Dead Aim

CHAPTER 7

They arrived outside the car rental just before nine. The sun was bright, but the air had a humid heaviness that made them glad to get into the small air-conditioned building. Mallon was silent while Lydia tried talking the pale, thin young woman behind the desk into showing them the papers, offering her one hundred, then three hundred, then five hundred dollars. As the young woman politely and cheerfully shook her head, the thin, faded blond hair flew into her face and she had to brush it away from her eyes in a practiced gesture that Mallon sensed made her feel unapproachable and yet alluring. It seemed to give Lydia an idea. She turned to look at Mallon.

Mallon stepped closer. “Miss,” he said. “I’m Robert Mallon, the client who hired Miss Marks. Catherine Broward tried to drown herself on a beach in California where I live. I pulled her out of the ocean, but a few hours later she shot herself. She’s dead. The police in Santa Barbara have not yet been able to find and notify her family. All we want to know is whether there’s a local address on the form where she said she could be reached. It might lead us to her parents. They could be frantic with worry, trying to reach her right now, and there’s no reason to make them go through that. They have a right to be told what happened.”

The young woman was no longer smiling opaquely, but she did not offer to give them anything.

Mallon persisted, as though what needed to be prodded was her memory. “She was about your age, not blond like you but with long, dark hair. She was kind of pretty-I don’t mean like a movie star, just a nice-looking person. Do you at least remember her coming in?”

The young woman looked worried, and perhaps even a bit irritated by his attempt to manipulate her. “So many people come in for cars, and I have to watch the paperwork so closely that I don’t always even look close at faces.”

“Honey, you look at their faces when they show you their driver’s licenses,” Lydia reminded her gently. “You have to be sure it’s the same person.”

The girl’s smile came back. Mallon could see it was her armor. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Lydia would not be dismissed. “We’re not from your company. We don’t work for your company. Here’s my identification. As you can see, I really am a private investigator.”

The girl stared at the detective’s license, but seemed unconvinced. She looked at Mallon expectantly. He pulled out his wallet and held it open while she examined the California driver’s license behind the plastic to verify that his name really was what he had said. She sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can find.”

Lydia reached into her purse. “Here’s your five hundred.”

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I just don’t want to lose my job.” She began typing on the keyboard of her computer terminal, staring at the screen. Then she took the pen that was lying on the counter tied to a string, scribbled something on the back of a company brochure, and handed it to Mallon. She did not touch the money Lydia had placed on the counter. “That’s the address and phone number she gave.”

“Please,” said Mallon. “I would like you to take the money. If this is her family, the whole search is over, and you’ve saved me whatever I would have spent hunting for them.”

She ventured a glance at the money, but she didn’t move. She studied Mallon. “Why are you doing this-any of it?”

He shrugged. “I suppose it’s because this is the only thing left that I can do for her. I had a chance to talk her out of it, but I didn’t think of the right thing to say. I feel sad about it. I wish you would take that money.”

“Why do you care whether I take the money?”

“So that somebody who showed compassion would get some small benefit out of it.” He took the bills from the counter and added some from his pocket. “I’m rich now, but there have been a couple of times when a few hundred bucks might have changed my life.” He folded the money, took her hand, and folded her fingers over it. He held the hand for a couple of extra seconds, until he felt her finger muscles tighten, then gently released it like a small bird. “Thanks for your help.” He turned and walked out the door.

Lydia said quietly, “We really aren’t from your company. And I really am a detective.” She pointed up at the tinted glass half-globe on the ceiling above the door. “Don’t forget to put a fresh tape in the security camera’s tape deck before you leave. You can lose the old one on the way home.”

The address belonged to a woman named Sarah Carlson. The house was a very small, narrow, two-story cottage painted a daffodil yellow with spotless white enamel trim. There was a small covered porch with a white railing that gleamed in the sunlight.

Lydia and Mallon stood on the porch listening to the soft footsteps moving toward the door. The woman who opened it was about thirty, with light skin and dark brown hair that she wore short, and Mallon knew that Sarah Carlson was not just a friend.

Lydia appeared not to have seen the resemblance. “Good afternoon. Are you Sarah Carlson?”

The woman looked at Lydia, then at Mallon through the closed screen door, and answered, “Yes.” The voice was like Catherine’s. It made Mallon feel the sadness again.

