by Jan Burke
The day the verdicts were handed down, he left our post-trial celebration early to catch a flight back East. Before he left, he gave me a hug and said, “Write to me. Call me collect. And keep slaying dragons.”
Lefebvre stopped by the party for an hour or so, and was the first person to notice that I wasn’t drinking. “Driving tonight?” he asked when he was sure he wouldn’t be overheard.
I glanced at O’Connor, who was quietly downing one scotch after another. “I think that would be best.”
“You two are getting along now, I see.”
“We still have our occasional differences of opinion,” I said, which made Lefebvre smile. “But I like it when we tackle a story together. It’s hard to describe, but there’s a kind of energy there that I don’t always feel when I work on my own.” I shrugged. “This is going to sound corny, but I like him because he tries so hard to do the right thing.”
“Corny, huh? Maybe not. I’ve been reading some of the articles you’ve written together — it’s a good partnership, I think. And speaking of partnerships — I hear that you’ll soon be related by marriage.”
I sighed. “For as long as it lasts. Yes, my sister Barbara and his son Kenny are getting married. The only upside to this is that Kenny has moved out of O’Connor’s house and bought a place of his own.”
“You don’t place much hope in their future?”
“I shouldn’t be so negative,” I admitted. “They’ll probably be together forever. Kenny needs constant care and attention. My sister loves providing it — to a healthy male like him, anyway.”
He studied me after I said this, and I found myself hoping he didn’t ask me what I meant by it. He probably knew about my father, but he changed the subject.
“I wanted more of these old questions to be resolved,” he said, “but I have worked in law enforcement long enough to feel relieved that at least Ian and Eric now have felony convictions on their records. If they fail to win appeals, I’ll be happy.”
“I know what you mean. I just wish Betty Bradford had called me back.”
“Maybe she will, one of these days.”
“She’s passed up a huge reward, and if the person who was her boss was convicted today, she should have stepped forward.”
He shook his head, but didn’t comment. We both knew the big fish got away. And neither of us thought there was a hope in hell he’d be caught.
When last call rolled around, O’Connor and I were the only ones still in the bar. O’Connor was under full sail. Still, he managed to walk fairly steadily to the Karmann Ghia, and didn’t have too much difficulty getting in.
I drove him home. He was sobering up a little by then, and invited me in for coffee. I had been to his house many times by then, and he to mine, but this was something he had never done before. I accepted the invitation, but watching the clumsiness of his movements, seated him at the kitchen table while I made the coffee. Never let a drunk loose in a kitchen. Too many sharp implements, and the simplest tasks will take forever.
I made coffee that was the equivalent of forty-weight motor oil. He drank three cups of it. I could see him coming into focus, so I asked, “What is it, O’Connor?”
“What’s what?”
“What’s eating at you?”
He shrugged. “I was thinking of Ian and Eric’s catechism, and wondering if I could have become Mitch’s Yeager’s enemy before I was eighteen.”
“When you were a copyboy?”
“Maybe before that, even.”
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t answer. I poured him another cup of coffee.
“I was thinking of Maureen tonight, that’s all,” he said. “I think of her every day, but sometimes … like that night when you were in that tunnel… God, did that worry me.”
“Who’s Maureen?”
He seemed surprised I didn’t know, then looked down at his coffee. “Was… who was Maureen.”
After a long silence, he told me the story of his missing sister, and how he blamed himself because he had not walked her home that night. He talked of the misery his family had experienced, of the years of waiting for her to return. Of how even the discovery of her remains, while a relief of one kind, hadn’t brought him the peace he had hoped for. He spoke with bitterness over the fact that her murderer had not been caught. He seemed to blame himself for that, too.
I thought of the many times, over the past few months, when we had talked of unidentified bodies and missing persons. Not once had he mentioned Maureen. I realized that not even the loss of Jack could compare with the painfulness of this wound.
“We had been so close,” he said quietly. “I miss her to this day.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say or do to comfort him. I wanted to hug him, and while in later years that would become a natural part of our friendship, it was not yet. Finally, I said, “When you told me about the way she felt about your work — she was proud of you. I think she still would be proud.”
“Do you?” he asked. “I wonder.”
“I’m sure of it.”
He smiled softly then said, “It’s late, Kelly. Will you call me to let me know you’ve got yourself home safely? Don’t worry you’ll wake me.”
I called him when I got home, thinking of that night when he searched for me along the bluffs, and of his admission tonight that he had been afraid for me. I vowed that if he ever again wanted to see me safely to my door or wanted me to call him when I got home, or check in with him during the day, I would not fight it or refuse to do as he asked. These requests were not, I saw at last, overbearing protectiveness. His fears came out of a devastating loss, one that had haunted him all his life.
At work the next day, thinking of how drunk he had been, I wondered if he would remember telling me about his sister. He drew me aside and said, “I know you heard my sad tale with a kind heart, Irene, so I won’t regret the telling of it. But I have no right to use my sister’s memory in such a way. I would be grateful if we did not speak of it again.”
