by Jan Burke
“I would if I knew who it was.”
“Drives a Nash. Does that help?”
“A Nash? A Nash? A Nash Rambler?”
“Didn’t I just say so?”
“Thanks, Mary. I know who it is now.” I told her about my schedule for the day. As usual, she was fine with it. She wanted, she told me, all the time she could get with Dad.
I hung up and sat there thinking that I wanted to quit my job. I wanted to go home and read to Patrick Kelly, and laugh with him, and mow his lawn.
But first, I decided, I needed to find O’Connor.
Mary thought I should thank him.
I had a different idea. I wanted to kill him.
35
I TRIED THE PRESS CLUB FIRST. HE WASN’T THERE. SOME OF THE NEWSROOM boys were already knocking ’em back, and it took me a little while to turn down offers of drinks without causing offense. Wildman, of all people, came to my rescue, telling the rest of them to back off and escorting me to the door. “You might try O’Grady’s,” Wildman said. “And you be sure to tell Conn I was a perfect gentleman.” This last came out as “gennelmum,” but I assured him I’d convey the message.
O’Connor wasn’t at O’Grady’s, either. The place was almost empty. I asked the bartender if he’d seen him, and he said O’Connor hadn’t been in all week. I took my roll of dimes and went to the pay phone, which was in the hall outside the gents, and called Helen.
The problem was, by the time I reached her, I was out of steam. So when she asked me if anything was wrong, I told her, “Not with him. I, on the other hand, have lost my mind.” I gave her a brief rundown of the afternoon. “So I was going to tell him off for sneaking behind my back to visit my dad, but — somewhere along the way, I guess I started to hear what Mary was trying to tell me.”
“That your father enjoyed the visit. That it was a relief to her.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to share him, won’t you?”
“Yes.” I took a deep breath and tried to change the subject. “How are you?”
“Rough day. But I’ll be all right.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No, and you have enough to contend with — but listen, if you’re looking for Conn when he’s upset, try Holy Family Cemetery.”
“What?”
“Jack’s grave. He goes out there to have a word with him once in a while.”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude,” I said. “I’ll catch up with him later.”
I wasn’t far from Griffin Baer’s favorite barbershop, so I drove over to it. It was a clean little shop, with the traditional pole mounted outside the door, revolving in a pattern that must have inspired early psychedelic art. I walked into a room of white linoleum, maroon leather chairs, chrome, and mirrors. A thin, gray-haired man was sitting in one of the chairs, reading the sports section of today’s Express, but he quickly stood when I came in. He looked at my shoulder-length hair and said, “Good afternoon! Two dollars to trim off those split ends and even it up a bit. The length is good on you, so we won’t take off much.”
Normally, I have to work up some courage to let anyone with a pair of scissors in his or her hand come near me, having had a couple of bad experiences with hairdressers who couldn’t control their impulses — but this old guy didn’t strike me as the type who felt the need to experiment on humans. “A deal,” I said, taking a seat in a comfy chair. “But I want to be honest with you — I didn’t come in here for a haircut.”
“Sales?”
“A reporter for the Las Piernas News Express.”
“I already subscribe,” he said, indicating the copy he had set down. I saw that he had been circling horses’ names on the handicapper’s page.
“No,” I said, “I’m not selling the paper. I’m a reporter.”
“A reporter! How about that…”
He draped a cape over me and fastened it at my neck, then began combing my hair. No one had done this for me for a long time. I suddenly seemed to be able to feel every hair on my scalp. It almost tickled, but not quite. The sensation was both relaxing and gently stimulating. While it wasn’t sexual, there was all the same a kind of intimacy in this personal attention. No wonder people confessed everything to barbers and beauticians.
“A natural brunette,” he said. “Don’t ever color it. It’s gorgeous.”
“Thanks, but how can you tell it’s my natural color?”
“Do you know how to type?”
“Better than some congressional employees.”
He laughed. “Well, you also know news. And I know hair.”
