Mercy (8 page)

“But…well…” Kittrie added, “I’d like to tell them myself.” She cleared her throat.

“Do you know them?”

“I’ve met them before. They’d remember me.” Her eyes were still closed.

“I’m sure the coroner’s office would appreciate that. You should check with them.” Palma paused, signaling a change of tone in her questioning. “What about boyfriends? Did she have anyone special?”

“No.” Kittrie opened her eyes. She seemed sure of it.

“Had there been anyone special, in the recent past?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“What kind of men did she date in the last year or so?”

“Oh, I don’t know. After a while they all seem the same…just guys.” Spoken like a woman twice her age. Kittrie couldn’t have been more than twenty-three.

“Can you give me the names of some of the men she’d been dating so we can check with them as to when they last saw her?” Palma made it routine.

“I know she dated a guy at Computron, Wayne Canfield. He was in marketing. There was another guy, Gil—I think it was—Reynolds, I met him at her place a few times. I don’t know anything about him.”

She stopped.

“Is that it?” Palma asked.

Kittrie sighed and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Uh, let’s see. There was a Dirk she knew from a night class; she took an accounting course at the University of Houston.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, last year, spring semester. For a while she dated a bank vice president…” she frowned. “…the bank…I don’t know the bank, but I think his last name was Bris…Bristol. Yeah, Bristol.” She looked at Palma, irritated. “I don’t know. That’s all I can remember.”

“She live alone?”

Kittrie nodded, her hands working the wadded tissues once again.

“I understand that on Thursday evening, the last time you saw her, a group of people from your office had stopped off for drinks.”

“Right, at Cristof’s. That’s near Greenway Plaza. We do that a lot, to wait out the traffic.”

“Who was in the group?”

“The two of us, Marge Simon, Nancy Segal, Linda Mancera.”

“All of you in separate cars?”

“Yes…no, Marge and Linda were together.”

“How often do you do that? Several times a week?”

“Sure, two or three times a week.”

“At the same place?”

“About half the time at Cristof’s. It’s on the way home.”

“Do you ever meet men there, or date the men you meet there?”

“Not really.”

“You don’t?”

“No.” Kittrie punched a hole in her tissue with a shiny fuchsia fingernail, doubled the tissue, and punched another hole, kneading it roughly.

“Did Dorothy seem concerned about anything that Thursday? Out of sorts? Anything bothering her?”

“Nothing, nothing like that. And I’ve thought about it, too. Asked myself if I had noticed anything different.” She ducked her head and shook it. “But this came out of nowhere…I can’t imagine its having anything to do with her. I mean, that it would be related to anything. I just can’t imagine that it would.”

“Was she planning to go home after she left all of you at the club?”

“We all were.”

“She wasn’t going to stop off somewhere, the laundry, the grocery? Had she made any offhand references to something like that?”

Kittrie shook her head as she ran a hand through her long ginger hair.

Palma thought of Sandra Moser. The last time she had been seen was by her maid and children as she was leaving home in the evening to go to exercise class. She never arrived. The next time she was seen was when the maid at the Doubletree Hotel on Post Oak went into the room the next morning and found her nude on the bed in the same funereal posture as Samenov.

“You had an exercise class with Ms. Samenov on Saturday morning. Where was the class?”

“The Houston Racquet Club,” Kittrie said, and then pulled some more tissues from the box sitting on the coffee table and dabbed at her nose again.

Sandra Moser had been on her way to Sabrina’s, a tony health club off Woodway in the Tanglewood area not far from Moser’s home. Whatever else Palma might learn of the man who had killed these two women, it was already apparent that he had rarefied tastes. He was working territory that was squarely in the middle of two suburbs whose demographics placed them among the wealthiest in the nation.

Palma studied Kittrie for a moment. “Do you have any ideas about this?”

Kittrie’s eyes flinched. “Ideas? Jesus, no,” she said. Her surprise was reflexive, genuine, one of those spontaneous facial reactions that occurred in an unguarded moment and told you more about someone’s relationship to a particular person or situation than two weeks of background investigation could reveal. Kittrie ducked her head again, plying the tissues.

