Goodnight, Irene (8 page)

“See you soon.”

We hung up and I let Lydia know what was up.

It took Frank about thirty minutes to get over to the house. Lydia had fallen asleep on the couch by then, but woke with a start when he knocked on the door. After making sure who it was, she let him in. I introduced them to each other, and watched them quickly appraise one another.

“I’ll leave you two sleuths to do your work,” she said, adding, “Are you going to give Kevin any notice, Irene? I thought we could ride in together tomorrow, if you’d like.”

The thought of another car ride with Lydia, and my uncertainty over how things would go with Kevin when I told him my plans, led me to decline politely. She said goodnight and went off to bed. To my dismay, my two-timing cat followed her into her room.

“So, you’ve got your job back already?” Frank asked casually.

“Yes. I’ve got to let my boss at the PR firm know what’s up, though. I’m probably going to take a leave — this doesn’t seem like a good time to make decisions about my career — I’m too emotional.”

“All things considered, you’re doing great.”

We went into the kitchen, where we would be least likely to keep Lydia awake with the noise of our conversation. We sat on stools at the counter. He was carrying a bulky clasp envelope, from which he pulled out a five-inch-thick sheaf of photocopied pages from one of O’Connor’s notebooks.

“Your pal O’Connor must have never thrown a piece of paper away in his life. The guys who went through his desk told me every drawer was stuffed with notebooks, scraps of paper, you name it.”

“He was something of a pack rat, I’ll admit,” I said.

“Well, these copies are from the notebooks. I’ve had someone trying to put them in order all day today. These seem to be the most recent; at least, they are if these dates aren’t in some kind of code, too.”

“No, no secret date system.” I thumbed through the notes, pleased at how quickly O’Connor’s shorthand system came back to me. “I’ve been reading this code since I was a GA — general assignment reporter — and he started working it out so that I’d always get assigned to his stories.” I laughed, remembering. “Boy, talk about your rumor mill — the paper was buzzing then. Most of them thought he had the red hots for me.

“Anyway, unlike some of the older staff, he didn’t have any trouble using the computer terminals, but he didn’t trust them entirely — didn’t believe they were very secure. He suspected some newsroom hacker might call up his work somehow, even though there are passwords and all of that. So he used a system of abbreviations, nicknames, and good old-fashioned shorthand notation.”

As I glanced through them, I saw that most of the notes were pretty routine. Over the last fifteen years, O’Connor had had fairly free rein to pick his stories. Lately, a lot of his work had been on political stories. For every hot item there were a hundred deadly dull ones. He had notes from press conferences, campaign interviews, and so on.

“What’s this?” Frank asked, leaning over my shoulder to point to a page where O’Connor had scrawled the letters “RCC.”

“Rubber-chicken circuit,” I explained. “Political fund-raising banquets. Refers to the delicious fare at those gatherings.” I looked at the notes below this one, on the same page. O’Connor had placed a dot with several lines angling off it.

“See this?” I asked, pointing to them. “It’s a rat’s nose and whiskers. O’Connor used those to mean, ‘I smell a rat.’” I smiled, thinking of him making the rat-nose notation, a hound on the trail of some faint scent. “I once asked him why all his political notes weren’t covered with these rat noses. He told me I should watch out, that working for newspapers had made me a real cynic and that was just another way of losing objectivity. Then he laughed and said, ‘Besides, this means a real rat, not every little mouse that thinks he’s a rat.’”

Frank laughed, and his laugh made me feel good. The O’Connor in these notes was alive; his wit and sense of humor, his curiosity, his ability to puzzle it all out. I went back to reading them, feeling as if they were letters from home.

“You miss him, don’t you?” asked Frank, watching me.

“Oh, yeah, sure I do,” I said. “I keep asking myself, ‘How would O’Connor handle this? How would he pursue it?’ So many times I saw him stop and examine some minor point the rest of us had just sailed right by. It would turn out to be the key to everything.”

“He must have been quite a character. I’ve known some cops who were the same way — just doggedly pursued something until it gave out. I think I’m just now getting to be old enough to really appreciate that kind of patience and persistence.”

We sat quietly, going back over the notes more slowly. I stopped when I came to a page I had missed the first time through. The heading was “JD55,” O’Connor’s way of writing, “Jane Doe 1955.”

