Dead Aim

CHAPTER 9

Mallon and Lydia walked Angela Berwell to the end of the wooden bridge, where the valet-parking attendant brought her car, and then watched her drive off into the night. Lydia was grateful to her for coming: she had wanted Mallon to hear the details directly from the investigating officer. She knew that at some point she was going to have to repay Angela’s favor in some way, but she sensed that this was in keeping with this phase of her life. She seemed to have moved entirely into the realm of repaying favors, incurring new ones to repay the ones she had owed for years.

She had wanted very much to help Bobby Mallon, had an urge to reward him for being the kind of person he always had been, by finding the answers to his questions about Catherine Broward. But now it seemed clear what the rest of the revelations would be like. What she had just seen on tape had also raised a confusing mixture of feelings that were making things more difficult for her. She couldn’t quite banish from her mind the wish that Bobby’s concern had not been devoted to a young stranger who was already dead. Seeing the tape had raised feelings of jealousy, but also had given the girl a reality she had never had before. Lydia felt terribly sorry for her. She turned to Mallon. “Kind of a depressing story, wasn’t it? Think you’ve heard all you need to hear?”

Mallon and Lydia walked back toward Mallon’s bungalow. “What if she was afraid? What if the reason she left was that she sensed the danger, or even knew about it, and didn’t want to be killed?”

“Maybe if we knew why he was killed, that would be a good theory,” said Lydia. “In my experience, people aren’t very good at sensing danger in advance. If they’re scared, it’s usually of the wrong thing.”

“If he saw one of these guys commit a crime, and told her about it, she would know he was in trouble,” said Mallon. “Or if he heard there was a big drug shipment coming in at a particular place and time, and he wasn’t supposed to know. She might have panicked, run away, and regretted it later.”

She looked at him with mild skepticism. “Nobody can rule any of those things out, or any other story we dream up. But if she knew Romano had seen or heard something that put him in danger, he should have known too, and run away. And you heard Angie,” said Lydia. “The tape we saw was one of dozens. It’s a hundred times more likely that he got killed for fucking somebody’s girlfriend.”

Mallon walked along for a few steps, then stopped. “Look at her behavior afterward-all of it. Maybe it was aimless, but maybe it wasn’t. She moved from one city to another, got low-paying jobs, stayed a few months, and each time, she suddenly packed up and moved on again. She could have been wandering, but what she did was also exactly what you might do if you didn’t want to be found. It’s what parole violators used to do after they skipped out.”

She shrugged. “Still do. Know of any reason why she wouldn’t tell her sister she was afraid?”

“Not offhand.”

“Know of any reason why she would spend all that time running to save her life, and then suddenly change her mind and kill herself?”

“No. Maybe she realized running was futile. Maybe there was a reason not to be caught alive.”

“You saw her go into the water. Was there any sign that she thought somebody was after her, or that she was in any hurry?”

“Not then,” Mallon admitted. “But she didn’t seem to be willing to put it off for one more day.” He shook his head and walked on. “But no. I specifically asked her if she was running from something, and she denied it. There was no reason not to tell me the truth.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” said Lydia.

Mallon unlocked the door of his bungalow and they entered. “I don’t get it.”

“I understand your attraction to her better now that I’ve seen her in the buff,” said Lydia. “Since I was forced to watch that tape, it kept occurring to me that this was a woman who was sincerely interested in the man she was with. I think it was true that she was in love with him, and doted on him, and would have cared about his every move. It’s hard to believe she wasn’t curious about what he was up to. What else do we know? We can be pretty sure that whatever got Mark Romano killed, it wasn’t innocence.”

Mallon tried to formulate a suitable answer, but he found that he had nothing to say. He nodded, to acknowledge that he had heard.

“That would be a motive for Catherine to not to tell you the truth about things, to open up to you.” She waited, then said carefully, “I’m not saying she was involved in something illegal, but maybe something was worrying her that we don’t know about. Maybe we’ve made some false assumptions about her. Think back on how she behaved with you. I mean, she hopped right into bed, but wouldn’t tell you her name.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mallon. “I know you’re right to bring it up, but I don’t think so. And I don’t think I’m fooling myself about her. One of the things that you’re thinking is that she had sex with me for some hidden reason, some practical reason, like money or a place to hide. But I had offered her money and a place to stay hours before that. Yes, the sex happened, and it was surprising at the time. But it’s a kind of information that seems at first to be important but, finally, isn’t.”

