by Thomas Perry
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I heard what Sarah Carlson said. So far the only person who ever laid eyes on him seems to have thought he was a prince. I need to find out more facts before I start having an opinion of my own.”
Lydia and Mallon rented a car at Los Angeles International Airport and drove it to the Hotel Bel-Air, then checked in. Lydia said, “I’m going to go to my room and see what I can get on the Internet. I’ll call you later for dinner.” Mallon followed a bellman to his bungalow. He unpacked his single bag, showered, changed, and went out.
Los Angeles was more crowded and intimidating than he remembered it. He knew that was a sign that age was advancing rapidly, making him not timid exactly, but prickly and unwilling to be inconvenienced. In Santa Barbara, people walked. Here, in order to go to a place where he could walk without appearing to be a vagrant or a criminal, he had to take a cab a couple of miles, past Santa Monica Boulevard to the shopping area of Beverly Hills. He walked up and down the streets pretending interest as he looked in famous windows at rather ordinary merchandise. The sidewalks and the fronts of buildings seemed to be particularly clean and mostly white. The blocks were short and required waiting for traffic lights to change, so he went around blocks in a series of squared loops.
When he returned to the hotel, Lydia was sitting at a table in the tiled patio dining area, sipping a tall glass of iced tea.
She said, “You must have walked halfway to Tijuana. I’m glad you finally made it back, because we’re meeting somebody here in a few minutes.”
“Who?”
“A cop. I looked up the article in the L.A. Times that Sarah Carlson told us about to get the name of the homicide detective who investigated the Romano thing. It turned out to be somebody I met while I was here on a case one time. It’s a big favor to come down here to talk to us, so you’re buying dinner. Better go put on a coat.”
Mallon went to his room and returned wearing the only sport coat he had brought from home. As he approached the table, Lydia looked to her right, smiling. Mallon turned his head in order to see the cop’s arrival.
She was blond and looked about thirty-five, with the raw, light-skinned sort of face he had always associated with the inland towns that were almost desert, skin that seemed to have been sunburned too many times.
Lydia said, “Here’s Mallon, my client. This is Detective Angela Berwell.”
She held out her hand to Mallon, but when he reached for it expecting her to grip too hard, as women in jobs like hers sometimes did, she surprised him by gently grasping his hand and letting go. She wore a blue summer dress with a pattern of white flowers, and high heels that were a bit too high. Mallon could see that Lydia was amused at her own cleverness in not mentioning that the cop was another woman. Mallon mumbled, “Pleased to meet you,” and she gave him a display of even white teeth and sky-blue eyes.
Next she turned to Lydia and hugged her, both of them careful not to touch their cheeks and smudge their makeup. Then she pulled back with a wry look on her face. “Love your purse, Lydia.” Mallon looked at it, a small, unremarkable black bag with a zipper on the side. “In fact, I’ve got one just like it.”
“You do?”
Detective Berwell nodded. “I almost brought it tonight. It’s the best I’ve ever found that was designed for the purpose. But I needed a bigger purse tonight. Want to show me a carry permit for the gun?”
“Sure.” Lydia took out her wallet and showed her a card.
“Town of Stovall. Kern County, eh?” She handed it back to Lydia, then mistook Mallon’s discomfort for surprise. “Nobody gets a concealed-weapon permit in most of the urban counties, L.A. County especially. So people who want one establish a residence in some rural county, and get a permit there. When they carry here, it’s legal. We can’t stop them.”
Mallon nodded politely, as though that loophole in the law were not already familiar to him. He supposed Lydia must have decided not to reveal that she and Mallon had once worked together as parole officers. He spent only a second wondering why, and then reflected that knowing more than people supposed was a useful pose.
Lydia smiled. “Don’t worry. I just got off an airplane. I’m not carrying. I just didn’t change purses when I left home.” She slipped her wallet back into the purse, then looked at Detective Berwell. “Did you bring the tapes?”
