“I’m sure your lawyer will take care of it,” Palma said. She and Grant had only introduced themselves before Mirel launched into her legal rights speech.
“I mean!” she snapped, and her dull eyes flashed as best they could. She was pissed.
“All we want to do is ask you some questions about one of your customers,” Palma said. Grant was standing behind her near the door, and Mirel kept glancing at him.
“I don’t have to answer any questions about my ‘clients.’”
“Lieutenant Frisch tells me you’ve already discussed your situation with him. He tells me you’ve come to an agreement with him and the DA’s office about your role in this investigation. He tells me you have agreed to answer questions.”
Mirel narrowed her eyes. “Well, my lawyer will have some things to say about that.”
“It’s my understanding that he’s already said some things about that, and he believes you had better cooperate if you want to avoid indictment as an accessory.”
Mirel glowered at her straw. She sucked on it, grabbed a tissue from a square flowered box on the chrome tray swung over her bed and dabbed at her mouth with a wince. “What client?”
“Dominick Broussard.”
Mirel frowned. “Shit. I don’t know anybody by a name like that.”
“He probably uses a false name. He knew Samenov and Moser and Louise Ackley. And Vickie Kittrie.”
Mirel snapped her head around. “Vickie?” She looked at Grant over by the door, and then back at Palma. “Vickie get killed?”
“Late last night. They found her body this morning.”
“God almighty damn,” she said slowly. “Vickie.” There was awe in her voice. She looked out her dusty window at the wall of another wing of the hospital. She had a good view of the compressors of the air-conditioning system, and the lime-fouled roosting site of thirty or forty pigeons who seemed to have taken a great liking to one of the ugliest spots in the entire 525-acre medical center. Mirel’s expression took on a faraway look of seriousness that was distinctly different from her former anger. “That’s a lot of ‘em. Girls I knew.” She looked back up at Palma. “God damn. This’s weirder’n shit. This guy’s Billy Berserko.” She paused. “What? You think this Grussard’s doing it?”
“Broussard. He’s one suspect,” Palma said. “There are others.”
“He’s into S&M?”
“We think so. That’s what we wanted to hear from you.”
“Well, can you tell me something about him, for God’s sake? I mean. What’s he look like?”
“He’s about forty-six, forty-eight. Six feet. Dark complexion like a Hispanic, though he’s clearly not Hispanic. He’s a cross-dresser. He’s got black hair but…”
“Wears blond wigs, expensive dresses, and does a damn good job with his makeup.” Mirel smirked. “‘At’s Maggie Boll. Margaret. He insists on Margaret, but I call him Maggie to his back. This joker’s the best cross-dresser I’ve ever seen. I mean. Thing is, he’s not really built for crossing—he’s a little thick for it—but the guy’s got such style you can’t believe it’s a man. Makes kind of a sultry babe.”
“Why does he come to you?”
“To watch. Likes to see women whip up on each other. Most crossers like to see men. Well, actually, most cross-dressers I get are gay. So.” Mirel shrugged. She sipped from the accordian straw and then blotted the pink tissue to her swollen mouth. At first Palma found it difficult to understand her through her clenched teeth, but now she was getting used to the twang. “But his deal is women. Sits behind the two-way mirror, always in the act, watching. Sometimes I watch him.” She cut her eyes at Grant. “I got another peeking place so I can peek on the peekers. Some of these crossers whack off while they’re watching, but not Maggie. He just sits there, always in the act, watching. Just like it’s a movie. I mean he doesn’t show any emotion, nothing. Might as well be a documentary about skydiving. He don’t show nothing.”
“That’s it?”
Mirel nodded with exaggeration, her strawy spray of hair wagging stiffly.
“How often does he come in?”
“Every six or eight weeks. Something like that.”
“How long does he stay?”
“Most of an hour.”
“Has he been around more frequently lately?” Grant asked.
Mirel looked at him. “Not really.”
