Dead Aim

CHAPTER 4

Mallon drove to the police station on Figueroa Street, climbed the steps into the small foyer, and waited at the front counter for a few minutes before he got a chance to tell the woman behind it what he had come for. She asked him to sit on a bench of blond wood that matched the counter, then made a telephone call. After a few more minutes, a tall policeman with a muscular frame and curly black hair who was wearing a tan summer-weight sport coat and blue jeans came out of a door at the side of the counter. He looked around, saw that Mallon was the only one waiting, then stepped up and shook his hand. “I’m Detective Fowler,” he said. “I can take your report.”

He led Mallon around the counter and through another door, then into a large office with several desks in it. He set a straight-backed chair in front of one of the desks, then sat down behind the desk and placed a pen and a yellow pad in front of him. “Now, Mr. Mallon. Can you tell me how you knew the deceased?”

“I didn’t,” said Mallon. “I don’t even know her name. I pulled her out of the ocean the other afternoon. She had tried to drown herself.”

Detective Fowler squinted at him as though he were having difficulty hearing what Mallon had said. Mallon went on. “I thought I should let you know about it.” He paused. “I’m not sure what good it does now, but it didn’t seem as though I could not tell you.”

Fowler nodded.“How did it happen?”

Mallon told him the story. He did not leave out the way it had felt to try to maneuver the young woman away from the ocean, to manipulate her into letting him take her to the hospital, and then to fail.

Fowler listened patiently, staring into his face as he talked, and interrupting only to ask, “What time was this?” or “Why did she change her mind?” His questions seemed intended to be polite, to make it easier for Mallon to talk, but Mallon knew they were more than that.

When he told Fowler about returning from the restaurant and finding an empty house, Mallon said, “I thought about calling the police that night, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that she had gotten through it, and now she would be somewhere getting a good night’s sleep. Maybe after that she would feel up to facing things. I thought that having the police show up to question her would make things seem worse to her.” Mallon sighed. “I guess I was just trying to think up reasons why it was best to do nothing. I should have reported it.”

Fowler shrugged. “Absolutely. Then I’d be the one who feels bad today.” He added, “I mean that. Getting somebody hospitalized without her consent on a 5150 isn’t that easy. All she’d have had to do was say the suicide attempt had never happened. You’re not a relative, or even an acquaintance. If she was acting composed enough to convince you that she’d be okay, she could have convinced everybody else, too.”

“I suppose,” said Mallon. “Well.” He leaned forward and began to stand, but Fowler held up his hand. He did it without urgency, but it was deliberate and authoritative.

“Do you mind?” asked Fowler. “I just need to take care of a few details, and then we’ll be through.”

“Okay,” said Mallon. He sat back down and waited.

“Just some questions I have to ask. After you saved her life, did she seem grateful, affectionate?”

Mallon shook his head. “No. Not really. She understood that I was trying to help her-she thanked me-but at first it took just about all her patience to be polite about it.” He decided he had to move closer to the parts of the evening that were more difficult to discuss. “After her nap, when she was feeling better, she was affectionate.”

“She seemed to like and trust you. She walked all the way to your house and went to bed. Did you have sexual intercourse?”

Mallon was shocked, appalled at the suddenness. “No,” he said firmly, then caught himself. He couldn’t lie to the police. “Not right away. It was after her nap. We each had a shower, and we ended up in the bath together. It wasn’t anything I intended. It was her idea, and she was very insistent.” The intensity of his own reaction suddenly struck him as suspicious. He began to identify the reasons aloud, so he wouldn’t sound defensive. “She was attractive, but she seemed to me to be around twenty-five, and I’m forty-eight. I thought I must have struck her as ancient. Besides, I assumed she must be emotionally…” He searched for a word, and came up with “unhealthy. Weak.” He added, “But at the time, when we were talking about it, she seemed to be sane and in control of herself.”

