Mercy (74 page)

Palma stopped a moment while a line of trailer trucks pulled around the corner and headed up the ramps to the expressway, their diesel engines laboring and their stacks belching black, oily smoke. When the last one was gone, she continued shouting at Leeland, watching Grant in the car through the dusty glass.

“Since we don’t have a sample of Broussard’s wigs, all we can really determine at this point is whether the hair is wig hair.”

“But if it’s human hair, how do we do that?” Leeland’s voice was faint, even though she could tell he was shouting.

“I’m not sure.” Palma wiped her mouth. She was burning up in the booth, even with the door open. “But I’m going to give you the name of a hairdresser I know who can give you the answer. This is her home phone.” Palma read the number out of her address book. “Or maybe Barbara Soronno already knows the answer to that. Listen, I’m getting out of this booth. I’ll get back with you after a while.”

Palma hung up the telephone, her hands feeling grimy from holding the filthy receiver. She quickly got inside the car, which she had left running with the air conditioner going, and turned the vent into her face.

“They’re going to check it out,” she said, getting a disposable towelette from her purse. She tore open the foil packet, wiped her face with the small damp cloth, and then turned the dash vent toward her and put her face in front of it.

“I don’t know which is worse,” Grant said, watching her.

“The heat and sweat down here, or the cold and frostbite back home.”

“The cold and frostbite,” Palma said, putting the car in gear and pulling out onto the street.

Grant watched the traffic for a few minutes and then said, “You know, that was a damned balanced assessment from a woman like that.”

“What do you mean, ‘a woman like that’?” Palma asked.

“It was pretty amazing, in fact,” Grant said. “She probably didn’t have a college education, even an elementary course in psychology. I would imagine her only exposure to transvestism has been with drugged-out male prostitutes. Not exactly good recommendations for cross-dressing. But she knew, she knew in her gut that Broussard’s cross-dressing was a benign disorder. She wasn’t indignant; she wasn’t horrified. She even seemed to ‘understand.’”

“‘Domestics know something about human nature, too,’” Palma said. Having to stop at a traffic light, she looked out her window at a group of grade school boys lounging in the shade of a chinaberry tree at the side of a vacant house. They were lolling around on a tire swing, the empty shell of a barbecue pit, and the detached rear end of a taxicab, passing around a tiny joint, holding their breaths like the big dudes.

She turned to Grant. “You’re awfully damned sure of yourself,” she said.

Grant shook his head. “It won’t hurt to have them check out the hairs,” he said.

“But Broussard’s not our man.”

“I’m not saying that.” Grant was tired, his tone a little edgy. “Cross-dressing may give you the creeps, but it’s not something that ought to trigger suspicion in sex crimes.”

“Except for the male prostitutes.”

“Yeah, but true transvestic fetishism, which seems to me to be what she was describing, is a harmless disorder, unless you’re married to the guy. It’s rare in women, and these guys are almost exclusively heterosexual.”

“And the underlying causes?” Palma didn’t know what the hell to think anymore.

Grant shrugged. “Psychologists think maybe it’s a conditioning model problem. Something occurred when he was a small child that, perhaps inadvertently, taught him to associate female dress with acceptance, made him believe that acceptance was contingent on his ‘becoming’ a girl. This misconception—or maybe it was a reality—continued until puberty and became associated with sexual gratification. Stimulus-response. The pattern was set. It’s a hell of a rigmarole to have to go through in order to become sexually excited, but there’s nothing threatening about it.”

“Then you don’t see any possibilities here?” Palma asked. “I mean, homicide and the psychology behind transvestism, even the possibility that somehow it’s gotten garbled in his mind? Maybe he accepts the fact that his sexual life has been made unbearably complicated by this. He blames it on his mother, a sister, an aunt—whoever—something she did, something she didn’t do, which he directly relates to his situation.”

Grant looked at his watch. “Look, I didn’t eat much of that breakfast, and it’s already approaching two o’clock. Could you go for a hamburger?”

“Sure.”

“Meaux’s have good hamburgers?”

Palma turned back on Montrose and headed toward Bis-sonnet.

