Dead Aim (9 page)

L
ydia Marks sent Mallon out to do some errands and buy them some dinner, then called her office and listened to the messages on the telephone voice-mail system, mentally sorting them. She was busy for the moment with the matter of Catherine Broward, and in any event had no interest in taking a lost-husband case in Denver, or getting involved in a child-custody dispute in Phoenix.

She took down the numbers, but she was listening for something that would require her immediate attention. If she’d had to guess what that might be, it would have been Donald Finnan suddenly going to the safe-deposit box at the Bank of America branch near his house in San Jose. That was where he kept his passport, and probably the valuables he would take with him if he decided to skip and become a fugitive. Donald Finnan was awaiting trial on a manslaughter charge, and he was the type who might try to leave the country. But Donald Finnan seemed to have stayed put, and none of the messages had any urgency. When the last of them had played, she erased them all, set up her laptop computer on Mallon’s dining room table, and connected it to the telephone jack.

Next she sat at the table and looked at the piece of paper on which
she had scribbled what she had seen in Catherine Broward’s purse before she had turned it over to the police: her New York driver’s license number, credit card numbers, social security number, date of birth, address. She e-mailed them to her office in San Jose. She also retyped and e-mailed herself the strange little contract that Mallon had paid his lawyer to draft:

The sum was very high for this kind of work, particularly when the client was no longer a murder suspect. But Bobby Mallon was an intelligent man, and Lydia had warned him that he might be wasting his money. It was even possible that she was wrong and he would get his money’s worth by the time this was over.

The contract, Lydia suspected, had been the little blond lawyer’s idea. Lydia had not expected to have an old friend put everything in writing. She had often signed contracts with corporate clients who needed something to show auditors and, ultimately, had to answer to stockholders. The oral agreements that were customary in her business were not acceptable in theirs. They had to make sure they could prove what they had hired her to do, and protect themselves from liability for whatever else she might happen to do. Contracts with individual clients where rarer. She kept a standard agreement on a disk in
her office for the clients who wanted one. It was full of complicated clauses that put the two parties at arm’s length from one another, declared that they held each other harmless for this or that. Some clients seemed to like that kind of thing, and Lydia didn’t mind.

As she thought about it, she changed her mind and decided the contract must have been Mallon’s idea. It had something to do with old times—maybe to reassure himself that he wasn’t merely demanding a favor of an old friend, maybe to ensure that she would allow him to pay her at all—but she had not worked out the proportions yet.

Bobby Mallon’s case had a great many aspects that she found depressing. She had always harbored a wish—not quite allowing it to grow into more than a pleasurable thought—that she and Bobby might someday meet again when they were both free. When she had first seen him in his doorway, it had come back more strongly than she had anticipated, a sudden shock to her chest, almost like air being forced into her lungs.

It had been looking into his eyes after all this time. Mallon had the kindest eyes she had ever seen in a man. They were watchful eyes, a little sad. She had once allowed herself to think that when they looked at her, he too might be entertaining a wish that he couldn’t speak aloud: he had still been married to Andrea then.

She had to admit that she had caused the feeling of emptiness she felt now. After he had called her, sometime while she was busy packing and making plane reservations and rushing down here, she had allowed that part of her brain to awaken. But now it was clear that she had been foolish. He had become a rich old bachelor—too rich for anybody to marry without seeming to be after the money—and the case was about a little chick half her age that he had taken to bed with him. She had learned to live comfortably with the idea of Bobby Mallon as a missed opportunity from long ago. This was worse.

She forced herself to concentrate on her tasks. When she had finished sending her e-mails, she turned her attention to learning about Catherine Broward. Over twenty years ago, when she had started her
own detective agency, she had also filed to give legal existence to a corporation called LJM Financial Systems, which she used as a front to request credit checks and other information on people. She set to work now and used the corporation to impersonate an insurance company sending an inquiry about Catherine Broward’s driving record, including any cars registered to her, to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. She ran credit checks with the three major services. Finally, she logged on to the site of a company that collected public records. She began with New York and California and searched for any criminal judgments, civil lawsuits, marriages, divorces. Then she extended her search to Illinois and Texas because of their sizes, and Nevada because it was a stop that had often produced interesting surprises for her in the past.

When she had finished, she sent the information as an attachment to an e-mail to her computer in her office, then turned off the laptop. The part of this that she could do in Santa Barbara was done. She was going to need to travel. In a way, it was a relief.

It was nearly nightfall when Mallon returned with the food.

Lydia waited until they had eaten before she said, “I’ve got a place to begin searching, so I’m leaving.”

“When?”

“Now would be pretty convenient.” She glanced at her suitcase, which she had left in the living room. “I haven’t unpacked.”

“I’d like to go with you.”

She sat completely still and stared at him. “Why?”

“I want the answer. I don’t have any reason not to go find it myself. I just don’t know how—even where—to begin anymore. I hired you because you’re the only detective I know I can trust. You know how it’s done these days. You’re also a woman, and I think what we find may be easier for you to understand than for me. Maybe it would be better, simpler, if I didn’t go, but I’ll try to be useful instead of annoying.” He stopped speaking and waited patiently.

It was the waiting that kept Lydia from delivering the automatic refusal
that had formed in her mind. Mallon had said everything he wanted to say, and had then had the sense to stop talking and wait. That was a rare quality, and she had missed it over the years. If she looked at it from a pure business perspective, she was aware that Mallon had put up fifty thousand dollars in advance, which he had a right to expect would buy him extraordinary tolerance from a detective. But none of that would have mattered to her if it had not been Mallon. He wasn’t just a client, he was her old friend, her partner in the parole office when they’d both been young and had shared a belief in the fundamental goodness and perfectibility of human beings. Over the years they had both learned to hide it—she more convincingly—but it was still there. After all, that was what they were both doing in this Catherine Broward case: acting on the faith that things should have gone right, and trying to learn why they hadn’t.

