Mercy (42 page)

Grant studied her and nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”

They retraced their steps along the broad hallway, then down the sweep of stairs, Grant turning off the lights behind them so that darkness trailed after them at a distance like a wary black dog, and the huge home gradually went dark until there was nothing left but the lighted portico as they drove over the crunching cinders and out into the street.

Again they were on Memorial Drive, the rain slackening to a drifting mist. The digital clock on the dashboard said 9:50, as Grant loosened his tie and sat back in his seat in silence once more. She wondered what he was thinking, but she was no more inclined to ask him than she guessed he would be inclined to tell her. She accelerated and pushed the car beyond the speed limit, past the wooded estates of the Duchesne Academy on the left and then St. Mary’s Seminary on their right, heading toward the West Loop.

Grant looked out the window, and Palma nursed her own thoughts, beginning to wonder what in the hell she was thinking, being so arch with him. If she thought she was being smart, she was making a big mistake. Even if she felt she was justified on a personal level, it sure as hell wasn’t justified from a professional perspective. She was defeating the very purpose for which she had wanted him to come down in the first place, and for which she needed him. And she knew men. If she didn’t pick his brain herself, if she couldn’t make him feel comfortable sharing his insights with her, then it would be very easy for her to find herself cut out of the information loop altogether on this thing. It would be only natural for him to share most of the substance of his observations with Frisch, falling back on the bureaucratic safety net of “procedure.” She had seen it happen before. And she couldn’t blame anyone but herself if she let this slip out of her hands. Christ.

“It’s almost ten o’clock,” she said. “You want to get something to eat? I guess you haven’t had anything since lunch.” She tried to keep her voice as neutral as possible, no lingering inflections of impatience or feminine wile.

“Sure, something to eat would be good,” he said.

“There’s a pretty good diner on the way downtown. The food’s good and the coffee’s guaranteed.”

He looked at her. “Guaranteed to what?”

Did she detect an edge of sarcasm? Did she give a shit? She tried to put a little breeze in her voice without choking on it.

“Guaranteed to keep you awake long enough to eat a piece of Mom’s American apple pie, if you don’t mind Mom being a bachelor and the American being Polish.”

Grant smiled. “Sure. Let’s see what you call Houston coffee.”

Meaux’s Grille had settled into the nighthawk time of late night, coming up on the hours when a different kind of people moved quietly into the almost empty diners and truck stops and grills that never closed. These were coffee-and-cigarette people, the kind who seemed to carry old regrets in the pouches under their eyes like unforgivable sins, whose unblinking, early-morning stares were testimonies to their fear of sleep and its companion ghosts. These were private people, the strange few for whom loneliness was a desirable thing, the better portion of lives of uncertain value.

They took a booth by one of the front windows that looked out to the glistening street and the huge catalpa tree with broad, dripping leaves where Palma had parked the car. The night shift at Meaux’s was Salvadoran: a cook who looked like the inevitable twisted heavy in all the Mexican movies she had seen in the barrio as a girl, a busboy who was beautiful enough actually to have been a movie star, and a waitress named Lupe who had extraordinary, straight white teeth and who had tearfully confided to Palma late one night when the place was empty, except for them, that of all the people in her guerrilla unit that had roamed the mountains around Chalatenango, she had been the best, the absolute best, with the piano wire.

They each ate a blue plate special with a minimum of conversation, and then Lupe brought them fresh coffee and a generous wedge of apple pie for Grant, who ate almost half of it before he sat back against his seat and took a deep breath and a sip of coffee.

“Jesus, that hits the spot,” he said, wiping his mustache with his napkin. “Very good.” He looked around the grill, watched Lupe a moment as she worked behind the counter, and then he quickly took in the few scattered solitaires and a couple of Rice coeds conferring conspiratorily in their booth, their legs folded underneath them as they leaned toward each other on their elbows. His eyes came back to Palma. “Your hangout?”

“Pretty much,” she smiled. “I don’t live too far from here. It’s a good place for breakfast, and for late at night when there’s not enough companionship at home and too much anywhere else.”

“You’re not married?”

“Divorced. Six months ago.”

“Still a tender subject?”

“Not really,” she lied. “It was over before it was over. I knew it had to be done long before I did it.”