Fowler nodded. “I understand. I just have to ask all these things, because somebody has to, and I’m the one it fell to. If something we’re supposed to get on the record came out later, and we hadn’t already covered it, that might make us both look bad. Let’s see. You said that at first she wasn’t affectionate or friendly. Did she resent you for saving her?”

Mallon reflected. “I’m not sure. Maybe a little.”

“Did you have to struggle with her, maybe to get her out of the drink, or make her go with you after?”

“No.”

Fowler looked at him with a furrowed brow, as though asking him for a favor. “Sometimes drowning people get a panic grip on you-climb right up on you and hold you under. You might have to hit them to keep them from dragging you under with them.”

“No,” said Mallon. “She was unconscious.”

“Even then,” said Fowler. “An unconscious girl is just a hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight. Sometimes you have to grab them any way you can.”

“I used a cross-chest pull, my arm over her left shoulder and under her right arm. She didn’t fight, and I didn’t have to do anything but swim. When I got her to the shallows, I took both her wrists and dragged her up on the sand. It didn’t hurt her, and all I was worried about was keeping her face above the surface. When I got her to the shore I gave her CPR, and she coughed up some water. She never said anything about pain, so I assume there was none.”

Fowler said, “Okay. Thanks very much for coming in and telling us about this, Mr. Mallon. It will help us clear this up. When a young woman like that dies, it’s just… mysterious.”

“You’re welcome,” said Mallon. He stood up to leave, but Fowler made a quiet uh sound, and Mallon turned his head and waited.

Fowler was looking at his notes, then at Mallon, then at his notes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll need to have you give the evidence guys your prints and a blood sample.”

“Why? The most my DNA would tell you was that we had sex, and I already told you that.”

“Standard procedure. We do it in any case like this. It’s mainly to eliminate you if something should come up later. If there’s a second set of prints on the weapon, you’ll want us to know right away they’re not yours. Likewise, blood and so on.”

Mallon was sure now that the detective had been lying to him from the beginning. He had been prodding Mallon with these questions because he suspected him of something: killing the girl, or maybe rape. “It doesn’t sound like standard procedure. Should I call my lawyer?”

Fowler’s jaw tightened, and he let out a breath in a speculative hiss. “That’s up to you. I’m certainly not going to go on record telling any citizen that he’s wasting his money to get an attorney. I will say that you just spent over an hour telling me a long story voluntarily, and that I wasn’t planning to ask you any more questions.”

Fowler looked innocent, even mildly disappointed and insulted. But Mallon was aware that a cop conducting an interrogation had no legal responsibility to tell a suspect the truth. Mallon reminded himself that he had nothing to protect. If they wanted his fingerprints or his blood, they would get them eventually, and how could they incriminate him? He said, “Okay. I guess there’s no need to wait around for my lawyer.”

He followed Fowler into the hallway, and then through a door near the end of the hall. There was clearly something about the death of the girl that had not been in the papers. He chided himself for rediscovering the obvious. How could he have imagined that there would not be?

When Mallon left the police department he drove home, then admitted to himself that the only sensible thing he could do was to see his lawyer, Diane Fleming, to tell her what had happened. He turned on his front steps to go back toward his car, but then changed his mind, left it in the driveway, and instead walked down Anacapa Street toward her office. He had been sitting in the police station for hours, and he told himself he needed to walk and arrange his thoughts before he spoke with her. But after a block, he found that there was an unexpected aftereffect of failing to persuade the girl not to kill herself: it was forcing him to revisit parts of his own life.

Mallon knew much more about what might happen to him than he had told Fowler. The slow, methodical procedures of the police and the courts were very familiar to him. When he was eighteen, he had disappointed his parents and gone into the Air Force instead of going to college. After he had gotten out, he had returned to the still half-rural area outside San Jose where his family had lived since the gold rush, and disappointed his parents again by going to the police academy to become a parole officer. He had worked in the San Jose department for four years before he’d reluctantly conceded to himself that his optimistic longing to take people who had made mistakes and repair their lives had not made him good at it. All his sincerity and hard work had accomplished was to make him feel like a failure, case by case. He’d felt that he was smothering himself in problems that he could not hope to solve. He’d handed in his badge and a short letter of resignation and had gone to work as a carpenter on a construction crew.

