Mercy (37 page)

Garrett made the introductions and apologized for being late.

“Naw, we’re fifteen minutes early,” Hauser said. “Tail winds.” He pointed his chin at the bank of telephones across the concourse.

“Sander’s over there,” he said, and he and Garrett quickly fell into a conversation while Palma turned toward the telephones. There were eight telephones in a row facing the concourse, and another eight on the other side, out of sight. All the ones on the near side were busy: two women, six men. Palma tried to pick him out, but none of them seemed right to her. She looked at the legs under the bank of telephones on the other side. Four men, one in jeans, one in khakis, two in suits. She was looking at the two pairs of suit trousers when she realized that the last man on the right was looking at her from between the telephone boxes. He was talking, but watching her, and when their eyes met he was not the one to break eye contact. She pretended she hadn’t seen him looking at her, let her eyes go down the length of the crowded concourse, and then turned to Hauser and Garrett, catching Hauser cutting his eyes at her while Garrett was ending a story that Hauser could have comprehended quite easily at three times the speed.

“Here he comes,” Hauser said, and both Garrett and Palma turned to see a man cutting through the concourse traffic wearing a double-breasted suit. She had never seen a special agent wear a double-breasted suit. The suit coat was unbuttoned and Grant was putting a breast pocket wallet into his coat as he stalled once or twice in the cross traffic. Palma guessed him at six-two or three, maybe one hundred seventy pounds. He had dark hair going gray, and which he wore a little fuller than she would have expected, combing it back at the temples so that the gray streaked and was visible from a distance. He wore a clipped mustache that was slightly darker than his hair. His nose was not broad, but straight and handsome, or rather it had been straight. A significant crook in the bridge signaled its having been broken, perhaps more than once. His eyes were slightly hooded with the beginnings of crow’s-feet at the corners. He walked with his shoulders back, not with a military bearing but with a rather loose-gaited, comfortable stride. As he approached, he smiled and put his hand out to Palma first.

“Detective Palma,” he said. “It’s good to see you, finally.” He turned to Garrett. “Clay, I appreciate your coming out to get us.” They shook hands and then Grant reached down and picked up his small, soft leather valise and hanging suit bag, as did Hauser, and the four of them started walking.

“Sorry about the short notice,” Palma said. “But I was afraid this was going to get out of hand before any of us could get a grip on it.”

“It’s okay. We do a lot of short-notice work,” Grant said. “Anything since this morning?” They had stepped out in front of Garrett and Hauser, and Palma was having to take long steps to keep up with Grant. While they walked down the long concourse she told him about forming the task force and how it was set up.

“That’s good,” he said. “It’ll be easier that way. I’ve got some stuff for you from one of the VICAP analysts. It’s not much. They didn’t have any strong hits, but there’re some things you need to check out. Something in New Orleans, something in Nashville, and a long shot out in Los Angeles.”

They emerged into the main concourse and started across the cavernous terminal lobby, getting separated by the crowds, coming back together, finding Garrett and Hauser ahead of them.

“How’re you holding up?” Grant asked, dodging a pair of airline stewardesses quick-walking across in front of them with their luggage on small wheeled carts.

“I don’t even know,” she said.

Grant looked around at her and smiled. “Well, maybe it won’t last too long.”

“It’s already done that,” Palma said. “This is my first one of these. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. And I’m not talking about the loss of sleep.”

This time Grant didn’t say anything. Palma wanted to look at him, but they were already going through the electric doors, out into the drive across from the garages.

On the way into the city Palma turned and leaned her back against the door and reviewed Bernadine Mello’s background.

“She was forty-two; her husband, Raymond Mello, is sixty. Mello’s a structural engineer. Made a personal fortune on a patented method for testing the tensile strength in construction steel, and still travels a lot doing this. They’d been married just a little over two years. She’d been divorced three times before she married Mello, and he’d been married once before. According to him, this marriage was going under too. Mello’s pretty candid and readily admits the marriage hadn’t worked out like he’d hoped. He said both of them had had other lovers, in fact her lawyer had hired a private detective to substantiate his affair. He suspected she was about to sue him for divorce. He wasn’t sure of the men she’d been sexually involved with, except one, her psychiatrist. When we asked him if he had any reason to believe that his wife might be bisexual, he seemed flabbergasted by the idea. And we didn’t find anything in her house that would have suggested it, either.”

