Mercy (21 page)

“You never married?” she said finally.

“Never.”

Again she fell silent. She swung her legs momentarily, like a child, then drew one of them up on the chaise and he caught a flash of her powder blue panties. Powder blue. She drained her glass with this one leg poised between where it had been and where it was going and she laid the empty glass on a small table on the other side of the chaise. She lay down.

“Would you answer me something, honestly, about yourself?”

“All right,” he lied.

“Have you ever had a homosexual experience?”

“No.”

“Ever wanted to?”

“No.”

“You know that story I told you about my aunt?”

“Yes.”

“That wasn’t exactly true, what I said.”

Broussard waited. Bernadine was an arcanum for whom there were no initiates. She knew it, and it horrified her, and made her desperate. “But you told me it was true,” he said.

“It was, but not exactly.”

“Fine.”

“The truth is that when I walked into the room everything was as I said, but I didn’t find a strange man there. It was a woman.”

Broussard swallowed the Stoli in his mouth.

“She was in the chair, but she was completely naked, bending to put on her stockings. She smiled, as I said, and she put her finger to her lips for me to be quiet. But she did it casually, softly, without alarm, as if she had just gotten a baby to sleep in its crib. Nothing in her gestures or her face indicated the least inhibition. It was all perfectly natural.”

“Why did you tell me it was a man?”

“At the last minute I couldn’t do it.”

“What?”

“It was all part of a plan, a scenario. The story was only an introduction.”

“An introduction?”

“To…my own…story.”

Broussard stiffened.

“Well,” she said. She was staring straight out to the sweep of green grass that sloped gently toward the bayou which, in contrast to the manicured and domesticated lawn, lingered along the margins of the property in a shapeless pool like something feral and vaguely dangerous, overgrown with cattails and sharp brambles and gnarls of untamed vines, its black mud a womb for brackish water. “She’s younger than me…I had no idea what I was getting into, what…beauty I had been missing.”

Her voice had changed and the full-throated huskiness of emotion disgusted Broussard, who scarcely could believe his ears.

“I had never known, never suspected, you see, that I could feel such things, tinglings and quiverings, cool and warm waves washing over me as real as water, electrifying me…Things I had never, ever, felt with a man. And the peace, a complete absence of anxiety. I hadn’t imagined touching another woman like that…but…when it came to it I was completely at ease. It is so…right…I…you could never understand how it is. I don’t believe it’s possible for you to understand. I hardly believe it myself.”

Broussard was speechless.

Bernadine Mello smiled once again, but it was not at Dr. Broussard. She smiled at the incomprehensible good fortune that had come to her at this middle age of forty-two, just as her life once more was about to be uprooted by divorce, and the failure of her fourth marriage loomed before her as confirmation yet again of her unloveliness and of the smallness of her worth. She smiled at the memory of only that morning and of the recent weeks when she had made a discovery as earth-moving and inspirational as anything she had ever experienced in adolescence. Everything she had searched for and longed for in her relationships with men, but which had proved to be so heartbreakingly elusive, she had found in another being whose mind and body were a mirror image of her own.

18

I
t was half past seven in the evening when Palma turned into the small Weslayan Plaza shopping center near her home and went into Richard’s Liquors and Fine Wines and bought two large bottles of white Folonari Soave. She went next door to Randall’s and got a couple of chicken breasts, a jar of olives, and a crock of brown mustard. She stood in line oblivious to everyone else around her and thought about Louise Ackley sitting in her dim, smoke-saturated living room drinking beer and grieving over what she had lost and what she had left. They must have seemed like equally empty considerations. Louise Ackley had a great deal to adjust to, and it didn’t look as if she had made a very promising start.

