“Inconsistent childhood discipline.”
“That we don’t know. Again, my gut tells me it was a mess.”
“Living with a partner.”
“No.”
“Follows crime in the news media.”
“If we can believe him, he says no.”
“Precipitating situational stress.”
“We don’t know, but I’d say we’ll find something there.”
“The man’s married and has children.”
“Not Broussard.”
“Kept souvenirs from the killings.”
“Of course, we don’t know. But with Broussard—as opposed to Reynolds—we’ll find some. I’m sure of it.”
“The importance of fantasy.”
“I’m dead-solid on that one. Broussard’s a fantasizing fool.”
She stopped. “That’s most of them.”
“By my count,” Grant said, “Broussard fits four out of ten of the characteristics this killer should have. We never expect to have all of them right, but we hope to have a better ratio than that. And I, personally, usually have a hell of a lot better ratio than that.”
Palma took another sip of water. The thought of the coffee she had badly wanted half an hour earlier nauseated her.
“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself,” she said. “You guessed at many of those characteristics. We simply don’t know Broussard that well. I think we ought to have this conversation again after we talk to Alice Jackson. With a little luck, things could look a lot different.”
56
Alice Jackson lived less than a dozen blocks from Texas Southern University, which was established by the Texas legislature in 1947 as the Texas State University for Negroes. The legislative move was not, as it might seem, the result of an educationally enlightened state political body, but rather an effort by Jim Crow politicians to stave off ambitious blacks who more and more were beginning to go to court to obtain admission to the state university. As it was, blacks were not admitted to the Texas state university system of schools until 1950, but the efforts to prevent them from doing so established a university that now had an enrollment of more than eight thousand predominantly black students, most of them from the city of Houston.
The neighborhood had fallen on hard times. In fact, no one there could remember anything but hard times, though there were many who now claimed that in addition to hard, things were also getting mean, too damn mean. Just a few blocks to the east of Alice Jackson’s street, the Gulf Freeway kept up a constant roar of traffic going to and from the coast, and a few blocks to the west the South and Southwest freeways kept up a constant roar sending traffic south toward Mexico. Alice Jackson never went to either place. She stayed close to home and watched the things that used to be pass away and the things that shouldn’t be take their place. Not too far away in Emancipation Park the kids of the ward worked their way to hell at nights, giving each other cocaine and heroin and new diseases and drug-ridden little babies that the welfare system had to clean up and their grandmamas had to raise. Hope was the name of a few of the older girls in the local high schools, but that was all any of the kids knew about the word. And even the grown-ups had let the word slip out of their vocabulary in recent years. There weren’t any Hopes below the eighth grade.
Alice Jackson watched this strange, sad pageant of her neighborhood from the front porch of her small brick house that distinguished itself from all the other houses on her street by its neatness. Not only did Alice’s tiny front yard have grass on it, but the grass was mowed. The front porch railings were painted. She regularly killed the persistent weeds that sprang up in the cracks of her cement driveway, even though she didn’t have a car to park in it. She washed her windows. Three times a week she went to church at the River of Jordan Baptist Church around the corner, and it was only because of this regular and highly emotional exposure to the idea of the possibilities of a better world that Alice Jackson was able to look upon all the decay that went on around her with a kind of philosophical composure. She kept her backbone straight and her heart soft and waited with the rest of the congregation for that day “farther along when we’ll understand why.”
Pink and mauve and lavender petunias were blooming in faded clay pots on the steps of Alice’s front porch when Palma and Grant pulled up to the curb in front of her house around twelve-thirty. Palma took in the derelict street and Alice’s neat little brick house and began to form judgments about the woman she was about to interview. The petunias had been recently watered and the dark patches on the cement steps were still glistening in the sun as they made their way up to the porch and knocked on the screen door. The cooking smells of a Sunday meal wafted out to them on the warm air.
“Baked ham,” Grant observed in a low voice, and Palma thought of the different smells she remembered in a different part of the city, smells of the barrio instead of the ward.
Before she had a chance to say anything, the face of Alice Jackson appeared on the other side of the screen door, a dark face with sharp, chiseled features arranged in a questioning expression and the amber palm of a long-fingered hand placed cautiously on the face of the screen.
“Ms. Alice Jackson?” Palma asked.
The woman nodded. “I am.”
“My name is Carmen Palma and this is Mr. Grant.” Palma pulled her shield out of her purse and held it up for Alice Jackson to see. “I’m with the Houston Police Department, and Mr. Grant is with the FBI. Would you have a few minutes to talk to us?”
Alice Jackson hesitated. “Regarding what, ma’am?” She spoke slowly, politely. She wore a dark Swiss-dot dress with a broad white collar. Her hair was long and pulled back in a bun, and at the front of her hairline and to the left side of the off-center part was a broad streak of gray that was combed back toward her bun in a gentle, wiry wave.
“We’re part of a team of detectives who are investigating a series of homicides in the city,” Palma said. “We’re questioning people who live or work in Hunters Creek, where some of the victims lived, and we understand you’re employed in that area.”