“Here! Look at this, it’s about Hannah! ‘JD55’ was his code for her. He’s got all these arrows — he doodled arrows when he thought something seemed like it was an important break in a story. Let’s see. It’s shorthand for ‘Mac teeth,’ and then here’s the letter
F,
circled.”

“Great, when can I make an arrest?”

I looked up at him. “Remember what O’Connor said about being a cynic, smart-ass. It goes double for cops.”

“Why not? Everything else does.”

Frank stood up and stretched, and walked into the living room, which was off the kitchen, and started pacing around. Out of what I took to be some kind of innate detective nosiness, he was reading the titles on the spines of Lydia’s books and looking at her family pictures.

I tried to make out another section on the page about Hannah.

“Hey, Frank — do you know someone in the coroner’s office by the name of Hernandez?”

“Yeah,” he said, walking back over, “Dr. Carlos Hernandez. He’s the new coroner. He took over about a year ago, when old Woolsey retired. Why?”

“He’s in the notes. Something about Hannah’s teeth. Has he talked to you about seeing O’Connor?”

“No, but he hasn’t been around the last few days. He had to fly back to Colorado to testify in a murder trial. That’s his previous jurisdiction.” He leaned over my shoulder again. “What do the notes say about Hernandez?”

“It says, ‘Old Sheep Dip wrong about teeth’ — Sheep Dip is Woolsey. O’Connor had a rather strained relationship with him.” I felt a little embarrassed to mention this nickname for Dr. Emmet Woolsey, coroner of Las Piernas for over forty years, but when I glanced at Frank, I could see he was amused by it.

“Woolsey felt like O’Connor was pointing out some failing of his when he talked about Hannah in the paper every year,” I explained. “He was bitter over it. On the other hand, as I’ve said, the same column sometimes helped to identify a John or Jane Doe left in the morgue, so Woolsey had to grudgingly acknowledge O’Connor’s help.”

“Woolsey could be a real pain in the ass. I’ve never thought much of him. Always preferred to deal with just about anybody else in that office. Hernandez, on the other hand, is sharp. He came on board just before that double homicide down at the beach last year — his work on that really helped me out.”

“Any way to reach him?”

“Shouldn’t be too hard. I can at least get word to him, ask him to get in touch.”

Frank pulled out his notebook and wrote a memo to make the call. He folded it up and put it back in his pocket. He had a grin on his face. “Old Sheep Dip, huh? Are all these nicknames so colorful?” He sat back down next to me. “I wonder if Hernandez will know what ‘Mac teeth’ means. Are you sure that’s what it says?”

“I think so,” I said, and tried to puzzle it out again. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it says ‘Mac teeth.’ Look, I’ll get into his computer files tomorrow. You have copies of those?”

“Yes, but other than stories he was actually in the process of writing or ones he had already filed, it’s this same gobbledygook. Without the help of arrows or whiskers.” He sat leaning on the counter with his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes. He suddenly looked tired again. I watched him for a moment.

“You’d better get some sleep,” I said, standing up.

I straightened out the papers and put them back in the envelope, trying to keep my idle hands from temptation. “Can I keep these?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “If you can manage to keep going over them, I think we’re bound to get a better handle on this.”

“When I get into his computer files tomorrow I’ll have more to work with.”

“I guess you were right about working at the paper,” he said, looking down. “Sorry if I got a little hot under the collar this afternoon, I just…” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he shrugged and said, “Well, be careful anyway, okay, Irene? For my sake?” Quickly he added, “I’d hate for you to get killed before I learned what the hell ‘Mac teeth’ means.”

“Gee, thanks.”

He laughed and said goodnight.

That night I dreamed again and again that I was buried under sand, suffocating. I couldn’t move my hands or mouth, but somehow I was crying out. The sand muffled the cries. Frank was walking right over the place I was buried, and I couldn’t get him to hear my screams. Sometimes O’Connor would be there, and he’d tell Frank, “She’s here,” and Frank would dig me free. Other times O’Connor wasn’t in the dream, and Frank kept walking on down the beach. I’d wake up drenched in sweat either way, afraid to fall back to sleep.

I had a hell of a time making the bed the next morning.