“I wanted to ask you about Griffin Baer.”
He stopped combing, then began again. “Old Griff, huh? Why ask about him now? Man has been dead for some time now.”
I nodded toward the paper. “You read the story about the bodies in the car?”
“A little of it — don’t be insulted, I just haven’t had time to get to it yet. I was just catching up on sports when you walked in. I like to start the day with a smile, so I read the funny pages, then the sports, then ‘Dear Abby,’ and by then I’m ready for the news. But I do read the whole paper. I have to, in my business. Never know what a customer will want to talk about.”
“Griffin Baer owned the farm where the bodies were found.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I used to think that old man was just telling me tales, trying to make me think he’d had a wild youth. And after I went to his funeral and everyone was so nice and normal, I thought he’d made it all up!”
“He told you he had buried a car on his farm?”
“Oh no — hell no. Never said anything about that. But tell me — the people in the car, were they bootleggers?”
“What?”
“Bootleggers. Rumrunners. That’s how Griff got that house by the ocean.”
“You mean he smuggled booze into Las Piernas during Prohibition?”
“Yes, exactly. Told me they’d bring it into his house down there by the water, and then he did the work of getting it over to the old farm. Had a whole operation for distributing it from there.”
“His heirs believe he got the house on the beach by selling mineral rights to the farm.”
“Griff used to say — and lordy, I thought he was just being dramatic — that he was approached about letting them use the farm first. I guess it was a big place — a lot of acreage — and private. Set back from its neighbors. So then they arranged for him to get the house for a song, provided they could use it to land their hooch. He had a legitimate reason, see, for going from the house to the farm, and all that.”
“Why not just buy the farm from him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want their names on too many records.” He frowned. “That mineral rights story — you know who bought them?”
“No, but I’m going to find out.”
He shook his head. “I get a few odd ducks in here, and I figured old Griff was just reading too many spy novels. He always acted a little paranoid. Would come in on a weekday afternoon, just like you have now. Wouldn’t say a word if there was another person in the shop. He told me the government men never suspected that farmhouse, but I guess he had a false floor in the barn and a secret cellar. You can see why I didn’t believe him.”
I thought about all of that while he started to trim my hair. Maybe it really was nothing more than a paranoid old man’s stories.
“What year did Prohibition end?” I asked.
He paused in his trimming and said, “Oh, let me see. Sometime during the Depression. Around the time we had the big earthquake here — 1933.” The scissors went back to snipping. From what I could see in the mirror, he was doing a good job.
“The car was buried in 1958,” I said. “So I don’t know how it can have anything to do with bootlegging. And the people who were murdered were a young family. A man and woman in their early twenties, and their baby.”
He shook his head sadly. “Honey, I don’t like to think ill
of Griff, who was always kind to me, and generous, even if he was a little odd. But the fact of the matter is, that kind of bootlegging would connect him up to some folks who weren’t very nice.”
The absurdity of talking about killers and gangsters as “not very nice” might have made me laugh if I hadn’t become caught up in wondering about the Ducanes possibly having mob connections.
He finished his work with the scissors and put them and the comb into a jar of blue liquid to sanitize them. He was using a big soft brush to dust the clippings off my shoulders when I asked, “Did Mr. Baer ever mention a place up in the mountains? Near Lake Arrowhead?”
“No. And I don’t think he ever went up there. He stayed in town. He didn’t like the cold, but then, that just might be something that was part of old age. When he was younger, he could have been a ski champ, for all I know.”
I thanked him both for the haircut and the information and promised I’d be back. I tipped him very generously.
First the Cliffside and then a big tip. I was walking around town as if I was in high cotton, as the Louisiana branch of the Kellys might have said. Ludicrous behavior for someone making an entry-level reporter’s salary.
But then again, what had all the money in the world bought the Ducanes?
