Goodnight, Irene (21 page)

“Never mind, Pete,” I said, “I need to be getting home. And I’m sure the Unsinkable Frank Harriman here could use some rest, too. Not to mention that Officer Sorenson is supposed to be keeping an eye on him. Okay if I come back tomorrow afternoon, Frank?”

“Sure,” he said, “I’m probably not going into work until Monday.”

“Thanks for the pep talk,” I said.

“No problem. Take care of yourself.”

We said our good-byes and Pete took me over to Lydia’s. The house was dark when we pulled up. I had forgotten that she would be off on her big date.

“You gonna be here alone?” Pete asked, sounding a little worried.

“I’ll be okay. There’s a ferocious cat in there.”

“Yeah, that cat’s kind of famous in the department. We gave Frank hell about those scratches.”

“Well, then you know I’m safe. Thanks for everything, Pete.”

“See you later, Irene. I’ll just wait out here for a while.”

“I’m okay, really. If you’re going to wait around until Lydia comes in, you may have a long wait. Might as well come in.”

He shrugged. “Tell you what. Could I use your phone?”

As we walked in, Cody bit me on the ankle and then ran off down the hallway, apparently unhappy about having been abandoned. Pete called in to the department and arranged for a patrol car to make a few extra passes down our street.

“So long, Irene,” he said as he walked out.

I locked up and climbed into bed. Cody joined me a few minutes later, acting as if nothing had happened. I pulled back the bedroom-window curtain and wasn’t entirely surprised to see Pete still sitting out in his car at the curb.

I knew he was tired, but he wasn’t going to break his pledge to Frank to watch over me.

I lay awake a long time, petting Cody, listening to him purr. “Cat, you miss me?” I asked him. He gave me a sandpaper kiss. I heard Lydia come in, but didn’t get up to talk to her — I was afraid she’d think I’d stayed up waiting for her. I heard Pete’s car drive off, and still I couldn’t sleep. I decided to think of some pleasant memory. I put myself back on my grandmother’s farm in Kansas. I was standing in a wheat field, watching the wind move the wheat in undulating waves of gold. Somehow the memory became a dream, and I was dancing through the wheat, feeling it brush against me while I held my face to the sun. I held my arms out to its warmth and whirled in slow, lazy circles, laughing as I turned. My grandmother, still alive in the dream, called to me, and I ran to her. I felt her soft apron and the smell of cinnamon as she hugged me with her thin old arms, and she said, “Child, what am I going to do with you?”

I woke up feeling fine.

H
MM — SOMETHING SMELLS GREAT
. You making breakfast?” Lydia called out to me as she made her way to the kitchen.

“Yeah, cinnamon toast. Here, have some.”

“You always cut it up in little strips like this?”

“My grandmother did. I had a dream about her last night.”

“I haven’t had this in ages.”

“Me neither.” I sat down next to her, dishing out some scrambled eggs and bacon. “A country breakfast. Hardens your arteries, but we’ve all got to live on the edge sometimes.”

“This is great, Irene.”

“Thanks. How was the date with Michael?”

“Eh.”

“‘Eh’?”

“There was all this animal magnetism between us, but we couldn’t make much conversation. We just didn’t have anything much to talk about. We saw a movie, or it would have been the longest evening of my life. After the movie, it was either make out all night or come home alone and get a good night’s sleep. God knows I’ve been horny lately, but this is the nineties, not our college days, so Michael and I left it at a goodnight kiss.”

“You went that far on a first date?” I said with mock horror.

“First and last, I’m afraid,” she said, shoving the morning edition toward me. “You see the paper yet? People are going to get jealous.”

Good old John Walters had given me another page one. The story of Jennifer Owens was as public as it was going to be.

There were a pile of messages and O’Connor’s mail waiting for me at work. The mail made me think of the second envelope from Wednesday, which I had completely forgotten. I opened my purse and found it.

It contained a note from MacPherson dated last week, saying he had found someone to do the computer drawings of the woman’s face, and he would call when they were ready. I felt a great sense of relief. I hadn’t been walking around for two days with some big clue stashed in my purse.

