Mercy (33 page)

She slowed the Audi as she passed under the Gulf Freeway downtown, made a quick left on Bagby, another quick left on Prairie, and then right on Riesner to the police station. She parked her car on the third floor and walked over to the crime lab where she filled out the appropriate form to submit Kittrie’s hair samples into the evidence file of Samenov’s case and requested the comparison tests with the unknown hairs. Then she went outside and walked down the hot asphalt drive and around the end of the administration building, the expressway across the loop of bayou to her left throwing off heat and noise which she tried to ignore as she thought of the revelations awaiting her in the person of Louise Ackley.

The foyer of the station was crowded with what seemed to be an anachronistic gathering of two tribal families of hippies, their sorely tried women keeping a very loose rein on half a dozen ill-begotten waifs while three of their men with drooping mustaches, bandanna-wrapped heads, and powerful odors argued with several officers about the validity of the inspection stickers on their “vehicles.”

Birley was not in the office, having already checked in and left her a message that he was going to Andrew Moser’s house to talk to Sandra’s mother. The children were at school, and Andrew had said that his mother-in-law would know where the names and telephone numbers of Sandra’s doctors were. He had asked only that Birley not make the request over the telephone, that he go see the old woman in person.

Leeland was checked out to the University of Houston, and Cushing was running around interviewing hairdressers.

Palma got another cup of coffee. She had drunk three at Mancera’s and she knew she would have to drink them all day long to stay conscious. Her eyes felt grainy, and when she flipped on the CRT she had to squint until she got used to the glare. She dug her notebook out of her purse, turned back through the pages until she got to the point where she had interviewed Kittrie and Saulnier, and started typing.

She typed straight through until she reached the end of her notes with Mancera’s conversation, and then immediately printed out her two copies. As she was leaving Frisch’s copy in his supplement tray she also checked out, leaving word that she was going back to talk to Louise Ackley.

By two-thirty she had checked a car out of the motor pool and was on the Gulf Freeway again, doubling back through the interchanges to the Southwest Freeway. She exited at Shepherd Drive and had a BLT at the 59 Diner where she had talked to Andrew Moser. Then she was back in the car, back on the freeway and on her way to Bellaire.

It was almost three-thirty in the afternoon when she drove up in front of Louise Ackley’s house and looked up the sidewalk to the opened front door. She couldn’t see if the cat was in the lawn chair on the concrete stoop. She picked up the hand radio from the front seat as she got out of the car and locked it. She hoped Louise would not be passed out in her bedroom, unable to answer the door, but it wouldn’t matter. She had already made up her mind she was going in anyway.

The cat wasn’t in the lawn chair, but he had left behind a fresh kill. A half-grown rat that had been killed for the pleasure of it, rather than to eat, was lying on the cloth cushion on the seat of the chair. The rat had a bobbed tail, chewed off close to its rump, but the rest of him was perfectly intact. The only visible signs of violence done to him were rumpled patches of damp hair where the cat had toyed with him. She had seen cats do this, having morbidly wounded and immobilized the rat, they keep it near at hand, seeing its feeble struggles to escape as part of a grim game for their amusement, and they bite and chew the rat as whim and fancy takes them. It could go on for hours, an afternoon, or most of a night, but when the rat dies they lose interest.

She looked at the rat for a moment, started to pick up the cushion, then changed her mind and turned and stepped up to the screen door. After several knocks there was still no answer, and Palma reached for the handle as she had done the first time she was there and half expected to hear Ackley’s hoarse admonition. Opening the screen door, she stepped inside. “Ms. Ackley.” She stood just inside the living room. Nothing had changed. There were three empty beer bottles sitting on the coffee table, the ashtray on the end table at the left of the sofa was still overflowing with butts and ashes, and the inside of the windowsill behind the sofa was still stacked with cords of amber beer bottles. Even the oscillating fan was still sitting in the same spot in the middle of the living room floor, droning back and forth, moving the stale air, occasionally disturbing a dust ball along the edges of the wooden floor.

