Mercy (32 page)

“Up to a point? Really?” Palma said. “What point would that be, if homicide isn’t it?”

Mancera looked at Palma, her eyes narrowing, wanting to be understood. “Can you imagine walking around with a psychological hump on your back the size of another person? That’s what it’s like, you know, being bisexual or lesbian. You’re not really allowed to be an honest person, not if you want a shot at the mainstream way of life. You have to hide half of what you’re all about if you want your talents and abilities to be taken at face value. Otherwise, you have to carry that hump around on your back and you soon realize that, for all practical purposes, the hump is all that people see.”

Mancera’s anger was quiet but intense. With the wisdom of a survivor, she had learned to control it, to disguise it like she had disguised her sexuality. She smiled softly, icily, and placed a long-fingered hand on her graceful throat.

“What society doesn’t realize is that we’re in the mainstream anyway. We’ve learned the value of invisibility. We’re doctors and lawyers and teachers and executives and real estate agents…and detectives. But we’re carrying a psychological hump on our shoulders, and the only time we can get rid of it is when we’re together. That’s what this group was all about. It was the only place we could relax because we were all alike. And the only reason the group was successful was because we were secret; we were protected.”

Mancera picked up her coffee cup, but the coffee was cold and she set it down again. She looked at Palma. “How could we keep quiet? There was a chance you’d catch the killer; there was no chance society was going to restore our status once we’d lost our anonymity.”

“Unfortunately,” Palma said, “there’s no chance we’ll catch the killer either, if you don’t cooperate with us.”

Mancera got up from her chair. “I need some fresh coffee. How about you?”

Palma wanted to slam her back down in her chair, but checked her temper and followed Mancera into the kitchen.

Mancera walked around the corner of the bar and poured her cold coffee down the sink. “You’ve got to promise me my background won’t be given to the papers if all this comes out. I don’t want my name in the papers, with or without that kind of appellation.” She picked up the coffeepot and filled Palma’s cup, and then her own.

“I can’t promise that,” Palma said. “The case files are open to the homicide division, all the detectives working the case, certain ones in the administration. Right now there are four detectives. But if anyone else gets killed, a lot more people are going to want to dip into it.”

“You think it’s Gil Reynolds?”

“I have no idea,” Palma said. “I mean, all I have on him is a story that he likes to beat up women. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make him special.”

Mancera looked out to the palmettos past Palma’s shoulder. Palma could see the irises in her eyes shrinking; she could see contact lenses.

Mancera swallowed. “Denise Reynolds divorced her husband because he was a batterer,” she said. “She put up with it for years until he did his thing in front of their sons. The boys were in junior high, and one night Reynolds hammered her so badly he put her in the hospital.”

“That would have been in the files,” Palma said. “It wasn’t.”

“She claimed she was mugged, and she stuck with the story. Everyone knew it wasn’t true, but she clung to that line like a life raft. But when she got out of the hospital, she divorced him for irreconcilable differences.” Mancera looked at her cup, and rotated it. She appeared to be particularly affected.

“But before Denise divorced him, for maybe a year before, she had belonged to our group. More than a few of us are battered wives.”

Mancera stopped and regarded Palma a moment as if trying to decide how to express herself.

“I assume you’re neither bisexual nor lesbian,” Mancera said. “I don’t know how well informed you are, but I can assure you that there’s no such thing as ‘the gay woman’ any more than there’s ‘the heterosexual woman.’ The term encompasses as many moral philosophies and lifestyles and political views as does the word ‘heterosexual.’ We’re not a single-minded entity.”

She hesitated slightly. “I’ve known since my first sexual stirrings that I preferred women as sexual partners. I had a normal, happy childhood, no mental or physical abuse. I love both my parents and my siblings, and the love is reciprocated. I’m comfortable with the way I am, despite the fact that professionally I’m forced to live in a world of pretense, appearing to be flattered by the attention I get from the men I work with while being careful not to betray the real pleasure I derive from being around the women.

“But my preference for women as sexual partners is a private thing,” Mancera insisted. “As all sexual interactions should be. It doesn’t dictate my politics or my religion or my morals. It doesn’t run my life. It’s only a part of it, like my race or my job or my age or my height. Actually, if I weren’t compelled to play an absurd game of charades to assure nonprejudicial treatment, the issue of my sexual preference would drop way down on the scale of importance in my life. It shouldn’t be a big deal. There are other values of moral concern that are more important.”

Palma did not interrupt the pause created when Mancera stopped to take a sip of coffee. She didn’t know where Mancera was going with her explanation, but at least she was talking, and that was often half the battle of a good interview.

“I mentioned abuse a while ago,” Mancera continued, leaning her forearm on the counter next to the coffeepot. “More than a few women are lesbians because of having been abused as children or wives. A lot of women will vehemently deny that, but their denial has more to do with feminist politics than reality. They don’t want to attribute their sexual orientation to a reaction against what men have done to them. That would put men in the driver’s seat again: lesbians being what they are because of men. They insist that their sexual orientation is a matter of free choice. And they don’t like the term ‘lesbian.’ They prefer ‘gay.’ They feel that ‘lesbian’ carries too many derogatory connotations from old Victorian prejudices.”

She shook her head. “I’ve known middle-aged women who had their first lesbian experience after they’d divorced battering husbands and were totally repulsed by anything male. Still others choose a lesbian lifestyle strictly as a political choice, their answer to ‘patriarchal heterosexism.’ There’s no one reason, no one answer.

“But for Denise Reynolds, turning to women for love was as much a matter of an acquired repulsion for men as anything else. A matter of sanity. She had to find kindness somewhere, genuine love, and she happened to find it with other women. There was no threat there, and there was hope for happiness. Then Gil found out about it and had the boys taken away from her on moral grounds. They’re living with relatives now.”

“Where’s Denise?”

“She disappeared.”

Palma frowned. “What do you mean? She just wanted to start a new life?”

“We don’t know. At the time, she was living alone, so she’d been gone a week or so before anyone really checked into it.”

“It was reported to the police?”

Mancera nodded. “Missing persons. But nothing ever turned up. They found a suitcase missing from her place and a lot of her clothes and money. Her car was missing. It just never came to anything. I think the police believe she snapped after the boys were taken away from her. There simply was no evidence of foul play.”

“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

W
hen 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.