Mercy Read online

  Palma studied her, deliberately not saying anything, just looking at her. She was very well made and had a natural way of wearing a minimum of clothes. The low-cut arms on the tank top would have kept a man busy assessing her dimensions, but she wore it like an athlete. Her sure manner reminded Palma of the girls on her swim team in college, comfortable with their bodies, easy in their nakedness.

  “Do you work?” Palma asked.

  Helena seemed surprised by the question, but not necessarily bothered.

  “No.”

  “You’re home most of the time?”

  “Yeah.” Her face portraying a sudden realization. “Nathan’s not my husband,” she explained. “My last name’s Saulnier. I’m sorry, we didn’t make that very clear. I’m divorced.” She gave a small, hard smile. “I got half of everything. The way I see it, I made my payments into the mutual fund. I worked for the man on my feet and on my back for twenty-six years, a lot longer than I wanted to be on either one. The divorce was my retirement party, the settlement was my pension. Now I don’t work anymore.” She kind of tossed it off, but Palma could tell it was something that cut to the grain.

  “And Mr. Isenberg?”

  “Not my live-in,” she smirked. “Not permanently.”

  “There’s a sport jacket in there on the sofa,” Palma said. “Was that Mr. Isenberg’s?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know whose it was?”

  “No. Vickie doesn’t have anyone special as far as I can tell. But…she always has someone. The jacket was there when we got there, but the guy’s never shown up.”

  “Can you remember if you were home last Thursday night?”

  Saulnier thought back. ‘Thursday night, Thursday…I was. Yes, I was home. I had rented a couple of movies.”

  “We think that’s when Dorothy was killed. Maybe around ten o’clock. Did you happen to notice anyone coming or going over there at any time on Thursday?”

  Saulnier thought a moment, her eyes staying on Palma, a little dew of perspiration beginning to show on her chest just below the shallow dent in her throat. “No, I didn’t see anything. At least nothing comes to mind.” She frowned. “Jesus, it was last Thursday? She’d been in there that long? That’s horrible.” She paused. “Did Vickie see her…like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “After she was dead…a while?”

  “I think so.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “She was strangled.”

  Saulnier wiped the thin fingers of one hand delicately over her top lip, which was also perspiring now. A cicada’s drone swelled and died out in a nearby mimosa. Palma felt a trickle forming between her breasts.

  “What happens now?” Saulnier asked.

  “We don’t have much to go on.”

  “I see.” Saulnier was looking toward the pathway around the corner.

  Palma reached into her purse and took out a card. She wrote her home telephone number on the back and handed it to Saulnier. “If anything comes up, day or night, anytime, I’d like to hear from you.”

  Saulnier took the card and smiled. It was kind of an odd thing to do.

  “I really want to get into this one,” Palma said. “If you could help I’d appreciate it.”

  They walked back toward Kittrie’s apartment, and Palma let herself out the wrought-iron gate.

  “Listen,” Saulnier said, talking through the bars. “Don’t think too harshly of her. After a time, when she’s calmed down some, maybe she’ll come up with something.”

  Walking back to the car Palma could feel the moisture all over her body as the air she created moved around her. Standing still, she hadn’t really noticed. She unlocked the car and left the door open for a moment while she took off her purse and laid it on the front seat.

  Before she got in she glanced back across the cul-de-sac. Saulnier was still standing at the gate, watching her. Palma pretended she didn’t see her, though she didn’t know why.

  13

  Palma backtracked a few blocks on Westheimer and pulled into a Landry’s restaurant. From the telephone booth outside she called Birley at Samenov’s condo.

  “I did the pizza thing first,” he said. “Leeland’s pizza hunch was good. She ordered a pepperoni and green olive from Ricco’s Pizzeria around the corner here. They had a FasFax copy of the order coming in at seven twenty-eight. I called Rutledge, and he said that something like that would pass through her stomach in about one and a half to two hours. According to the autopsy the ‘tail’ of Samenov’s pizza was just about to enter her intestines. So it’s likely she died somewhere around ten o’clock on the same night she was last seen by Kittrie.”

