Mercy (72 page)

Palma spent a minute or two asking general questions and making notations in her notebook, giving Alice a chance to watch her and draw some conclusions about her, and in turn getting a feel for how she thought Alice might react to the touchier questions that were soon to follow. Within a few minutes she decided that the circumspect older woman was not only fully capable of coping with the awkwardness of discussing her employer, but also that she had already begun to suspect that Dominick Broussard was in fact the very reason they were there. She was not a woman who needed to be humored or coddled along, either emotionally or intellectually.

“Ms. Jackson,” Palma said finally. “I think it’s probably best if I’m simply straightforward with you.” Alice Jackson gave a half nod. “I’m going to need to ask you a number of rather personal and confidential questions about Dr. Broussard. But I want you to understand that in the natural course of an investigation like this we ask questions about a lot of people. Naturally, most of the people we make inquiries about are not guilty of homicide, but we have to make the inquiries all the same. It’s true that in a criminal trial the person who is charged with the crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty. But it’s also true that before the trial there’s the investigation, and as a general rule there are always far more people suspected of a crime than are ultimately charged with it.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Detective Palma,” Alice said. “I understand it. Go ahead.”

Palma smiled. “Okay. How long have you worked for Dr. Broussard?”

“Eight years. Or a little over eight years.”

“And you work five days a week?”

“Five and a half. I come in on Saturday mornings and stay until noon. Often he sees clients on Saturday morning. I get his Saturday supper for him. A microwave meal. I cook French dishes; he taught me a number of dishes. I fix them for him to heat in the microwave after I’m gone. A complete meal, so all he does is warm them. That’s what I do mostly, is cook. There’s not much housekeeping, him being a bachelor. Nothing gets messed up much. He’s a very neat man.”

“You do that every Saturday?”

She nodded. “For years. Regular as a new moon.”

“You commute to work? You ride the bus?”

“In, in the morning; out in the evening.”

“What time do you leave at in the evenings?”

“Seven o’clock. I start his suppers for him. That’s later than most domestics, but he pays me well for that. And in the summertime there’s still plenty of light to enjoy when I get home.”

“What do you know about Dr. Broussard’s habits in the evenings? Does he go out regularly?”

“I don’t know about that,” she said.

“Have you ever met any of the women he’s dated?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you know anything about his social life at all?”

“Not hardly.”

Palma didn’t know whether Alice meant of course not, it was out of the question, or not very much. It was an interesting response.

“Is Dr. Broussard homosexual?”

Alice Jackson didn’t respond immediately, but she didn’t seem shocked by the question. She was giving it some thought. She looked toward the screen door, where the bright sunshine of midday threw a burnished path across the linoleum floor from the threshold of the door to her chair, and she seemed to regard it with mild curiosity while her mind was more specifically occupied with Palma’s question. Outside, the day was sweltering and the voices of children playing under the row of chinaberry trees across the street wafted in on the hot air. Alice Jackson’s hands still rested in her lap, but they did not fidget or betray a sense of uneasiness. Finally she turned back to Palma.

“I don’t know how to answer that, really,” she said. “Keeping house for people, you know, is a funny thing.” She looked at Palma. “Down here, in the South, people’s housekeepers are usually black or Mexican. Any of your people ever housekeepers?”

“No,” Palma said. “I don’t believe so.”

“Well.” Alice’s eyes glided in a smooth circle toward Grant and back again to Palma. “It’s an interesting thing. Dr. Broussard’s a psychiatrist, knows a lot about human nature.” She tilted her head at Palma. “Police, they know a lot about human nature. Dr. Broussard sees a lot of strange human nature, and I guess you do too.” She nodded to herself, thinking.

“Well, domestics—I usually say ‘housekeeper,’ employers like to say ‘domestic’—they know something about human nature too. I don’t know what it is, but when people pay someone to take care of their personal things, you know, ‘personal’ things, then it seems to me they kind of have to separate themselves from those people somehow, because it’s embarrassing to pay a stranger to do something you would otherwise do for yourself, or someone close to you would do for you, a mama or a wife. So what happens is they pretend, maybe, that you are not a full-fledged person. Pretend you’re deaf or blind and don’t hear and see things they say and do. You know, you’re just the ‘help.’

