Mercy Page 26

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  Mancera shook her head. “No. I don’t.”

  “How did Reynolds get involved with Dorothy Samenov?” Palma asked. Gil Reynolds had been all over the place. The guy was becoming a one-man sideshow.

  “That’s the strangest part of all this. We all knew Denise by the name of Kaplan. She changed it from Reynolds after the divorce. Shortly after she disappeared Reynolds entered the scene with Dorothy, who was actively bisexual. It wasn’t unusual for her to take up with a man. But none of us connected him to Denise. Then shortly after that, Kittrie came into the picture. Dorothy was really taken by her. She was rebounding from an affair with another woman, and Reynolds and Kittrie sort of overlapped their relationships with her.”

  Palma found the story amazing. Dorothy Samenov, the pillar of feminist stability, was looking more and more like an emotional derelict, victim of child abuse and husband battering, blackmailed, bisexually promiscuous, the unsuspecting prey of a younger woman whose sexual perversions would qualify for her own chapter in Krafft-Ebing, and, finally, murder victim. She had not had a peaceful life. Unfortunately, Palma had seen more than a few Dorothy Samenovs.

  “How do Reynolds’s sadistic relationships with women fit into this?” Palma asked. Mancera had talked all around it, or maybe all this was prelude.

  Mancera nodded, seeming to have decided that she had brought Palma far enough with the preliminaries.

  “I used to go with a woman named…Terry…She lived with a roommate, nothing sexual, just good friends, close friends. Terry’s roommate was a longstanding S&M partner of Reynolds. Some of it involved Kittrie…and it was bad.”

  “Terry heard it from her roommate and told you.”

  “That’s right. But I’m not going to pass it on. You can talk to the woman yourself. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I don’t like it. For the majority of lesbians whose relationships are monogamous and loving, those women are despicable. The worst thing that ever happened to Dorothy Samenov, and the group, was not Gil Reynolds; it was Vickie Kittrie. There wouldn’t have been any Gil Reynolds without her. He wouldn’t have stayed with Dorothy. She didn’t have a mean streak. She may have been a weak and tormented woman, but she wasn’t mean. She needed love and constancy, not Vickie Kittrie’s schizophrenia.”

  “Why do you suppose the woman I talked with last night didn’t send me to Terry’s roommate in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. Who was it?”

  Palma shook her head. “Who was the roommate?”

  “Louise Ackley.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “I know,” Mancera said, quickly hurrying to mollify Palma, to temper the damage. “I played dumb when you asked about S&M at the office Tuesday, but you caught me off guard. I had to have time to think.”

  “I interviewed Louise after I left there,” Palma said.

  “And how did you find her?”

  “Drunk. In bad shape.”

  Mancera shook her head. “Look,” she said. “I owe you, and I want to help out in this horrible mess if I can. I really do. I’m sorry I’ve given you trouble. Tomorrow night some women are coming over here for drinks. A couple of friends we’ve known for years in another city are in town and we’re just going to have some people over. Why don’t you come? These things are very casual and newcomers are commonplace and introduced only by their first names. No one has to know anything else about you. I’ll make sure Terry’s here and that you have the opportunity to talk to her in private. No one will notice, no one will care. It’ll be simple and easy, and it’ll give you a chance to meet some of the other women—without the shield—yours or theirs.”

  Palma didn’t hesitate. “Fine, I’ll take you up on it,” she said. “But my occupation can’t be an ‘open’ secret. I really don’t want anyone to know but you and Bessa and Terry.”

  “Agreed,” Mancera said, and she smiled a warm, comfortable smile that Palma immediately liked, and then made her slightly uncomfortable.

  28

  When Palma stopped at a service station on Woodway and called Louise Ackley’s home in Bellaire, no one answered the phone. Thinking she might have returned to work, though it would have been unusual, it seemed to Palma, to have returned on a Thursday, she called Maritime Guaranty. But Ackley had not shown up.