Grant moved up closer to the bed. “When he watches the girls, does he do anything in particular? I know you said he just sits there, doesn’t do anything, but what exactly does he do? Does he hold his hands in his lap? Does he cross his legs? Chew gum? Rub his arm?”
Mirel Farr regarded Grant with sullen eyes and thought about this. She clicked her fingernails against the aluminum Coke can and thought and thought. It seemed an odd thing for her to apply this much attention to Grant’s question. The other responses had been snappy, almost flippant. But now she deliberated with some gravity. Then she began to nod tentatively, then with more conviction.
“Yeah. Come to think of it, I guess he does,” she said. “What he does is he holds himself. I mean, not his dick, but like a woman holds herself. You know, kind of wraps her arms around herself. He does that, and then he kind of leans forward like he’s got the cramps, leans forward just a little.” Mirel leaned forward a little, too.
“That’s it?”
“Well, yeah. And it seems to me like maybe he sort of presses his hand into his stomach the way you do when you’ve got a stomachache, or a cramp. Menstrual cramps. Maybe Maggie thinks she’s having her time.” She tried to grin at the idea, but it was a stiff effort, and she gave it up. “Not much fan to peek at, though. Some of those other guys, the peepers, damn, you wouldn’t believe the kind of kinko shit they go through when they’re peepin’ but don’t know they’re being peeped.”
“Could you see Broussard’s face when he was doing this?” Grant asked.
“Sort of.”
“What was his expression like?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. I mean, he had makeup on.”
“Who did he watch?” Palma asked. “Anyone in particular?”
“Yeah. Shit, yeah! Goddamn!” Her eyes widened. “That was the special thing. Certain women. Yeah, you bet.” She was getting excited. “He gave me a list. Some of the girls that’s been killed. Dorothy was on there. Jesus. And Sandy Moser. Vickie. And then he saw Louise Ackley with Dorothy once, and he put her on the list, too.”
“These women knew he was watching them?” Grant asked.
Mirel cocked her head self-consciously. She didn’t answer right away and spent some time touching the tiny faded blue flowers on her gown. “He gave me a pretty good boost to let him do that. Top dollar. They never would’ve done it if they’d known. When they called to schedule a time, I’d let him know. If he showed up, I got top dollar. He wouldn’t always show up.”
“Were there very many women on his list?”
She shook her head. “At first only Dorothy and Louise. Then he saw them with other women. If he liked them, he’d ask me who they were, and he’d add them to his list, too.
“How many?”
“Six, seven.”
“We’ll need the names,” Palma said reaching for her notebook in her purse. “There’s Dorothy, Louise Ackley…”
“Yeah, and there was Vickie Kittrie and Sandra Moser. Uh, that’s four. Nancy Seiver. Cheryl Loch. Mary Lowe.”
Palma’s hand jagged like a polygraph needle, but she kept her head down. Christ! They were catching up with him, getting closer and closer to the kills.
“I don’t know,” Mirel shrugged. “There wasn’t that many of them. I was probably the only place in town for this kind of thing, so there wasn’t that many of them. This is not exactly a widespread recreational kind of entertainment. I was lucky to hit onto this group of nuts. Never seen anything like them. I used to be in LA for a while, and San Francisco, too. But this little group of gals here beats ‘em all.”
“Mary
Lowe,” Palma said. “What do you know about her?”
Mirel cocked her head and parted her dry lips from her clenched teeth. She was uncomfortable and looked like she wanted to brush her teeth.
“Mary is a class act. Of all these gals, even Dorothy, Mary’s the one with something that makes you wonder why she’s in this league. High society. Almost all of these women are upper-class, you know. West side. The Villages. River Oaks. Junior League. Charity organizers. Wear whatever color’s in for the season. I coulda made a fortune blackmailing ‘em. Mary’s built like a model, maybe her tits are a little big, but what tits! Married. Two kids. Big modern house in Hunters Creek. I went and looked at the house. I do that sometimes. I like to see how far down they’re coming when they come to my place.” She paused. “Mary, she does all the right things at all the right places. Very savvy gal.”
