Mercy Page 5

  “I went to a movie and got home around eleven o’clock; I was exhausted. Paul was still out and Emily had already gotten the children into bed. I took a cold shower, and when I got out I dried quickly and lay down on the bed, still damp. The windows were open, and I could smell the woods after last night’s rain. I went to sleep.”

  He looked at the toes of her stockinged feet, the little tips of slightly darker nylon through which he could see her pedicured nails. Ankles as slim as a gazelle’s. The dress was a shirtwaist of silk or rayon, a pastel rose so sheer it required a full slip. Even so, it settled over her body with telling detail.

  “It could just as easily have been fifteen seconds as fifteen hours. I was oblivious.”

  She stopped again. After a quiet interval he asked, “What happened? Why this…long sleep?”

  The question was rote. When they told him they had experienced something for the first time, an emotion or thought or physical sensation, he asked them why they believed it happened. They pondered this question with serious self-indulgence, gratified that someone wanted to know how they felt, that someone cared why they did the things they did, even if he was being paid to do it.

  “I haven’t slept like that since I was ten.”

  Broussard’s eyes moved from her rose thighs to her face. She hadn’t addressed his question.

  “Ten?”

  She turned her hands over and placed them palms down, fingers spread slightly, the gesture of a woman suddenly wary, as if the chaise had trembled inexplicably. But she was not frightened; her face betrayed nothing.

  “Since you were ten?” he prompted.

  Mary Lowe had been coming to Dr. Broussard for a little over two months, five days a week. He hadn’t made much progress with her. From the beginning she had been a resistant client, but Dr. Broussard tolerated her recalcitrance, even overlooked the bleak prognosis for success. After all, he was not a strict interpreter of the classic forms of psychoanalysis, and if this woman did not want to cooperate he wasn’t going to be rigidly demanding. He already had told both Mary and her husband that the type of therapy she had selected could be time-consuming and protracted. He would let that prove to be so. In the meantime, he was more than content to listen to her recitations which, up to now, had been evasive and vacuous ramblings, a waste of time. But only a waste of time for her. For his own part, he could not have wished for a more pleasurable hour, sitting quietly just out of her peripheral view with the freedom and leisure to let his eyes travel during the course of every sixty-minute session from one end of her long body to the other, imagining the exact texture and tones of the flesh beneath the sheer rose veil.

  Dr. Dominick Broussard was forty-eight.

  Her hands gradually relaxed, and she turned them over once again, palms up, fingers curled gently without tension.

  “When I was nine,” she said, “I had a doll from Dresden. My father was in the army, and had been stationed there…or in Germany, anyway, and he brought her back to me. She was porcelain, her face was. I imagine she was expensive, though that didn’t occur to me at the time. But thinking back, remembering the delicacy of her features, the detail, the luminous quality of her face, she must have been. She was blond, too, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world. The most beautiful.”

  Her tone of voice caused Dr. Broussard to focus his attention on her face. She possessed an exemplary beauty, a firm jawline with high cheekbones and a subtly asymmetric mouth which he found especially appealing because of a small hint of a pucker at the corner of one side. She had a shallow, but distinct, dimple above her upper lip, a fashion model’s straight nose, and large gray-blue eyes which she lightly shaded about with a russet shadow that gave them a soulful appearance. Her hair was blond, not the strawy, bleach-punished white of the beauty parlor, but rather the thick, butter-rich blond that occurs only as a genetic gift. Today she wore it pulled back in a loose knot, a style which accented the beguiling qualities of her features.

  He found her so wonderfully appealing that he happily would have continued seeing her had she come only to lie on the chaise in silence, staring out at the sun-dappled grounds for an hour before departing in silence. In fact, the idea of that scenario was so appealing to him that he played it out in his imagination: a psychoanalyst has a beautiful client who comes to him three times a week, not to recite her fears and anxieties and to have them analyzed and explicated and demythologized, but to share her silence and secrecy, and through them, perhaps, to share her myths as well. The analysand becomes the analyst, and the analyst, the analysand. The psychoanalyst does not help the woman re-create herself through the emblems of her own words, but rather she re-creates him through the wise compassion of her silence.