After a year of construction work and some intensive study, he had gotten a contractor’s license and hired his own crews and begun to build houses. On his father’s advice, since he had joined the Air Force he had been putting all of his savings into buying pieces of farmland. He had simply held it, paying the bank and the taxes by renting it to neighboring farmers who wanted more land to cultivate.

After his construction business had begun to prosper, he met a girl named Andrea at a party, took her out a few times, fell in love, and persuaded her to marry him. It was only two years later that his parents both died-first his father, and then a few months after that, his mother. He was terribly sad, but not particularly surprised. In a way, he had been expecting it, and when it came, it seemed almost overdue. It seemed to him that they had begun to die on the day when the call from Boston had come about his older sister, Nancy.

Nancy had been the smart one, the only one who’d ever played the piano that sat in the parlor of the family farmhouse, a beautiful, tall, strong girl with an open-mouthed, loud laugh and long, light brown hair that the sun always bleached a bit in the summer. She had gone off to college in Boston when he was twelve and, according to his parents, had done beautifully for the first three years. She was still doing just as well on the day when she had made her telephone call.

The day became such a part of his history that he had never seen another month of March arrive since then without remembering. He had answered the telephone and been surprised, because long-distance calls were expensive, and scholarships didn’t pay for them. He remembered being a bit confused, because she seldom called, and this conversation didn’t seem to be about anything much. She had seemed disappointed when he’d told her that both of their parents were out, but she had filled the time by asking him what he’d been doing, how his grades were, and had even teased him a bit about girls. She had seemed reluctant to hang up, as though she were hoping their parents would arrive. He had offered to have them call her back later, but she had said, “No, never mind. I don’t think I’ll be around then. Just tell them I love them. I love you all.” Then they’d hung up. The next call from Boston had been from the head of the campus police. It had fallen to him to tell the family that she’d killed herself.

It had been the most important day in the life of Mallon’s family, the day when everything had changed. His parents had been different after that, in a slow decline that lasted until he was a married, self-employed, and successful contractor. And when that had been accomplished, they’d died.

Mallon went on, remodeled the old family house and moved his wife into it, and kept building his business. In time, the monetary value of the land he had bought became so compelling that he needed to devote some attention to finding something to do with it. His wife, Andrea, had always been ashamed that he was essentially a tradesman who worked with his crew and came home in blue jeans soaked in sweat and covered with sawdust. She had, since their wedding day, referred to her husband as a “developer,” but had lately refined her story to promote him to a man who “owned land,” and so she welcomed any sign that he was actually interested in the property, and not in getting his hands dirty.

He began to build houses on the farmland. He was one of the many beneficiaries of the steady population growth of northern California, and soon he began to act very much like the man Andrea had been saying he was. Then, ten years ago, as their growing prosperity was becoming noticeable, she had decided that it was time to leave.

Mallon’s divorce from Andrea had been an ugly, drawn-out campaign with charges and counterattacks that had been painful but meant nothing, since it made no legal difference in the state of California if he was taciturn and distant or if she’d had affairs. Once they were no longer living together, the battles finally had nothing to focus on but the sums that could be produced by the sale of things that had once been treasures. Their meeting on the day of the final decree had ended the marriage in a last conflagration and a division of spoils.

The property division had required that they sell their house. It had been in his family for four generations, and had originally been a working farm. Even when he had been a boy, it still had been far enough out in the country so that he and his father used to take target practice with their rifles at the edge of their backyard. In that direction there had been nothing to hit for miles. Since then, the city of San Jose had simply grown to engulf the farm and make the hundred acres worth more than all the crops ever grown there. He had felt a deep guilt for not contriving a way to prevent the sale of the house. He had not, in any emotional sense, owned it. He had not been one of the people who had built it, or fought the droughts and the politicians to hold it. He had merely covered over a few more of the fields with grass to enlarge the yard, turned his grandmother’s kitchen garden into a tennis court, torn out his father’s swimming pool and put in a better one to please Andrea. He had, by default, been this generation’s caretaker, holding the house for the next. When it went, he had mourned it like a death, but the house had not been a surprise. She had not liked the place.

