Goodnight, Irene (2 page)

“Why don’t you take that jacket off? I’m not so formal here with my shoes off.”

“Thanks,” he said, standing up again for a moment. He took off his suit jacket and folded it neatly over the back of the chair. Even in the long-sleeved shirt and shoulder holster, he looked a lot more comfortable. He sat back down, loosened his tie and flipped his notebook open to a clean page. I felt nervous again.

“Look, how about something cold to drink?”

He gave me that questioning look again. “Sure,” he said.

Hell’s bells, I thought. I’ve got to stop acting like an idiot. I realized that every time one of us was on the verge of discussing what had happened to O’Connor, we fumbled around and stalled.

I poured a couple of glasses of iced tea and brought them into the living room.

Outside the big picture window, the heat waves made the street look like a river. A big dark-blue car ferried its way past the window. I could see Cody stretched out in the sun on the lawn.

I handed Frank his iced tea and sat down again. “Sorry — I should have thought of offering you something sooner. I’m a little distracted, I guess. What do you want to know?”

“It’s okay. I guess I’m distracted too. Anyway, you saw O’Connor last night?”

“Yeah, we went out to Banyon’s. He was in a festive mood, you might say. He did quite a bit of drinking, but I was driving, so I quit after a Guinness. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.” I thought about O’Connor and the dancers. I stopped the story for a minute and looked outside. Cody had moved into the shade. I took a deep breath and went on.

“Anyway, we talked and watched people dance, and left sometime after midnight, probably about twelve-thirty. I drove him home. Got there around one. He got out of the car, sang ‘Goodnight, Irene’ to me on his way in. He likes to — he liked to sing that to me.”

Why was it so hard to tell something that I’d been thinking about all day? I looked out the window again; the blue car — a Lincoln, I noticed — was going slowly back up the street.

“Did you walk up to the house with him?” Frank asked.

“No, but I watched him go up the porch steps — he wasn’t too steady on his feet. There wasn’t any package there. Kenny was already home — at least, his car was in the driveway.”

“What was O’Connor working on?”

“The paper wouldn’t tell you?”

“Haven’t been over there yet — figured you’d know more about what he was really up to than that jackass Wrigley.”

I had to smile at that. “You’re not just trying to get on my good side by saying that about the esteemed editor of the
Express,
are you?”

“No, I decided he was a jerk long before Mark Baker told me why you left the paper. That just confirmed it.”

“Well, he is a jackass. But maybe it was a mistake to leave the paper. I probably shouldn’t have let him get to me. O’Connor was always pushing me to go back, said I’d let my Irish get the better of me. He was a real old-school newspaperman. The genuine article. ‘Duty to the public,’ and all of that. He wasn’t naive in any way about anybody or anything, but he hadn’t soured on the world like some do.”

“Same thing happens to cops,” Frank said.

“I know. We all get to see the underside of the rock, I guess. Hard to remember there’s anything else sometimes. Of course, in the line I’m in now it’s all sunshine and lollipops. God, I hate public relations work. I spent most of last night bitching about it to O’Connor. Anyway, he believed in what he was doing. I don’t believe in what I’m doing right now and it’s turning me into a real cynic.”

“You’ll do what you need to do.”

“You sound like O’Connor. Anyway, you asked what he was working on. Well, let’s see. He was spending time on a campaign-funding story — mayor’s office. That took most of his energy lately.”

“I didn’t really know him,” he said. “Just met him once or twice. Saw him around City Hall now and then, used to catch his column once in a while. One or two of the old-timers in the department told me O’Connor had some pet story about an unsolved homicide?”

“Oh, you mean Hannah. Yes, there was always Hannah. That wasn’t her name, that was just sick newspaper humor. Pretty gruesome story, really. Young woman, about twenty years old. Found her in the sand down under the pier. Somebody didn’t ever want her identified. Bashed in her face and cut off her hands and feet. Some wag in the newsroom named her ‘Handless Hannah.’ The autopsy showed she was about two months pregnant at the time. That was in the summer of 1955. O’Connor was about twenty-seven, I guess.

