Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“Okay,” said Mallon. “Crazy wasn’t the right word. I just don’t think she was the kind of person who would kill somebody.”

“You knew her for a few hours,” said Lydia. “And spending time naked with somebody isn’t the same as reading their innermost thoughts. I’m not saying this to be cruel, but that’s one of the mistakes Catherine seems to have made.”

“And now I’m making it about her?”

“All I’m saying is that the whole story about her going to a self-defense school because she was afraid her boyfriend was in danger makes very little sense. It makes no sense at all once you know he’d already beaten her up and thrown her out,” said Lydia. “It makes perfect sense if she was the one who killed him.”

Mallon glared at her. “I’ll admit that your theory is logical. But I talked to her, and we’ve both talked to other people about her, and I’m just not prepared to say that she would kill someone, even someone who deserved it.”

“Neither am I,” said Lydia. She turned right at Century Boulevard and headed toward the airport. “I want you to take a plane back to Santa Barbara. I’ll get in touch in a few days.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got to take care of some other stuff: you know, check in with Harry up north at the office, then try to figure out who else to ask questions down here. I’ll call you.”

As afternoon was ending and the sun glared brightly from a low angle above the ocean in preparation for the change into evening, Mallon stepped off his plane and into the Santa Barbara terminal. His lawyer, Diane, was already walking toward him, smiling. Her short blond hair was perfectly brushed and shining, and she wore a tailored navy blue suit, as though she had been in court. He looked at her and held his hands out in confusion.

“I was trying to reach Lydia Marks, and when I did, she told me your flight number.”

“So you’re here for me?” He realized that he had asked the wrong question. What he wanted to know was why she had called Lydia.

“Sure. She said you would tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ll try.”

They waited a few minutes in the baggage claim area for his single suitcase to appear on the metal ramp and slide down to the carousel, and then she drove him to a restaurant on Stearns Wharf, where they could look out and watch the yachts and fishing boats putting slowly into the harbor for the night. She listened patiently to his recitation over dinner. Finally, he asked, “What do you think?”

She sipped her coffee, looked out the big window at four blue kayaks coming into the harbor. “I think it’s getting to be time to move to the next phase.”

“What’s that?”

“First, you record everything you’ve learned in a journal: what you observed, the evidence you found, what each person told you, and when. You read each entry over to be sure it’s absolutely accurate. Then you write down what you think actually happened, in chronological order. Draw a conclusion. If the story is convincing enough so that you’re sure you know the truth, then you go to the police.”

“And if it’s not convincing enough?”

“Then you put it at the bottom of a drawer, and concede that there are some questions that just can’t be answered.”

He stared at her uncomfortably. “You think I’m out of my mind to do this.”

She returned his stare for a moment. “Not at all. When this first came up, it had not been established that Catherine Broward’s death was a suicide. If it turned out to be something else, you were a potential suspect. In those situations it’s not a bad idea to have experienced defense attorneys and private investigators visibly working on your behalf. I also knew that you’d had a weird, unsettling experience. I thought it might be therapeutic for you to go find out what had caused it. And, frankly, I expected that when you found out, you would come to the conclusion that you had done all you could to save her, but she was not somebody who could be saved. You’ve done that. I think at some point, you stop. Now would be a good time.”

He looked out the window again, and stared across the harbor at the thicket of white masts of the sailboats moored at the slips. “I don’t know enough yet. We’ve found things that I think we have to resolve first.”

She studied him with benign tolerance. “You have to drive on the right side of the street and pay your taxes. You don’t have a civic duty to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to uncover every nuance of the reason a stranger killed herself. It happens. It’s always partly obvious, because there’s always some real reason to be unhappy, and it’s always partly mysterious, because we can never know what anybody else is thinking.” She saw the expression on his face as he impatiently waited for her to finish. “I’m trying to do you some good here.”

A smile raised the corners of his lips, faded, and then returned. “I know that. I’m not sure I can explain why I’m going on with this, because the reason keeps changing. At first I wanted to know what I could have said or done to stop it. I realized-maybe while I was listening to her sister-that it was incredible egotism to think that just by saying some words I could induce a person I’d just met to reverse the biggest decision she had ever made. But it happens. It happens all the time. Somebody on a suicide hotline talks a young woman like her out of it every night.”

“She has to call the hotline first. They don’t wait until she’s drowned herself, pull her out, and make her come to the phone. Maybe that’s the difference. Or maybe she was nuts. Delusional. Yes, I’m being flippant. I hope you know that if she were here now, I would be the last person you know to say, ‘Who cares?’ But now that it’s over, I have to say, ‘Who still cares?’ because the second that life left her body, all of this became a nonissue. Nothing you do will help her, or anybody else.”

“You’re not even curious?”

“Of course I am,” she said. “I’m the biggest gossip in town. You know that. Right now I spend a few minutes of each day spying on the tax attorney who has an office down the hall, because just about every day at lunchtime, a good-looking young guy shows up with take-out food, and she closes the office for an hour and a half. But he doesn’t leave until she reopens at one-thirty. I want to know all about it: who he is, where they met, what they’re doing-specifically and in detail-and how she’s keeping her husband from catching her.” She paused. “See? It’s titillating, it’s interesting, it’s not especially sad, and I don’t have to hire an expensive detective to interpret it for me.”

He grinned. “You keep returning to the money. You think I’m wasting it, don’t you?”

“You’re not the only rich client I have, thank God, and you’re not nearly the silliest. Usually, I include you in the other group, the ones I don’t worry about because they still have their first dollar. But right now, you have a certain quality that appeals to the motherly side of my nature, so I’ll give you a motherly lecture. Money can have some traps. It allows people to do surprisingly dumb things without obvious disastrous consequences. That can be a danger. You can get the idea that your money buys you everything you want, and will protect you from anything you don’t want. It can’t always, and when you reach the limit, it can be a nasty shock.”

“I’m not sure how this applies to me,” said Mallon.

“I don’t think you can find out everything about another person’s life just by paying a fortune to investigators. And I’m not sure that if you could, it would be a good bargain.”

“Lydia is an old friend of mine, and I have more money than I need,” he said.