Mercy Page 24

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be on one of the benches there. We’ll find each other.”

  “You’ll have to give me twenty minutes.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  The line went dead.

  Palma put down the telephone and steadied herself. She crawled over the papers to the edge of the bed and sat with her feet on the floor. Jesus Christ. The goddamned dream. What had brought that on? She hated having that kind of dream, that kind of sick lunacy. She didn’t like knowing something like that could come out of her head. She stood unsteadily and lurched to the bathroom. Running cold water, she splashed her face, grabbed a towel, and hurried back into the bedroom, dropped the damp towel on the floor in front of the closet, and grabbed a beige and white striped chambray shirtdress off its hanger. Throwing the dress on the bed, she took panties and a bra out of her dresser and slipped into them, then pulled on the dress. She didn’t give a thought to panty hose as she stepped into a pair of woven Mexican sandals and buckled a beige belt around her waist. She ran a brush through her hair, grabbed her purse from the chair by the door, and turned and opened the drawer to the bedside table. She took out her SIG-Sauer, checked the clip, and put it into her purse.

  Leaving the light on in her bedroom, she hurried down the stairs, fishing for her keys in the bottom of her purse. By the time she got to the front door she had found them, left the light on at the bottom of the stairs, and stepped out into the damp early-morning darkness. A light fog had moved in during the last several hours.

  She switched on the Audi’s headlights and pushed the car through the tree-lined neighborhood streets to University Boulevard and turned left. Within moments she was passing the stadium on the western edge of the Rice University campus, and then the Cameron baseball field and the track stadium. At Main the university campus ended and the 525-acre campus of the Texas Medical Center began, its hospital complexes, research laboratories, and medical schools forming its own city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, its lights spreading out in high banks to the left and right, shimmering and disappearing into the fog. Crossing Main, Palma doubled back on Fannin a few blocks and turned right into Ross Sterling Avenue, which became a passageway through the University of Texas Medical School, and then came into the open again adjacent to the mall.

  Palma scanned the sprawling compound lighted here and there with the smoky glow of mercury vapor lamps and scattered with the serrated shadows of heavy trees. It was two o’clock by the dial on her dash, and Palma didn’t want to take the time to drive over to the nearest of the center’s parking lots. She began hunting for a service drive or a staff lot, found one near the Jones Library on the other side of the mall, and turned in.

  She walked around the library to the mall and paused on its south end, looking toward the rear door of the medical school. The granite pavers were glistening with the damp and Palma wished she had brought a raincoat. No one was sitting on the benches that were easily visible, and the fog was restricting her depth of vision into the shadows. All she could do was walk across the mall and hope the woman would see her. The rear door of the school opened and a solitary, white-coated figure emerged from the lighted foyer and started across the far end of the mall with a backpack slung over one shoulder. It was a girl; a student. Time was all the same to them, only sometimes you needed lights to see and sometimes you didn’t.

  Palma was moving toward the center of the mall, listening to the precise fall of her own footsteps, when someone spoke from a cluster of live oaks in a cloverleaf of sidewalks.

  “Detective Palma.”

  She stopped and looked toward the trees, making out a wood-framed kiosk with Plexiglas walls, and then a single figure on the bench inside. She turned and made her way to the slight rise of landscaping and approached the kiosk.

  “It’s dry in here, at least,” the woman said. “I’m Claire,” the woman said, extending her hand from where she was sitting.

  Palma shook it, straining to see the woman’s face as the woman leaned back against the corner of the kiosk at one end of the laminated wood bench. Palma respected the subtle message and sat at the opposite end of the bench.

  “I’m sorry you had to come out at this hour,” Claire said. “And the fog. But I’m afraid it’s the only time I could do this.”