“Well, ten years earlier, O’Connor’s older sister went missing. She was about the same age as Hannah, about eighteen or nineteen. They found her body about five years later but never figured out who killed her. She had disappeared in the spring of ’45, just before the end of the war — on her way home from a defense plant. Didn’t find her until 1950. So that was only about five years before Hannah showed up on the beach.

“When he talked to me about his sister, he told about how it had driven his mother crazy; it was hard on the whole family, not knowing for those five years. He was really close to this sister. I guess he usually walked her home from work, but he had a hot date that night. Lots of guilt over what happened. On top of everything else, the date stood him up.”

“So because of his sister, he got caught up in the story of this Jane Doe without the hands?”

“Right. The old bulldog kept trying to figure out who she was. It was an obsession, really. When the coroner’s office got tired of holding her in the morgue, O’Connor spent his own money to arrange for a decent burial and a tombstone for her.

“He would even use his vacations to try to figure out where she had come from, what she might have been doing here. Every year, on the anniversary of the day they found her, he’d write his famous ‘Who Is Hannah?’ story. He wrote about her case and any recent Jane or John Does lying around in the morgue. Sometimes the story would get picked up by out-of-town papers. He actually helped to get the identification on a couple of bodies. But nobody ever claimed Hannah. Every year someone looking for a missing daughter or sister or wife would contact him, but it wouldn’t turn out to be Hannah. Now and then he’d tell me he thought he had a lead on it, but I don’t think he ever really learned much.

“‘Irene,’ he’d say, ‘somebody misses that girl. Every night they go past her room and wonder if she might still be alive, if maybe she has amnesia, if she secretly hated them and ran away, if she has been tortured or treated cruelly. They miss her. And somewhere some black-hearted bastard knows he killed her, knows where her hands and feet are buried. I aim to make him feel a little worried.’”

Frank stretched and sighed. “Thirty-five years ago. The killer may not even be alive now, let alone worried.” He stood up and walked around a little. “I guess O’Connor ruffled a few feathers along the way.”

“I’ve thought about that,” I said, standing up too. “This town’s so thick with potential enemies, you can’t stir ’em with a stick. Lots of people who didn’t like what he had to say about them, people with the power to do something about it. He got death threats occasionally. Didn’t mention any lately, though.”

There was a knock at the front screen door. We turned to look, and it appeared that no one was there.

“Cody. Wild Bill Cody, my cat,” I explained. “He’s got a cat door, but this way he can make a nuisance of himself.” I opened the door and let him in. He pranced over to sniff Frank’s shoes — shoes must be to cats what crotches are to dogs, although cats are more delicate about it — and Frank bent down and picked him up. Cody is a sucker for affection, and even with the heat he was happy to be scratched between the ears. Frank stood there holding Cody and looking out the window. He seemed to be staring at something, when suddenly he dived toward me and knocked me to the floor, landing on top of me and knocking my breath out. Cody went tearing out from between us just as three gunshots blew out the window.

F
RANK LIFTED HIS HEAD
and I saw blood on his face. I started to cry out, but he put his hand over my mouth. He was listening for something. We heard the car drive off. He scrambled up off me and pulled out his gun, looking outside quickly before going out the front door. I got up a little more slowly. There was glass all over the place and a gaping hole in the back of my armchair. That really pissed me off. Trying not to step on any glass, I went out to the front porch.

The gunshots had been loud enough to draw a few of my neighbors out for a little rubbernecking. “Frank, get in here, you’re scaring the neighbors.” Not every day they saw a bloodied man with a gun standing out on my lawn. “Nothing to worry about, folks, he’s a cop.”

“You’re a real laugh riot. I guess that means you’re not hurt.”

“Thanks to you, I’m not.”

He managed a quick smile and said, “All in the line of duty.”

He was looking out at the street in front of the house next door. Suddenly, I saw what he was staring at. A red Corvette.

“That your neighbor’s?” he asked.

“No,” I said in disbelief, “but it looks just like Kenny O’Connor’s.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.” He walked over to it, took a quick look through the windshield that apparently didn’t reveal anything special, and came back to my house. “Let’s go back inside,” he said.

He made a phone call to headquarters while I went to get something to clean up his face.