“My name is Lydia Marks, and this is Robert Mallon. Do you know Catherine Broward?”

She looked at them warily. “What is this about?”

Lydia said, “A few days ago, in Santa Barbara, California, Catherine Broward took her own life. We’re trying to find her family, and-”

Sarah Carlson was crying. It had begun at “took her,” the tears appearing in the eyes without the expression having time to change yet, so that it looked as though a cold wind had simply blown into her eyes and made them water. But then the eyes squinted, the shoulders came up in a cringe, the mouth quivering and the chin puckering before the hands could rise to her face to hide it. She began to wail, “Oh, no. Oh, no. No…”

Mallon watched, wondering. The girl he had saved had seemed to be healthy, smart, sure of herself. Now he could see that she’d had someone who had cared very deeply about her. He had heard or read somewhere, in the period after his sister’s death, that sometimes people killed themselves in order to punish someone-their families, usually. As he watched this young woman behind the screen sobbing, he reflected that if this was a punishment, it was incredibly effective. It was hard to imagine anything a stranger could have said to this woman that would have made her dissolve into sorrow this way. It occurred to him that what he was seeing was probably like watching himself thirty-three years ago-not the tears or the exact expressions, but the utter devastation.

He turned to Lydia, at first only to keep from staring cruelly at the woman. Lydia’s body was straight and rigid, her face solemn, but her eyes were in quick motion. She was looking past the woman, over and around her into the house, then to the left at the house beside hers, then to the right, and back at the woman. Now that she had temporarily forgotten the visitors, Lydia studied her pitilessly. After Lydia seemed to have exhausted the sights available to her, she asked, “Would you like us to come back later? We only need to ask a few questions. Her parents…”

Sarah Carlson forced herself to focus her attention on the two people still standing at her door. She raised her eyes toward them and seemed to see them as troublesome. She began to nod, but then appeared to remember something, or to discover it. “No, please,” she said. “Come in.”

She pushed the door open and held it, and it occurred to Mallon why Lydia’s offer had sounded so perfunctory and insincere to him. Lydia had known Sarah would not send them away. If she did, she would be left sitting alone in this house grieving, but knowing nothing about what had happened.

Mallon followed Lydia in and stood awkwardly beside her in the small living room. Mallon liked the room as much as he had liked the outside of the house. Built-in bookcases covered two of the walls, all filled tightly, but without pretense. There were old leatherbound volumes stuck in among paperbacks, sets of faded clothbound books that looked as though someone had reread them many times beside bright-jacketed books he recognized from recent visits to bookstores. The framed pictures on the walls were all interesting rather than merely decorative. There were a couple of miniature portraits of nineteenth-century people who didn’t seem to be famous and weren’t beautiful, a couple of color plates of ferns from some forgotten botany text.

She said, “I’m her sister. Carlson is my married name. Our parents are dead, so I’m all she had. Tell me what happened.”

Lydia glanced at Mallon. “Mr. Mallon spoke with her a few hours before she died. I think he can tell you more than I can.”

Mallon turned toward her to speak and felt alarm, but he took a breath and began, trying to say enough words to fill the void between them. He told the first part of his story honestly and fully, describing what had happened at the beach, their walk to his house, everything that had been said. He spoke without lying about anything. He did not try to make himself seem less than quick and brave in saving Catherine, nor did he pretend he had not felt a stupid vanity at the thought that he’d been a hero. He talked until he came to the point when she reappeared at the top of his staircase wearing his robe, then began to leave out parts of it. “After her nap she said she was hungry. She didn’t have any clothes with her that she was willing to wear to a restaurant, so I went out for food. When I returned, she was gone. I drove around the area searching for her, but never found her. I waited for hours, left the door unlocked and the lights on in case she came back. The next I heard of her was two days later, when the newspaper reported that she’d been found.”

Sarah Carlson asked, “Did they find a note?”

Lydia shook her head. “No. They always look for one, but it’s not unusual not to leave one.”

Sarah narrowed her eyes at Lydia, but did not say what she was thinking. Mallon knew it was something angry about Lydia’s way of talking. She implied that everything was something that had happened hundreds of times before. There was nothing special or new about what this woman’s only sister had done to herself.