  “What size was the pizza?”

  “Right. Small.”

  “Doesn’t sound like she was expecting company…for dinner, anyway.”

  “Nope. How was Vickie?”

  Palma went over it with him briefly.

  “Damn, sounds like Dorothy had some goofy neighbors. We ought to check ‘em out.”

  “Yeah, I plan to do that. Meanwhile I’m on my way downtown to talk to Linda Mancera at Siskel and Weeks Advertising. Have fun in the neighborhood.”

  She quickly ate a shrimp salad with iced tea and then headed back out Westheimer to the West Loop where she picked up the Southwest Freeway again. By now the streets were blistering and the sun splintered a million different ways off buildings and cars, off chrome and glass and polished steel. Palma put on her sunglasses and muscled into the traffic.

  She couldn’t get Helena Saulnier and Nathan Isenberg off her mind. She had to admit she had been relieved when they so suddenly appeared in the hallway and took charge of the unstable Kittrie. Palma had been in no mood to play nursemaid to the girl’s easily provoked hysterics. And Saulnier had been helpful, too, in putting Kittrie’s relationship with Samenov into perspective. Helpful, yes, but in the end it was Saulnier’s perspective that Palma had finally gotten, not her own, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that Saulnier had a vested interest in just exactly how Palma understood the situation.

  The Allied Bank Plaza was a blue glass monolith of too many stories on the western side of downtown. A stylized trapezoid with rounded ends, its western face overlooked the green sward of Sam Houston Park and the overpass scaffoldings of the Gulf Freeway under which the Buffalo Bayou made a muddy meander eastward on its way to the Port of Houston Ship Channel on the fringes of the city. West, too, was a limitless stretch of green treetops from which the clusters of skyscrapers at Greenway Plaza and the uptown Post Oak district rose up like cities unto themselves. On the eastern face the view grew hazy toward the fifty vermicular miles of ship channel encrusted with shipping terminals, petroleum refineries, chemical plants, and steelworks, all industries capable of churning out enough effluvia to shroud the sunrise, which they often did.

  Siskel and Weeks was on the sixty-seventh floor. It was a ritzy place with glass-brick walls and Plexiglas desks and plastic translucent room dividers in primary colors and secretaries in forties hairstyles and sparkling lipstick. All the men wore tailor-made braces on their pleated suit pants and cut their hair short like the male models in Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Everyone was young and clean and busy.

  Palma’s wrinkled cotton shirtwaist and well-worn shoulder bag did not command immediate attention from the fresh-faced men and women who breezed through the reception area, and the receptionist herself had a serious problem with myopia, which told Palma that she had been sized up as a minority job applicant. She could wait, which she did. She gave the receptionist the benefit of the doubt and three more minutes before she placed her shield two inches in front of the girl’s red-framed glasses and stopped a telephone conversation that didn’t seem all that important to the firm’s fiscal well-being.

  The girl’s mouth stopped in mid-yap and she rolled her eyes up to Palma, who was looking down on her.

  “If you would put that person on hold and buzz Linda Mancera that she is wanted out front, I would
appreciate it.”

  “May I tell her…”

  “Carmen Palma.”

  Though flustered, the receptionist did a beautiful job, and Palma thanked her and walked over to a leather sofa where she picked up a magazine from a palette-shaped lavender Lucite coffee table.

  Linda Mancera came down a long hallway of glass bricks that changed in shade from submarine blue to fluorescent white as it neared the reception area and made her look as if she were emerging from the inside curl of a long surfing wave. Before she got close, Palma could tell she was in her late twenties, built like the women on the cover of Cosmopolitan, and dressed like the women in Vogue. Frowning and preoccupied, her long, black hair temporarily pulled around over one shoulder, she walked briskly into the reception area and then stopped, brought herself back to the present, glanced around and caught Palma’s eye.

