Dead Aim (14 page)

“I guess I do,” said Lydia. “Look, I’ve known you forever, Bobby. I understood from the beginning that you’re not just a rich guy who’s got morbid curiosity about some young girl. You cared about her a lot. Probably in about a month, she could have gotten you to marry her if she’d wanted. I’m just reminding you that no matter what we find out, we already know there wasn’t a happy ending.” She squinted her eyes for a moment, then said wearily, “But I suppose you still want to do it.”

Mallon nodded. “I still want to do it.”

“Well, there are things we can still look into. I might be able to find out more about these guys Romano knew who were involved in drugs.”

“That’s about him. It doesn’t tell us anything about Catherine,” Mallon said. “I need to know what she was thinking.”

Lydia looked up at him and nodded. At some point, Lydia supposed, she was going to have to fire her client.

“Maybe I’ll check with Detective Fowler in Santa Barbara and see if there’s anything new he can tell me,” she said. “They’ve had a chance to look around in Catherine’s apartment here in L.A., and maybe something turned up there. The apartment has been locked up, but as soon as her sister gets here, that’s over. Unless there’s some indication that it’s not a suicide after all, they won’t hold anything. Sarah will probably retrieve a few family mementos, dump the rest, and take her sister home to bury her.” She stood up. “Well, I’m tired. I’ll get started on all of that in the morning, and I’ll give you a call before noon. In the meantime, don’t be too hard on yourself. The more we learn, the clearer it is that this had nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do. You couldn’t stop it, because you didn’t cause it.”

He studied her. “You don’t just mean Catherine’s death, do you?”

“I mean both of them.” She suddenly leaned close to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek, then went to the door and let herself out.

As she drove away from the hotel, she glanced at the address she had retrieved from her computer earlier in the day, and headed east on Sunset toward Hollywood. Many times in the past twenty years she had been down to Los Angeles looking for clients who had decided to lose themselves. She knew the area between Franklin and Santa Monica Boulevard well, and when she had seen the address in the purse the day after Catherine’s death, she had thought she could even place the building in her memory. She had been right. It was not one of the old apartment buildings with decorative 1920s facades that had been refurbished in the past few years. It was a nearly new four-story stucco rectangle with rows of identical balconies and rows of identical aluminum windows that did not fit the neighborhood, a structure that managed to be ugly in spite of its simplicity. It was a bit after midnight when she came to the door of Catherine Broward’s apartment. She had considered doing this later, when the neighbors would be in their deepest sleep, but she had decided that coming later raised the stakes too high. If someone heard her at midnight, they would hear other sounds too, sounds coming from other parts of the building and sounds from the street. At twelve, she was probably a resident coming home from a party. At three, she was a burglar.

Lydia was glad to see that the locks on the doors along the corridor were a cheap, standard five-tumbler model that she was comfortable opening. She rechecked the apartment number, removed the pick and tension wrench from the lining of her purse, and began to work the lock. It took only a few seconds, and she turned the knob and entered.

She closed the door quietly, locked it, and stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light from the sliding glass doors on the balcony and listening for sounds that would indicate that someone had heard her. When she was ready she went to the glass doors and closed the drapes, then turned on her small flashlight and let its narrow beam show her the general structure of the place. She was in a compact living room, with an off-white couch and matching chair probably bought from Ikea. Beyond this room was an alcove that served as a
kitchen, furnished with a table and four chairs. She let the light play on the counter surfaces for a moment, then opened the refrigerator to confirm her theory: it was empty. Either Sarah had already gotten here and thrown out everything, or Catherine had decided to quit the world without leaving a mess behind.

She looked in a drawer to see which it was, and found silverware and kitchen knives, all clean and neatly arranged in segmented trays: Catherine. Sarah would have packed those. She felt forebodings of failure—messy people and ones who did not know they were about to die were more accommodating than ones who planned suicide. They left things around that would answer questions. But she also felt a kind of guilty relief, since she would be able to tell Bobby Mallon that she had risked a burglary charge to get in, and then found nothing. She moved into the single bedroom.

The bed was a platform with a futon covered by sheets and a quilt in bright colors that she guessed had probably come from Ikea too. There were a small dresser and a simple desk with four drawers. She moved immediately to the desk and opened them, knowing before she did that she was simply looking in all the obligatory places. The drawers were three inches deep, not big enough to hold a large collection of old papers. The top one held pens and pencils and paper clips, the second stationery. The rest were empty.

It was like a man’s apartment—a dull man, at that. Catherine Broward had been a woman who traveled light. Or at least, she had ended as that kind of woman. Lydia suspected that no woman began that way. Happy women accumulated troves of things—furniture, cosmetics, clothes, useless trinkets, pictures, china, souvenirs. They were always adjusting their surroundings to suit them ever more closely. Even when they lived in apartments like this one, the kind of disposable architecture that any sensible person would know was doomed in the next earthquake, even when they were nomads who moved every year, they collected. She and all of the women she knew had a special energy for this incessant and pointless settling.

That was what was missing from Catherine Broward, that energy. Whatever it was that had really happened to her, it had left her depleted. And Lydia suspected that as she had moved from city to city, she had jettisoned things. Probably the first she would have thrown out were the very things Lydia could have used: receipts, canceled checks, letters.