We never did, directly. We often did, in a thousand other ways.
Neither of us ever forgot Maureen O’Connor.
PART III
LEX TALIONIS
“Did I appeal to the law — I? Does it quench the pauper’s thirst if the king drink for him?”
— M
ARK
T
WAIN
,
Life on the Mississippi
February 2000
51
WHEN THE DOGS STARTED BARKING, FRANK WAS IN THE SHOWER AND I was in the bedroom, getting dressed. I had just pulled my pantyhose up around my knees when the doorbell rang. I glanced at the clock. Seven-thirty on a Wednesday morning. Who the hell was at my door at this hour?
I hastily pulled the pantyhose up the rest of the way, got a big run in them as I quickly put on some shoes, swore, and went to the door. I opened it to see — to my utter surprise — Kenny O’Connor.
Kenny was not the same man who had walked into that café all those years ago. He and Barbara had married and divorced, and were talking seriously about remarrying now.
Over those twenty years or so we had all changed to some degree, I suppose, but Kenny’s growing up had been recent. He had received a savage beating at the business end of a baseball bat, a beating that had left doubt about whether he’d live, and, if he survived, whether he’d walk, be able to speak without slurring his words or stop seeing double. The latter two problems cleared up fairly quickly. After years of rehabilitation work, he was walking now, with the help of a cane, and although his features were perhaps not as handsome as they had once been, anyone who had seen him immediately after the beating was now a believer in the wonders of plastic surgery and dental prosthetics.
He still worked in construction, but had been forced to sell his own company to pay medical bills. Now he was employed by O’Malley’s company, as a supervisor. Working for O’Malley had been good for him — better for him, in many
ways, than working for himself. These days, Kenny never took his job — or much of anything else — for granted.
“Hi, Irene. Mind if I come in for a minute?”
“Sure, great to see you. I was just about to make breakfast. Have you eaten?”
“Yes — I’ve eaten. But don’t let me hold you up.”
I motioned him inside. “Come and talk to me while I get busy in the kitchen.”
“Is your husband here?”
“Yes, he’s in the shower. Let me tell him you’re here.”
“That’s okay — I came here to talk to you, anyway. I just thought — well, I’ll ask him later.”
He followed me into the kitchen, sat at the counter, and accepted an offer of coffee. He watched while I put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster.
“So, what’s up?” I asked.
“Barbara tell you we’re moving?”
“Yes. A house not too far from here, right?”
“Right. Thought we’d make a fresh start this time around.”
“You’ll like the area,” I said, not commenting on the fresh-start part. I kept trying to make myself forgive him for some of the horrible things he had said to Barbara when he was going through man-o-pause. For fooling around on her. I supposed I should get over it, since obviously she had.
There is a distance between “should forgive” and “have forgiven” that is sometimes hard to cross.
“Well…” he said, then stalled.
I waited. Eventually he started up again. “I have some old stuff of my dad’s. I thought you might like to have it.”
“Stuff of your dad’s? Kenny, I saw what was left of his house when he was… when he died. Everything burned to the ground. You lost everything … right?”
“Yeah, everything.” He fell silent again. The toast popped, and I set it on a plate. Maybe Frank would want it. My appetite was gone.
Deke, one of our big mutts, sidled up to him. “Well,” Kenny said, reaching down to pet her, “you might not remember this, but after Barbara and I separated, I moved back in with my dad. He had filled my old room up with a lot of papers and stuff, and so when I came back home, he dumped it into boxes and carted it all over to this storage place.” He opened his wallet and pulled out a business card and handed it to me.
“U-Keep-It Self-Storage,” I read. I flipped it over. Scrawled on the back, in a hand I would have recognized anywhere, O’Connor had written “#18B.”
“It might just be junk,” Kenny said quickly.
“Haven’t you looked through it?”
He paused, went back to petting Deke, then said in a low voice, “I can’t.”
After a moment, I said, “I understand.”
He nodded, not looking up at me. Dunk, our other dog, saw what he was missing and crowded him on the other side of the chair.
“If they’re getting obnoxious, I’ll put them out,” I said.
“No. No — I like dogs. Might have room for them at this new place.”
“You’ve been paying the rent on this storage place all this time?”
He nodded again. He reached for his keys and pulled one off. “Almost forgot. You’ll need this to open the padlock. The code to get into the gate is four-six-four-five.”
I frowned. “Everyone who rents there knows that code?”
“No, Dad made that one up for himself. Each person has his or her own. And there are cameras all over the place. But you can change the code if you want to — just see the guy at the counter, and he’ll put your new one in the computer. I guess he was a friend of Dad’s.”
“He made them wherever he went.”
Kenny smiled. “True.”
“You sure you want me to have whatever is in there? Maybe there will be things you’ll want.”
“If it’s just papers and stuff like that, I don’t really want them. Otherwise — you can let me know if there’s something you think I’ll want. I trust you.”
