Dead Aim (8 page)

“How do you want to begin?”

“Where you did. Take me to the spot where you pulled her out of the water.”

“All right,” said Mallon. “When?”

“Now,” she said. “Give me a few minutes to change. While I’m doing it, you can put on the clothes you wore that day. It will help me put together a picture of what happened.”

Fifteen minutes later, she emerged from the spare bedroom dressed in a pair of shorts and a loose Hawaiian shirt with her long brown hair unraveled from its bun and tied back in a ponytail. Mallon drove her along the ocean to the stairway that led down to the beach.

As they walked, Lydia asked Mallon questions about his daily activities, about local real estate and weather patterns. She never showed a reaction to any of the answers except comprehension. She simply waited for a sign from Mallon that they had walked far enough.

Finally, Mallon stopped, looked at the cliffs to his right, the big rocks at their base, then up at the crest where the tops of a couple of eucalyptus trees were visible, and said, “This is it.” He pointed at the spot in the ocean where she had gone in.

Lydia looked at the rocks along the upper part of the beach under the cliffs. “When she arrived, exactly where were you? Do you remember?”

Mallon started to point, but Lydia said, “Go there.”

Mallon sat among the rocks, where he had been when he had first noticed he was not alone anymore. He watched Lydia walk to the spot where the cliff curved and came out near the water and the beach was only a few feet wide at high tide. She stopped at the spot where the girl had stood that day, staring out at the sea. Lydia turned to Mallon. Mallon nodded: that was where she had been.

“I’m not surprised that she didn’t see you.” Lydia took a slow, deliberate
step toward the ocean, then another, a bit faster, and maintained a steady pace down to the hard, wet sand at the surf line. Then she stopped. She looked back at the beach above her, then began to walk in her own footprints, back toward the little point. Mallon stood up and followed her at a distance.

She was stepping slowly, dragging one foot sideways across the sand. Now and then she would go out of her path to the nearest part of the cliff face to delve in the sand around the base of a rock of a certain size, then return to the path she’d been making. It led her back the way they had come. After about fifty feet, she turned to look again at the spot where she’d left Mallon, and saw Mallon coming after her. It didn’t seem to strike her as important. She had only wanted to know where Mallon had been sitting, and she kept looking back at the spot until she was around the point. Then, instead of stopping, she went to work even harder. This time she picked up a long piece of driftwood, an inch-thick branch of some drowned tree, and began to make grooves in a sweeping motion as she walked. After ten minutes, she stopped, dropped the piece of wood, and dug with her hands. She lifted something and set it aside on the sand.

Mallon came closer. “It’s her purse, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” She was still digging, now lifting each handful of sand and sifting it through her fingers instead of merely pushing it out of the way.

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “She didn’t have money or I.D. when you saw her, or any keys. She’d had them earlier, so she left them someplace. This is what they sometimes do.”

“You have the purse. What are you looking for now?”

“Whatever she had that she didn’t put in the purse.”

She sifted some more sand, and then held out her hand. In the palm was a simple gold ring with designs etched on it. She looked at the place where she had been digging, then seemed to make a decision. She stood, taking the ring between her thumb and forefinger and
looking inside it. “It’s not a wedding ring. It’s one of those rings men give a girlfriend.”

Mallon said, “How could you know she buried these things?”

Lydia glanced at him impatiently, then looked back at the ring. “I’ve been hired a few times over the years to find out if suicides were really suicides. It’s just one of the things they do sometimes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It feels right to do it, so they do. By the time it happens, they’re way past pleasing anybody else, or explaining themselves. Maybe they’re not sure whether they want to destroy these things or just put them where they’ll turn up someday and be wondered about.” She thought for a moment. “And you can stop feeling bad, thinking that you said the wrong thing or didn’t think of something good enough to convince her to stay alive. She was already gone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“After you pulled her out, she didn’t come back looking for these.” She removed the wallet from the purse and thumbed through the credit cards and memberships and receipts, then opened the zipper on the cash compartment. Mallon could see a few twenty-dollar bills and hear a clink of change. She unzipped a compartment built into the silky fabric inside the purse. There was a sheaf of hundreds. She zipped it up again. “We’ll have to stop at the police station on the way to your house.”