“Yes,” she said. She patted her oversized purse. “That’s what’s in here.”
“Would you like to have a drink out here first?” asked Lydia.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I’d like to get this over with, and do it where we can talk a bit in private.”
Lydia said to Mallon, “Let’s go to your room.”
Mallon led them past the open doorway of an interior dining room that was painted a pinkish color. They could see thick, starched white linen and heavy silver and quiet, unobtrusive waiters. Mallon waited until they were walking down the quiet garden path toward his bungalow before he spoke to Detective Berwell. “I appreciate your willingness to meet with us.”
She said, “It’s not entirely out of the goodness of my heart. This is partly for me. Lydia always says she’s the best, but the truth is, the worst I can say is that she’s only one of the best. I wouldn’t be upset if you paid her to turn up something that I missed and solve the Romano case for me.”
“Did she tell you how I got involved in this?”
She nodded, and her eyes stayed on him. They weren’t quite as cheerful. “I’ve been through that. Almost everybody I know has. When you lose one, you go over and over it for a while. I’m not sure what I have will help you: I don’t really know much about Catherine Broward. She just came up in the investigation with a few dozen other names. What I know about is Mark Romano.”
They had reached Mallon’s bungalow. Mallon sidestepped ahead of the others on the narrow stone walkway and opened the door. They stepped inside, and Mallon closed it. He gestured toward the couch, and Lydia and Detective Berwell sat. He pulled out the desk chair, turned it around, and sat facing them. Mallon said, “The newspaper implied he had been involved with the drug trade. Is it true?”
“Not exactly,” Berwell answered. “The way he first came to the department’s attention was on a surveillance. There were some gentlemen who were being watched by the D.E.A. The agents were taking videos, and the department was cooperating—running license plates, identifying people these guys met with, and so on—and he got himself on a couple of tapes. We identified him, so he got a file. Nobody ever got anything on him to add to the file, and certainly there was nothing illegal about what he was doing on the feds’ tapes: he was talking to people in a bar. So he was forgotten until he was murdered.”
“Do you have any idea who killed him, or why?” asked Mallon.
“You can die just by hanging around with the wrong people,” she said. “The men Romano was seen with had arrests for drug possession, some trafficking charges that didn’t stick, some suspected extortion, some assault, some domestic violence stuff. It wasn’t one crime, it was a pattern, a lifestyle.” She looked at him curiously. “Are you understanding this?”
“I think so,” he said. He understood it perfectly. What she had said applied equally to most of his old clients and all of their friends. This was a logical time to tell her that he had once been a parole officer, but he decided he would learn more if he left things as they were.
“Romano hung out with a social set who knew one another slightly because they went to the same clubs, used drugs, liked certain kinds of cars, and so on. As far as I could tell, the investigation fizzled because it was a search for organized crime, and all they found was a bunch of lowlifes. Most of the connections weren’t even between the men. They were between the women, who stood in front of the mirrors in the ladies’ rooms of bars, talking while they put on way too much makeup. If one of them had been dumped by a boyfriend, one of the others knew somebody who would be interested in taking her out
. They invited each other to parties, probably shared drugs. Maybe a couple of them bought and resold small amounts.”
“That’s it?” asked Lydia. She looked disappointed.
“Don’t get me wrong. Some of those people had connections with big, ugly drug networks, and some of them had committed real crimes. But Mark Romano wasn’t one of them. When you ask me if I think I know who killed him, I have to say yes: one of those people. I don’t know whether it was one of the ones he knew who got mad at him, or another one who happened to run into him and didn’t like him. And I don’t know why, exactly. My guess is that it was over a woman, because he was very popular with women, and jealousy is always a potent motive. But sometimes when there’s an investigation, even if it’s done perfectly and there are no mistakes or leaks, the bad guys seem to sense it. If Romano got killed because some criminal guessed there was a surveillance going on and thought he might be a police informant, he wouldn’t be the first. And there’s evidence to support that view. Within a minute or two after Romano was shot, the killer or killers walked into a house nearby and shot a family of four who must have seen what was going on. Jealous boyfriends don’t usually do that. They might open up on whoever they see right afterward—especially friends and relatives of the victim—or even turn the gun on themselves, but they don’t go looking for witnesses.”
