Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“Her sister was under the impression that this Mark was the love of her life, and that his death caused the suicide,” Mallon repeated.

Berwell leaned forward and patted Mallon’s arm. “I know. Things aren’t always just one way. I’m sure that Catherine probably did tell her sister all of that, and meant it. When things were going well in the relationship, he was her true love, they were going to get married, and all that. But after the investigation, I can tell you it was never going to happen. She was kidding herself. He had a long history. He used his looks-which were really something, as you just saw-to attract women. And he could talk very convincingly. He would go wherever he could find women: college campuses, coffee shops, food courts at the big malls. He got their confidence, their trust, and then took advantage. He treated them like slaves, and spent their money as though it were his. When he was tired of them, he dumped them. In at least a couple of cases, he passed them on.”

“To whom?” asked Lydia. She handed Berwell the videotape, and Berwell put it back into her purse.

She looked at Mallon while she answered. “Now we’re back to the beginning-the people the feds were investigating. That seems to be the reason he was popular with creeps. He was somebody who knew a lot of attractive, available women. He had the temperament of a pimp.”

Mallon asked, “And the women put up with that?”

“Some of the women we interviewed weren’t exactly squeamish about it. They were basically no different from him. They used him too: got a place to live for a while, went to all the parties, and met people who had a lot of cash and were willing to throw it around. When Mark Romano moved on, they considered a change to one of the bigger creeps a soft landing, or even a step up. Who has a better supply of money and drugs than a guy who sells drugs?”

Mallon shook his head. “Catherine wasn’t that way at all. Why would she kill herself over a man like that?”

Angela Berwell’s lips formed a half smile, but her eyes were sad. “The reason somebody like him can exist is that some women are really good at convincing themselves of things that aren’t true. It’s entirely possible that when he kicked her out, she told herself they were just having a spat. And when he was with another woman he was just trying to make her jealous. I’ve seen people who have ignored everything they knew about some jerk, and spent years mourning the person they wished they had known. It’s possible that she even blamed herself for his murder. I can see a whole train of thought for that. She tells herself it’s her fault that he threw her out. She wasn’t pretty enough or compliant enough or giving him enough money. And it never would have happened if she had still been in his good graces that night. He wouldn’t have gone out at all, or she would have been with him and the killer wouldn’t have shot him in front of a witness, or whatever. I’ve spent hours listening to this kind of thing from other women. Maybe that’s what made Catherine Broward kill herself.”

“But she didn’t do it right away,” said Mallon.

“Right. It’s been about a year since he died. Lydia tells me she drifted around from city to city after that, not really accomplishing anything or taking hold. She showed up at her sister’s. That’s not an unusual thing, making a last visit.”

“I suppose not.”

“They’re not exactly saying good-bye. That would tip their families off. They’re just sort of taking a last look. Sometimes they say something revealing. In this case, it seems she had convinced her sister that what was wrong with her life dated from the death of Mark Romano. All I can say for sure is, if he was a loss to anybody, he was no loss at all to her. They had broken up at least a couple of months before he was killed. She wasn’t living with him. She wasn’t even in L.A. She’d left about six weeks before he was shot.”

“Before?” asked Mallon. “Are you sure?”

“I told you,” she said. “We don’t know everything, and we never find it out. But what we do know, we try to get right. She had been out of L.A. for six weeks before.”

“Where?”

“Up north, staying on a ranch somewhere above Santa Barbara.”

Lydia checked her watch. “We owe Angie a nice dinner, and our reservation is for eight. We’d better get back down the path before they give our table to some congressmen on a relief mission to Beverly Hills.”

Mallon stood up. “You’re right, Lydia. I’m getting hungry.” He went to the door and opened it for her and Detective Berwell. For the rest of the evening they were surrounded by strangers, so the conversation became light and pleasant, and was limited to comments about the preparation of the food, the beauty of the hotel, and the gentle, cool June weather the city was having. Mallon joined in as well as he could, but now and then one of the others would notice that he was staring down at the table, his brow furrowed in thought.

Mallon and Lydia walked Angela Berwell to the end of the wooden bridge, where the valet-parking attendant brought her car, and then watched her drive off into the night. Lydia was grateful to her for coming: she had wanted Mallon to hear the details directly from the investigating officer. She knew that at some point she was going to have to repay Angela’s favor in some way, but she sensed that this was in keeping with this phase of her life. She seemed to have moved entirely into the realm of repaying favors, incurring new ones to repay the ones she had owed for years.

She had wanted very much to help Bobby Mallon, had an urge to reward him for being the kind of person he always had been, by finding the answers to his questions about Catherine Broward. But now it seemed clear what the rest of the revelations would be like. What she had just seen on tape had also raised a confusing mixture of feelings that were making things more difficult for her. She couldn’t quite banish from her mind the wish that Bobby’s concern had not been devoted to a young stranger who was already dead. Seeing the tape had raised feelings of jealousy, but also had given the girl a reality she had never had before. Lydia felt terribly sorry for her. She turned to Mallon. “Kind of a depressing story, wasn’t it? Think you’ve heard all you need to hear?”

Mallon and Lydia walked back toward Mallon’s bungalow. “What if she was afraid? What if the reason she left was that she sensed the danger, or even knew about it, and didn’t want to be killed?”

“Maybe if we knew why he was killed, that would be a good theory,” said Lydia. “In my experience, people aren’t very good at sensing danger in advance. If they’re scared, it’s usually of the wrong thing.”

“If he saw one of these guys commit a crime, and told her about it, she would know he was in trouble,” said Mallon. “Or if he heard there was a big drug shipment coming in at a particular place and time, and he wasn’t supposed to know. She might have panicked, run away, and regretted it later.”

She looked at him with mild skepticism. “Nobody can rule any of those things out, or any other story we dream up. But if she knew Romano had seen or heard something that put him in danger, he should have known too, and run away. And you heard Angie,” said Lydia. “The tape we saw was one of dozens. It’s a hundred times more likely that he got killed for fucking somebody’s girlfriend.”

Mallon walked along for a few steps, then stopped. “Look at her behavior afterward-all of it. Maybe it was aimless, but maybe it wasn’t. She moved from one city to another, got low-paying jobs, stayed a few months, and each time, she suddenly packed up and moved on again. She could have been wandering, but what she did was also exactly what you might do if you didn’t want to be found. It’s what parole violators used to do after they skipped out.”