Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

The feeling was better than the first time he had gone hang gliding, better than rock climbing. He had killed an armed enemy in a gun battle. After all, he was pretty sure that his first round had been the one that had done the trick. It was a shame that he couldn’t tell anyone about it, at least not for a lot of years. And there was no trophy for this kind of hunting. The rewards were all internal. Now that the target was dead, he wished that the target had been a man, not a woman. But that made little difference, really: Markham would have been just as dead if the target had fired first. He knew that no matter how long he lived, he would never forget the name: Lydia Marks.

Mallon squinted against the morning sunshine as he walked up to the office on De la Guerra Street holding a folded newspaper under his arm. He stepped inside, looked at the seats along the wall where clients were supposed to sit and wait, and approached Sylvia, the secretary. She said, “Good morning, Mr. Mallon. Can I get you something to drink while you’re waiting, maybe a cup of coffee, or…?” Her voice trailed off as she saw the expression on his face.

“No, thanks,” he said, then turned to see Diane coming out of her inner office.

She looked at Mallon, then quickly at Sylvia, a question in her eyes. Sylvia gave a tiny shrug, and Diane’s eyes snapped back to Mallon. “Robert!” she said, with a large, fixed smile. “Come on in.” She stepped aside to let Mallon in, then lingered, her eyes on Sylvia again. But Sylvia only slowly moved her shoulders up and shook her head, her eyes wide.

Mallon stood waiting in the center of the carpet until Diane had closed the heavy office door. “Lydia is dead.”

She froze. “What do you mean, ‘dead’? How?”

“She’s been murdered. Somebody killed her last night. It’s on the news on the L.A. television stations. It’s even in the early edition of the L.A. Times.”

“Oh, Robert, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

Mallon handed her the folded newspaper, with the article facing up. She stared at it, her eyes picking up disconnected phrases, which she said aloud-“evening shootout,” “unknown assailants”-then she lowered it. She tried to hand it back to Mallon, but he would not reach for it.

“Keep it. I bought that on the way for you. I have one at home.”

“This is terrible.” She dropped it on her desk and turned away from it, toward Mallon. “Tell me what happened.”

“Somebody killed her in a little restaurant down south of the L.A. airport. They shot her, it says, ‘numerous times.’ They also killed a bartender, a waitress, and three customers. It says the police aren’t sure who was the intended victim, or if it had something to do with the restaurant-maybe a robbery. They had to be after Lydia.”

“They did?”

“Look at the place. She wouldn’t go into a place like that all by herself unless she was on business.” He picked up the newspaper from her desk, turned it over, and held it in front of her face. There was a picture of some officials pushing a wheeled stretcher into an ambulance. The building was low, made of stucco, with a big sign and a satellite dish, and only small front windows high on the wall.

“It looks like a dive,” she agreed. “So what was she doing there?”

“She must have been meeting somebody, probably another one of the women who knew Mark Romano. When we met with people, if she couldn’t go to their homes or businesses, she would suggest a place that was expensive. She said it helped her to get people to open up to her. She even stayed in big, fancy hotels, because she figured local people knew the hotels and judged strangers by where they stayed.” Mallon stared at the picture again. “Not this time, though. The person she was interviewing must have picked that place.”

Diane looked at the picture again, then leaned on her desk and read the article. She seemed to be concentrating, so Mallon sat in a chair by the wall and waited. After a minute, she looked up. “It doesn’t say she was meeting anyone.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t. They don’t seem to know that she was working, or that what she did when she was working was talk to people. I need to tell them.”

Diane stared at Mallon, an expression of curiosity on her face. “They know who she was: it says she was a private detective. I think they must know how detectives work. They’re investigators too, after all. They know the mechanics of the job better than we do.” She paused, then said uncomfortably, “How well did you know her, really?”

“About as well as I know anybody,” he said. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m just wondering. You said you hadn’t seen her in a long time. She also had other cases, a bail bond business to run, undoubtedly a lot of personal relationships that you can’t know about.” She looked at him defensively. “I’m just saying, it may be too early to imagine that we know why she was killed.”

“I called the bail bond office and talked to her partner. He said she’d called in every day to check with him, and all she seemed to be working on was Catherine Broward.”

“Do we know she would tell him if there was something else?”

“I’m not sure what I know anymore,” Mallon said. “Before I talk to the police in L.A. today, is there anything else I need to keep in mind?”

“Yes. Don’t,” she said.

“But they’ll need to know about the case she was working on for me, and what she was investigating, and so on.”

“You’re right,” she said. “We’ve got to do that. But I think you’d better let me make that call.”

“You do?” Mallon was surprised.

Diane nodded. “I do. After all, I wrote up her contract, and kept in touch with both of you all the way through. At the moment, I know what was going on as well as you do. I have a responsibility as an officer of the court to come forward whether you do or not. I also am unlikely to whet their appetites for a suspect. If, after I’ve told them what we know, they still want to talk to you, we’ll go there with Brian Logan.”

He squinted at her skeptically. “I’m just trying to help them solve the death of an old friend who was doing me a favor. Why so cautious? What have I got to be worried about?”

“Let’s see. You hired Lydia originally after you spoke with the Santa Barbara police about a woman who had died of a gunshot wound right after she was with you. Once her death was declared a suicide, you and Lydia both went across the country to conduct a private investigation of her life. You then started in on her boyfriend’s murder. Now Lydia has been murdered. I don’t know everything there is to know about homicide cases. It’s not my field. I do know that every now and then, a person who has been talking to the police, giving them leads, will be arrested for a murder. And the next thing you know, the police are building a case based on the fact that he’s been around when several other people were murdered, sometimes a few people going back ten or twenty years. It’s hard sometimes for the police to believe these things are coincidental.”

“I don’t believe for a minute that they’re coincidental,” Mallon insisted. “That’s the whole point of going to talk to the police.”

“I know, I know,” said Diane. “And I’ll try to convey that. But another thing we want to avoid right now is giving them the impression that you’re one of those people who are eager to spend a lot of time hanging around the police and guiding them in one direction or another.”

“I don’t see how they could imagine I killed Lydia.” He had let his irritation creep into his voice.

“I’m not comfortable saying what they might or might not imagine,” said Diane.