The sale of the construction business Mallon owned had been a surprise, because he had never before seen Andrea make a decision that seemed contrary to her own best interests. He had offered her a monthly income that would have consisted of half his profits. But she had insisted on having the company appraised-trucks, tools, trailers, telephones-and getting half of the total in cash immediately.

Andrea’s demand came just at a time when northern California was gripped in its most frantic growth spurt. Mallon had run out of land that he had already paid for or inherited, and had begun borrowing to buy more empty land and build developments on it. He had needed to use all his credit, so when her demand came, all Mallon had been able to do was agree to sell out and give her what she had asked for. But her timing was perfect. A much larger company made a preemptive offer just so they could keep the buildings going up without a pause. None of his crews even got a day off when the exchange was made. Mallon had told his lawyers to handle the sale, pay off the debts, give Andrea’s attorneys a check for her half of what was left, and send his share to Wells Fargo bank.

A week later, Mallon had been given an appointment with two women in the private banking office in Palo Alto who were specialists in managing people’s investments. He had explained that he needed to have them invest his money conservatively so he would not be left short before he found a job. The two had looked at the printout that contained his balance, and looked at each other. The older one, who had silver eyeglasses on a silver chain, wrote something on a piece of paper before she spoke. “Mr. Mallon. This is what your investments will throw off in an average year.” She had spun the paper around to face him so he could read the number she had written.

Mallon had thanked the women, signed the various forms they handed him, and then walked out of their building. He’d looked up and down the sidewalk, then up at the sky. As he’d stepped along, the implications of the numbers had begun to demand his attention. The figure the woman had shown him was five or six times what he had spent even when Andrea had lived with him.

He could not stand to live in San Jose anymore, to take circuitous routes just to avoid passing by his family’s farm or his old construction business or Andrea’s new house. He stopped at the office one last time to say good-bye to his former employees, then drove two hundred and eighty miles south to an apartment in Santa Barbara because he had visited the city a few times and had no unpleasant memories of it. After a month he had invested in an old brick colonial house above Mission Street near State. He spent nearly a year remodeling it, doing most of the work himself, and trying to think about his future but failing. He knew nothing about the future, but the past was full of problems he had not solved. During that year, the investments he had left with the private banking people up north had begun their steady growth. At the end of the year, instead of selling the house, he moved into it. There had never again been any practical reason for Robert Mallon to do anything in exchange for money.

In his new life in Santa Barbara he walked everywhere he went, driving only when he needed to carry something bulky or fragile. He acquired a great many acquaintances, because he had plenty of leisure time, spent much of it in public, and spoke to anyone who spoke to him. He made sure he spent two hours a day getting some form of outdoor exercise and two hours reading. But at the end of ten years in the city, Mallon knew that if he disappeared, there would be little notice. He was not a person who was living a life here. He was just very, very slowly passing through.

Diane Fleming’s office was in one of several low Spanish-style buildings on De la Guerra Street painted blinding white with big brass plaques beside their doors. She kept him waiting for five minutes, then rushed into the outer office and shook his hand, and held on to it. “Robert!” she said. “Come on in!” She was in her mid-thirties, and had the distinctive broad-faced blond look that half the women in Santa Barbara had. They had big legs and strong hands like small men, and their appeal was not femininity but a kind of frank robustness. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, but I was on a call. Sylvia should have told me sooner.” She kept his hand in hers as she led him into her office and sat beside him on a leather couch, then released it.

“It’s okay. I should have called for an appointment,” he said. “But I need your help with something.”

“What kind of something, and what kind of help?”

