Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  “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.

  In each of the three black and white eight-by-tens, a woman who appeared to be in her late forties posed nude in a variety of pornographic postures with an anatomically correct male mannequin. The mannequin wore a leather S&M mask and held a straight razor in one of its plaster hands, its partially visible phallus an enormous exaggeration which the woman seemed to accommodate with ostentatious anguish. Each photograph was a positional variation. But Palma was not interested. She had already recognized Samenov’s face in the colored pictures.

  Samenov was in each of the four colored photographs, which were four-by-sixes and appeared to have been taken with an inexpensive camera. In the first photograph she was tied to a bed with practically every device in her bureau drawer attached to her or inserted in her, her hair pulled up on top of her head and tied to the headboard of the bed, causing her neck to arch in response to the tension as she strained to turn her grimacing face away from the camera. Her body was covered with red blotches from blows or burns or constrictions recently delivered. The other photographs of her were variations of the same pose—in two of them she was tied facedown—the devices variously and ingeniously applied.

  But something else arrested Palma’s attention. In three of the four colored photographs a second person was partially visible, wearing a black leather hood that masked the face. In the first of these, only the head and part of a shoulder were visible in profile, but so close to the camera that they were slightly blurred and washed out by the flash. In a second picture the same masked head, or one like it, was protruding out from under Samenov’s bed, lifting off the floor to look at her, mouth open, tongue extended, eyes rolling white. This time the image was sharp. In the third photograph, the masked head could be seen sticking up from behind the opposite side of the bed, spewing a mouthful of bright red liquid in an arching stream onto Samenov’s splayed body.

  Was this the reason Vickie Kittrie was so distressed at Palma’s questions about Samenov’s personal life? Did she know of Samenov’s sadomasochism? In light of the pictures and the paraphernalia, it was no longer a mystery as to how Samenov could have been tied up without a struggle.

  But what about Sandra Moser? To imagine her in these circumstances was something else again. Palma immediately thought of Moser’s two children, a daughter in the third grade, a little boy in the first. She thought of Moser’s work in an Episcopalian shelter for the poor and her active membership in the parent groups of her children’s private school. She had supported her husband and his career, dutifully entertained his associates at their home when it was expected of her, chaired fund-raisers for the Chartres Academy’s music program, and sweated herself into a size eight which she maintained by avoiding most of the things she really wanted to eat. In short, it was doubtful that any woman could more accurately represent the upper-middle-class, all-American woman than Sandra Moser. And she was a sadomasochist? Palma couldn’t see it, but she knew a few radical feminists who would argue that Moser’s lifestyle, her wholehearted submission to her husband and his career, certainly qualified her as a masochist at least.

  “Damn!” Birley had stepped out of the closet and was looking at the photographs over her shoulder. “This puts a new face on things.”

  After a moment Palma carefully gathered up the photographs and returned them to the envelope, stood, a
nd handed it to him. “We’re going to have to talk to Andrew Moser again. What do you think? You want to bet he hid something like this from us?”

  “No, I wouldn’t touch it.” Birley shook his head and looked at the envelope.

  “But if he was hiding something…” She stopped, lost in thought, staring at the mattress where Dorothy Samenov had lived her strange pleasures and died her strange death.

  Birley nodded. “Yeah, it would be a break. Something to go on.”

  Palma didn’t feel exactly right about it, but some part of her was hoping that upon closer examination Sandra Moser would turn out to be as extreme as the Marquis de Sade.

  7

  “So what did it look like?” Frisch asked. He was standing in the doorway of Palma and Birley’s office with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a pencil in the other. His shirttail was coming out a little in the back and a frail lock of his thinning sandy hair was sagging over his forehead. He had just come from seeing the captain and had walked back into his office when he saw Palma and Birley come into the squad room. Never taking his eyes off them, he had walked around the plate-glass window behind his desk and out the office door. Ignoring the squad room confusion, he followed them around the noisy, narrow aisle that circled the island of cubicles in the center of the homicide division to their office, one of the many small, windowless compartments which lined the walls like computer-equipped monks’ cells in a high-tech monastery.

  “It looked like we’d seen it before,” Palma said, sitting down and pushing off her shoes.

  “I’ll be damned,” Frisch said, and his long face, which always took on the hollow features of a mendicant by the end of the day, registered a respectful surprise. “I didn’t believe him. Cush called in and said he thought he had something like the Moser case you two had caught. Wanted you to come out and look at it.”

  “Well, he’d been doing his homework,” Birley said, “because that’s exactly what he had.”

  “Where is he?” Frisch looked at his watch.

  “Morgue.”

  He looked at Palma. “You got time to tell me about it right now?”

  “Sure,” she said, wishing she had stopped by the women’s room to wash up.

  Frisch stepped outside and grabbed a worn-out typist’s chair that was sitting at an empty desk in the squad room and dragged it into the cubicle. He closed the door, put his papers on the side of Birley’s desk, slipped the pencil behind his ear, and sat down in the wobbly chair.

  As Palma walked him through it, Frisch listened attentively, nodding, interjecting a question occasionally, shaking his head at the description of Samenov’s wounds, frowning at the contents of the bureau drawer. But mostly he just looked at her. He had no habits, not gum or cigarettes or coffee or rock candy, and when he listened to you he didn’t fiddle with anything, sip anything, or doodle on paper with his pencil. He simply listened, no frills or entertaining nervous tics. He was a good lieutenant. He liked his job and liked his men and had a natural talent for managing detectives. He didn’t have any enemies up the ladder or down the ladder and everyone who worked with him felt they could trust both his judgment and his word. He talked straight and didn’t play games. You always knew where you stood with him.