Palma decided to go to the heart of the issue. “What can you tell me about Ms. Samenov’s sex life?”

Kittrie jerked her head up and looked at Palma with a mixture of resentment and anxiety. “Jesus Christ. Do you have to do this?” She started crying again, wiping at her cheeks and eyes which already had been washed of their makeup, revealing them to be paler and smaller and less striking than she would have liked. Her unmade face now seemed at odds with her sophisticated hairstyle and assertive clothes. Her vulnerability was now as visible as her unpowdered freckles.

“The more I know about her, the better chance I have of understanding what happened,” Palma persisted. “She might have been a random victim; she might not have been. I need to be able to put her private life into perspective.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Kittrie blurted. “I don’t know who…or…anything. Christ!” She started sobbing uncontrollably and couldn’t talk. She buried her face in her hands and her shoulders shuddered rhythmically. Palma didn’t believe her. She was too insistent, and her flustered denials seemed out of proportion to the question. She simply could have said she didn’t know. But Palma had no doubts about the sincerity of her grief.

There was no reason to try to go any further with her now. Palma looked around for the absent couple, but they were nowhere in sight. Or so she thought, until she glimpsed a wisp of bright crimson in a doorway on the other side of a round Venetian table that sat in the center of the room. She remembered the sarong with its pattern of taupe and gold, and its crimson hem.

6

S
he left Vickie Kittrie crying on Nathan Isenberg’s sofa, wondering if Kittrie’s “friends,” who had not yet arrived, really existed. Helena had come back into the room when she heard Palma closing the interview and walked her to the sunken entrance hall where they visited a minute by the front door. Palma learned that she had seen nothing out of the ordinary, no one coming or going from Dorothy Samenov’s home during the past several days. Helena appeared to be in her mid-forties, with dark, kind eyes and the figure of a woman less than half her age. She said she would see that Kittrie got home safely. Palma wondered about these two Good Samaritans and their willingness to help. She had noticed that Helena had worn no wedding ring.

It was almost noon when she walked out into the heat and bright sunlight again and saw the rear of the morgue van going away from her under the overhanging trees at the far end of Olympia. Cushing and Leeland’s car was already gone, as well as one of the patrol cars. She crossed the street and nodded at VanMeter and another patrolman still lingering in the shade of the magnolia. They would stay there until it was decided the scene could be left alone. Palma walked into Samenov’s condo through the front door, which had been left open. Someone had turned up the thermostat.

She returned to the bedroom where Birley was standing in Samenov’s large clothes closet taking notes.

“How’d it go?” he asked, not looking up from his notepad.

“She was pretty upset. Where’s LeBrun? His van’s still outside.”

“He’s in one of the back bathrooms, getting the sink traps.”

“Was he able to get anything from the bathroom floor?”

“I think so.” He looked at her, his eyes wrinkling with an amused smile. “That was pretty fancy, what you did earlier.”

“You mean smart aleck,” she said, walking over to him.

“Yeah, that too.”

“Sorry, but I wasn’t about to let Cushing take it away from us.”

“Fine with me. You did good. Here,” he said, leaning out of the closet and handing Palma a brown leather address book, the gauzy sleeve of a peach negligee caught on his left shoulder. “I thought you might like to go through this first thing.”

Which is just exactly what she did. Dennis Ackley’s name was there, his address and two telephone numbers. The book obviously was not used for her business accounts because, with the exception of a liquor store, a dry cleaner, a shoe shop, a pharmacy, a hairdresser, and a few other similar, personal-use commercial businesses, all the other names were of individuals. And in most cases only the first names were entered and no addresses were given.

“Kittrie told me about an ex-husband,” Palma said. “It wasn’t a good divorce. He’s in here, address and telephone number. I’m going to have a patrol unit go by and see if he’s at home.”

“Fine,” Birley said from the closet.

Using the telephone on a bedside table, Palma called the dispatcher and made the request and then dialed the second number under Ackley’s name, thinking it might be his business. There was no answer. She dialed the first number, but again no answer. She dialed information, which had no listing for Dennis Ackley and did not show an unlisted number. She put the address book in her purse.