“How can it not be important?” asked Lydia.

“Because I understand it, and it leads nowhere. She had complicated reasons for doing it, but none of them were causes of her suicide-just the opposite. The sex was possible because the suicide was already a certainty. She knew that I had made a big effort to save the life of a complete stranger and asked nothing in return. She saw that I was a middle-aged heterosexual guy who lived alone and had spent his day alone, and realized that a convincing and generous demonstration of her appreciation would be to seduce me. I also like to think that she told me the truth, and really did feel an unaffected urge to do it. Since she knew she was going to die that night, she thought, ‘Why not? What have I got to lose?’ And she did it. Do you see? It wasn’t for gain, because she didn’t accept anything from me-not even dinner. Having sex with me didn’t obligate her to tell me anything, not even her name. And none of this tells us why she killed herself.”

She studied him for a moment. “I suppose it doesn’t. I guess we know why she did it: Mark Romano broke up with her.”

“I don’t,” said Mallon. “Just because Mark Romano broke up with other girlfriends, it doesn’t mean he broke up with Catherine, does it? We assume that’s what happened, that she lied to her sister out of embarrassment, or that she deluded herself into thinking he didn’t mean it or something. What if the reason she never told her sister is that it never happened, that he never broke up with her?”

“Well, for one thing, she gave her sister a new phone number, then another one six weeks before he was killed, remember?”

“One was probably the ranch where she was staying near Santa Barbara.”

“Maybe,” Lydia conceded. “But the rest of what she told her sister was a fantasy. This guy was a slimy little character who preyed on women. He got killed because he was a bum who hung around with bums. He pissed somebody off. No mystery there. But she told her sister what a great catch he was.”

“I can imagine her telling her sister a reassuring lie that would keep her from worrying. But Catherine didn’t seem like a person who would delude herself to that extent.”

“Okay,” said Lydia. “I guess she preferred the delusion that Mark Romano would treat her differently from the way he’d treated everybody else. I’m not sure that we’re ever going to know exactly what she thought, but-”

“I get the point,” Mallon interrupted. “No matter what she thought, being with him is evidence of some delusion.”

Lydia sighed as she sat on the couch. “It’s my professional opinion that we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. Whatever nuance you read into the story, the essentials are not going to change: she ran into a guy who was very good-looking, who knew how to be charming, and fell in love with him. I think the fact that he had her tape among a couple of dozen others indicates that she was nothing special, and I accept Angie’s theory that he got tired of her and broke up with her. But I don’t insist on it. Even that doesn’t matter. Either way, we know she was deprived of his company forever by the shooter. She was depressed about it-felt guilt for running away, or regret for not letting him take even more advantage of her, or sadness at being dumped, or shame for being with him at all-and took herself out.”

“But which story is it?” asked Mallon. “We still don’t know, and it makes a difference.”

“You’re the client, Bobby,” said Lydia. “It’s still your money and your choice. If you want, we’ll keep looking into it until we can determine which it was, or until we find that we can’t. But if you’re ready to quit now, I’ll refund the part of your advance we haven’t already spent and call it even.”

“I want to keep looking,” said Mallon. “I have the feeling it’s not over, but I don’t know where to look next.”

Lydia sighed. “If you’re trying to find out some single fact that changes everything, that will make you feel satisfied that things happened for the best, you’re going to be out of luck.”

“Don’t you really mean that I’m out of luck if I’m trying to convince myself that I did and said the right things?” asked Mallon.

“I guess I do,” said Lydia. “Look, I’ve known you forever, Bobby. I understood from the beginning that you’re not just a rich guy who’s got morbid curiosity about some young girl. You cared about her a lot. Probably in about a month, she could have gotten you to marry her if she’d wanted. I’m just reminding you that no matter what we find out, we already know there wasn’t a happy ending.” She squinted her eyes for a moment, then said wearily, “But I suppose you still want to do it.”

Mallon nodded. “I still want to do it.”

“Well, there are things we can still look into. I might be able to find out more about these guys Romano knew who were involved in drugs.”

“That’s about him. It doesn’t tell us anything about Catherine,” Mallon said. “I need to know what she was thinking.”

Lydia looked up at him and nodded. At some point, Lydia supposed, she was going to have to fire her client.