“How was he reacting to her death?”

“Genuinely shocked, I think.”

“How long had his wife been seeing the psychiatrist?” Grant asked. The rain on the side windows of the car cast gray spatters over the front of his white shirt as they sped along Interstate 45, heading south into the city.

“Five years.”

“And did the affair predate the marriage to Mello also?”

“He said he thought so.”

“Then the psychiatrist should be able to enlighten you on the bisexual question,” Grant said. “For our purposes, he’ll be more valuable to us than the woman herself. How old is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He hasn’t been interviewed yet?”

“No.”

“There shouldn’t be any client-doctor privileges now that she’s dead. He could be a gold mine in leads, especially if there is a connection with her and the other women and their organization.”

Grant had been sitting forward a little as Palma talked. Outside, the stormy late afternoon was as dark as dusk from the lowering clouds, and Grant’s face was largely obscured except when it was being illuminated in brief washes of pale light as they passed the freeway lights at regular intervals. Only the left side of his face was periodically visible to her. As she listened to him talk and watched his eyes in the passing washes of mottled light that came through the rainy window, she felt them looking at her with a calm regard that seemed to operate from a different level of consciousness than his words. They did not seem to her to convey an inner world consistent with his personality.

If Sander Grant seemed easily congenial at first meeting, she was sure that she could not trust in that assessment. As Garrett pushed the Bureau car through the complex interchanges of expressways that brought them into the city, Palma began to have the feeling that Grant’s eyes were what the man was all about, and the amiable personality that greeted her at the airport was only a practiced facade that he presented as a matter of professional necessity. She wondered how long he employed the mask or if, in fact, he ever took it off at all. She hoped he did and that he would do it quickly and get it over with. She didn’t look forward to working with a man who held her at arm’s length with a bogus cordiality. Nor did she relish waiting for the inevitable moment when, because of tension or competitiveness or unsuppressable egoism, he would yank off the mask of amicability and confront her with whatever it was his eyes were really hiding.

Suddenly, whether justified or not, the prospect of working with Sander Grant took on a slight edge of apprehension that was quite separate and apart from the context of the grisly murders he had come to help her investigate.

32

H
olding a black umbrella over his head, Dr. Dominick Broussard stood on the back terrace of his three-story brick home and looked past a margin of pines at the afternoon mist hovering in the honey locusts and redbuds scattered across the sloping lawn to the bayou below. Accompanied by a big, tawny Labrador that he ignored, he stepped off the terrace and progressed along a stone path that wandered through his property toward a smaller building that architecturally echoed the larger house and which served as his office. This building, which he pretentiously referred to as his studio, was situated nearer the bayou than the main house, and was nestled in a dense wood that extended beyond it some distance before reaching the end of the doctor’s property. Woods provided the same seclusion on the opposite side of the large house as well. He had privacy, he liked to remind himself, a great deal of privacy.

For the last half hour Dr. Broussard had been in an emotional free fall, a long descent through his own empty grief precipitated by Bernadine Mello’s death—the Asian anchorwoman on the noon news program had said “murder.” He was staggered, but had had the presence of mind to quickly make three telephone calls canceling his afternoon appointments. He had caught two of his clients, but Evelyn Towne had already left her home to have a late lunch with a friend before his appointment. She couldn’t be reached.

Walking away from the sandwich his maid had prepared for him in the gray light of the sun-room, he had taken his umbrella and in a preoccupied daze had stepped outside. He had intended to go to his studio, but instead was now walking directionless across the lawn until he came to one of the paths that laced his wooded property. He took the first one and followed it. Now, under the canopy of trees, he folded up his umbrella, took off his suit coat and draped it over his left arm, and loosened his tie in deference to the heat and humidity. All about him the rain tapped on the huge leaves of the catalpas; it drummed and roared so that he could not hear his own footsteps crunching on the cinder.

