The McCone Files (24 page)

Jody Greenglass came back with a wooden stool and set it on my side of the counter. I thanked him and perched on it, then took a pencil and notebook from my bag. He hoisted himself onto his own stool, sighing heavily.

“I see you were looking at my songs,” he said.

“Yes. I haven't really seen any sheet music since my piano teacher gave up on me when I was about twelve. Some of those are pretty old, aren't they?”

“Not nearly as old as I am.” He smiled wryly. “I wrote the first in thirty-nine, the last in fifty-three. Thirty-seven of them in all. A number were hits.”

“
You
wrote them?”

He nodded and pointed to the credit line on the one closest to him: “Words and Music by Jody Greenglass.”

“Well, for heaven's sake,” I said. “I've never met a songwriter before. Were these recorded too?”

“Sure. I've got them all on the jukebox. Some good singers performed them—Como, Crosby.” His smile faded. “But then, in the fifties, popular music changed. Presley, Holly, those fellows—that's what did it. I couldn't change with it. Luckily, I'd always had the store; music was more of a hobby for me. ‘My Little Girl'”—he indicated a sheet with a picture-pretty toddler on it—“was the last song I ever sold. Wrote it for my granddaughter when she was born in fifty-three. It was not a big hit.”

“This is your granddaughter you want me to locate?”

“Yes. Stephanie Ann Weiss. If she's still alive, she's thirty-seven now.”

“Let's talk about her. I take it she's your daughter's daughter?”

“My daughter Ruth's. I only had the one child.”

“Is your daughter still living?”

“I don't know.” His eyes clouded. “There was a … an estrangement. I lost track of both of them a couple of years after Stephanie was born.”

“If it's not too painful, I'd like to hear about that.”

“It's painful, but I can talk about it.” He paused, thoughtful. “It's funny. For a long time it didn't hurt, because I had my anger and disappointment to shield myself. But those kinds of emotions can't last without fuel. Now that they're gone, I hurt as much as if it happened yesterday. That's what made me decide to try to make amends to my granddaughter.”

“But not your daughter too?”

He made a hand motion as if to erase the memory of her. “Our parting was too bitter; there are some things that can't be atoned for, and frankly, I'm afraid to try. But Stephanie—if her mother hasn't completely turned her against me, there might be a chance for us.”

“Tell me about this parting.”

In a halting manner that conveyed exactly how deep his pain went, he related his story.

Jody Greenglass had been widowed when his daughter was only ten and raised the girl alone. Shortly after Ruth graduated from high school, she married the boy next door. The Weiss family had lived in the house next to Greenglass's Glen Park cottage for close to twenty years, and their son, Eddie and Ruth were such fast childhood friends that a gate was installed in the fence between their adjoining backyards. Jody, in fact, thought of Eddie as his own son.

After their wedding the couple moved north to the small town of Petaluma, where Eddie had found a good job in the accounting department of one of the big egg hatcheries. In 1953, Stephanie Ann was born. Greenglass didn't know exactly when or why they began having marital problems, perhaps they hadn't been ready for parenthood, or perhaps the move from the city to the country didn't suit them. But by 1955, Ruth had divorced Eddie and had taken up with a Mexican national named Victor Rios.

“So you tried to stop her.”

He nodded wearily. “I tried. But Ruth wasn't listening to me anymore. She'd always been such a good girl. Maybe that was the problem—she'd been
too
good and it was her time to rebel. We quarreled bitterly, more than once. Finally I told her that if she kept on living with Rios, she and her child would be dead to me. She said that was just fine with her. I never saw or heard from her again.”

“Never made any effort to contact her?”

“Not until a couple of weeks ago. I nursed my anger and bitterness, nursed them well. But then in the fall I had some health problems—my heart—and realized I'd be leaving this world without once seeing my grown granddaughter. So when I was back on my feet again, I went up to Petaluma, checked the phone book, asked around their old neighborhood. Nobody remembered them. That was when I decided I needed a detective.”

I was silent, thinking of the thirty-some years that had elapsed. Locating Stephanie Ann Weiss—or whatever name she might now be using—after all that time would be difficult. Difficult, but not impossible, given she was still alive. And certainly more challenging than the job I'd initially envisioned.

Greenglass seemed to interpret my silence as pessimism. He said, “I know it's been a very long time, but isn't there something you can do for me? I'm seventy-eight years old; I want to make amends before I die.”

I felt the prickle of excitement that I often experience when faced with an out-of-the-ordinary problem. I said, “I'll try to help you. As I said before, I can get on it right away.”

I gathered more information from him—exact spelling of names, dates—then asked for the last address he had for Ruth in Petaluma. He had to go in the back of the store where, he explained, he now lived, to look it up. While he did so, I wandered over to the jukebox and studied the titles of the 78s. There was a basket of metal slugs on top of the machine, and on a whim I fed it one and punched out selection E-3, “My Little Girl.” The somewhat treacly lyrics boomed forth in a smarmy baritone; I could understand why the song hadn't gone over in the days when America was gearing up to feverishly embrace the likes of Elvis Presley. Still, I had to admit the melody was pleasing—downright catchy, in fact. By the time Greenglass returned with the address, I was humming along.

