Dead Aim (21 page)

“I might,” said Lydia. She took her eyes off the road for a moment to look at Mallon, then looked ahead again. “Let’s think about the things we didn’t know when we started two weeks ago. We know that Markie was not a nice man. He was a lowlife. We know that when she tried to talk to him about their personal disagreements, including his having a car she paid for, and her money, he beat the hell out of her in a parking lot. We know that sometime later—a month or two, after her teeth had been replaced and the arm healed—she paid forty grand to spend four weeks at a self-defense camp. That was in July. A month after that, Markie gets shot. At that moment, where is Catherine? She isn’t even in town. She’s—still—at the self-defense place in the woods.”

“Right,” said Mallon. “Is there some way to make it all fit with the rest of what we know?”

“Yeah, there’s a way: she killed him.”

“No!” Mallon said immediately. Then he cocked his head as though listening while he soundlessly tried the tone of it. He said, more quietly, “That’s crazy.”

“She had a hell of a motive.”

“Well,” said Mallon, “all right, he was a bum. Some women might respond to that fact by wanting to kill him. But even if she did, wanting to is a very long way from actually doing it.”

“You know what they study in that self-defense school? I took a brochure. There are courses in the technology of self-defense, which is about pepper spray and Tasers and alarms and locks and security cameras, and so on. That’s standard stuff, but there’s a high-end tilt to it because the customers are rich and worry about kidnapping and protecting big houses. The second course is hand-to-hand combat, taught by male and female instructors who have black belts in aikido and karate, among other things. The third course is firearms training, including work on a combat range. That was why we heard pistols the day we were there. So Catherine had a pretty good introduction to ways of hurting people, and enough knowledge to understand that the only realistic way for her to get Markie was a shot to the head. She
also, after you stopped her from drowning, killed herself with a pistol, which means she was capable of getting one when she needed it. We have enough of a motive, I’d say. How hard do you think it would be for her to get an opportunity—maybe slip out of that camp at night, drive to the apartment where she used to live with him in L.A. and do him, then drive back?”

“Okay,” said Mallon. “Crazy wasn’t the right word. I just don’t think she was the kind of person who would kill somebody.”

“You knew her for a few hours,” said Lydia. “And spending time naked with somebody isn’t the same as reading their innermost thoughts. I’m not saying this to be cruel, but that’s one of the mistakes Catherine seems to have made.”

“And now I’m making it about her?”

“All I’m saying is that the whole story about her going to a self-defense school because she was afraid her boyfriend was in danger makes very little sense. It makes no sense at all once you know he’d already beaten her up and thrown her out,” said Lydia. “It makes perfect sense if she was the one who killed him.”

Mallon glared at her. “I’ll admit that your theory is logical. But I talked to her, and we’ve both talked to other people about her, and I’m just not prepared to say that she would kill someone, even someone who deserved it.”

“Neither am I,” said Lydia. She turned right at Century Boulevard and headed toward the airport. “I want you to take a plane back to Santa Barbara. I’ll get in touch in a few days.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got to take care of some other stuff: you know, check in with Harry up north at the office, then try to figure out who else to ask questions down here. I’ll call you.”

As afternoon was ending and the sun glared brightly from a low angle above the ocean in preparation for the change into evening, Mallon
stepped off his plane and into the Santa Barbara terminal. His lawyer, Diane, was already walking toward him, smiling. Her short blond hair was perfectly brushed and shining, and she wore a tailored navy blue suit, as though she had been in court. He looked at her and held his hands out in confusion.

“I was trying to reach Lydia Marks, and when I did, she told me your flight number.”

“So you’re here for me?” He realized that he had asked the wrong question. What he wanted to know was why she had called Lydia.

“Sure. She said you would tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ll try.”

They waited a few minutes in the baggage claim area for his single suitcase to appear on the metal ramp and slide down to the carousel, and then she drove him to a restaurant on Stearns Wharf, where they could look out and watch the yachts and fishing boats putting slowly into the harbor for the night. She listened patiently to his recitation over dinner. Finally, he asked, “What do you think?”

She sipped her coffee, looked out the big window at four blue kayaks coming into the harbor. “I think it’s getting to be time to move to the next phase.”

“What’s that?”

“First, you record everything you’ve learned in a journal: what you observed, the evidence you found, what each person told you, and when. You read each entry over to be sure it’s absolutely accurate. Then you write down what you think actually happened, in chronological order. Draw a conclusion. If the story is convincing enough so that you’re sure you know the truth, then you go to the police.”

“And if it’s not convincing enough?”

“Then you put it at the bottom of a drawer, and concede that there are some questions that just can’t be answered.”

He stared at her uncomfortably. “You think I’m out of my mind to do this.”

She returned his stare for a moment. “Not at all. When this first
came up, it had not been established that Catherine Broward’s death was a suicide. If it turned out to be something else, you were a potential suspect. In those situations it’s not a bad idea to have experienced defense attorneys and private investigators visibly working on your behalf. I also knew that you’d had a weird, unsettling experience. I thought it might be therapeutic for you to go find out what had caused it. And, frankly, I expected that when you found out, you would come to the conclusion that you had done all you could to save her, but she was not somebody who could be saved. You’ve done that. I think at some point, you stop. Now would be a good time.”

He looked out the window again, and stared across the harbor at the thicket of white masts of the sailboats moored at the slips. “I don’t know enough yet. We’ve found things that I think we have to resolve first.”