She supposed she had just discovered the catch in the contract, the unwritten expectation that would make this routine job maddening and difficult. It was possible that at some time in the future, she would remember this as the moment when she should have given Mallon his money back. But she didn’t. She said, “All right.”

Mallon didn’t thank her, just said, “I’ll be ready to leave in twenty minutes.”

Lydia sat in the living room and read over her notes in silence while Mallon quickly and efficiently moved from room to room, locking windows, picking up small items like keys and sunglasses, then disappeared for a few minutes. For Lydia it was a pleasant surprise when Mallon was at the front door with a small suitcase after only fifteen minutes. Mallon was a rich man now. There were very few rich people who didn’t speak about other people’s time carelessly, and it was a good sign to her that he still lived up to his word in small matters.

They got into Mallon’s car and drove up the freeway to Fairview Road and into the entrance to the small, quiet airport. Lydia and Mallon were on a half-empty commuter plane to Los Angeles International
in another half hour. When they arrived, they were in time to catch the red-eye to Pittsburgh.

Lydia sat beside Mallon through the two flights and in the airport waiting areas, preparing herself for questions that never came. At first it seemed to Lydia that Mallon had assumed that questions from him would detract from the efficiency of her inquiry. Later, she wondered if maybe it was simply that Mallon had lived alone for so many years that he had grown comfortable with silence. Halfway through the flight to Pittsburgh, she decided to volunteer.

“We’re going to Pittsburgh because I think Catherine Broward may have come from there.”

Mallon looked politely interested. “Why do you think that?”

She said, “What you and I are working on now is an outline I got from a credit check. About two months ago, she was there. She flew to Pittsburgh from her last place in Los Angeles. She bought a plane ticket in Pittsburgh to fly back to Los Angeles after a couple of weeks. But while she was there, she didn’t use a credit card to pay for a place to stay. She didn’t arrive with a round-trip ticket. It all has a certain feel to it, doesn’t it?”

“A man?”

She shrugged. “If she was visiting a boyfriend, she would have made a round-trip reservation, knowing when the visit would be over. If she had been coming to Pittsburgh to live with him, she would have given up her apartment in L.A. and put her stuff in storage or shipped it. Those are things that create charges, and there aren’t any.”

“So you’re guessing she was visiting her family.”

“Everything is a guess right now, except that somebody let her stay for free. This isn’t science,” said Lydia. “It’s just like looking for parole violators. The method is still just using your instinct for recognizing something that’s odd.”

Mallon studied her for a moment. “Why did you start in Pittsburgh, and not L.A.? You think they’ll know, don’t you?”

She hesitated. “Maybe, if they are relatives. If she went home to see them for an open-ended visit, maybe what she was doing was something young people sometimes do. The world out there gets to be too much for them.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. She gets a job, and the job is low-paying and leads nowhere. She has a relationship, but the boyfriend isn’t somebody she wants to marry. So maybe she waits until she can get some time off or, more likely, makes time by quitting, and goes back to where she came from. She knows she can’t go back there to stay, because that would be the dead end of all dead ends. Her family is glad to see her, but even they know it isn’t going to last. Still, she toys with the idea of staying in Pittsburgh. What she’s doing, really, is playing that she can stay, pretending that she’s younger and hasn’t gone off on her own yet. It goes away.” She sighed. “Or it takes a worse turn.”

“Do you think it’s possible that Catherine went to see them because she knew she was about to commit suicide? I mean, if that’s who she saw.”

She nodded. “It’s entirely possible.”

“Then what?”

“Then either she will have told somebody her troubles, or she will have lied through her teeth, smiled a lot, and pretended everything was just great. They do that, too.”

They arrived in Pittsburgh in daylight, with the sun still very low and shining almost horizontally into the windows of the airport. Lydia rented a Lincoln Town Car and checked them into a large, expensive hotel downtown. While they were walking to the elevators, Mallon said quietly, “Everything doesn’t have to be luxurious just because I came along. I’m still a pretty ordinary guy. Do whatever you normally do.”

“I’m not wasting your money,” she said. “When I hunt bail jumpers, I check into the cheapest, most anonymous fleabag in town, lie low, and start hunting for my guy in the neighborhood. In this kind of investigation
I try to play against type a little. People who live in a town know the hotels better than we do. They form impressions of outsiders based on a lot of superficial things, including what kinds of cars they drive and where they’re staying. Detective work is a trashy profession. Expecting that people will talk about personal matters to a private detective staying in a cheap motel by the tracks is asking too much.”

“This hotel’s fine with me,” said Mallon. “I don’t have any more nostalgia for cheap hotels than you do. I just don’t want you to waste your energy trying to keep me pampered. I haven’t changed that much. Where do we go first?”

“You can get yourself settled in now. I’ve got to go back to the car-rental agency, but I’ll be back in an hour or two. If you can’t sleep, maybe you can take a walk and get a swim. That’s pretty much your regular routine, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mallon. “That’s why I don’t need to do it here. What are we going to do at the car rental?”

“I’m going to get somebody to show me the forms Catherine Broward filled out to rent her car when she was here.”

“How?” asked Mallon. “We’re not cops carrying an arrest warrant anymore.”

“What I usually try first is bribery.”