Mercy (20 page)

“You don’t have any idea where we might find him?”

“No, hell no. He told me Mexico. But I didn’t believe him. That’d put him too far away from his sugar titties.”

“You think he’s still in Houston?”

Ackley shrugged. She didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

“How close were you to Dorothy Samenov?”

Ackley let her eyes settle on Palma and she grew somber, her thoughts far away from either of them. The oscillating fan periodically lifted little wisps of her dyed, black hair on either side of her face as it passed back and forth in front of her.

“Close,” she said. “I’ve known Dorothy since before she and Dennis started dating in college. I knew her first.” Unexpectedly, she smiled.

“Then maybe you know some of the men she’s dated in the last year or so.”

“Not hardly.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I wasn’t interested.”

“How long had she been into S&M?”

Ackley sat perfectly still. “I didn’t know she was.” She didn’t seem surprised, and she didn’t seem curious.

“Was your brother involved in S&M also?”

Ackley shook her head and looked at Palma as if she couldn’t believe she had asked her such a question. “Well, now, I just really couldn’t tell you about that. S&M and his Social Security number are two things he just refused to discuss with me.”

“If your brother didn’t kill Dorothy, who do you think might have?”

“Jesus Christ!” Ackley arched her neck and scowled. “What the hell kind of a question is that? You think I keep company with a whole lot of people who are killers? Something like that? What the hell kind of a question is that? You wanna go arrest ol’ Lalo in there? Shit, he’s all passed out, go cuff him. He’s good-looking, too, make a good killer…in the papers. He might have done it, fact, he probably did. Yeah…”

Ackley reached over and grabbed her cigarettes, but the package was empty and she wadded it up and threw it backhanded away from her.

“It was a particularly brutal murder,” Palma persisted. She wanted to touch what she sensed were the tender ends of Louise Ackley’s nerves. “She was strangled and mutilated…in a certain way. We’re having a difficult time getting any leads. Any help, anything at all, that you could do for us would be appreciated.”

Ackley looked at Palma, her head bobbling a little like the unsteady head of an old woman.

“In what particular way?”

“I can’t discuss that with you.”

“Why? What if I recognize something about it?”

“What might you recognize about it?”

“I don’t know. How do I know.” Her voice was wheezy. She started crying. “Jesus, dear Jesus. Dorothy.” She put her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook as she cried.

Palma thought of Vickie Kittrie, how hard she had cried and how much Samenov’s death seemed to have affected her.

“I’m going to leave you a card,” she said, putting her card on a corner table near her chair. “I’ve put my home telephone number on the back. I would appreciate your help. If your brother gets in touch with you again, please let me know.”

Palma got up and went to the door and stepped outside.

“Wait,” Ackley said from her sofa, and Palma heard her getting up. She appeared on the other side of the screen, her hair disheveled, her eyes puffy. “What about…her…the funeral? What’s being done…?”

“I believe some of her family are coming to get her from South Carolina.”

“Oh. Really? That’s good,” Ackley said, going from surprised to satisfied. She put her hand on the screen between them. “I don’t know, really, which is the best way,” she confided. “If I knew the details I might think about them, dream about them, or have them pop into my mind when I didn’t want them to. But if I don’t know the details maybe it’ll make me crazy wondering about it. You know, what did she go through? What the hell was it? I suppose it’s a toss-up. I don’t know how you deal with it, but for me it’s been bloody hell. I don’t know how to leave it alone. They never should happen, things like this…should never, never happen.”

17

B
roussard looked at himself in the mirror of his umber-marbled bathroom just off his consulting room. A hairbrush in each hand, he lightly stroked his graying temples and then leaned close to the mirror and studied the flesh around his eyes. Did he see something subtle there, an as yet indiscernible thickening of the subcutaneous tissue, the precursor of sagging musculature? No, he thought not. Not yet. He surveyed his face above the white collar of his shirt. He had his Lebanese mother to thank for his swarthy complexion. It was bloody well all he could be grateful to her for. She had been a fractious, scowling woman of stern demeanor who had driven his physician father to other women, not as a mere womanizer, but in search of solace, of that elusive peace that lay within the embrace of the vertical smile. And then he drank. And then he killed himself.