Mallon tried to erase the impression by giving the same answer to her question more gently. “I’m sorry. If she left a note, they haven’t found it yet.” He paused. “We’d like to help you. Are there any other relatives we should speak to, or do you prefer to call them yourself?”

She seemed to be listening more closely to Mallon now, as though she had detected something surprising in his voice. “You feel terrible, don’t you?”

Mallon took two breaths before he answered. “Yes, I do,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, wanting to tell her about his own sister. But he concluded that the impulse was misguided: this was about her sister, her feelings, not his. “I tried to get her to see a doctor at the hospital, offered to take her to a different one if she wanted. She refused, and I let it go. I tried to remind her that life isn’t always the same, and that people get through bad times. I tried to convince her that if she let herself live for another day she might feel better. I failed. I didn’t say enough, or I didn’t say it well, or what I said was stupid and beside the point. I was the last chance, and my arguments weren’t good enough, or I wasn’t good enough. I’m very sorry.”

Sarah Carlson shook her head, tears still running down her face. He could tell that what she was going to say was costly. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Nobody could have said anything that would have convinced her.” Mallon knew, rationally, that she could not possibly mean it. She must believe that if only she had been the one, it would have made all the difference.

He said, “I think you’re very generous to say that. I wish things had been different.”

“I meant it. See, Cathy had a problem with depression. Not a clinical imbalance or disease, where a doctor can prescribe something. It was sadness.”

Lydia visibly straightened, her head held still, as though if she moved she might miss a word, or startle Sarah into silence.

Sarah sighed. “It was one of those things that you read about in the papers, or see on television. It must happen to lots of other people, but it still doesn’t seem real to me. Cathy had a boyfriend. She was absolutely devoted to him, adored him. For about a year she was impossible to listen to. She wouldn’t talk about herself, or what she thought or did, because he was what she thought about, and trying to please him was what she did. If there was something to have an opinion about, it was ‘Mark thinks’ this or that, or even, ‘Mark knows about these things, and he says’ this or that.”

Mallon had lied. Neglecting to tell her about the sex made his whole story false. Mallon felt ashamed while he listened to her now, because listening this way was another act of deception, pretending to be receptive to every word, but really waiting to hear the secret reason that Sarah would divulge in a moment of weakness or misplaced trust. Or maybe she would report with such perfect accuracy that she would describe the reason without knowing it for what it was.

He decided that to dispel the feeling, he had to make her remember she was talking to strangers. “Who is he? Does he live in Pittsburgh?”

Sarah shook her head. “She met him in Los Angeles. I remember there was a class she took in the evening. She wanted to get a master’s degree in psychology, and this was an undergraduate class she wanted to make up. She met him at some coffee place on campus. He wasn’t in her class; he was just having coffee. About a month later she wrote and told me she had moved in with him. I didn’t think much of that, but she sent a picture of him in the letter, and I could hardly blame her. He was gorgeous. He looked like a model: tall and thin with black hair and blue eyes. He really did seem to be perfect, and she wasn’t my baby sister anymore, she was a grown woman. She was happy, so I was happy.”

“What happened?” asked Mallon.

“Everything was great for about a year. Then it wasn’t, or maybe she was just beginning to worry that it wouldn’t always be. She was kind of tense and irritable when I talked to her on the phone. About that time they moved to a different apartment. One day she left a message on my machine with a new phone number. A month later she called with another one. Then, six weeks after that, Mark was dead.”

Now Lydia stopped hiding her interest. “Dead? How?”

“Murdered. Shot dead in his car in a dark alley behind their apartment, where their garage was. She came to see me the next week, and she had a newspaper article about it. There was a lot of vague stuff about how he spent a lot of time in after-hours clubs and was ‘associated’ with people in the designer-drug scene, and all that. If the reporter knew what he was talking about, the article didn’t manage to convey it to me. People in their twenties go to clubs, and when they do, there are people who might be using just about anything. Of course, I asked Cathy.”

“Did your sister explain it?”

“She admitted that she had been getting nervous about some of the people Mark seemed to know. And now and then he would be out all night, and when he came in it was pretty clear he had been partying.”

“Other women?”

Sarah shrugged. “She didn’t know, and she said she didn’t want to know, but after all, he wasn’t out all night alone. He must have been with somebody and it wasn’t her, right?”

Lydia said, “Did he take a lot of drugs, or just know people who did?”

