Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

Mallon drove to the police station on Figueroa Street, climbed the steps into the small foyer, and waited at the front counter for a few minutes before he got a chance to tell the woman behind it what he had come for. She asked him to sit on a bench of blond wood that matched the counter, then made a telephone call. After a few more minutes, a tall policeman with a muscular frame and curly black hair who was wearing a tan summer-weight sport coat and blue jeans came out of a door at the side of the counter. He looked around, saw that Mallon was the only one waiting, then stepped up and shook his hand. “I’m Detective Fowler,” he said. “I can take your report.”

He led Mallon around the counter and through another door, then into a large office with several desks in it. He set a straight-backed chair in front of one of the desks, then sat down behind the desk and placed a pen and a yellow pad in front of him. “Now, Mr. Mallon. Can you tell me how you knew the deceased?”

“I didn’t,” said Mallon. “I don’t even know her name. I pulled her out of the ocean the other afternoon. She had tried to drown herself.”

Detective Fowler squinted at him as though he were having difficulty hearing what Mallon had said. Mallon went on. “I thought I should let you know about it.” He paused. “I’m not sure what good it does now, but it didn’t seem as though I could not tell you.”

Fowler nodded.“How did it happen?”

Mallon told him the story. He did not leave out the way it had felt to try to maneuver the young woman away from the ocean, to manipulate her into letting him take her to the hospital, and then to fail.

Fowler listened patiently, staring into his face as he talked, and interrupting only to ask, “What time was this?” or “Why did she change her mind?” His questions seemed intended to be polite, to make it easier for Mallon to talk, but Mallon knew they were more than that.

When he told Fowler about returning from the restaurant and finding an empty house, Mallon said, “I thought about calling the police that night, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that she had gotten through it, and now she would be somewhere getting a good night’s sleep. Maybe after that she would feel up to facing things. I thought that having the police show up to question her would make things seem worse to her.” Mallon sighed. “I guess I was just trying to think up reasons why it was best to do nothing. I should have reported it.”

Fowler shrugged. “Absolutely. Then I’d be the one who feels bad today.” He added, “I mean that. Getting somebody hospitalized without her consent on a 5150 isn’t that easy. All she’d have had to do was say the suicide attempt had never happened. You’re not a relative, or even an acquaintance. If she was acting composed enough to convince you that she’d be okay, she could have convinced everybody else, too.”

“I suppose,” said Mallon. “Well.” He leaned forward and began to stand, but Fowler held up his hand. He did it without urgency, but it was deliberate and authoritative.

“Do you mind?” asked Fowler. “I just need to take care of a few details, and then we’ll be through.”

“Okay,” said Mallon. He sat back down and waited.

“Just some questions I have to ask. After you saved her life, did she seem grateful, affectionate?”

Mallon shook his head. “No. Not really. She understood that I was trying to help her-she thanked me-but at first it took just about all her patience to be polite about it.” He decided he had to move closer to the parts of the evening that were more difficult to discuss. “After her nap, when she was feeling better, she was affectionate.”

“She seemed to like and trust you. She walked all the way to your house and went to bed. Did you have sexual intercourse?”

Mallon was shocked, appalled at the suddenness. “No,” he said firmly, then caught himself. He couldn’t lie to the police. “Not right away. It was after her nap. We each had a shower, and we ended up in the bath together. It wasn’t anything I intended. It was her idea, and she was very insistent.” The intensity of his own reaction suddenly struck him as suspicious. He began to identify the reasons aloud, so he wouldn’t sound defensive. “She was attractive, but she seemed to me to be around twenty-five, and I’m forty-eight. I thought I must have struck her as ancient. Besides, I assumed she must be emotionally…” He searched for a word, and came up with “unhealthy. Weak.” He added, “But at the time, when we were talking about it, she seemed to be sane and in control of herself.”

Fowler nodded. “I understand. I just have to ask all these things, because somebody has to, and I’m the one it fell to. If something we’re supposed to get on the record came out later, and we hadn’t already covered it, that might make us both look bad. Let’s see. You said that at first she wasn’t affectionate or friendly. Did she resent you for saving her?”

Mallon reflected. “I’m not sure. Maybe a little.”

“Did you have to struggle with her, maybe to get her out of the drink, or make her go with you after?”

“No.”

Fowler looked at him with a furrowed brow, as though asking him for a favor. “Sometimes drowning people get a panic grip on you-climb right up on you and hold you under. You might have to hit them to keep them from dragging you under with them.”

“No,” said Mallon. “She was unconscious.”

“Even then,” said Fowler. “An unconscious girl is just a hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight. Sometimes you have to grab them any way you can.”

“I used a cross-chest pull, my arm over her left shoulder and under her right arm. She didn’t fight, and I didn’t have to do anything but swim. When I got her to the shallows, I took both her wrists and dragged her up on the sand. It didn’t hurt her, and all I was worried about was keeping her face above the surface. When I got her to the shore I gave her CPR, and she coughed up some water. She never said anything about pain, so I assume there was none.”

Fowler said, “Okay. Thanks very much for coming in and telling us about this, Mr. Mallon. It will help us clear this up. When a young woman like that dies, it’s just… mysterious.”

“You’re welcome,” said Mallon. He stood up to leave, but Fowler made a quiet uh sound, and Mallon turned his head and waited.

Fowler was looking at his notes, then at Mallon, then at his notes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll need to have you give the evidence guys your prints and a blood sample.”

“Why? The most my DNA would tell you was that we had sex, and I already told you that.”

“Standard procedure. We do it in any case like this. It’s mainly to eliminate you if something should come up later. If there’s a second set of prints on the weapon, you’ll want us to know right away they’re not yours. Likewise, blood and so on.”

Mallon was sure now that the detective had been lying to him from the beginning. He had been prodding Mallon with these questions because he suspected him of something: killing the girl, or maybe rape. “It doesn’t sound like standard procedure. Should I call my lawyer?”

Fowler’s jaw tightened, and he let out a breath in a speculative hiss. “That’s up to you. I’m certainly not going to go on record telling any citizen that he’s wasting his money to get an attorney. I will say that you just spent over an hour telling me a long story voluntarily, and that I wasn’t planning to ask you any more questions.”

Fowler looked innocent, even mildly disappointed and insulted. But Mallon was aware that a cop conducting an interrogation had no legal responsibility to tell a suspect the truth. Mallon reminded himself that he had nothing to protect. If they wanted his fingerprints or his blood, they would get them eventually, and how could they incriminate him? He said, “Okay. I guess there’s no need to wait around for my lawyer.”