“Maybe you ought to drop me off first,” said Mallon. “For the moment, the cops here seem to have accepted the idea that I might not be a murderer, but the case isn’t closed.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll make it clear you didn’t move this from your house or something. But this is the kind of evidence you have to get to them right away.”

As she walked along the beach toward the steps, she took out each item in the purse, one at a time, examined it closely, then put it back. When she reached the driver’s license, she held it out to Mallon.

Mallon reached for it, but she said, “You know better than that. Don’t touch it, just look. I want to be sure it’s her.”

Mallon stared at the photograph, scanned the name, the birth date and description. “Catherine Broward,” he said. “Cathy Broward. No, I think she wasn’t a Cathy. Catherine.”

“You didn’t see her on her best day,” she reminded him. “People who are in that kind of depression talk slowly and think slowly. And she had been unconscious. You’d have to hunt down some people who knew her before, if you wanted to know what she was like.”

“I need you to help me do that,” said Mallon. “I want to know.”

She looked at him steadily. “What do you think it will tell you?”

“Why she was so sure she had to be dead right away. You can see from the picture that she was an attractive young woman. She looked healthy, and she said she was, too. She had some money—maybe not a lot, I don’t know—but there was enough in her purse so she wasn’t in danger of starving to death.” He realized that he wasn’t saying anything that mattered, and that made him try harder. “It was a calm, cool, hazy day. The ocean was glassy, the air was soothing. It was beautiful. Standing there and looking around her should have been enough.”

Lydia cocked her head but said nothing.

“You think I sound like an idiot.” It was an observation, not an accusation.

She said, “I think you sound like somebody who wants to know things that you’re not going to learn by investigating a stranger who killed herself.” She paused. “I know that sounds a little harsh. But I can tell you from bitter personal experience that having sex with somebody is not the same as knowing them. And unless she left a note that we haven’t found yet, we’re not likely to know her thoughts on any subject, least of all you.”

“I didn’t say this was about her relationship with me.”

“What else, Bobby? What else could it be?”

After a few more steps he said, “I know I have no excuse for this, but I cared about her. I wanted to be with her for a longer time. If that
turned out not to be something she wanted too, I wanted her to go off and enjoy the rest of her life. From a distance, the suicide looks unsurprising, even inevitable: she tried once, got stopped, then finished the job. But it wasn’t, and only I know it. It was shocking: it didn’t fit. Things like this—events that changed everything and just seemed to come from nowhere—have happened in my life before. This is the first time one happened after I had the time and money to try to find out what it meant. Maybe I want to know what I can’t. Even if I can’t, it’s worth the effort because the death of a person you shared something with is important. Maybe all that’s left to do for her is to care about why it happened.”

Lydia kept walking for an interval while she considered this. Then she said, “It is in the interest of anybody in any business to convince you that spending your money will buy you important things, like wisdom or contentment, so I shouldn’t say this. But I’ve spent a lot more time than you have looking closely into the secrets of strangers, including dead ones. I don’t think that I’ve learned much that’s made me any happier.”

“I’m not sure that happier is what I’m trying to be. I want to know.”

“But what do you—” She seemed to have a sudden thought, a suspicion. “This is your first, right? You didn’t have a relative, maybe a friend, who did this when you were younger?”

Mallon hesitated, then said, “Yes. I did. It was my older sister. Her name was Nancy. She killed herself when she was away at college. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ll admit that the similarities haven’t escaped me: they were both young and apparently healthy, and seemed to have no reason for it. But I don’t think that what I’m trying to do is wrong or irrational. I’m not asking you to look into something that happened over thirty years ago. I just want to know what happened three days ago.”

