“Yeah,” Haws croaked, and his hand started to sink.
“Gordy, you son of a bitch,” Marley yelled again. “Point at the streetlight!” Haws’s hand and nickel-plated Colt went back up in the air. And that was where they were when the swarm of radio units converged on Mirel Farr’s house not far from the Astrodome, and the ambulance jumped the curb and pulled up beside Haws and Marley on the dead grass.
Palma and Grant were at the intersection of San Felipe and Kirby Drive returning from Broussard’s when they heard Haws’s frantic call for an ambulance. Palma whipped the car right onto Kirby and headed south as fast as she could negotiate the traffic, passing under the Southwest Freeway and following Kirby all the way into Westwood Park.
The crowd was several people deep around the shooting scene and the collection of radio units, which were parked every which way on the curbs and blocking the street. An officer shooting always attracted a horde of radio units, and their cherry and sapphire flashers were bouncing off the crowd and neighborhood houses, giving the scene an unintended carnival atmosphere. Palma and Grant used their badges to push through the crowd and get past the vigilant uniformed officers. The crime scene unit hadn’t even arrived yet, and Palma was the first detective on the scene. She spotted Marley hanging around the back of the ambulance that Haws was going into. As the doors closed, Marley saw her coming over and went over to meet her.
“How is he?” she asked.
“Lucky,” Marley said, looking drained. “It was Barbish,” he said, turning to look toward the street where the ambulance personnel were having a harder time with Barbish, trying to get him out of the gutter. Marley patiently told them what had happened, going through it chronologically and in some detail. “The slug missed the bone, but cut an artery, so he bled like hell. He’ll be okay,” Marley said, wiping a hand over his thin hair. “Jesus,” he said. “I’m a little shaky.”
Palma and Grant followed him over to the stoop of Farr’s house where he sat down. Under the sickly porch light Palma could see his clothes were smeared with mud, his shoes so clogged with it that they looked like brogans. He lifted his chin toward Barbish. “Asshole’s okay, too. I blew his knee off.” He looked at Palma. “I kinda kicked him in the head.” He glanced at Grant. “Just between us. I think that’s their problem over there. I may’ve vegetabilized him.”
“Farr didn’t give you much help about Reynolds?” Palma asked.
Marley shook his head. “Just that he’s a bad-ass who likes to beat up women. We didn’t get much past that before Barbish came in. We need to talk to her, though. I’d bet a paycheck she’s been letting him stay here. We ought to use that to get more out of her about Barbish’s relationship with Reynolds.
The way she was talking, I think they may have more to do with each other than we thought.”
Several more police cars arrived and pushed their way through the crowd to park next to the yellow crime scene ribbons. Frisch, Captain McComb, and two of the detectives assigned to the special squad set up to investigate officer-involved shootings got out of one of the cars and started making their way across the pitted and bogged yard, which got more difficult to negotiate with each passing minute as officers swarmed around the house.
Palma put her hand on Marley’s shoulder. “Hang in there, Lew,” she said, and she and Grant moved away as the officers approached, and Marley got ready to tell his story all over again. He would have to tell it more times than anybody would want to.
“Carmen,” Frisch said, veering away from the group and pulling an envelope out of his pocket. “Reynolds’s search warrant.” He handed it to her. “I talked to Art fifteen minutes ago, and he said he and Boucher have followed Reynolds all the way out to Galveston. He’s having dinner with a woman out there at Le Bateau on the waterfront. They’ve been drinking, just ordered their meal. As soon as they left the city, we had our people go in and wire the place. Before you go up, check with Leeland about the surveillance van so they’ll know what’s happening.” He handed her a key. “The wire people had it made. Turn it in to Leeland when you’re finished up there.”
“What about Reynolds’s car?”
Frisch shook his head. “They didn’t get to it in time. They’ll get something in it tonight. Look, you’ve got a couple of hours at least, if you go right now. That should give you enough time.” He looked at her, and then at Grant. “Do it right,” he said, then he turned and walked back toward Marley.
