by Jan Burke
O’Connor waited a bit, then tried again. “You were wearing your good suit when you ended up in the marsh. Or what was left of your good suit—”
“Where is it?”
“The ER nurses showed it to me, and told me they’ll bring the remains of it up here once it’s dry. If I had any fear that you could get out of that bed and put it on, I’d have them burn it. So — you were wearing your good suit. Where’d you go last night?”
“Lillian’s place. Katy’s birthday.”
O’Connor couldn’t hide his disbelief. “Katy’s birthday party? Lillian invited you?”
“No. Katy did.”
He was wearing down, but fighting it, O’Connor thought.
“Conn, something was eating at her. Really bothering her.”
“Bothering Katy?”
“Yes…” Jack’s thoughts seemed to drift, then he looked back at O’Connor. “She kept saying she wanted to talk to me, but she obviously didn’t want the family to hear what she had to say. You know she’s never serious about much of anything, but tonight… I mean, last night… she was troubled.”
“If you’re worried about her, I’ll call her tomorrow. Maybe she’ll come and visit you.”
“Go by their place tonight.”
“Tonight? Jack, it’s almost midnight.”
“She’s a night owl.”
“And I suppose Todd Ducane won’t mind my calling on his wife in the dead of night?”
“Guess again.”
“What are you saying?”
“He has a mistress. He’s home maybe three nights a week.”
“First of all, maybe that’s what’s troubling Katy. And second, what if I happen to luck into one of the three nights?”
“Katy doesn’t care. I offered to pound him so flat she could use him as rug.”
“This being when you yourself hadn’t been made into a carpet.”
Jack ignored him. “She told me not to bother. She doesn’t want him. She’s known about this for months. Old news.”
“Okay, to everyone but me, I guess. All the same, maybe Todd will be a dog in the manger and still not take to my showing up on his doorstep at midnight. People have been shot for less.”
“He drives an old heap, it will be parked in the drive.”
“Not the garage?”
“No. He likes to irritate the neighbors. Hopes it will get him a gift from Lillian.”
“I think I understand. Lillian owns the house, right?”
“Right.”
“And his parents won’t buy him a new car, so he figures he’ll embarrass Lillian into coughing up the dough for something worthy of the neighborhood.”
“Yes.”
“Why did she marry the Toad?”
“Ask her.”
“When I see her tonight.”
“Yes.”
“And who’s going to keep an eye on you? I don’t want to risk having someone come in here and finish what they started.”
“I’ll be fine. See Katy. Go over and find out if she’s okay.”
“Why don’t I just call her from the pay phone downstairs?”
“You’ll wake the baby and everyone else.”
O’Connor sighed. “It’s that important to you?”
“Please.”
“I’m on my way,” he said, grabbing his coat and hat. He paused as he reached the door. “Jack, where are your hat and coat?”
“I don’t know. Lillian’s? I’m not sure.”
“I’ll make a note to ask her about it before Hastings gives it away to charity.”
“The butler? He’s probably pressing it as we speak.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Can’t seem to avoid it… Hey, Conn?”
O’Connor waited.
“Thanks.”
“Just rest. I’ll let you know what the princess has to say.”
O’Connor drove his Nash Rambler through the rain, his window down a crack to keep the windshield from fogging up, allowing the rain to pelt in. He talked to himself over most of the distance, calling himself a sap to do the bidding of someone in Jack’s condition, a man who had been beaten so badly, he believed that he saw a car being buried on a farm.
Then again, O’Connor thought, maybe Jack really saw it. O’Connor was inclined to believe he did, but it made so little sense, he had to question Jack’s condition at the time. If not dazed by the beating, perhaps by the booze. Jack wasn’t usually one to see visions while drinking, but he had been a hard drinker for many years, so perhaps he had reached that stage where he had downed enough martinis to bring on the pink elephants.
