Dead Aim

CHAPTER 5

Mallon punched the numbers on the telephone, listened to the ringing, then heard the connection. A voice came on that he had not heard in years.

“Lightning Quick Bail Bonds, Harry here.” Harry was now probably about sixty, but the voice was still the same. It was hard, even a little challenging. For Mallon it brought back a clear picture of the short, broad-shouldered frame and the prizefighter’s face with the smeared right eyebrow where the hair never grew in right over the scar. Mallon could feel his facial muscles contracting into a smile.

“Harry,” he said. “This is Bob Mallon.”

“Bobby!” came the voice. “How are you doing? I heard you were in Paris. You calling from Paris? You sound like you’re right here.”

“I’m in Santa Barbara.”

“You went all the way from Paris to Santa Barbara and didn’t even stop in to say hello? What the hell’s the matter with you? I practically raised you from a pup.”

“No, you didn’t. I didn’t meet you until I was a full-grown dog. And I’ve never been to Paris, Harry. Santa Barbara is where I live.”

“Good,” said Harry. “Paris is too good for you. What are you calling for? Don’t tell me you need bail? What the hell did you do?”

“I called because I wanted to talk to Lydia. Is she around today?”

“You’re in luck. She just came in,” said Harry. He yelled, “Lydia!” A few seconds later, he said, “She’s going to take it in her office. Nice to talk to you, Bobby.”

“Take care, Harry.”

Lydia Marks came onto the line, her voice still carrying a very faint trace of a southern accent that Mallon had always assumed wasn’t real, the husky smoker’s rasp in her throat maybe a bit deeper than last time. “Hello, Bobby.”

“Hello, Lydia. How’s business?”

“The same,” she said. “You’d think there’d be less competition to lend large sums of money to people accused of stealing.”

“You would. But if you’re complaining, you’re probably doing okay.”

“Nobody in jail wants to stay,” she admitted. “I’m just getting too old to keep tracking the bastards down afterward to keep them from ruining us. You have to remember I’ve been doing this since the days when you and I were parole officers, and I’m still doing it.”

“I suppose most of them get away from you now that I’m gone.”

“None of them do,” she huffed. “I don’t know what I ever needed the likes of you for.”

“It was me that needed you,” he said. “When you quit, I had to leave too.”

“Are we nearly getting around to why you called?” she asked wearily.

“Yes,” he said. “I want to hire you.”

“To do what?” Her voice was suspicious.

“Something like what we used to do together in the old days.”

“Not a chance,” she snapped.

“Whatever you’re remembering wasn’t me,” he said. “I was married at the time, and I know I wasn’t cheating on her.”

“Your mistake. Why do you need a detective?”

“I need to find out what I can about somebody.”

“Gee, I’d love to help you,” she said without enthusiasm, “but I just don’t know. Things around here-”

“I know your time costs more than it used to, and I know you don’t want to go because you have a lot of business and don’t want to be out of town, distracted from it. So I’ll pay you an outrageous amount of money, if you’ll just help me out. Come on, Lydia.”

“Who are we talking about?”

He said, “It’s a young woman who committed suicide here a couple of days ago. The police haven’t even got a name yet. I… met her before she did it. She was on the beach. She tried to drown herself, but I pulled her out.”

Her voice changed. This time there was an unaffected curiosity in it. “You really care about this, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you live these days? What’s the address?”

“It’s 2905 Boca del Rio in Santa Barbara.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can get a plane.”

“Thanks, Lydia.”

Her voice hardened again, but unconvincingly. “Don’t thank me. You’re going to pay full price for anything you get, you rich bastard.”

It was late afternoon when she arrived in Santa Barbara. Mallon watched her from behind the window blinds as she got out of the back seat of the cab, handed a bill to the driver, and waved him away from her wheeled suitcase. As the cab drove off, she slung her big purse over her shoulder, extended the handle of the suitcase, hung her carry-on bag over it, and pulled it up his driveway.

She did not look as he had expected her to, and he had not been prepared: she did not show the ten years since he had last seen her. Her face seemed nearly the same to him, although he knew he was probably not seeing wrinkles that were there, maybe now appearing at the corners of the big, light brown eyes. He could see that she still had the hourglass figure that, when Mallon had worked with her, used to cause whispered, longing comment among their colleagues in the overwhelmingly male office. The narrow waist curving out to wide hips and shoulders had, even then, been out of fashion with other women, but no man had ever agreed with that assessment. There had been a kind of defiance to her attitude about her appearance: the business suits she favored had seemed tailored to show the curves.