“Let’s go,” Grant said. “There’s no such thing as ‘enough time’ when you’re doing this.”
Palma backtracked to Bellaire Boulevard and turned toward the West Loop. She picked up the radio and called Leeland and told him to let the electronics surveillance people know that they were on their way. Leeland told her that they should identify themselves as soon as they entered the condo, and then do the same when they were leaving.
They parked among a cluster of other cars under the enormous spread of a live oak fifty yards from the phosphorus glow of a mercury vapor streetlamp in the parking lot of the St. Regis Tower condominiums. Though condominium owners were allowed a designated number of slots in the tower’s covered parking garage, weekends always found a spillover of cars in the landscaped parking lot in the front of the building. There were a number of large live oaks in the maze of medians and those parking places that fell within the circumference of their canopies were prized spots because they guaranteed shade the next day when the sun would send the temperature inside an exposed car shooting out the top of a thermometer.
Palma got out with the flash camera she had taken from the photo lab at the department that afternoon, and the two of them walked across the front drive of the fifty-six-story tower and into the marble and glass entrance. They took an elevator to the twenty-seventh floor and Palma let them into Reynolds’s place with the key that Frisch had given her.
As soon as they were inside, Palma spoke up and identified their entry, and before her eyes had adjusted to the dark foyer she realized that Grant had already left it. He was no longer with her. She started to ask him where he was, then caught herself, not wanting the guys in the surveillance van somewhere outside to know that she was already out of pocket.
She stood in the dark foyer with the uncanny feeling of being in over her head. At first she heard nothing, saw no light, and had the sudden, irrational feeling that Grant wasn’t there, that something had gone wrong, and she was walking into a situation that was completely different from what she had left a few minutes before. She shook off the temptation to let her mind run with that fiction. It was too easy to allow that kind of fantasy to dictate to you, make you do something rash. But now she didn’t know what to do. Did she wait for him in the foyer? Did she go look for him? Without turning on the lights? Obviously he wasn’t using the lights. Maybe if she let her eyes adjust. A few minutes’ wait did help, enough to enable her to negotiate the furniture, but certainly not well enough for her to see anything in detail. Then what the hell was he doing?
She moved to the other side of the foyer and started through what must have been the living room. She could make out sofas and armchairs, a potted palm silhouetted against the Post Oak district skyline sparkling through floor-to-ceiling windows with their drapes drawn back. There was a grand piano, an item of furniture that immediately struck her as incongruous, a bar with a collection of bottles. When she got to the far side of the room near the windows, she turned and looked back, hoping to see the doors to other rooms. To her right was a dining room, and perhaps the kitchen, and to her left she saw an arched doorway and a faint wash of light falling across the marble floors.
Palma moved across the living room toward the light, made the corner, and saw what was probably a bedroom door closed with a bright seam of light issuing from the bottom. She made her way to it, being careful to keep the camera from knocking over a lamp or vase, sliding her feet slowly across the floor like a woman wading in the surf. When she made the hall, she headed for the seam of light, feelin
g still that she was about to open the door on something completely outside her experience, about to do something that could not be compared with anything she had ever seen or done before.
Almost compelled to knock first, she resisted the impulse and pressed down the door handle and pushed it open. Sander Grant was on his knees beside a king-size bed. She knew he must have heard the door open, though he didn’t turn around or speak or acknowledge it in any way, but continued doing something with his hands on the bed in front of him. Palma approached the bed, and even when she knew she was in his peripheral vision he did not indicate that he saw her or knew she was there.
In front of him on the bed were two boxes of bleached white wood about a foot square and four or five inches high. Both boxes were elaborately carved with Oriental motifs, and as Palma looked closer, she could see that in places the wood was mottled as if stained from frequent handling. Grant had gotten one of the boxes open, and one of each of its four drawers swung out of a different side of the box and at a different level, forming a spiral stair, each tray pivoting on a single pin hinge located in one of the four corners. There were no handles to the drawers, no latches, no indication of how the drawers were to be sprung and opened. It was this intricate, but clever, locking system that Grant was still trying to discover on the second box.