O’Connor’s thoughts moved quickly to his bigger concern: that someone had been out to murder Jack. This big blond man he spoke of had knocked him out cold with one punch, Jack said. So why did he keep on beating an unconscious man? If he had done anything like that at the party itself, people would have intervened. So he had to have taken Jack away, and in full sight of witnesses. O’Connor began to feel more anxious to talk to Katy — perhaps she’d be able to tell him what had happened. Best of all, she’d know who was at the party.
He turned the corner to the Ducanes’ street, and braked hard to avoid hitting a police barricade.
10
THE NASH FISHTAILED ON THE SLICK STREET, BUT HE MANAGED TO BRING it back under control and stop without hitting either of the grim-faced officers who were now shining flashlights through the windshield. They wore slickers, but the wind was gusting, and no ducking or turning of their heads prevented the rain from pelting into their faces. When one of them moved to the driver’s side, O’Connor rolled his window down a little more and showed his press pass. Even as the officer took it, O’Connor’s attention was drawn to the Ducanes’ home. The circular drive held a strange combination of vehicles: a battered black Hudson, which O’Connor took to be Todd’s old heap, a dove gray and black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, and the coroner’s wagon.
O’Connor felt his stomach lurch.
Along the street there were patrol cars as well, and a T-Bird that O’Connor had seen many times before. The T-Bird belonged to an old friend — Detective Dan Norton.
“It don’t take you creeps any time at all, does it?” the patrolman said, handing the pass back.
“What’s going on, Officer?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Who is it, Joe?” the other cop asked, walking over to the window. To O’Connor’s relief, it was someone he had met before, an officer named Matt Arden.
“A reporter,” the man called Joe said. “Only there is no such thing as ‘a’ reporter. It’s like one ant or one cockroach. They just don’t come in singles.”
“Officer Arden, we’ve met before,” O’Connor said.
Arden peered in and said, “Oh, it’s you.” He turned to the other officer. “He’s okay, Joe.”
“He’s waiting right here until I get the word. Go up and ask at the house.”
“Matt — what’s happened here?” O’Connor asked.
“Woman got herself killed,” Joe answered, before Matt could reply.
“A woman… my God…”
“Hey, Conn,” Matt said, “you all right?”
“Arden, why are you still here?” Joe said. “I thought I told you to get up to the house.”
Matt gave O’Connor a helpless look and hurried away.
“Now, be a good boy,” Joe said, “and move this jalopy over to the side of the road, so you can wait out of the way. Go on, move it.”
In a daze, O’Connor moved the car, parking beneath a large tree.
Between disbelief and sadness, one thought returned to him again and again:
What am I going to tell Jack?
Jack was in no condition to receive news like this. What might it do to him?
As cool as Lillian had been toward Jack over the years since the accident, she had never prevented Katy from becoming attached to him. That had happened because both Jack and Lillian were friends of Helen S
wan.
O’Connor remembered those days. Helen had become angry at Old Man Wrigley not long after Jack’s accident, and she left the paper. To Wrigley’s chagrin, she went to work for his goddaughter, Lillian Vanderveer Linworth, who did everything she could to keep Helen from caving in to his efforts to recruit her back. Lillian even moved to her ski lodge in Arrowhead for a time and took Helen with her.
Eventually, Lillian returned to Las Piernas. Helen went back to work at the newspaper, but by then she was attached to Katy and would often baby-sit her. Jack got to know Katy through his close friendship with Helen. Even as a toddler, Katy took to Jack.
O’Connor recalled, with a mixture of amusement and shame, that he had felt jealous of Katy when he was a young boy. Maureen had helped him get over it, talking to him about Jack being the sort of person who would only stay attached to those who didn’t try to lay claim to him. “Grab on to him too tightly, Conn, and he’ll let go of you.”
When he saw the truth of this, he asked his sister how she had figured that out about Jack, since she had only met him once or twice. She said, “When you told me what happened that night at the diner, when Lillian Vanderveer complained that Jack was spending too much time with you? She was jealous of you. Showing it was her mistake.”
That had sounded like nonsense at the time. It had been many years before he could figure out how Lillian Vanderveer could possibly be jealous of him. But he trusted Maureen and took her advice: he hid his feelings.