“The point is,” Alice continued, “Dr. Broussard is a very kind man, always very good to me. But, sometimes, he thinks I am deaf and blind.” Alice looked at Grant. “I’m sorry,” she said, “if this sounds roundabout. It’s just that that’s a serious question, and I think I have an answer, but I’m not sure what it means. It needs some understanding.” Then back to Palma.

“For eight years I have taken care of Dr. Broussard’s house,” she continued. “I don’t believe he has ever married. Lifelong bachelor. I clean his house, but as I said he does not live in it too hard, and so the only things that regularly need attention are his things. His bedroom. His sheets. His laundry.” She paused and started to look over again at the sunny path coming in through the screen and then decided to look at her hands instead. She raised them a little and lightly patted her thighs as if she were resolving to continue. “He likes women, all right. Sometimes one has been there in the mornings when I get to the house. Sometimes they are still in bed till late morning. I have heard them, but I act deaf. I have seen them, but I act blind.” She smiled a little, as if she had proved her earlier point.

Then she gathered her brows and frowned. “But in Dr. Broussard’s upstairs bedroom there are two very large closets. One of them is full of Dr. Broussard’s suits and pants and shirts, all his clothes. The other one, well, it is full of women’s dresses and a low shelf with wigs. He has two very large dressers. One of them is filled with his underclothes and other personal items. The other one is filled with women’s underclothes. He keeps his cologne on his dresser with a few other things, a set of clothes brushes, a set of shoe brushes. He’s a very dapper man, if you’ve noticed. On the ladies’ dresser is a full set of perfumes and cosmetics. A wide variety of them. For a long time I thought he had a special lady, and that these women’s clothes and cosmetics were hers. But of course, I learned very soon that wasn’t the case at all. He had lots of women friends, and they were not all of them the same size or would have used the same makeup. So I was curious, and I began to notice. The makeup was used regularly. The dresses were worn frequently. The dresses were all the same size, rather large. But the labels were tony, and they were very pretty dresses, very smart. Dinner dresses, almost all of them. Nothing casual. And every once in a while a new dress would show up, and an older, less stylish one would disappear.”

Alice Jackson looked straight at Palma. “The thing was, you see, there was times I was washing ladies’ underwear when there wasn’t any ladies there, and hadn’t been any ladies there for weeks at a time.”

“How long had you been working for him at this time?” Palma’s heart was pounding. She imagined that Grant’s mind was churning, trying to place this newly discovered piece into the fragmented psychological mosaic of the murders.

“You mean when I first noticed all this? Well, from the very start is when.”

“So you’ve known all these years that he was cross-dressing?”

“If that’s what it’s called, yes.”

“What color are the wigs?” Palma asked. She could hardly keep her voice in a normal register.

“Blond, mostly. There’s a light brown one, I think, but mostly blond.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Seems like five, maybe.”

“Have you ever seen him cross-dressed?”

Alice looked blank for a moment and then she was clearly embarrassed, looking to the side, moving in her chair.

“Once,” she said. “A couple of years ago. It was on a Thursday evening. I had ridden my bus home, and when I got off at my street I realized I had left at Dr. Broussard’s a gift that I had bought for my little niece who was coming over that evening. I just stood right there and waited for the next bus coming the other way and rode all the way back into town and went back to the house. I rang the front doorbell, but he never answered, and I thought he was at the office, you know, through the woods there. So I let myself in with my key, went into the little dayroom where I keep my things, and got the toy. As I was walking back through the house, I heard music start up on the terrace. I stepped into the dining room and looked out. He was out there, all dressed up, drinking wine and walking back and forth on the terrace in this flowing evening dress.” She smiled. “It was very strange to see him. I couldn’t help myself. I stood and watched for some time, him prancing and gliding around in that dress, drinking and listening to the music.” She shook her head, remembering.