He heard the consulting room door open. Bernadine never knocked. He ran cold water and washed his hands and dried them. He turned out the light and opened the door.

She was smiling at him, sitting on the edge of the chaise in a Monet-patterned floral silk jacquard with pleated bodice. If he didn’t think of the webby confusions of her depressing psychology, but thought of her instead as something to be consumed like a cool and colorful summer fruit, then he would say that the word “succulent” suited her completely.

“So handsome,” she said, her contralto languid and seductive. “How do you see yourself, Dom? When you look in that mirror?”

“What do you mean?” He feigned indifference, but he was curious that she seemed so pleased with herself.

“Do you see the young man you were,” she asked, kicking off her shoes, “or the old man you’re going to be?”

Broussard was deciding not to put on his sport coat which was hanging inside the closet. He would remain in his shirt sleeves. She was the last of the day. He looked at her. Yes, “succulent,” that was the best word.

“Have you already tuned me out?” She was still smiling. “I haven’t even been laid yet.”

“No, I haven’t tuned you out.” Her pale gray eyes were picking up a blue light from the dress. He could almost see through them into her head. And they were always open. She never closed them; even when they made love, she regarded their intercourse with the calm frankness of a mother watching her nursing child. Indeed, with Bernadine he sometimes felt like a child, and he even believed she could sense that and it pleased her, though the idea had never been voiced between them. And if she had ever asked him if it were so, he would have denied it.

“I see myself as I am,” he said, to show her that he had heard every word she had spoken. He walked over to his leather armchair and sat down, “And sometimes I see myself as I will be. I don’t believe I have ever seen myself as I was. I never look back in the mirror.”

“Ohhh. How well balanced of you.”

“It doesn’t do any good,” he added, looking at her shins. “There’s no salvation in the past.”

“Salvation?”

“There’s no profit in it, I mean.”

“When I look in the mirror,” she said, “I see something different every time. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen exactly what I am.”

Yes, he thought, he could well believe that. Her mind was so fractured, so shattered and scattered, she might never see herself—ever. Those pale, limitless eyes would likely never behold the true terrain of their source.

“You don’t think an old dog can learn new tricks, do you, Dom?” She was still smiling, as if she knew something amusing about him and was teasing him with it. “You believe that we are at an impasse here, you and I. Psychotherapy can be a lengthy enterprise, I know. You told me. It takes time, sometimes a lot of time, to gain ‘insight,’ you said.”

“That’s right,” he said, feeling as if he were speaking to a child. “And you’ve got to want to do it. You’ve got to commit yourself, be dedicated to it.”

He heard echoes in his words of a sincerity long ago abandoned, and it caught him by surprise. Bernadine was the first client he had ever despaired of. It wasn’t that he had benefited all the others. Of course not; there had been many over the years he knew he couldn’t help. But Bernadine had been the first he had wanted to help so desperately that he had risked his own emotional equilibrium to do so. It had been a fool’s endeavor, and that was why she meant so much to him.

“So how do you think I’ve done?”

“Since when?”

“Overall.”

“You’ve made good progress,” he lied. As if inadvertently—was it?—her forearms, which rested on her upper thighs as she fiddled with a hair clip, had worked up the hem of her dress, and the little faces of her knees stared back at him like twin creatures guarding the approach to Helen’s Well.

“You think so?” she asked, and he thought he detected a mocking tone.

He looked up at her face, and she was still smiling. This was something new for Bernadine, this self-satisfied manner, as if she had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

“If I had a scotch,” she said, “I could tell you a story.”

“I think you must’ve had one before you came here,” he said, observing her.

“Dom-my,” she chided, as if he were a child.