Lydia opened the dresser drawers, but found nothing except the usual clothes, folded as though for display. She looked in the closet. The clothes were all hung with the same care, the shoes lined up underneath. On the shelf above, her light settled on some shoeboxes, so she reached for one. It did not feel as though it contained shoes, so she brought it down and opened it. The box was filled with bank statements. She looked at the front one, then at the one in the back, and saw that Catherine’s filing system must have been determined by the size of her shoeboxes. She had kept her statements as long as they still fit, which was about three years. Lydia looked in the next box, which was full of canceled checks.

Lydia held the light in her mouth and fingered back through the checks to last August, when Mark Romano had died. But Catherine had been gone a couple of months before, so Lydia pulled out July, June, and May too. She put the stack of checks into her purse, then reached up for the third box. It was full of photographs. The oldest were from Catherine’s childhood. The later ones had more clarity and the color got better and better because of the improvements in technology. There were a few of her as a teenager clowning with friends, then a prom picture, and a few of Catherine as a college student with some different friends. Lydia had no trouble identifying Catherine’s sister.

When Lydia reached Mark Romano’s era, she recognized him from the dim videotape. She studied the pictures to get a clearer look at his face. Sarah’s description had barely done him justice. For the first time during this case, Lydia understood what had happened to Catherine Broward. A man that handsome would be nearly impossible to resist.
A woman with any imagination at all would be able to think up enough excuses for him to keep herself fooled for years. She sighed. A boyfriend who was too handsome was not a problem Lydia Jean Marks was going to have in this life. If this one was what they were like, maybe it was just as well.

She leafed through more photographs, and began to see more pictures of Romano and Catherine together: the dead couple at play on a beach, in a park, at a party. Instinctively—maybe because she knew a bit about him, and maybe because she identified with any woman who had been treated that way—she found herself hating Mark. She liked Catherine. In the pictures she had a good-natured face rather than a beautiful one, and the tapes had shown a body that was nice, but not spectacular. She looked like a good companion, a person who could tell a funny story.

As Lydia looked at the pictures, she noticed that she was feeling sleepy. If she had known she would be doing this, she would not have had wine with dinner at the hotel. When Mark’s time was up, the pictures ended. There were none that seemed to have been taken after that. She selected the photographs she wanted and put the rest back.

She kept searching the apartment patiently and carefully, but increased her pace. When she ran out of shoeboxes she stood on a chair to be sure she had found everything on the upper shelf. She looked under the frame of the futon, in the cupboards of the little kitchen. All she found confirmed the sparse and frugal tone of the place: a set of four plates, a set of four glasses, a set of four coffee cups and saucers. There were no more papers.

Lydia took a final look around her with her flashlight, wishing she had brought Bobby Mallon with her to see this place. Maybe he would have understood the girl better. Catherine had prepared everything she was leaving behind, absolutely certain that the next visitors would arrive after she was dead. By the time Bobby Mallon had seen her, there was nothing he could have done that would have changed anything.

Lydia used her flashlight to take a last look in her purse, ticking off the things she had kept: a good, clear photograph of Mark Romano and a good one of Catherine Broward, both from sometime late in their relationship; one of them together taken at a beach; the most recent bank statement from the shoebox; a stack of checks. She told herself that taking these things didn’t matter. The negatives for the pictures were still in the box in envelopes, the bank statement could be duplicated, and the checks were a year old. Taking them was a felony, but so was being here at all. There was no use for them except to somebody who was examining Catherine Broward’s death in detail, and nobody seemed to think there was anything left to know except Robert Mallon.

“You were in her apartment?” Mallon was incredulous. “You broke in?”

Lydia said, “Breaking in sounds a lot more interesting than what I did. Nothing is broken. Nobody will notice I was there, and what I took is of no value to anyone but us.”

Mallon watched as Lydia opened the plain manila envelope she carried, and began placing things on the table near the window that overlooked the bungalow’s little garden. “Here. Take a look,” she said.

Mallon studied the photographs. The two with Catherine Broward in them were painful to look at. This was a version of the sensation he had sometimes felt when he saw pictures of happy Europeans taken just before World War II. In the midst of this happiness, did they have any tiny feeling that something was coming, any fear that something about this day wasn’t quite right?

He took his eyes off Catherine Broward and studied the boyfriend. The photograph was clearer and brighter than the videotape had been. Romano had been tall, lean, and well-formed, his face almost too good, too big-eyed and perfect, so his looks almost crossed the line and became feminine. He had the sort of appearance that teenaged
girls liked—the look of a boy, really, because boys weren’t as frightening as men.

There was a bank statement. Mallon looked at the address of the branch in West Los Angeles and saw that the date was only a month ago. There were about fifteen checks written for sums that invited him to identify them. Eleven hundred near the end of the month was her rent, because it was even. Thirteen hundred eighty-two and forty-nine cents on the third was a credit card bill that had arrived on the first. One twenty-seven thirteen was probably electricity. It couldn’t have been gas because it was summer and she would have used no heat. His eyes stopped at the balance, a bit over one hundred and twelve thousand dollars. There had been one deposit: twenty thousand even on the first of the month.

Lydia seemed to have read his expression. “The balance?”

“That and the only deposit.”

“The deposit is the same every month. I think it’s a trust fund. She and her sister probably each got twenty thousand a month. I could see from the apartment that she didn’t spend much, so the balance tended to grow on her. Now and then she would write a check to move some to a savings account. If she moved it from there, I didn’t see the record. She doesn’t seem to have been an investor: she didn’t have much interest in the distant future.”