Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  “We had nurses to stay with him,” she said. “One afternoon—it was three o’clock in the afternoon, an odd time to do that sort of thing, it seemed to me later—he asked his nurse to leave and asked me to come into his room. I’ve told you about Gerald. He was a kind man. A gentleman and a gentle man. He treated everyone with the same evenhanded respect, no exceptions. He was a kind of philosopher in that, if you think about it. It was spring, and he was in a room surrounded with windows, as airy as a solarium, and outside every window pink azaleas were creating a gaudy flare of color.” She paused. “When I see that shade of pink now, I think of syphilis.” She paused again. “Strange, isn’t it, how that sort of thing works…the mind.”

  She put her hands together in her lap.

  “He told me as kindly as he knew how. Told me how long he probably had had it, how he probably had contracted it. He told me how grieved he was that I was going to have to go through this with him. He talked about his life, our life. It was a very gentle kind of soliloquy…for it was that. I never uttered a word.

  “When he was through I walked over to him, a world of pink azaleas only a foot or two away from us, an embarrassment of beauty under the circumstances. I walked over to him and kissed him. I kissed him on the lips. I forced my tongue into his mouth and gave him the most erotic, most sensuous kiss I had ever given him. And then I turned and walked out of the room. I went straight upstairs and packed a suitcase and drove off within an hour without telling him or anyone else where I was going.”

  She was breathing shallowly, oblivious of Broussard.

  “I was gone for nine days. I never called him or checked on him or told him where I was. After I came back—I just showed up one day—I dedicated myself to him, nursing him, taking care of him; I cleaned him, bathed him, groomed him, read to him, sat with him when nothing else would do. I was with him every minute of the rest of his life and at the moment of his death five months later.” She stopped, and her eyes went back to Broussard. “He never asked where I’d gone, or what I did, or why.”

  In the silence that followed, Broussard watched the poet’s hands crook back gently at the wrists as if to prepare to gesture and in his mind’s eye he saw the solarium and the hazy glow of pink azaleas.

  “I…have no earthly idea why I kissed him that way,” she said, and Broussard could see in her face that the memory of that moment was tormenting her. He had never seen her this shaken, and he knew that it was costing her more than it would most people for him to see her this way. “God knows,” she said, “I’ve regretted it.”

  Broussard looked at her. “Neither of you ever mentioned it, I suppose.”

  “Of course not…I think he believed he understood why I did it.”

  “And that’s what bothers you.”

  “Damn right it does,” she snapped, “I don’t understand it, how could he?”

  “You’re talking about a dead man, Evelyn.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s over. He’s gone. You’ll never know what he thought about it.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Dominick,” Evelyn said, gaping at him, leaning forward over her crossed legs, a single smoky gray pearl drop glinting at him through a thin web of silver-laced chestnut hair. “I know all the logic of it. It’s the other stuff I’m having trouble with.”

  There was a true urgency in Evelyn’s voice, but her face showed anger. She was clearly frustrated that the kiss had had more to do with her unconscious than she wanted to admit. It was an interesting thing in a woman that she was so insistent upon everything having a rational basis. But she was not all that terribly logical, and certainly not as disciplined as she would like to believe. There was too much of the poet in her, and from what he knew of her sexuality, she was fully capable of abandoning herself to fey winds.

  “What other stuff?” he asked.

  She sank back in the armchair and looked away, then back at him, and then to the collection of statuettes on his desk.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  It was an evasive response. He let her simmer. His heart was not in it. He looked at the pearls through the wires of gray and chestnut. Evelyn was a complex beauty. She would never have an indifferent lover. She would never allow it, dedicated as she was to intensity.

  “Why hadn’t you ever been in danger of Gerald’s syphilis?” he asked abruptly.

  Her eyes moved away from the figurines on his desk and settled on him like dead weights.

  “My God,” she said. Her voice was flat, offended.