“Did Broussard ever demonstrate any special interest in her?”
“No, but she’s a turn-on for all the others, I can tell you. I mean. She’d turn a woman’s head as fast as a man’s, has these dykey types drooling. But when she does her thing she does it with femmes. Never dykes.”
“Did she prefer to control or be controlled?” Palma asked.
“I seen her do both, but mostly she bottoms. She does it like it’s a modern-dance performance or something. I mean, she’s graceful whatever she does.” Mirel nodded, almost trying to smile again. “She’s a class act. People wouldn’t believe it, you know. Seeing her at my place, doing what she does. I mean. Shit. People wouldn’t believe it.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment, and the only sound was that of Mirel Farr’s straw vacuuming the last few drops of Diet Coke as she reached the bottom of the can. Palma looked at Grant, who was watching Mirel with that expression in his eyes that told her he wasn’t seeing what he was looking at. Then he caught Palma looking at him.
“Do you know,” Grant said to Mirel, “if Broussard—or Boll—ever saw any of these women aside from these instances?”
“Well, you know, I’m not sure about that,” she said. “I wondered about that myself. I mean, he asked to see Dorothy the first time, so I guess he knew her from somewhere. Let’s see, then he saw Louise with Dorothy, and Vickie with Dorothy. Then he asked to see Sandy Moser, so I guess maybe he knew her somehow, too. Uh, I think he saw Nancy Seiver with Moser, or maybe Kittrie, or maybe that was Carol Loch. But I know he asked to see Mary Lowe, because she was a pretty recent addition.”
“Did any of them ever mention him, Dominick Broussard?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know anything else regarding his interest in sadomasochism besides his coming to your place and watching these women?” Grant asked.
“Nope.”
“How did he happen to learn about you?” Palma asked. “Did he just walk in one day?”
Mirel shook her head again. “Nobody jus’ walks into my place,” she said with evident pride, though perhaps not everyone would understand the cause of her smugness. “It’s not like I was in the Yella Pages. References. Somebody’s got to put you onto me. And I don’t accept anybody, either. I mean,” she snorted.
“So who recommended him to you?”
Again Mirel squirmed a little with embarrassment, which she then immediately attempted to cover up with a cocky explanation.
“Look, I’ve been around the block with people like this,” she said. “I see ‘em walk in the door I know if they’re masos or sados or some kind of jerk-off combination. You got to trust your gut with these people ‘cause they don’t think like the rest of us. They got hang-ups you wouldn’t believe. Reason I’m alive right now is ‘cause I know my way around these people, can smell a screwball a mile away. Maggie gets in touch with me, I know exactly what I’m into. Just a harmless peeper. Not even all that weird. Offers big bucks to watch a lady he knows. I can tell. No problem here. And there’s big bucks. One thing he wanted was that they didn’t know he was watching. Fine. I know he’s not going to pull anything funny. I mean, I’m watching him. My instincts told me all I needed to know. Guy was harmless. Hell, if he knew Dorothy…” Mirel shrugged as if that was self-explanatory.
Palma looked at her. Listening to Mirel’s “explanation” of how her reference system worked—that is, not at all—made her furious. The woman was despicable. She jabbed her pen and notebook into her purse.
“I’ll tell you what,” she snapped. “I think you’d better have your instincts examined. And you’d better hire yourself another lawyer. I don’t think one is going to be enough.”
If Mirel’s mouth could have dropped open it would have, but as it was she simply rolled her head and widened her eyes at Palma’s back as Palma strode out of the room without looking at Grant.
She waited near the nurses’ station halfway down the hall while Grant probably thanked Mirel for her help, going through all the crap that goes along with having to be a public servant. Sometimes Palma found the stupidity of people like Mirel Farr too infuriating to deal with rationally. With every year that passed she was finding it increasingly difficult to convince herself that each person on earth had as much intrinsic worth as the next. She had grown up with that concept persistently impressed upon her by her mother, whose unflagging religious faith had, admittedly, carried her through many thin and arduous times. But there were many days when Palma just didn’t swallow the idea. Some lives evidenced no discernible value whatsoever. It would be difficult to ascribe any positive worth at all to Mirel Farr.
