Dead Aim (5 page)

M
allon drove to the police station on Figueroa Street, climbed the steps into the small foyer, and waited at the front counter for a few minutes before he got a chance to tell the woman behind it what he had come for. She asked him to sit on a bench of blond wood that matched the counter, then made a telephone call. After a few more minutes, a tall policeman with a muscular frame and curly black hair who was wearing a tan summer-weight sport coat and blue jeans came out of a door at the side of the counter. He looked around, saw that Mallon was the only one waiting, then stepped up and shook his hand. “I’m Detective Fowler,” he said. “I can take your report.”

He led Mallon around the counter and through another door, then into a large office with several desks in it. He set a straight-backed chair in front of one of the desks, then sat down behind the desk and placed a pen and a yellow pad in front of him. “Now, Mr. Mallon. Can you tell me how you knew the deceased?”

“I didn’t,” said Mallon. “I don’t even know her name. I pulled her out of the ocean the other afternoon. She had tried to drown herself.”

Detective Fowler squinted at him as though he were having difficulty hearing what Mallon had said. Mallon went on. “I thought I
should let you know about it.” He paused. “I’m not sure what good it does now, but it didn’t seem as though I could not tell you.”

Fowler nodded.“How did it happen?”

Mallon told him the story. He did not leave out the way it had felt to try to maneuver the young woman away from the ocean, to manipulate her into letting him take her to the hospital, and then to fail.

Fowler listened patiently, staring into his face as he talked, and interrupting only to ask, “What time was this?” or “Why did she change her mind?” His questions seemed intended to be polite, to make it easier for Mallon to talk, but Mallon knew they were more than that.

When he told Fowler about returning from the restaurant and finding an empty house, Mallon said, “I thought about calling the police that night, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that she had gotten through it, and now she would be somewhere getting a good night’s sleep. Maybe after that she would feel up to facing things. I thought that having the police show up to question her would make things seem worse to her.” Mallon sighed. “I guess I was just trying to think up reasons why it was best to do nothing. I should have reported it.”

Fowler shrugged. “Absolutely. Then I’d be the one who feels bad today.” He added, “I mean that. Getting somebody hospitalized without her consent on a 5150 isn’t that easy. All she’d have had to do was say the suicide attempt had never happened. You’re not a relative, or even an acquaintance. If she was acting composed enough to convince you that she’d be okay, she could have convinced everybody else, too.”

“I suppose,” said Mallon. “Well.” He leaned forward and began to stand, but Fowler held up his hand. He did it without urgency, but it was deliberate and authoritative.

“Do you mind?” asked Fowler. “I just need to take care of a few details, and then we’ll be through.”

“Okay,” said Mallon. He sat back down and waited.

“Just some questions I have to ask. After you saved her life, did she seem grateful, affectionate?”

Mallon shook his head. “No. Not really. She understood that I was
trying to help her—she thanked me—but at first it took just about all her patience to be polite about it.” He decided he had to move closer to the parts of the evening that were more difficult to discuss. “After her nap, when she was feeling better, she was affectionate.”

“She seemed to like and trust you. She walked all the way to your house and went to bed. Did you have sexual intercourse?”

Mallon was shocked, appalled at the suddenness. “No,” he said firmly, then caught himself. He couldn’t lie to the police. “Not right away. It was after her nap. We each had a shower, and we ended up in the bath together. It wasn’t anything I intended. It was her idea, and she was very insistent.” The intensity of his own reaction suddenly struck him as suspicious. He began to identify the reasons aloud, so he wouldn’t sound defensive. “She was attractive, but she seemed to me to be around twenty-five, and I’m forty-eight. I thought I must have struck her as ancient. Besides, I assumed she must be emotionally …” He searched for a word, and came up with “unhealthy. Weak.” He added, “But at the time, when we were talking about it, she seemed to be sane and in control of herself.”

Fowler nodded. “I understand. I just have to ask all these things, because somebody has to, and I’m the one it fell to. If something we’re supposed to get on the record came out later, and we hadn’t already covered it, that might make us both look bad. Let’s see. You said that at first she wasn’t affectionate or friendly. Did she resent you for saving her?”

Mallon reflected. “I’m not sure. Maybe a little.”

“Did you have to struggle with her, maybe to get her out of the drink, or make her go with you after?”

“No.”

Fowler looked at him with a furrowed brow, as though asking him for a favor. “Sometimes drowning people get a panic grip on you—climb right up on you and hold you under. You might have to hit them to keep them from dragging you under with them.”

“No,” said Mallon. “She was unconscious.”

“Even then,” said Fowler. “An unconscious girl is just a hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight. Sometimes you have to grab them any way you can.”

“I used a cross-chest pull, my arm over her left shoulder and under her right arm. She didn’t fight, and I didn’t have to do anything but swim. When I got her to the shallows, I took both her wrists and dragged her up on the sand. It didn’t hurt her, and all I was worried about was keeping her face above the surface. When I got her to the shore I gave her CPR, and she coughed up some water. She never said anything about pain, so I assume there was none.”

Fowler said, “Okay. Thanks very much for coming in and telling us about this, Mr. Mallon. It will help us clear this up. When a young woman like that dies, it’s just … mysterious.”

“You’re welcome,” said Mallon. He stood up to leave, but Fowler made a quiet
uh
sound, and Mallon turned his head and waited.

Fowler was looking at his notes, then at Mallon, then at his notes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll need to have you give the evidence guys your prints and a blood sample.”

