Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  Broussard stopped. “Does this sound any different from the ‘horrible’ crimes committed against little girls, except that the sexes are reversed?” He answered his question by shaking his head. “The marvelous double standard, again. Men want specific things of women—to be a Madonna or to be a mistress. The mother of God, or a whore. But never, never, do they want both of these things in one woman. They want the mother of their children to be a saint and their mistresses to be whores. Men themselves, of course, can be partners to both: good father with a mistress. No problem there. But it upsets their concept of the universe if their women are both. It seems to go against ‘nature.’”

  He shook his head at them as if he were chastising children.

  “It’s a fantasy, of course, to believe that men and women are different in such things. Indeed, it is a mistake to think they are different at all, except in what and how they are taught to conduct themselves by a particular society within a particular culture. But that is learned behavior. Deep in our guts, men and women are alike. For better and for worse.”

  When Broussard stopped talking, he was smiling and looking directly at Grant, who had forgotten to pretend to take notes and was staring at Broussard with fascination. It may have been that Broussard was smiling at Grant’s expression.

  “A second point,” Broussard continued, seeing Grant’s interest. “Sexual abusers of children are typically ‘tender’ in the manner of their abuse. Their narcissism demands love, and it is love they are trying to elicit. A while ago you asked me if I knew whether any of the three women victims in these cases had ever been inclined toward sadomasochism. By that I infer that these homicides somehow involve this activity. It is not a characteristic of child abusers, so I wouldn’t think your killer would be a child abuser himself.”

  “But a moment ago,” Palma interrupted, “you said that…twenty-three percent of the cases in the survey of boys sexually abused by women involved some form of sadistic behavior.”

  This time Broussard’s smile was a smirk, and he nodded as if Palma’s observation were itself proof of something self-evident.

  But before he had time to respond, Grant asked, “You had another point?”

  “Point two,” Broussard said, quickly holding up two fingers. “Fantasy. Sadomasochists are powerfully motivated by fantasies, role-playing. The play’s the thing.’ They are stimulated by very specific acts, gestures, attire, words. It’s the same with sexual killers. But not so with pedophiles. I don’t believe your killer will be a sexual abuser of children.”

  “Fine. Let’s say we rule that out,” Grant was speaking slowly, watching Broussard with an anticipatory curiosity. “How do you imagine his personality?”

  Broussard seemed irritated by Grant’s persistence in general and by this question in particular. “I should think that by now any observant reader of the newspaper or true-crime magazines could answer that. It’s a personality type that has been well documented and has almost become a cliche. Introspective, solitary, studious, obsessional, vain. Rarely demonstrates violence to those who know him. A ‘perfect’ neighbor, nice guy, who in fact harbors deep, hidden aggression. If he is a mental patient or a prisoner, he will be a model inmate, never causing trouble, probably becoming a trusty or earning good-behavior time. Most likely he is impotent, and probably feels sexually inferior to women. He has bizarre interests of which his friends—I should say his ‘acquaintances,’ he probably has no real friends—are unaware. He is a habitual masturbator and reader of pornography. He probably experiences periods of anxiety or depression.”

  Broussard opened his hands and let them fall on the desk in front of him.

  “All right,” Grant said. “Now what do you, as a psychiatrist, know about him?”

  Broussard studied Grant, his eyes crimping slightly, as if he was appraising not only Grant’s question but Grant himself, as if he suspected Grant was in some way trying to get him to overextend himself. “Probably nothing,” he said at last.

  “You can’t speculate?”

  “I could. I can’t see any benefit in it.”

  “Insight, Dr. Broussard,” Grant said. “You get it from listening to people talk. I can imagine myself as a sexual killer, and I learn something, about myself and about the man I’m imagining. But I learn even more if a trained psychiatrist with years of clinical experience imagines him.”

  “Mostly with women.”

  “What?”

  “My clinical experience has been mostly with women.”

  “All the better.”