She spoke in a tone that seemed designed to make Mallon see the futility of his inquiry, but he became even more attentive. “A whole family?”
“A mother, a father, and two kids, aged ten and six. They were the nearest neighbors who were home at the time, and there was nothing about them that could have gotten them killed except seeing too much.”
“That’s horrible,” Mallon said. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then looked at Detective Berwell again and asked, “Where does Catherine Broward come in? I assume you interviewed her right after the shooting?”
Detective Berwell shook her head. “No. She wasn’t living with him at the time of his death. The neighbors said there were frequent female guests but no roommate right then. Catherine Broward was not around, and he’d had at least one regular girlfriend for a couple of weeks after her.”
Mallon frowned. “Are you sure?”
She looked at him steadily. “It was a homicide investigation. We do try to get the easy facts straight.”
“It’s just that her sister seemed to be pretty sure that she still loved him. She said that his death was what threw Catherine into a depression, and she never recovered.”
Detective Berwell sighed. “I never met Catherine Broward. She came up only after we searched his apartment.” She looked at Lydia. “Think it’s time?”
“I’d say so,” said Lydia. She stood and waited while Detective Berwell pulled a videocassette from her purse and handed it to her. Lydia stepped to the television cabinet, slipped the tape into the VCR, and started it. The screen showed a few seconds of snow and static, then resolved itself into a dimly lighted bedroom.
Mallon watched while a young woman came into the room. A few seconds later, a young man came into the frame from somewhere in the vicinity of the camera. The woman switched off the bedside lamp, but the man turned it on again, then pushed her onto the bed. He said, “I want to be able to see you,” and she giggled and turned her face away from his, in the general direction of the camera. She did not seem to see it.
Mallon said, “That’s her. That’s Catherine.” He turned to Detective Berwell. “What is this? Can this be a surveillance tape?”
She gave her head a little shake. “Uh-uh. The man is Mark Romano. This is a tape he made himself. We found it when we searched his apartment.”
Mallon watched the screen for a minute or two. The couple were already naked, and caressing each other passionately. The sight made a wave of heat spread up the sides of his neck to his temples and his scalp: he sensed feelings of shame, anger, loss, and jealousy, all asserting themselves in shifting proportions. He turned away from the sight toward Detective Berwell, and saw that she was staring intently not at the television, but at him. He said, “I’m not sure I understand. He made tapes of himself and Catherine. Did she know?”
She shook her head slightly. “Not just her. There were a number of women. There were some tapes where we had a question about whether the woman was fully aware of what was going on. They were all conscious—more or less—but some were obviously under the influence of something. We got the best stills of faces we could from the tapes, identified the women, and asked them about it.” She gave Lydia a tired look and rolled her eyes. “I got to do that, of course.”
She returned her gaze to Mallon. “By the time we obtained Catherine Broward’s name, I had interviewed at least twenty. None of them had known they were being taped, but none of them claimed it was anything but consensual sex. Catherine Broward was out of town while that was going on, and by the time she got back, I had moved on to follow other leads, so somebody else interviewed her, but there are no revelations in the file. It was a pointless issue by then, anyway. None of the women knew about the tapes, so the tapes weren’t a motive for the murder. And even if we’d found a woman who had been drugged without her knowledge or something, we weren’t going to prosecute a dead man for rape.” She looked at the screen again, where Catherine Broward and Mark Romano were now having intercourse. She displayed no discomfort or embarrassment at the sight, only impatience. “Seen enough?”
Mallon nodded. “More than enough.”
Lydia stood up again and walked to the television to stop the tape. She pressed another button, and they could hear it rewinding.
“Her sister was under the impression that this Mark was the love of her life, and that his death caused the suicide,” Mallon repeated.
