Mercy (59 page)

“Ms. Farr?”

“Yeah.” She was frowning fiercely.

“Detective Lew Marley, Houston Police. I’d like to talk to you a minute, please.”

“Me?”

“Well, yes.”

“What about?” She had bleached hair with about an inch of the auburn roots showing down the middle of her part.

“May I come in, please?”

“You got a warrant?”

“Well, I don’t need a warrant, ma’am. I just want to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said petulantly and started to close the door, but Marley’s foot was quickly inside the jamb.

“I can radio for a warrant,” Marley said. “It’ll just take a little longer, and it’ll probably piss me off.”

The woman looked at him. Her lifeless hair framed a sad face with flat cheekbones and a rather pallid, splotchy complexion. She had a long, sheepish top lip and an unattractive way of quivering the left side of her face. She pulled an overtired face at Marley’s remark and backed away from the door, letting Marley push it open himself. He entered a small living room sparsely furnished with two stained cloth sofas, a couple of Goodwill end tables and lamps, and a television and VCR.

“You alone?” Marley asked, keeping his voice low.

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your back door?”

“Out the kitchen,” she said, a little worried.

Marley flicked his head for her to go first, and they walked into the yellow-tiled kitchen and he motioned for her to open the back door while he stood at the living room door and looked down a short hallway toward the back of the house.

“Hi, hon,” Haws said as Farr pulled open the back door. “Got any cookies?”

“Shit,” the girl groaned.

“Show us around.” Marley was all business.

It didn’t take her long. They walked through a dining room into a hallway past a bathroom, a bedroom which looked like a bedroom, to a second bedroom which didn’t look like a bedroom. On the far side of the room and projecting out into the middle was a platform about ten inches high and eight feet square. It had been built out of plywood and two-by-fours. Attached to the wall over the platform were iron rings and various sizes of pulleys and clips and hasps. A rough cedar beam projected from the wall out to the end of the platform and was supported by an upright pier anchored to the end of the platform and supported by two joists also affixed to the end of the platform. The beam was also fitted with iron rings and pulleys. There were a few benches on the platform. On one of the walls of the room was an “armaments rack,” where three or four different kinds of whips hung along with chains and ropes, leather straps, rubber hoses, and clamps of various sizes. There was a closet in one corner of the room full of rubber and leather costumes and a nearby rack where some of this clothing was drying.

There were a couple of chairs in the room, and Marley sat on one near the platform and motioned to Farr to sit down. She sat down in the other, and Haws sat on the edge of the platform, looking around the room as he took out a thin box of Chiclets, shaking several into his hand. Farr took a pack of Salems out of her robe pocket and lighted one, tossing the paper match on the floor. Perhaps it was because she had just been through a somewhat rigorous routine with her incognito client, but she seemed rather drained of energy in addition to being clearly nervous. She did not appear to be a woman overly concerned with healthful habits.

“You know, Mirel,” Marley said, looking her in the face, “we’re not interested in busting you on this.” He shook his head. “Not in the least. We’re gonna walk out of here in a minute and that’ll be it. But we really expect you not to hold out on us.”

Haws nodded and looked at Mirel’s crossed legs where her thin imitation-silk robe was slipping away from her knees. Well, she was going to give it a try, he guessed. Why not? He could see inside the loosely draped top of her robe. Mirel was not going to win the next Miss Big Cup contest.

“Right to the point,” Marley said. Mirel was cutting her eyes at Haws. “Just to set us straight and save some time, we want to tell you that there are some things we know and some things we don’t know. We’ll tell you what we know, and then you tell us what we don’t know. Okay?”

Mirel Fair flicked the ash from her cigarette in Marley’s direction without being too insulting, and some of it got on his pants leg.

“Good,” he said. “We know that Sandra Moser has been here to work out in your little gym. We know that Vickie Kittrie has been here too, and Dorothy Samenov. We know that Gil Reynolds has been here. Sometimes with them, sometimes without them. We know that you are, off and on, Clyde Barbish’s good friend. We know that you are aware of the tragedies that have lately befallen these people.”

Marley looked at Farr with a pleasant expression. “Okay? Let’s start with a simple yes-or-no question.” He reached into a baggy suit-coat side pocket and pulled out two different photographs of Bernadine Mello. He handed them to Farr, who took them with one hand and placed them on her bared knee, one above the other.