She walked with the same energy and determination that he remembered, her eyes making tiny restless movements to take in everything around her as she came. She did not knock at the door, because she had already seen him studying her through the blinds, merely waited for him to get there to open it.

They hugged wordlessly, and then she stepped in, bumping her suitcase up and over the threshold before he could get around her to reach it.

“Don’t pretend you’re a gentleman at this late date,” she said. “I worked with you when you couldn’t afford an extra pair of socks.”

The voice, with its mock-sarcastic tone, made him begin to sense how much he had missed her. “You’re looking great, Lydia.”

“You’re not. You look ten years older.” She brushed past him and sat on the couch. “On the plane I used my laptop to read the Santa Barbara papers. It wasn’t exactly page-one stuff. Tell me what wasn’t in the papers.”

He recited the story again, telling her everything he had told Detective Fowler. When he had finished, Lydia sighed and stared at the wall, her lips pursed.

“I didn’t expect that you would approve,” he said.

“I don’t approve or disapprove,” she answered. “I’m not your mother, and I never had any interest in you myself, except what I could get out of you as a parole officer, which was damned little. You were terrific at holding their hands and sympathizing, but not so hot at tracking them down when they got scarce. Since I’ve known you for a very long time, I will say that I had hoped that by now you would have outgrown having sex with any young thing who has the impulse, but there’s no reason for you to be the first man who ever did. So let’s get started on finding out who she was.”

“How do you want to begin?”

“Where you did. Take me to the spot where you pulled her out of the water.”

“All right,” said Mallon. “When?”

“Now,” she said. “Give me a few minutes to change. While I’m doing it, you can put on the clothes you wore that day. It will help me put together a picture of what happened.”

Fifteen minutes later, she emerged from the spare bedroom dressed in a pair of shorts and a loose Hawaiian shirt with her long brown hair unraveled from its bun and tied back in a ponytail. Mallon drove her along the ocean to the stairway that led down to the beach.

As they walked, Lydia asked Mallon questions about his daily activities, about local real estate and weather patterns. She never showed a reaction to any of the answers except comprehension. She simply waited for a sign from Mallon that they had walked far enough.

Finally, Mallon stopped, looked at the cliffs to his right, the big rocks at their base, then up at the crest where the tops of a couple of eucalyptus trees were visible, and said, “This is it.” He pointed at the spot in the ocean where she had gone in.

Lydia looked at the rocks along the upper part of the beach under the cliffs. “When she arrived, exactly where were you? Do you remember?”

Mallon started to point, but Lydia said, “Go there.”

Mallon sat among the rocks, where he had been when he had first noticed he was not alone anymore. He watched Lydia walk to the spot where the cliff curved and came out near the water and the beach was only a few feet wide at high tide. She stopped at the spot where the girl had stood that day, staring out at the sea. Lydia turned to Mallon. Mallon nodded: that was where she had been.

“I’m not surprised that she didn’t see you.” Lydia took a slow, deliberate step toward the ocean, then another, a bit faster, and maintained a steady pace down to the hard, wet sand at the surf line. Then she stopped. She looked back at the beach above her, then began to walk in her own footprints, back toward the little point. Mallon stood up and followed her at a distance.

She was stepping slowly, dragging one foot sideways across the sand. Now and then she would go out of her path to the nearest part of the cliff face to delve in the sand around the base of a rock of a certain size, then return to the path she’d been making. It led her back the way they had come. After about fifty feet, she turned to look again at the spot where she’d left Mallon, and saw Mallon coming after her. It didn’t seem to strike her as important. She had only wanted to know where Mallon had been sitting, and she kept looking back at the spot until she was around the point. Then, instead of stopping, she went to work even harder. This time she picked up a long piece of driftwood, an inch-thick branch of some drowned tree, and began to make grooves in a sweeping motion as she walked. After ten minutes, she stopped, dropped the piece of wood, and dug with her hands. She lifted something and set it aside on the sand.

Mallon came closer. “It’s her purse, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” She was still digging, now lifting each handful of sand and sifting it through her fingers instead of merely pushing it out of the way.

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “She didn’t have money or I.D. when you saw her, or any keys. She’d had them earlier, so she left them someplace. This is what they sometimes do.”

“You have the purse. What are you looking for now?”