She studied him with benign tolerance. “You have to drive on the right side of the street and pay your taxes. You don’t have a civic duty to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to uncover every nuance of the reason a stranger killed herself. It happens. It’s always partly obvious, because there’s always some real reason to be unhappy, and it’s always partly mysterious, because we can never know what anybody else is thinking.” She saw the expression on his face as he impatiently waited for her to finish. “I’m trying to do you some good here.”

A smile raised the corners of his lips, faded, and then returned. “I know that. I’m not sure I can explain why I’m going on with this, because the reason keeps changing. At first I wanted to know what I could have said or done to stop it. I realized—maybe while I was listening to her sister—that it was incredible egotism to think that just by saying some words I could induce a person I’d just met to reverse the biggest decision she had ever made. But it happens. It happens all the time. Somebody on a suicide hotline talks a young woman like her out of it every night.”

“She has to call the hotline first. They don’t wait until she’s drowned herself, pull her out, and make her come to the phone. Maybe that’s the difference. Or maybe she was nuts. Delusional. Yes, I’m being flippant. I hope you know that if she were here now, I would be the last person you know to say, ‘Who cares?’ But now that it’s over, I have to say, ‘Who still cares?’ because the second that life left her body, all of this became a nonissue. Nothing you do will help her, or anybody else.”

“You’re not even curious?”

“Of course I am,” she said. “I’m the biggest gossip in town. You know that. Right now I spend a few minutes of each day spying on the tax attorney who has an office down the hall, because just about every day at lunchtime, a good-looking young guy shows up with take-out food, and she closes the office for an hour and a half. But he doesn’t leave until she reopens at one-thirty. I want to know all about it: who he is, where they met, what they’re doing—specifically and in detail—and how she’s keeping her husband from catching her.” She paused. “See? It’s titillating, it’s interesting, it’s not especially sad, and I don’t have to hire an expensive detective to interpret it for me.”

He grinned. “You keep returning to the money. You think I’m wasting it, don’t you?”

“You’re not the only rich client I have, thank God, and you’re not nearly the silliest. Usually, I include you in the other group, the ones I don’t worry about because they still have their first dollar. But right now, you have a certain quality that appeals to the motherly side of my nature, so I’ll give you a motherly lecture. Money can have some traps. It allows people to do surprisingly dumb things without obvious disastrous consequences. That can be a danger. You can get the idea that your money buys you everything you want, and will protect you from anything you don’t want. It can’t always, and when you reach the limit, it can be a nasty shock.”

“I’m not sure how this applies to me,” said Mallon.

“I don’t think you can find out everything about another person’s life just by paying a fortune to investigators. And I’m not sure that if you could, it would be a good bargain.”

“Lydia is an old friend of mine, and I have more money than I need,” he said.

“You don’t have unlimited time,” she said. “Nobody has. It’s hard for a person who cares about you to see you obsessed with a dead woman.”

“She wasn’t dead when I met her.” Mallon paid for their dinner, and they walked along the harbor breakwall, watching the last of the boats coming in just after sundown.

“Is it the boyfriend’s murder that’s keeping you involved?” she asked. “Do you secretly think her death was a murder too?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Mallon replied. “We know she went to a self-defense school. What for? Lydia thinks she went there to learn how to kill somebody, and then did—that she killed Mark Romano herself.”

“And then what? Something drove her to suicide?”

“I don’t know. Guilt, maybe, or regret.” They walked along for a few yards, and he said, “I keep wondering about that self-defense camp. Have you heard of it?”

“I don’t think so,” she answered. “But you have to remember what kind of place Santa Barbara is. It’s always been a place where rich people came to live after they stopped doing whatever it was that made them rich—sometimes a generation or two after. And it’s drawn more than its share of strange characters of one kind or another, who have something specific in mind, some way of taking advantage of that potential. A friend of mine used to say that there are five thousand living religions, and thirty-eight hundred of them were started within a hundred miles of here. This is also one of the places you come if you want to hold a class in yoga, or start a health-food store, or push some kind of self-improvement. This self-defense school seems to me to fit into that mix—on the fringes, maybe.”

“I suppose,” he said.

They walked back to the parking lot, got into Diane’s car, and she drove him to his house. He took his suitcase, leaned in the open window on his side, and said, “Thanks for picking me up, Diane.” Then he added, “And thanks for listening to all this.”

“Thanks for dinner,” she replied. “If listening helps you get over this, I’ll listen anytime.”

“It’s not a complete waste. Lydia and I may have solved a murder.”

“And found a murderer who’s mostly a victim and who is, incidentally, dead.”

“The truth matters.”

“Some truths matter more than others. Spend your time thinking about living women. They sometimes repay your interest.” The window on Mallon’s side slid shut, and she drove off into the night.

Mallon unlocked his front door, turned on the lights, and carried his suitcase up to his bedroom. He began to unpack, hanging up the clean clothes he had packed this morning. He was frustrated. Nobody seemed to understand that what he was looking for made a difference. He was sure that the girl who had been in his house had not been seeing things in a distorted way.

She had been clear-eyed and sane. Maybe the one who killed Mark Romano had tracked her to his door, taken her out, and shot her. Maybe she had known that Mark Romano should die, had gone out and learned how to kill him, and then done it. And maybe she had discovered something he could not quite know, but suspected: that killing another human being had changed her into someone she did not want to be.