Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

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.”

Mallon was silent.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m trying to catch up. I guess I never thought of her in those terms. For a young woman who worked as a waitress, she was pretty wealthy.”

Lydia hesitated. She was not sure whether she wanted to show Mallon her next exhibit. She knew that if she showed it to him, Mallon would jump to conclusions again. The ironic part of it was that Lydia knew any detective should be eager to show it to Mallon. It would make Mallon want to keep paying her for the next year. Delving for ever-more-minute details of Catherine Broward’s short life was a lot easier than going back to the bail bond shop to begin hunting down the next violent jerk that Harry managed to bail out of jail. But Lydia was determined not to take advantage of Bobby Mallon’s guilt. She let herself think wistfully for a moment of putting it all back in the envelope and saying, “Well, that’s it. That’s all she left lying around.” Instead, she reached into the envelope again and produced one of the canceled checks she had stolen.

She laid it on the table beside the photographs. It was for forty thousand dollars, and the date was last July 15. It said, “Pay to the order of Safe-Force School of Self-Defense,” and the notation written on the line in the lower left said, “July 15-August 15.” She said, “There are two of these, both to the school, to pay up to September fifteenth.”

She watched Mallon bend over it and stare. He picked it up and turned it over to read the stamped endorsement. “Deposit only SF Self-Defense.” The bank was in Ojai, California. Mallon placed the check back on the table and stared at Lydia impassively.

Lydia said, “Don’t read too much into this.”

Mallon’s left eyebrow arched. “July fifteenth through September fifteenth, Lydia. She was off taking a self-defense course when her boyfriend got killed. How can that be a coincidence?”

“I’m not saying it was a coincidence. I’m just not assuming it means she knew he was in danger.”

“Then what was she afraid of?”

“It doesn’t even mean she was afraid.”

Mallon’s other brow rose. “Forty thousand bucks a month?”

Lydia shrugged.

Mallon pressed her. “Forty thousand bucks for four weeks at a self-defense camp, and she’s not afraid?”

“It’s not much time if you’re not doing anything else, and forty thousand is not much money if your trust fund brings in twenty thousand while you’re gone.”

“Forty thousand is not much money compared to my bank account either, but forty thousand bucks is still forty thousand bucks. It has an objective value. I know that most people work a long time to get that much, even if I don’t. To throw it away is disrespectful to them.”

“You worked most of your life, built a couple of businesses. You learned young. She probably didn’t.”

“She worked as a waitress, not once, but several times in different cities. She wouldn’t have to do too many shifts on her feet to get the idea.”

“Maybe it was a lark,” said Lydia. “You know: go to some fancy ranch with a couple of girlfriends, learn a few judo moves, and discharge a firearm at a target a couple of times.”

“That’s not a lark. For forty grand she could have gone anywhere.” Mallon frowned at the check. “Depending on who you talk to, she was either in the midst of the love affair of her life or she had just been dumped. Either way, it doesn’t sound like a time to go out of town for intensive self-defense training, does it?”

“It could be a response to her boyfriend’s social set. Maybe they just gave her the creeps.”

“Then she was afraid, exactly as I said,” Mallon insisted. He looked at Lydia expectantly.

“All right. We’re never going to figure out what she was thinking by sitting here and making up stories,” said Lydia. “We’ve got to go back up to Santa Barbara anyway if we’re going to get anything out of Detective Fowler. Why don’t we drive up? On the way we can take a detour, have a look at this self-defense school. Maybe they’ll be able to tell us what the hell she was doing there while her boyfriend was down here getting himself killed.”