Berwell leaned forward and patted Mallon’s arm. “I know. Things aren’t always just one way. I’m sure that Catherine probably did tell her sister all of that, and meant it. When things were going well in the relationship, he was her true love, they were going to get married, and all that. But after the investigation, I can tell you it was never going to happen. She was kidding herself. He had a long history. He used his looks—which were really something, as you just saw—to attract women. And he could talk very convincingly. He would go wherever he could find women: college campuses, coffee shops, food courts at the big malls. He got their confidence, their trust, and then took advantage. He treated them like slaves, and spent their money as though it were his. When he was tired of them, he dumped them. In at least a couple of cases, he passed them on.”
“To whom?” asked Lydia. She handed Berwell the videotape, and Berwell put it back into her purse.
She looked at Mallon while she answered. “Now we’re back to the beginning—the people the feds were investigating. That seems to be the reason he was popular with creeps. He was somebody who knew a lot of attractive, available women. He had the temperament of a pimp.”
Mallon asked, “And the women put up with that?”
“Some of the women we interviewed weren’t exactly squeamish about it. They were basically no different from him. They used him too: got a place to live for a while, went to all the parties, and met people who had a lot of cash and were willing to throw it around. When Mark Romano moved on, they considered a change to one of the bigger creeps a soft landing, or even a step up. Who has a better supply of money and drugs than a guy who sells drugs?”
Mallon shook his head. “Catherine wasn’t that way at all. Why would she kill herself over a man like that?”
Angela Berwell’s lips formed a half smile, but her eyes were sad. “The reason somebody like him can exist is that some women are really good at convincing themselves of things that aren’t true. It’s entirely possible that when he kicked her out, she told herself they were just having a spat. And when he was with another woman he was just trying to make her jealous. I’ve seen people who have ignored everything they knew about some jerk, and spent years mourning the person they wished they had known. It�
��s possible that she even blamed herself for his murder. I can see a whole train of thought for that. She tells herself it’s her fault that he threw her out. She wasn’t pretty enough or compliant enough or giving him enough money. And it never would have happened if she had still been in his good graces that night. He wouldn’t have gone out at all, or she would have been with him and the killer wouldn’t have shot him in front of a witness, or whatever. I’ve spent hours listening to this kind of thing from other women. Maybe that’s what made Catherine Broward kill herself.”
“But she didn’t do it right away,” said Mallon.
“Right. It’s been about a year since he died. Lydia tells me she drifted around from city to city after that, not really accomplishing anything or taking hold. She showed up at her sister’s. That’s not an unusual thing, making a last visit.”
“I suppose not.”
“They’re not exactly saying good-bye. That would tip their families off. They’re just sort of taking a last look. Sometimes they say something revealing. In this case, it seems she had convinced her sister that what was wrong with her life dated from the death of Mark Romano. All I can say for sure is, if he was a loss to anybody, he was no loss at all to her. They had broken up at least a couple of months before he was killed. She wasn’t living with him. She wasn’t even in L.A. She’d left about six weeks before he was shot.”
“Before?” asked Mallon. “Are you sure?”
“I told you,” she said. “We don’t know everything, and we never find it out. But what we do know, we try to get right. She had been out of L.A. for six weeks before.”
“Where?”
“Up north, staying on a ranch somewhere above Santa Barbara.”
Lydia checked her watch. “We owe Angie a nice dinner, and our reservation is for eight. We’d better get back down the path before they give our table to some congressmen on a relief mission to Beverly Hills.”
Mallon stood up. “You’re right, Lydia. I’m getting hungry.” He went to the door and opened it for her and Detective Berwell. For the rest of the evening they were surrounded by strangers, so the conversation became light and pleasant, and was limited to comments about the preparation of the food, the beauty of the hotel, and the gentle, cool June weather the city was having. Mallon joined in as well as he could, but now and then one of the others would notice that he was staring down at the table, his brow furrowed in thought.