  “Is that subject inviolate?” he asked. Suddenly he was angry. What kind of spurious indignation was she pretending? “You let it slip,” he reminded her. “You said you were never in danger of contracting it.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t say that.”

  Broussard looked at her. In that one moment of denial she had diminished herself. The proud demeanor that had distinguished her, the haughty self-assurance that had influenced everything about her, including her posture and the way she spoke and laughed and even made love, had shattered in one crisp moment like fine crystal. Broussard had not expected this capitulation to denial. So, like everyone, Evelyn too felt shame, and it was an emotion so potent in her as to make her put at risk her entire persona rather than reveal the source of it.

  And then Broussard surprised himself. He backed off. He hadn’t the stomach for it. Whatever he believed about the unconscious and its demons, whatever revelations needed to be uncovered to give her an opportunity for peace through confrontation, he didn’t care. He hadn’t the stomach to walk her through the fires of purification. He wanted no part of her liberation because it would take its toll on him too, as well as her, and he suddenly had had his fill of the harrowing spirit. This was one journey through hell he would not take; he would be no Virgil to Evelyn Towne. Hers would be a long quest, he could sense it—hadn’t she taken this much time just to reach the point of departure, so fearful had she been? He wouldn’t do it. He would rather give her up to her own anxieties, and if the truth were known, he would rather condemn her than risk his own sanity. That was what it came down to in the end, wasn’t it? Was he really obligated to risk his own sanity to help these women regain hope? Who should be lost, who saved? He had been at it a long while, and now it was the time of sifting.

  Evelyn Towne would be a casualty of history. In another time, at another place, she would have made it. Another hour this way or that, and he would have taken the plunge with her. But the moment was now, and now he was unwilling. There would be no grand confrontation with Evelyn Towne’s unconscious, no journey into the self with a wise companion. He was going to let her go to save himself, an act of spiritual triage.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “I was tired; I could easily have misunderstood.”

  And Evelyn Towne looked at him with an expression of confused desperation. She knew, he thought, horrified. She knew that he had cut her loose.

  33

  They parked at the curb under the covered entrance of the Hyatt Regency, and Palma and Garrett waited in the sunken, thirty-story lobby while Grant and Hauser checked into their rooms. Grant had wanted to make the most of his time and asked to go to Palma’s office immediately to see the crime scene photographs they had gotten on Bernadine Mello to see how they “felt” in relation to the others. He also wanted to see the crime scene photographs on the Ackley-Montalvo killings as well. Even though they were not the same type murders, Grant was eager to see them in the event they proved to have a spinoff relationship with the killings of the three women. It was a ten-block drive to the police station and a quick walk in the rain across the motor pool compound to the headquarters building.

  The homicide division was approaching its evening shift with only one team out at a cantina shooting on Navigation Boulevard near the ship channel. Don Leeland had set up his operation in an office that had been used as a storage room for old equipment since the department’s remode
ling several years earlier. Space had always been at a premium in the homicide division and now the dusty old desks, outdated computer terminals, and worn-out metal filing cabinets cluttered the already narrow corridor that went around the island of cubicles in the center of the squad room, choking down the walking space to a single-file passage and making the far side of the squad room look like a fire sale.

  Leeland had gone home to catch a few hours’ sleep, and Nancy Castle, a detective Leeland had pulled from crime analysis, was sitting at one of the computer terminals plugging in the names that Childs and Garro had produced in the Mello case, as well as those that were coming in on the tip sheets. One of the few up sides to having a high-profile case come out in the open was that once the police presented the carefully selected facts of the cases to the public, they usually generated a flood of tips. It took only one good one to break a case wide open. In his usual methodical fashion Leeland had set up a process in which all tips were processed through one specific person on each shift, and had modeled the tip sheet itself after the one used by the Green River serial killings task force in King County, Washington, which included a cross-indexing system and a method for prioritizing suspects and information. The tips operation was growing by the hour, with the information being fed into the computer as soon as it came in. Even now a uniformed officer was at a small corner desk interviewing a telephone caller in a low monotone and filling in the sheet.

