Mercy (48 page)

She moved around to the end of the desk, stood close to it, placing her thighs against it, unfolding her arms and touching the dark mahogany with the tips of her fingers. She was almost in profile to Palma.

“He is a good man,” she said, her mouth almost smiling but having to stop because of the trembling. “He’s brilliant. He is solid and stable and conscientious. He provides me with security. Insurance policies. Stocks. Bonds. Annuities. He always does the right thing by me and the boys.” She spoke as if she were making a checklist, a woman evaluating the qualities of one of several suitors. “He is good and moral. I would trust him with my life, his hand on the scalpel, even if he knew about my other relationships.”

Palma was startled by a single enormous tear appearing suddenly on the lashes of Alison Shore’s right eye, a single one, tumbling down her cheek like a drop of mercury, making a large dark daub on the breast of her emerald dress.

“But somewhere,” she almost choked, “in the womb, in the cradle, at the breast…somewhere he was cheated. He was never taught, or never learned…that very wisest of things…to express himself tenderly, to demonstrate his love by touch and breath, even—wildest imagination—even passion. Yet I know he loves me. He’s told me, years ago. I see evidence of it…as I told you, in the way he cares for my economic needs, my physical comforts.”

She cleared her throat, looked toward the window again and then back to her hands, the ends of her middle fingers touching lightly the surface of the wood.

“I am a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology solely because he could not show me he loved me. We met in medical school. He was then just exactly as he is now, only I was younger, not so experienced about what men are really like. I thought his strong remoteness was manly, even romantic. I didn’t have the maturity to imagine a lifetime of it, or believe that he would remain the same. I must have assumed the tenderness was there, to be drawn out of him by my own strong emotions. Anyway, we married. I quit medical school when I became pregnant with Mark. Our second son, Daniel, was five when I went back to school. By this time, of course, I knew what I’d gotten myself into.

“I was mad with loneliness and longing and indecision. I had choices. Divorce. Affairs. Turn myself into a mother who loses her own life in those of her husband and sons. It would have been cruel to leave him. He didn’t deserve that kind of rejection…simply…for being unable to show affection. So small a thing, really, but it had such enormous consequences.

“I plunged into my own career, became an overachiever. I neglected nothing, neither husband nor sons nor career. And it worked, for a good number of years. I fooled myself for a decade, even more. No extramarital affairs. No whining self-indulgence. We became a remarkable family, touched by the golden finger of prosperity and professional success. He was brilliant. I was brilliant. The boys were healthy and intelligent and good-looking—I think,” she said, lifting her eyes to see their pictures on her desk and permitting herself a wan smile.

“Six years ago—the boys were just in junior high school—I had a nervous breakdown,” she said, her voice going slightly brittle at remembering it. “For absolutely no ‘reason’ at all. Just one of those things. I received counseling—a male psychiatrist, ‘the best,’ Morgan said. I cooperated, lied to him, and got the hell out as fast as I could. ‘Recovered’ quickly.”

“Do you mind telling me who your psychiatrist was?” Palma interrupted.

“There’s a doctor-client privilege,” Shore reminded her.

“I know that. But it turns out that Bernadine Mello and Sandra Moser had the same psychiatrist.”

Shore swallowed, her eyes immobile. “Dr. Leo Chesler.”

“No,” Palma said. “I’m sorry, go ahead.”

Shore swallowed again. “Well, it was during this time of recuperation I met a nurse here at the college who was marvelously perceptive. She…changed my life. She’s gone now, moved to another city, but she introduced me to some of the women in Dorothy’s circle of friends. That was in the time before Vickie Kittrie. None of us knew about the really sad story of Dorothy and the two Ackleys. We were all blissfully innocent of that kind of…tragedy.”

She turned slightly toward Palma. “I don’t expect you to understand; really, I don’t. But I can live this…divided life with more grace than I can live without affection. It’s sad that I can’t find that kind of comfort with my husband, but I don’t condemn him for being unable to provide it. He doesn’t withhold himself out of cruelty, but rather out of some extreme deficit in his personality that neither of us can understand. I came to the conclusion years ago that God didn’t make any whole people, only broken or chipped ones, all somehow imperfect. I think to achieve completeness we have to commit ourselves to another imperfect person. Not such a bad plan, really, when you think about it. I do that for Morgan. I do love him, and he knows it. I don’t deny him anything, sexual or otherwise. He needs me, and I am happy to give him what I can. But what he can’t give me, I have to find somewhere else, as a matter of self-preservation. Is it a deception? Yes. Is it worse than breaking up the family, hurting him and the boys, destroying careers and the genuine happiness that we do share in being a family? I can’t believe it is. This is the way I’ve worked it out.