“The thing about transvestic fetishists,” Grant continued, “is that, apparently, his only sexual preoccupation is related to female clothing. It isn’t dependent on another person’s emotional response, therefore the interpersonal element is minimal. You give them a woman’s clothes, and they’re perfectly happy. They don’t have to have the woman. But, equally as often, they function perfectly well heterosexually, only they’re wearing women’s clothes instead of men’s. It’s kind of a hard thing for a woman to go along with, but if she can handle it they can be perfectly happy as a couple. Two thirds of these guys are married and have children.”

Grant looked out the window. “The point is,” he said, trying to put it to rest, “this is not the sort of thing that promotes high levels of aggressive anxiety. It would be a low-motive ingredient for aggressive acts against women.”

“Even if it’s coming from a guy who’s got other problems, a lot of problems, and this is just one of them?”

Grant was silent a moment. “No. You can’t dismiss the guy in a situation like that. Look, I’m only saying that cross-dressing shouldn’t draw any more attention to Broussard regarding these murders than acne or bucked teeth. It’s that harmless. It’s that irrelevant. Whatever else is in the guy’s brain is another story. That’s what we’d hoped to learn from Alice Jackson. Maybe some hint of an interest in sadomasochism, some kind of sexual kink that involved a specific kind of emotional interaction with another person. But, damn, cross-dressing…”

Grant shook his head, and slipped on a pair of sunglasses. Palma let it go, but something lodged at the back of her mind like a small grain of sand that wouldn’t wash away in the sure current of Grant’s dismissals. She glanced at Grant as he stared out to the harsh light of the street from behind his sunglasses. She believed there was something else that needed explaining regarding Dominick Broussard’s cross-dressing. And she had the feeling that despite Grant’s ready explanations, he also was rethinking the possibilities.

Because they had missed the lunch hour rush, Palma found a parking place in the shade of the catalpa tree in front of Meaux’s, and they again found a window booth looking onto Bissonnet. For some reason Lauré was not there, but Alma, the shy Guatemalan sister, waited on them, casting prolonged glances of curiosity at Grant whenever she was far enough away from them to believe she was unobserved. Palma rarely came here with a man other than Birley, whom they all knew and whom the Guatemalan sisters treated with the same affectionate goodwill they would allow a barnacled uncle. But Grant was a different thing, and it wasn’t just her usual friendliness that caused Falvia, Alma’s spicy sister, to make several passes by Palma’s table to speak and flash a dazzling smile.

Grant was not noticing and gave most of his attention to Gustaw’s hamburger and Polish home fries. Both of them kept their thoughts to themselves until they were through eating, and Alma had come by to top off their coffee cups. Outside the catalpa leaves hung still and limp in the afternoon heat.

Grant sat back and looked at Palma until she felt it and looked back at him. He pulled a paper napkin from its worn black holder next to the window and wiped at the empty space where Alma had cleared away their plates. He was thinking.

“Okay,” he said finally. “How far have you gotten with it?”

Palma sipped her coffee, looking at him over the top of her cup. She was going to tell him, by God. She thought she was right. And if she was, they were both right.

“I think I know why your profile analysis isn’t tracking like you thought it would,” Palma said. Grant nodded for her to go ahead.

“The killer’s a woman,” she said.

Grant looked at her with a blank expression, and then a slow, crooked smile grew on his face, and he shook his head. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. He looked at her, studied her, and as he did she suddenly knew she had it. He started nodding. “Go ahead,” he said.

“In one of our very first telephone conversations you pointed out some basic assumptions we could make about these killers,” she began. “The broadest assumption, the one invariable in crimes of this nature, is the gender of the killer. He is male. His victims are female. Sometimes his victims are children, and they can be male or female, but the killer is male. Never otherwise, not in sexual homicides. Women do not kill for sexual reasons, no matter how distorted or sick.

“For nearly twenty years the Bureau’s been developing behavioral models of investigation that have been based on a psychology that is exclusively male. The killers think the way men think, they behave the way men behave. Men dominate the crime, the investigation, and the assessment. You’ve said yourself that this business is really about playing the odds. No one’s going to argue with that. But you don’t really believe that you win every time, do you? Your uncleared cases prove you don’t.

