Mercy Page 21

  “What things?”

  “All her perfume and cosmetics. Just the stuff in her bedroom. I think they were in there when she told him.”

  “Was he easily angered?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did Dorothy ever tell you about the time he knocked out Dennis Ackley?”

  Vickie nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, I think Dennis slapped Dorothy when Gil was there, and Gil jumped all over him.”

  “Hit him once and knocked him out?”

  Vickie shrugged, “Well, that’s not exactly what Dorothy said. She said there was a real brawl, and she had to pull Gil off Dennis, that Gil almost ripped Dennis’s ear off, and he had to have surgery on it. She said Gil almost killed him.”

  “I was led to believe that Reynolds was something of a gentleman,” Palma said. “Is that how you viewed him?”

  “Well, yeah, he was, but he kind of had this other side of him, too. The guy scared me a little, but I don’t really know why. It could’ve just been me.”

  Palma could believe that.

  “What makes you think Dorothy and the other woman knew their killer?” Saulnier asked, looking back at Palma. “Maybe they were random victims. You’re not even sure the other woman’s bisexual.”

  “You’re right,” Palma said. “We’re not sure. But Sandra Moser willingly went to her hotel, checked in under a false name, and met someone she knew. There’s every indication that Dorothy knew her killer too. She willingly let him into the house. There was no illegal entry. There was no struggle, no sign of resistance.”

  “But you told me the last time we talked that she was strangled,” Saulnier said. “Surely there was some kind of struggle.”

  Palma shook her head. “That brings us to the next thing we need to discuss. Both Moser and Dorothy were strangled…with a belt, probably the same belt. Their wrists and ankles had been tied, but apparently there was no struggle in either case. They had allowed themselves to be tied. Both were sexually mutilated in the same way. Sadomasochist paraphernalia was found hidden at both residences. Do many of the women in this group go in for that?”

  Saulnier shook her head firmly. “I suspect that what you found was used for autoerotic purposes.”

  Palma was prepared for that. She picked up the manila envelope again and took out the four-color photographs of Samenov tied to the bed, her leather-hooded tormentor aping for the camera. Palma spread the pictures out on the table and looked at the two women. Saulnier was dumbfounded; Kittrie blanched, then dropped her eyes and quickly puffed on her cigarette.

  “Vickie, I understand you know something about this,” Palma said.

  Saulnier was quick to check her expression of shock at this second revelation, but her eyes betrayed a restrained disbelief as she casually turned to Kittrie, who was keeping her head ducked as she shook it, denying the accusation. When Saulnier saw the girl was hiding something—Kittrie was embarrassingly transparent—she quickly moved to shield her.

  “Look,” Saulnier suddenly said to Palma. “What is it you want?”

  “I want to know who the men were who were involved with Dorothy in this kind of rough sex.” Palma addressed her remarks to Kittrie, ignoring Saulnier’s protective intervention. “I want to know who’s wearing the leather hood.”

  “No!” Kittrie yelled, her childish face as flinty as she could make it. “No. Men? No!”

  “I was told men were involved, Vickie.” Palma raised her voice, stretching the truth, wanting to stretch it more, but checking herself before she overplayed.

  Kittrie did not start crying. The extra day had steadied her nerves, and perhaps her resolve. “I don’t care what you were told,” she raised her voice also. “It was just…the two of us…something…something she asked me to do. I went along.”

  “What do you mean? Did you take the pictures?”

  “No, but I mean that kind of thing. Dorothy was into that.”

  “I can see that.” Palma didn’t bother to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “I want to know who the men were.”

  “And I’m telling you there weren’t any men.”

  “Then who the hell is this?” Palma stabbed a finger at the hooded figure.

  “I do-not-know.” Kittrie darted her eyes at the still off-balance Saulnier.