“Do you know her?” Marley asked.

Farr held her cigarette aloft and studied the photographs with a certain myopic distance, tilting her head as if that was going to make a difference.

“Nope,” she said. “Never seen her.”

“Positive?” Marley asked.

“Sure am.”

“What if she had dark hair?” Haws interjected. He jerked a felt-tip pen from his shirt pocket, leaned over to Farr’s leg, and started coloring in Mello’s light hair with broad swishes of his felt tip, his left hand covering a large part of her naked thigh to steady the photographs on her knee. When he was through, it took him a second to steady the pictures again.

Farr didn’t move the whole time he was doing his graphic adjustment of Mello’s hair and inadvertently massaging the top of her thigh. Her eyes locked on him with a cold, slow burn, and when he was through they followed him as he sat back again on the dungeon platform. She never looked at Mello’s picture again, never saw Haws’s artwork.

“Don’t know her,” Farr said to Marley, but she didn’t pick up the pictures to hand them back.

Marley nodded, accepting her acid testimony. He carefully took the pictures off her knee, taking them by their corners, scrupulously careful to avoid touching her.

“Now, what else we don’t know is: What kind of S&M scenarios did Gil Reynolds like best? When was the last time you saw him? When was the last time you saw Clyde Barbish? How well did Barbish know Reynolds…?” Marley paused. “Well, let’s just start with these.”

“What makes you think I know the goddamn answers?” Farr asked with a strong west Texas twang.

“I told you,” Marley said. “We know.”

“Yeah?” Farr nodded skeptically, pulling on her shortening Salem and looking like she wanted to cry. She waited a moment, nervously swinging her crossed leg, which didn’t have a suntan but did have a couple of uneven bruises just above the knee. Finally she blurted, “He liked to whip up on women. About five weeks ago. About three months ago. They knew each other purty good through Dennis Ackley.”

Marley looked at her blankly.

“Oooh,” Haws said. “Toughy.”

“That’s good,” Marley said with elaborate patience. “Now let’s try for a little more in-depth report.”

“Where you guys parked?” Farr asked suddenly.

“Across the street.”

“Jesus. In a police car?”

“It’s unmarked.”

“Oh, right. Big deal.” She looked pained. “I can’t just go telling you all this shit. This gets out…I mean, you know what these people are like? I been at this seven years now. It’s my clientele. They know I’ve talked to the cops I won’t even be able to get niggers in here, much less the white trade.”

“You don’t really have any choice here, Mirel,” Marley said, almost in the tone of a big brother breaking kind of hard news to his sister, all the time, of course, sympathizing with her situation.

“Okay,” Mirel said, a tremor breaking her voice. “Okay.” She jerked her robe tight around her chest. No slack, no free looks. She glared at Haws chomping on his Chiclets, then moped a minute while Haws and Marley waited, before she started talking.

47

“M
ost of the guys come here are masos. They like to be intimidated and humiliated, got their favorite ways to be punished and mastered,” Mirel began. “And most of the girls, too. They’re bottoms—masos. Same thing. That’s what Moser was into and Dorothy and Louise Ackley. Most people. Vickie, she bottoms too, but with Reynolds she tops. A very strange couple. Weird. Reynolds only masos with her, but sados with everybody else. Vickie’s the only one of the group, Samenov’s bunch, that sometimes goes out slumming to bring back fresh meat. Gets out those colored hankies, whatever color she’s coding—different things on different nights—sticks it in her right-side hip pocket to signal she’s bottoming, and takes off. She cruises the dens, picks up the girls who’re into whatever game she’s in the mood for, and brings ‘em back here.”

“Why doesn’t she take them home?” Marley asked. “I thought you had a set clientele.”

“Hell, I hire out, whatever.” Mirel looked at him like he didn’t know shit. “Anyway, one thing, I got the ‘quipment. Another thing, she doesn’t want Dorothy to know she goes to the dens. But mainly it’s because she bottoms. I mean, she doesn’t always know the girls she’s picking up, if she can trust them. So she wants me to keep an eye on their game, keep her from getting killed by one of these bitches. But that’s what she likes, the risk in it. Sometimes she doesn’t even bother to lay down the rules or get the safe words straight. She just gets right into it, hell for leather. That’s when she really needs me. I know when she calls and wants me to do a peeper that it’s going to be a wild show and anything can happen. I watch through the mirror in my bedroom wall,” she said, tossing her head toward a full-length mirror opposite the raised platform.