Palma knelt down beside him and looked at the contents of the four opened drawers of the first box. The bottom of each bleached wooden tray was covered with a piece of bright yellow silk, and mounted on the silk with thin wire clips were rifle shells, two columns of five each. On each shell was engraved a date and a location: Tien Phuoc, 16 May 1968; Thuan Minh, 4 June 1968; Dak Ket, 15 June 1968; Ta Gam, 17 June 1968; Son Ha, 21 June 1968. She went to the next drawer: Rach Goi, 9 July 1968; Vi Thanh, 23 July 1968; Rang Rang, 3 August 1968; Don Sai, 10 August 1968.
Palma heard a click and Grant opened out each tray in the second box. Four more drawers of yellow silk, ten shells to the drawer: Chalang Plantation, 12 June 1969; Chalang Plantation, 13 June 1969; Chalang Plantation, 14 June 1969; Bo Tuc, 20 June 1969; Tong Not, 25 December 1969; Dak Mot Lop, 19 March 1970; Ban Het, 22 March 1970; Ban Phya Ha, 9 May 1970; Polei Lang Lo Kram, 23 June 1970. There were eighty shells in all, each of the same caliber, but differing in subtlety of metal color and place and date.
Grant stared at the trays and their contents. He said nothing, did nothing, and his face gave no indication of what he might be thinking. Then, very carefully, he closed each of the eight drawers. He stood, still not acknowledging Palma’s presence, and picked up the first of the two boxes and carried it across the room where he set it on the floor of the opened closet, careful to place the shallow, flat legs of the boxes into the same indentions they had made in the thick carpet. He did the same with the second box, then came over to the bed and smoothed it out, adjusting the hang of the bedspread to make sure the seam was even.
Palma stood out of Grant’s way while he made himself familiar with Reynolds’s bedroom in much the same way he had done at Mello’s and Samenov’s. He went through Reynolds’s clothing, studied the contents of his bathroom, looked through his chests where he found a drawer full of pornographic magazines and videotapes. Seeming preoccupied, he moved out of the bedroom and into the second one, which was furnished but unused, without even towels or soap in the bathroom. She followed Grant into the living room, where he made his way to the far wall and pulled the drapes closed before he turned on the lights and began wandering through the spacious room, which was furnished with an extensive collection of Oriental furniture and objets d’art. Grant left no jar unexamined, no decorative box unopened. He checked under the upholstered bottoms of the chairs and sofas and unzipped the covered foam cushions and probed the sides. There was a small wall of books, and Grant removed each volume and quickly, but thoroughly, fanned through their pages. He spent some time at the bar, looking at the type of liquor Reynolds kept and the kind he had in reserve.
In one corner of the room there was an alcove with a desk surrounded by shelves. Grant pulled open each drawer on the desk and went through it, then carefully went through the few envelopes and papers stacked to one side. Two items were side by side, and he looked at their positioning a moment before he picked up the calendar and set it in the center of the desk.
“Carmen, how much film did you bring?”
“Four rolls, thirty-six exposures each.”
“Great. Let’s see how many pages we need to photograph out of the calendar.”
They went through every page, beginning with the last weekend in December of the previous year. Luckily the calendar showed a week on each double-page spread, and Palma was able to get every week up to the present on one roll. There were no notations beyond the present week. Grant carefully replaced the calendar and pulled the address book over in front of them. It appeared to be dedicated to personal use, not cluttered with the names of business contacts as would be his Rolodex at his office. Most of these names were first names only, some with a last-name initial. The book was about the size of a breastpocket wallet, and Palma was able to get every double page on the next two rolls of film.