“I’ll let you decide. Have you read about the young woman they found dead in a field two days ago?”

She nodded, her face allowing an acknowledgment that was cautious, tentative. “I did see that in the paper.”

“I had pulled her out of the ocean a few hours earlier. I guess she tried again and succeeded. I went to the police and told them. They listened, then asked for a blood sample and fingerprints.”

“They think you killed her?”

“That’s not what the detective said, but I don’t think he would tell me if he did. It’s possible.”

She rolled her blue eyes. “Robert, I’m basically a tax attorney. You’re going to need a criminal lawyer right away. I’ll make some calls and see who we can get. Now go home, and I’ll call you later.”

He had somehow expected a longer conversation, and he had especially expected that she would spend some time reassuring him and telling him there was nothing to worry about before she called in a criminal lawyer. But obviously she agreed that there was something to worry about. He saw no reason to delay her telephone calls. He stood and walked to the door. “Thanks, Diane,” he said, and left. As he was walking through the reception area, he saw Sylvia pick up her phone. She said, “Sure, Diane, right away.”

He went for a long walk down State Street to pick a place to have lunch, but the idea was a failure. He had no appetite, just a restlessness that kept him walking. Mallon barely saw the streets as he walked, because the memory of the girl flooded his mind. He knew that the smooth, beautiful skin he had touched was now cold and lifeless, the voice silenced, but he could still see and hear her, and the knowledge that even that vestige would fade made him want to weep.

He tried to decide whether he had fallen in love with her. He had not been naive enough to allow himself to let go, to place his fate in her hands that way. He had been fairly certain that their day together had been as much of an aberration as what had caused it, a violent diversion from the normal trajectories of their lives. He had, at every moment, been prepared to relinquish her, to send her back to the world, where she would make a life with people her own age. But he had loved her. He had listened to her and watched her and touched her. She was a creature he had been glad he had preserved, somebody he was delighted with and wanted to live on and on, even if he never saw her again. Now that was over, beyond reach. Nobody else seemed to know what a precious thing had been wasted.

When he reached his house, Diane had already called and left a message on his answering machine. When he called her back, she said, “They’re not treating you as a suspect.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“It’s a long story. They also don’t really know who the girl was. The name she used in the motel didn’t match the name she gave when she rented the car she parked there. She left no other identification in the room, no purse, no keys. There were none in the field where she was found, either. You didn’t happen to see any on her, did you?”

“No,” he said. “And I didn’t see any purse, either. There was nothing but what she had on.”

“Which was-?”

“Shorts, sneakers, a little top with thin straps.” He paused. “I remember seeing her standing there by the rocks. Then she just started walking toward the water and didn’t stop. It was kind of odd. She didn’t dive or swim or anything, just kept walking until the water was over her head and disappeared. I didn’t even notice about the shoes at first.”

“What about them?”

“She left them on,” he said. “I guess she had no reason to preserve her running shoes.”

“I suppose.”

He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “So I guess I don’t need a criminal lawyer after all. But thanks for taking care of this. I was really beginning to wonder.”

“Oh, no. You do need one, and I got the one I wanted. His name is Brian Logan, and he’s a very big defense attorney, based in L.A. He’s already on your case.”

“If there is no case, what’s he doing?”

“He’s making inquiries, showing the flag. He’s the one who got the police to tell him you’re not a suspect. He’s very expensive, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“It’s part of the strategy. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you don’t look like a multimillionaire, even by Santa Barbara standards. You buy a pair of shorts from some store on lower State and then wear them practically until your ass shows through. You look like maybe an unemployed construction worker.”

“That’s pretty much what I am.”

“I suppose it is, but that’s not what you want to be when the police are looking for a suspect. So I hired you a lawyer that only a rich guy can afford, with a name they know.”

“That gets me off the hook?”

