She even understood the deer better. The reason they were dangerous when they were wounded was not that they were trying to fight. They were trying to get up and run. They still had hope. Parish had taken David’s hope.
Suddenly, Marcia was terribly tired. She felt as though she were weightless, but she could barely lift her arm.
“Well?” said Parish.
She cocked her head and looked up at him.
He asked, “Was it what you expected?”
“No.”
“Not disappointed, are you?”
She looked down at her hands. To her surprise, they were not clenched in fists, or shaking. They were merely her hands, at rest on her lap, the fingers a bit too plump for her taste, the nails too short to be very pretty. “No,” she said. “It was exactly what I might have wished for. I just couldn’t decide how it should end. But you knew. You ended it perfectly.”
CHAPTER 13
When Lydia had driven Robert Mallon down from the self-defense school to his house in Santa Barbara in the late afternoon, she had stopped the car in the driveway without turning off the engine. Mallon had said, “Aren’t you going to stay?”
Lydia had answered, “No. I’m going back to L. A to spend a few days asking around, and see if I can find some more people we can talk to. I’ll get in touch as soon as I do. In the meantime, check in with Diane and let her know you’re home. Fowler may have asked about you.”
Mallon had returned to his routines. In the mornings he walked on the beach. Since Catherine’s death he had not wanted to walk near the spot where he had pulled her out of the water, so now he usually walked down to the foot of State Street and followed the coast to the east toward Montecito. Each time he returned to his house, he immediately stepped to the kitchen counter to see if the red light on his answering machine was blinking, but always it glowed steadily.
On the eighth day, the telephone rang, and he picked it up to hear Lydia’s voice. “Bobby?”
“Yes, Lydia.”
“I’m in the car right now, but I wanted to tell you I’m interviewing somebody tomorrow, and I thought you might be interested in joining me.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s a woman who knew both of them. It took me a while to hunt her down, because she’s moved a few times since those days, but I just talked to her and she’s agreed to meet me in a bar on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice at one o’clock. You don’t have to decide right now. I’ll be there either way.”
“I would like to join you, I think. Thanks.”
“I do have to warn you that I can’t guarantee she’ll show up,” Lydia said. “They don’t always, and it’s not like being their parole officer, where they have to make up some kind of an answer when you ask them a question.”
“Do you have the address of the bar?” asked Mallon.
“Not on me. I thought it would be best if you’d just take a morning commuter flight down here tomorrow. There’s one that leaves around ten. I’ll pick you up at the airport, and we’ll go to the bar together.”
The woman was strikingly attractive, but not what Mallon would have called pretty. Her face looked triangular, the large dark eyes making the upper part seem very wide. She had a nose that was wide at the bridge and seemed to narrow, and below it a set of lips that he guessed had been treated to make them fuller, then a tiny pointed chin. Her eye shadow was too dark, the liner too thick and black, the lipstick too starkly outlined for daytime. The tight pants and the top that tied in the back, Mallon knew, were what was in store windows this month, but intended for teenagers, who were slightly younger and a bit skinnier. On her, they seemed to be a costume, something she was always thinking about, touching and readjusting. It made him think about them too.
They sat at a table near the windows that looked out on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Mallon wondered why they had not met at one of the bars a few blocks closer to the ocean so they could see it. There was enough light streaming in for her to see the photographs that Lydia had stolen from Catherine Broward’s apartment. The woman squinted at them, then pushed them toward Mallon. “Yeah,” she said. “Markie was the one I knew, really. The girl was only with him for a while. She’s dead, too?” Her perfectly outlined Cupid’s-bow lips pouted while she waited for an answer.
“That’s right,” said Lydia. “She killed herself.”
“Oh,” said the woman, tonelessly. “I only saw her a few times.” That seemed to be her explanation for her utter indifference. Then she said, “I remember I was working on the video for Alien Steam’s first CD at the time, so it would be… about two years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mallon. “Working on the video?” His confusion was sincere. All Mallon could tell was that she was dropping an impressive name. “Are you a musician?”
Lydia said, “Miss Gracely danced on that video. I’ve seen it. She was the principal dancer, really.” Lydia turned to her. “Did you meet them at a party?”
She nodded, picked up her glass, and brought it toward her mouth, then pantomimed her surprise that it was empty. Mallon waved to the bartender. “Three more, please.” He returned his attention to her. “I know the police probably drove you crazy with questions about all this at the time, but can you tell us anything about the party? Where was it?”
“It started at the ballroom of the Millefleurs Hotel. It was for the release of Juan-do Ward’s last CD-he was already dead-and the company invited, like, the whole industry. I got a lot of work from that party. Later it overflowed and kind of oozed from one place to another. There were a couple of suites in the hotel, and some people went to the company offices, and there was a kind of after-party at a club. Alien Steam had a limo, and we traveled from place to place.” She chuckled at the memory of it. “Nobody was any good at opening champagne bottles, so it kept shooting all over the windows and the seats and us.”
Mallon nodded in a sympathy that he did not feel. She was a person with obvious attractions, but her evaluation of them seemed to be too high: they did not dazzle him and make him unable to form unflattering thoughts. She said, “I remember first noticing Markie at the hospitality suite. He was really something. Those eyes, the expression on his face.” She gave a little shiver of appreciation, then seemed to return to the present, where he was dead and could be of no use. The look immediately changed to boredom. Then she saw her next drink arrive, and she brightened. “He was at the bar. I went over to him, and asked if he would get the bartender to make me a Cosmopolitan. I was with a couple of the guys from Done Deal right then-Fred Howard and Mickey Dill-but I just had to get a closer look at him. He hit on me. He asked my name, and phone number. I gave, but then there’s this girl.”
Lydia pointed at the picture of Catherine on the table. “This girl?”
Del Gracely nodded. “She had been in the bathroom. When she got back, I kept right on flirting with him, because it never occurred to me that he could be with her. He was the most beautiful man. She was… she had kind of stringy brown hair and a sort of ordinary face. She had kind of an okay body, but come on. That room was full of women who made her look… Well, I thought he must be in the business, and she was his agent, or an executive or something. She had good clothes-very expensive-but she wasn’t good-looking enough to be there unless she was something like that.”
“Did he introduce you to her?” asked Lydia.
“Sure. He was one of those guys who never slips up, never forgets anybody’s name, always looks at every woman in the room as though she’s the special one and he just came there on the off chance that he might run into her. He said, ‘This is Cathy,’ then ‘This is Del Gracely.’ I gave her my best smile and everything, because I figured that she must be somebody, a behind-the-scenes person. But she wasn’t.” Her mind seemed to shift. “About that time was when Irwin Rogow noticed me. I saw he was looking, so I went over to talk to him. The party began to move again, so we did too.”