36
“YOU’RE LUCKY SHE DIDN’T BREAK YOUR NOSE,” IAN SAID, HANDING his brother an ice pack. “I can’t believe you let a chick do that to you.”
“Wasn’t her,” Eric said. He would have said more, told him to fuck off, that the one who had really hurt him was their former cousin, but speaking through his scraped and swollen lips was too painful. Eric didn’t think that wienie Kyle had landed all that many blows — he wasn’t even sure he had made contact more than once before that bitch hit him in the face with the handbag from hell — but there were places along his neck, shoulders, back, and legs that ached from whatever the fuck he had done. Eric never saw it, never even saw it coming. Hit him from behind, then let a girl finish his fight — like the wienie he was.
When the purse hit his face, his teeth had cut into his lips and the inside of his cheek. The corner of whatever the hell it was she had in that bag had struck his eye, and it was now nearly swollen shut. Planting his face in the asphalt hadn’t helped. His nose had stopped bleeding now, but it was tender and swollen, as was most of the left side of his face. His head throbbed.
“Man, your face is completely fucked up. You sure you aren’t going to lose any teeth?”
If Ian didn’t shut up soon, Eric was going to risk another set of injuries to make it as difficult for his brother to talk as it was for him.
As usual, though, Ian read his mood. He could always do that more quickly than anyone else. “Sorry, that was a shitty thing to say. If that asshole Kyle — wait, Uncle Mitch is right. He shouldn’t have ever had even one part of our dad’s name. I don’t know what to call him. He’s dead as far as I’m concerned.”
Eric managed something close to a smile. “Deadman.”
“Good one. Because he should have been dead a long time ago.”
Eric nodded slightly. Even that much movement of his neck caused excruciating pain.
“We are getting way too old for this physical shit, you know?” Ian said.
“No kidding,” Eric said. Guys in their early forties shouldn’t have to do this kind of thing. They both kept in shape, worked out, and spent time out at the firing range, but they hadn’t done this kind of job for Uncle Mitch in many years.
Uncle Mitch’s businesses had changed. For the last twenty years, there hadn’t been much rough stuff. Oh, every once in a while, Eric or Ian had to do a little collections work, but they seldom had to get physical. And Uncle Mitch hated to hear any report of that kind of action.
Uncle Mitch had wanted to be respectable now. He had a big thing about it. The Ducanes, the Linworths, the Vanderveers — that whole crowd had looked down their noses at Uncle Mitch. So Uncle Mitch was always on the climb, wanting to look right back down at them. Eric admired that about him. When he was a kid, Uncle Mitch owed that crowd money. Now he had more money than any of them.
For the past ten years, Eric and Ian had drawn a fat salary and had the titles of vice president in Yeager Enterprises, as Uncle Mitch’s biggest company was known. That meant they went around to his various businesses and kept people honest, voted the way he told them to at board meetings, ran little errands. Nothing too challenging.
Except for one other task, the one they were told was their primary job — to keep an eye on Warren Ducane. Make sure he didn’t go near any reporters. Come back and tell Uncle Mitch if he did anything out of the ordinary.
Ian and Eric used to wonder why Uncle Mitch didn’t just kill the miserable son of a bitch. Over time, Eric began to understand certain things. One was that Warren Ducane and Uncle Mitch were in some kind of standoff, and that if either one of them made a move, the other could do serious harm.
He knew better than to put Warren Ducane out of his misery, because Uncle Mitch enjoyed seeing that misery. Warren wasn’t the only one. There were these people in Las Piernas whom Uncle Mitch had never forgiven. Eric wasn’t even sure what they had done to Uncle Mitch, but he knew that Uncle Mitch was paying them back for something. Uncle Mitch wasn’t in a rush — he wanted them to suffer.
Uncle Mitch felt superior to all of them, but no one as much as Warren.