Outside, Palma carried her sack of groceries across the parking lot in the copper glow of the streetlamps that had just come on and were creating a metallic haze in the dusk. She put the wine and groceries in the car and pulled out on Bissonnet, drove through the intersection and turned into a Stop ‘N Go convenience store to get gas from one of the pumps out front. While she held the nozzle in the tank, she continued to think about Louise Ackley. She had been a surprise all the way around. Obviously, she had been hit hard by Samenov’s death, and it seemed to Palma that she had been closer to her former sister-in-law and friend than she had been to her brother. Of course, considering what Palma had learned so far about Dennis Ackley, that was completely understandable. The kind of man who would readily blackmail his sister and his former wife was not exactly a man of great heart. Palma also wondered what it was that Ackley had on the two women that they would continue to fork over a significant amount of their income to keep it quiet.

The automatic cutoff snapped in the gas pump handle, startling her and splashing her with gasoline. She swore, wiped her hands on a pink paper towel she got from a dispenser beside the pump, and walked inside the store to pay.

It was only a few minutes to her house, and a blue evening light was settling in and darkening the trees that lined the street. She parked in the curved drive at the front door, got out, unlocked the door of the house, and shoved it open. Then she returned to the car and wrestled the grocery sacks into her arms and closed the car door with her hip. She went inside the house, closed the house door with her hip also, then walked into the living room, where she turned down the air-conditioning thermostat, and then continued through the dining room and into the kitchen.

Within half an hour she had taken a cold shower and changed into a cotton sundress without underwear and was in the kitchen pouring a glass of Folonari, her damp hair cool as it feathered over the tops of her shoulders. She had intended to grill the chicken breasts, but now she thought it was too late and she was too tired to bother. Standing barefoot at the cabinet, she mixed a green salad with lettuce, yellow and red bell peppers, cucumbers, rings of red onions, and olives. She wondered if Louise Ackley had lied to her about the blackmail. Maybe, despite, her vituperation against her brother, she and Dorothy Samenov were actually supporting him, helping him remain a fugitive. It didn’t seem to make sense, but then Palma had learned a long time ago that “sense” was a relative term. It didn’t look the same to everyone, and even the most twisted mind, the mind guilty of the most unbelievable horrors—she thought of Samenov’s lidless stare—did things because they made “sense” within the context of its reasoning.

When Palma stopped and looked down at what she was doing, a pile of sliced olives, enough for four salads, was heaped in the bed of lettuce in her plate. Wearily, she picked out the surplus and put it in a small glass bowl in the refrigerator. Cutting a thick slice of bakery bread, she buttered it, put it on her plate with the salad, and took it all into the living room and set it down on the floor in front of the television. She didn’t want to think about anything to do with Samenov or Moser while she ate. She grabbed the remote control and flipped it on.

Though she refused to watch sitcoms, she would always watch movies, practically any movie, and be satisfied for at least the length of time it would take her to finish the salad.

She found an old Truffaut film and picked up her glass of wine and took a sip. She put her plate in her lap and leaned back against the front of the sofa, her legs straight out and crossed at the ankle as she listened to the French and read the poorly contrasting captions at the bottom of the screen.

The telephone rang seven minutes later. She automatically punched up the time on the television, punched off the sound, and leaned across and dragged the telephone off the coffee table.

“Hello.”

“This is Sander Grant, FBI, in Quantico. Is this Detective Carmen Palma?”

“Yes, it is.” She swallowed the bite of salad and tried to get out from under the plate and away from the glass without dumping everything on the floor.

“I apologize for calling you at home,” Grant said. “But you said in your application that this would be all right.”

“Sure, it’s fine. I appreciate your doing it.”

“Listen,” Grant’s voice was mellow and casually precise, like a news commentator or public speaker in private conversation. “You’ve got a couple of interesting cases here. Anything new from the labs during the day?”

“Not really, but our primary suspect…”

“Hold on. Excuse me,” Grant interrupted her. “But I don’t want to know anything about your suspects. It could prejudice me as to what I see in the crime scene. It’s best if I read it ‘blind.’ All I want to know is what he did, but I want to know as much as I can about that. Nothing new forensically, then?”

“No. There hasn’t been time.”

“Okay, fine. I want you to keep me posted, too, regarding victimology. I got a good picture of both victims from your report, but it would help to know anything new immediately.” She heard him shuffling papers. “Concentrate on her circle of friends—and any men who are known to several of her friends.” He paused, apparently making notes. “Okay, if anything else comes up, anything you can add to it, call me and fax it up here. I’ve called only to tell you that I’m sending you some material about the profiling process. Articles, papers. I’ve Federal Expressed them so you should have them in the morning before ten o’clock. If you read them it’ll help us communicate.