“Maybe I’ll check with Detective Fowler in Santa Barbara and see if there’s anything new he can tell me,” she said. “They’ve had a chance to look around in Catherine’s apartment here in L.A., and maybe something turned up there. The apartment has been locked up, but as soon as her sister gets here, that’s over. Unless there’s some indication that it’s not a suicide after all, they won’t hold anything. Sarah will probably retrieve a few family mementos, dump the rest, and take her sister home to bury her.” She stood up. “Well, I’m tired. I’ll get started on all of that in the morning, and I’ll give you a call before noon. In the meantime, don’t be too hard on yourself. The more we learn, the clearer it is that this had nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do. You couldn’t stop it, because you didn’t cause it.”

He studied her. “You don’t just mean Catherine’s death, do you?”

“I mean both of them.” She suddenly leaned close to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek, then went to the door and let herself out.

As she drove away from the hotel, she glanced at the address she had retrieved from her computer earlier in the day, and headed east on Sunset toward Hollywood. Many times in the past twenty years she had been down to Los Angeles looking for clients who had decided to lose themselves. She knew the area between Franklin and Santa Monica Boulevard well, and when she had seen the address in the purse the day after Catherine’s death, she had thought she could even place the building in her memory. She had been right. It was not one of the old apartment buildings with decorative 1920s facades that had been refurbished in the past few years. It was a nearly new four-story stucco rectangle with rows of identical balconies and rows of identical aluminum windows that did not fit the neighborhood, a structure that managed to be ugly in spite of its simplicity. It was a bit after midnight when she came to the door of Catherine Broward’s apartment. She had considered doing this later, when the neighbors would be in their deepest sleep, but she had decided that coming later raised the stakes too high. If someone heard her at midnight, they would hear other sounds too, sounds coming from other parts of the building and sounds from the street. At twelve, she was probably a resident coming home from a party. At three, she was a burglar.

Lydia was glad to see that the locks on the doors along the corridor were a cheap, standard five-tumbler model that she was comfortable opening. She rechecked the apartment number, removed the pick and tension wrench from the lining of her purse, and began to work the lock. It took only a few seconds, and she turned the knob and entered.

She closed the door quietly, locked it, and stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light from the sliding glass doors on the balcony and listening for sounds that would indicate that someone had heard her. When she was ready she went to the glass doors and closed the drapes, then turned on her small flashlight and let its narrow beam show her the general structure of the place. She was in a compact living room, with an off-white couch and matching chair probably bought from Ikea. Beyond this room was an alcove that served as a kitchen, furnished with a table and four chairs. She let the light play on the counter surfaces for a moment, then opened the refrigerator to confirm her theory: it was empty. Either Sarah had already gotten here and thrown out everything, or Catherine had decided to quit the world without leaving a mess behind.

She looked in a drawer to see which it was, and found silverware and kitchen knives, all clean and neatly arranged in segmented trays: Catherine. Sarah would have packed those. She felt forebodings of failure-messy people and ones who did not know they were about to die were more accommodating than ones who planned suicide. They left things around that would answer questions. But she also felt a kind of guilty relief, since she would be able to tell Bobby Mallon that she had risked a burglary charge to get in, and then found nothing. She moved into the single bedroom.

The bed was a platform with a futon covered by sheets and a quilt in bright colors that she guessed had probably come from Ikea too. There were a small dresser and a simple desk with four drawers. She moved immediately to the desk and opened them, knowing before she did that she was simply looking in all the obligatory places. The drawers were three inches deep, not big enough to hold a large collection of old papers. The top one held pens and pencils and paper clips, the second stationery. The rest were empty.

It was like a man’s apartment-a dull man, at that. Catherine Broward had been a woman who traveled light. Or at least, she had ended as that kind of woman. Lydia suspected that no woman began that way. Happy women accumulated troves of things-furniture, cosmetics, clothes, useless trinkets, pictures, china, souvenirs. They were always adjusting their surroundings to suit them ever more closely. Even when they lived in apartments like this one, the kind of disposable architecture that any sensible person would know was doomed in the next earthquake, even when they were nomads who moved every year, they collected. She and all of the women she knew had a special energy for this incessant and pointless settling.

That was what was missing from Catherine Broward, that energy. Whatever it was that had really happened to her, it had left her depleted. And Lydia suspected that as she had moved from city to city, she had jettisoned things. Probably the first she would have thrown out were the very things Lydia could have used: receipts, canceled checks, letters.