  Palma waited a moment. She had to talk to Ackley. She wanted to know every sexual twist in the Reynolds repertoire, every quirk and warp in his mind, before she talked to him again. If she had to she would hole up with Louise in her grim little house and buy her as many cases of beer as it took to get the information out of her or, if necessary, she would pay for a twenty-four-hour detox, or however the hell long it took, to get the woman to the point that she could speak either loosely or lucidly about Reynolds’s sadistic games. After what she had learned from Claire, and now from Mancera, Palma was sure that somewhere in those sick diversions she was going to find traces, like behavioral fingerprints, of the deaths of Sandra Moser and Dorothy Samenov.

  She put the quarter back in the slot and called again, but there still was no answer. She wanted to drive to Ackley’s at that very moment, but she was already close to overextending herself. Kittrie’s hair samples, which were sitting in the car a few feet away, should already be at the lab. She had the information from Grant’s call early in the night, Claire’s interview late in the night, and then Mancera’s interview this morning. All of it needed to be put into supplements. It would be stupid to string herself out any further.

  Once again Palma drove back downtown on Memorial Drive, past the joggers sweating in the hazy, late-morning heat as they pounded, loped, plodded, and fast-walked along the paths that ran between the winding drive and the pines of the densely wooded Memorial Park that ran nearly two miles from the West Loop toward downtown.

  She thought of Vickie Kittrie. It had been a distinct surprise to Palma, as well as to Helena Saulnier, that the ginger-haired girl who seemed to evoke such protective instincts in Saulnier, had been—if Claire and Mancera could be believed—the source of so much menace. What kind of psychology lay beneath the freckles of that girl from the small East Texas town, and what had her life been like that at so young an age she should know so much about the dark side of eroticism? Palma wondered, too, if Claire had been totally honest with her. Or perhaps the more appropriate question would be, which parts of the things she told Palma were “adjusted” to lay on one more misleading flourish to an already baroque investigation? She would not be surprised to learn from someone else that Claire’s “lark” had actually been in earnest. But did it matter if the woman had lied to her? It had gotten her this far, one step deeper into the brackish well of sadomasochism.

  She slowed the Audi as she passed under the Gulf Freeway downtown, made a quick left on Bagby, another quick left on Prairie, and then right on Riesner to the police station. She parked her car on the third floor and walked over to the crime lab where she filled out the appropriate form to submit Kittrie’s hair samples into the evidence file of Samenov’s case and requested the comparison tests with the unknown hairs. Then she went outside and walked down the hot asphalt drive and around the end of the administration building, the expressway across the loop of bayou to her left throwing off heat and noise which she tried to ignore as she thought of the revelations awaiting her in the person of Louise Ackley.

  The foyer of the station was crowded with what seemed to be an anachronistic gathering of two tribal families of hippies, their sorely tried women keeping a very loose rein on half a dozen ill-begotten waifs while three of their men with drooping mustaches, bandanna-wrapped heads, and powerful odors argued with several officers about the validity of the inspection stickers on their “vehicles.”

  Birley was not in the office, having already checked in and left her a message that he was going to Andrew Moser’s house to talk to Sandra’s mother. The children were at school, and Andrew had said that his mother-in-law would know where the
names and telephone numbers of Sandra’s doctors were. He had asked only that Birley not make the request over the telephone, that he go see the old woman in person.

  Leeland was checked out to the University of Houston, and Cushing was running around interviewing hairdressers.

  Palma got another cup of coffee. She had drunk three at Mancera’s and she knew she would have to drink them all day long to stay conscious. Her eyes felt grainy, and when she flipped on the CRT she had to squint until she got used to the glare. She dug her notebook out of her purse, turned back through the pages until she got to the point where she had interviewed Kittrie and Saulnier, and started typing.

  She typed straight through until she reached the end of her notes with Mancera’s conversation, and then immediately printed out her two copies. As she was leaving Frisch’s copy in his supplement tray she also checked out, leaving word that she was going back to talk to Louise Ackley.

  By two-thirty she had checked a car out of the motor pool and was on the Gulf Freeway again, doubling back through the interchanges to the Southwest Freeway. She exited at Shepherd Drive and had a BLT at the 59 Diner where she had talked to Andrew Moser. Then she was back in the car, back on the freeway and on her way to Bellaire.