  “It’s fine,” Palma said. “I’m glad you called.” She ran a hand through her hair and felt the dampness. The spillover from the mercury vapor lamp seventy-five yards away filtered through the trees and the scarred Plexiglas, creating a feeble light mottled with thin shadows that fell across the woman’s face like a veil. But Palma’s eyes adjusted, and she recognized her from the photographs. She must have been in her late forties, with black hair and a sharp nose that gave a girlish effect to her features that should have long since faded. She was dressed in business clothes, complete with makeup and small jewelry, which made Palma guess that she was on night duty somewhere in the medical complex and had not dressed just for this meeting. Palma also noticed she was wearing a wedding ring.

  “Helena called me,” Claire said. She crossed her legs at the knee and turned on the bench to face Palma. “I understand there were pictures of me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know they were still around.” The remark was meant to be careless, but there was an underlying note of tension.

  “Did Helena Saulnier tell you about our conversations?”

  “Yes. I don’t know, I guess she told me everything.”

  Palma nodded. Claire—Palma did not believe it was her real name—reached into her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes. She took one without offering any to Palma, lighted it with a small lighter that provided too little flame to illuminate her face, and blew a plume of smoke out to mingle with the mist. Though one leg was crossed over the other, she did not swing it nervously as most women would do in such a situation. She seemed very much in control of herself, and in no hurry to get on with the interview.

  “Why did you call me?” Palma finally asked.

  The woman continued to look at her for a moment, and Palma suddenly thought that perhaps she wasn’t so confident after all.

  “I thought I might be able to help you,” the woman said.

  “In what way?”

  “I knew Sandra Moser. I think…perhaps I was the last one of…our group…to be with her before she died.”

  26

  Claire didn’t go on. She pulled on the cigarette, a highly polished fingernail catching a sharp glint of light.

  “Then she was a lesbian?”

  “Bisexual.” Claire corrected her. “Most of us are bisexual.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  Claire again hesitated, her eyes on Palma from the lacy shadows, her knee supporting the hand with the cigarette, a powder blue ribbon of smoke rising from its embered tip.

  Palma looked at her and realized what was happening.

  “I can’t give you the pictures,” she said. “They’re evidence in a homicide. It’s out of the question.”

  Claire turned her head away and looked through the Plexiglas at the wet paving stones of the courtyard. She seemed to be collecting her composure. She pulled on the cigarette again. “Those were a lark,” she said. “I knew it was a mistake at the time. It’s my own fault. I should never have let her talk me into it.”

  “Dorothy?”

  “Vickie, dammit.”

  “Kittrie?”

  Claire nodded; the bitterness showed in the tense way she held herself and in the tone with which she had spoken Vicki’s name.

  “Why did she want you to do it?”

  Claire didn’t answer immediately, seeming to consider how she should frame her response. “Dorothy always had a special affection for me. A few years ago we’d been lovers, but Dorothy wanted it to be permanent. She knew I couldn’t—wouldn’t—do that. I had my family, my career. It even went against the philosophy of what this group is all about. It wasn’t meant to break up fam
ilies and wreck lives. But she wouldn’t give it up, became possessive. I finally had to break it off completely. And she adjusted to that; she understood. But she never really let go. She would ask the others how I was doing, was I happy, who was I seeing. Things like that.” She shrugged.

  “Then, after Dorothy and Vickie’s relationship developed, I felt like there was no danger of Dorothy’s becoming preoccupied with me again. I stopped avoiding them. I got to know Vickie. She was okay, but I thought she was a little strange, which proved to be true. One night I showed up at a party at a woman’s home in Tanglewood. Vickie was there, but Dorothy was out of town. After too many drinks and most of the people had left, Vickie cornered me, started telling me how Dorothy still wanted me, how she talked about me. She talked me into posing for the pictures with the mannequin, something to spice up their lovemaking, she said. I was just drunk enough…maybe even just a little turned on to Vickie, to do it. The sado theme was her idea, of course.”

  “When were the pictures taken?”

  “About six, no, seven months ago, just when Vickie started getting Dorothy into this sadomasochist stuff.”