The Labrador followed him, blinking in the steady rain, the two of them circling aimlessly along the bayou paths until the dog’s hair was matted and Broussard’s own thick wavy hair was kinking, his hand-tailored shirt plastered against his thick barrel chest, where the hair showed through the material made translucent by the rain. Finally he stopped. He looked down the path in front of him, at the leaves glistening and shimmering in the rain. Without taking his eyes off them, he reached out to the trunk of a water oak for support. Slowly he leaned against it, letting it take all his weight, and then he began to cry, a dry, awkward sound at first because he was unused to it. The Labrador sat unquestioningly on the wet path, and with a dense curiosity and a slack tongue calmly regarded the pattern of the rain as it stippled the surface of the brown bayou water in overlapping mandalas. Broussard, overcome by the dizzying effervescence of images bubbling up from his memory, overcome by an unexpected fear of loneliness, a queer selfishness that made him anguish more bitterly for himself than for Bernadine, wept like a child.

He slumped against the water oak, submerged in his own self-concern until he was entirely soaked, until his clothes were heavy and clinging, until, even in the stifling heat, he felt a chill grow against his spine and settle in across the back of his shoulders. Pushing himself away from the tree, he wiped his hair out of his eyes and continued on the path toward his studio. With the Labrador lumbering along behind him in the mist, he arrived at the office’s back door and paused in an alcove to step out of his soaking shoes. Having left the studio unlocked at noon, he pushed open the rear door which allowed him to come and go to his office without being seen by his clients, who parked in a cinder drive at the front of the building and entered the office from a more formal entrance.

The equanimous Labrador lay down in the alcove with an overweight sigh as Broussard entered the darkened hallway and turned into his office. The glass wall that looked down to the bayou presented a pointillistic scene of hanging mist, as if Georges Seurat had managed to create a picture that possessed an imperceptible motion, one that could not be seen to move, but that could be seen to have moved. The mist—almost a fog—was thick, then sheer, appearing first before, then behind the trees, allowing the bayou now to emerge and now to disappear into its ghostly drifting.

Broussard went into his bathroom, shed his rain-soaked clothes, and took a warm shower. He tried to maintain a blank mind as he washed his hair. He did not want to think about Bernadine either in life or in death. He did not want to remember anything about Bernadine. When he got out, he dried himself and dressed in some of the clothes he kept in the studio closet, a fresh pair of gray trousers, a freshly starched pale blue shirt and dark navy tie. He didn’t bother with a jacket. He walked to the liquor cabinet and poured a Dewars and water and was already standing in front of the plate-glass windows when he remembered he was drinking Bernadine’s drink, her beloved scotch. It was nectar to her. She was nectar to him. Jesus. How odd, how surreal, he had felt when he heard, and saw, Bernadine’s name on the bright red lips of the newscaster.

No suspects.

He had nearly finished his drink when he heard the front door opening and suddenly realized that he hadn’t turned on lights anywhere in the office.

“Dominick. Are you here?” Evelyn.

“Yes, back here,” he called and started turning on his desk lamps, and then the several others in the large office. He had no ceiling light, preferring the more oblique lighting afforded by lamps. He quickly finished his drink as he heard her footsteps in the short hallway, and then she was in the doorway just as he was closing the liquor cabinet.

She looked at him quizzically. “No lights?”

“I’ve just come back from lunch at the house,” he said. “I was just turning them on.” There was a split second when he wanted to blurt out the news of Bernadine’s death. But it was only a moment, and when he didn’t do it, he knew he never would.

Evelyn looked at him and moved across the room to the windows where Broussard himself had just been standing. She looked out to the rainy landscape for a long time, long enough for her silence to attract his attention and long enough for them to become aware of the small sounds that fill silences: the ticking of the mantel clock on the bookshelves, rain dripping from the eaves onto the glass wall, the sound of their own breathing, the inner turmoil of their own thoughts.