Dead Aim (20 page)

“I would like to join you, I think. Thanks.”

“I do have to warn you that I can’t guarantee she’ll show up,” Lydia said. “They don’t always, and it’s not like being their parole officer, where they have to make up some kind of an answer when you ask them a question.”

“Do you have the address of the bar?” asked Mallon.

“Not on me. I thought it would be best if you’d just take a morning commuter flight down here tomorrow. There’s one that leaves around ten. I’ll pick you up at the airport, and we’ll go to the bar together.”

The woman was strikingly attractive, but not what Mallon would have called pretty. Her face looked triangular, the large dark eyes making the upper part seem very wide. She had a nose that was wide at the bridge and seemed to narrow, and below it a set of lips that he guessed had been treated to make them fuller, then a tiny pointed chin. Her eye shadow was too dark, the liner too thick and black, the lipstick too starkly outlined for daytime. The tight pants and the top that tied in the back, Mallon knew, were what was in store windows this month, but intended for teenagers, who were slightly younger and a bit skinnier. On her, they seemed to be a costume, something she was always thinking about, touching and readjusting. It made him think about them too.

They sat at a table near the windows that looked out on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Mallon wondered why they had not met at one of the bars a few blocks closer to the ocean so they could see it. There was enough light streaming in for her to see the photographs that Lydia had stolen from Catherine Broward’s apartment. The woman squinted at them, then pushed them toward Mallon. “Yeah,” she said. “Markie was the one I knew, really. The girl was only with him for a while. She’s dead, too?” Her perfectly outlined Cupid’s-bow lips pouted while she waited for an answer.

“That’s right,” said Lydia. “She killed herself.”

“Oh,” said the woman, tonelessly. “I only saw her a few times.” That seemed to be her explanation for her utter indifference. Then she said, “I remember I was working on the video for Alien Steam’s first CD at the time, so it would be … about two years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mallon. “Working on the video?” His confusion was sincere. All Mallon could tell was that she was dropping an impressive name. “Are you a musician?”

Lydia said, “Miss Gracely danced on that video. I’ve seen it. She was the principal dancer, really.” Lydia turned to her. “Did you meet them at a party?”

She nodded, picked up her glass, and brought it toward her mouth, then pantomimed her surprise that it was empty. Mallon waved to the bartender. “Three more, please.” He returned his attention to her. “I know the police probably drove you crazy with questions about all this at the time, but can you tell us anything about the party? Where was it?”

“It started at the ballroom of the Millefleurs Hotel. It was for the release of Juan-do Ward’s last CD—he was already dead—and the company invited, like, the whole industry. I got a lot of work from that party. Later it overflowed and kind of oozed from one place to another. There were a couple of suites in the hotel, and some people went to the company offices, and there was a kind of after-party at a club. Alien Steam had a limo, and we traveled from place to place.”
She chuckled at the memory of it. “Nobody was any good at opening champagne bottles, so it kept shooting all over the windows and the seats and us.”

Mallon nodded in a sympathy that he did not feel. She was a person with obvious attractions, but her evaluation of them seemed to be too high: they did not dazzle him and make him unable to form unflattering thoughts. She said, “I remember first noticing Markie at the hospitality suite. He was really something. Those eyes, the expression on his face.” She gave a little shiver of appreciation, then seemed to return to the present, where he was dead and could be of no use. The look immediately changed to boredom. Then she saw her next drink arrive, and she brightened. “He was at the bar. I went over to him, and asked if he would get the bartender to make me a Cosmopolitan. I was with a couple of the guys from Done Deal right then—Fred Howard and Mickey Dill—but I just had to get a closer look at him. He hit on me. He asked my name, and phone number. I gave, but then there’s this girl.”

Lydia pointed at the picture of Catherine on the table. “This girl?”

Del Gracely nodded. “She had been in the bathroom. When she got back, I kept right on flirting with him, because it never occurred to me that he could be with her. He was the most beautiful man. She was … she had kind of stringy brown hair and a sort of ordinary face. She had kind of an okay body, but come on. That room was full of women who made her look … Well, I thought he must be in the business, and she was his agent, or an executive or something. She had good clothes—very expensive—but she wasn’t good-looking enough to be there unless she was something like that.”

“Did he introduce you to her?” asked Lydia.

“Sure. He was one of those guys who never slips up, never forgets anybody’s name, always looks at every woman in the room as though she’s the special one and he just came there on the off chance that he might run into her. He said, ‘This is Cathy,’ then ‘This is Del Gracely.’ I gave her my best smile and everything, because I figured that she
must be somebody, a behind-the-scenes person. But she wasn’t.” Her mind seemed to shift. “About that time was when Irwin Rogow noticed me. I saw he was looking, so I went over to talk to him. The party began to move again, so we did too.”

“But you saw Mark Romano again?” asked Lydia.

“Lots of times. Maybe once or twice a month until he died.”

“What about Catherine Broward?”

She seemed taken aback. “Oh, I thought you meant alone. Her, I saw only once more. I was at a club. I was leaving with a bunch of people because there was going to be a party at Wilfred Fillmore’s house in Malibu.”

Mallon knew who that was. He was a basketball player who seemed to spend his off-seasons getting arrested for felonies, then having the charges dropped or reduced to minor infractions.

“Mark was in the parking lot and she was with him. I had gotten the impression that they had broken up, but I think I got it from him, so it probably wasn’t true yet. They were having a fight.” She stopped, looked out the window, and sipped her drink.

Mallon’s muscles tensed as he waited for the woman to put down the glass and say more, but she seemed to think that she had already told them the whole story, that the few words she had said would evoke for Mallon and Lydia exactly what she had seen and heard. She placed the glass in front of her and looked at them expectantly.