“Yes, I am,” she said. She looked at Grant, regarded him leisurely, and nodded. “I sure am.” She looked back at Palma. “I guess you better come on in.” She pushed open the screen and stepped back.
As tall as Palma, Alice Jackson was a thin woman with a slow, proud carriage, and a gentle manner. She offered them seats on a small sofa in a pin-neat living room and offered them something to drink, which they both refused. Sitting forward in an armchair opposite them, she very naturally crossed her low-heeled feet at the ankles and folded her hands in her lap. She did not appear to be uncomfortable having these two white police detectives in her home, despite the fact that she lived in an area where neither the police nor white people were common visitors, and when they were they were universally unwelcome. She cocked her head slightly forward and waited for Palma to explain further.
Palma spent a minute or two asking general questions and making notations in her notebook, giving Alice a chance to watch her and draw some conclusions about her, and in turn getting a feel for how she thought Alice might react to the touchier questions that were soon to follow. Within a few minutes she decided that the circumspect older woman was not only fully capable of coping with the awkwardness of discussing her employer, but also that she had already begun to suspect that Dominick Broussard was in fact the very reason they were there. She was not a woman who needed to be humored or coddled along, either emotionally or intellectually.
“Ms. Jackson,” Palma said finally. “I think it’s probably best if I’m simply straightforward with you.” Alice Jackson gave a half nod. “I’m going to need to ask you a number of rather personal and confidential questions about Dr. Broussard. But I want you to understand that in the natural course of an investigation like this we ask questions about a lot of people. Naturally, most of the people we make inquiries about are not guilty of homicide, but we have to make the inquiries all the same. It�
�s true that in a criminal trial the person who is charged with the crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty. But it’s also true that before the trial there’s the investigation, and as a general rule there are always far more people suspected of a crime than are ultimately charged with it.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Detective Palma,” Alice said. “I understand it. Go ahead.”
Palma smiled. “Okay. How long have you worked for Dr. Broussard?”
“Eight years. Or a little over eight years.”
“And you work five days a week?”
“Five and a half. I come in on Saturday mornings and stay until noon. Often he sees clients on Saturday morning. I get his Saturday supper for him. A microwave meal. I cook French dishes; he taught me a number of dishes. I fix them for him to heat in the microwave after I’m gone. A complete meal, so all he does is warm them. That’s what I do mostly, is cook. There’s not much housekeeping, him being a bachelor. Nothing gets messed up much. He’s a very neat man.”
“You do that every Saturday?”
She nodded. “For years. Regular as a new moon.”
“You commute to work? You ride the bus?”
“In, in the morning; out in the evening.”
“What time do you leave at in the evenings?”
“Seven o’clock. I start his suppers for him. That’s later than most domestics, but he pays me well for that. And in the summertime there’s still plenty of light to enjoy when I get home.”
“What do you know about Dr. Broussard’s habits in the evenings? Does he go out regularly?”
“I don’t know about that,” she said.
“Have you ever met any of the women he’s dated?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Do you know anything about his social life at all?”
“Not hardly.”
Palma didn’t know whether Alice meant of course not, it was out of the question, or not very much. It was an interesting response.
“Is Dr. Broussard homosexual?”
Alice Jackson didn’t respond immediately, but she didn’t seem shocked by the question. She was giving it some thought. She looked toward the screen door, where the bright sunshine of midday threw a burnished path across the linoleum floor from the threshold of the door to her chair, and she seemed to regard it with mild curiosity while her mind was more specifically occupied with Palma’s question. Outside, the day was sweltering and the voices of children playing under the row of chinaberry trees across the street wafted in on the hot air. Alice Jackson’s hands still rested in her lap, but they did not fidget or betray a sense of uneasiness. Finally she turned back to Palma.
“I don’t know how to answer that, really,” she said. “Keeping house for people, you know, is a funny thing.” She looked at Palma. “Down here, in the South, people’s housekeepers are usually black or Mexican. Any of your people ever housekeepers?”
“No,” Palma said. “I don’t believe so.”
“Well.” Alice’s eyes glided in a smooth circle toward Grant and back again to Palma. “It’s an interesting thing. Dr. Broussard’s a psychiatrist, knows a lot about human nature.” She tilted her head at Palma. “Police, they know a lot about human nature. Dr. Broussard sees a lot of strange human nature, and I guess you do too.” She nodded to herself, thinking.
“Well, domestics—I usually say ‘housekeeper,’ employers like to say ‘domestic’—they know something about human nature too. I don’t know what it is, but when people pay someone to take care of their personal things, you know, ‘personal’ things, then it seems to me they kind of have to separate themselves from those people somehow, because it’s embarrassing to pay a stranger to do something you would otherwise do for yourself, or someone close to you would do for you, a mama or a wife. So what happens is they pretend, maybe, that you are not a full-fledged person. Pretend you’re deaf or blind and don’t hear and see things they say and do. You know, you’re just the ‘help.’
