Mercy (19 page)

“That’s it?”

“Almost. We got an interesting fluke here. Donny gets smart and pokes around in the records of Samenov’s clients. These records are very complete, including frequency of the rep’s on-site calls. Over the last year Samenov called on one client a hell of a lot more than any of the others. Maritime Guaranty, Inc., a multinational insurance corporation that underwrites anything that touches water. Their offices are a couple of blocks away. Records showed that Samenov had been there on the Thursday she was last seen. It turns out the contact, guy named Gowen, was not the person she regularly went there to see. She checked in with Gowen, all right, but then she went back into accounting and visited with a woman named Louise Ackley.”

“His wife?” Palma was surprised.

“She’s not married. We think maybe a sister,” Cushing said. “We checked at Maritime but she wasn’t there. She’d called in sick on both Monday and today. Her personnel file says she’s from Charleston, South Carolina.”

“Ackley’s hometown.”

“Right. You wanna talk to her?”

“You haven’t?”

“Nope. We located Walker Bristol, though. He’s still a VP at a bank downtown. We called him, and he’s agreed to meet us at this little place in half an hour.”

This little place. Cushing’s euphemism for a bar.

“So you want Sis, then?” Cushing asked. “She’s out in Bellaire.”

“Sure.” She jotted down Louise Ackley’s address.

“Also we found Gil Reynolds. He’s some kind of executive with a business called Radcom. Radio communications. It’s off Post Oak Lane. Since it’s out toward Samenov’s, you want to talk to him too?”

“Sure,” Palma said again, and wrote down the address. It looked like Cushing was going to stick to Ackley. He knew a good horse when he saw one. “Those dates when Samenov called on Ackley at Maritime Guaranty, do you have them?”

“Damn right. We photocopied the schedule. Just a sec.” Palma heard him lay down the telephone; the music was distant but it was standard-issue bump-and-grind. Palma hoped Cushing had enough sense not to meet Bristol at this little place.

Then Cushing was back on the telephone reading off the dates. Palma took them down, and they hung up. She quickly scrambled through the notes on her desk and found the dates Birley had given her when Samenov had withdrawn money. It took her only a moment to see that Samenov’s cash withdrawals corresponded with the dates she had also called on Maritime Guaranty—which was right across the street from the Bank of the Southwest.

She looked at her watch. It was too late to get Reynolds’s office. She would call him in the morning before she went out.

16

L
ouise Ackley lived in Bellaire in a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood with scaly-barked cottonwoods in the front yard. A cracked sidewalk led up to a cement front porch with iron railings around it and a lumpy loquat crowding up next to it. A hummingbird feeder hung from one of the branches of the loquat and a dusty, lynx-eared cat lay under a metal lawn chair sitting in a corner of the porch. He watched with lazy-eyed indifference as Palma got out of her car and came up the sidewalk toward him. By the time she stepped up on the porch the cat had decided to ignore her altogether and rolled over on its back and started pawing distractedly at a tag of cloth that dangled from a cushion on the seat of the lawn chair.

The front door of the house was open, as were all the windows that Palma could see from the porch. Through the screen door she could see into the dim living room, though it was difficult to distinguish anything inside. The whirring of an oscillating fan came from somewhere near the middle of the room. She knocked on the wood frame of the door, loudly, because she didn’t want to have to do it again. As she waited, she heard no one moving about in the house. A strong odor of stale cigarette smoke wafted through the screen. She knocked again, and heard it echo through the rooms. Still no one answered. She hooked a finger under the screen handle and pulled; it was not locked. She opened it a little more and stuck her head inside.

“Ms. Ackley?” she called.

“I ought to blow your goddamned head off,” a woman’s tight, strained voice said without menace, almost casually.

Palma flinched and looked toward the voice, her eyes adjusting to the shadowy room just enough to see the silhouette of a figure on the sofa.

“You’re way out of line,” the woman said. There was something thick about her voice that told Palma she was drinking. Palma saw her move her hand up to her mouth and smoke rolled away from the silhouette. “What the hell you going to do, rob me? I don’t think you’ve got the right equipment to be a rapist.”