Grant nodded. He ate another bite of pie and looked out the window while he chewed it. Then he sipped the coffee again and looked at her.

“I was married twenty-three years,” he said. “She died a couple of years ago after a brief illness. Maybe you were lucky, didn’t have that much of an investment in it. All those years, then nothing.”

Palma was startled to hear such a statement. It certainly wasn’t what she had expected.

“You call two daughters ‘nothing’?”

Grant’s eyes went flat, and he looked at her with a dispassionate, level gaze. “You’ve done a little research?”

“That’s not research. That’s just keeping your ears open.”

He regarded her with an expression that looked very much like disappointment. “I guess that’s right,” he said.

Palma felt the sting of regret for having a quick tongue. She had already broken her resolution to back off.

“Look,” she said. “That was out of line. I…it just came out…wrong.”

Grant twisted his head a little in a forget-it kind of shrug. “I set myself up for it,” he said. “I knew better.” He took another sip of coffee. “As a matter of fact,” he said, tilting his head toward the college girls in the booth on the other side of the room, “they reminded me of my daughters when we came in.” He smiled. “They’re in Columbia. School of Journalism. Setting the world on fire.”

Palma was chagrined, didn’t know what to say.

“As for you—four years in homicide. How do you like it?”

“Now that’s research,” she said.

“Right. The big FBI vetting,” he said. “I called a friend of mine, said I was going to be working with this Palma person, what did he hear about her?” This time only his eyes smiled. Now he was the one trying to defuse the tension.

“I like it,” she nodded. “My father was a detective in this division. I’d always hoped we might be able to be here at the same time, but it didn’t work out.”

“Well, you’ve got a good rep,” he said.

Jesus. He was bending over backward. Rep was a potent thing in this business. If you were lucky enough to have a good one, it went a long way. It opened doors, made things happen. If this was flattery, it had more class than comments about her beautiful eyes.

In the kitchen, Chepe turned up his Japanese portable and the tinny, jerky strains of
conjunto
music strayed into the room. The pretty busboy did some suave, subtle turns and tucked a hand into Lupe’s buttocks as he passed her on his way to the kitchen. Lupe didn’t even acknowledge the crude gesture; her expression never changed, she never stopped working. The kid was lucky he was on the night shift. That was the sort of thing Lauré wouldn’t have missed. She would have fired him for it—after a tongue-lashing.

“It took me a while to get to homicide,” she said. “Two years in uniform, two in vice, two in sex crimes. But this is where it feels right.”

“Your dad know what you wanted to do?”

“Oh, sure. It was his ‘fault,’ according to my mother. I loved his war stories, when he’d tell me how he figured something out, how he ‘hunched onto’ the idea that this was so or that was true, and then how he set about to get it straight. ‘A good detective sometimes comes in at the back door. You gotta figure out what didn’t happen.’ He taught me about liars: ‘A good liar will make you ignore the evidence.’ He taught me about eyewitnesses. They were ‘one of the major flaws in the justice system,’ he said.” She laughed. “He said a lot of things.”

“I take it your husband wasn’t a cop.”

She didn’t know how he managed to “take” that. “No, he wasn’t,” she said. “But that’s not what ended it. It was more fundamental than that.”

Grant nodded, looking at her, but his mind was somewhere else. She had noticed that it was easy for him to do that, to shuttle his thoughts off in another direction if the topic at hand didn’t fully occupy him. Certainly she knew her former marriage wasn’t the most riveting subject. Still, after having been so attentive it was a little like a splash of cold water to see him turn you off right in the middle of your response to a question he had asked himself. Working with Grant wasn’t going to be all that smooth. Not at all.

36

I
t was almost eleven-ten when Palma dropped off Grant at the Hyatt Regency and then stopped at a pay telephone only a few blocks away. She dialed the Harris County medical examiner’s office and listened to the telephone ring four times before someone answered it. She asked for Dee Quinn.

“Dee? Uh, I think she’s out…what?” The man turned away from the mouthpiece and talked to someone, then back to Palma. “Just a second, stand by.”

Quinn was on the line immediately. “Dee, this is Carmen Palma.”

“Yeah, Carmen, you just caught me. We got a cutting.”

“Just give me a minute,” Palma said.

“Shoot.”