“Whatever she had that she didn’t put in the purse.”

She sifted some more sand, and then held out her hand. In the palm was a simple gold ring with designs etched on it. She looked at the place where she had been digging, then seemed to make a decision. She stood, taking the ring between her thumb and forefinger and looking inside it. “It’s not a wedding ring. It’s one of those rings men give a girlfriend.”

Mallon said, “How could you know she buried these things?”

Lydia glanced at him impatiently, then looked back at the ring. “I’ve been hired a few times over the years to find out if suicides were really suicides. It’s just one of the things they do sometimes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It feels right to do it, so they do. By the time it happens, they’re way past pleasing anybody else, or explaining themselves. Maybe they’re not sure whether they want to destroy these things or just put them where they’ll turn up someday and be wondered about.” She thought for a moment. “And you can stop feeling bad, thinking that you said the wrong thing or didn’t think of something good enough to convince her to stay alive. She was already gone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“After you pulled her out, she didn’t come back looking for these.” She removed the wallet from the purse and thumbed through the credit cards and memberships and receipts, then opened the zipper on the cash compartment. Mallon could see a few twenty-dollar bills and hear a clink of change. She unzipped a compartment built into the silky fabric inside the purse. There was a sheaf of hundreds. She zipped it up again. “We’ll have to stop at the police station on the way to your house.”

“Maybe you ought to drop me off first,” said Mallon. “For the moment, the cops here seem to have accepted the idea that I might not be a murderer, but the case isn’t closed.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll make it clear you didn’t move this from your house or something. But this is the kind of evidence you have to get to them right away.”

As she walked along the beach toward the steps, she took out each item in the purse, one at a time, examined it closely, then put it back. When she reached the driver’s license, she held it out to Mallon.

Mallon reached for it, but she said, “You know better than that. Don’t touch it, just look. I want to be sure it’s her.”

Mallon stared at the photograph, scanned the name, the birth date and description. “Catherine Broward,” he said. “Cathy Broward. No, I think she wasn’t a Cathy. Catherine.”

“You didn’t see her on her best day,” she reminded him. “People who are in that kind of depression talk slowly and think slowly. And she had been unconscious. You’d have to hunt down some people who knew her before, if you wanted to know what she was like.”

“I need you to help me do that,” said Mallon. “I want to know.”

She looked at him steadily. “What do you think it will tell you?”

“Why she was so sure she had to be dead right away. You can see from the picture that she was an attractive young woman. She looked healthy, and she said she was, too. She had some money-maybe not a lot, I don’t know-but there was enough in her purse so she wasn’t in danger of starving to death.” He realized that he wasn’t saying anything that mattered, and that made him try harder. “It was a calm, cool, hazy day. The ocean was glassy, the air was soothing. It was beautiful. Standing there and looking around her should have been enough.”

Lydia cocked her head but said nothing.

“You think I sound like an idiot.” It was an observation, not an accusation.

She said, “I think you sound like somebody who wants to know things that you’re not going to learn by investigating a stranger who killed herself.” She paused. “I know that sounds a little harsh. But I can tell you from bitter personal experience that having sex with somebody is not the same as knowing them. And unless she left a note that we haven’t found yet, we’re not likely to know her thoughts on any subject, least of all you.”

“I didn’t say this was about her relationship with me.”

“What else, Bobby? What else could it be?”

After a few more steps he said, “I know I have no excuse for this, but I cared about her. I wanted to be with her for a longer time. If that turned out not to be something she wanted too, I wanted her to go off and enjoy the rest of her life. From a distance, the suicide looks unsurprising, even inevitable: she tried once, got stopped, then finished the job. But it wasn’t, and only I know it. It was shocking: it didn’t fit. Things like this-events that changed everything and just seemed to come from nowhere-have happened in my life before. This is the first time one happened after I had the time and money to try to find out what it meant. Maybe I want to know what I can’t. Even if I can’t, it’s worth the effort because the death of a person you shared something with is important. Maybe all that’s left to do for her is to care about why it happened.”

Lydia kept walking for an interval while she considered this. Then she said, “It is in the interest of anybody in any business to convince you that spending your money will buy you important things, like wisdom or contentment, so I shouldn’t say this. But I’ve spent a lot more time than you have looking closely into the secrets of strangers, including dead ones. I don’t think that I’ve learned much that’s made me any happier.”

“I’m not sure that happier is what I’m trying to be. I want to know.”

