Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  She pushed the door open and held it, and it occurred to Mallon why Lydia’s offer had sounded so perfunctory and insincere to him. Lydia had known Sarah would not send them away. If she did, she would be left sitting alone in this house grieving, but knowing nothing about what had happened.

  Mallon followed Lydia in and stood awkwardly beside her in the small living room. Mallon liked the room as much as he had liked the outside of the house. Built-in bookcases covered two of the walls, all filled tightly, but without pretense. There were old leatherbound volumes stuck in among paperbacks, sets of faded clothbound books that looked as though someone had reread them many times beside bright-jacketed books he recognized from recent visits to bookstores. The framed pictures on the walls were all interesting rather than merely decorative. There were a couple of miniature portraits of nineteenth-century people who didn’t seem to be famous and weren’t beautiful, a couple of color plates of ferns from some forgotten botany text.

  She said, “I’m her sister. Carlson is my married name. Our parents are dead, so I’m all she had. Tell me what happened.”

  Lydia glanced at Mallon. “Mr. Mallon spoke with her a few hours before she died. I think he can tell you more than I can.”

  Mallon turned toward her to speak and felt alarm, but he took a breath and began, trying to say enough words to fill the void between them. He told the first part of his story honestly and fully, describing what had happened at the beach, their walk to his house, everything that had been said. He spoke without lying about anything. He did not try to make himself seem less than quick and brave in saving Catherine, nor did he pretend he had not felt a stupid vanity at the thought that he’d been a hero. He talked until he came to the point when she reappeared at the top of his staircase wearing his robe, then began to leave out parts of it. “After her nap she said she was hungry. She didn’t have any clothes with her that she was willing to wear to a restaurant, so I went out for food. When I returned, she was gone. I drove around the area searching for her, but never found her. I waited for hours, left the door unlocked and the lights on in case she came back. The next I heard of her was two days later, when the newspaper reported that she’d been found.”

  Sarah Carlson asked, “Did they find a note?”

  Lydia shook her head. “No. They always look for one, but it’s not unusual not to leave one.”

  Sarah narrowed her eyes at Lydia, but did not say what she was thinking. Mallon knew it was something angry about Lydia’s way of talking. She implied that everything was something that had happened hundreds of times before. There was nothing special or new about what this woman’s only sister had done to herself.

  Mallon tried to erase the impression by giving the same answer to her question more gently. “I’m sorry. If she left a note, they haven’t found it yet.” He paused. “We’d like to help you. Are there any other relatives we should speak to, or do you prefer to call them yourself?”

  She seemed to be listening more closely to Mallon now, as though she had detected something surprising in his voice. “You feel terrible, don’t you?”

  Mallon took two breaths before he answered. “Yes, I do,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, wanting to tell her about his own sister. But he concluded that the impulse was misguided: this was about her sister, her feelings, not his. “I tried to get her to see a doctor at the hospital, offered to take her to a different one if she wanted. She refused, and I let it go. I tried to remind her that life isn’t always the same, and that people get through bad times. I tried to convince her that if she let herself live for another day she might feel better. I failed. I didn’t say enough, or I didn’t say it well, or what I said was stupid and beside the point. I was the last chance, and my arguments weren’t good enough, or I wasn’t good enough. I’m very sorry.”

  Sarah Carlson shook her head, tears still running down her face. He could tell that what she was going to say was costly. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Nobody could have said anything that would have convinced her.” Mallon knew, rationally, that she could not possibly mean it. She must believe that if only she had been the one, it would have made all the difference.

  He said, “I think you’re very generous to say that. I wish things had been different.”

  “I meant it. See, Cathy had a problem with depression. Not a clinical imbalance or disease, where a doctor can prescribe something. It was sadness.”

  Lydia visibly straightened, her head held still, as though if she moved she might miss a word, or startle Sarah into silence.

  Sarah sighed. “It was one of those things that you read about in the papers, or see on television. It must happen to lots of other people, but it still doesn’t seem real to me. Cathy had a boyfriend. She was absolutely devoted to him, adored him. For about a year she was impossible to listen to. She wouldn’t talk about herself, or what she thought or did, because he was what she thought about, and trying to please him was what she did. If there was something to have an opinion about, it was ‘Mark thinks’ this or that, or even, ‘Mark knows about these things, and he says’ this or that.”

  Mallon had lied. Neglecting to tell her about the sex made his whole story false. Mallon felt ashamed while he listened to her now, because listening this way was another act of deception, pretending to be receptive to every word, but really waiting to hear the secret reason that Sarah would divulge in a moment of weakness or misplaced trust.Or maybe she would report with such perfect accuracy that she would describe the reason without knowing it for what it was.

  He decided that to dispel the feeling, he had to make her remember she was talking to strangers. “Who is he? Does he live in Pittsburgh?”