  “Vickie? I thought Dorothy was the one who started that.”

  Claire smirked. “Vickie told you that, huh?”

  Palma nodded.

  “Let me tell you something,” Claire said, tossing her cigarette out into the mist and exhaling smoke toward the open front of the kiosk. “That little girl is trouble. Her sexual instincts are as warped as any I’ve ever seen. I don’t know what they do to them in those East Texas piney woods, but that girl is spooky.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She had very particular tastes,” Clare said. “Like most of us she liked men also, but she only wanted to do S&M with them. But she always topped with men, and bottomed with women.” She looked at Palma. “You know about S&M?”

  Palma knew enough to know she never knew enough. While she was working in vice she thought she had learned just about everything there was to know about sexual deviancy. And then she went to homicide. A murderer’s passions were often closely linked to their sexuality, and sometimes they weren’t even conscious of this until they killed. Somehow, in the deepest fissures of the psyche, it was all tied together by dark flowing estuaries, but no one really understood it. The fact that there was an indisputable relationship seemed an awesome enough discovery.

  “I know the top is the aggressor and the bottom is the victim,” Palma said. She would leave it at that. Every time she heard someone “explain” these things, she learned everyone understood a different truth.

  “In the ‘play,’” Claire said. “Right. That’s the scenario. But in reality, the bottom calls the shots, the whole scene is for them, for their gratification. The terminology,” she added parenthetically, “lacks grace, but most of this language comes from a butchy crowd—grace isn’t their strong suit. Anyway, the top has simply agreed to play a role and do the bottom’s bidding. If you do it right, all of this is agreed on beforehand. The bottom tells the top what she wants done to her—whether it’s whipping, cutting, hot wax, choking, the fist, water, whatever—and she outlines the progression of events leading up to the finale. And she establishes a safe word. Essentially the whole drama is orchestrated for her satisfaction. But at the same time, the top derives pleasure from giving the bottom what she wants. Ideally, the pleasure makes a full circle. Though there are some women who will only top, and some who will only bottom, most will easily switch roles in order to accommodate a partner.

  “The crucial point of all this, however, is trusting your top. If you don’t trust the woman’s judgment, then you’re crazy to let her tie you up and crawl on top of you with a razor. The top has got to be in control of her own emotions during all this. The risk is that the ‘punishment’ can go too far. So they establish a ‘safe word’ so the top can tell where the bottom’s fantasy stops and reality begins once they start role-playing. The top starts the punishment and after a while the bottom is begging not to be treated, the way she really wants to be treated, pretending that it’s all ‘against her will’ while all the time she’s loving it. No matter how much the bottom begs for it to stop, the top is supposed to go right on with it until the bottom either achieves the level of pleasure that she’s looking for, or she uses the safe word to signal that it’s getting out of hand, going too far for her.”

  Palma watched her as Claire leaned forward to dig in her purse for another cigarette and then sat back in the shadow of the corner again. Her movements were graceful, thoroughly feminine, and Palma remembered Helena Saulnier’s remark that a woman who wanted a woman wanted a woman.

  “Vickie was okay with women,” Claire continued. “Because she was always the bottom. But when she was with men she couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that she could be lethal.”

  “Do you know any of the men she topped with?”

  “You’ve already talked to one of them, Gil Reynolds.” Palma felt her face flush. The bastard. He had rolled over like a spaniel to get her sympathy and then told her he thought men might have been involved with Kittrie and Samenov. Did he really believe she wouldn’t catch him out? Or was he that contemptuous of her? “Another one was Walker Bristol. Vickie almost killed him, the poor devil. He told me after she’d almost let him bleed to death that she was topping on anger, that she just went berserk with him. Walker has a tendency toward histrionics. He said she had a worm eating away inside her, and it made her mean as hell. I thought that was an ironically Freudian reference. Walker really hated her after that.”

  “If Kittrie only tops with men, then Reynolds must have been on the receiving end also.”