“No, it prevents you from getting on. If they discover in the next day or two that she had help shooting herself, or find that she’s been raped, you’re the only one who admits having seen her. If they know who you are, they keep looking. And it’s not as unfair as it sounds. You wouldn’t believe how few middle-aged multimillionaires are out there murdering total strangers and then telling the police about it. So we not only make them aware that you’re not going to be easy, but also that you’re highly unlikely to be anything but innocent. He’s on his way here, and we’re meeting with him in my office at four.”

At a quarter to four, Mallon was sitting in Diane’s office, waiting. Brian Logan did not arrive alone. When the door opened he was preceded by a small woman in a business suit and a white shirt that was cut a bit like a man’s but was soft silk. Her eyes were sharp and her movements quick and birdlike. Once she had entered, the next one in was a young man whose function seemed to be to carry a couple of huge leather cases and lean his body against doors so they would stay open for Brian Logan.

Logan entered last. When he stepped through the threshold, Mallon felt as though he had seen him before. After that instant, Mallon wasn’t sure whether he had seen him on television talking into a microphone outside some courthouse, or had seen him as one of the legal experts on some talk show about a big murder, or if he simply looked like the kind of lawyer who was on television. He seemed to be slightly younger than Mallon, and that gave Mallon a few seconds of discomfort, but he reminded himself that a forty-year-old was not a beginner, and the man’s appearance was probably calculated to please juries. He had dark brown hair that was short, but thick and shiny as a dog’s coat, and he wore a charcoal gray suit that looked like the outfits that major politicians wore on international visits, only with a better, more subdued tie. His shave was fresh, his nails were manicured, and the impression he gave was of a cleanliness like some clerics had, which gave him an aura of sanctity. He smiled at Diane, said “Thanks,” and she realized he meant he wanted her to leave. She nodded to Mallon and retreated.

He glanced in the direction of Robert Mallon for only a heartbeat, and then seemed not to need to look more closely. His attention was directed to some papers his female assistant had snatched out of one of the leather cases and handed to him. “Good afternoon,” he said in Mallon’s direction, his eyes still on the papers.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mallon said, and stepped forward to shake Logan’s hand.

Logan endured the ceremony, then said, “Sit down,” and indicated the chair Mallon had just vacated. “You went to the police voluntarily and made this statement?”

“Yes, I went voluntarily.” He craned his neck to see the paper. “I assume that’s the statement I made.”

Logan suddenly focused on him. “Why did you do it?”

“It occurred to me that I was probably the only one in Santa Barbara who knew anything about what had happened, maybe the only one who had even spoken to her.”

“So far, you are,” said Logan, but his statement seemed inattentive, absentminded. He was staring at the paper again. Mallon wasn’t sure whether he was comparing the statement to what Diane had told him or was just reading it for the first time.

“Right,” Logan muttered to himself. It was clear that he had already finished reading the statement. “Is there anything else that you forgot to mention to the police?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mallon. “I was there for quite a while, and I tried to bring back every detail.”

“Good,” Logan said. He had a very warm smile when he used it, but to Mallon the effect was startling, like a bright light being switched on. “Now. The only other thing that might come up is anything from your past that we don’t know.”

He said it so carefully and cautiously that Mallon needed to reassure him. “I understand,” said Mallon. “There’s nothing that I can think of.”

Logan ignored his reassurance. “Ever been arrested?”

“No.”

“Not even a traffic ticket?” He was openly preparing to be triumphant, as though he had surprised clients with this many times.

“I’ve had parking tickets-I think three in my life-but no moving violations.”

“Ever seen a psychiatrist for any reason?”

“No.”

“You’ve been divorced.” Logan said it as though he were vindicated now that his probing had hit something undeniable.

“Yes,” said Mallon. “It was about ten years ago. Her name is Andrea, and she still lives up in San Jose.”

“If the police went to her and asked her about you, would she say good things or bad things?”

Mallon frowned. “As far as I know, nobody gets divorced because they’re brimming with delight about the other person. I assume she wouldn’t be very complimentary, but she wouldn’t say I was a criminal or something.”

“Did you ever hit her?”

“Of course not.”

“Push her or threaten her?”