  Sarah shook her head. “She met him in Los Angeles. I remember there was a class she took in the evening. She wanted to get a master’s degree in psychology, and this was an undergraduate class she wanted to make up. She met him at some coffee place on campus. He wasn’t in her class; he was just having coffee. About a month later she wrote and told me she had moved in with him. I didn’t think much of that, but she sent a picture of him in the letter, and I could hardly blame her. He was gorgeous. He looked like a model: tall and thin with black hair and blue eyes. He really did seem to be perfect, and she wasn’t my baby sister anymore, she was a grown woman. She was happy, so I was happy.”

  “What happened?” asked Mallon.

  “Everything was great for about a year. Then it wasn’t, or maybe she was just beginning to worry that it wouldn’t always be. She was kind of tense and irritable when I talked to her on the phone. About that time they moved to a different apartment. One day she left a message on my machine with a new phone number. A month later she called with another one. Then, six weeks after that, Mark was dead.”

  Now Lydia stopped hiding her interest. “Dead? How?”

  “Murdered. Shot dead in his car in a dark alley behind their apartment, where their garage was. She came to see me the next week, and she had a newspaper article about it. There was a lot of vague stuff about how he spent a lot of time in after-hours clubs and was ‘associated’ with people in the designer-drug scene, and all that. If the reporter knew what he was talking about, the article didn’t manage to convey it to me. People in their twenties go to clubs, and when they do, there are people who might be using just about anything. Of course, I asked Cathy.”

  “Did your sister explain it?”

  “She admitted that she had been getting nervous about some of the people Mark seemed to know. And now and then he would be out all night, and when he came in it was pretty clear he had been partying.”

  “Other women?”

  Sarah shrugged. “She didn’t know, and she said she didn’t want to know, but after all, he wasn’t out all night alone. He must have been with somebody and it wasn’t her, right?”

  Lydia said, “Did he take a lot of drugs, or just know people who did?”

  “She said she never saw him take anything. But she admitted that if he had wanted to, he
could easily have fooled her. She didn’t care. She was absolutely in love with him. When she came and told me all this, she hadn’t slept in two days, and she talked just about all night, until she fell asleep. She woke up about fifteen hours later, and she had changed.”

  “How?” asked Mallon.

  “She never talked about him much after that, but she was always thinking about him. I waited for a month, but she was still that way—mourning him as though he had just died. One morning when I woke up she was packing. She thanked me and said she was going to New York.”

  “Why did she pick New York?”

  “I don’t know. She lasted there a few months, working in a restaurant. Then she moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, because it was a change from New York. Then she moved back to L.A. After Mark died, she was never the same. She was nervous, restless. She went places, but it wasn’t because she was hoping that anything was going to happen when she got there. It was more like a person pacing the floor, just moving because staying in one place was intolerable. She came here two months ago. She stayed here with me. She rented a car, the way she always had, but all the time while she was here she probably never went farther than the yard. I would come home from work and find her lying flat on her back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. She had no desire to see anybody from the old days, or to pick up the phone to talk to anybody in any of the places she’d lived. Not even L.A. She had always been the one who was athletic, but this time she seemed physically weak. She was unwilling to move, but she wasn’t ever at rest. Finally one day, she packed up again to go home. That’s what she said. That it was time to go home.”

  Sarah barely got the words out before she dissolved into tears again. Mallon and Lydia let their eyes meet while hers were closed. There seemed to Mallon to be nothing for them to do but wait. Lydia gave her only ten seconds before she said, “What was Mark’s last name?”

  “Romano.”

  Lydia said, “Do you know whether they caught the person who killed him?”

  “No,” said Sarah. “I don’t think so.”

  “Did that seem to bother Cathy?”

  She stared at the window for a moment, and her answer seemed to come as a mild surprise to her. “I don’t think so. She talked about him, about good things they had done together. She didn’t talk about the killer at all. I suppose that if the only man you ever loved that much is killed, then what matters is that he’s gone. She never talked about the rest of it, the way some people seem to. Like they could never rest until the person gets punished. I think Cathy knew she could never rest no matter what.”

  Mallon said, “Maybe if I had somehow known all of this at the time, I could have said or done the right things.”

  “No. I knew everything, and I talked to her over and over for a year or more. It made no difference. The only thing that would have was bringing Mark back.”

  Lydia said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give the Santa Barbara police your phone number and address. They’ll need to talk to you, and there will have to be arrangements made.”

  Sarah looked at the floor. “I know. I’ll call them right away. I’ll have her brought back here so she can be buried near my parents.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself. Mallon knew she was going to be talking to herself often in the next few days, reminding herself of things that needed to be done, people who needed to be called. Death wasn’t just an event that happened by itself. It was a lot of work.

  Lydia stood and said, “We’ll be back in California tomorrow. If there’s anything we can do to help, here’s my business card. It has my number on it.” Sarah accepted it, but placed it on a bookshelf without looking at it.

  She said, “Thank you. And, Mr. Mallon, I thank you for trying so hard to help my sister. I don’t think acts of kindness are wasted or lost. You made my sister’s last memory of people warmer and brighter.”