  But she did speak, and just now, for the first time in over forty hours of consultation, she had introduced the subject of her childhood. Over the years he had heard the childhood stories of many women. There were not many happy ones. After all, they came to him because they had problems, and many of their problems were, tragically, rooted in childhood. Perhaps the most depressing reality he had had to wrestle with in his profession was the banality of his clients’ problems. Over the years he had treated hundreds upon hundreds of complaints, the same complaints again and again and again: alcohol and drug abuse; anxiety-based disorders—phobias and obsessive-compulsive neuroses; mood disorders (my God, he could have made a career of depression alone); promiscuity; psychogenic disorders—anorexia, bulimia, ulcers; a plethora of sexual dysfunctions…But these were not problems, they were only symptoms. Their cause was something else, something more complex than the symptoms, more traumatic. Like a psychic craven, this thing cowered in the deepest fissures of the client’s unconscious and sent emissaries—the symptoms—up to the surface of consciousness to harass the bewildered client on his behalf. Like an unsuspecting woman looking into a two-way mirror, the client sees only her own reflection, her own pain, and blames only herself for all that she sees. It was Dr. Broussard’s role to break the mirror and to reveal the entity on the other side. It was not a role he always enjoyed, nor was he always successful.

  “Actually, I’d gotten the doll when I was five,” she said. “They’d just divorced.”

  Dr. Broussard checked the tiny red light on his tape recorder across the room.

  “He drank.” She paused. “He was a very handsome alcoholic, and I loved him without reservation. A child can do that, once, anyway. I don’t remember anything…no scenes, no screams, no quarrels. Nothing like that. But she told me about them later, and she showed me scars, which she said he’d made. I don’t know if he did.”

  “Do you believe she lied to you about it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a trace of impatience. “I just don’t know that he did it. And I never got to see for myself because we ran away. We left him in the middle of the night, in Georgia, in a little town near Savannah. She wouldn’t stop until sometime the next morning when we pulled off the highway onto a farm road. She made me stay awake while she went to sleep. When I finally woke her, it was early in the afternoon. We bought some barbecue at a roadside stand and kept driving. We didn’t stop until it was night again, and we were somewhere just inside the Mississippi state line.

  “And then for a year we lived like Gypsies while mother went through a series of waitressing and clerk jobs, staying for a little while in one place and then another and then moving on, dozens and dozens of cheap apartments, walk-up rooms, ‘tourist court’ motels, different ones all over the South. Mother liked to call it ‘Dixie.’ God, I’ve forgotten how many dirty rooms we stayed in, but I’ve never forgotten how they smelled. Disinfectant. Uric ammonia in the stale mattresses. The sour odors of other people’s sweat and intimacies. At nights she would sob in the dark, and I would hold the Dresden doll, listening to her pitiful whimpering, breathing the smells of those stained mattresses…I don’t know what she was crying about; she was the one who left.”

  Broussard looked at Mary Lo
we’s feet, her right one drawn back, the stocking wrinkling slightly across the top of her ankle. “You don’t seem to have very much sympathy for your mother,” he said, and looked at her face. She had turned her head a little away from him so that he saw her profile from an acute angle, what the artists call a profile perdu, only the outline of her cheek and chin.

  “I missed him so much,” she said, ignoring his question. “Sometimes, in those sweaty beds at nights, the thought would come into my head that all my internal organs were slowly detaching themselves from one another. When I held my breath I thought I could feel it happening, things pulling away, stretching, little gummy strings of me getting thinner and thinner, about to snap. I would grow light-headed, terrified that I would suddenly blow apart and all the tiny, unrecognizable pieces of me would zing off in all directions of the universe. They would never find all of me. There wouldn’t be anything of me left for someone to love.”