  Broussard continued looking at Grant, his eyes seeming to calculate the meaning and risk of the challenge, the corners of his mouth drawn down slightly, an outward sign of an inward conflict. He slid his eyes away from Grant and reached over and idly picked up a black statue from among the dozens on his desk and set it in front of him.

  “The Hindus’ Kâli Ma,” he said. The female figure was skeletal and hideous, squatting over her consort Shiva, devouring his entrails, a rosary of skulls swinging from her neck. “Giver of life and devourer of her children.

  “Some men, maybe many men,” Broussard began slowly, “engage in sadistic sexual fantasies to a slight or great degree. But only a relatively few actually act them out. If I am one of the few, why? What factors cause me to act out what most men only flirt with? It is unlikely that there is any single, universal factor. Perhaps I was sexually assaulted in childhood or adolescence. Perhaps my first orgasm occurred during one of these assaults, stunning me with the realization that I was enjoying a wondrous sensation in the midst of despicable degradation. It would have left an indelible scar on my psyche, and forever would have related one of life’s most elemental drives—something that should have been good and nurturing—to something harsh and sadistic. I would always equate the two, cruelty and orgasm, because my unformed personality would mistakenly affirm the relationship. The event would have occurred at a crucial point in my sexual orientation. I would have been…perversely taught.”

  There was only one light on in Broussard’s office, a desk lamp with an amber glass shade that sat to his right and cast a candle-colored glow across the varied heads and forms of his mythical women and kept his own face softly alight in the coming dusk. Palma and Grant, sharing little of the lamp, receded farther into the shadows with the failing light.

  “My social-sexual relationships would be disappointing as I entered puberty. Nothing would seem to be ‘as it should be’ in my relationships with the opposite sex. I would feel inadequate from the beginning, and as I grew older I would become increasingly frustrated. Unable to control events in the real world, I would turn to fantasizing a different one, one in which I always would be in control. I would develop a pattern of thinking and imagining, scenarios of sexuality that were warped by my earlier experiences. Only now I am in control. I go over the scenarios again and again and again. This pattern of thinking, the scenario, the fantasy, becomes a habit, and I find that I become sexually aroused by fantasies of controlling and dominating. These fantasies become my sole sexual experiences. I retreat into them. Also, eventually, I become bored by them, and I learn that to sustain my sexual arousal I have to alter the scenarios to make them increasingly vivid and provocative. I discover that variety is, indeed, a spice. I may even find myself beginning to act them out, following women at a distance, watching them as I imagine dominating them, humiliating them.”

  Broussard rubbed the burnished Kali, looking at her, his voice quiet and steady, his monologue coming increasingly easy to him.

  “I become bolder. I follow a woman home and break into her house while she is away, staying for hours by myself. Trying on her clothes. Or crawling naked under the covers of her bed where her perfume lingers like musk among the sheets. I may ‘accidentally’ meet her, at a restaurant, at a bar, and talk to her. My intimacy with her personal items, her underclothes which I have worn on my own body, her toiletries which I have applied to my own genitals, makes me bold. I know something she does
n’t know. I control our meetings. I’m charming enough, my boldness gives me a kind of easiness of manner. In the game of the sexes I am already ahead because I know so much about her, the kind of soap she uses, the name of her perfume, her brand of sanitary napkins. I go home with her. I am at ease, because I know everything about this house that I am pretending to enter for the first time. I enjoy the joke; it gives me confidence. I have confidence and control all the way through it, all the way to the end…”

  Broussard stopped suddenly in mid-thought and let his eyes slide back to Grant, who was almost swallowed by the darkening shadows. Outside, a lilac evening had slipped into a warm, purple darkness, and below them the sluggish waters of the bayou turned inky and foul in the falling night.