Grant had gone through Reynolds’s kitchen and was going through a golf bag in the coat closet in the entryway when Palma checked her watch. They had been in Reynolds’s condo an hour and forty minutes. She walked to the telephone and called Leeland. Reynolds had left Galveston and was headed back into the city. They were about three miles out from Hobby Airport. Palma told Grant they might have another thirty minutes, and he started making one more trip through the condo, this time acting as if he were going through a museum. He turned on all the lights and simply strolled through each of the rooms, pausing and looking at things that Palma couldn’t imagine he needed to see again since he had already examined them in detail. But he touched nothing, and sometimes he would turn a lamp off here and there and look around at the effect of the changed lighting on the room, or it seemed to Palma that that was what he was doing. Gradually he worked his way back to the front foyer. Behind them all the lights were out, the drapes over the large glass window overlooking the Post Oak district were once again open, and the lights of the city glittered across the darkness to the foyer.
Twenty-five minutes after Palma talked to Leeland they stepped out into the hallway, and Grant locked the door behind them.
48
Palma and Grant returned to the police headquarters on Riesner and took the rolls of film to Jake Weller in the photo lab, requesting that he print whatever size photographs it took to read the writing on the calendar and the address book. They asked for two copies of each print, one to go to Leeland in the task force control room and one to go on Palma’s desk.
Then they went down to homicide, where the main hall was crowded with reporters from all three media branches, none of whom were being let into the squad room itself and all of whom recognized Palma and tried to get her to stop for a few words. Finally making their way into the squad room, they found another, but smaller, crowd of police officials jammed into Frisch’s office and spilling out of the opened door. Palma also recognized a couple of city councilmen and the mayor’s law-enforcement liaison.
With Grant right behind her, she headed into the narrow corridor that took her to the task force room, where a secretary was working at the computer, Nancy Castle was talking on the telephone, and Leeland was hunched over a pile of papers at a crowded desk. Except for Castle’s subdued conversation on the telephone and a clerk’s fingers clicking on the computer keyboard, the room was the quietest place on the third floor.
They learned from Leeland that both Haws and Barbish were now in surgery, Haws at Methodist Hospital where he’d asked to be taken and Barbish at Ben Taub. Haws was going to be fine, but Barbish was in serious condition. In addition to his exploded right knee, he had suffered a life-threatening brain concussion, which he apparently sustained when he fell and hit his head against the curb after Marley shot him. Tough luck. If Barbish died or had brain damage, the
y might never learn the truth about the hits on Louise Ackley and Lalo Montalvo.
“What about Mirel Farr?” Palma asked.
“Well, actually, she’s at Ben Taub, too,” Leeland said. “Getting her jaw wired up. Uh, she broke it somehow during all this. I’m not sure of the details. Lieutenant Corbeil’s still over there with a couple of our guys and a team from vice. Farr’s records could be a lot of help.” He looked at Grant. “Anything at Reynolds’s?”
“I don’t think so, at least nothing immediately conclusive.”
That was news to Palma. On the drive back from the St. Regis, Grant had politely but firmly fended off Palma’s questions. She had let it go for the moment, but she wasn’t any good at being put off. Grant was going to have to cough it up.
“But Carmen photographed Reynolds’s calendar and address book,” Grant said. “They’re in the photo lab now, and they’re supposed to bring a copy up to you when the prints are ready. Did you get Reynolds’s military record?”
“Right here,” Leeland said, reaching for a manila folder which he yanked from under a stack of others. He opened it in front of him and bit his bushy mustache with his lower teeth. “Was a marine sniper in Nam from February 1968 to July 1971. Three tours. Requested a fourth, but was turned down and shipped home. Discharged in September 1971. He had…” Leeland paused for effect, “…ninety-one confirmed kills.”
“And an honorable discharge?” Grant asked.
Leeland nodded.
“Any psychological analysis in his medical section?”
Leeland shook his head.
“The Corps protects its own.”
“Have you heard from Birley?” Palma asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact…” Leeland leaned over and lifted a page on a notepad, “He’s out in Briar Grove right now talking to a woman who spent a lot of time with Denise Kaplan Reynolds during the year before she disappeared. Here’s a picture of Denise,” he said, pulling a snapshot from a folder and handing it to Palma. “She’s blond, but beyond that I can’t see that she looks anything like the victims.”
Mercy Page 48