Lydia leaned forward. “Can you remember anything at all about the fight—what was said?”

She seemed surprised. “Oh, sure. She was trying to move close to him and talk quietly, but he pushed her away, so her voice got loud, and it wasn’t hard to hear. She said he’d taken some money of hers, and that it was okay, but he should come home. He brushed her off, and got into his car. It was embarrassing him, because the valet had just brought it up, and we were all waiting for our cars. She reached in the window and snatched the key out. He got out of the car and tried to get her to hand the keys back, but she wouldn’t do it. Meanwhile,
we’re all standing around watching this, while the valets went to pull our cars up so we can go to the party. People started making funny comments and laughing. These are guys who are cool and important, people Markie would have wanted to impress. And the girls are … well, guys like that don’t hang with second-rate girls. Everybody’s laughing, and Cathy is making him look stupid. He reaches for the keys, and she twists around and keeps them out of his reach. He grabs her wrist, but she’s already moved them to the other hand. She says they need to talk, and she won’t let him go. He says, Give me the keys, Cathy. She says, It’s not even your car. I bought it. He’s intensely aware that this little scene is ruining him. He twists the wrist around behind her back and reaches for the one with the keys. Instead of letting it happen, she tosses them into the sewer by the curb.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much,” she said. “He was still holding her arm, so he jerked her around with it. Then he hit her, right in the mouth. Twice, real quick, and let her go. She dropped on the ground. That was when I could see her arm was actually broken, because it was kind of hanging limp, and looked wrong. She tried to talk, and her mouth was all bloody, and I could see these two front teeth right here were out.”

Mallon winced. He could see her in his mind, intuit the emotional pain she must have been feeling, the sheer amazement that someone she loved would hurt her that way. “What happened then?”

“By then our cars were there.” She shrugged.

A few minutes later, Mallon and Lydia were on the street making their way to the parking lot where Lydia had left her car. Mallon said, “Did you know about this before?”

“I had some suspicions,” said Lydia. “The autopsy report in Santa Barbara said that two of her upper incisors were dental implants. In a girl her age, that usually says car accident, but there was nothing conclusive about that. The arm didn’t show on the autopsy, so if it really was injured it was probably a dislocation, and after the doctor popped it back in there wasn’t anything.”

Mallon felt a wave of horror that threatened to turn into nausea. He tried to make his mind form another image to replace Catherine’s agony. “How did you come up with Del Gracely?”

“Angie interviewed her in the homicide thing.”

“Did you really see the rock video she was on? Should I know her face?”

“I saw several she was on. She’s probably twenty-five years old and she’s already past it without having gotten anywhere. There’s an endless supply of girls who gyrate around behind some group. You have to listen for clues. The one she was talking about—Alien Steam’s first CD—made them rich. Not her. It was their first CD, before they were anything. She was on one for Done Deal, a couple other name groups. She’s not exactly a show-business legend. She goes to parties. She hooks up with various guys for various periods. Including Markie Romano. The reason she got interviewed in his murder was because she was in some of his nonmusical videos.”

“After she saw what he did to Catherine?” Mallon sat in the passenger seat of Lydia’s car.

Lydia got in and started the engine. “Before, or after, I’m not sure which. Probably she isn’t either.” She drove up Abbot Kinney to Washington Boulevard, then turned right onto Lincoln.

They drove in silence, moving south. Finally, Mallon said, “Do you think that was why Catherine went to the self-defense camp—because she was afraid Romano would hurt her again?”

Lydia hesitated for a moment, overcame her reluctance, then spoke carefully. “I think we’ve been looking at this wrong from the beginning. We’ve been acting on the strength of things we thought we knew before we started. Everything we saw or heard, we just used to revise the story we started with. We knew Catherine was bent on killing herself. Her boyfriend was dead? Then she must have been depressed because her boyfriend died tragically while she was waiting for him to come home. Oh, she was out of town at some resort north of Ojai at the time? Then maybe she left L.A. and went there because
she knew he was going to get it soon, and she was scared. The resort isn’t a resort, but a self-defense boot camp? Then she really must have been scared, and trying to learn enough to protect him. He had already dumped her, beaten her up, and thrown her out on her ass? Then she was trying to learn to protect herself from him, or guys like him. You have an excuse for that. I don’t. I still do this for a living.”

“An excuse for what?”

“For starting out with a story that had to be true because that’s the way things usually happen, and just fitting everything new that we hear into it. I think we need to throw out the old story and start with a new one.”

“We’ve been trying to figure out why Catherine got into a depression and committed suicide,” said Mallon. “I didn’t hear anything today that wasn’t a reason for her to be depressed.”

“Yeah,” said Lydia, “but the story doesn’t fit together. At least not the way we’ve been looking at it.”

“Of course there are contradictions,” said Mallon. “I started out wanting it to be neat and logical. But nobody’s life is neat and logical. I know the sister told us she was still madly in love with this guy, and everybody else agrees that they’d already broken up, but—”

“Not just broken up. He punched her front teeth out.”

“But it wouldn’t be unprecedented for her to hate and fear a guy like that and still love him too, would it? Or maybe just be heartbroken that he had turned out not to be what she’d thought?”

Lydia was silent.

Mallon added, “And it wouldn’t be odd not to tell her older sister all about it, but instead to let her keep believing that everything had still been beautiful. After all, the truth was ugly and humiliating. And for what? Why would her sister need to know all the tawdry details?” He paused. “And it’s even possible that the sister knew everything, but had no desire to tell two strangers all about it.” He waited, then seemed to run his own arguments through his mind again but be dissatisfied. “Do you have another way to look at it?”