That statement left me speechless.
Frank came out then, and Kenny visibly relaxed. “Hey, Frank — how’s it going?” They shook hands and almost immediately began talking about weekend sports.
Frank glanced over at me, his gray-green eyes full of amusement, and reached for the cold toast.
“Let me heat it up for you,” I said, a bit of domesticity that made him raise his brows even as he thanked me. I put the toast back in the toaster.
Kenny said, “Do you know much about this DNA stuff, Frank? I mean, being a homicide detective and all, of course you do, but … well, can I ask you about it?”
“Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“My dad’s only living brother is coming over from Ireland in a couple of months.”
“Dermot?” I asked.
“Yes. What I was wondering is — I’ve heard you can tell about paternity from DNA, even if you don’t have a sample from a living parent.”
“Yes, that’s true. You just need a relative descended from the same person.”
“So I could find out if my dad was really my dad from a sample of Dermot’s blood?”
“Yes. You’d each have to provide a blood sample, and you’d have to have it done by a private lab. It can be expensive — about fifteen hundred or more. Takes about four to five weeks.”
“Oh. Well, that makes sense, I guess.”
“Is that something you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it, that’s all.” He sniffed the air and said, “I think your toast is burning.”
Later that morning, I sat at O’Connor’s desk in the newsroom. It was my desk now, at least as far as the newer staffers were concerned, and I called it mine, but that was for convenience’ sake. I could never truly think of it as mine rather than his, and I know most of the staffers who had known him felt the same way — I was a tenant, not a proprietor. It’s one of the last of the old-style desks in the newsroom, and I have resisted all attempts to get me to exchange it for a piece of plastic on metal tubes. The publisher has heard me threaten to quit if it’s moved an inch from where it is.
Winston Wrigley III, the jerk who inherited his late father’s job, knows that isn’t an empty threat. I quit the paper in the late 1980s after he failed to fire someone for sexually assaulting another staff member. I was gone from the Express for a couple of years. I came back because it was the only way I was going to find out who had killed one of my closest friends — my mentor, Conn O’Connor.
The same people who had been responsible for Kenny’s beating had been responsible for O’Connor’s murder. O’Connor had died because he got too close to the truth while covering a story. I followed the leads he had worked so hard to discover, and his killers were brought to justice. It didn’t ease the loss.
The homicide detective working on the case was a man I had known in Bakersfield, Frank Harriman. Though he moved to Las Piernas in 1985, we didn’t manage to reconnect until O’Connor’s death. To the shock of everyone who had written me off as a woman who would be single all her life, we had married.
I’m Irish enough to think O’Connor’s spirit had a hand in that.
Maybe because I held the key to his storage unit in my hand, I could feel him looking over my shoulder in the newsroom that morning. I still missed him terribly and often wished I could hold another conversation with him, to tell him he was right, that newspaper work was in my blood, and that I had wanted to come back to the Express all along — but mostly to listen to his voice, his laughter, at least one more time.
I looked around me and wondered if he would want to work here these days. Not so much as a whiff of cigarette smoke, but that wouldn’t have bothered him. A bigger problem would be that a Starbucks Double Latte was about the strongest drink anyone kept near his desk.
No, that wouldn’t be the biggest problem. The biggest problem would be that someone had come by, vampirelike, and sucked the life’s blood out of the place while we were all trying to make deadline.
Nearby, I heard ot
her reporters murmuring into headsets and the soft snicking of computer keyboards. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead provided the loudest noise in the room. Quiet as a damned insurance office, and looked like one, too.
A few faces would be familiar to him. John Walters, Mark Baker, Stuart Angert, and Lydia Ames — who was now the city editor. Most of the men who had been hired in the late 1950s and 1960s had taken advantage of retirement packages in recent months, unable to watch the paper change as it had under Winston Wrigley III’s latest overhaul. We were losing a lot of people who had ten to twenty years in, too.
Circulation was down, and Wrigley was engaging in desperate measures these days. In the past few months, photographs had taken up more room than text on the front pages of every section. “What are we afraid of — readers?” one veteran reporter had said to me, just before he left. “Soon we’ll be giving out crayons to new subscribers.”
Another plan involved keeping stories to about two column inches each. All right, that’s an exaggeration, but as one of my colleagues said, “We used to have sidebars longer than these stories.”
The paper would have been even worse off if Wrigley’s father had not foreseen that his son might not be up to the job. While he had spoiled his son to a large degree, by the end of his life he had become less willing to excuse his only child’s weaknesses, and grew impatient with his lack of judgment. He couldn’t bring himself to deny him the position held for two generations by men named Winston Wrigley, but he made sure that Wrigley III didn’t inherit controlling stock, and established a Publisher’s Board that his son had to answer to.
Wrigley had less-than-subtle pressure from the board to keep me around, and John Walters covered my back — a loyalty I tried hard to continue to deserve.