  It was almost three-thirty in the afternoon when she drove up in front of Louise Ackley’s house and looked up the sidewalk to the opened front door. She couldn’t see if the cat was in the lawn chair on the concrete stoop. She picked up the hand radio from the front seat as she got out of the car and locked it. She hoped Louise would not be passed out in her bedroom, unable to answer the door, but it wouldn’t matter. She had already made up her mind she was going in anyway.

  The cat wasn’t in the lawn chair, but he had left behind a fresh kill. A half-grown rat that had been killed for the pleasure of it, rather than to eat, was lying on the cloth cushion on the seat of the chair. The rat had a bobbed tail, chewed off close to its rump, but the rest of him was perfectly intact. The only visible signs of violence done to him were rumpled patches of damp hair where the cat had toyed with him. She had seen cats do this, having morbidly wounded and immobilized the rat, they keep it near at hand, seeing its feeble struggles to escape as part of a grim game for their amusement, and they bite and chew the rat as whim and fancy takes them. It could go on for hours, an afternoon, or most of a night, but when the rat dies they lose interest.

  She looked at the rat for a moment, started to pick up the cushion, then changed her mind and turned and stepped up to the screen door. After several knocks there was still no answer, and Palma reached for the handle as she had done the first time she was there and half expected to hear Ackley’s hoarse admonition. Opening the screen door, she stepped inside. “Ms. Ackley.” She stood just inside the living room. Nothing had changed. There were three empty beer bottles sitting on the coffee table, the ashtray on the end table at the left of the sofa was still overflowing with butts and ashes, and the inside of the windowsill behind the sofa was still stacked with cords of amber beer bottles. Even the oscillating fan was still sitting in the same spot in the middle of the living room floor, droning back and forth, moving the stale air, occasionally disturbing a dust ball along the edges of the wooden floor.

  Then she smelled the feces, and a ripple of fear tripped her heart and set it pounding, and instantly she was short of breath. Her hand went into her purse for the SIG-Sauer and the surging adrenaline sharpened her perceptions. She let her purse slide noiselessly off her shoulder to the floor, as she carefully pulled back the slide on the SIG, easing it softly through the cocking snap. She moved to the wall across from the sofa and to the right of the front door and the chair where she had sat facing Ackley. She was only a foot away from the door frame that led into the bedroom where Ackley’s drunken companion had groaned on the squeaking bed springs. The smell of feces was stronger here, and tinged with an unmistakable mustiness. Palma wanted to back out of the house and call for assistance, but she couldn’t be sure anything was wrong.

  She thought about the street. What cars had been out there? How far down were they? Were they new? Old? No flags went up, but it was no comfort. She could see a few feet away into the kitchen, a dinette against the wall with an open jar of strawberry jam sitting all alone on the bare table. Past that an opened door to the left would probably be a bathroom, beyond that at the end of a short hall would be another bedroom. Christ. She took a deep breath and eased her head around the corner to the bedroom and saw the foot of the bed, the covers wadded and limp from the humidity. She heard flies. Next to her face the paint on the door frame was chipped and dirty and tacky to the touch. She waited. The house was absolutely silent, except for the flies. She eased around the corner, through the bedroom doorway, and stopped once more. Then she leaned in.

  Louise Ackley was lying on her back on the bed, her filthy T-shirt wrenched up above her naked hips, one leg cocked, her arms flung out to either side. Half her face was gone, blown up against the bloody wall behind the bed, and her one remaining eye, pooched out of its socket a little, seemed to be on its own, trying to look in Palma’s direction through a welter of flies. Ackley’s midsection and pelvis were arched over a pillow under the small of her back, and the blood that had gushed from her in the moments after the gunshot had been trapped on the opposite side of the pillow so that her head and shoulders lay in a darkening pudding, abuzz with a swarm of flies. The wall was spattered nearly to the ceiling. More flies, working Ackley’s inner thighs below the dark patch of pubic hair, had found the feces.