“Jesus.” He hoisted himself out of the deep armchair and went to the liquor cabinet. Why did he let her make him feel this way? His back was to her as he made the drinks—he made one for himself as well and, perversely, he made them both vodka—and he could feel her looking at him. He even thought he could feel a small breath of her on the back of his neck, and any moment he expected to feel the wet flesh of her tongue sliding into his ear. But it didn’t. He turned around and carried the drinks over to her. “Here,” he said.

She took the cold glass, saw that it was vodka, and looked at him standing in front of her. Her smile had faded somewhat, and then faded altogether as he put his right hand on the inside of her left knee and moved it up her thigh under the soft jacquard, along her thickening inner leg until he was almost there. She put a hand on his forearm, her small tapering fingers gripping him, stopping him. She maneuvered away from him and straightened her dress, but left the hem just above the knee. She nodded toward his leather armchair.

“Let’s pretend,” she said, “that I’ve come here for psychotherapy.”

It was a cutting remark and he felt his face flush, but he knew she didn’t mean anything by it. At least, nothing he should be hurt by. But he was, a little. He sipped the Stoli, cold and biting. Unlike Bernadine, it was his first for the day. He returned to his armchair and propped his feet on the hassock.

She sipped her drink, looking at him over the top of her glass the way she liked to do. It was a seductive act, though he knew she didn’t intend it to be. But it was. The pale gray stones of her eyes peering at him over the veil of ice and glass and clear vodka couldn’t have been interpreted any other way. Bernadine was seductive the way a fox was crafty. She didn’t have to be conscious of it; it was her nature. And because of it—again like the fox—she was always in the narrow borderlands of some undefined danger.

“Why have you never married?” she asked.

Broussard felt a flash of anger which he quickly checked; he knew his face hadn’t betrayed him. She had done this before, a number of times. Perhaps no other woman had tried more often to dig into his past, and he detested it. At times Bernadine had almost gone too far in this direction, and it was precisely this subject that has almost destroyed their relationship a couple of years earlier.

“Why, Dom, have you never married?”

“Why have you never
stopped
marrying, Bernadine?”

“Oh, no. We talk about that all the time. We’ve talked about that for five and a half years.” She lowered her glass to her lap where she held it in both hands. “I want to know about you. I mean, if I’m supposed to listen to you regarding these things, shouldn’t you have some credentials, something to establish your authority? Priests, for instance. You know, the stupidity of having celibate men giving sexual and marriage advice. God knows you’re more qualified than a priest in matters sexual, but what about in matters marital?”

She kind of laughed at the way she put that, liking it. Broussard looked at her and wondered why she was doing this. Maybe she needed to. It was clear from what she had said about her husband on her last visit that she was on the brink of another divorce. If he had been good for nothing else, he had helped her through two of those—the first had occurred before Broussard had met her. Whatever the reason for her recent capricious mood, he knew that the emotional trials of another divorce would soon take precedence over everything else. She would begin wanting to see him more frequently—Bernadine’s divorces were a financial windfall for him, as well as for her—and she would become sexually voracious. This sexual aspect of her divorces had shocked him the first time he realized the relationship. Yes, it had shocked him, but it hadn’t prevented him from self-indulgence. The second time he helped her through a divorce he had acted shamefully, like a satyr, and when it was all over he had had to face the fact that he had peeled back yet another layer of his shadow, and it had nothing to do with creativity. Bernadine had shown him more about himself than he had learned in his own ten-year encounter with psychoanalysis.

“Dom…”

“I think,” he blurted, showing more impatience than he had wanted to show, “that the institution hasn’t got much to recommend it.”

“Marriage?”

“Yes. Yes, Bernadine. Marriage. Weren’t we talking about marriage?”

“Oh. So you haven’t married because you see people like me all the time, so many bad marriages.”

“It gives me pause for thought.”

“But what about most people?”

“What about them?” He had checked his temper, his sudden frustration.

“People who come here…we’re not like most people.”

“Who the hell do you think ‘most people’ are?” His tone was morose; he couldn’t help it.

Bernadine fell silent. She nursed the Stoli, keeping the clear ice cubes back with her lips as she drew the clear liquor from the clear glass, looking at him.