  She stopped. He could tell from the corner of the one eye visible to him that she was squinting slightly, remembering.

  “I would lie awake in the suffocating darkness of those nights…waiting for that idea to come into my head, dreading it.”

  Broussard no longer empathized with these stories. He had taught himself not to participate, merely to listen. His understanding of her story was purely intellectual and associative; he did not actually feel her pain or turn morose under the burdens of her childish loneliness. He hadn’t always been so detached, but after twice succumbing to a nervous breakdown himself, he had learned that to help his clients he had to cauterize his own natural inclination to take their somber stories to heart. Like Odysseus, he had to lash himself to the mast of objectivity to endure the melancholy songs of broken women, songs that in the past had so easily seduced him. Still, even now, he often found them bewitching.

  Broussard believed that these stories were elaborate biographies, fabrics of the imagination into the warp and woof of which were woven fine threads of fantasy and reality. Every individual fabric had to have a proper mixture of these fibers to be successful, to give the lives they represented the stability of the one and the creativity of the other. But sometimes when the tale is told, when the fabric was taken from the loom, the storyteller discovered that she had so skillfully intertwined her strands that she could no longer distinguish between them, and what she was had become indiscernible from what she was not. It was Dr. Broussard’s task, an often arduous and tedious one, to help the storyteller unravel the fabric of her imagination.

  He was a man of sincere demeanor. He knew that; it was something he cultivated. He owed it to his clients, he thought, to present them with a personality that was receptive to their stories, that did not treat their desperation lightly. Just short of six feet, he cut a handsome figure with a naturally well-developed upper torso which he kept trim with only a modicum of weight management. His complexion was dusky—he didn’t have to punish himself in the sun to look healthy—and his hair was thick and wavy, graying at the temples in such a way that he believed it would be difficult to improve upon. He had it clipped slightly, but frequently, so that he never had that awkward appearance of having recently visited the barber. His nails were manicured. His wardrobe was expensive, but not flamboyant, tending toward the rich, sober constancy of European fashion.

  “These feelings of panic,” he dutifully persisted. “How long did they last?” He felt a loose cuticle on his ring finger and unobtrusively took nail clippers out of his pocket and began carefully to nip at the little shred of horny flesh while she continued.

  “And you know what I remember?” she asked, again disregarding his query. “‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ Elvis Presley. Jesus. I don’t remember if it was on the radio or a record player or what. I was only six or seven. I wouldn’t have remembered the song either, except that she never let me forget it. Even after she remarried she would hum that song, or play it on the record player when he wasn’t there. I don’t know. You would have thought she would have wanted to forget it if it reminded her…I never hear that song that it doesn’t bring back the memory of all those strange, dirty rooms in all those ‘Dixie’ towns. We never stayed in any of them long enough to be anything more than strangers.”

  She stopped. Dr. Broussard was quiet, finishing his cuticle, and giving her time. But she was through. He could tell by her mouth, which was her most expressive feature, that she was not going to pursue this any further. He doubted that she realized that she had reached a crucial juncture, or maybe she did and that was why she had stopped. And yet she seemed unmoved. She had spoken as if she had been reading from a book, as if the words had been someone else’s.

  “What happened to your father?” He unobtrusively folded up the clippers and put them away. The question might have worked, though he had never been able to coax her.

  Mary Lowe didn’t move or answer. She raised her right hand and looked at her watch. It was small and delicate with an annulus of tiny diamonds around the dial. She wore it with the face on the underside of her wrist.

  “It’s five o’clock,” she said. She sat up and swung her legs around on the chaise facing him, her knees together, her stockinged feet spread apart to straddle her shoes which were side-by-side on the floor. Raising her arms she tucked at the strands of flax that had strayed loose at the nape of her neck. She bent down to slip on her shoes, and Dr. Broussard watched her breasts fill the top of her scoop-necked dress. She immediately looked up as if sensing what he was doing and met his gaze. He did not try to dissemble, nor did she pretend to be unaware or embarrassed or angered. Instead, she returned to her shoes, letting him look while she finished and maybe, he thought, he hoped, wishing for some sign of complicity, taking a little longer than was necessary.