  “Yeah, well, psychosexually, Gil is a cretin,” Claire said. “Did you know he was a sniper in Vietnam? He told Vickie once…he told her that he had orgasms when he saw the heads explode through his scope. That tells you about Reynolds. I think the reason Vickie never went too far with him like she did with Bristol was because she was afraid if Reynolds ever got loose he’d kill her. They have an unhealthy mutual respect for each other. Sometimes…sometimes I think they’re more alike than any two people I’ve ever known in this crazy world.”

  “In what way?”

  Claire inhaled deeply of her cigarette and held it. She looked at Palma. “They’re amoral,” she said slowly, and the two words oozed out of her mouth on a long snake of smoke.

  If she had meant the response to be an eerie one, she succeeded. Palma now saw Reynolds’s spurious humility as poisonously cynical; in retrospect it seemed especially depraved.

  “Do you know if Bristol or Reynolds ever switched the roles so that they were the punishers?”

  “Yeah. Reynolds. That’s his natural bent. I think he only let Kittrie whip him so he could get her naked. She wouldn’t touch him otherwise.”

  “Do you know any of the women he punished?”

  Claire waited a moment before responding, and for an instant Palma thought she might refuse to answer. Then she said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to get that from someone else. Even my rumors are third-rate on that question.” But this time Palma didn’t believe her. Even in the marbled shadows of the kiosk Palma could sense the change in Claire’s demeanor. The question had more substance than the woman wanted to take responsibility for.

  “You can see where this is going,” Palma said. “I’ve got to know more about him. If you could just give me a name, someone who’d know, someone who could lead me to someone else.”

  In the shadow Claire flicked the ash off her cigarette and for a moment the tip was a single bright eye that suddenly glared at Palma, then clouded over again, and waited.

  “You talked to Linda Mancera.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Talk to her again.”

  Somebody coughed deeply across the courtyard, and they both turned to see another white-coated student in jeans and jogging shoes heading toward the lighted back door
where the girl had come out earlier. He cleared his phlegmy throat and spat to the side of the doorway before yanking open the glass panel and disappearing inside.

  “What do you know about Helena Saulnier?” Palma changed directions.

  “Helena’s very straightforward, not too complicated psychologically. She’s a manhater. A week after the last of her two children moved away from home for college, Helena walked out on her astonished husband after twenty-six years of marriage. She’s got a powerful dislike for anything with a penis.”

  “Then how does she tolerate Nathan Isenberg?”

  Claire stopped in the middle of pulling on her cigarette and snapped her head around at Palma. She looked at her with round eyes for a moment and then burst out laughing, her voice carrying in the damp air, a muted echo ricocheting off the sheer walls of the surrounding buildings. “Jesus H. Christ! What a world we live in!” She dropped her cigarette on the cement floor of the kiosk and ground it out with the pointed toe of her shoe. “I’m sorry,” she said, still laughing. She looked at Palma. “Nathan hasn’t got a penis. Nathan is actually Natalie Isenberg.”

  Palma watched Claire laugh again, Claire who wasn’t Claire, laughing about Nathan who was Natalie. Weird lost its meaning with people like this.

  “So what about Sandra Moser?” Palma asked. She had almost forgotten.

  Claire, who had leaned forward out of the shadows to laugh, leaned back again into the corner. This time her leg did start swinging, and she folded her arms under her breasts.

  “I read the papers,” she said. “It must’ve been grim.” She paused, not for Palma to affirm her assumption, but to collect her thoughts. “I’ve been with her a number of times. She was very sweet, a beautiful body, really wonderful body. She liked to use her mouth a lot; she was very good with it.” Her tone was almost reminiscent. “But Vickie discovered her…and liked her. Dorothy wasn’t too possessive with Vickie. Really, after a while I think she just tolerated whatever it was Vickie was into. Men, women, S&M. Whatever. She knew she couldn’t control her, couldn’t demand any kind of reasonable fidelity of her.