You can condemn me for it, but you can’t be sure you’re justified in doing so.”

Palma looked at her. She had delivered a slow, quiet monologue, an effort, perhaps, to achieve many things—to be understood, not to be thought the insensitive woman that she must have believed she appeared to be. It was an effort of sheer will to communicate with Palma woman to woman. She had made the supreme effort in that regard, by freely revealing her vulnerabilities. If she had not been straightforward from the beginning, it would have been the result of more than one kind of fear.

Palma nodded, and snapped the latch on her purse. “What about the women who are going to die?”

Shore’s face showed disappointment. “You don’t give us much credit, do you?” She wiped a hand with a black pearl ring along one side of her smooth chignon. “From the first day we learned of Dorothy’s death, all of us have been in touch. I don’t believe there’s a single woman who’s not aware of the threat.”

Palma looked at her. “Bernadine Mello was killed the night before last. You don’t know if she was part of the group?”

“You know we’re compartmentalized, but of course, everyone’s curious who the connections were to those who have died. No one I’ve talked to knows her. And I think,” she said, looking down at her hands again, “that if she’d been known to anyone in the group I would have heard. Since all this began, our communications have been constant and thorough.”

Palma nodded again. “Thank you for the time,” she said and turned to go.

Shore stopped her, touching her arm. “You asked about Morgan.”

“We’re having to look at everyone,” Palma said. “We’re not making any presumptions of innocence.”

Shore’s face could not conceal her alarm.

“You may not believe it,” Palma said, “but we’re being discreet. The fact is, the bisexual element in all this is something we very much want to keep quiet. For a number of reasons, it’s to our advantage.”

Dr. Alison Shore folded her arms once more, and Palma walked out of her office.

40

P
alma stood at the large windows that fronted the main lobby of the Baylor College of Medicine, tying the belt on her raincoat and watching the rain being driven by a strong wind across the car-packed parking lots. She looked at her watch. The meeting with Terry at Linda Mancera’s was in half an hour. She would give the weather a few minutes to let up. The gusting spring wind wouldn’t last long, though now it came in spasmodic blasts, plunging out of the dark sky, hurling sheets of rain like the temperamental outbursts of a thwarted woman’s ineffectual wrath. Palma thought of Alison Shore, wondering what she had done after Palma had walked out of her office, wondering if she had turned again to the windows and the stormy landscape, wondering how many women in this one city, their lives invested with men they couldn’t talk to, were doing the same, reviewing their destinies, evaluating their decisions to leave or remain with men they had despaired of understanding.

She could not help but catch flashes of her own marriage as she had listened to Shore talk of how she eventually had reconciled herself with her husband’s inexplicable and unreachable distance. The common stories of alienation she had heard from these women during the past week, and even similar stories from the men, seemed to underscore the mutual incompatibility between the sexes that was so elementary and so obvious as to be hardly worth remarking on. It was a disharmony of spirits and perceived mutual good as old as the species, something that men and women must surely have recognized for millennia, but which they seemed no closer to conciliating now than they had from the misty beginning.

Sexual homicide was surely the nadir of this misalignment of the sexes, the ancient antagonism driven to monstrous depths, to regions of legendary depravity. The archetypical images of the male aggressor and his female victim had also become mythologized, an insidious theme that cut across time and cultures, embedded forever in the minds of men and women from Persephone to Picasso.

Suddenly realizing the rain was slackening, Palma pulled up the collar of her raincoat, pushed open the heavy glass doors, and stepped out into the steamy, gray light of the spring storm.

As Palma slowed the car beside the telephone in the Plexiglas box outside the gates of Mancera’s condo, she quickly noticed the cherry red Ferrari parked in front. When the gates opened she rolled into the bricked courtyard and parked beside the sports car. She took her time getting out of the plain, boxy department car, adjusting her raincoat against the mist and looked inside the creamy leather interior of the Ferrari. She noticed the rain beading uniformly on its highly polished surface. Terry’s life must have improved dramatically from the days when she roomed with Louise Ackley in the dingy little wood-frame house in Bellaire.

