“We’re going to Pittsburgh because I think Catherine Broward may have come from there.”
Mallon looked politely interested. “Why do you think that?”
She said, “What you and I are working on now is an outline I got from a credit check. About two months ago, she was there. She flew to Pittsburgh from her last place in Los Angeles. She bought a plane ticket in Pittsburgh to fly back to Los Angeles after a couple of weeks. But while she was there, she didn’t use a credit card to pay for a place to stay. She didn’t arrive with a round-trip ticket. It all has a certain feel to it, doesn’t it?”
“A man?”
She shrugged. “If she was visiting a boyfriend, she would have made a round-trip reservation, knowing when the visit would be over. If she had been coming to Pittsburgh to live with him, she would have given up her apartment in L.A. and put her stuff in storage or shipped it. Those are things that create charges, and there aren’t any.”
“So you’re guessing she was visiting her family.”
“Everything is a guess right now, except that somebody let her stay for free. This isn’t science,” said Lydia. “It’s just like looking for parole violators. The method is still just using your instinct for recognizing something that’s odd.”
Mallon studied her for a moment. “Why did you start in Pittsburgh, and not L.A.? You think they’ll know, don’t you?”
She hesitated. “Maybe, if they are relatives. If she went home to see them for an open-ended visit, maybe what she was doing was something young people sometimes do. The world out there gets to be too much for them.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. She gets a job, and the job is low-paying and leads nowhere. She has a relationship, but the boyfriend isn’t somebody she wants to marry. So maybe she waits until she can get some time off or, more likely, makes time by quitting, and goes back to where she came from. She knows she can’t go back there to stay, because that would be the dead end of all dead ends. Her family is glad to see her, but even they know it isn’t going to last. Still, she toys with the idea of staying in Pittsburgh. What she’s doing, really, is playing that she can stay, pretending that she’s younger and hasn’t gone off on her own yet. It goes away.” She sighed. “Or it takes a worse turn.”
“Do you think it’s possible that Catherine went to see them because she knew she was about to commit suicide? I mean, if that’s who she saw.”
She nodded. “It’s entirely possible.”
“Then what?”
“Then either she will have told somebody her troubles, or she will have lied through her teeth, smiled a lot, and pretended everything was just great. They do that, too.”
They arrived in Pittsburgh in daylight, with the sun still very low and shining almost horizontally into the windows of the airport. Lydia rented a Lincoln Town Car and checked them into a large, expensive hotel downtown. While they were walking to the elevators, Mallon said quietly, “Everything doesn’t have to be luxurious just because I came along. I’m still a pretty ordinary guy. Do whatever you normally do.”
“I’m not wasting your money,” she said. “When I hunt bail jumpers, I check into the cheapest, most anonymous fleabag in town, lie low, and start hunting for my guy in the neighborhood. In this kind of investigation I try to play against type a little. People who live in a town know the hotels better than we do. They form impressions of outsiders based on a lot of superficial things, including what kinds of cars they drive and where they’re staying. Detective work is a trashy profession. Expecting that people will talk about personal matters to a private detective staying in a cheap motel by the tracks is asking too much.”
“This hotel’s fine with me,” said Mallon. “I don’t have any more nostalgia for cheap hotels than you do. I just don’t want you to waste your energy trying to keep me pampered. I haven’t changed that much. Where do we go first?”
“You can get yourself settled in now. I’ve got to go back to the car-rental agency, but I’ll be back in an hour or two. If you can’t sleep, maybe you can take a walk and get a swim. That’s pretty much your regular routine, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Mallon. “That’s why I don’t need to do it here. What are we going to do at the car rental?”
“I’m going to get somebody to show me the forms Catherine Broward filled out to rent her car when she was here.”
“How?” asked Mallon. “We’re not cops carrying an arrest warrant anymore.”
“What I usually try first is bribery.”
“If the person turns you down, what do you try second?”
“Bribing somebody else.”
CHAPTER 7
They arrived outside the car rental just before nine. The sun was bright, but the air had a humid heaviness that made them glad to get into the small air-conditioned building. Mallon was silent while Lydia tried talking the pale, thin young woman behind the desk into showing them the papers, offering her one hundred, then three hundred, then five hundred dollars. As the young woman politely and cheerfully shook her head, the thin, faded blond hair flew into her face and she had to brush it away from her eyes in a practiced gesture that Mallon sensed made her feel unapproachable and yet alluring. It seemed to give Lydia an idea. She turned to look at Mallon.
Mallon stepped closer. “Miss,” he said. “I’m Robert Mallon, the client who hired Miss Marks. Catherine Broward tried to drown herself on a beach in California where I live. I pulled her out of the ocean, but a few hours later she shot herself. She’s dead. The police in Santa Barbara have not yet been able to find and notify her family. All we want to know is whether there’s a local address on the form where she said she could be reached. It might lead us to her parents. They could be frantic with worry, trying to reach her right now, and there’s no reason to make them go through that. They have a right to be told what happened.”
The young woman was no longer smiling opaquely, but she did not offer to give them anything.
Mallon persisted, as though what needed to be prodded was her memory. “She was about your age, not blond like you but with long, dark hair. She was kind of pretty-I don’t mean like a movie star, just a nice-looking person. Do you at least remember her coming in?”
The young woman looked worried, and perhaps even a bit irritated by his attempt to manipulate her. “So many people come in for cars, and I have to watch the paperwork so closely that I don’t always even look close at faces.”
“Honey, you look at their faces when they show you their driver’s licenses,” Lydia reminded her gently. “You have to be sure it’s the same person.”
The girl’s smile came back. Mallon could see it was her armor. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Lydia would not be dismissed. “We’re not from your company. We don’t work for your company. Here’s my identification. As you can see, I really am a private investigator.”
The girl stared at the detective’s license, but seemed unconvinced. She looked at Mallon expectantly. He pulled out his wallet and held it open while she examined the California driver’s license behind the plastic to verify that his name really was what he had said. She sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can find.”
Lydia reached into her purse. “Here’s your five hundred.”
“I don’t want it,” she said. “I just don’t want to lose my job.” She began typing on the keyboard of her computer terminal, staring at the screen. Then she took the pen that was lying on the counter tied to a string, scribbled something on the back of a company brochure, and handed it to Mallon. She did not touch the money Lydia had placed on the counter. “That’s the address and phone number she gave.”