Eventually he hid the jealousy of Katy so well it disappeared, perhaps because as he grew a little older he realized he had nothing to fear from her. In time she won him over, as she did almost everyone, and he began to think of her as a lively, if spoiled, younger sister.
For all the wealth of the Linworths, he thought, she might have been better off if she had been part of the O’Connor family. His own mother had never been as reserved as Lillian, and although Kieran had been difficult to live with, O’Connor never doubted his father’s love. Harold Linworth was as much an absentee father as he was an absentee husband.
Linworth had kept his distance, but he was one of the few. Katy was beautiful and young and spirited, and if she wasn’t rich yet, she was destined to inherit a fortune. So was Todd, although hers would be the larger. O’Connor hadn’t seen much of Katy in recent years, and not at all since she had married Todd, a fact that now ladened him with guilt.
A woman got herself killed, the cop said. How? O’Connor knew that the only way he’d find out anything tonight was if Dan Norton would talk to him.
He thought about seeing Todd’s battered Hudson parked next to Dan’s shiny T-Bird. Was Todd home, then? Was he the one who killed Katy? Had she threatened to divorce him over the mistress?
The wind gusted and the rain drummed against the roof of the car, then subsided back to tapping.
He saw Matt Arden return with a figure who hunched into his raincoat and carried a big umbrella. Dan Norton. O’Connor felt something ease in his shoulders — a tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying. Whatever else was going wrong tonight, the best of the best had been assigned to this case. O’Connor put on his hat. He picked up an old newspaper from the seat next to him and sheltered under it as he got out of the car.
Norton smiled and said, “Jesus, O’Connor, they don’t even pay you news-hounds enough to buy umbrellas?”
“Mine’s warm and dry at home, Dan. Haven’t been there in almost a day, so…”
Dan immediately sobered. “How’s Jack?” he asked, moving his umbrella so that O’Connor was a little drier, and he a little more wet.
“He regained consciousness, at least. Too early to say much, but he seems to have his sense of humor.”
“Good sign. I guess you’ve heard what happened here? Although how you did, I’d love to know.”
“Jack asked me to check on Katy — Kathleen. Just a feeling he had, I guess. I didn’t come here knowing she had been murdered.”
“Kathleen? No — Jesus, Conn, who told you that?”
O’Connor stared at him. “But…”
Matt Arden said, “I believe he misunderstood something Joe said, sir.” He explained what had been said when O’Connor arrived.
“Hell, it’s not Kathleen,” Norton said. “It’s one of the maids. The one that looks after the baby. Nursemaid, I guess they call them…. Conn, listen, this is a hell of a mess. Are you here to cover this for the Express?”
“No, but—”
“But nothing. If you are, I can’t say another word to you.”
“Ever?”
“You know what I mean.”
“And you know what I mean. If I know something went on here and I don’t let the paper know about it, Mr. Wrigley would have every reason to fire me.”
“He won’t. Not if you mean the old man. He knows what’s going on himself and swore he’d cooperate. But I have to make sure — he didn’t send you out here to cover it?”
“No. I’m here for the reason I told you.”
“All right. Wait here, and as soon as the lab guys finish up, I’ll come back and tell you more. Right now I’m a little busy.”
“Dan — what’s going on?”
He hesitated, then said, “The baby’s missing. Little Maxwell Ducane. Kidnapped, looks like. But we don’t know where the Ducanes are — any of them.”
“What?”
“They went out on the Ducanes’ new boat, but haven’t come back — they were only supposed to be gone for a couple of hours, but there was fog late last night and this storm came in right behind it, so who knows what they ended up doing? Could be over on Catalina Island, waiting it out. Tried to get them by radio, but no luck. The Coast Guard will look for them, but in this weather — anyway, that’s it in a nutshell. Now sit tight, and I’ll tell you more when I can.”