“I’ve got two people, husband and wife, both physicians. They have different specialties, I don’t know either of their names, or even if the woman goes by her married name or her maiden name professionally. Is there some kind of physician directory I can go through and look for repeated street addresses or something?”

“That’d be quite a task,” Dee said. She was a tall, lanky woman in her mid-twenties with an unflappable nature and a dogged curiosity about her work. Palma had never seen her without her bright red hair pulled back in a ponytail. “There’s several thousand doctors, and I guess a pretty fair number of them are husband and wife.”

“But is there some kind of directory?”

“There’s the Harris County Medical Society Directory,” Quinn said. “But not all the physicians in Harris County belong to the society.”

“What’s in the directory?”

“Doctor’s name, address, telephone number, spouse’s name—just spouse’s first name. But you don’t even know their names?”

“No. I only know he’s an opthalmologist, and she’s a gynecologist. She let it slip out while I was talking to her.”

“On the telephone?”

“What?”

“Do you know what she looks like?”

“Yes, I’ve met her.”

“You’re in luck, then. Their pictures are in the directory.”

“Fantastic. Do you have a copy down there?”

“Sure.”

“Can I come out there and look through it?”

“Sure, but I won’t be here. I’ll leave it with Dolores.”

“Dee, thanks. I appreciate it.”

Within three minutes Palma was back in her car, ascending the ramps onto the Gulf Freeway and heading south. To her left the entire inner city seemed to rotate in the rain as she passed around it, like a colossal faceted world whirling through a moist space. Then it drifted away from her as she turned sharply southward, heading into smaller worlds, the Texas Medical Center gliding past on her right, its buildings fading in and out of the mist and an encroaching fog as she exited off the freeway and down onto Old Spanish Trail.

The back door of the ME’s office was kept locked at nights, and when Palma knocked, Dolores’s porcine face peered out of the small window and then smiled in recognition before the latch clacked open, and Palma stepped into the fluorescent-bright back offices of the morgue. The place was empty except for Dolores, who gave Palma the directory and asked her if she wanted coffee, which Palma declined.

Dolores returned to one of several copies of People magazine she had on her desk while Palma opened the first page of the directory. There were hundreds of photographs, but of course proportionally fewer women than men. Still, it wasn’t until she had paged her way through more than half the book that she suddenly stopped. Claire’s face stared back at her from a small, square black and white photograph. She was Dr. Alison Shore, professor of gynecological sciences, Baylor College of Medicine. Palma remembered that she had asked that they meet at the mall outside the University of Texas Medical School, a minor geographical diversion of a hundred yards of lawn and trees. Another diversion was Dr. Shore’s hair. It was not dark, but light, either a light taffy or blond. It was difficult to tell in the duo-toned photograph. To Palma she seemed more strikingly attractive as a blond, even younger. She was, indeed, a handsome woman.

On the page opposite her was Dr. Morgan Shore.

Opthalmologist.

The dash clock on Palma’s car said eleven-fifty when she pulled into the courtyard at Linda Mancera’s. She had called from the morgue to apologize for missing Mancera’s gathering, only to have Mancera insist she come on. They had gotten a late start anyway, she said, and the party wouldn’t be breaking up until well after two.

The circular courtyard in front of Mancera’s condo was full of cars, and Palma had to park outside the gates with several other cars along the margins of the wooded drive. She took a moment to freshen her hands and face with a towelette from a foil packet, to brush out her hair, and to rub in a perfumed lotion. It was the best she could do. It had been a lousy day.

She took an umbrella and opened it as she got out of the car. Though the rain had stopped, she could feel a dense fog moving in, hear it dripping off the thick vegetation along the street, and see it beginning to drift between her and the lights on the condos. She walked through the drive gates, which were open, and made her way through the cars to the winding sidewalk. Both floors of Mancera’s home were lighted, and by the time Palma got halfway up the shrub-bordered sidewalk she could hear women’s laughter. Surprising herself, she acknowledged a slight shudder of butterflies in her stomach as she approached the door and rang the bell. She listened, but the level of conversation she could hear coming from the other side of the door didn’t change at the sound of the doorbell, and then immediately the door swung open and Linda Mancera was there in an airy sundress of tropical flowers in blues and greens and a smile that made Palma forget the butterflies.