Dead Aim (40 page)

As he merged into the northbound side of the freeway, he tried to sort out what was happening. It was possible that Detective Berwell would tell him something that would indicate his predicament was about to improve, but he doubted it. He hoped that talking with her would at least provide him with an advocate on the Los Angeles police force. Even if she was only willing to help him because she wanted to find Mark Romano’s killer, it didn’t matter.

The traffic was moving smoothly, and it took him less than a half hour to reach the corner where he had agreed to meet Detective Berwell. Since he was so early, he drove up and down a few of the streets near the intersection of Wilshire and Fairfax, killing time and looking for the best place to park. Finally, he drove along Sixth Street behind the L.A. County Museum of Art, intending to find a space in the parking lot up the street and walk toward Fairfax. But on Sixth, just before he reached Curson, he found a space and took it. As he was about to get out of the car he looked up South Curson. It led into Park La Brea, a large apartment complex. Inside the entrance, he saw something that puzzled him. In the circle at the end of South Curson were two plain
vans, one blue and the other white, stopped at the curb with their motors running. Each had a driver sitting behind the wheel and two other men loitering nearby. A few feet ahead of them was a car with another driver waiting behind the wheel and a person beside him.

Mallon decided not to get out of his car yet. He sat and waited. It seemed an odd gathering to him. Neither van had any markings to indicate that it was from a delivery company or a repair service. Maybe he was being overly jumpy, but who were these men, and what were they waiting for? Almost certainly there was some dull, benign explanation, but what was it?

After another minute, the passenger door of the car parked ahead of the vans opened, and a woman got out. Mallon recognized the blond hair at once. It was Angela Berwell. She stepped away from the car and he could see that she was wearing a navy blue pantsuit. As she moved toward the white van, she was talking. One of the men leaning on the van approached her, and the other went to the back door of the van and climbed inside. Mallon waited, and the man who had gone inside came out again and stood in front of Angela Berwell.

Mallon guessed that on her way to meet him, she and her partner must have detected some violation, and this man was going to show her some permit, or maybe just his license and registration. But he didn’t show her anything. Instead, she opened her coat, held the lapel away from her body, and the man reached up to fiddle with something inside it. While he did, one of the two men near the blue van got into it.

The man with Detective Berwell said something to her, she talked for a few seconds, and then both of them turned to look at the man beside the blue van. He waved an arm and nodded. As Mallon watched, the man who had been sitting behind the wheel of the sedan got out and joined them for a moment, then returned to his car. The rest of the men got into the two vans, and all three vehicles drove around the circle and back down South Curson to Wilshire Boulevard. Then they turned right toward Fairfax. Angela Berwell stood and watched them make the turn, then began to walk alone down Sixth Street in the general
direction of the corner where she had agreed to meet him. As she went, Mallon could see that she was talking to an invisible listener. She was wearing a wire.

Mallon sat motionless, trying to get over the shock and disappointment. She wasn’t interested in helping him. She was meeting him to try to get him to say something incriminating on a surveillance tape. He supposed they must be considering prosecuting him for running over the two men in the parking garage. Maybe they had even begun to suspect him of killing Catherine, or killing Lydia. Once he became a suspect, there was probably no limit to the crimes they could link to him. Diane Fleming had been right: it had not been smart to keep bringing himself to their attention, offering his help and asking for theirs.

Time was passing. What should he do now? He could not go to a meeting with Angela Berwell knowing that she was planning to trap him into saying something she could use against him, but how could he refuse? He got out of the car, walked across the grass of the park toward the back of the county art museum. There were pay telephones to the left, just across the path from the entrance to the Page Museum, where the finds from the La Brea Tar Pits were displayed. He hurried to the nearest of the telephones, put in two quarters, took out the sheet of paper where he had written the number of the Hollywood station, and dialed.

A male voice answered, “Hollywood Division.”

Mallon said, “I’d like to leave a message for Detective Angela Berwell in Homicide, please.”

“I’ll connect you with her voice mail.”