“I’m going to concentrate on this tonight and tomorrow, and then sometime tomorrow I’ll call you with a preliminary reading. This will only be preliminary. I want to stress that. I’ll make a more complete report later, but I think this is something that will need immediate attention.”

Palma couldn’t argue with that.

“You think this guy’s on a biweekly schedule?”

“Well, I just guessed…both killings occurred on Thursdays, two weeks apart. I’m going to be a little nervous on the eighth.”

“I’m not so sure you’ll have to wait that long. Listen, why don’t you…”

“Wait a minute,” Palma interrupted him. “Why do you say that?”

“I think it would be best if you read the material I’m sending you first. I’ll call you back tomorrow…tomorrow night, probably, and we’ll talk about it.”

“I appreciate it,” Palma said, a little ticked off at the aborted reference.

“No problem. Get a good night’s sleep.”

He was off the phone, and Palma was left looking at a silent television screen. A man and a woman were walking away from the camera down the middle of a wet cobblestone street strewn with damp autumn leaves.

THIRD DAY

19

Wednesday, May 31

P
alma snapped off the alarm clock radio and threw back the covers. She already had hit the snooze button three times and it was now six-fifty. She sat up in bed and knew even before looking in the mirror that her eyes were puffy. She pulled the chemise over her head, tangling her black hair, and slung it off her arm. After fighting the urge to fall back on the pillows she turned and looked at herself in the mirror over her dresser to the left of the bed. Grim. It was going to take something heroic to make her look decent this morning. She crawled out of bed and walked straight to the shower.

While she bathed she tried to get her bearings. Christ. It hadn’t even been forty-eight hours since they had found Dorothy Samenov’s body, and she felt as if she had been at it a week. That was the pace and nature of any case that set them to work against the clock. Time smeared, the body clock went haywire, chronology lost its logic of sequence. She thought about Grant’s call. The man had been brusque, but not ungracious, and in retrospect it had been thoughtful of him to call since he really didn’t have anything to tell her that couldn’t have waited. The only thing he did tell her—that he expected the killer would not wait two weeks before his next hit—he would not explain and had left her feeling more uneasy than before he called.

She turned off the water, opened the shower door, and reached for a towel for her hair, wrapping it in a loose knot on top of her head before she got another towel to dry off. She walked into the bedroom, where she had already plugged in the curlers, and finished drying, then dropped the towel and started rolling her hair. While she was doing this she automatically took stock of her body, turning sideways to look at the profile of her breasts—something she didn’t mind doing while she was rolling her hair and her raised arms gave them a more attractive lift. She looked at her stomach, holding it in as she turned the other way, and checked her high-hipped waist, tightened buttocks. Not too bad, but she worked like hell for it. Then the images of Sandra Moser and Dorothy Samenov flashed into her mind. She thought of the bite marks, of the frenzy that had caused them, and she turned away from the mirror and dressed.

Before she left the house she called Birley, quickly ran over her interview with Louise Ackley, told him she was going to try to see Reynolds after breakfast, and would come in to the office after that to work up her supplements. Then she tried the Radcom offices. Reynolds wasn’t in, but when Palma told his secretary who she was, the woman quickly checked Reynolds’s calendar and set up an appointment for ten o’clock.

When she got to Meaux’s Grille she was two and a half hours later than she normally arrived, and Lauré’s eyes widened as she came in the door.

“Ah, what are the police doing here this late?” she asked, laying down her new copy of
Elle
and smiling, displaying the gold that framed her upper canine and a lower incisor. Lauré, of stumpy stature and the face and hair of a silent-movie heroine, faithfully read the latest French and American fashion magazines. Uninvited, she followed Palma to a table that Falvia had just finished cleaning near the front windows, and the two of them sat opposite each other. Falvia and Alma were busily clearing the dirty tables. The morning had been a busy one.