Palma already had her shield in her hand and held it up. “I’m Detective Carmen Palma,” she said. “Houston police. Are you Louise Ackley?” Palma saw that the woman was sitting at one end of the sofa near an end table. A bottle of beer was profiled against the open windows behind the sofa. The woman reached for the beer and turned the bottle up, taking a long drink. When she sat the bottle down it rocked a little, and she had to steady it.

“Are you Louise Ackley?” Palma repeated.

“Yes, of course,” Ackley said wearily. “Come on in. You want a Corona? I’m drinking Mexican beer; you’ll like that.”

“No, thanks,” Palma said.

“Okay. Sit down, then. Let’s get on with this.”

Palma sat in an armchair to the left of the door, across from Ackley. The oscillating fan was on the floor between them, humming back and forth, sucking all the air toward Ackley, blowing her smoke out the windows behind the sofa. Palma could now see that she was wearing only a white T-shirt and was sitting with one leg tucked up under her, the other foot flat on the sofa, the hand holding the cigarette resting on her elevated knee. She wasn’t wearing panties, and she did not try to hide what was visible between her splayed legs. From the looks of her tousled black hair and the condition of the T-shirt, Palma guessed that Louise Ackley had been like this for several days.

“What’re you here for?” Ackley asked.

“I’d like to ask you some questions about Dorothy Samenov.”

A brief silence.

“That’d be the ‘late’ Dorothy Samenov?” Ackley’s voice was distinctive, slightly hoarse, though not rough or gravelly.

“Yes. How did you know she was dead?”

“I believe I saw it in a little narrow article about four and a half lines long in the cop section of the newspaper. There wasn’t very much about it at all. Hardly anything at all. Practically not there.”

“You knew her?”

“I did.”

“What was your relationship with her?”

“Now there’s a word for you—‘relationship,’” Ackley said, going for her bottle of beer again. She drained the last of the beer and reached over behind the sofa and laid the empty bottle down in the opened windowsill. Palma heard it chink against others already there. “‘Relationship’ must be a tired word. People have just about used it to death.” She ground out her cigarette in a deep ashtray on the end table. “Dorothy and I were friends.”

“Did you see her very often?”

“Actually, I hadn’t seen her in almost a year. We used to be friends.”

“Robert Gowen, your boss at Maritime Guaranty, said that Dorothy Samenov spent nearly half an hour with you at your office last Thursday, the day she was last seen alive, and that she came to see you there regularly.”

“Did that silly man say that? Actually, I’m fond of Robert, and he’s a good boss, so I shouldn’t contradict him.” Ackley wasn’t in the least concerned about being caught in the lie. “It seems like I remember that he’s right—I did talk to her last Thursday. And I did see her regularly, come to think of it.”

Palma could see now that Ackley had a fine narrow nose and high cheekbones, and a seductive mouth that she had a pleasant way of holding slightly open while her tongue lightly touched her upper front teeth.

“Why did she come to your office so often?”

“She liked to talk to me.” Ackley had intended for this to have been as flippant as her other responses, but her voice cracked making the last few words almost a whisper. She squeezed her lips together and turned her head aside with an expression resigned to sorrow. With an elbow on her knee, she ran her fingers into the front of her hair and rested her forehead on the palm of her hand. “And she liked the way I…the way I looked,” she said, almost inaudibly.

Close by in the next room to Palma’s right, there was a sudden whump! and a bottle—a beer bottle, Palma’s senses told her—fell to the wooden floor followed by a rain of coins bouncing and wheeling in all directions and a blurted “
Chingale!
” as a man swore in Spanish. Palma flushed with adrenaline. “This fawkin’…chit, man…” Mexican. Palma’s heart hammered, but she kept her right hand on the SIG in her purse.

“Oh, shut up, Lalo,” Louise Ackley mumbled wearily, almost to herself. She didn’t even look up, her forehead still resting on her palm. She was not acting like a blackmailer, and the tears that suddenly glistened on her face in the oblique light coming from the opened windows were not the tears of an extortionist.

“He’s pathetic,” Ackley said. Someone fell heavily onto a bed, the springs squeaking, then silence and a bovine groan of satisfaction. “Pathetic.”

“Why was she bringing you the money?” Palma asked. She relaxed a little, figuring it was lights out for Lalo. Her tone with Ackley was more curious now than accusatory. “We thought it was blackmail.”