“Kittrie claims she doesn’t have the faintest idea of what might have happened here,” Palma said, looking around. She saw smudges of ferric oxide all over the room, like patches of mold that seemed to be everywhere once you began looking for it. LeBrun had already removed the sheet from the bed and sealed it in a paper bag which he had placed near the door along with a number of other paper packets of various sizes, sealed and labeled. “She really got upset when I asked her if she knew anything about Samenov’s ‘private life.’”

Birley looked up from his notebook. “Oh? She seem particularly upset about that? You mean her sex life?”

Palma nodded.

“That’s interesting,” Birley said, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “Take a look over there in the bottom drawer of her bureau.”

Palma stepped around the end of the bed, feeling a nagging depression at the sight of the bare mattress and its few sallow stains. No place, no matter how expensive or exclusive, no matter how pure or important its occupants, was free of stains—of one sort or another.

The scattered bottles of cosmetics and perfume on the top of the chest had been disturbed and darkened with more patches of ferric oxide. LeBrun was thorough. She looked in the small top drawer first and saw that LeBrun had taken samples of the lipstick, the eye shadow, everything that might have gone onto Samenov’s face. Then she bent down to the bottom drawer and pulled it open. There were some sweaters, cotton ones. She lifted them.

The paraphernalia was diverse, some of it homemade, some of it commercial: soft leather bondage cuffs and keys, panic snaps, a riding crop, nipple clips and clamps, a box of white candles, Tiger Balm, spiky dog-grooming brushes and rakes, a hand dildo and an electric stepped-down low-ampere dildo, enema bag and rubber hose, a straight razor, a variety of weighted nipple rings, K-Y jelly, surgical gloves, a cluttered drawer full of instruments and accessories. She was familiar with all of it from working vice but now, as then, the devices seemed oddly scientific and clinical to her as well as illicit and malign, as if they were the instruments of a death-camp gynecologist.

Kneeling on one knee in front of the drawer, she stared into it. Secrets. Palma would wager that Samenov had never dreamed that strangers—this morning five or six of them at least—would casually go through her hidden cache of erotica. Sudden death, unexpected death, Palma had learned, had a character of its own. It didn’t come to every man, only the mysteriously chosen, and it arrived with a large measure of irony. It exposed secrets,
arcanum arcanorum
, as Sister Celeste would have said. In one unexpected instant, sudden death perversely unveiled everything that had been meant to be concealed, hidden things that people jealously guarded with constant vigilance and all the duplicity they could devise. It teaches: you control nothing, not even your own secrets, which at any time can be snatched out of the darkness and thrown into the light like black glitter against the sun.

She thought of Birley behind her, probably with his head bent to his notebook, but with his eyes cut to one side, watching her.

“There was nothing like this with Sandra Moser,” she said needlessly.

“How do we know?”

The question stunned her. Birley had figured it out in an instant. Naturally they had not gone through Moser’s home as they were doing Samenov’s. She had been killed in a hotel room, and her husband and children were still living in the home. It was true that Andrew Moser hadn’t mentioned anything like this in all the lengthy interviews they had had with him, but then he probably wouldn’t have. Certainly not if he had been involved himself. And probably not even if he hadn’t been involved or even aware, but had discovered something like this while going through his wife’s personal belongings after her death. He was pretty much of a straight arrow; he wouldn’t have told. He would have carried it around with him as his own personal cross of shame, seeing it, of course, selfishly, as an embarrassing testimony to his own real or imagined sexual inadequacies, proof that she had had to go elsewhere, had had to seek something other than what he could give her. Her secret, and now his secret. Palma understood something of the fragile egos of strong men, that sometimes they had the appearance of stone and the substance of thin glass.

“We need to photograph and dust this stuff,” she said, and then glimpsed the corner of a manila envelope in the bottom of the drawer. She carefully pinched its corner and pulled it out from under the gear, trying to avoid disturbing it. She opened the envelope and dumped an assortment of photographs onto the floor, black and white, and color, some that appeared to be recent, others perhaps several years older and showing evidence of frequent handling. There were seven photographs which she spread out in front of her.