As she walked up the sidewalk she tried to ignore the uneasiness in the pit of her stomach. She had already decided she was going to act as if nothing had happened the night before—not a very original plan, but an intelligent one, she thought. Anyway, a lot was happening, and she really wasn’t in any mood for games. It wasn’t the time for it, and this particular game was not anything she wanted to pursue in any case.

She rang the doorbell, and after a moment Mancera opened the door. She was dressed in a bone white linen skirt and blouse and was already smiling, but Palma thought it was an almost apologetic smile, as if she had realized the morning after that she had probably overstepped. As they said good morning to each other her eyes lingered a little on Palma’s as if she wanted to see something there, some indication of how Palma was feeling, and then it was over and they were walking into the living room where Bessa was sitting on one of the Haitian cotton sofas, her remarkable long-limbed figure set off in a pale lemon bandeau and shorts set.

In an oversized armchair at a right angle to her, a rather small, startled-looking strawberry blond in a simple pink cotton chambray sundress looked up at Palma. Almost frail in appearance, she stood when Mancera introduced them and extended a narrow-boned and delicate hand and gave a quick nervous smile, and then sat down again in her armchair and resumed fidgeting with a small pastel blue stone egg that she had picked up from a collection on the coffee table in front of her. Though dressed casually, all three women’s clothes bespoke individual incomes several times Palma’s.

“I’m assuming Linda’s brought you up to date on what’s happening,” Palma said, sitting on a small settee opposite Terry while Mancera sat on the larger sofa next to Bessa, resting an olive arm on one of the Jamaican’s bare ebony thighs. Terry, whose last name had not been provided, nodded curtly, her eyes avoiding Palma’s.

“I’m going to get to the point,” Palma started off, and Terry’s small eyes, adroitly made up to affect a largeness they did not possess, looked up and fixed on her. “It’s important that you understand that what we talk about here is confidential. At this point, it could easily be a fatal mistake for someone if you tell anyone what we talk about here.” She had been looking at each of them as she said this, but now she stopped her eyes on Terry. “Gil Reynolds is a suspect. Not the only suspect; one of them. In each of these killings the victims have been brutalized in a particular fashion. Some of it specifically peculiar.” She paused a moment to give their imaginations time to explore the possibilities.

“I understand Louise Ackley confided in you regarding her ‘discipline’ sessions with Gil Reynolds?” she said to Terry. The girl nodded again. She must have been in her late twenties, Palma thought, about the same age as Vickie Kittrie. “What I’m interested in, and I need you to be specific, is how Reynolds liked to play out these scenarios. Was there one thing he especially liked to do, some technique or physical act? Was there anything that was particularly important to him? Was there a favorite object involved in these episodes with Louise, a favorite ‘game’?”

Terry swallowed and nodded that she understood, but didn’t speak immediately. She continued to fondle the stone bird egg, her narrow fingers turning it over, stroking its smooth, rounded surface.

“It wasn’t always the same,” she said, finally. “Not like the usual sadomaso routines where an elaborate scenario does the trick for them.” She looked at Palma. “You’ve been in Louise’s place…you didn’t see any of the ‘dungeon’ crap in there. They weren’t into role-playing or paraphernalia, and that distinguished them from what you normally see…in this.”

She leaned forward and put the blue egg on the coffee table and picked up a beige one with brown speckles. Palma caught Mancera and Bessa exchanging glances.

“They were distinguished, too,” Terry continued, “by the fact that their encounters were not choreographed. There was not the slightest pretense that Louise’s desires were actually the ones that were being catered to. There were no safe words. It was very straightforward, hard stuff. Reynolds liked to hurt; Louise wanted to be hurt. He wasn’t doing anything particular or special to accommodate her kinks. He was doing what he liked. She was simply letting him have his way. Basically, putting an absolute blind trust in him, that he wouldn’t kill her or maim her. It was like putting her head in the mouth of the only lion in the cage that she knew to be totally unpredictable. It was Russian roulette—freewheeling sadomaso with no predictable end, the way they both liked it.”