Lydia opened the dresser drawers, but found nothing except the usual clothes, folded as though for display. She looked in the closet. The clothes were all hung with the same care, the shoes lined up underneath. On the shelf above, her light settled on some shoeboxes, so she reached for one. It did not feel as though it contained shoes, so she brought it down and opened it. The box was filled with bank statements. She looked at the front one, then at the one in the back, and saw that Catherine’s filing system must have been determined by the size of her shoeboxes. She had kept her statements as long as they still fit, which was about three years. Lydia looked in the next box, which was full of canceled checks.

Lydia held the light in her mouth and fingered back through the checks to last August, when Mark Romano had died. But Catherine had been gone a couple of months before, so Lydia pulled out July, June, and May too. She put the stack of checks into her purse, then reached up for the third box. It was full of photographs. The oldest were from Catherine’s childhood. The later ones had more clarity and the color got better and better because of the improvements in technology. There were a few of her as a teenager clowning with friends, then a prom picture, and a few of Catherine as a college student with some different friends. Lydia had no trouble identifying Catherine’s sister.

When Lydia reached Mark Romano’s era, she recognized him from the dim videotape. She studied the pictures to get a clearer look at his face. Sarah’s description had barely done him justice. For the first time during this case, Lydia understood what had happened to Catherine Broward. A man that handsome would be nearly impossible to resist. A woman with any imagination at all would be able to think up enough excuses for him to keep herself fooled for years. She sighed. A boyfriend who was too handsome was not a problem Lydia Jean Marks was going to have in this life. If this one was what they were like, maybe it was just as well.

She leafed through more photographs, and began to see more pictures of Romano and Catherine together: the dead couple at play on a beach, in a park, at a party. Instinctively-maybe because she knew a bit about him, and maybe because she identified with any woman who had been treated that way-she found herself hating Mark. She liked Catherine. In the pictures she had a good-natured face rather than a beautiful one, and the tapes had shown a body that was nice, but not spectacular. She looked like a good companion, a person who could tell a funny story.

As Lydia looked at the pictures, she noticed that she was feeling sleepy. If she had known she would be doing this, she would not have had wine with dinner at the hotel. When Mark’s time was up, the pictures ended. There were none that seemed to have been taken after that. She selected the photographs she wanted and put the rest back.

She kept searching the apartment patiently and carefully, but increased her pace. When she ran out of shoeboxes she stood on a chair to be sure she had found everything on the upper shelf. She looked under the frame of the futon, in the cupboards of the little kitchen. All she found confirmed the sparse and frugal tone of the place: a set of four plates, a set of four glasses, a set of four coffee cups and saucers. There were no more papers.

Lydia took a final look around her with her flashlight, wishing she had brought Bobby Mallon with her to see this place. Maybe he would have understood the girl better. Catherine had prepared everything she was leaving behind, absolutely certain that the next visitors would arrive after she was dead. By the time Bobby Mallon had seen her, there was nothing he could have done that would have changed anything.

Lydia used her flashlight to take a last look in her purse, ticking off the things she had kept: a good, clear photograph of Mark Romano and a good one of Catherine Broward, both from sometime late in their relationship; one of them together taken at a beach; the most recent bank statement from the shoebox; a stack of checks. She told herself that taking these things didn’t matter. The negatives for the pictures were still in the box in envelopes, the bank statement could be duplicated, and the checks were a year old. Taking them was a felony, but so was being here at all. There was no use for them except to somebody who was examining Catherine Broward’s death in detail, and nobody seemed to think there was anything left to know except Robert Mallon.

“You were in her apartment?” Mallon was incredulous. “You broke in?”

Lydia said, “Breaking in sounds a lot more interesting than what I did. Nothing is broken. Nobody will notice I was there, and what I took is of no value to anyone but us.”

Mallon watched as Lydia opened the plain manila envelope she carried, and began placing things on the table near the window that overlooked the bungalow’s little garden. “Here. Take a look,” she said.

Mallon studied the photographs. The two with Catherine Broward in them were painful to look at. This was a version of the sensation he had sometimes felt when he saw pictures of happy Europeans taken just before World War II. In the midst of this happiness, did they have any tiny feeling that something was coming, any fear that something about this day wasn’t quite right?

He took his eyes off Catherine Broward and studied the boyfriend. The photograph was clearer and brighter than the videotape had been. Romano had been tall, lean, and well-formed, his face almost too good, too big-eyed and perfect, so his looks almost crossed the line and became feminine. He had the sort of appearance that teenaged girls liked-the look of a boy, really, because boys weren’t as frightening as men.