  Palma stared at Kittrie. Dammit, she believed her. The girl’s confusion, her own exasperation, was translating to Palma as a feeling of futility in the face of impossible demands. Palma believed her, but something told her she was approaching quicksand. No one spoke, and Helena Saulnier, stunned, curled up on her tapestry armchair and wrapped her sarong around both legs, sobered, with something to think about that she hadn’t had to think about before. Reluctantly she took her eyes off Vickie Kittrie and turned to Palma.

  “Look,” she said. “This scares the hell out of me, but I can’t bring myself to give you names. Let me talk to a few of these women…I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think any of them are going to talk, to risk it. But let me do what I can.” She looked at the two photographs on the table. “Let me talk to her,” indicating the unidentified woman posing with the mannequin.

  “Take Sandra Moser’s picture, too,” Palma said. “We’ve got to know more about who she was seeing. You could be of great help to us.”

  There was another silence. After the scene they just went through, Palma was dreading what she had to do next.

  “There’s one other thing,” she said. “The crime lab has identified two other persons’ hair in Dorothy’s room and on her body.” Both women frowned at her, incredulous. Kittrie suddenly looked as if she was going to cry. “Some of that hair may have come from the killer. There may be other hairs that turn up elsewhere in her bedroom as we continue to investigate,” Palma said, not hitting directly on the mark of truth. She looked at Kittrie. “Since you were Dorothy’s lover and had been in that room many times, we need to know which of those hairs might be yours. We need hair samples from you for comparison.”

  “Jesus,” Saulnier said. She seemed on the point of protesting, and Palma was afraid she was going to object on Kittrie’s behalf when the girl spoke up.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “What do I do?”

  Saulnier shook her head as if she couldn’t believe Kittrie’s foolishness.

  “I have to have five head hairs from five different parts of your head,” Palma said. “The front, the back, both sides, and the top. I have to have ten from the top area of your pubic hair, and ten from the hair around your vagina. The hair has to be plucked, not cut, and I have to witness that they came from you. I’ve got a package of small self-sealing plastic bags here, and I’ll ID the source on each bag. We can go into the bathroom if you want.”

  “I don’t care,” Kittrie said. “We’ll do it here.”

  While Saulnier helped Kittrie, and Palma witnessed the process and marked and sealed the plastic bags, Kittrie proceeded to pluck a total of twenty-five long ginger hairs from the various locations on her head. When she had finished that she stood, unbuttoned her shorts and stepped out of them, peeled off her pink panties, and sat back on the sofa. Bending her head she carefully plucked ten wiry hairs from high on her pubic bone, and then, more slowly, more carefully, she did the same from around her vagina. Palma held the small plastic bags for her as Kittrie dropped in the hairs one by one, and then Palma sealed the bags and marked them.

  While Kittrie dressed, Palma finished marking the bags, wrapped them in a bundle with a rubber band, and put them in her purse. Then she picked up the photographs still lying on the gold tiles of the coffee table and returned them to the manila folder, leaving the picture of Sandra Moser. Picking up her purse and the envelope, she stood and looked at Kittrie, who was tucking her shirttail into her shorts.

  “I appreciate your doing this,” Palma said. “It’ll help us a great deal.”

  “I didn’t mind.” Kittrie seemed no longer angry, but subdued. Palma wanted to say so
mething else, but she wasn’t quite sure what. The girl was such a strange mixture of innocence and deception that it was difficult to know exactly how to handle her.

  Palma turned to Saulnier. “Do you still have my card and home telephone number?” she asked.

  Saulnier nodded, and Palma turned and started toward the entryway. Saulnier followed her around the large potted ficus where the entryway stepped down to the front door. Opening the door herself, she stepped outside, not looking at Saulnier. “Don’t wait too long to use it,” she said without looking back, and walked out of the courtyard past the frondy sago palms and the bright banks of snapdragons.