Eric had observed Warren for many more hours than his uncle had, and didn’t share his uncle’s complacency. He once told Uncle Mitch that he might have underestimated Warren Ducane. Eric would never forget the ranting and raging that had followed that — Uncle Mitch had a fire poker in his hand, and had threatened Eric with it. Ian had stepped in to protect him, and Uncle Mitch had hit him. That’s why Ian’s hair had a white streak in it — it grew that way out of the place where he had been hit.
For a time, Uncle Mitch had seemed to be right about Warren Ducane. Over the years, except for a little change in his manner after he visited Auburn Sheffield, Warren Ducane seemed to be a beaten man.
They all knew better now, didn’t they? And did Uncle Mitch remember Eric’s warnings? No. He berated Ian and Eric, blamed them for becoming bored out of their minds with watching a dull little wimp like Warren Ducane go through his dull little life.
Uncle Mitch always made it clear that he didn’t think they were smart. Maybe they weren’t as smart as his adopted traitor — but they weren’t stupid. They weren’t as interested in some of the business stuff as Uncle Mitch wanted them to be, but that didn’t mean they were dumb.
Uncle Mitch didn’t respect them, but he took care of them. It had been that way from the beginning of their lives. He wasn’t always an easy man to please, but he was there when you needed him. He was good at protecting them, and they did their best to return the favor. But he had younger guys on his payroll, and Eric wished one of them had been over at the Cliffside this afternoon instead of him.
“He can’t let anyone else handle this,” Ian said, again following his thoughts. “And you know why.”
Eric nodded and instantly regretted the motion.
“I guess I’d better try to find the Deadman,” Ian said. “Why’d you get in his face, Eric? Now they’ll be watching for us.”
Eric flipped him the bird.
Ian didn’t say anything for a minute. When he spoke, he took up another sore subject. “I can’t believe he bought a Beemer. A black one, like ours?”
“Yes,” Eric said, deciding that it was easier to talk than to nod.
“He’s trying to show us up, isn’t he?”
Eric thought the Beemer was the Deadman’s way of telling Ian and Eric that he didn’t need Uncle Mitch in order to have a car. He could buy his own.
For a few moments, Eric found himself wondering what it would be like not to have to go to Uncle Mitch for everything.
He thought about the little treasure box he kept hidden — his insurance, as he thought of it. A few things to help him out if Uncl
e Mitch’s will turned out not to be so generous to his nephews after all. Eric had been collecting small but valuable items in it from the day Uncle Mitch took an orphan into his home. Still, nothing in the treasure box would allow Eric to live as he did now.
“Do you think our little cousin is getting it on with that chick from the newspaper?” Ian asked, breaking in on these thoughts.
Eric managed to mumble, “Don’t know. But he’s after her.”
Ian suddenly sat up straight. “Do you think he’s trying to get Warren’s side of things into the paper, now that Warren thinks he’s safe?”
Eric’s one good eye widened. He hadn’t thought his cousin was on anything more than a mission to get laid. But Ian was right. “Shit,” he said.
The biggest problem was, Warren did seem to be safe. They had learned not to mention him around Uncle Mitch. Warren and that little wiener and now a reporter from the Express — not a good mix.
Ian frowned, growing more worried. “No wonder Uncle Mitch wants us to keep an eye on them. Fucking weirdo, Warren! Why couldn’t he just leave things alone?”
Eric was in complete sympathy with these feelings.
“A reporter,” Ian repeated. “A reporter! Damn!”
“That’s not all,” Eric said. “She’s O’Connor’s friend.”
“What! O’Connor!”
“I shit you not.”
“The Deadman couldn’t have given them anything from Warren yet,” Ian reasoned, “or it would already be in the paper. So what’s the deal? We’ve gotta find a way to stop him. Maybe we should just kill the Deadman — and this reporter.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Warren could still tell O’Connor. Or someone else. Warren is the problem.”
“So what do we do?”
“Set a trap for Warren.”
“How?”
“The Deadman — make him the bait.”
Ian liked the idea. “I’ll tell Uncle Mitch.”
“No,” Eric said quickly.