I sat down and began to go through the mail and messages. Yesterday, a note from Barbara, asking me to give her a call at the hospital when I got back. A call from MacPherson with “Says it’s not urgent” written at the bottom of the message slip. Some calls from people I recognized as political organizers, probably about various people and issues in our upcoming election.

The mail was much the same, with the exception of one envelope. A scrawling, shaky hand was addressed to me, care of the
Express,
but marked “Personal & Confidential” in one corner. The return address was unfamiliar. Inside was a sheet of paper with a handwritten message:

Miss Kelly,
I understand you are now back at the newspaper. I tried calling you at Malloy & Marlowe to tell you I am deeply sorry about Mr. O’Connor. I have a few things to say, and no one left to say them to. I thought of you because I know you were his friend and co-worker, and I imagine you are now pursuing matters he left unfinished. This much I know of you.
As for Mr. O’Connor, it is important to me that you know that I always respected him. Had I known things would go so far, I would have told the truth long ago. But now I am tangled in a web I helped to weave. I cannot bear to live to see my forty-three years of service to this community overshadowed by what will undoubtedly follow. I ask you to forgive me for the unforgivable.
Emmet Woolsey

I re-read Emmet Woolsey’s letter a half a dozen times. I felt uneasy holding this letter from a man who could not live with himself, who had been dead for three days. I knew it was evidence of a sort and should be turned over to the police; I also knew I should show it to John; but both actions seemed a violation of some kind of trust Woolsey had placed in me. I thought about how unwelcome an apology may sometimes be. I wasn’t in a forgiving kind of mood.

I called Frank. It was early, but Sorenson answered on the second ring and told me they were both up and about. He handed the phone over to Frank.

“Good morning!”

His voice said he was in a cheerful frame of mind, and I immediately felt bad about calling. Maybe I wouldn’t tell him about the letter after all.

“Good morning, Frank,” I said, trying to lighten my tone.

“What’s wrong?”

I wondered if I was ever going to be able to fool anybody about anything.

“Emmet Woolsey mailed a letter to me; I guess it’s sort of a suicide note.” I read it to him.

“Hmm.”

I waited.

“They’re going to want to take it as evidence,” he said. “Do you have any problems with that?”

“None that I can’t live with, but I should show the note to John. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll call in and ask someone to come by your offices.” He paused, then asked, “Are you upset that Woolsey picked you to tell it to?”

“A little. I feel awkward. I can’t forgive him. Not without knowing more than he’s told me here. I feel sorry for him, but that’s different.”

“Somebody apparently had something on him. Guess we better try to find out why he was keeping things hidden about this case. I’ll have somebody look into his background. Could you try back issues of the
Express
from around June and July 1955?”

“Sure, I’ll go downstairs to the morgue and see what I can find out.”

We said good-bye, and I got up and took the letter over to John Walters. He read it, grunted, walked over to a copier and ran off a couple of copies. “Here,” he said, shoving the original and one copy toward me. “I don’t even want to touch it. Goddamn coward worried about his fucking reputation. Makes me want to puke. You gonna find out who had his nuts in a vise?”

“Ooohwee. And I thought I was being stingy with him. Yeah, I want to know what he was afraid of. Must have been pretty bad if he stuck by his story through over thirty years of pestering by O’Connor.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going soft on me, Irene. Are you forgetting what’s happened because this bastard didn’t have the balls to speak up?”

“No, I’m not likely to forget it.”

“Hummph. Well, he’s not getting a dime’s worth of sympathy from me. You just think about Jennifer Owens’s mother not knowing what happened to her daughter for thirty-five years. Go on, get back to work.”

I went back to my desk and called MacPherson to bring him up to date and thank him for his help. Next I tried to call Barbara, but ended up just leaving a message for her at the nurses’ station; apparently she had stepped out of Kenny’s room for a moment. They wouldn’t tell me anything about Kenny over the phone, except that he was still in intensive care.

I gathered the mail into a neat stack, and threw away the out-and-out junk. As I cleared off O’Connor’s desk, I thought to myself that it was unnatural for it to be so clean. He never would have left it so orderly. I still felt like Goldilocks sitting in Papa Bear’s chair, but I wasn’t as uncomfortable as I had been a few days before.

I grabbed a notebook and headed down to the place where all the back issues of the
Express
were on file, as back issues were at any newspaper, in that place where dead news remains unburied — the morgue. And now, I thought, we’ll see if Lazarus will rise.