  “Carmen Palma?”

  “Detective Palma,” she said, showing her shield.

  “Oh, my God,” Mancera said, raising one red-nailed hand but stopping short of her mouth. “Dorothy.”

  “Have you got a few minutes? I won’t keep you long.”

  “I just heard, just this minute,” Mancera said, wrinkling her eyebrows. “A friend called…she worked with Dorothy, just across the street. Nancy Segal…she said she’d just talked to the police…a man.”

  Good boy, Palma thought. If Cushing’s girl had looked anything like this one, Palma could be sure he had questioned her at length.

  “Could we go somewhere with a little privacy?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, of course,” Mancera reflexively reached out, a gesture of apology. “Let’s go to my office,” she said, and Palma followed her into the long watery light, her heels clicking on the dove gray marble.

  Mancera’s workplace was at the far end of the glass corridor, one of the desirable “outside” offices that had a ceiling-to-floor view of the southwestern United States. She had a thick plate-glass desk with glass bricks to hold it up and behind her was a wide credenza of similar design with built-in files and drawers. The credenza and part of Mancera’s desk were covered with artists’ sketches and layouts of ad campaigns, and Mancera shoved them aside as she sat down, her eyes on Palma.

  “So what happened?” she asked without ceremony, planting her forearms on the glass and leaning across.

  Palma gave her a quick outline of events, enough to satisfy her immediate curiosity, and Mancera listened with an expressive face, reacting to the turn of events with genuine emotion, obviously finding the whole story incredible.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Mancera said when Palma finished. “This is too much!”

  “If she was a random victim there’s not a lot we can do from the approach of questioning her friends,” Palma said. “But if she wasn’t, if she knew her assailant, we’re hoping her friends will be able to help us identify possible suspects.”

  “What? You mean, who do I think could have done this? My God, I can’t even believe I know someone this has happened to, much less know who might have done it.” Mancera was wearing a linen work smock over a silk blouse and viscose suit skirt. She kept pushing back the baggy arms of the smock. “Look, if you’ve been talking to Dorothy’s friends you’ve probably already gotten a good idea of how unpredictable she was. She was one sharp gal, quick, intelligent, but she could be wacky. I mean, she was a free spirit, it opened her up for a lot of…adventures. I loved her to death…” Mancera caught the unfortunate reference and looked embarrassed.

  “Jesus…anyway, but she was unpredictable. She easily could have picked up someone on the spur of the moment.”

  “Did you, any of you, often do that at Cristof’s?”

  “Actually, no. Times are changing, you know. We tend not to go around hitting on guys at bars. I mean, we don’t; people still do, I guess.” She looked at Palma’s hands. “You’re not married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “So what do you do?”

  Palma ignored the unexpected question, though it seemed to have been asked more out of genuine curiosity than flippancy.

  “Did you know Dorothy’s ex-husband?”

  Mancera nodded, a subtle look of distaste changing the pleasant shape of her mouth. “I met him once. The guy’s an absolute waste. None of us could really feature them together. Totally out of Dorothy’s league. Dorothy was…classy. Very sharp. Guys like that didn’t even get close to her. But I understand he went way back, before Dorothy learned a few things.”

  “How did they get along?”

  “They didn’t.”

  “How did you happen to meet him?”

  Mancera rolled her eyes, remembering. “It was a strange incident.” She kind of laughed and frowned at the same time. “Some of us were over at Dorothy’s one night, this was over a year ago, and he simply showed up at her door. It was clear she was stunned to see him—later she said she hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He just pushed his way in. Nothing she could do about it. I didn’t know who he was so I didn’t know what the hell was going down. It scared me. He stormed right into the living room and Dorothy jumped up and kind of ushered him back out into the entry. We could hear them arguing. The strange thing was the way Dorothy was acting. She was always so strong, you know. Among us she was kind of the pacesetter. The New Woman. But we could hear them, and she was wheedling, trying to soothe him, calm him. They got quiet—I don’t know, this sounds sleazy now, but we were all sitting there petrified, listening to this—they got quiet and we heard this, these, intimate sounds. They were kissing, making out. It was crazy. Then suddenly whap! He hit her. It sounded like an open-hand slap. A couple of us jumped to our feet, but nobody left the room. The door slammed, and he was gone. Dorothy ran down the hall to the bathroom before anyone could get to her.”