She lighted another cigarette and got it going with a couple of deep tugs.

“What kind of games?” Marley asked.

“She’s into fisting in a big way, and rimming, golden showers, and when she’s feeling weird she goes riding the rag, or the shit scene, or heavy whipping. Red hankies, dark blue, yellow, maroon, brown, black. Whatever. I watch ‘em all, don’t matter to me. I been doing this scene so long I’m as good as a doctor at it. I know when they’re going too far. I can see ‘em gettin’ on the vital signs. Some of these bitches don’t know Jack-shit about what they’re doing. And some of ‘em get carried away and don’t care. Sometimes me and…Barbish—what the hell, I know the guy—watch together and drink a couple of six-packs of beer. It’s better’n David Letterman.”

She stopped.

“What about Reynolds? What’s he like?”

“Sado. That’s his thing. All the way. And I used to have a hard time with that ‘cause I wasn’t always willing to go the distance with the guy.” She looked at Marley. “To tell you the truth, I had Clyde back me up on him lots of times. But Reynolds didn’t know it. He’d of killed me. Clyde sat right in there like I did for Vickie, and watched him. Reynolds is not a stable man.” She shook her head. “Not a stable man.”

“Did Barbish ever have to stop him?”

“Nope.”

“You said you ‘used’ to have a hard time with him. You don’t anymore?”

“Nope, ‘cause I quit doing it with him. I don’t know. I just had a feelin’ I needed to shut it down. Which is too bad. The guy paid way more’n anybody else.”

“How did he react to that?”

“What, to my quitting? Pissed him off bad. We had a fight about it one night, but shit, what could he do? I threatened to call the cops. And I would’ve, too, but it cooled him down, the bastard.”

“Listen,” Marley said, wiping a hand over his balding pate. “What we need to know about him is, just exactly what did he like most? Was he fascinated by any particular part of a woman’s body? I mean not the usual parts, but off-the-wall parts, you know. I mean it might not be a…sex part…”

“To tell you the truth…” Mirel stopped, and her eyes opened wide. All of them heard it and looked toward the doorway and the sound of the Venetian blinds banging against the opening back door.

“Mirel. Hey, Mirel,” a man called, and then they heard steps coming across the linoleum floor.

Fair jumped to her feet. “Clyde! Cops! Co…” Marley hit her with all his might with the back of his fist and sent her tumbling back over her chair, feet going over her head, as he came out of his own chair with his .45 already in his hand, racing Haws for the doorway. He burst past the door frame first, going too fast to turn down the hall, and slammed against the wall, hearing Barbish running across the kitchen floor, Haws making the turn first but going too fast himself to make the turn into the kitchen, which he zipped right past and which was lucky, because Barbish fired one-two-three blasts from his Colt Commander .45, ripping fist-size hunks out of the hallway sheetrock. Marley, who was on his feet again and running, backpedaled wildly at the sound of the shots, sliding on the wood floor right into the line of fire, yelling, “Shitshitshitshitshit!” as he tried unsuccessfully to reverse the natural law of momentum in an effort to stay out of the doorway, where he finally slid to a stop on his back, firing into the kitchen at whatever the hell was in there, hoping to forestall return fire until he could get out of the way.

By the time Marley realized Barbish was gone, Haws was already pounding across the living room and bursting out the front door into the muggy night. Forgetting about the muddy yard, he bounded off the stoop with the full intention of hitting the ground running and shooting. Instead, his legs squirted out from under him in different directions and slammed him on his back, knocking the wind out of him so that as he struggled to his knees he had no breath and thought he was going to pass out as he saw Barbish stop at the edge of the street, turn, and fire.

Haws went down just as Marley came onto the stoop and yelled, “Jesus Christ, Gordy!” and saw Barbish running into the street. Marley fired his Smith & Wesson from the stoop one-two-three-four times, and Barbish finished crossing the street on his stomach, sliding facedown into the opposite curb.

Haws was already trying to sit up when Marley got to him.