T
WO NIGHTS
without much sleep threatened to make me a cranky baby, so I had to talk myself into getting going the next morning. I was excited about digging into O’Connor’s files, but first I had to face Kevin.

Kevin was the Malloy of Malloy & Marlowe, the public-relations firm I had been working for since I quit the
Express
. He had worked at the paper at one time as well, but left just after old man Wrigley died. Kevin had the foresight to see what was coming with Son of Wrigley. He had left amicably, hooked up with Don Marlowe, who was another former reporter, and formed a very successful firm. Always able to smooth-talk if need be, Kevin had also been a real go-getter, and the energy had paid off. He wasn’t the writer Don was, but the combination of the copy Don turned out and Kevin’s ability to work with people made for lots of happy clients.

Kevin had been a great friend of O’Connor’s. They often went drinking together, and O’Connor used to say that Kevin made him feel like a true Irishman. They would tell stories all night, and Kevin was one of the few who were a match for O’Connor’s silver tongue. As one of the members of the circle that revolved around O’Connor, Kevin embraced me as a friend, but I’ve no doubt it was his love of the old man which led to his hiring me after the great brouhaha at the paper.

I had gone into the newsroom pissed as hell one day after learning that Wrigley was not going to take any disciplinary action against an assistant city editor who had all but raped one of the women working as a night-shift GA. It was part of a whole atmosphere that had festered under Wrigley’s inability to keep his hands to himself. He never touched me, but he made sexually provocative comments to me and other women staff members on a nauseatingly recurrent basis.

I made a lot of unflattering references to his ancestors and his own person, told him I was through working for an ass-pinching sleazeball and stomped off. I got a loud cheer and some hoots from my longtime companions in the newsroom. Lydia told me later that as the applause died down, O’Connor stood up and told Wrigley that he wasn’t going to have much of a staff left if he didn’t take better care of people who depended on him to see the right thing was done. Word got out to the Publisher’s Board, which could still outvote Wrigley, and was starting to do so more and more frequently. Some pressure was brought to bear, and Wrigley fired the assistant city editor.

I, of course, for all the personal satisfaction that had given me, was out of a job, finding myself in the position of many a person who has told the boss to shove it. The bills came anyway.

O’Connor tried to get me to swallow my pride and come back, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Kevin Malloy heard what was no doubt a richly embellished version of this story one night when he was down at one of the local newshounds’ watering holes; he called me up the next day and gave me a job. Although he was a demanding boss, he had been nothing but good to me since. Trouble was, my heart wasn’t in the work.

So when I went into Malloy & Marlowe that Tuesday morning, it was with the lousy taste you get in your mouth from biting the hand that feeds you. Kevin was talking to Clarissa, his back to me. Clarissa’s eyes widened in surprise and she called out, “Irene, you aren’t supposed to be in for another week!”

Kevin turned around. I asked if I could talk to him for a minute. He stood there looking as if he were making his mind up about something, and then invited me back.

I sat in one of the four chairs surrounding what we jokingly referred to as the “Aircraft Carrier Malloy,” Kevin’s gigantic marble-topped, dark cherry-wood desk. Kevin opted for a chair close to my own instead of the one behind the desk.

He was a sandy-haired man with boyish but not foolish looks, and a smile that could melt the world’s hardest heart. “We’ve both lost a very good friend,” he said, and halted, a sadness so sudden and complete coming over his face that when I saw it I felt a tightening in my chest. Tears began welling up in his eyes, and in no time flat we were both crying quietly, neither of us able to speak. Eventually, we both went digging for our handkerchiefs.

“God, I loved that man,” he said, unbashedly weeping now. “He was one of the best. I can’t believe it. I can’t.”

“He thought a lot of you, Kevin. You were one of his favorites. He didn’t have many real favorites.”

He just wept.

After a while he sat up straight and said, “I’m sorry,” giving me that strange apology we Americans make for our grief. Between the two of us, there was a lot of nose-blowing for a few minutes. We both sighed and tried to pull ourselves together.

“How are things going here?” I asked.

“Hectic as usual. We miss having you around, even though you’ve only been gone for a day. The Kensington project and the various campaign work going on is keeping me from sitting around using up boxes of Kleenex. It’s a busy time of year.”