  Mancera pushed aside some papers on her desk and found a pack of cigarettes. She lighted one, turned around to the credenza and found a heavy crystal ashtray, and put it in front of her.

  “It was crazy,” she said.

  “That was it?”

  “Well, you know, we tried to get things back to normal, went into the kitchen, made drinks, lighted cigarettes, started trying to clear our heads after that downer. When Dorothy finally came back into the room she apologized. Some of the girls wanted to talk about it, but Dorothy cut them off. It ruined the evening.” She pushed at the smock sleeves. “All I could think of was those sounds in the entryway. Those were not the sort of sounds that should have gone with that little scenario. You hear something incongruent like that, it sticks in your mind.”

  Mancera was clearly still bothered by the events of that evening. She didn’t know what to do with her eyes so she turned and looked out the glass wall. The hand holding the cigarette was resting on the plate-glass desk, the wrist cocked back, the cigarette trembling.

  “Do you know any of the men Dorothy dated?”

  Mancera shook her head without even giving it any thought and turned back to Palma.

  “I don’t know how it is with you and your friends, but with Dorothy and us, the little bunch of us that often go to Cristof’s together after work, men just aren’t part of the agenda. As participants, anyway. We might talk about them, share war stories, but we aren’t interested in being with them in that context. It’s just girl talk. You know, kick back and relax, say what you want to, forget the minuet of the sexes.”

  She put out her cigarette, only half smoked.

  “So to answer your question: no. Aside from that one shabby little episode at her place that night, I know nothing about her men and their relationships. I hope it was better for her with the others.”

  Palma liked Mancera. She didn’t seem to have anything to hide, didn’t appear to be walking on eggshells like Saulnier and Kittrie. But then, she wasn’t as close to Samenov. Aside from that, Linda Mancera seemed a more straightforward personality and was simply more confident as a woman.

  “Can you characterize the way Dorothy talked about men when you were together?” Palma as
ked. “You said you shared ‘war stories.’ What were hers like?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mancera frowned. “Nothing really sticks in my mind about it except that maybe she seemed a little more independent than the rest of us.” She shrugged and smiled ironically. “You see, that’s the problem. I do think of her as the symbol of the woman of the new age: independent, a successful businesswoman who hasn’t fallen into the old cliched power traps like a lot of women. Too often I’ve seen women who’ve achieved a degree of success in ‘the men’s world’ stop being women and simply start acting like men in dresses, miming the old male models, being just as hard-ass, being one of the boys. But not Dorothy. She was true to herself, to being a decent human being. But then there was that episode at her house when she seemed like the sweet, suffering, battered wife. God. I guess I hadn’t admitted even to myself how much that had affected me. Listen to me. I can’t stop talking about it.”

  She stopped and looked at Palma. “Sorry, I didn’t really answer your question, did I? How did she talk about men? I honestly don’t remember any particular attitude in a sexual context. I guess she had pretty much the same views as the rest of us. You know, I guess we’re all generally less tolerant than maybe we used to be. We don’t take the bullshit from them that we used to, demand more, not as willing to compromise.”

  “Do you know if she dated a lot?”

  “I always had the impression she got around quite a bit.”

  Palma watched Mancera closely and asked, “Were you aware of her interest in rough sex?”

  There was a blank expression followed by slowly raised eyebrows. “Rough sex?”

  “We found photographs among her personal things, and some sexual paraphernalia. She was in some of the photographs.”

  Mancera swallowed. “Jeez-us. I never heard anything about that from her.”

  “Aside from her ex-husband, do you know any other men in her life?”