Dead Aim Read online

  “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.”

  “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?”

  “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.”