  From the moment they entered the squad room Palma sensed a shift in Grant’s easygoing demeanor. He gave a quick look around as they threaded their way back to Leeland’s task force office and smiled briefly at Nancy Castle when he was introduced, but did not speak. His only interest was getting to Mello’s file. Castle got it out of the locked filing cabinets for them and Palma, Grant, and Hauser took them into Palma’s empty office while Garrett went for coffee.

  Grant took off his coat and hung it over the back of Palma’s chair and gave the pictures to Hauser as he sat down and began at page one of the case report. Hauser turned square to Birley’s desk and started with the first pictures, which had been organized and numbered in the chronological order of the investigation from crime scene to autopsy. Both men turned their backs to Palma, obviously wanting to be left alone. But Palma didn’t leave; there would be questions. She sat down in a chair beside the filing cabinets and waited. After a while Garrett returned with four coffees, but Grant and Hauser didn’t even look up, eventually reaching for their Styrofoam cups without taking their eyes off their work. In a short while they exchanged files for photographs and continued.

  Palma waited. Garrett wandered the squad room, striking up conversations with detectives who didn’t know him well enough to avoid him or didn’t mind his plodding speech. Grant took a long time with the photographs, studying the same body wounds in photographs that represented them from different perspectives and in different lighting conditions. He took a pencil from Palma’s desk and made a few notes, and then turned in his chair to face her, crossing one leg over the knee of the other.

  “What do you see different here?” he asked, then sipped from his coffee, which must have been cold at this point. His eyes, she now saw, were an unremarkable brown with hesitant splashes of light green.

  “The navel bite marks,” Palma said, “are not new—we saw them first on Samenov—but it appears he spent more time with them here. The sucking is more severe. He concentrated on the navel more this time. The facial beating is worse. Again, not new, but it got my attention.”

  Grant nodded, and Palma thought she detected a slight smile around his eyes.

  “The wrinkles in the sheet,” she continued. “It looks to me like he lay down beside her, probably the last thing he did. I noticed them for the first time with Bernadine—the red silk sheet—but I went back and checked the photographs for Moser and Samenov, and they’re there, too. I just hadn’t noticed them. I guess the larger picture was dominating my attention. I should have noticed.”

  Grant shrugged, as if it was an oversight anyone could have made.

  “But I think the fact that he lies down beside them is significant,” she added.

  Grant looked at her, and Palma felt as if he was actually reading her thoughts. It was the same way she felt when she knew she was being watched by a man whose sole concern with her was sexual, to undress her, to get next to her breasts and stomach and inner thighs with his mind. Most of the time this sort of thing didn’t bother her, but once in a while there would be a man whose eyes and expression almost made her believe that in fact he could see beneath her clothes and, by the sheer power of his imagination, place himself next to the tenderest parts of her anatomy. This was the feeling she got from Grant’s soft smile, except that Grant’s eyes never left her eyes. It wasn’t her breasts with which he was being intimate.

  He said, “Why do you suppose he did that?”

  She looked at him and hesitated. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Hauser was also looking at Grant, and she realized that he was not Grant’s equal in this work. He was too young; Grant was his mentor.

  “I suppose…he was working himself up…maybe masturbating—though there weren’t any traces of seminal fluid.”

  “But why this way? Why does he put makeup on her, fix her hair—this time he even used hair spray—” he said, looking down at the report. “Paint her nails…all that?”

  “She’s got to look a certain way,” Palma replied, remembering their telephone conversation of two nights before. “She’s got to fit into his fantasy…”

  “The ‘fantasy,’” Grant said, stabbing the air once with an index finger. “Come here.” He rolled himself forward with his feet, taking the pictures from Hauser and holding them so both Hauser and Palma could see. He selected one of Mello taken from the foot of the bed so that she lay in the photograph slightly foreshortened like Holbein’s pale, dead Christ, her nippleless breasts as voluptuous in wounded death as they had been in life, and the darker wool of her vulva seeming almost a wound itself in contrast to her blond hair which complemented the smooth, opalescent surfaces of her skin.

