Dead Aim (6 page)

Mallon’s divorce from Andrea had been an ugly, drawn-out campaign with charges and counterattacks that had been painful but meant nothing, since it made no legal difference in the state of California if he was taciturn and distant or if she’d had affairs. Once they were no longer living together, the battles finally had nothing to focus on but the sums that could be produced by the sale of things that had once been treasures. Their meeting on the day of the final decree had ended the marriage in a last conflagration and a division of spoils.

The property division had required that they sell their house. It had been in his family for four generations, and had originally been a working farm. Even when he had been a boy, it still had been far enough out in the country so that he and his father used to take target practice with their rifles at the edge of their backyard. In that direction there had been nothing to hit for miles. Since then, the city of San Jose had simply grown to engulf the farm and make the hundred acres worth more than all the crops ever grown there. He had felt a deep guilt for not contriving a way to prevent the sale of the house. He had not, in any emotional sense, owned it. He had not been one of the people who had built it, or fought the droughts and the politicians to hold it. He had merely covered over a few more of the fields with grass to enlarge the yard, turned his grandmother’s kitchen garden into a tennis court, torn out his father’s swimming pool and put in a better one to please Andrea. He had, by default, been this generation’s caretaker, holding the house for the next. When it went, he had mourned it like a death, but the house had not been a surprise. She had not liked the place.

The sale of the construction business Mallon owned had been a surprise, because he had never before seen Andrea make a decision that seemed contrary to her own best interests. He had offered her a monthly income that would have consisted of half his profits. But she
had insisted on having the company appraised—trucks, tools, trailers, telephones—and getting half of the total in cash immediately.

Andrea’s demand came just at a time when northern California was gripped in its most frantic growth spurt. Mallon had run out of land that he had already paid for or inherited, and had begun borrowing to buy more empty land and build developments on it. He had needed to use all his credit, so when her demand came, all Mallon had been able to do was agree to sell out and give her what she had asked for. But her timing was perfect. A much larger company made a preemptive offer just so they could keep the buildings going up without a pause. None of his crews even got a day off when the exchange was made. Mallon had told his lawyers to handle the sale, pay off the debts, give Andrea’s attorneys a check for her half of what was left, and send his share to Wells Fargo bank.

A week later, Mallon had been given an appointment with two women in the private banking office in Palo Alto who were specialists in managing people’s investments. He had explained that he needed to have them invest his money conservatively so he would not be left short before he found a job. The two had looked at the printout that contained his balance, and looked at each other. The older one, who had silver eyeglasses on a silver chain, wrote something on a piece of paper before she spoke. “Mr. Mallon. This is what your investments will throw off in an average year.” She had spun the paper around to face him so he could read the number she had written.

Mallon had thanked the women, signed the various forms they handed him, and then walked out of their building. He’d looked up and down the sidewalk, then up at the sky. As he’d stepped along, the implications of the numbers had begun to demand his attention. The figure the woman had shown him was five or six times what he had spent even when Andrea had lived with him.

He could not stand to live in San Jose anymore, to take circuitous routes just to avoid passing by his family’s farm or his old construction business or Andrea’s new house. He stopped at the office one last
time to say good-bye to his former employees, then drove two hundred and eighty miles south to an apartment in Santa Barbara because he had visited the city a few times and had no unpleasant memories of it. After a month he had invested in an old brick colonial house above Mission Street near State. He spent nearly a year remodeling it, doing most of the work himself, and trying to think about his future but failing. He knew nothing about the future, but the past was full of problems he had not solved. During that year, the investments he had left with the private banking people up north had begun their steady growth. At the end of the year, instead of selling the house, he moved into it. There had never again been any practical reason for Robert Mallon to do anything in exchange for money.

In his new life in Santa Barbara he walked everywhere he went, driving only when he needed to carry something bulky or fragile. He acquired a great many acquaintances, because he had plenty of leisure time, spent much of it in public, and spoke to anyone who spoke to him. He made sure he spent two hours a day getting some form of outdoor exercise and two hours reading. But at the end of ten years in the city, Mallon knew that if he disappeared, there would be little notice. He was not a person who was living a life here. He was just very, very slowly passing through.

Diane Fleming’s office was in one of several low Spanish-style buildings on De la Guerra Street painted blinding white with big brass plaques beside their doors. She kept him waiting for five minutes, then rushed into the outer office and shook his hand, and held on to it. “Robert!” she said. “Come on in!” She was in her mid-thirties, and had the distinctive broad-faced blond look that half the women in Santa Barbara had. They had big legs and strong hands like small men, and their appeal was not femininity but a kind of frank robustness. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, but I was on a call. Sylvia should have told me sooner.” She kept his hand in hers as she led him into her office and sat beside him on a leather couch, then released it.

“It’s okay. I should have called for an appointment,” he said. “But I need your help with something.”

“What kind of something, and what kind of help?”

“I’ll let you decide. Have you read about the young woman they found dead in a field two days ago?”

She nodded, her face allowing an acknowledgment that was cautious, tentative. “I did see that in the paper.”

“I had pulled her out of the ocean a few hours earlier. I guess she tried again and succeeded. I went to the police and told them. They listened, then asked for a blood sample and fingerprints.”

“They think
you
killed her?”

“That’s not what the detective said, but I don’t think he would tell me if he did. It’s possible.”

She rolled her blue eyes. “Robert, I’m basically a tax attorney. You’re going to need a criminal lawyer right away. I’ll make some calls and see who we can get. Now go home, and I’ll call you later.”

He had somehow expected a longer conversation, and he had especially expected that she would spend some time reassuring him and telling him there was nothing to worry about before she called in a criminal lawyer. But obviously she agreed that there was something to worry about. He saw no reason to delay her telephone calls. He stood and walked to the door. “Thanks, Diane,” he said, and left. As he was walking through the reception area, he saw Sylvia pick up her phone. She said, “Sure, Diane, right away.”

