“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?”