Ackley nodded, keeping her forehead on her palm. “It was.” She lifted the tail of her stained T-shirt and wiped her nose, revealing her naked torso and a glimpse of the bottoms of her breasts. “Blackmail, pure and simple.”

“You were blackmailing her?”

“No, God no, it wasn’t me,” she said, lifting her head and looking at Palma. Again she raised her shirt and wiped at her nose, then jerked it down in frustration and leaned over and pulled a wad of tissues from a box almost out of reach on the sofa. “Shit,” she said, wiping the tears off her face. “I didn’t know I had any more left.”

Palma didn’t know if Ackley was referring to her tears or to the tissues. “Who was blackmailing her?”

“Oh, Dennis,” she said, exasperated. “He was blackmailing both of us.”

“Both of you? Your own brother was blackmailing you?”

Ackley jerked herself up straight, mimicking Palma’s surprise, and smiled sourly. “My ‘own brother.’ Yeah. Well, blood is thicker than water, but it’s not thicker than sorry, and Dennis is one sorry son of a bitch.” She looked at Palma. “You find that hard to believe, that he was blackmailing me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you just learned something, didn’t you?”

“I guess I did.”

“Dorothy brought the money to me because Dennis didn’t want to see her. I added mine to it and took it to him.”

“Why didn’t he want to see her?”

“You know, I’m not sure I can answer that.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“That’s right.”

“How long had he been blackmailing you?”

“Let’s see, how to answer that…about eighteen months.”

“You seemed to qualify that before you answered.”

“Eighteen months for money. Before that there was emotional intimidation, all kinds of shit to take from him. He was a bully. It just shows you how really stupid he was that it took him all these years to think of blackmailing us for money.”

“This had been going on for a while, then?”

“Years.”

“How many?”

“Too many.”

Palma was frustrated. How much of this could she believe? Interviewing a drunk was like trying to pick up a drop of mercury.

“How much did the two of you pay out to him?”

“Twenty-eight thousand six hundred,” she said without hesitating. “Half of that from each of us. But I wasn’t doing as well as Dorothy, so she…paid part of mine. He promised he’d stop at thirty thousand. We were almost there.”

“What was he blackmailing you for?”

Louise Ackley snorted. “Good try, honey.” She folded her other leg down and sat with them both tucked up under her, yoga-style.

“Are you going to continue paying him?”

Ackley didn’t answer.

“You don’t have to do that, you know. You’ve got plenty of documentation to press charges.”

Ackley only looked at Palma with an expression of weary intolerance. She had already been through all the possibilities. If her brother were arrested, everything he was keeping quiet about would come out. It was more important to her to prevent that than to be rid of her tormenter.

“You know where he lives?”

“No.”

“But you said…”

“Oh, I would just meet him with the cash somewhere. He didn’t want Dorothy even to do that.”

“When did you last see him?”

“March twenty-second, last time we gave him some money. He said he was going to Mexico. Good-damned-riddance. I hope he got the worms down there and died. If I don’t see him again till the end of time it’ll be too soon.”

“He’s a suspect in Dorothy’s killing,” Palma said.

“I’m sure he is,” Ackley wheezed. “You seem to be reasonably well informed, so I suppose you believe you have good reasons to suspect him.”

“We know he was arrested three times for aggravated assault and that Dorothy was the victim each time.”

Ackley nodded, sliding her eyes to one side.

“What was their problem?” Palma asked.

“It was a sorry affair, that’s all. It was sick.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Wouldn’t you call it sick to live with a guy year after year who regularly beat the shit out of you? I mean, he did it all the time. She just called the cops three times. And you know he was sick. The whole thing…” She stopped and shook her head.

“Do you think he did it?”

Ackley began shaking her head, slowly, wearily. “It was the first thing I thought of when I heard about it,” she said. “But, really, I just don’t know what to think. The silly bastard could’ve done it, but…I just can’t believe that he really did.”

“‘Heard’ about it?”

“Huh?”

“You just said you’d ‘heard’ about Dorothy’s death. Earlier you’d said you’d read about it in the paper.”

Ackley was unconcerned. “Figure of speech, whatever.”