T
HE PAPERS
from the fifties were on microfilm, and so I used one of the aging machines down in that darkened area of the morgue to check the reels for the first two months of summer in 1955. The same thing happened this time that happens to me every time I go down to the morgue. I got hung up reading old articles and advertisements that caught my eye. The first one I came across was for a 1955 Packard — “The Patrician.”

“One phone call delivers a new Packard to your door,” the ad said.

Then I started wondering if porterhouse and T-bone steaks really were eighty-five cents a pound, like the “women’s-pages” ads said. If they were, I supposed I could believe that a quart of ice cream was forty-five cents, too. There was a dress offered by a department store for $10.95, and it looked pretty snazzy. The models all wore gloves, hats, and pearl chokers. But what I really wanted was the “Davy Crockett Study Lamp” with six action scenes from his adventures.

I started paying more attention to news items. Neither the paper nor the town were as big in the 1950s as they were now, but there was still enough print to make me feel dizzy as the pages flashed across the screen.

Some of the headlines in mid-June 1955 looked sort of familiar, such as “Middle East Peace Talks Proposed,” “County Budget Proposal Is Largest Ever,” and “Soviet Minister Visits U.S.,” while others caught my attention because I knew how they turned out: “Peron Claims Argentine Rebellion Finished,” “Salk and Sabin Testify on Polio Vaccine,” and a much smaller article, “South Vietnam Reds Tell U.S. ‘Go Home.’” The local news included items such as “Downey Women’s Club Honors HUAC Members” and “Committee Studies Fire-Department Integration.”

Marilyn Monroe could be seen in
The Seven Year Itch
if you were willing to drive into L.A. to watch it at Grauman’s Chinese. Locally, it was easier to catch
Jungle Jim and the Moon Men
or
The Creature with the Atom Brain.

I don’t know why I should have been startled by the large-type headline that proclaimed “Woman’s Mutilated Body Found Under Pier” on the front page of the June 18, 1955, issue. It was big local news, and there wasn’t a chance that it would have received less sensational coverage. But now, knowing the future of this case — and having met the mother of the victim — I couldn’t help but feel disturbed. O’Connor might have felt compassion for this anonymous victim and her family, but he had not been the only writer on the story; the other coverage was unflinching in its detail.

In issues over the next few days, the story had died down. With no clue to her identity surfacing, and little other progress being made, there was not much to feed to the public. Las Piernas City Councilman Richard Longren rallied his fellow council members to invest in better lighting by the pier and an expansion of the police force to increase beach patrols. I sat back thinking that our current mayor never missed a political trick, even then.

I rewound the microfilm to the date of Hannah’s murder and went more slowly through each issue for that week. Page after page of reports that ranged from Congressional hearings to meetings of the Fuchsia Society. Then, in the local news section for Tuesday, June 21, 1955, I found my Lazarus:

Eyewitness to Fatal Accident Found
Coroner’s Wife Will Not Be Charged

Police announced today that no charges will be filed against Mrs. Blanche Woolsey, wife of Las Piernas Coroner Dr. Emmet Woolsey, in an accident that killed two last Sunday. A witness, whose identity was not revealed by police, saw the car of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Decker cross over a double yellow line and hit Mrs. Woolsey’s vehicle at a curve on Hampstead Road before going over a cliff.
While other witnesses had earlier identified Mrs. Woolsey’s car as the one seen weaving down the same road in a reckless fashion, this witness is apparently the only person to see the accident itself. Police refused to comment on why the witness might have delayed stepping forward until now.
Mrs. Woolsey remains hospitalized for injuries received in the accident.

So Woolsey’s wife was saved from charges in what looked to be a felony drunk-driving case. But who had provided the witness? Could Frank find the witness’s name in police records?

I kept looking through the issues for that week to see if anything more had been written on the accident, when I came across the society pages for Sunday, June 26. Over two different pages, large photographs, and lavish detail were given to what must have been the major wedding of the last half century in Las Piernas: the marriage of Elinor Sheffield to a young man who had been recently appointed to the staff of the district attorney’s office — a young Harvard Law School graduate by the name of Andrew Hollingsworth — on the previous day.