After Mallon had heard her recorded voice say, “Please leave a message,” he said, “This is Robert Mallon. I’m afraid I won’t be able to meet you today after all. I hope it’s not too late, and you check your messages in time. Anyway, I’m sorry.”

He hung up the telephone, hurried back to his car, and drove. He hated not being able to get Angela Berwell’s help, and the knowledge
that she had turned on him made him afraid. He made his way to the San Diego Freeway and returned to his hotel. When he was in his room again, he dialed his own telephone number.

The telephone rang four times, there was a click, and his answering machine came on. “If you would like to leave a message—”

Mallon pressed the keys for his three-digit code. If the police in Santa Barbara suspected him too, they would hear him calling in to check his messages, but certainly they would have played them already. The machine said, “One. New. Message.”

“Robert?” The voice was high, tense, and worried. “It’s Diane. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for days. Where are you? If you’re there, pick up.” There was a pause. “I guess you’re not. Call me as soon as you get in.”

Mallon hung up the telephone. He looked at his watch. It was after twelve, but he dialed Diane’s office.

There were two rings, an unfamiliar clicking, then another ring. Sylvia said, “Law office. May I help you?”

Mallon said, “Hello, Sylvia. This is Robert Mallon. I’m returning Diane’s call.”

Sylvia’s voice seemed uncomfortable. “She’s not in the office right now, Mr. Mallon. But she asked that you leave a number so she can call you back.”

Mallon said, “I’m in L.A.,” then read the number to her off the label on the telephone.

“I’ll have her call as soon as I can. She’s due back from the courthouse any minute.”

“Okay,” said Mallon. He hung up and sat on the bed for a moment, staring at the wall. He had heard a sound while she had been writing down his number. She had heard it, and had immediately started talking again, with that business about the courthouse. She had been trying to distract him, in case he had heard it too. The sound had been the whistle of a train.

Diane’s office was on De la Guerra. The nearest train tracks were
south of Haley, near the ocean. The whistle he’d heard had been too loud, too close. She had not been in the office. She had not exactly said that she was in the building on De la Guerra Street. She had said, “Law office,” which was the way all lawyers’ phones were answered, for some reason. He decided it was foolish to make up excuses. She had lied to him. She had said Diane was on her way back from the courthouse. With call forwarding, either of them could be anywhere.

The telephone beside him rang. He took a breath. “Hello,” he said, keeping his voice even and calm. His own demeanor seemed to be the only part of the universe that he was able to control, and all he could do with it was to hide his uneasiness, anger, and confusion.

“Robert?” It was Diane’s voice, as he had expected. At one time he used to love to listen to it, the carefully modulated tones like music. He had never minded that the voice was an artifice. It had made him feel flattered, the way seeing a woman dress up to meet him did.

“Hello, Diane,” he said. “You left a message on my machine to call.” His own voice—the tone of unconcern—sounded insane to him. He had been attacked twice over the past two days by people he’d never seen before, and he was concealing it.

“Robert,” she said, her voice tightening to a breathless whisper. “I’m so glad I finally reached you. I think we’re both in terrible danger. I’m not calling from my office. I’m afraid to go near the place. The calls get forwarded to Sylvia, and she calls me so I can return them.”

Mallon was disconcerted. Over the past two days, he had slowly come to the belief that Diane had been lying to him. He let his suspicion come into his voice. “You heard about the power of attorney?”

“What power of attorney? Robert, I’m not calling you about some stupid papers that need to be signed. I think somebody is planning to kill us.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “Did you know I revoked your signature power for my accounts?”

She drew in a breath, as though to raise her voice and insist that he pay attention to what she had been trying to tell him, but then the silence
grew longer. The pause sounded as though she had sensed that he believed what he had said was extremely important, and now she was trying to fathom what had been happening to him. “Why would you do that?”

“Because the people at Wells Fargo called to ask me why I wanted to liquidate the whole account there—why I wasn’t satisfied.”

“I don’t get it. Why are you doing it?”

“I’m not. They said they had received a transfer order with your signature on it.”

“Mine? Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Who are these people? How did they know about any account, let alone know that my name would do them any good?”