There was a bank statement. Mallon looked at the address of the branch in West Los Angeles and saw that the date was only a month ago. There were about fifteen checks written for sums that invited him to identify them. Eleven hundred near the end of the month was her rent, because it was even. Thirteen hundred eighty-two and forty-nine cents on the third was a credit card bill that had arrived on the first. One twenty-seven thirteen was probably electricity. It couldn’t have been gas because it was summer and she would have used no heat. His eyes stopped at the balance, a bit over one hundred and twelve thousand dollars. There had been one deposit: twenty thousand even on the first of the month.

Lydia seemed to have read his expression. “The balance?”

“That and the only deposit.”

“The deposit is the same every month. I think it’s a trust fund. She and her sister probably each got twenty thousand a month. I could see from the apartment that she didn’t spend much, so the balance tended to grow on her. Now and then she would write a check to move some to a savings account. If she moved it from there, I didn’t see the record. She doesn’t seem to have been an investor: she didn’t have much interest in the distant future.”

Mallon was silent.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m trying to catch up. I guess I never thought of her in those terms. For a young woman who worked as a waitress, she was pretty wealthy.”

Lydia hesitated. She was not sure whether she wanted to show Mallon her next exhibit. She knew that if she showed it to him, Mallon would jump to conclusions again. The ironic part of it was that Lydia knew any detective should be eager to show it to Mallon. It would make Mallon want to keep paying her for the next year. Delving for ever-more-minute details of Catherine Broward’s short life was a lot easier than going back to the bail bond shop to begin hunting down the next violent jerk that Harry managed to bail out of jail. But Lydia was determined not to take advantage of Bobby Mallon’s guilt. She let herself think wistfully for a moment of putting it all back in the envelope and saying, “Well, that’s it. That’s all she left lying around.” Instead, she reached into the envelope again and produced one of the canceled checks she had stolen.

She laid it on the table beside the photographs. It was for forty thousand dollars, and the date was last July 15. It said, “Pay to the order of Safe-Force School of Self-Defense,” and the notation written on the line in the lower left said, “July 15-August 15.” She said, “There are two of these, both to the school, to pay up to September fifteenth.”

She watched Mallon bend over it and stare. He picked it up and turned it over to read the stamped endorsement. “Deposit only SF Self-Defense.” The bank was in Ojai, California. Mallon placed the check back on the table and stared at Lydia impassively.

Lydia said, “Don’t read too much into this.”

Mallon’s left eyebrow arched. “July fifteenth through September fifteenth, Lydia. She was off taking a self-defense course when her boyfriend got killed. How can that be a coincidence?”

“I’m not saying it was a coincidence. I’m just not assuming it means she knew he was in danger.”

“Then what was she afraid of?”

“It doesn’t even mean she was afraid.”

Mallon’s other brow rose. “Forty thousand bucks a month?”

Lydia shrugged.

Mallon pressed her. “Forty thousand bucks for four weeks at a self-defense camp, and she’s not afraid?”

“It’s not much time if you’re not doing anything else, and forty thousand is not much money if your trust fund brings in twenty thousand while you’re gone.”

“Forty thousand is not much money compared to my bank account either, but forty thousand bucks is still forty thousand bucks. It has an objective value. I know that most people work a long time to get that much, even if I don’t. To throw it away is disrespectful to them.”

“You worked most of your life, built a couple of businesses. You learned young. She probably didn’t.”

“She worked as a waitress, not once, but several times in different cities. She wouldn’t have to do too many shifts on her feet to get the idea.”

“Maybe it was a lark,” said Lydia. “You know: go to some fancy ranch with a couple of girlfriends, learn a few judo moves, and discharge a firearm at a target a couple of times.”

“That’s not a lark. For forty grand she could have gone anywhere.” Mallon frowned at the check. “Depending on who you talk to, she was either in the midst of the love affair of her life or she had just been dumped. Either way, it doesn’t sound like a time to go out of town for intensive self-defense training, does it?”

“It could be a response to her boyfriend’s social set. Maybe they just gave her the creeps.”

“Then she was afraid, exactly as I said,” Mallon insisted. He looked at Lydia expectantly.

“All right. We’re never going to figure out what she was thinking by sitting here and making up stories,” said Lydia. “We’ve got to go back up to Santa Barbara anyway if we’re going to get anything out of Detective Fowler. Why don’t we drive up? On the way we can take a detour, have a look at this self-defense school. Maybe they’ll be able to tell us what the hell she was doing there while her boyfriend was down here getting himself killed.”