Lydia looked up at him as they walked. “This looks like a fairly simple, straightforward investigation, Bobby. You and I used to do harder ones than this in a day. We’ve already got what looks like a real
name and address. If we wait a week, the police will probably be able to tell us most of what we’d find out,” she said. “For me, it’s easy money. If you want to pay it, I won’t turn it down.”

“Thank you,” said Mallon. He let those words close the topic. He suspected that the fact that he and Catherine had been in bed together made it all seem simple to Lydia: Mallon’s interest during her life was romantic and his interest in her death is sentimental. He did not want to end the inquiry before it had begun simply because it looked like something Lydia found familiar. He was haunted by the feeling that he had faltered somehow and lost the one precious opportunity to save her. But as he walked, he noticed unexpected, contrary thoughts: maybe she had foolishly taken an action he had, at various times in his life, rejected. Or maybe she had gone ahead to show him the way.

When they had gone to the police station and surrendered the purse and the ring to Fowler, Lydia said, “Now we’d better go see your defense lawyer and let him know what’s up.”

“He’s in L.A.,” said Mallon. “My regular attorney—the one who handles my business stuff—hired a criminal lawyer, just in case the police were serious.”

“I wouldn’t be too quick to assume they’re not. Who is he?”

“His name is Brian Logan.”

“Wow,” said Lydia. “Very impressive.”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “We’re not buddies. The kind of people who can hire him don’t need bail bonds much.” She looked at him with sudden disapproval. “I keep forgetting you’re that kind of people now. But he’s known. Dropping his name might impress the other guys on death row when you get there. For now, let’s just keep it simple and mention this to your local guy. Who is he?”

Mallon took Lydia to meet Diane Fleming. While Mallon explained to Diane what he and Lydia had found, the two women stood in Diane’s office and eyed each other from behind wary smiles. Mallon suspected that neither had yet decided whether the other was
someone to be trusted, ignored, or opposed. But when Mallon had finished, it was to Lydia that Diane spoke.

“I’m so glad you took the time to keep me informed. At first he seemed to be under the impression that this wasn’t quite serious. He didn’t even tell me about it until after he’d talked to the police.”

“I know,” said Lydia, and shook her head in frustration. “I’ve known him for years, and he’s always been too dumb to get scared when it would still do him some good.”

“For years? How did you meet him?”

Lydia glanced at Mallon. “Didn’t he tell you? He and I worked together for three or four years. We were parole officers. Whenever somebody didn’t show up for his appointment, Mallon and I would go looking for him. That’s probably why we both burned out at about the same time.”

Diane’s eyes widened. “You did?” She turned to Mallon in amazement. “I never knew you were a police officer.”

Mallon shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“I thought you were a land developer,” she said accusingly.

Lydia jumped in. “That was a long time ago too. From what I understand, he hasn’t done one useful thing since I last laid eyes on him.”

“That’s not exactly the only possible view of the subject,” Mallon told Diane.

“I thought you’d try to deny it,” Diane said, then turned her attention to Lydia again. “But you became a private detective. How interesting.”

“It’s really just a sideline, now,” said Lydia. “Years ago I became a partner in a bail bond business, and it’s grown. Most of my time is taken up tracing deadbeats who don’t show up for their trial dates. I still take a few outside clients now and then, but only cases I can do in my sleep. There’s nobody in the world better at surveillance than a middle-aged woman. We’re invisible.”

“I know the feeling very well,” said Diane, glancing at Mallon with exaggerated coolness.

By the time Mallon and Lydia left, the two women seemed to have formed an alliance that transcended him, and showed signs of going beyond his problems. They had exchanged business cards, implied that they would refer prospective clients to each other, and promised that they would talk often. As Mallon walked with Lydia to the car he said, “What was that all about?”

Lydia shrugged. “We hate each other, and we’re making the best of a bad thing.”