’s emotions were closer to the surface than Palma had thought. “…she’d come by and we’d ride to work together. I’m on her way.” She nodded and tried to keep her mouth from puckering. The cigarette was hoisted in the air, her elbow tucked into her side.

  “You told me yesterday Dorothy’s divorce was not a friendly one. What do you know about that?”

  “Not a lot. Dorothy would talk about it sometimes, and I’ve met the guy.” She dragged on the cigarette again. “I don’t know how Dorothy could have married him in the first place. The guy’s a bastard. He used to knock her around. He couldn’t hold a job. For a while he was a chemicals-supply sales rep. You know, janitorial supplies to hotels and restaurants. For a while he was part owner of a tire company. He thought that was cool, the best job he’d ever had.” She hit on the cigarette again. “‘Where the rubber meets the road.’ That’s what he’d say when he wanted to have sex. He thought that was smart as hell, like it was a unique expression. Dorothy used to imitate him. She was merciless. The guy was a prick. He wasn’t even good-looking. I mean, I know that’s subjective, but you poll a bunch of women, and he’s not going to come out too good. I didn’t like him. Dorothy said she married him right out of college, graduate school. He was very macho. That’s why she did it.”

  “She liked macho men?”

  “At that time she did. But not after having lived with the prick for six years.”

  Kittrie mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray, picked up the pack beside her on the sofa, and lighted another. She took her time, but her face showed that she was trying to collect her thoughts on this one. Palma’s eyes scanned the coffee table: a TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, People, and peeking through two magazines turned on their backs, a pink-nippled, oversize breast and a cloying, toothpaste smile, and above them the black banner title of a men’s nudie magazine.

  Somewhere in the back of the apartment a water pipe began to hiss softly as someone turned on a bathroom faucet. A quick twitch skittered across Kittrie’s ginger eyebrows, but she kept her eyes glued on Palma, refusing to acknowledge what they both had heard.

  “Do you remember when you first reported your concern for Dorothy last Saturday, you talked to a patrolman who came by but he was reluctant to check into the house?”

  Kittrie nodded, interested.

  “He put you off and suggested maybe Dorothy had gone on a spur-of-the-moment weekend with someone without telling anyone. You said maybe so. Were you aware she had done that before?”

  “Yeah, she had.”

  “Who with?”

  “I don’t know. Just sometimes I would miss her, like at exercise class on Saturday, and when I would ask her about it at work on Monday she’d say she’d gotten an invitation for a weekend trip and she’d taken it. It was no big deal.” She angrily ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. It wasn’t even half smoked.

  Great, this really wasn’t headed anywhere, and Palma had the growing impression that Kittrie was holding out. At the same time she seemed genuinely disturbed by Samenov’s death, her nerves just barely under control.

  “We found some photographs among Dorothy’s things,” Palma said. Kittrie’s eyes fixed on her, and she didn’t move a muscle. “They were pornographic, and Dorothy was involved in them. She was tied to a bed in a sadomasochist scenario.

  There was a guy in a leather hood, a mask. Were you aware of these?”

  Kittrie stiffened and shook her head quickly, too quickly.

  “Did you know of Dorothy’s interest in sadomasochism?”

  Kittrie shook her head again.

  This time Kittrie’s expression had something else in it. She was no longer defiant or evasive or maddeningly uninformative because she had reached the point where her facial movements were operating on their own and she could no more have disguised the fear that showed there than she could have levitated off the sofa. Palma took advantage of it.

  “We found some other things too, and there were photographs of other people. I think you understand what I’m talking about. It’s not really to anyone’s advantage for you to withhold anything on this. This is a homicide investigation, Vickie, and you’re liable under the law if you know something that would be helpful to the investigation and you withhold it. We can keep secrets. We do it all the time. What you tell us will be confidential, it’s part of the process. You don’t have to worry about any of it getting out.”

  Kittrie’s eyes had grown wider and a little wilder as Palma talked, and she had dropped her hands to her sides on the sofa as if to steady herself.

  “What the hell are you talking…What are you trying to do…?” she blurted. She slapped her clenched fists down on either side of her on the sofa and shook her head, her voice rising through clenched teeth. “What…what…what…”

  “Vickie!” The man’s voice, quick and firm, caught them both by surprise. They turned toward the hallway near the kitchen and saw Nathan Isenberg standing there. He was barefoot, wearing white pants and a Jamaican pink shirt with stripes, the tail out, the long sleeves unbuttoned at the wrist. Helena was a step behind him.

  Suddenly Kittrie broke into tears, crying uncontrollably, not hiding her face, just sobbing with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, tears already streaming down her pale cheeks past her twisted mouth.

  “Let me get her into the bedroom,” Isenberg said to Palma. It was half question, half statement. With a great deal of patience and tenderness, he helped the sobbing girl off the sofa. Supporting her by embracing her with his left arm, he began crooning soothingly, his voice taking on the same intonations of an old woman coddling her spoiled little house poodle.

  Standing, Palma watched them leave the room and then looked at Helena, who hadn’t moved a step. She was trim and tan in a peach cotton tank top tucked into a pair of tailored khaki shorts. Her girlish figure and bobbed hair shot through with gray created a striking image.<
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  Before Palma could make sense of what she had just seen, Helena said, “Look, I’m sorry to butt in like that, but…well…could we just step outside?”

  They did, and the midday heat was coming up off the herringbone bricks with a vengeance. “Over here, maybe,” Helena said, stepping up onto the redwood walkway and going a little way into one of the courtyards near a trellis of roses. It was out of the sun, but into a pocket of humidity held close by the surrounding palmettos and banana trees.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I guess none of this is my business, or maybe it is. Anyway, I heard all of that in there,” she said matter-of-factly. “I really couldn’t help it. Vickie didn’t call any friends yesterday, she lied about that. I’ve lived across the street from Dorothy for a couple of years now. I didn’t know her really well, just enough to wave and speak. We saw each other at the pool a lot, but we didn’t socialize. She had her own friends, and so did I. I kind of knew Vickie because she was over at Dorothy’s a lot and sometimes was out at the pool with her. That’s why I came over yesterday when I saw the police. She wouldn’t stay at my place, so I came home with her last night and slept in her other bedroom. She didn’t have a good night.”

  “She didn’t have other friends?”

  Helena shrugged. “I just know she wouldn’t call anyone. I asked her if she was going to be alone and she said yeah but she didn’t care. I tried to get her to stay at my place, but she didn’t want to be across the street from Dorothy’s.”

  She crossed her arms and shifted her weight to her left leg. “I don’t know anything personal about their relationship, okay, but it seems to me that Dorothy was kind of like an older sister to her. Vickie wasn’t being very helpful to you in there—this is my impression—and I just thought maybe she didn’t want to hear some of the stuff she was hearing. Couldn’t deal with it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to hear those things about Dorothy. Look, I’m just giving you my impression. Staying here last night, it seemed to me this girl is not all that independent. I think maybe Dorothy kind of looked after her a little…”