“The point is,” Alice continued, “Dr. Broussard is a very kind man, always very good to me. But, sometimes, he thinks I am deaf and blind.” Alice looked at Grant. “I’m sorry,” she said, “if this sounds roundabout. It’s just that that’s a serious question, and I think I have an answer, but I’m not sure what it means. It needs some understanding.” Then back to Palma.
“For eight years I have taken care of Dr. Broussard’s house,” she continued. “I don’t believe he has ever married. Lifelong bachelor. I clean his house, but as I said he does not live in it too hard, and so the only things that regularly need attention are his things. His bedroom. His sheets. His laundry.” She paused and started to look over again at the sunny path coming in through the screen and then decided to look at her hands instead. She raised them a little and lightly patted her thighs as if she were resolving to continue. “He likes women, all right. Sometimes one has been there in the mornings when I get to the house. Sometimes they are still in bed till late morning. I have heard them, but I act deaf. I have seen them, but I act blind.” She smiled a little, as if she had proved her earlier point.
Then she gathered her brows and frowned. “But in Dr. Broussard’s upstairs bedroom there are two very large closets. One of them is full of Dr. Broussard’s suits and pants and shirts, all his clothes. The other one, well, it is full of women’s dresses and a low shelf with wigs. He has two very large dressers. One of them is filled with his underclothes and other personal items. The other one is filled with women’s underclothes. He keeps his cologne on his dresser with a few other things, a set of clothes brushes, a set of shoe brushes. He’s a very dapper man, if you’ve noticed. On the ladies’ dresser is a full set of perfumes and cosmetics. A wide variety of them. For a long time I thought he had a special lady, and that these women’s clothes and cosmetics were hers. But of course, I learned very soon that wasn’t the case at all. He had lots of women friends, and they were not all of them the same size or would have used the same makeup. So I was curious, and I began to notice. The makeup was used regularly. The dresses were worn frequently. The dresses were all the same size, rather large. But the labels were tony, and they were very pretty dresses, very smart. Dinner dresses, almost all of them. Nothing casual. And every once in a while a new dress would show up, and an older, less stylish one would disappear.”
Alice Jackson looked straight at Palma. “The thing was, you see, there was times I was washing ladies’ underwear when there wasn’t any ladies there, and hadn’t been any ladies there for weeks at a time.”
“How long had you been working for him at this time?” Palma’s heart was pounding. She imagined that Grant’s mind was churning, trying to place this newly discovered piece into the fragmented psychological mosaic of the murders.
“You mean when I first noticed all this? Well, from the very start is when.”
“So you’ve known all these years that he was cross-dressing?”
“If that’s what it’s called, yes.”
“What color are the wigs?” Palma asked. She could hardly keep her voice in a normal register.
“Blond, mostly. There’s a light brown one, I think, but mostly blond.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Seems like five, maybe.”
“Have you ever seen him cross-dressed?”
Alice looked blank for a moment and then she was clearly embarrassed, looking to the side, moving in her chair.
“Once,” she said. “A couple of years ago. It was on a Thursday evening. I had ridden my bus home, and when I got off at my street I realized I had left at Dr. Broussard’s a gift that I had bought for my little niece who was coming over that evening. I just stood right there and waited for the next bus coming the other way and rode all the way back into town and went back to the house. I rang the front doorbell, but he never answered, and I thought he was at the office, you know, through the woods there. So I let myself in with my key, went into the little dayroom where I keep my things, and got the toy. As I
was walking back through the house, I heard music start up on the terrace. I stepped into the dining room and looked out. He was out there, all dressed up, drinking wine and walking back and forth on the terrace in this flowing evening dress.” She smiled. “It was very strange to see him. I couldn’t help myself. I stood and watched for some time, him prancing and gliding around in that dress, drinking and listening to the music.” She shook her head, remembering.
“But you know, the strangest thing. Dr. Broussard is not an easygoing man. He is a bit…aloof. Often he is tense, preoccupied. Kind of surly. But while I stood there watching him, it was very clear to me that he was completely at ease. He was not awkward in that dress. Did just fine in those heels. And he was graceful! Lord, I was just hypnotized by him. He seemed to be comfortable and at ease for the first time since I had been working for him. I believe that man would be better off as a lady. A lot happier.”
She turned to Grant again. “So you see what I mean? Homosexual? Oh, I don’t think so. I’d say his personal life with ladies is pretty healthy. But the man dresses up like a lady. All the time. I don’t know the fine details of a homosexual, but I think Dr. Broussard just likes ladies so much he wants to be one.”
“You’re very observant,” Grant said. It was the first time he had spoken, and Alice Jackson sat a little straighter. “I think your information is going to be a lot of help to us. You mentioned Dr. Broussard’s office; do you clean that as well as the house?”
“Oh, no. He has a service to do that. He says he can take it off his income taxes.”
“Have you ever met any of his clients?” Grant asked.
“I’ve seen them. I haven’t met them.”
“Have you seen them at his home?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know they were clients?”
“I told you, he acted like I was deaf sometimes. He talked to them like he was talking business, like I imagine a psychiatrist would talk.”
“And then you think he had sexual relations with them?”
Mercy Page 57