Back in my office at All Souls, I set a skip trace in motion, starting with an inquiry to my friend Tracy at the Department of Motor Vehicles regarding Ruth Greenglass, Ruth Weiss, Ruth Rios, Stephanie Ann Rios, or any variant thereof. A check with directory assistance revealed that neither woman currently had a phone in Petaluma or the surrounding communities. The Petaluma Library had nothing on them in their reverse street directory. Since I didn't know either woman's occupation, professional affiliations, doctor, or dentist, those avenues were closed to me. Petaluma High School would not divulge information about graduates, but the woman in records with whom I spoke assured me that no one named Stephanie Rios had attended during the mid- to late-sixties. The county's voter registration had a similar lack of information. The next line of inquiry to pursue while waiting for a reply from the DMV was vital statistics—primarily marriage licenses and death certificates—but for those I would need to go to the Sonoma County Courthouse in Santa Rosa. I checked my watch, saw it was only a little after one, and decided to drive there.

Santa Rosa, some fifty miles north of San Francisco, is a former country town that has risen to the challenge of migrations from the crowded communities of the Bay Area and become a full-fledged city with a population nearing a hundred thousand. Testimony to this is the new County Administration Center on its outskirts, where I found the Recorder's Office housed in a building on the aptly named Fiscal Drive.

My hour-and-a-half journey up there proved well worth the time: the clerk I dealt with was extremely helpful, the records easily accessed. Within half an hour, for a nominal fee, I was in possession of a copy of Ruth Greenglass Weiss's death certificate, She had died of cancer at Petaluma General Hospital in June of 1974; her next of kin was shown as Stephanie Ann Weiss, at an address on Bassett Street in Petaluma. It was a different address from the last one Greenglass had had for them.

The melody of “My Little Girl” was still running through my head as I drove back down the freeway to Petaluma, the southernmost community in the county. A picturesque river town with a core of nineteenth-century business building, Victorian homes, and a park with a bandstand, it is surrounded by little hills—which is what the Indian word
Petaluma
means. The town used to be called the Egg Basket of the World, because of the proliferation of hatcheries such as the one where Eddie Weiss worked, but since the decline of the egg- and chicken-ranching business, it has become a trendy retreat for those seeking to avoid the high housing costs of San Francisco and Marin. I had friends there—people who had moved up from the city for just that reason—so I knew the lay of the land fairly well.

Bassett Street was on the older west side of town, far from the bland, treeless tracts that have sprung up to the east. The address I was seeking turned out to be a small white frame bungalow with a row of lilac bushes planted along the property line on either side. Their branches hung heavy with as yet unopened blossoms; in a few weeks the air would be sweet with their perfume.

When I went up on the front porch and rang the bell, I was greeted by a very pregnant young woman. Her name, she said, was Bonita Clark; she and her husband Russ had bought the house two years before from some people named Berry. The Berrys' had lived there for at least ten years and had never mentioned anyone named Weiss.

I hadn't really expected to find Stephanie Weiss still in residence, but I'd hoped the present owner could tell me where she had moved. I said, “Do you know anyone on the street who might have lived here in the early seventies?”

“Well, there's old Mrs. Caubet. The pink house on the corner with all the rosebushes. She's lived here forever.”

I thanked her and went down the sidewalk to the house she'd indicated. Its front yard was a thicket of rosebushes whose colors ranged from yellows to reds to a particularly beautiful silvery purple. The rain had stopped before I'd reached town, but not all that long ago; the roses' velvety petals were beaded with droplets.

Mrs. Caubet turned out to be a tall, slender woman with sleek gray hair, vigorous-looking in a blue sweatsuit and athletic shoes. I felt a flicker of amusement when I first saw her, thinking of how Bonita Clark had called her “old,” and said she'd lived there “forever.” Interesting, I thought, how one's perspective shifts…

Yes, Mrs. Caubet said after she'd examined my credentials, she remembered the Weisses well. They'd moved to Bassett Street in 1970. “Ruth was already ill with the cancer that killed her,” she added. “Steff was only seventeen, but so grown-up, the way she took care of her mother.”

“Did either of them ever mention a man named Victor Rios?”

The woman's expression became guarded. “You say you're working for Ruth's father?”

“Yes.”

She looked thoughtful, then motioned at a pair of white wicker chairs on the wraparound porch. “Let's sit down.”

We sat. Mrs. Caubet continued to look thoughtful, pleating the ribbing on the cuff of her sleeve between her fingers. I waited.

After a time she said, “I wondered if Ruth's father would ever regret disowning her.”

“He's in poor health. It's made him realize he doesn't have much longer to make amends.”

“A pity that it took until now. He's missed a great deal because of his stubbornness. I know; I'm a grandparent myself. And I'd like to put him in touch with Steff, but I don't know what happened to her. She left Petaluma six months after Ruth died.”

“Did she say where she planned to go?”

“Just something about getting in touch with some relatives. By that I assumed she meant her father's family in the city. She promised to write, but she never did, not even a Christmas card.”

“Will you tell me what you remember about Ruth and Stefanie? It may give me some sort of lead, and besides, I'm sure my client will want to know about their lives after his falling-out with Ruth.”

She shrugged. “It can't hurt. And to answer your earlier question, I have heard of Victor Rios. He was Ruth's second husband; although the marriage was a fairly long one, it was not a particularly good one. When she was diagnosed as having cancer, Rios couldn't deal with her illness, and he left her. Ruth divorced him, took back her first husband's name. It was either that, she once told me, or Greenglass, and she was even more bitter toward her father than toward Rios.”