by Jan Burke
“This place has really gone downhill,” groused Wrigley.
Michael had our salads and wine out to us in record time. He fussed endlessly over Lydia, who gloried in the attention. This also seemed to have the effect of inhibiting Wrigley’s desire to make passes. I wondered if Michael had any interest in journalism.
“Well,” Wrigley said in a peeved tone, “now that we have a few moments to ourselves” — he shot a meaningful look at Lydia — “now that we can talk without being overheard by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with an apron on, I just wanted to ask you if certain rumors I hear are true, Irene.”
“Rumors?” I repeated with perfectly feigned innocence.
“It’s been said that you might be looking to get back into the newspaper game.”
Reflecting that for Wrigley, who had inherited a large share of stock in the paper and made himself executive editor, it was indeed nothing more than a game, I told him that rumor was true.
“Well, how exciting! How thrilling! And of course you will come back to work for us then! It couldn’t be any other way, Irene. We’re your family. Why, we practically raised you. You came to us as a mere child, and we would welcome you back. It’s only right.”
This was going to be easier than I thought. Lydia must have really done a job on the old boy if she had him this eager. Still, I had to make sure of my position.
“Actually, I had thought of going to work at another paper.”
“The Bee? Oh, yes, I know all about it. I can’t let that happen. Why, O’Connor would come back to haunt me. He would be rolling in his grave if I let you go to work anywhere but the Express.”
The spinning and haunting O’Connor already invoked, I thought I might as well go for broke.
“Well,” I said slowly, as if thinking it all over for the first time, “O’Connor and I were close friends. It would be nice to be back in the old newsroom, near his desk. I’d feel closer to him somehow.”
“Yes, yes!”
“In fact, he always told me all about the stories he was working on — in confidence, of course, seeing how I was really one of the Express family, as you say. Some of his most recent stuff will really turn some heads. Make those snobs at the Times take you seriously.”
“Yes, yes, I can see it will!”
Time to set the hook. “Who did you give his stuff to?”
“Oh, the police have most of it, you know, murder investigation.”
“I mean, who have you assigned the stories to?”
“Why, Irene, that’s what I’ve been trying to say! It’s what I’ve been trying so hard to tell you! You! You’re the one I want for his stories. Couldn’t be anybody else.”
“You’re willing to overlook our last… discussion?”
He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal, dipping his sleeve in blue cheese dressing. “Forgive and forget, I always say. Let bygones be bygones, that’s my motto. Isn’t it, Lydia?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, smiling as she lied.
Just then Michael brought our main courses. I noticed Lydia’s portion seemed substantially larger than Wrigley’s or mine. In fact, mine left me no doubt that Crystal did indeed eat here. A piece of reddish-orange chicken, about the size of the sole of a baby’s shoe, graced one side of a white plate, with two halves of a potato too small to have left its mother on the other; they were fenced off from each other by what looked like something that had been weeded from between the bromeliads.
Wrigley’s pasta looked so weird, I was glad there wasn’t too much of it to look at.
Queen Lydia continued to reign as Michael asked her if everything was satisfactory and left right after she told him it was great. I didn’t begrudge her all her fun — she deserved it, and I owed her big time for working Wrigley into such a fervor for me.
As he ate, Wrigley continually dropped bits and pieces of his food on his clothing. In the space of about five minutes, you could have figured out what he ordered by looking at his lapels. Early on he captured a peppercorn between his front teeth, making it very hard not to look at his teeth while he talked.
And talk he did. On and on about how he had visions for the Express and how I was a part of those visions. How the newsroom just wasn’t the same without me.
I told him I’d need a fairly free rein to follow up on O’Connor’s stories.
No problem.
I told him I’d like access to whatever the police hadn’t hauled off from O’Connor’s desk.
No problem.
I told him I wanted more pay.
Problem. These difficult times, the need to stay competitive, and so on.
Michael came by again, insisting that Lydia order dessert. She went for the chocolate-mousse pie. I ordered crème brûlée and Wrigley ordered profiteroles. When they came, I realized how this place stayed in business — from now on, people would have to invite me out for dessert if they wanted to meet me here.
Wrigley finally agreed to a very slight increase in my former pay, and I felt that after hoodwinking him into buying us dinner and begging me to do everything I wanted to do, I should be satisfied. We shook on it. I had to wipe sauce off my hand afterward.
Lydia excused herself for a moment and I got a little panicked that with her gone, Wrigley would wax romantic to seal the deal.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Lydia, but you have a peppercorn stuck in your front teeth.”
“Why, thanks for letting me know,” he said. “That’s so embarrassing.”
He then took out a slim silver object which I first took to be a cigarette case. He opened it and took out a length of dental floss, and using the polished lid as a mirror, proceeded to floss his teeth at the table.
“Nothing beats good dental hygiene, I always say,” he said between teeth.
Let bygones be bygones, I thought to myself, trying not to watch.
Lydia finally got back. She had missed the demonstration of Wrigley’s table manners completely. Michael brought our check and told Lydia he hoped she had enjoyed her evening and would return soon, and left the check. I was sure Wrigley would stiff him his tip.
AS WE CROSSED the parking lot, I could see that Lydia was dying to tell me something. As soon as we were in the car, she revealed that Michael had asked for her phone number.
“He said he’d call when he got off work tonight, about eleven.” She frowned for a moment. “I suppose I shouldn’t get my hopes up. He’s quite a bit younger than I am. He might not call.”
“Don’t talk yourself into or out of anything yet, kiddo. Enjoy it.”
“You’re right. I’m not going to spoil it.”
I thanked her for paving the way for my getting everything I could hope for out of Wrigley, and she laughed so hard at my description of Wrigley’s flossing that I didn’t even think about her driving.
10
WHEN WE GOT HOME , there was a message for me from Frank on the answering machine, asking me to call him. He sounded weary on the tape. He wasn’t in at headquarters, but they said he was expecting my call, so they would contact him out in the field.
About fifteen minutes went by, and the phone rang. It was Michael. He was still at the restaurant, but was calling Lydia to ask if she’d like to go out Thursday night. He worked Fridays and weekends, so that was his next night off. She said yes, hung up and was bouncing off the walls in excitement for the next half hour. Cody, whose affections for Lydia had been won with lasagna, got in the act and started tearing through the house as if he were being chased by a pack of wild dogs.
Sometime around twelve o’clock Lydia and Cody finally wound down. We were sitting together on the couch, scratching Cody’s ears and catching up on newsroom gossip, when Frank called. Lydia handed the phone to me.
“Hi, Frank.”
“Hello, Irene. Do you have a few minutes?” That weary tone again.
“Lately I haven’t been booked at midnight. What’s up? You sound kind of down.”
“Do
I? I’m okay, just tired. Can’t keep the hours I did when I was twenty-three. Anyway, I need your help with something. We’ve got copies of O’Connor’s handwritten notes and you were right — they’re in some kind of code. Do you know how to read it, or am I going to have to hire a cryptographer?”
“I can usually make out most of it.”
“Great.”
“Can you get copies of what you have to me?”
“Yeah. You going to be up for a little while?”
“Yeah, probably. Lydia’s catching me up on the latest rumors at the Express. Did you want to drop them by on your way home?”
“If you don’t mind…”
“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 h
im 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.”