Then she smelled the feces, and a ripple of fear tripped her heart and set it pounding, and instantly she was short of breath. Her hand went into her purse for the SIG-Sauer and the surging adrenaline sharpened her perceptions. She let her purse slide noiselessly off her shoulder to the floor, as she carefully pulled back the slide on the SIG, easing it softly through the cocking snap. She moved to the wall across from the sofa and to the right of the front door and the chair where she had sat facing Ackley. She was only a foot away from the door frame that led into the bedroom where Ackley’s drunken companion had groaned on the squeaking bed springs. The smell of feces was stronger here, and tinged with an unmistakable mustiness. Palma wanted to back out of the house and call for assistance, but she couldn’t be sure anything was wrong.

She thought about the street. What cars had been out there? How far down were they? Were they new? Old? No flags went up, but it was no comfort. She could see a few feet away into the kitchen, a dinette against the wall with an open jar of strawberry jam sitting all alone on the bare table. Past that an opened door to the left would probably be a bathroom, beyond that at the end of a short hall would be another bedroom. Christ. She took a deep breath and eased her head around the corner to the bedroom and saw the foot of the bed, the covers wadded and limp from the humidity. She heard flies. Next to her face the paint on the door frame was chipped and dirty and tacky to the touch. She waited. The house was absolutely silent, except for the flies. She eased around the corner, through the bedroom doorway, and stopped once more. Then she leaned in.

Louise Ackley was lying on her back on the bed, her filthy T-shirt wrenched up above her naked hips, one leg cocked, her arms flung out to either side. Half her face was gone, blown up against the bloody wall behind the bed, and her one remaining eye, pooched out of its socket a little, seemed to be on its own, trying to look in Palma’s direction through a welter of flies. Ackley’s midsection and pelvis were arched over a pillow under the small of her back, and the blood that had gushed from her in the moments after the gunshot had been trapped on the opposite side of the pillow so that her head and shoulders lay in a darkening pudding, abuzz with a swarm of flies. The wall was spattered nearly to the ceiling. More flies, working Ackley’s inner thighs below the dark patch of pubic hair, had found the feces.

Palma stared, her lips open, teeth clenched, breathing through her teeth, not wanting to close her mouth or she would taste the odor. Suicide? She didn’t see the weapon. To her right the closet door was open. She checked it and eased around the foot of the bed, looking on the floor for the weapon. It wasn’t there. She glanced at the second bedroom door that opened into the hallway and looked through the opposite doorway into the kitchen, this time toward the cabinets and the sinks. There were some unwashed pots on the countertops, and an opened can of chili. She moved to the side of the bed and looked for the weapon in the grume and twisted covers. She didn’t see it. Jesus Christ. No suicide weapon? Jesus Christ. And her heart hammered even harder, and she felt as vulnerable as if she knowingly had walked naked into the room with the killer. Then reflexively her mind registered the darkening blood. The hit was not recent, not within the last several hours. It was a rational judgment she couldn’t bring herself to trust.

Still breathing through her teeth, she skirted the foot of the bed again and stepped into the hallway. She made her way through the hot, stinking air trapped in the inner hallway, and checked the bathroom. Ackley kept house like a bag lady, but the place wasn’t ransacked. A hall closet was open and empty. She turned inside the second bedroom and suddenly recoiled, falling back and catching herself against the door frame, bringing down the SIG and leveling it at the man on the floor. He was facedown, naked, one arm tucked under his body, the other flung out to his side and clutching a pair of stained jockey shorts. She saw the relatively small entrance wound in the thick black hair of the back of his head and knew that his face, resting just over the edge of a filthy area rug that had soaked up most of his blood like a paper towel, would look something like Louise Ackley’s. Abruptly she came to her senses and jerked the SIG around and locked her eyes on the last closet in the house. It was shut, not ajar even a little. She swallowed without closing her lips, which were dry now, and started to step across the dead man, but stopped. Jesus. She knew better than that. She backed out of the room, keeping her eyes on the bedroom door, backed down the hall to the living room, her legs tingling, wanting to buckle as she fumbled for her hand radio tangled in the strap of her purse. Moving to one side of the living room where she could keep her eyes on the bedroom door at the end of the hallway, she radioed for assistance.

