“One was probably the ranch where she was staying near Santa Barbara.”
“Maybe,” Lydia conceded. “But the rest of what she told her sister was a fantasy. This guy was a slimy little character who preyed on women. He got killed because he was a bum who hung around with bums. He pissed somebody off. No mystery there. But she told her sister what a great catch he was.”
“I can imagine her telling her sister a reassuring lie that would keep her from worrying. But Catherine didn’t seem like a person who would delude herself to that extent.”
“Okay,” said Lydia. “I guess she preferred the delusion that Mark Romano would treat her differently from the way he’d treated everybody else. I’m not sure that we’re ever going to know exactly what she thought, but-”
“I get the point,” Mallon interrupted. “No matter what she thought, being with him is evidence of some delusion.”
Lydia sighed as she sat on the couch. “It’s my professional opinion that we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. Whatever nuance you read into the story, the essentials are not going to change: she ran into a guy who was very good-looking, who knew how to be charming, and fell in love with him. I think the fact that he had her tape among a couple of dozen others indicates that she was nothing special, and I accept Angie’s theory that he got tired of her and broke up with her. But I don’t insist on it. Even that doesn’t matter. Either way, we know she was deprived of his company forever by the shooter. She was depressed about it-felt guilt for running away, or regret for not letting him take even more advantage of her, or sadness at being dumped, or shame for being with him at all-and took herself out.”
“But which story is it?” asked Mallon. “We still don’t know, and it makes a difference.”
“You’re the client, Bobby,” said Lydia. “It’s still your money and your choice. If you want, we’ll keep looking into it until we can determine which it was, or until we find that we can’t. But if you’re ready to quit now, I’ll refund the part of your advance we haven’t already spent and call it even.”
“I want to keep looking,” said Mallon. “I have the feeling it’s not over, but I don’t know where to look next.”
Lydia sighed. “If you’re trying to find out some single fact that changes everything, that will make you feel satisfied that things happened for the best, you’re going to be out of luck.”
“Don’t you really mean that I’m out of luck if I’m trying to convince myself that I did and said the right things?” asked Mallon.
“I guess I do,” said Lydia. “Look, I’ve known you forever, Bobby. I understood from the beginning that you’re not just a rich guy who’s got morbid curiosity about some young girl. You cared about her a lot. Probably in about a month, she could have gotten you to marry her if she’d wanted. I’m just reminding you that no matter what we find out, we already know there wasn’t a happy ending.” She squinted her eyes for a moment, then said wearily, “But I suppose you still want to do it.”
Mallon nodded. “I still want to do it.”
“Well, there are things we can still look into. I might be able to find out more about these guys Romano knew who were involved in drugs.”
“That’s about him. It doesn’t tell us anything about Catherine,” Mallon said. “I need to know what she was thinking.”
Lydia looked up at him and nodded. At some point, Lydia supposed, she was going to have to fire her client.
“Maybe I’ll check with Detective Fowler in Santa Barbara and see if there’s anything new he can tell me,” she said. “They’ve had a chance to look around in Catherine’s apartment here in L.A., and maybe something turned up there. The apartment has been locked up, but as soon as her sister gets here, that’s over. Unless there’s some indication that it’s not a suicide after all, they won’t hold anything. Sarah will probably retrieve a few family mementos, dump the rest, and take her sister home to bury her.” She stood up. “Well, I’m tired. I’ll get started on all of that in the morning, and I’ll give you a call before noon. In the meantime, don’t be too hard on yourself. The more we learn, the clearer it is that this had nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do. You couldn’t stop it, because you didn’t cause it.”
He studied her. “You don’t just mean Catherine’s death, do you?”
“I mean both of them.” She suddenly leaned close to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek, then went to the door and let herself out.
As she drove away from the hotel, she glanced at the address she had retrieved from her computer earlier in the day, and headed east on Sunset toward Hollywood. Many times in the past twenty years she had been down to Los Angeles looking for clients who had decided to lose themselves. She knew the area between Franklin and Santa Monica Boulevard well, and when she had seen the address in the purse the day after Catherine’s death, she had thought she could even place the building in her memory. She had been right. It was not one of the old apartment buildings with decorative 1920s facades that had been refurbished in the past few years. It was a nearly new four-story stucco rectangle with rows of identical balconies and rows of identical aluminum windows that did not fit the neighborhood, a structure that managed to be ugly in spite of its simplicity. It was a bit after midnight when she came to the door of Catherine Broward’s apartment. She had considered doing this later, when the neighbors would be in their deepest sleep, but she had decided that coming later raised the stakes too high. If someone heard her at midnight, they would hear other sounds too, sounds coming from other parts of the building and sounds from the street. At twelve, she was probably a resident coming home from a party. At three, she was a burglar.
Lydia was glad to see that the locks on the doors along the corridor were a cheap, standard five-tumbler model that she was comfortable opening. She rechecked the apartment number, removed the pick and tension wrench from the lining of her purse, and began to work the lock. It took only a few seconds, and she turned the knob and entered.
She closed the door quietly, locked it, and stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light from the sliding glass doors on the balcony and listening for sounds that would indicate that someone had heard her. When she was ready she went to the glass doors and closed the drapes, then turned on her small flashlight and let its narrow beam show her the general structure of the place. She was in a compact living room, with an off-white couch and matching chair probably bought from Ikea. Beyond this room was an alcove that served as a kitchen, furnished with a table and four chairs. She let the light play on the counter surfaces for a moment, then opened the refrigerator to confirm her theory: it was empty. Either Sarah had already gotten here and thrown out everything, or Catherine had decided to quit the world without leaving a mess behind.
She looked in a drawer to see which it was, and found silverware and kitchen knives, all clean and neatly arranged in segmented trays: Catherine. Sarah would have packed those. She felt forebodings of failure-messy people and ones who did not know they were about to die were more accommodating than ones who planned suicide. They left things around that would answer questions. But she also felt a kind of guilty relief, since she would be able to tell Bobby Mallon that she had risked a burglary charge to get in, and then found nothing. She moved into the single bedroom.
The bed was a platform with a futon covered by sheets and a quilt in bright colors that she guessed had probably come from Ikea too. There were a small dresser and a simple desk with four drawers. She moved immediately to the desk and opened them, knowing before she did that she was simply looking in all the obligatory places. The drawers were three inches deep, not big enough to hold a large collection of old papers. The top one held pens and pencils and paper clips, the second stationery. The rest were empty.
It was like a man’s apartment-a dull man, at that. Catherine Broward had been a woman who traveled light. Or at least, she had ended as that kind of woman. Lydia suspected that no woman began that way. Happy women accumulated troves of things-furniture, cosmetics, clothes, useless trinkets, pictures, china, souvenirs. They were always adjusting their surroundings to suit them ever more closely. Even when they lived in apartments like this one, the kind of disposable architecture that any sensible person would know was doomed in the next earthquake, even when they were nomads who moved every year, they collected. She and all of the women she knew had a special energy for this incessant and pointless settling.