  All the time she was speaking, they were advancing on the door, and then they were outside. Mallon looked for a last time at the yellow house. It was outdated now, the cheerful paint job and the neat interior all part of a phase of Sarah Carlson’s life that had stopped existing at the moment when he and Lydia had stepped onto her porch.

  He stood on her front walk, gripped by the impulse to go back up the steps and tell her the rest of the story. He asked himself what he was longing for. Could he possibly want sympathy from her for the sense of loss that he felt? No, it was something else. He had momentarily imagined that telling Sarah something so private—so damning, now that Catherine had proved that her consent could not have been the free choice of a person in control of her will—would make Sarah reciprocate and tell him things that were equally private: intimate details and secrets that would make him finally understand what Catherine had been thinking. He recognized that the urge was insane. If he told Sarah that he’d had sex with her sister a couple of hours before she’d killed herself, she could only loathe him. He had already heard everything she would ever tell him.

  “Bobby?” Lydia’s voice startled him. “Forget something?”

  “No,” he said, turning toward the car, and took a step. “Just for a minute, I thought I had.”

  “You’re right,” Lydia said softly. “We told her enough.”

  CHAPTER 8

  As Mallon drove the Town Car around the corner and pulled over on the next block, Lydia took out her cell phone and dialed a long-distance number. “Detective Fowler, please.” She turned to Mallon. “You know we’ve got to do it.”

  Mallon nodded, then listened with undisguised curiosity.

  “This is Lydia Marks. Robert Mallon and I are in Pittsburgh.” She repeated, “Pittsburgh. We’ve managed to locate the sister of Catherine Broward. Yeah, the one who killed herself. The sister’s name is Sarah Carlson and she’ll be calling you shortly. Want her number and address anyway?” She recited them, spelling the street name. “You’re welcome. Nothing you haven’t heard before. There was a boyfriend, he died, and she never got over it. The only odd thing was that he got murdered.” She rolled her eyes at Mallon. “Mark Romano. It was in L.A., about a year ago.” She paused for only a second. “I doubt it, but I’m going to look more closely when I get back. Of course I’ll let you know anything I find.” There was another pause. “Oh? That’s quick. I’d better let you take her call.”

  She avoided Mallon’s eyes as she put the telephone away. “There,” she said. “Now he’s got nothing to bitch about, and if he finds out something we don’t know, he might very well save us from wasting our time trying to get it too. In any case, he hasn’t got the unpleasant suspicion that I’m a problem.”

  Mallon gave a single nod and a perfunctory half smile of acknowledgment, but he seemed not to have necessarily agreed. He remained silent as he pulled back onto the residential street and turned in the direction of the highway back to their hotel.

  “Well, what do you think?” Lydia asked. “This might be a good place to quit.”

  Mallon looked surprised. “Why do you say that?”

  “You tried to save a girl. You wanted to know why she wasn’t willing to be saved. Now you know: her boyfriend was killed, she felt depressed, and she never got over it.”

  Mallon seemed to be comparing the assertion with some interior standard. “I’m not ready to quit. I don’t think I know enough yet.”

  Lydia considered. “You don’t think the sister told us the truth?”

  “Well,” said Mallon, “I think what she told us was true. I don’t imagine for a second that she told us everything she knew to be true, and I think she suspects still more that she isn’t sure is true, but may be. All of it together doesn’t seem to be enough.”

  “Has it occurred to you that some things can’t be known so completely and in such detail that there are no mysteries left?”

  “Sure,” Mallon said. “But I don’t think we’ve reached the end. We’ve just got one person’s reaction, with one point of view.”

  Lydia said, “Let’s look at it from another poin
t of view, then: yours. We’ve just listened to her only relative. What did you hear that makes you curious? You tell me what to look at next.”

  “The relationship with Mark Romano.”

  “Fine,” said Lydia. “That’s L.A. We can be on a plane back to L.A. in an hour or two. We’ll find out what we can about Romano, and see where that leaves us.”

  The flight back to Los Angeles seemed longer to Mallon than the flight to Pittsburgh. This plane seemed to be smaller than the last, and Lydia had said little since the conversation in the car. Mallon opened the subject again. “I know I’m being self-indulgent.”

  “If you know, then why are you doing it?”

  “I think it’s because I realized that for the first time in my life I actually could. I’ve seen things happen to other people, had things happen to me. I don’t think I ever really understood why most of them happened. This one I saw coming. I knew what she was trying to do, but I still didn’t understand what she was thinking, why she was doing it. I don’t, even now. This seems to me to be a chance to find out one thing that matters.”

  “I’ve known since the beginning that this isn’t just about her,” said Lydia. “When you first realized what she was doing, you felt as though you were reliving your sister’s last day, when you talked to her and couldn’t save her. You were trying to make sure that this time it came out right—that you said the right things, did the right things, and made it not happen.”

  “Maybe I was,” Mallon said. “It didn’t work. All that’s left now is knowing.”

  “What you want isn’t possible to get in one lifetime. It’s omniscience. That’s why people read books. Maybe you could take a night class or something.”

  “Night class,” said Mallon. “That’s where she met him.” He was silent for a time. “What do you think of him?”