Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“I would like to join you, I think. Thanks.”

“I do have to warn you that I can’t guarantee she’ll show up,” Lydia said. “They don’t always, and it’s not like being their parole officer, where they have to make up some kind of an answer when you ask them a question.”

“Do you have the address of the bar?” asked Mallon.

“Not on me. I thought it would be best if you’d just take a morning commuter flight down here tomorrow. There’s one that leaves around ten. I’ll pick you up at the airport, and we’ll go to the bar together.”

The woman was strikingly attractive, but not what Mallon would have called pretty. Her face looked triangular, the large dark eyes making the upper part seem very wide. She had a nose that was wide at the bridge and seemed to narrow, and below it a set of lips that he guessed had been treated to make them fuller, then a tiny pointed chin. Her eye shadow was too dark, the liner too thick and black, the lipstick too starkly outlined for daytime. The tight pants and the top that tied in the back, Mallon knew, were what was in store windows this month, but intended for teenagers, who were slightly younger and a bit skinnier. On her, they seemed to be a costume, something she was always thinking about, touching and readjusting. It made him think about them too.

They sat at a table near the windows that looked out on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Mallon wondered why they had not met at one of the bars a few blocks closer to the ocean so they could see it. There was enough light streaming in for her to see the photographs that Lydia had stolen from Catherine Broward’s apartment. The woman squinted at them, then pushed them toward Mallon. “Yeah,” she said. “Markie was the one I knew, really. The girl was only with him for a while. She’s dead, too?” Her perfectly outlined Cupid’s-bow lips pouted while she waited for an answer.

“That’s right,” said Lydia. “She killed herself.”

“Oh,” said the woman, tonelessly. “I only saw her a few times.” That seemed to be her explanation for her utter indifference. Then she said, “I remember I was working on the video for Alien Steam’s first CD at the time, so it would be… about two years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mallon. “Working on the video?” His confusion was sincere. All Mallon could tell was that she was dropping an impressive name. “Are you a musician?”

Lydia said, “Miss Gracely danced on that video. I’ve seen it. She was the principal dancer, really.” Lydia turned to her. “Did you meet them at a party?”

She nodded, picked up her glass, and brought it toward her mouth, then pantomimed her surprise that it was empty. Mallon waved to the bartender. “Three more, please.” He returned his attention to her. “I know the police probably drove you crazy with questions about all this at the time, but can you tell us anything about the party? Where was it?”

“It started at the ballroom of the Millefleurs Hotel. It was for the release of Juan-do Ward’s last CD-he was already dead-and the company invited, like, the whole industry. I got a lot of work from that party. Later it overflowed and kind of oozed from one place to another. There were a couple of suites in the hotel, and some people went to the company offices, and there was a kind of after-party at a club. Alien Steam had a limo, and we traveled from place to place.” She chuckled at the memory of it. “Nobody was any good at opening champagne bottles, so it kept shooting all over the windows and the seats and us.”

Mallon nodded in a sympathy that he did not feel. She was a person with obvious attractions, but her evaluation of them seemed to be too high: they did not dazzle him and make him unable to form unflattering thoughts. She said, “I remember first noticing Markie at the hospitality suite. He was really something. Those eyes, the expression on his face.” She gave a little shiver of appreciation, then seemed to return to the present, where he was dead and could be of no use. The look immediately changed to boredom. Then she saw her next drink arrive, and she brightened. “He was at the bar. I went over to him, and asked if he would get the bartender to make me a Cosmopolitan. I was with a couple of the guys from Done Deal right then-Fred Howard and Mickey Dill-but I just had to get a closer look at him. He hit on me. He asked my name, and phone number. I gave, but then there’s this girl.”

Lydia pointed at the picture of Catherine on the table. “This girl?”

Del Gracely nodded. “She had been in the bathroom. When she got back, I kept right on flirting with him, because it never occurred to me that he could be with her. He was the most beautiful man. She was… she had kind of stringy brown hair and a sort of ordinary face. She had kind of an okay body, but come on. That room was full of women who made her look… Well, I thought he must be in the business, and she was his agent, or an executive or something. She had good clothes-very expensive-but she wasn’t good-looking enough to be there unless she was something like that.”

“Did he introduce you to her?” asked Lydia.

“Sure. He was one of those guys who never slips up, never forgets anybody’s name, always looks at every woman in the room as though she’s the special one and he just came there on the off chance that he might run into her. He said, ‘This is Cathy,’ then ‘This is Del Gracely.’ I gave her my best smile and everything, because I figured that she must be somebody, a behind-the-scenes person. But she wasn’t.” Her mind seemed to shift. “About that time was when Irwin Rogow noticed me. I saw he was looking, so I went over to talk to him. The party began to move again, so we did too.”

“But you saw Mark Romano again?” asked Lydia.

“Lots of times. Maybe once or twice a month until he died.”

“What about Catherine Broward?”

She seemed taken aback. “Oh, I thought you meant alone. Her, I saw only once more. I was at a club. I was leaving with a bunch of people because there was going to be a party at Wilfred Fillmore’s house in Malibu.”

Mallon knew who that was. He was a basketball player who seemed to spend his off-seasons getting arrested for felonies, then having the charges dropped or reduced to minor infractions.

“Mark was in the parking lot and she was with him. I had gotten the impression that they had broken up, but I think I got it from him, so it probably wasn’t true yet. They were having a fight.” She stopped, looked out the window, and sipped her drink.

Mallon’s muscles tensed as he waited for the woman to put down the glass and say more, but she seemed to think that she had already told them the whole story, that the few words she had said would evoke for Mallon and Lydia exactly what she had seen and heard. She placed the glass in front of her and looked at them expectantly.

Lydia leaned forward. “Can you remember anything at all about the fight-what was said?”

She seemed surprised. “Oh, sure. She was trying to move close to him and talk quietly, but he pushed her away, so her voice got loud, and it wasn’t hard to hear. She said he’d taken some money of hers, and that it was okay, but he should come home. He brushed her off, and got into his car. It was embarrassing him, because the valet had just brought it up, and we were all waiting for our cars. She reached in the window and snatched the key out. He got out of the car and tried to get her to hand the keys back, but she wouldn’t do it. Meanwhile, we’re all standing around watching this, while the valets went to pull our cars up so we can go to the party. People started making funny comments and laughing. These are guys who are cool and important, people Markie would have wanted to impress. And the girls are… well, guys like that don’t hang with second-rate girls. Everybody’s laughing, and Cathy is making him look stupid. He reaches for the keys, and she twists around and keeps them out of his reach. He grabs her wrist, but she’s already moved them to the other hand. She says they need to talk, and she won’t let him go. He says, Give me the keys, Cathy. She says, It’s not even your car. I bought it. He’s intensely aware that this little scene is ruining him. He twists the wrist around behind her back and reaches for the one with the keys. Instead of letting it happen, she tosses them into the sewer by the curb.”