  46

  Mirel Farr lived in a neighborhood not far from the Astrodome and that for years had been teetering on the brink of decline. Then a couple of years earlier it finally plunged over the edge, and all the homeowners seemed to have decided within an eighteen-month period to sell out to absentee landlords. Now most of the little houses were rental property, and because the people who lived in them had invested neither money nor memories and were themselves teetering on the brink of one kind of disaster or another, the little houses began to reflect the hopelessness of the lives of their occupants. The lawns were unkempt now, and weedy, and burnt to hard, dun-colored bristles, and the buckled sidewalks went unrepaired. Paint had faded to pastels of their former shades and the composition shingles on the roofs were curled and blistered to crumbles under the vicious Texas sun. And another sure sign of “things going to hell,” as Gordy Haws observed, was that people had taken to parking in their front yards and putting cars up on blocks in their driveways.

  Haws and Lew Marley stopped their dark gray department car under the frondy spread of a fat Mexican blue palm across the street from Mirel Fair’s house. They looked at the house a moment, its bare yellow porch light casting a jaundiced glow over the cement stoop and thought about the best way to go about talking to dominatrix Farr. Just as they decided that Haws would go around back and Marley would knock on the front door, a black Lincoln sedan eased down the street and turned into Fair’s driveway. Its lights went out and the car remained dark and still for a moment, and then a man got out and walked gingerly across the muddy yard to the front door, with his shoulders hunched around his face as if he was warding off a blowing rain. When he got to the front door he simply opened it and walked in.

  “Customer,” Marley said, scratching a long sideburn.

  “Why don’t I check this guy out?” Haws said, jotting down the license number and picking up the radio. He called in the number, and in a few moments the radio scratched and they learned the man’s name and address and driving record, all of which were uninteresting. Just a west Houston businessman slumming over to Mirel’s for some kinky entertainment.

  “It’ll take a while,” Marley said. “Let’s go get a burger.” He put the car in gear and they pulled away from the curb and drove to South Main, where they got hamburgers at the American Boy cafe run by three Vietnamese brothers who took their cross-cultural menu seriously by offering old standard cuisines of several nationalities, jellyfish and squid in steamed vegetables on a bed of seaweed, chicken-fried steak with biscuits and lots of milk gravy, chicken enchiladas, and barbecued brisket. And always, hamburgers and fries.

  Marley and Haws took their hamburgers and fries back to the Mexican blue palm across the street from Farr’s and settled in to eat, the car windows rolled down to let in the rain-cooled evening air. Their radio was turned low so it wouldn’t carry out into the still night.

  They had been there only fifteen minutes when the broad, flat muzzle of a giant mixed-breed dog suddenly appeared in Haws’s window. Smelling stoutly of wet hair, it draped its great muddy paws over the windowsill and lusted shamelessly after Haws’s hamburger, its overlong tongue lathering its purple lips. Unsuccessful in beating the dog away from the window, Haws finally offered a dollar each to two Mexican boys who were passing by if they would tie one of their belts around the dog’s neck and lead the animal away. But as soon as Haws gave the boys the money, they bolted and ran away into the dark, and the dog was back up on the windowsill, drooling down on Haws’s armrest. Swearing, Haws emptied all of his and Marley’s pepper onto the paper his hamburger had been wrapped in and stuck it out for the dog to whiff, which he did mightily. Then he stopped breathing, rolled his eyes and let out a bawl mixed with a sneeze that splattered slobber all over Haws’s grinning face, snapped the dog’s head back, and whammed it against the top of the window as he scrambled off the side of the car, raking his claws down the paint and knocking his chin against the windowsill. He shot out into the dark, bellowing and snuffling and tossing his head like a mad dog.

  Haws and Marley laughed and finished their hamburgers, and Haws told everything that had happened to Marley, even though Marley had been sitting right beside him through the whole thing. Haws told it a couple of times. Later, the cur returned to sit and watch them from the darkness on the other side of the blue palm, but no matter how Haws tried, he couldn’t coax the dog to approach the car again.

  That was the entertainment.