Palma’s beeper startled her. She checked the number, saw it was Frisch’s, and walked up to the nurses’ station and asked them to tell the man who would be coming out of Farr’s room that she had gone down to use the telephone outside the waiting room.
Frisch sounded tired.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
Palma brought him up to date on what they had learned about Broussard from Alice Jackson, and what they had just heard from Mirel Farr.
“I’d be surprised if Grant doesn’t have some proactive suggestions after this,” she said. “He’s being very cautious about it, but Broussard’s been all over these women for a long time. He’s known some of them as long as they’ve known each other. He knows a hell of a lot about them, and I don’t think he’d have any trouble getting next to them, even during all this scare. Besides that, these women aren’t the kind who scare too easily anyway.”
She looked out the glass door of the booth and saw Grant waiting, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. He was staring straight ahead, lost in thought, facing away from the waiting room, which looked like a scene from a refugee camp. Because Ben Taub was a charity hospital, certain of its waiting rooms were often crowded with the indigent friends and relatives of the indigent patients. It was no trick to grow depressed simply staring into the passive faces of people who seemed perpetually exhausted.
“Grant’s outside now. We haven’t had time to go over Farr’s interview. Let us hash it out, and we’ll get back to you in half an hour, or we’ll be back to the station to talk. Anything happening?”
“Nothing,” Frisch sounded irritable. “Reynolds hasn’t budged, and his girlfriend’s still with him. Nothing’s moved at Broussard’s. I hope to hell he isn’t laying her out in there.”
“Grant swears it won’t happen. Not at his place,” Palma said. “It’ll have to be somewhere else.”
“Shit.” Frisch was impatiently skeptical. It was rare for him either to swear or be rude, or even show that much emotion. She could imagine what the atmosphere was like at the station and was glad she wasn’t there.
“Anybody turn up anything canvassing Hardeman’s neighbors?” she asked.
“Nothing.” Frisch turned away from the telephone and she heard him tell someone to shut the damn door, and then he was back on. “Nobody saw anything. This guy’s got to be the luckiest bastard going. Vickie’s car turned up in the parking lot of the Houston Racquet Club.”
“What about the lab reports on her?” P
alma asked. “Did LeBrun come up with anything? What about the autopsy?”
“Yeah, actually we have gotten something from the lab, just a few minutes ago.” Frisch turned away from the telephone again, and she heard him asking someone for the lab report. She looked outside at Grant. He hadn’t moved, literally. He looked like a mannequin. “Yeah,” Frisch said to somebody, and she could hear him shuffling papers and someone, she thought it was Leeland, talking to him. “Okay, here it is. On the head hair LeBrun found on Hardeman’s bed with Kittrie, we’ve got a matchup with the unidentified head hair found at Samenov’s. LeBrun also picked up pubic hairs on Kittrie that match the two unknown, single-source, pubic hairs found on Samenov. However, they can’t tell us whether the unknown head hair and pubic hair found on Samenov and Kittrie came from the same person or whether they’re male or female.”
“So the hairs could be from two people or from one person.”
“Right.”
“And they don’t know the sex.”
“Right. But we do know—regardless of whether it’s one or two people—that he or they were with both Samenov and Kittrie sometime shortly before their deaths.”
“And they don’t know if it’s wig hair yet?”
“No, but they know that wig hair has been treated with some kind of preservative. They’re trying to nail that down now, and then they can test for it. It’s going to take a while.”
“What’s a while?”
“It depends on what the preservative chemical is.”
“Damn. The pubic hair,” Palma said suddenly. “Broussard’s hair is black. If it’s his, it’ll have to be bleached or dyed. Have them check it.”
Mercy Page 60
