Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

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.