  When Palma finished, Frisch sat a moment, nodding, looking at her, thinking. “A married woman and a single woman,” he said. “Besides the M.O. what are the victim similarities?”

  The telephone rang and Palma picked it up. It was one of the patrolmen who had gone to Dennis Ackley’s address. Ackley no longer lived there, and the older couple who did said they had bought the place from Ackley nearly six months ago. They didn’t know where he was now or how to get in touch with him.

  “Geography,” Birley said. “They lived about a mile or so from each other. Social background. Samenov is a college-educated professional who had to be pulling down some bucks to afford that condo.”

  “Age?”

  “Moser was thirty-four,” Palma said. “Samenov’s driver’s license said thirty-eight. They both were blond.”

  “That’s good,” Frisch said, brightening. “If they were random targets that could be important. And it’s good that they were low-risk victims. Maybe we won’t have all this complicated by prostitutes.”

  “But that’s about all,” Birley said. “At least as far as we know at this point.”

  Birley’s telephone rang next. He spoke briefly and hung up. “That was Leeland. The autopsy’s over, and they’re on their way in.”

  Frisch nodded slowly, thinking. He looked at his watch. “They can make it in fifteen minutes. When they get here let’s meet in my office. We’ll just lay everything out and see where we are.” He looked at Palma. “You’ve talked it over with them? You’re going to work the cases together?”

  “Sure,” Palma said. “We haven’t worked out the details, but we’ve agreed to do it.”

  Frisch looked at her. “This case could attract a lot of heat, a lot of media. Unless we’re incredibly lucky it could take a while. Are you and Cushing going to be able to stay away from each other’s throats?” It was a blunt question, but Frisch had characteristically gone right to the heart of it. If she couldn’t make peace with Cushing, now was the time to get it out in the open.

  “I think we’ve come to some sort of understanding,” Palma said. “I don’t anticipate any problems.” She would have said the same thing about working with the devil. She wanted to be on this case, and she wasn’t going to let a question like that bump her off this early in the investigation. If it was necessary, she would deal with Cushing when the time came. Right now he wasn’t her big concern.

  “Fine,” Frisch said. He got his papers off Birley’s desk. “Buzz me when you’re ready.” He pushed the typist’s chair out of the office ahead of him and left it in the squad room where he had found it.

  Birley looked at Palma. “Jesus. I’m glad to hear you don’t anticipate any trouble.”

  “I know,” she said. “What was I supposed to say?”

  “You want some coffee?”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to wash up and get a glass of water.”

  In the rest room Palma pulled back her hair with her tortoiseshell clasp, took off her watch, and began washing her hands and arms up to the elbows with soap and cold water. Then she washed her face, rinsing repeatedly, splashing a little of it on the back of her neck until she began to feel her body heat subside and the tension ease in her shoulders. She dried unhurriedly, being careful with the rough brown paper towels from the dispenser. Taking a flacon of perfumed lotion from her purse, she rubbed a small amount over her lips and around her throat. She looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. Slowly she raised a hand and gently touched a middle finger to the carotid artery on one side of her neck. When she found the pulse she lay the thumb of the same hand on the carotid artery of the other side. She stood a moment, feeling the regular, rushing pulse against her fingertips, and then she tried to imagine her freshly washed face without eyelids. It was easy to do. She picked up her purse and returned to the squad room.

  By the time she got her glass of water and walked back into the office, Birley was already at the computer typing his portion of the report. Without any further conversation, she sat down at her desk, flipped on her own screen, and set to work.

  The meeting in Frisch’s office came at the end of the day when blood sugar and energy were ebbing and everyone would rather have been somewhere else. Frisch’s office was a large one in a corner of the large squad room. It had two other metal desks besides his own and a number of chairs scattered around. It was often used as a bull-session room, and because of the crowded accommodations in the homicide division the other two desks were variously occupied from time to time by other lieutenants. But when one of them needed it to talk with his men, the others found someplace else to go.

  Frisch sat behind his desk and at his back the plate-glass window of the office looked out into the squad room. The four detective
s sat in chairs around Frisch, using the corners of the other desks for their files and coffee cups and soft-drink cans. Leeland, who didn’t like autopsies but watched every minute that Cushing watched—and Cushing usually watched them from the first incision to the last suture like a bored kid glued to the fifty-fifth rerun of a TV horror movie—nursed a plastic glass of water with a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets churning the surface. He didn’t toss it right down, but sipped it like a martini. Cushing, looking like he wanted a real drink, had the ankle of one leg propped on the knee of the other and was wagging his foot nervously, absentmindedly, his tie loosened and the collar of his black shirt unbuttoned and open. Birley was eating one of the cafeteria’s old doughnuts on which the glaze had melted to make a soggy surface around the doughnut’s tough core. Palma wondered what the long-term effect must have been on his health. He had had one every afternoon about this time, with a bad cup of coffee, for years.

  At Frisch’s request she opened the meeting by quickly reviewing the Moser case while passing around the photographs from the crime scene. She pointed out the similarities that they had seen that morning with Samenov and noted that as she was going back through the Moser file before the meeting she realized that both women possibly had been killed on the same day of the week, Thursday. Then she reviewed what they knew so far in the Samenov case, her interview with Kittrie, what she and Birley had found in Samenov’s condo.

  When she finished, Cushing went over the results of Samenov’s autopsy.

  “The cause of death was ligature strangulation.” Cushing began unbuttoning his shirt sleeves and rolling them up while he read from his notebook propped on his crossed legs. “Rut-ledge compared the furrows with the one on Moser and got a perfect match. They weren’t all that pronounced, which Rut-ledge says could indicate the thing was removed as soon as she died. The cartilage in the larynx and trachea was crushed, hell of a lot more than was necessary to kill her.”