So O’Connor waited, listening to the rain. He had felt so relieved to learn that it wasn’t Katy who was murdered, but hearing the rest of Norton’s news so soon after that had brought an end to that relief. Mixed with his anxiety for the child was his frustration at only having bits and pieces of information.
The coroner’s van left. Who was she, he wondered, that poor soul who’d been killed just because she worked here?
He caught a glimpse of movement in his rearview mirror, someone coming up the sidewalk. He waited, watching, but no one passed the car. He looked back, but the rear window was fogging up, and between that and the rain, he wondered if he had seen anything more than shadows.
O’Connor stepped out of the car. He tried to see if someone had moved behind the bushes that bordered the walk, tried to peer through the rain, but the wind drove it hard against him. He hurriedly got back inside.
He divided his attention between watching the street and glancing in the rearview mirror, but other than shifting shadows from the windblown branches of the trees, he saw nothing.
Suddenly there was a change in the pattern of the patrolmen’s movements. One of the wooden barricades was moved aside as Lillian Vanderveer Linworth’s chauffeured Rolls pulled up to it.
The Silver Cloud moved slowly past O’Connor’s car, then stopped and backed up, pulling alongside the Nash. He wondered if the police had asked her to come to the house, or if she had decided to see the crime scene for herself. Knowing Lillian, probably the latter — Lillian was never one to be passive. O’Connor didn’t blame her for coming here. He had spent a lot of time standing on the corner where Maureen had last been seen.
The chauffeur stepped out of the car, holding a large umbrella. The wind didn’t make it of much use to him. He was a young man, younger than O’Connor. He made his way miserably over to the driver’s side window of the Nash and waited politely. O’Connor took pity on him and rolled down the window, figuring no one enjoyed standing out in a cold rain.
“Mr. O’Connor? Mrs. Linworth would like a word with you, sir.”
“I’m waiting for someone. May I come by the house later on instead?”
The chau
ffeur hurried back to ask. O’Connor saw one of the windows of the Rolls open a fraction of an inch. He heard Lillian’s voice, but couldn’t make out what she was saying.
The chauffeur hurried back.
“Yes, sir, she would appreciate that very much. She said not to regard the hour, sir — to come at any time, day or night. I’m to impress upon you—”
“You have,” O’Connor said. “Please tell her that I’ll try not to make her wait up too late. And that … well, tell her I’m sorry to hear of her troubles.” He saw that the chauffeur was getting soaked, umbrella or no. “Why don’t you go back to the car and try to dry off a bit, now?”
He saw a look of determination on the man’s face and wondered at it, until he heard him say, “Mrs. Linworth asks if you have need of an umbrella.”
“Is she offering yours to me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, Lily…” He shook his head. “You may tell her, with my compliments, thanks all the same, but I only use umbrellas when it’s raining.”
“But, sir, it is raining.”
O’Connor smiled. “I’m Irish — I don’t even see it falling. Go on. Tell her thanks, but I’ve got my own with me.”
“Thank you, sir.” He hesitated, then added, “If I may say so, sir — she meant well.”
“Not a doubt of it.”
A few minutes later he saw Norton motioning to him. He reached for the slightly soggy copy of the Express again and held it over his hat as he hurried toward the barricade.
Norton again shared his umbrella. “Mind your manners in there,” he said. “Not everyone loves the fourth estate as much as I do.”
They walked quickly toward the sheltered entryway of the house.
“I saw the T-Bird,” O’Connor said. “You don’t usually drive it out to a job.”
“The department sedan’s in the shop. Should have it back tomorrow. Listen … about Jack, I’m damned sorry, O’Connor. Might as well tell you, they haven’t been able to learn a thing about it. Jack have anything to say?”
“Not really. He seems — a little mixed up.”
“Strange how that works. Some son of a bitch tries to crack your head open, you feel confused for a time. Don’t let it worry you, Conn. Memories may come back to him after he’s had a little time to recover.” Dan closed the umbrella, shook it, and leaned it up against a wall. He turned to an officer who stood at the door and said, “Anyone tries to take that, shoot him.”