Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“What did he say?”

“Not much,” she said. “He was still holding her arm, so he jerked her around with it. Then he hit her, right in the mouth. Twice, real quick, and let her go. She dropped on the ground. That was when I could see her arm was actually broken, because it was kind of hanging limp, and looked wrong. She tried to talk, and her mouth was all bloody, and I could see these two front teeth right here were out.”

Mallon winced. He could see her in his mind, intuit the emotional pain she must have been feeling, the sheer amazement that someone she loved would hurt her that way. “What happened then?”

“By then our cars were there.” She shrugged.

A few minutes later, Mallon and Lydia were on the street making their way to the parking lot where Lydia had left her car. Mallon said, “Did you know about this before?”

“I had some suspicions,” said Lydia. “The autopsy report in Santa Barbara said that two of her upper incisors were dental implants. In a girl her age, that usually says car accident, but there was nothing conclusive about that. The arm didn’t show on the autopsy, so if it really was injured it was probably a dislocation, and after the doctor popped it back in there wasn’t anything.”

Mallon felt a wave of horror that threatened to turn into nausea. He tried to make his mind form another image to replace Catherine’s agony. “How did you come up with Del Gracely?”

“Angie interviewed her in the homicide thing.”

“Did you really see the rock video she was on? Should I know her face?”

“I saw several she was on. She’s probably twenty-five years old and she’s already past it without having gotten anywhere. There’s an endless supply of girls who gyrate around behind some group. You have to listen for clues. The one she was talking about-Alien Steam’s first CD-made them rich. Not her. It was their first CD, before they were anything. She was on one for Done Deal, a couple other name groups. She’s not exactly a show-business legend. She goes to parties. She hooks up with various guys for various periods. Including Markie Romano. The reason she got interviewed in his murder was because she was in some of his nonmusical videos.”

“After she saw what he did to Catherine?” Mallon sat in the passenger seat of Lydia’s car.

Lydia got in and started the engine. “Before, or after, I’m not sure which. Probably she isn’t either.” She drove up Abbot Kinney to Washington Boulevard, then turned right onto Lincoln.

They drove in silence, moving south. Finally, Mallon said, “Do you think that was why Catherine went to the self-defense camp-because she was afraid Romano would hurt her again?”

Lydia hesitated for a moment, overcame her reluctance, then spoke carefully. “I think we’ve been looking at this wrong from the beginning. We’ve been acting on the strength of things we thought we knew before we started. Everything we saw or heard, we just used to revise the story we started with. We knew Catherine was bent on killing herself. Her boyfriend was dead? Then she must have been depressed because her boyfriend died tragically while she was waiting for him to come home. Oh, she was out of town at some resort north of Ojai at the time? Then maybe she left L.A. and went there because she knew he was going to get it soon, and she was scared. The resort isn’t a resort, but a self-defense boot camp? Then she really must have been scared, and trying to learn enough to protect him. He had already dumped her, beaten her up, and thrown her out on her ass? Then she was trying to learn to protect herself from him, or guys like him. You have an excuse for that. I don’t. I still do this for a living.”

“An excuse for what?”

“For starting out with a story that had to be true because that’s the way things usually happen, and just fitting everything new that we hear into it. I think we need to throw out the old story and start with a new one.”

“We’ve been trying to figure out why Catherine got into a depression and committed suicide,” said Mallon. “I didn’t hear anything today that wasn’t a reason for her to be depressed.”

“Yeah,” said Lydia, “but the story doesn’t fit together. At least not the way we’ve been looking at it.”

“Of course there are contradictions,” said Mallon. “I started out wanting it to be neat and logical. But nobody’s life is neat and logical. I know the sister told us she was still madly in love with this guy, and everybody else agrees that they’d already broken up, but-”

“Not just broken up. He punched her front teeth out.”

“But it wouldn’t be unprecedented for her to hate and fear a guy like that and still love him too, would it? Or maybe just be heartbroken that he had turned out not to be what she’d thought?”

Lydia was silent.

Mallon added, “And it wouldn’t be odd not to tell her older sister all about it, but instead to let her keep believing that everything had still been beautiful. After all, the truth was ugly and humiliating. And for what? Why would her sister need to know all the tawdry details?” He paused. “And it’s even possible that the sister knew everything, but had no desire to tell two strangers all about it.” He waited, then seemed to run his own arguments through his mind again but be dissatisfied. “Do you have another way to look at it?”

“I might,” said Lydia. She took her eyes off the road for a moment to look at Mallon, then looked ahead again. “Let’s think about the things we didn’t know when we started two weeks ago. We know that Markie was not a nice man. He was a lowlife. We know that when she tried to talk to him about their personal disagreements, including his having a car she paid for, and her money, he beat the hell out of her in a parking lot. We know that sometime later-a month or two, after her teeth had been replaced and the arm healed-she paid forty grand to spend four weeks at a self-defense camp. That was in July. A month after that, Markie gets shot. At that moment, where is Catherine? She isn’t even in town. She’s-still-at the self-defense place in the woods.”

“Right,” said Mallon. “Is there some way to make it all fit with the rest of what we know?”

“Yeah, there’s a way: she killed him.”

“No!” Mallon said immediately. Then he cocked his head as though listening while he soundlessly tried the tone of it. He said, more quietly, “That’s crazy.”

“She had a hell of a motive.”

“Well,” said Mallon, “all right, he was a bum. Some women might respond to that fact by wanting to kill him. But even if she did, wanting to is a very long way from actually doing it.”

“You know what they study in that self-defense school? I took a brochure. There are courses in the technology of self-defense, which is about pepper spray and Tasers and alarms and locks and security cameras, and so on. That’s standard stuff, but there’s a high-end tilt to it because the customers are rich and worry about kidnapping and protecting big houses. The second course is hand-to-hand combat, taught by male and female instructors who have black belts in aikido and karate, among other things. The third course is firearms training, including work on a combat range. That was why we heard pistols the day we were there. So Catherine had a pretty good introduction to ways of hurting people, and enough knowledge to understand that the only realistic way for her to get Markie was a shot to the head. She also, after you stopped her from drowning, killed herself with a pistol, which means she was capable of getting one when she needed it. We have enough of a motive, I’d say. How hard do you think it would be for her to get an opportunity-maybe slip out of that camp at night, drive to the apartment where she used to live with him in L.A. and do him, then drive back?”