  Then boredom quickly followed and settled in. They had finished their hamburgers, drunk their Royal Crown colas, and eaten their ice, and the man still hadn’t come out of Mirel Farr’s neighborhood dungeon.

  “Je-sus,” Haws said, looking at his watch for the fourth time. “It’s been almost an hour. He must be gettin’ an enema.”

  “Shit,” Marley said, and slid down in his seat.

  Haws laughed at the unintended pun, but Marley didn’t even know he had made one and scooted down even more so he could lay his head against the back of the seat.

  “Let’s go in,” Haws said.

  “And interrupt something like that?” Marley asked.

  “Why not?”

  “You ever interrupted something like that?”

  “Well, no, Lew, I haven’t.”

  “Well, you don’t want to.”

  “Hell, you haven’t either.”

  “Right, but Dick Paredes did. Big mistake. He told me about it.”

  “Aw, come on.”

  “I’m telling you, you don’t know what she’s doing to the guy,” Marley said. “She’s got him hooked up some way, maybe something tagged onto his peter, something stuck up his ass, maybe electricity involved. We go blowing in there, scaring them, the guy might jump and rip something off or out or down.”

  “Down?”

  “I’m just saying it’s a risk I don’t want to take. He’ll be out in a minute,” Marley said authoritatively.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  Haws looked at Marley. “What’d Dick Paredes tell you?”

  “Long story,” Marley said, rolling his head against the back of the seat, trying to find a comfortable position.

  “We’re going somewhere?”

  Marley sighed impatiently. “When he was in vice they raided one of these dungeons and caught a little routine in progress. Guy was buck naked, blindfolded, lying on his back with his legs drawn up and alligator clips clamped all over his ass and his peter. Wires were hooked up to a big old truck battery, you know, twelve volts, and this old gal at the controls was buck naked too, except for a rubber Halloween mask of a pig and a pair of high-topped, laced-up roller skates. Paredes and his bunch went blowing in there and scared them all to shit. The gal’s skates shot out from under her and she fell on the neck of an upright beer bottle—this is no lie—and it went right up her ass. She screamed and accidentally snapped on the step-down switch she had hooked up to the battery and poured the full force of the juice of that battery into that guy’s ass and his peter.”

  Haws roared, but Marley never lifted his head off the seat. “Bad end to the story, Gordy,” Marley said soberly. “The gal in the pig mask had to go through a bunch of operations. The neck of the bottle broke off in there, and they never got it all strai
ghtened out the way it was before. And the guy on the floor, he lost one nut and got the end of his peter burned off. They had to cut most of the rest of it off.”

  Haws guffawed again, but stopped before he would have liked to because of Marley’s tone of voice, which was serious. Marley was kind of a moralistic guy anyway when it came to sex, and this was clearly a grave warning to any cop who wanted to raid an S&M dungeon while business was in progress. Haws sat back in his seat and thought about the scene Marley had just described and laughed to himself and now wanted more than ever to go bursting into Mirel Farr’s place to see what he could discover. Occasionally he would glance out the window and see the giant cur watching him from the deep shadows under the blue palm.

  After almost another half hour of waiting, they heard the front door of Farr’s place open, and the man came out, his shoulders once again hunched up around his ears.

  “Gee, he’s really disguised, huh, Lew?” Haws observed.

  The man quick-walked to his car, unlocked it, got inside, turned on the lights, backed out of the drive, and drove away.

  Haws and Marley got out of the car and locked it, and Haws made one last effort to call the cur to him, but the dog quickly drifted farther back into the shadows and growled menacingly from the dark. Chuckling, Haws rounded the front of the car, and the two of them walked across to Farr’s house. Marley waited for Haws to work his way around to the back before he stepped up on the stoop, opened the screen door, and knocked on the wood door behind it. The yellow light falling on his tall, thin frame made him appear slightly malarial. He had to knock loudly three more times before the door opened, and he held up his shield to a woman in a housecoat who looked to be in her late twenties.