Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  Time was passing. What should he do now? He could not go to a meeting with Angela Berwell knowing that she was planning to trap him into saying something she could use against him, but how could he refuse? He got out of the car, walked across the grass of the park toward the back of the county art museum. There were pay telephones to the left, just across the path from the entrance to the Page Museum, where the finds from the La Brea Tar Pits were displayed. He hurried to the nearest of the telephones, put in two quarters, took out the sheet of paper where he had written the number of the Hollywood station, and dialed.

  A male voice answered, “Hollywood Division.”

  Mallon said, “I’d like to leave a message for Detective Angela Berwell in Homicide, please.”

  “I’ll connect you with her voice mail.”

  After Mallon had heard her recorded voice say, “Please leave a message,” he said, “This is Robert Mallon. I’m afraid I won’t be able to meet you today after all. I hope it’s not too late, and you check your messages in time. Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  He hung up the telephone, hurried back to his car, and drove. He hated not being able to get Angela Berwell’s help, and the knowledge that she had turned on him made him afraid. He made his way to the San Diego Freeway and returned to his hotel. When he was in his room again, he dialed his own telephone number.

  The telephone rang four times, there was a click, and his answering machine came on. “If you would like to leave a message—”

  Mallon pressed the keys for his three-digit code. If the police in Santa Barbara suspected him too, they would hear him calling in to check his messages, but certainly they would have played them already. The machine said, “One. New. Message.”

  “Robert?” The voice was high, tense, and worried. “It’s Diane. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for days. Where are you? If you’re there, pick up.” There was a pause. “I guess you’re not. Call me as soon as you get in.”

  Mallon hung up the telephone. He looked at his watch. It was after twelve, but he dialed Diane’s office.

  There were two rings, an unfamiliar clicking, then another ring. Sylvia said, “Law office. May I help you?”

  Mallon said, “Hello, Sylvia. This is Robert Mallon. I’m returning Diane’s call.”

  Sylvia’s voice seemed uncomfortable. “She’s not in the office right now, Mr. Mallon. But she asked that you leave a number so she can call you back.”

  Mallon said, “I’m in L.A.,” then read the number to her off the label on the telephone.

  “I’ll have her call as soon as I can. She’s due back from the courthouse any minute.”

  “Okay,” said Mallon. He hung up and sat on the bed for a moment, staring at the wall. He had heard a sound while she had been writing down his number. She had heard it, and had immediately started talking again, with that business about the courthouse. She had been trying to distract him, in case he had heard it too. The sound had been the whistle of a train.

  Diane’s office was on De la Guerra. The nearest train tracks were south of Haley, near the ocean. The whistle he’d heard had been too loud, too close. She had not been in the office. She had not exactly said that she was in the building on De la Guerra Street. She had said, “Law office,” which was the way all lawyers’ phones were answered, for some reason. He decided it was foolish to make up excuses. She had lied to him. She had said Diane was on her way back from the courthouse. With call forwarding, either of them could be anywhere.

  The telephone beside him rang. He took a breath. “Hello,” he said, keeping his voice even and calm. His own demeanor seemed to be the only part of the universe that he was able to control, and all he could do with it was to hide his uneasiness, anger, and confusion.

  “Robert?” It was Diane’s voice, as he had expected. At one time he used to love to listen to it, the carefully modulated tones like music. He had never minded that the voice was an artifice. It had made him feel flattered, the way seeing a woman dress up to meet him did.

  “Hello, Diane,” he said. “You left a message on my machine to call.” His own voice—the tone of unconcern—sounded insane to him. He had been attacked twice over the past two days by people he’d never seen before, and he was concealing it.

  “Robert,” she said, her voice tightening to a breathless whisper. “I’m so glad I finally reached you. I think we’re both in terrible danger. I’m not calling from my office. I’m afraid to go near the place. The calls get forwarded to Sylvia, and she calls me so I can return them.”

  Mallon was disconcerted. Over the past two days, he had slowly come to the belief that Diane had been lying to him. He let his suspicion come into his voice. “You heard about the power of attorney?”

  “What power of attorney? Robert, I’m not calling you about some stupid papers that need to be signed. I think somebody is planning to kill us.”

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Did you know I revoked your signature power for my accounts?”

  She drew in a breath, as though to raise her voice and insist that he pay attention to what she had been trying to tell him, but then the silence grew longer. The pause sounded as though she had sensed that he believed what he had said was extremely important, and now she was trying to fathom what had been happening to him. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because the people at Wells Fargo called to ask me why I wanted to liquidate the whole account there—why I wasn’t satisfied.”

  “I don’t get it. Why are you doing it?”

  “I’m not. They said they had received a transfer order with your signature on it.”