“Yeah, dark blue, late model Lincoln, no front plate. Probably headed up Ocean Boulevard. Also, check out the registration of an ’87 Corvette, license 3RVE070. Yeah. No, we’re all right. Okay, thanks.” He hung up.

I sat him down at the kitchen table and then pulled a chair up facing him, and started to sponge the blood off his face with a warm washcloth. He winced a little, and I realized that he hadn’t been cut by glass or shot — he had a lovely deep set of Cody’s claw marks on the right side of his face.

“Cody got you good, didn’t he?”

“Not his fault, I scared him. Where is he?”

“Ran off — if my closet door is open, he’s up on the top shelf. Otherwise, ten to one he’s hiding under my bed.”

I had some antibiotic ointment and tried to be tender as I put it on the scratches. He was watching me with those beautiful gray-green eyes. He reached up and touched my hair.

“You’ve got little pieces of glass in your hair,” he said, and gently pulled a bead of it from near my ear.

“So do you,” I said, and reached into his soft brown hair to retrieve one of them. We took care of each other like a couple of parrots for a few minutes. We were interrupted by a knock at the door by something bigger than a cat and parted, both looking a little sheepish.

“Detective Harriman?”

“Yeah, be right with you,” Frank answered.

He stood up, shook his head, and squared his shoulders, trying to get into his Detective Harriman mode again.

The young, pink-faced, uniformed officer who came in the door looked as if the heat was about to do him in.

“Bob Williams, sir. We picked up a call to come over on a drive-by. They said to contact you.”

He noticed the scratches on Frank’s face and gave me a look.

A fleeting grin crossed Frank’s face. “Officer Williams, this is Miss Irene Kelly. You’re in her home.” Williams nodded toward me and then looked around. He got wide-eyed when he saw the chair, and I noticed for the first time that Frank’s coat, once so neatly folded, had been blown to shreds.

“I hope you weren’t sitting there, sir.”

“Not when it mattered. Anything on the Lincoln?”

“No, sir, not a sign. We can ask around the neighborhood if you’d like. Forensics will be here anytime now. Also, the Corvette is registered to a Kenneth O’Connor, 803 Randall Avenue.”

Frank and I exchanged looks.

“Is that helpful, sir?” Williams asked.

“Yes,” Frank said, “I think it is. Please try to discover where Mr. O’Connor is now.” He pulled out the notebook and flipped to one of its pages. “When I spoke with him this morning, he told me he planned on staying at the Vista del Mar Hotel down on Shoreline Drive. Find out if he’s been there yet today and if he’s visiting anyone here in the neighborhood. If not, ask if anybody saw him leave the car.”

Williams noted all of this with care. He looked up and eyed the scratches on Frank’s face again. “Do you need anyone else here with you?”

“No, we’re fine. Let me know if anyone noticed anything unusual going on. Besides windows being blown out.”

The young man headed out the door.

“Officer Williams?” I called to him.

“Yes, Miss Kelly?”

“The scratches? From a cat.”

“Yes, of course, ma’am.” He blushed and left without looking at either one of us.

Frank and I cracked up as soon as the kid was out of earshot.

“We shouldn’t laugh,” I said. “I remember when you were just a rookie yourself.”

“And I remember a fairly-wet-behind-the-ears reporter.”

“Yeah. Green as they come.”

We stood there in silence for a while, remembering. I thought of that spark of attraction between us all those years ago. We were much younger then, not so much in years — Frank and I are about the same age, nearing the final approach to forty, landing gear down — as in experience.

I thought back to Bakersfield, to the nights when we’d go for coffee and long four-in-the-morning talks at the end of our respective shifts. God, we were both so full of confidence in our ability to change the world.

Of course, we saw that world from different perspectives. My job was to get the story, Frank’s was to enforce the law. On some level, we were wary of each other then, as we were both trained to be by our employers. Sooner or later, every cop is burned by some reporter who misquotes or coaxes out too much information. And sooner or later every reporter is given a bum steer by some cop.

And yet, over time, I suppose we both learned it isn’t always that way; plenty of people manage to maintain a certain professional distance and still be friends with one another. Somehow Frank and I stayed friends. I guess we both had that ideal of doing the public some good.