  “We made good progress,” he said as she sat up again. “It gets easier with time.”

  She stood and smoothed her dress across the flat of her stomach. “Wonderful,” she said without feeling, looking at him as he stood also, putting his notepad facedown on his desk to conceal the fact that it was blank. She turned away and picked up her purse from the antique Oriental table near the door. Stepping around behind her, he reached for the doorknob to let her out, placing his left hand at the small of her back, flattening it out to touch as much of her as he could.

  “See you tomorrow, then,” he said, feeling a stirring of excitement as he cupped his fingers to the curve of her torso. She allowed this, neither stepping forward nor turning slightly to finesse a disengagement. She hesitated a moment. He thought she was going to speak, but then she moved through the door and was gone.

  5

  The four of them stood in the chill of the bedroom with the naked and funereally posed Dorothy Samenov, who stared up into eternity from startled, lidless eyes, who would go to her grave wide awake, unable to receive that last token gesture that modern men have never exorcised from their archaic past—the closing of their eyes against the awesome unknown. Palma’s analytic focus was tested by the pale, lacerated body of this lonely woman upon the cold sheet. As they stood in a circle and talked, Palma was constantly aware of Samenov’s waxy, recumbent form in her peripheral vision, as if she were waiting patiently for them to redeem her from humiliation. Her death had cost her more than her life, and the pitifully meek gesture of her politely folded hands seemed to be all that she had been allowed to salvage of her dignity.

  Palma had seen enough in her four years in homicide to recognize the distinctions between the particularly intense malevolence of sexual homicides as compared to homicides of other kinds. At first all killings appeared the same insofar as they were expositions of violence. The wounds might vary, but the energy that produced them had a common denominator. Yet the characteristics of sexual homicides quickly distinguished themselves. Though she might forget the details of the hundreds of shootings and stabbings and stranglings she would see during the course of her career, she would never forget the sexual homicides, not even the smallest minutiae. Nor would she forget the eerie
intuition she had when she entered the presence of these victims for the first time, as if the mind that produced the horror had lingered behind with the corpse to await its final pleasure: observing the reasonable mind’s revulsion at its crime.

  The question was one of the division of labors. If the cases were related, and they all believed they were, then Cushing and Leeland were, in a very real sense, behind in their homework. It was decided that the two detectives would stay with Birley, who would take them through the scene and compare its details with those in the case of Sandra Moser two weeks earlier. When it came time for the body to go to the morgue, Cushing and Leeland would follow and attend the autopsy. Birley would continue to go over the scene with LeBrun. Palma, having done most of the interviewing for the first killing, would interview Vickie Kittrie. When Cushing and Leeland got back to the station downtown, they would have to read the report and supplements on the Moser case. After that, the four of them would get together and compare notes.

  Leaving them in the bedroom, Palma passed Wendell Barry coming back in, and walked into the living room where the two patrolmen were keeping their distance from the back of the house. She supposed they had done their ogling of the naked woman before she got there and were maintaining this uncharacteristic lack of curiosity for her sake. Sometimes she ran into a peculiar kind of chivalry among the younger men, especially among the patrolmen who didn’t often see naked dead women. If the victim was sexually attractive, they were startled to find that death didn’t necessarily change anything in that regard, and the inappropriateness of their unexpected arousal could be distinctly disconcerting. Some of them became grave or formal or aloof, or simply stayed out of her way as if they were somehow accomplices with the offender by virtue of their sex and their own poorly controlled chemistry. It took them a while to learn to ignore it, to shut it out, and when they couldn’t do that, to joke about it. There were a lot of ways to handle it, but you couldn’t afford to take it to heart. Not every time.