  “Mine? Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Who are these people? How did they know about any account, let alone know that my name would do them any good?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” said Mallon. It was not exactly the way he had wanted to put it. He had wanted to accuse her, to tell her she was lying. She seemed so guilty, but now he was beginning to wonder whether he was just being jumpy, suspicious of everybody. She seemed to read his thoughts.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m just so scared that I’m suspecting everybody, but I was the one who did most of the talking to the police in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Maybe I was too clear about our business relationship. It wouldn’t be hard to find out the names of the banks you deal with. A credit check would turn up that much.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you think one of the cops is involved?” he asked. He tried unsuccessfully to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

  “I can’t trust my own thoughts right now,” she said. “I don’t know who anybody is. There were people watching my office. There was a woman who took my picture when I parked my car at La Cumbre Plaza, and then again near the courthouse. That night there were two men following me when I tried to drive home. I did everything I knew to lose them, but they stayed right behind me. A couple of times they came so close I thought they were going to try to push me off the road. Instead of going home, I stopped at a neighbor’s house and rang the bell. When he came to the door they drove off.”

  Mallon squeezed his eyes shut. The woman with the camera was certainly real. “What do you think we should do?”

  “I think we’ve already done it,” she answered. “We’ve both got to stay out of sight as long as we can, at least until we can find out what’s really going on, and who we can trust to help us.” She hesitated for a moment. “Have any of the police officers told you that you have to stay in the area?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I don’t know who is doing this. I thought it was something to do with Lydia Marks. But if somebody is trying to use my name to get at your money, then maybe Lydia was just killed to get her out of the way of that. Maybe it’s … I don’t know. Robert, you have to get out of there, away from southern California.”

  “What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m going, believe me. I’ve
been hiding in a hotel for days. The only thing that’s been holding me here was that I couldn’t disappear until I’d talked to you.” She paused. “Robert, as your attorney, I can tell you that if nobody told you that you can’t leave, then you can. And as your friend, I would tell you not to pay attention if they had. It’s time to leave. And don’t take a plane. If somebody who’s getting information from the police is involved, they might be able to get your destination. Get in your car and drive somewhere. Just tell me where you’re going, so I can meet you. We’ll go to authorities we know can’t be involved, because they’re out of state.”

  “All I’ve got is a rental car. Two men shot up my car last night, trying to kill me.”

  She took a breath, and he could hear a tremor in her throat as she let it out. “You can’t use a rental car. It’s even easier to trace than a plane ticket. We’ll go together. I’ll drive you. I bought a new car.”

  “New car?”

  “After those men followed me, I asked myself whether it was worth the money to trade my old one in and buy a new one. Believe me, it feels as though it is. I went to a lot of trouble to get a car that nobody will recognize. I don’t want to go where you are. I’m afraid if somebody followed you there, they’ll see it. We’ll meet somewhere. I’ll drive past. If somebody is following me, you’ll see them, and know enough to get out fast. If I come past again and you’re gone, I’ll know I have a problem.”

  “Where do we meet?”

  “I don’t know … yes, I do. Do you remember about a year ago, I told you about a place where I was thinking about investing in some real estate?”

  “Well, yes, I do,” said Mallon. “I think I can get there. When?”

  “After dark. Say, ten o’clock. Is that all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” she said, “we haven’t said aloud where it was, and we haven’t said what my car looks like or where I’ll be coming from. We haven’t said where we’ll be going after that. I guess it’s the best we can do.”

  “I guess so,” said Mallon. “Good luck to us.” He heard her hang up, so he did too. He sat for a time, going over the conversation in his mind. She had said something that would explain each of the suspicious facts: she had disappeared abruptly because she too had seen the woman with the camera, and then gotten stalked. She had claimed she had not known about the attempt to take the money from the private banking account at Wells Fargo. Of course, it could have been a lie, but suddenly he had realized that this was extremely unlikely. If she had wanted to get his money, or just deny him the use of it so he would be easier to kill, she should have been able to think of a better way than signing her own name to a withdrawal order. In a way, it seemed to him a sign of his emotional distress that he could have suspected her at all.

  The most persuasive indication to him that she was innocent was her plan to drive him out of the area. She was the one who had been most cautious about setting up procedures that he could use to protect himself from ambush. He tried to think of a way to know for certain, but there was only one: he would have to show up to meet her.

  CHAPTER 28

  Mallon sat in the bushes on the edge of somebody’s front lawn. He felt a faint movement of air, and it gave him hope. It was a hot night, but something was going on far out at sea, and the breath of it was just reaching shore. He had chosen this spot because the interior of the house behind him was dark, and it had the look of a place that was locked up except on weekends. The alarm company signs that said ARMED PATROL and ARMED RESPONSE seemed to be placed more aggressively than usual, and the sturdy doors and shuttered windows were permanently lit by small outdoor floods.

  He stared through the shrubbery at the house three lots to the north. He remembered the day only about a year ago when he had allowed Diane to drive him here to look at it. He had been reluctant at first: the reason for the trip had been that she wanted Mallon, a former contractor, to appraise the building. He had protested that he had never built anything within two hundred miles of Malibu. He had no knowledge of the current codes and regulations in Los Angeles County, he had not worked in almost ten years, and he had not kept up with any of the technological changes that were common in high-end houses, and so could not tell her whether the fixtures he found wired into the place were godsends or crap. But she had sighed. “Robert. You made millions building houses. I know you’ve kept your license current because I just called the state and they told me.”