  23

  She sat in the swing with her mother and listened to the old woman catalog the recent horrors of the neighborhood, Cynthia Ortiz’s middle boy had been arrested for the rape of a girl in Mayfair and they say he was crazy on cocaine, the Linares’ youngest daughter is getting married and they say she is three months pregnant, Doris de Ajofin had left her husband and they say her boyfriend is a man of the coca trade in Cali, Rodrigo Ruiz has been arrested for the third time for fondling a little girl in Eastwood Park and they say this time he will go to the pen for it, Mariana Flandrau’s hysterectomy was botched by her doctors and they say she is suing them for two million dollars, Juana de Cos’s baby daughter, Lupita, has died and lies in the Capilla de Tristeza and they say if you bend a little over the casket you can still see the needle tracks on her arms. They say Lupita’s boyfriend has tried to kill himself.

  They say a lot of things in the barrio, and while Palma listened to the stories of lives surprised by misfortune and redirected by the vagaries of fate, she thought of Helena Saulnier and Vickie Kittrie, whose own lives turned in a world of coded names and double identities and sexual exotica as old as human nature. She thought of Saulnier’s long, naked thighs, the dusky smoothness of them, and of how she knew that they were tender where they curved inward toward the dark triangle revealed by the gaping sarong, of how she was curious about Saulnier’s motives but unoffended by the brazen sexual content of her actions. Palma herself had virtually no understanding of this kind of woman. When she had worked vice she had learned more than she had wanted to know about the other side of the gay women’s world, the leather bars and dyke shops, a crude world of posturing harshness that seemed bitter and desperate and alien.

  But Helena Saulnier represented something altogether different. It was not a surprise to Palma that a woman who wanted a woman wanted a woman. She knew that the stereotypical hard-driving dyke and the feminine women who loved them lived on the thin, brittle borders of the mainstream and were only a part of the total picture of female homosexuality, but the picture Saulnier presented of a more prevalent bisexual and lesbian presence in the lives of upper- and middle-class women was one to which Palma had never given much thought. And it irritated her that she had never even considered this hidden world. The bisexual husband and father who lived a double life—sometimes successfully, most of the time disastrously—had long ago emerged as a staple genus in the typology of modern social science. It was indicative, she thought, that even in this recognition of the facts of human sexuality—whether or not they were widely acceptable by popular mores—women had not yet come into their own. So long denied recognition and legitimacy in the more common roles of society, woman’s place had not even been conceivable in those areas of the sexually recherche where, with ironic predictability, effeminate men had come into their own before women.

  The afternoon heat was settling, and in the shady courtyard where the paths were bordered with lilac liriope and the fragrance of the Mexican broom’s yellow blossoms sweetened the still, moist air, Palma listened to her mother gossip of the horrors of the barrio and thought of Vickie Kittrie, a capricious mix of innocence and guile who, in her own peculiar way, seemed to hide more potential perfidy than a woman twice her age. She thought of Vickie Kittrie unselfconsciously stepping out of her pink panties, the milky flesh of her inheritance so readily displayed, bending past her generous breasts, nipples as rose as her panties, to pluck the hairs from her strawberry crotch with locker room familiarity and the aplomb of a woman whose youth and genetics had given her a body that provided no cause for modesty.

  And the women. Several dozen, and several dozen more. Women whose bliss was the smell and taste and touch of other women, who admired in another woman even the smallest details of their own form, desired them, and took them with as much passion and abandon—perhaps more, they might say—as they had spent in breeding sons and daughters. Hidden lives, double lives, all the more intriguing because they were not women of the verge, but women of the mainstream, and Palma had a hunch that if she were to walk into a room with these women she would feel as much at home as if she had known them, public and private, all her life.

  With the sixth sense that adult children of the loquacious elderly quickly develop in self-defense of their own sanity, Pal-ma’s wandering mind quickly snapped back to the present moment. Her mother had stopped talking. She had taken a small white handkerchief from the baggy pocket of her gardening dress and was patting it over her forehead and neck.

  “The real summer is here,” her mother said. “No going back now. No more little cool days.” She waved the handkerchief around her face to stir the air.