“She said she never saw him take anything. But she admitted that if he had wanted to, he could easily have fooled her. She didn’t care. She was absolutely in love with him. When she came and told me all this, she hadn’t slept in two days, and she talked just about all night, until she fell asleep. She woke up about fifteen hours later, and she had changed.”

“How?” asked Mallon.

“She never talked about him much after that, but she was always thinking about him. I waited for a month, but she was still that way-mourning him as though he had just died. One morning when I woke up she was packing. She thanked me and said she was going to New York.”

“Why did she pick New York?”

“I don’t know. She lasted there a few months, working in a restaurant. Then she moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, because it was a change from New York. Then she moved back to L.A. After Mark died, she was never the same. She was nervous, restless. She went places, but it wasn’t because she was hoping that anything was going to happen when she got there. It was more like a person pacing the floor, just moving because staying in one place was intolerable. She came here two months ago. She stayed here with me. She rented a car, the way she always had, but all the time while she was here she probably never went farther than the yard. I would come home from work and find her lying flat on her back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. She had no desire to see anybody from the old days, or to pick up the phone to talk to anybody in any of the places she’d lived. Not even L.A. She had always been the one who was athletic, but this time she seemed physically weak. She was unwilling to move, but she wasn’t ever at rest. Finally one day, she packed up again to go home. That’s what she said. That it was time to go home.”

Sarah barely got the words out before she dissolved into tears again. Mallon and Lydia let their eyes meet while hers were closed. There seemed to Mallon to be nothing for them to do but wait. Lydia gave her only ten seconds before she said, “What was Mark’s last name?”

“Romano.”

Lydia said, “Do you know whether they caught the person who killed him?”

“No,” said Sarah. “I don’t think so.”

“Did that seem to bother Cathy?”

She stared at the window for a moment, and her answer seemed to come as a mild surprise to her. “I don’t think so. She talked about him, about good things they had done together. She didn’t talk about the killer at all. I suppose that if the only man you ever loved that much is killed, then what matters is that he’s gone. She never talked about the rest of it, the way some people seem to. Like they could never rest until the person gets punished. I think Cathy knew she could never rest no matter what.”

Mallon said, “Maybe if I had somehow known all of this at the time, I could have said or done the right things.”

“No. I knew everything, and I talked to her over and over for a year or more. It made no difference. The only thing that would have was bringing Mark back.”

Lydia said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give the Santa Barbara police your phone number and address. They’ll need to talk to you, and there will have to be arrangements made.”

Sarah looked at the floor. “I know. I’ll call them right away. I’ll have her brought back here so she can be buried near my parents.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself. Mallon knew she was going to be talking to herself often in the next few days, reminding herself of things that needed to be done, people who needed to be called. Death wasn’t just an event that happened by itself. It was a lot of work.

Lydia stood and said, “We’ll be back in California tomorrow. If there’s anything we can do to help, here’s my business card. It has my number on it.” Sarah accepted it, but placed it on a bookshelf without looking at it.

She said, “Thank you. And, Mr. Mallon, I thank you for trying so hard to help my sister. I don’t think acts of kindness are wasted or lost. You made my sister’s last memory of people warmer and brighter.”

All the time she was speaking, they were advancing on the door, and then they were outside. Mallon looked for a last time at the yellow house. It was outdated now, the cheerful paint job and the neat interior all part of a phase of Sarah Carlson’s life that had stopped existing at the moment when he and Lydia had stepped onto her porch.

He stood on her front walk, gripped by the impulse to go back up the steps and tell her the rest of the story. He asked himself what he was longing for. Could he possibly want sympathy from her for the sense of loss that he felt? No, it was something else. He had momentarily imagined that telling Sarah something so private-so damning, now that Catherine had proved that her consent could not have been the free choice of a person in control of her will-would make Sarah reciprocate and tell him things that were equally private: intimate details and secrets that would make him finally understand what Catherine had been thinking. He recognized that the urge was insane. If he told Sarah that he’d had sex with her sister a couple of hours before she’d killed herself, she could only loathe him. He had already heard everything she would ever tell him.

“Bobby?” Lydia’s voice startled him. “Forget something?”

“No,” he said, turning toward the car, and took a step. “Just for a minute, I thought I had.”

“You’re right,” Lydia said softly. “We told her enough.”