29

“Y
ou’re actually a little pissed about this, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be stupid, Bernadine.”

“You are. You’re…restrained.”

“I’m always restrained. It’s second nature to me, part of my training.” He loathed the fact that she was amused with him.

“Yes, but you’ve never ‘seemed’ restrained. Now you do. This whole thing is upsetting to you.”

“Bernadine, do you think I’ve never before encountered lesbian relationships?” It was true that he had lesbian clients, but then he had not been having an affair with them for the last five years. It made a difference, by God. Dispassionate objectivity was for analysis. Bernadine was a lover, for God’s sake.

“Not like this,” she laughed.

They were drinking, as always with Bernadine—this time she had her beloved scotch—and she had chosen to sit in the other armchair opposite him rather than taking her place on the chaise. She had never done this before. She had always liked the chaise for much the same reasons that he had liked it, because it introduced an aura of seductiveness. The posture was suggestive, and Bernadine knew how to make the most of a provocative attitude.

“We’ve discussed your lovers at other times,” he said.

“Not my lesbian lovers,” she persisted.

She was absolutely right, but he couldn’t possibly let her know that it would make any difference to him, even though he was reeling.

“Surely you understand after all these years, Bernadine, that it doesn’t matter. If it’s significant to you, if it’s important, I’ll help you explore it, try to help you understand yourself in light of what it means to you.” It almost gagged him to talk like that, especially with Bernadine. They had long ago gotten past this kind of thing, and now she was wanting him to act like a psychiatrist again. After all these years of intimacy, it was too much like role-playing. He detested the idea of it. But it was typical of Bernadine not to see the difficulty of what she was proposing. She was wanting to turn back the clock, to start from the beginning because she thought she had discovered some earthshaking truth by making love with another woman. She thought it was the answer. Bernadine had always tried to find the answer to her problems in the person of someone else. She never really understood, or accepted, the idea that she had to look inward.

She looked at him over the rim of her glass, as was her habit, and he could see that she was smiling.

“You know, this has been going on for a while,” she said, smirking. “And you didn’t sense it. On several occasions I even came here within an hour of having been with her, and I had both of you within an hour.”

Broussard couldn’t believe she’d said it, and in an instant their past several encounters flashed through his mind as he tried to remember which times it might have been, when he might have sensed something different about her. He sipped his Stoli to cover up the fact that he was going to have to swallow. She shouldn’t have told him this. Didn’t she see it was humiliating? She had used another woman as a love philter before coming to him, as if she had needed something to prime her for him. It was degrading. He looked at her smile and wondered if he was going to be able to go through with this. She was wanting to talk about it, and he was feeling a tightening claustrophobia. It saddened him that she could be so blindly insensitive; he wished that she were otherwise, that she was more aware of the spiritual tissue that had grown between them and had made him a part of her as surely as if they had been one flesh.

“Look,” she said, lowering her glass. “If you don’t want to talk about this…”

“Bernadine, please,” he managed to keep his even-keeled, patriarchal tone. “You know, I believe you’re rationalizing, imagining that I am discomforted by this subject and using that as an excuse not to discuss it while all the time it’s your own reluctance that you’re refusing to recognize.” By sheer force of will he had managed to turn it around.

“No! What do you mean?” Bernadine sat forward in her chair. She started to say something else, but stopped herself. She was frowning, her eyes nailing him, and then the smirk gradually returned to her face and she slowly relaxed and sank back into her armchair. Her mellow contralto laugh moved languidly in her throat.

“Okay,” she said, and she touched her tongue into the scotch, never taking her eyes off him. “Actually, this has not been my first sexual encounter with another woman.” She shook her head slowly. “Here’s another story. When I was in college—I went to an all-women’s university—I had a roommate that I got along with really well. We were together just one semester my junior year, and then she left to go to another school.