  Palma stared, her lips open, teeth clenched, breathing through her teeth, not wanting to close her mouth or she would taste the odor. Suicide? She didn’t see the weapon. To her right the closet door was open. She checked it and eased around the foot of the bed, looking on the floor for the weapon. It wasn’t there. She glanced at the second bedroom door that opened into the hallway and looked through the opposite doorway into the kitchen, this time toward the cabinets and the sinks. There were some unwashed pots on the countertops, and an opened can of chili. She moved to the side of the bed and looked for the weapon in the grume and twisted covers. She didn’t see it. Jesus Christ. No suicide weapon? Jesus Christ. And her heart hammered even harder, and she felt as vulnerable as if she knowingly had walked naked into the room with the killer. Then reflexively her mind registered the darkening blood. The hit was not recent, not within the last several hours. It was a rational judgment she couldn’t bring herself to trust.

  Still breathing through her teeth, she skirted the foot of the bed again and stepped into the hallway. She made her way through the hot, stinking air trapped in the inner hallway, and checked the bathroom. Ackley kept house like a bag lady, but the place wasn’t ransacked. A hall closet was open and empty. She turned inside the second bedroom and suddenly recoiled, falling back and catching herself against the door frame, bringing down the SIG and leveling it at the man on the floor. He was facedown, naked, one arm tucked under his body, the other flung out to his side and clutching a pair of stained jockey shorts. She saw the relatively small entrance wound in the thick black hair of the back of his head and knew that his face, resting just over the edge of a filthy area rug that had soaked up most of his blood like a paper towel, would look something like Louise Ackley’s. Abruptly she came to her senses and jerked the SIG around and locked her eyes on the last closet in the house. It was shut, not ajar even a little. She swallowed without closing her lips, which were dry now, and started to step across the dead man, but stopped. Jesus. She knew better than that. She backed out of the room, keeping her eyes on the bedroom door, backed down the hall to the living room, her legs tingling, wanting to buckle as she fumbled for her hand radio tangled in the strap of her purse. Moving to one side of the living room where she could keep her eyes on the bedroom door at the end of the hallway, she radioed for assistance.

  29

  “You’re actually a little pissed about this, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Bernadine.
”

  “You are. You’re…restrained.”

  “I’m always restrained. It’s second nature to me, part of my training.” He loathed the fact that she was amused with him.

  “Yes, but you’ve never ‘seemed’ restrained. Now you do. This whole thing is upsetting to you.”

  “Bernadine, do you think I’ve never before encountered lesbian relationships?” It was true that he had lesbian clients, but then he had not been having an affair with them for the last five years. It made a difference, by God. Dispassionate objectivity was for analysis. Bernadine was a lover, for God’s sake.

  “Not like this,” she laughed.

  They were drinking, as always with Bernadine—this time she had her beloved scotch—and she had chosen to sit in the other armchair opposite him rather than taking her place on the chaise. She had never done this before. She had always liked the chaise for much the same reasons that he had liked it, because it introduced an aura of seductiveness. The posture was suggestive, and Bernadine knew how to make the most of a provocative attitude.

  “We’ve discussed your lovers at other times,” he said.

  “Not my lesbian lovers,” she persisted.

  She was absolutely right, but he couldn’t possibly let her know that it would make any difference to him, even though he was reeling.

  “Surely you understand after all these years, Bernadine, that it doesn’t matter. If it’s significant to you, if it’s important, I’ll help you explore it, try to help you understand yourself in light of what it means to you.” It almost gagged him to talk like that, especially with Bernadine. They had long ago gotten past this kind of thing, and now she was wanting him to act like a psychiatrist again. After all these years of intimacy, it was too much like role-playing. He detested the idea of it. But it was typical of Bernadine not to see the difficulty of what she was proposing. She was wanting to turn back the clock, to start from the beginning because she thought she had discovered some earthshaking truth by making love with another woman. She thought it was the answer. Bernadine had always tried to find the answer to her problems in the person of someone else. She never really understood, or accepted, the idea that she had to look inward.