“But you know, the strangest thing. Dr. Broussard is not an easygoing man. He is a bit…aloof. Often he is tense, preoccupied. Kind of surly. But while I stood there watching him, it was very clear to me that he was completely at ease. He was not awkward in that dress. Did just fine in those heels. And he was graceful! Lord, I was just hypnotized by him. He seemed to be comfortable and at ease for the first time since I had been working for him. I believe that man would be better off as a lady. A lot happier.”

She turned to Grant again. “So you see what I mean? Homosexual? Oh, I don’t think so. I’d say his personal life with ladies is pretty healthy. But the man dresses up like a lady. All the time. I don’t know the fine details of a homosexual, but I think Dr. Broussard just likes ladies so much he wants to be one.”

“You’re very observant,” Grant said. It was the first time he had spoken, and Alice Jackson sat a little straighter. “I think your information is going to be a lot of help to us. You mentioned Dr. Broussard’s office; do you clean that as well as the house?”

“Oh, no. He has a service to do that. He says he can take it off his income taxes.”

“Have you ever met any of his clients?” Grant asked.

“I’ve seen them. I haven’t met them.”

“Have you seen them at his home?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know they were clients?”

“I told you, he acted like I was deaf sometimes. He talked to them like he was talking business, like I imagine a psychiatrist would talk.”

“And then you think he had sexual relations with them?”

“It seemed that was what was going on.”

“Do you have any reason to believe that his sexual relations with the women he brought to the house were in any way unusual?” Palma asked. She wondered how a question like that might strike an older woman who had been unmarried all her life.

“Unusual,” Alice said. “Now that is a loaded question. It seems to me that that word gets harder and harder to define every year.” She looked at her hands again and shook her head. “What goes for ‘unusual’ in this neighborhood has changed…so much. Everywhere, too, it seems to me.” She shook her head. “I am afraid that more things look ‘unusual’ to me than they might to the next person. But, no. I don’t have any reason to believe that anything ‘unusual’ went on with Dr. Broussard’s women.” She looked up at Palma. “But you understand, I really don’t know.”

57

“S
o you know a lot about women, then?” Mary Lowe said. She was still resting her chin on her bare knees, her arms wrapped around her legs.

“I know a good deal about some types of women.”

“Some types.”

Broussard nodded. He was aware of the warm breeze coming in the window. It penetrated the hair on his chest, got next to his skin. He was aware of the wet hissing of the sprinkler system.

“Victims of father-daughter incest,” Mary said.

Broussard nodded.

“About me.”

“To a certain degree.” And then he thought to himself that possibly, of all the women he had ever had as clients, he knew the least and was destined to continue to know the least about Mary Lowe. She was
sui generis
, and this sense that he had of her distinctiveness did not follow from reasoned deductions, or from analysis. Rather it came from his emotional center. It was a gut feeling.

“What do you know about me?” Mary asked.

“In general?”

“No. Me specifically. As a subcategory of the ‘type’ you just mentioned.”

Broussard caught the scent of damp, sun-heated grass, and it seemed to him as erotic as Mary’s perfumed flesh. Suddenly he thought of himself standing on the other side of the room looking at himself and Mary Lowe. It was an intriguing picture, and he liked the way they looked. Himself in summer linen. Her, naked. Blond and naked, framed in the tall opened window like a Renaissance woman with a landscape stretching out past her in the early summer heat. If he had seen this picture in a book or magazine without any caption or explanation, he would have enjoyed the opportunity to create a scenario of explication.

“You tend to isolate yourself,” Broussard said, moving his attention from the outward swell of her hip to her eyes. “I would say you have no close adult women friends. You tend to rebuff the approaches of friendship from the mothers of your children’s schoolmates. You are a good mother and wife, and you are extremely conscientious in your responsibilities in these roles, though you are perhaps not as affectionate as you might be. To others, you appear to be the model parent and wife.”

Broussard uncrossed his legs and pulled his chair closer to her. She had moved her face slightly so that her mouth was hidden on the back side of her bent knees and she gazed at him over the tops of them as though she were spying on him. Having pulled his chair as close to her as the window seat would allow, he leaned forward only slightly until his lips touched—just touched—the front of her knees and their eyes were only inches apart. When he spoke, his lips feathered against her flesh.