“Why? The most my DNA would tell you was that we had sex, and I already told you that.”

“Standard procedure. We do it in any case like this. It’s mainly to eliminate you if something should come up later. If there’s a second set of prints on the weapon, you’ll want us to know right away they’re not yours. Likewise, blood and so on.”

Mallon was sure now that the detective had been lying to him from the beginning. He had been prodding Mallon with these questions because he suspected him of something: killing the girl, or maybe rape. “It doesn’t sound like standard procedure. Should I call my lawyer?”

Fowler’s jaw tightened, and he let out a breath in a speculative hiss. “That’s up to you. I’m certainly not going to go on record telling any citizen that he’s wasting his money to get an attorney. I will say that
you just spent over an hour telling me a long story voluntarily, and that I wasn’t planning to ask you any more questions.”

Fowler looked innocent, even mildly disappointed and insulted. But Mallon was aware that a cop conducting an interrogation had no legal responsibility to tell a suspect the truth. Mallon reminded himself that he had nothing to protect. If they wanted his fingerprints or his blood, they would get them eventually, and how could they incriminate him? He said, “Okay. I guess there’s no need to wait around for my lawyer.”

He followed Fowler into the hallway, and then through a door near the end of the hall. There was clearly something about the death of the girl that had not been in the papers. He chided himself for rediscovering the obvious. How could he have imagined that there would not be?

When Mallon left the police department he drove home, then admitted to himself that the only sensible thing he could do was to see his lawyer, Diane Fleming, to tell her what had happened. He turned on his front steps to go back toward his car, but then changed his mind, left it in the driveway, and instead walked down Anacapa Street toward her office. He had been sitting in the police station for hours, and he told himself he needed to walk and arrange his thoughts before he spoke with her. But after a block, he found that there was an unexpected aftereffect of failing to persuade the girl not to kill herself: it was forcing him to revisit parts of his own life.

Mallon knew much more about what might happen to him than he had told Fowler. The slow, methodical procedures of the police and the courts were very familiar to him. When he was eighteen, he had disappointed his parents and gone into the Air Force instead of going to college. After he had gotten out, he had returned to the still half-rural area outside San Jose where his family had lived since the
gold rush, and disappointed his parents again by going to the police academy to become a parole officer. He had worked in the San Jose department for four years before he’d reluctantly conceded to himself that his optimistic longing to take people who had made mistakes and repair their lives had not made him good at it. All his sincerity and hard work had accomplished was to make him feel like a failure, case by case. He’d felt that he was smothering himself in problems that he could not hope to solve. He’d handed in his badge and a short letter of resignation and had gone to work as a carpenter on a construction crew.

After a year of construction work and some intensive study, he had gotten a contractor’s license and hired his own crews and begun to build houses. On his father’s advice, since he had joined the Air Force he had been putting all of his savings into buying pieces of farmland. He had simply held it, paying the bank and the taxes by renting it to neighboring farmers who wanted more land to cultivate.

After his construction business had begun to prosper, he met a girl named Andrea at a party, took her out a few times, fell in love, and persuaded her to marry him. It was only two years later that his parents both died—first his father, and then a few months after that, his mother. He was terribly sad, but not particularly surprised. In a way, he had been expecting it, and when it came, it seemed almost overdue. It seemed to him that they had begun to die on the day when the call from Boston had come about his older sister, Nancy.

Nancy had been the smart one, the only one who’d ever played the piano that sat in the parlor of the family farmhouse, a beautiful, tall, strong girl with an open-mouthed, loud laugh and long, light brown hair that the sun always bleached a bit in the summer. She had gone off to college in Boston when he was twelve and, according to his parents, had done beautifully for the first three years. She was still doing just as well on the day when she had made her telephone call.

The day became such a part of his history that he had never seen
another month of March arrive since then without remembering. He had answered the telephone and been surprised, because long-distance calls were expensive, and scholarships didn’t pay for them. He remembered being a bit confused, because she seldom called, and this conversation didn’t seem to be about anything much. She had seemed disappointed when he’d told her that both of their parents were out, but she had filled the time by asking him what he’d been doing, how his grades were, and had even teased him a bit about girls. She had seemed reluctant to hang up, as though she were hoping their parents would arrive. He had offered to have them call her back later, but she had said, “No, never mind. I don’t think I’ll be around then. Just tell them I love them. I love you all.” Then they’d hung up. The next call from Boston had been from the head of the campus police. It had fallen to him to tell the family that she’d killed herself.

It had been the most important day in the life of Mallon’s family, the day when everything had changed. His parents had been different after that, in a slow decline that lasted until he was a married, self-employed, and successful contractor. And when that had been accomplished, they’d died.

Mallon went on, remodeled the old family house and moved his wife into it, and kept building his business. In time, the monetary value of the land he had bought became so compelling that he needed to devote some attention to finding something to do with it. His wife, Andrea, had always been ashamed that he was essentially a tradesman who worked with his crew and came home in blue jeans soaked in sweat and covered with sawdust. She had, since their wedding day, referred to her husband as a “developer,” but had lately refined her story to promote him to a man who “owned land,” and so she welcomed any sign that he was actually interested in the property, and not in getting his hands dirty.

He began to build houses on the farmland. He was one of the many beneficiaries of the steady population growth of northern California,
and soon he began to act very much like the man Andrea had been saying he was. Then, ten years ago, as their growing prosperity was becoming noticeable, she had decided that it was time to leave.