“How many of those uncleared cases do you suppose could have been committed by women? How well do you think a behavioral model based on male psychological perspectives and interpreted by male investigators is going to work when applied to a case where the unknown subject is female? How many of your unsolved cases do you suppose you might’ve misread because they were committed by women and you were looking at the behavioral evidence as if the subjects were male and what you saw didn’t make any sense to you so you never made any headway? You claim that your one invariable is the fact that only men commit sexual homicides. How do you know that? Because you’ve never proved that a woman killed for sexual reasons? You’ve said yourself that when you’re dealing with the human personality the invariables are incalculable, that presuppositions are dangerous. Yet you begin every sexual homicide investigation, every one of them, with an enormous presupposition: that the unknown subject is male.”

Palma stopped.

Grant regarded her in silence and then asked, “Which one of the women in Samenov’s group is it?”

“None of them.”

Grant smirked, his lips thin under his mustache, and waited.

“This morning you told Frisch you really didn’t understand what was happening,” Palma reminded him, “that your profile didn’t jibe with any of the suspects, which by now have been whittled down to Broussard. But you said that after examining Vickie Kittrie you really didn’t see any reason to adjust your analysis. Well, you were expressing your doubts about how you saw the cases developing long before you talked to Frisch. Yesterday when we were having that late lunch at the Cafe Tropical, you said you were concerned about the ‘contradictions’ you were seeing between the behavioral evidence and the suspects.”

Palma took a pen and a notepad out of her purse, shoved her coffee cup and glass of water aside and wrote “#1” on the notepad.

“What puzzled you then, what seemed to stick most in my mind at that time, at least, was what the murderer did to the victim after she was killed. If he conformed to the usual behavioral characteristics of an organized murderer, the killing itself would have been sadistic. His perverted sexual motivation would have been satisfied by the sadistic and ritualized act of the murder itself. The disorganized murderer, on the other hand, would have continued ‘exploring’ the body: his first sexual act would have been with the body after death, dismemberment, even a return to the body at a later date, hours, days later, to do more of the same.”

Palma jabbed the “#1” with the tip of her ballpoint. “You said that you were puzzled because this ‘organized’ murderer had, uncharacteristically, continued to ‘nourish’ the body. He cleans her, grooms her, lies down beside her. You said, ‘He treats her like a child would treat a doll, dresses and undresses her, pretends that she’s real…’” Palma leaned toward Grant. “Who plays with dolls, Sander?”

Palma caught herself. It was the first time she had ever called him by his first name, ever called him anything at all. She went on. “Girls play with dolls. Girls. Not boys…or at least damn few of them. ‘Nurturing’ is typically considered a woman’s role, and this killer ‘nurtures’ the body.”

Palma made a “#2” on her notepad. “Broussard volunteered from the beginning of our interview with him that his clientele was almost exclusively female. He considered himself something of an expert on female psychology. He’s immersed in the feminine mind. Remember the clutter of feminine statuary he described to us with such relish? He was able to quickly give us ‘common denominators’ for the victims. He brought up the subject of child abuse himself, and said he couldn’t think of one of his women clients who hadn’t been a victim of child abuse. He gave us a little lecture about Freud’s seduction theory, about how at first Freud had attributed childhood sexual abuse to ‘nursemaids, governesses, and other servants and teachers,’ traditional women’s roles. He went into the whole idea that women, as well as men, sexually abuse children, but that cultural mores refused to accept it. He quoted statistics from a study about the number of women who were sexual abusers of children. He mentioned that a significant percentage of these female abusers indulged in sadistic behavior with their victims. He made the same point that you did that the personality of child molesters does not lend itself to sadism, so it was unlikely that our murderer would be a child molester. But he didn’t say anything about the killer possibly being a victim of child abuse. He talked about the importance of fantasy in the lives of sexual killers and sadomasochists and then, when you asked him to ‘imagine’ the killer’s personality, he protested, but then very easily slipped into that imagined role.