“But what do you-” She seemed to have a sudden thought, a suspicion. “This is your first, right? You didn’t have a relative, maybe a friend, who did this when you were younger?”

Mallon hesitated, then said, “Yes. I did. It was my older sister. Her name was Nancy. She killed herself when she was away at college. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ll admit that the similarities haven’t escaped me: they were both young and apparently healthy, and seemed to have no reason for it. But I don’t think that what I’m trying to do is wrong or irrational. I’m not asking you to look into something that happened over thirty years ago. I just want to know what happened three days ago.”

Lydia looked up at him as they walked. “This looks like a fairly simple, straightforward investigation, Bobby. You and I used to do harder ones than this in a day. We’ve already got what looks like a real name and address. If we wait a week, the police will probably be able to tell us most of what we’d find out,” she said. “For me, it’s easy money. If you want to pay it, I won’t turn it down.”

“Thank you,” said Mallon. He let those words close the topic. He suspected that the fact that he and Catherine had been in bed together made it all seem simple to Lydia: Mallon’s interest during her life was romantic and his interest in her death is sentimental. He did not want to end the inquiry before it had begun simply because it looked like something Lydia found familiar. He was haunted by the feeling that he had faltered somehow and lost the one precious opportunity to save her. But as he walked, he noticed unexpected, contrary thoughts: maybe she had foolishly taken an action he had, at various times in his life, rejected. Or maybe she had gone ahead to show him the way.

When they had gone to the police station and surrendered the purse and the ring to Fowler, Lydia said, “Now we’d better go see your defense lawyer and let him know what’s up.”

“He’s in L.A.,” said Mallon. “My regular attorney-the one who handles my business stuff-hired a criminal lawyer, just in case the police were serious.”

“I wouldn’t be too quick to assume they’re not. Who is he?”

“His name is Brian Logan.”

“Wow,” said Lydia. “Very impressive.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “We’re not buddies. The kind of people who can hire him don’t need bail bonds much.” She looked at him with sudden disapproval. “I keep forgetting you’re that kind of people now. But he’s known. Dropping his name might impress the other guys on death row when you get there. For now, let’s just keep it simple and mention this to your local guy. Who is he?”

Mallon took Lydia to meet Diane Fleming. While Mallon explained to Diane what he and Lydia had found, the two women stood in Diane’s office and eyed each other from behind wary smiles. Mallon suspected that neither had yet decided whether the other was someone to be trusted, ignored, or opposed. But when Mallon had finished, it was to Lydia that Diane spoke.

“I’m so glad you took the time to keep me informed. At first he seemed to be under the impression that this wasn’t quite serious. He didn’t even tell me about it until after he’d talked to the police.”

“I know,” said Lydia, and shook her head in frustration. “I’ve known him for years, and he’s always been too dumb to get scared when it would still do him some good.”

“For years? How did you meet him?”

Lydia glanced at Mallon. “Didn’t he tell you? He and I worked together for three or four years. We were parole officers. Whenever somebody didn’t show up for his appointment, Mallon and I would go looking for him. That’s probably why we both burned out at about the same time.”

Diane’s eyes widened. “You did?” She turned to Mallon in amazement. “I never knew you were a police officer.”

Mallon shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“I thought you were a land developer,” she said accusingly.

Lydia jumped in. “That was a long time ago too. From what I understand, he hasn’t done one useful thing since I last laid eyes on him.”

“That’s not exactly the only possible view of the subject,” Mallon told Diane.

“I thought you’d try to deny it,” Diane said, then turned her attention to Lydia again. “But you became a private detective. How interesting.”

“It’s really just a sideline, now,” said Lydia. “Years ago I became a partner in a bail bond business, and it’s grown. Most of my time is taken up tracing deadbeats who don’t show up for their trial dates. I still take a few outside clients now and then, but only cases I can do in my sleep. There’s nobody in the world better at surveillance than a middle-aged woman. We’re invisible.”

“I know the feeling very well,” said Diane, glancing at Mallon with exaggerated coolness.

By the time Mallon and Lydia left, the two women seemed to have formed an alliance that transcended him, and showed signs of going beyond his problems. They had exchanged business cards, implied that they would refer prospective clients to each other, and promised that they would talk often. As Mallon walked with Lydia to the car he said, “What was that all about?”

Lydia shrugged. “We hate each other, and we’re making the best of a bad thing.”