  Palma looked at the older woman’s profile, and her mind overlaid the face she had remembered as a child. Her mother had not changed all that much, or maybe Palma simply wanted to believe she hadn’t. It was a curious thing to see a parent aging. Her father had died too young for her to really see it happen to him, but to watch her mother enter old age, step by step, hour by hour, was a humbling thing. Life gradually was taking away what it had gradually given. It was the nature of things, but few people understood their tentative ownership of their gifts until they saw them being taken away from someone they loved. If you were lucky life allowed you that, a preview of the way it was going to be.

  “Mama,” Palma said, still looking at her mother. “Have you ever known any homosexual women?”

  Her mother continued to flap her handkerchief with a delicate action of her wrist, showing no sign that she might regard the question as unusual or embarrassing or improper.

  “Homosexual?” the old woman said, tilting her head back slightly and staring up into the mottled shade of the water oaks and pecans and catalpas. Palma knew she would take the question and the subject with equanimity. Her mother had never been a prude or pretended that life was anything other than what sensible people knew it to be.

  “I’ve got this case,” Palma said, and instantly thought of her father. That was the way he always began his discussions with her mother. He had talked about the cases that troubled him more than any detective she had ever known. For him, Florencia was his lifeline to sanity. Palma remembered coming into the living room or onto the screened porch late at night and finding them talking, her mother combing her hair or sipping ice water and lime, her father with his shoes off, his shirt-tail out and his feet propped on a hassock or another chair talking to her, his voice coming solemnly, softly, from deep within his barrel chest. “I’ve got this case,” he would begin the conversations, and Florencia would grow still and quiet as though she did not want to distract him, everything she was doing, or might have intended to do, was pushed into oblivion, wiped away, as she gave her total attention to his story.

  “Two women were killed recently, and it happens that both of them were bisexual,” Palma said. “One of the victims was married and had a family, two children. During the investigation I’ve come across a group of women like the victims, a kind of secret organization whose members lead double lives. Many, maybe most, are married, have families. Most of them are middle- to upper-class…”

  Palma stopped. She didn’t know what it was she expected her mother to tell her, and she didn’t know where to take it from there. She couldn’t outline the case. There was no point in it really. In fact, now she felt a little foolish for even broaching the subje
ct, so far removed was it from her mother’s life.

  “There were, in 1968,” her mother said, “several women living in two houses close together in the area—I forget the street—of Magnolia Park. They were there for some years, and then they left.”

  “I mean,” Palma said, “married women.”

  Her mother stopped waving the handkerchief and wiped carefully under her eyes, pulling the skin back toward the temples as she must have been taught to do so long ago that she had forgotten it was something learned. She let her eyes fall from pondering the canopy of shadows to three Spanish doves milling around a shallow fountain near a bank of trumpet vines studded with reddish-orange blossoms.

  “Two,” she said, dropping the handkerchief to her lap and giving the swing a little push with her bare feet against the stones. “One is dead, and the other is too old to gossip about.”

  “Here in the neighborhood?” Palma was surprised.

  “Yes,” she nodded.

  “Did you know them well?”

  “Yes, very.” She watched the speckled doves with complete serenity. Her thoughts, Palma could tell, were traveling back in time, gathering memories before them like dark clouds before the wind, gathering strength for stories and rain.

  “Lara Prieto and Christine Wolfe,” her mother said flatly.

  Palma was shocked. Mrs. Prieto had been the wife of the neighborhood grocer, a woman of quiet, swarthy beauty who kept to herself and, outside of the store, had little to do with others in the community. Christine Wolfe was the barrio’s guardian angel. The wife of a well-to-do businessman, she was a great organizer of church bazaars, charity benefits, and seasonal carnivals. She was the closest thing to a socialite the barrio could boast and though she had always lived there—as long as Palma could remember—and lived there still, she had too much money to be accepted on an equal footing with the rest of the women in the community. She was genuinely kind, and they were genuinely polite, but the money was an unbreachable barrier to genuine acceptance. There were many things that wealth could do and a few things it could not do.