He went for a long walk down State Street to pick a place to have lunch, but the idea was a failure. He had no appetite, just a restlessness that kept him walking. Mallon barely saw the streets as he walked, because the memory of the girl flooded his mind. He knew that the smooth, beautiful skin he had touched was now cold and lifeless, the voice silenced, but he could still see and hear her, and the knowledge that even that vestige would fade made him want to weep.

He tried to decide whether he had fallen in love with her. He had
not been naïve enough to allow himself to let go, to place his fate in her hands that way. He had been fairly certain that their day together had been as much of an aberration as what had caused it, a violent diversion from the normal trajectories of their lives. He had, at every moment, been prepared to relinquish her, to send her back to the world, where she would make a life with people her own age. But he had loved her. He had listened to her and watched her and touched her. She was a creature he had been glad he had preserved, somebody he was delighted with and wanted to live on and on, even if he never saw her again. Now that was over, beyond reach. Nobody else seemed to know what a precious thing had been wasted.

When he reached his house, Diane had already called and left a message on his answering machine. When he called her back, she said, “They’re not treating you as a suspect.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“It’s a long story. They also don’t really know who the girl was. The name she used in the motel didn’t match the name she gave when she rented the car she parked there. She left no other identification in the room, no purse, no keys. There were none in the field where she was found, either. You didn’t happen to see any on her, did you?”

“No,” he said. “And I didn’t see any purse, either. There was nothing but what she had on.”

“Which was—?”

“Shorts, sneakers, a little top with thin straps.” He paused. “I remember seeing her standing there by the rocks. Then she just started walking toward the water and didn’t stop. It was kind of odd. She didn’t dive or swim or anything, just kept walking until the water was over her head and disappeared. I didn’t even notice about the shoes at first.”

“What about them?”

“She left them on,” he said. “I guess she had no reason to preserve her running shoes.”

“I suppose.”

He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “So I guess I don’t need a criminal lawyer after all. But thanks for taking care of this. I was really beginning to wonder.”

“Oh, no. You do need one, and I got the one I wanted. His name is Brian Logan, and he’s a very big defense attorney, based in L.A. He’s already on your case.”

“If there is no case, what’s he doing?”

“He’s making inquiries, showing the flag. He’s the one who got the police to tell him you’re not a suspect. He’s very expensive, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“It’s part of the strategy. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you don’t look like a multimillionaire, even by Santa Barbara standards. You buy a pair of shorts from some store on lower State and then wear them practically until your ass shows through. You look like maybe an unemployed construction worker.”

“That’s pretty much what I am.”

“I suppose it is, but that’s not what you want to be when the police are looking for a suspect. So I hired you a lawyer that only a rich guy can afford, with a name they know.”

“That gets me off the hook?”

“No, it prevents you from getting on. If they discover in the next day or two that she had help shooting herself, or find that she’s been raped, you’re the only one who admits having seen her. If they know who you are, they keep looking. And it’s not as unfair as it sounds. You wouldn’t believe how few middle-aged multimillionaires are out there murdering total strangers and then telling the police about it. So we not only make them aware that you’re not going to be easy, but also that you’re highly unlikely to be anything but innocent. He’s on his way here, and we’re meeting with him in my office at four.”

At a quarter to four, Mallon was sitting in Diane’s office, waiting.
Brian Logan did not arrive alone. When the door opened he was preceded by a small woman in a business suit and a white shirt that was cut a bit like a man’s but was soft silk. Her eyes were sharp and her movements quick and birdlike. Once she had entered, the next one in was a young man whose function seemed to be to carry a couple of huge leather cases and lean his body against doors so they would stay open for Brian Logan.

Logan entered last. When he stepped through the threshold, Mallon felt as though he had seen him before. After that instant, Mallon wasn’t sure whether he had seen him on television talking into a microphone outside some courthouse, or had seen him as one of the legal experts on some talk show about a big murder, or if he simply looked like the kind of lawyer who was on television. He seemed to be slightly younger than Mallon, and that gave Mallon a few seconds of discomfort, but he reminded himself that a forty-year-old was not a beginner, and the man’s appearance was probably calculated to please juries. He had dark brown hair that was short, but thick and shiny as a dog’s coat, and he wore a charcoal gray suit that looked like the outfits that major politicians wore on international visits, only with a better, more subdued tie. His shave was fresh, his nails were manicured, and the impression he gave was of a cleanliness like some clerics had, which gave him an aura of sanctity. He smiled at Diane, said “Thanks,” and she realized he meant he wanted her to leave. She nodded to Mallon and retreated.

He glanced in the direction of Robert Mallon for only a heartbeat, and then seemed not to need to look more closely. His attention was directed to some papers his female assistant had snatched out of one of the leather cases and handed to him. “Good afternoon,” he said in Mallon’s direction, his eyes still on the papers.

“Pleased to meet you,” Mallon said, and stepped forward to shake Logan’s hand.

Logan endured the ceremony, then said, “Sit down,” and indicated
the chair Mallon had just vacated. “You went to the police voluntarily and made this statement?”

“Yes, I went voluntarily.” He craned his neck to see the paper. “I assume that’s the statement I made.”

Logan suddenly focused on him. “Why did you do it?”

“It occurred to me that I was probably the only one in Santa Barbara who knew anything about what had happened, maybe the only one who had even spoken to her.”

“So far, you are,” said Logan, but his statement seemed inattentive, absentminded. He was staring at the paper again. Mallon wasn’t sure whether he was comparing the statement to what Diane had told him or was just reading it for the first time.