Dead Aim (13 page)

“To whom?” asked Lydia. She handed Berwell the videotape, and Berwell put it back into her purse.

She looked at Mallon while she answered. “Now we’re back to the beginning—the people the feds were investigating. That seems to be the reason he was popular with creeps. He was somebody who knew a lot of attractive, available women. He had the temperament of a pimp.”

Mallon asked, “And the women put up with that?”

“Some of the women we interviewed weren’t exactly squeamish about it. They were basically no different from him. They used him too: got a place to live for a while, went to all the parties, and met people who had a lot of cash and were willing to throw it around. When Mark Romano moved on, they considered a change to one of the bigger creeps a soft landing, or even a step up. Who has a better supply of money and drugs than a guy who sells drugs?”

Mallon shook his head. “Catherine wasn’t that way at all. Why would she kill herself over a man like that?”

Angela Berwell’s lips formed a half smile, but her eyes were sad. “The reason somebody like him can exist is that some women are really good at convincing themselves of things that aren’t true. It’s entirely possible that when he kicked her out, she told herself they were just having a spat. And when he was with another woman he was just trying to make her jealous. I’ve seen people who have ignored everything they knew about some jerk, and spent years mourning the person they wished they had known. It’s possible that she even blamed herself for his murder. I can see a whole train of thought for that. She tells herself it’s her fault that he threw her out. She wasn’t pretty
enough or compliant enough or giving him enough money. And it never would have happened if she had still been in his good graces that night. He wouldn’t have gone out at all, or she would have been with him and the killer wouldn’t have shot him in front of a witness, or whatever. I’ve spent hours listening to this kind of thing from other women. Maybe that’s what made Catherine Broward kill herself.”

“But she didn’t do it right away,” said Mallon.

“Right. It’s been about a year since he died. Lydia tells me she drifted around from city to city after that, not really accomplishing anything or taking hold. She showed up at her sister’s. That’s not an unusual thing, making a last visit.”

“I suppose not.”

“They’re not exactly saying good-bye. That would tip their families off. They’re just sort of taking a last look. Sometimes they say something revealing. In this case, it seems she had convinced her sister that what was wrong with her life dated from the death of Mark Romano. All I can say for sure is, if he was a loss to anybody, he was no loss at all to her. They had broken up at least a couple of months before he was killed. She wasn’t living with him. She wasn’t even in L.A. She’d left about six weeks before he was shot.”

“Before?” asked Mallon. “Are you sure?”

“I told you,” she said. “We don’t know everything, and we never find it out. But what we do know, we try to get right. She had been out of L.A. for six weeks before.”

“Where?”

“Up north, staying on a ranch somewhere above Santa Barbara.”

Lydia checked her watch. “We owe Angie a nice dinner, and our reservation is for eight. We’d better get back down the path before they give our table to some congressmen on a relief mission to Beverly Hills.”

Mallon stood up. “You’re right, Lydia. I’m getting hungry.” He went to the door and opened it for her and Detective Berwell. For the rest of the evening they were surrounded by strangers, so the conversation
became light and pleasant, and was limited to comments about the preparation of the food, the beauty of the hotel, and the gentle, cool June weather the city was having. Mallon joined in as well as he could, but now and then one of the others would notice that he was staring down at the table, his brow furrowed in thought.

M
allon 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.