“That’s what I want to know,” said Mallon. It was not exactly the way he had wanted to put it. He had wanted to accuse her, to tell her she was lying. She seemed so guilty, but now he was beginning to wonder whether he was just being jumpy, suspicious of everybody. She seemed to read his thoughts.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m just so scared that I’m suspecting everybody, but I was the one who did most of the talking to the police in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Maybe I was too clear about our business relationship. It wouldn’t be hard to find out the names of the banks you deal with. A credit check would turn up that much.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you think one of the cops is involved?” he asked. He tried unsuccessfully to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

“I can’t trust my own thoughts right now,” she said. “I don’t know who anybody is. There were people watching my office. There was a woman who took my picture when I parked my car at La Cumbre Plaza, and then again near the courthouse. That night there were two men following me when I tried to drive home. I did everything I knew to lose them, but they stayed right behind me. A couple of times they came so close I thought they were going to try to push me off the
road. Instead of going home, I stopped at a neighbor’s house and rang the bell. When he came to the door they drove off.”

Mallon squeezed his eyes shut. The woman with the camera was certainly real. “What do you think we should do?”

“I think we’ve already done it,” she answered. “We’ve both got to stay out of sight as long as we can, at least until we can find out what’s really going on, and who we can trust to help us.” She hesitated for a moment. “Have any of the police officers told you that you have to stay in the area?”

“No.”

“Then don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t know who is doing this. I thought it was something to do with Lydia Marks. But if somebody is trying to use my name to get at your money, then maybe Lydia was just killed to get her out of the way of that. Maybe it’s … I don’t know. Robert, you have to get out of there, away from southern California.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I’m going, believe me. I’ve been hiding in a hotel for days. The only thing that’s been holding me here was that I couldn’t disappear until I’d talked to you.” She paused. “Robert, as your attorney, I can tell you that if nobody told you that you can’t leave, then you can. And as your friend, I would tell you not to pay attention if they had. It’s time to leave. And don’t take a plane. If somebody who’s getting information from the police is involved, they might be able to get your destination. Get in your car and drive somewhere. Just tell me where you’re going, so I can meet you. We’ll go to authorities we know can’t be involved, because they’re out of state.”

“All I’ve got is a rental car. Two men shot up my car last night, trying to kill me.”

She took a breath, and he could hear a tremor in her throat as she let it out. “You can’t use a rental car. It’s even easier to trace than a plane ticket. We’ll go together. I’ll drive you. I bought a new car.”

“New car?”

“After those men followed me, I asked myself whether it was worth the money to trade my old one in and buy a new one. Believe me, it feels as though it is. I went to a lot of trouble to get a car that nobody will recognize. I don’t want to go where you are. I’m afraid if somebody followed you there, they’ll see it. We’ll meet somewhere. I’ll drive past. If somebody is following me, you’ll see them, and know enough to get out fast. If I come past again and you’re gone, I’ll know I have a problem.”

“Where do we meet?”

“I don’t know … yes, I do. Do you remember about a year ago, I told you about a place where I was thinking about investing in some real estate?”

“Well, yes, I do,” said Mallon. “I think I can get there. When?”

“After dark. Say, ten o’clock. Is that all right?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, “we haven’t said aloud where it was, and we haven’t said what my car looks like or where I’ll be coming from. We haven’t said where we’ll be going after that. I guess it’s the best we can do.”

“I guess so,” said Mallon. “Good luck to us.” He heard her hang up, so he did too. He sat for a time, going over the conversation in his mind. She had said something that would explain each of the suspicious facts: she had disappeared abruptly because she too had seen the woman with the camera, and then gotten stalked. She had claimed she had not known about the attempt to take the money from the private banking account at Wells Fargo. Of course, it could have been a lie, but suddenly he had realized that this was extremely unlikely. If she had wanted to get his money, or just deny him the use of it so he would be easier to kill, she should have been able to think of a better way than signing her own name to a withdrawal order. In a way, it seemed to him a sign of his emotional distress that he could have suspected her at all.