  “Most of the time a crime scene like this is a disturbance of a routine,” Grant said, his voice mellowing pensively as if he were allowing her to hear him think. “Even when it seems to be a murder committed in extraordinary circumstances, say, during kinky sex. It’s only extraordinary to outsiders, not to the participants. They’re doing something that satisfies them, something they’ve done again and again to achieve repeated gratification. It’s a routine.”

  Grant used his index finger again and held it up in front of the photograph as though it were a needle measuring a response, letting it swing back and forth over the picture as though it were gauging his words.

  “In sexual homicides where there is, at first, a willing partner—often a prostitute—we actually have the possibility of two routines,” he explained. “One is a scenario designed to achieve their mutual satisfaction. A scenario the killer has engaged in maybe hundreds of times before, in reality and in his mind, without a fatal conclusion. And then there’s another scenario that interrupts the first and is played out for the satisfaction of only the murderer. We have to try to distinguish between the two, and pinpoint the place at which they diverge.” Grant’s finger stopped, tilted to the left. “Where did Bernadine Mello’s pleasure end,” his finger swung over to the other side, “and where did the murderer’s begin?” His finger went down and tapped the photograph. “And then we have to establish a chronology of the murderer’s scenario, because it’s with this chronology—what he did and the sequence in which he did it—that we begin to reconstruct his personality.”

  Grant fell silent, holding the photograph, looking at it. Palma was close to him, close enough to catch a vague, intimate sense of him: his bulk, his neck and shoulders thick with the weight of his maturity rather than the hard muscle of a younger man, his hands large enough to cover one of hers completely if he had reached out and placed it there. This close
she couldn’t look at his face, but she had watched him as he had pored over the photographs. He had a thick beard that was beginning to show through the morning’s shave with feathers of stubble growing at the edges of his mustache near the corner of his mouth. The mustache itself was cleanly shaped, as if it had been sculpted, above a thin, rather stern lower lip. He had a strong jaw which, along with the broken ridge of his nose, reminded Palma of the movie version of a rigorous British military officer.

  “The hotel room’s already back in use, isn’t it?” Grant asked, still looking at Mello’s body. For a moment Palma didn’t catch his meaning.

  “Oh. Yes, the Doubletree. Yes, it is.”

  “Samenov’s condo?”

  “Still sealed.”

  “Then we can go see it?”

  “Yes.”

  He turned to her. “Can Bob get the files on Moser and Samenov? He came along on this deal at the last minute, and he hasn’t seen them.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get them.”

  Grant stopped her. “Can we see Samenov’s tonight? And Mello’s?”

  “Sure. Raymond Mello’s moved out for a while.”

  The files were brought into Palma’s office, and Robert Hauser settled in with a fresh cup of strong coffee from the evening shift’s pot. Grant visited a while with Arvey Corbeil in the lieutenant’s office, playing the game, touching base with the man in charge. In the morning he would have to step in and see the captain. Palma noticed that Grant was good at this. He didn’t come on as Special Agent Grant, and best of all he didn’t try to be one of the boys, pretending a breezy camaraderie he hadn’t earned and which inevitably rang false with the naturally suspicious homicide detectives. He was not the sort of man to posture, and his unpretentious manner was immediately recognized for what it was.

  By seven-fifteen Palma and Grant were once again maneuvering their way around the mud puddles in the motor pool compound as they crossed in a light rain and went into the garage to check out a car. Grant waited while she signed out and got the keys, and then they took the steamy elevator up to the second level. As they walked through the garage, Grant took off his dripping raincoat and shook it out as they cut across the aisles toward the car, the smells of oil-stained cement and the sluggish bayou waters hanging in the dead air.