Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

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.”

“If the person turns you down, what do you try second?”

“Bribing somebody else.”

They arrived outside the car rental just before nine. The sun was bright, but the air had a humid heaviness that made them glad to get into the small air-conditioned building. Mallon was silent while Lydia tried talking the pale, thin young woman behind the desk into showing them the papers, offering her one hundred, then three hundred, then five hundred dollars. As the young woman politely and cheerfully shook her head, the thin, faded blond hair flew into her face and she had to brush it away from her eyes in a practiced gesture that Mallon sensed made her feel unapproachable and yet alluring. It seemed to give Lydia an idea. She turned to look at Mallon.