  “For nostalgia.”

  “So take a brief stroll down memory lane with me to look at my wiring and plumbing.” She had smiled. “I’ll buy you a spectacular dinner in L.A. for your trouble.”

  “Why do you want me to do it? You’ll have to hire an L.A. contractor to check it just to satisfy the bank anyway.”

  “I know. Come on, Robert. If you get a dog, I’ll housebreak it for you.”

  “I don’t want a dog.”

  “I’ll bring you your next financial statement wearing high heels and a pearl necklace.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, yes. Other things too, of course. But I really want you to do this for me.” She had frowned. “I need a good investment that includes a tax write-off. This would be a beauty, but only if there aren’t any nasty surprises. You’ve invested in coastal property lots of times since you retired. Won’t you please do me this favor? You’re the only one I know who’s qualified and can’t possibly be interested in making money from it. I need somebody I can trust.”

  That had done it. He had come down here with her, and spent three hours on that house. He had climbed onto the roof, checked the crawl space just below it. He had checked the plumbing, and randomly tested a few circuits for her. Finally, he had gone under the house. What he had found was a foundation that had begun shifting because it had not been anchored properly to the rock beneath the sand. A sewer pipe was already stressed, and might break within the next year. She could have paid the million and a half the realtors were asking and come here one day to see that the huge windows on the beach side had popped, and that she couldn’t open the front door anymore.

  They had driven home to Santa Barbara speaking in quiet, thoughtful tones. When he had gotten out of the car, she had thanked him warmly, but sadly. “Your friendship was all that saved me. I’ll never forget it.” Then she had brightened. “I’ll never forget the realtor who tried to sell me that place, either. Can you imagine pulling that on a lawyer?”

  He had grinned. “Actually, I can.” He had added, “Not you, of course.”

  As Mallon remembered that night, he felt reassured. It was the ordinariness of it, the mundane, comfortable history of his relationship with Diane that made him feel his confidence growing. He had known her for eight years. Could she have been planning to do him harm all this time, and never done it? That made no sense. Diane would show up, and she would do exactly as she had promised. They could trust each other.

  He heard the sound of an unseen car off to his left. He had been here for an hour, and this was only the second one to come along this narrow lane. In a moment he would see the shine of the headlights while the car was still far off, throwing faint light on the pavement where it curved. Next the light would brighten, throwing shadows and making the trees in front of the house across the street stand out from the undifferentiated grayness. Then the car would come around the bend, and for a second, illuminate this part of the street before it moved past. He lay flat in the brush and waited. If it was Diane, he would have to let her go by the first time without signaling her—just spot her in her unfamiliar new car, watch to be sure she was not followed, and await her second appearance.

  Mallon kept his eyes to the left on the house at the bend. The car noise grew louder, closer. In the still air he could hear the tires tossing up bits of gravel, but the house across the street did not light up. Diane’s car must be moving up the street without its headlights. He detected a change in the engine’s pitch. It was stopped, idling. Why would she do that? Was she being f
ollowed? Could she be stopping to deceive some pursuer into making a premature move to reveal himself? He considered the possibility that the driver could be somebody other than Diane, and decided it was best to stay where he was and wait.

  Mallon kept his body down behind the front hedge, but watched the road. He was staring at the bend so hard, expecting a change, that he was not startled when a man appeared there, walking along the shoulder on Mallon’s side. The man stepped into a pool of dim light from a flood at the peak of a garage and Mallon studied him. He was tall and lean, wearing a sport coat and wool trousers in a drab color, with a pair of shoes that had no shine and had thick rubber soles. The man passed out of the glow, and kept coming.

  Mallon felt a chill on the back of his neck, the sensation that hairs were beginning to stand up. The man must have walked past Diane stopped in the darkened car in the middle of the street. Neither of them had spoken, or Mallon certainly would have heard it. What if Diane had not come, and the car had belonged to this man?

  Diane might have come by here already, not seen Mallon, and made a mess of looking for him. This man could be someone who had followed her. Mallon heard the car engine stop. That meant the driver was still in it: there were at least two people within a couple of hundred feet of Mallon. It also meant that Diane was not here: she would not have turned off her engine.

  Mallon kept watching. This guy probably was a solitary resident out for a walk on a summer night. As he had the idea, it felt false to him. This man seemed wrong, somehow. Mallon tried to analyze the impression, to neutralize it, to argue himself out of it, but it was not working. The man was walking along with a kind of stiffness, his head held high but his arms and legs not quite moving naturally. It was as though he were just pretending to be loose and relaxed. And his clothes gave Mallon a strange feeling. The sport coat and the pants seemed too formal for the beach, and the night was uncomfortably warm. Mallon was wearing a sport coat because it was the darkest piece of clothing he had brought with him. He was using it to conceal himself. Why was this other man wearing one?