“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.”