“No,” said Mallon.

“Is there any chance she might say you had?”

Mallon was overcome with frustration. “It wasn’t that kind of thing at all. We had arguments, but they weren’t physical. They were pretty dull stuff. I worked too much, and she was always lonely and bored, so she spent too much. It was that kind of thing. And we didn’t argue very much-maybe if we had talked more, it would have saved the marriage. As it was, we both wanted the divorce. The biggest arguments were about that. She wanted everything we owned, had built, or inherited converted to cash instantly and split half and half. I knew that was what was ultimately going to happen, but I wanted to do it a lot more gradually: keep my business going and buy her out over time. She got her way, and we haven’t had any contact since the final decree.”

Logan said, “All right. How about other women?”

“You mean now?”

“During the marriage.”

“No.”

“Did she cheat on you?”

“I don’t really know. If she did, I never caught her at it. I think that she wasn’t involved with anyone until after the divorce was final. By then I had left town, and it was none of my business.”

“Were you in the military?”

“Air Force. In the seventies.”

“Honorable discharge?”

“Sure.”

“Were you ever formally disciplined or charged with anything?”

“Never.”

Logan scrutinized Mallon as though he were a particularly difficult witness. “Is there anyone you know of who might come forward or be turned up by the police and might say anything negative about you?”

“How can I possibly answer that?”

“I’m thinking of women, particularly. That you came on too strong, or you made them uneasy, for instance.”

Mallon held up both hands and shrugged his shoulders. “Over the years I’ve dated some women who liked me a lot, and others who didn’t especially warm up to me. I can’t imagine any of them saying I was dangerous.”

“I’m thinking especially of the time since you’ve resided in Santa Barbara,” said Logan. “After all, you are a heterosexual male who-you are exclusively heterosexual?” He watched Mallon nod. “Who has lived here all this time without forming a permanent relationship with a woman. It isn’t illegal, but it might raise questions in people’s minds.”

“I suppose,” said Mallon.

“Then there is no point at all that you’ve been keeping in the back of your mind, hoping it wouldn’t come up because you don’t want to talk about it?”

Mallon sighed. “I don’t like talking about my personal life, if that’s what you mean, but there are no guilty secrets. I went to school, then the Air Force, then worked as a parole officer in San Jose, then a contractor. I haven’t found a woman I wanted to marry yet, but-”

“Wait,” interrupted Logan. “You were a police officer in San Jose?”

“Well, parole officers work for the state Department of Corrections, but I worked out of the office in San Jose. It was only four years, and it was a long time ago, in the seventies.” He noticed the expression on Logan’s face, so he short-circuited the question. “No disciplinary actions, nothing on or off the record. I just decided to quit because four years was enough.”

“Have you told the police that you’d been a sworn peace officer?”

“No. Do you think it would have helped?”

“Probably not. At least not on a homicide. Ex-cops are all trained to shoot people, and once in a while, one of them does. They also have guns. Do you still have yours?”

“No. I turned mine in when I quit, over twenty years ago.”

“No others?”

“No.”

“All right, Mr. Mallon,” said Logan. “I’ll try to find out what the police and the district attorney have in mind. Don’t go anyplace where we can’t reach you quickly. I may want to talk some more.”

Mallon went home to wait. Four hours later his telephone rang. It was Diane Fleming again. “Robert?”

“Hi, Diane.”

“The coroner’s office is going to announce their finding tomorrow morning. They’re going to rule it a suicide.” She paused for a moment, apparently waiting for some expression of relief. “It’s a preliminary finding, but there’s really no doubt. There’s nothing about it that’s out of place or unexplained. Brian Logan and his people have already gone home.” She waited. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he sighed.

“You still sound unsatisfied.”

“I am.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I still don’t know anything about the girl. I want to know about her.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

Diane sounded tired, as though she were determined to humor him but dreading what he might demand. “There are people who do that sort of thing for a living. Do you want me to hire a private detective?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I know the one I want.”