Goodnight, Irene (29 page)

“I’m doing a lot better than the last time you saw me. I guess you know the guy who killed Elaine Tannehill is dead.”

“Yeah, your pal Pete is coming out here again to tie up some loose ends on that one.”

I found myself grinning into the phone. So old wily Pete had finagled at least one more trip to see Rachel. Good for him.

“You still there?”

“Yeah, sorry — got distracted here for a minute. I’m at the paper. I was looking at some old microfilm and started wondering about something, and I thought you might be willing to help me out.”

“Sure, if I can.”

“Any chance I could talk to Elaine Tannehill’s mother? There are a couple of people here who might have known Elaine when she was younger.”

“You have some idea on who hired Hawkeyes?”

“Too early to call it an idea. Just some pretty loose speculation.”

“Hmm. Will you let me know if you turn up anything solid?”

“No problem. I just don’t want to open a can of worms by guessing aloud at this point.”

“Well, I tell you what. Even though it is a Sunday and my day off, I’ll call in and get a number for old lady Owens. I’ll ask her if she’s willing to talk to you; if she is, I’ll have her call you. I couldn’t get much out of her this week — she’s been pretty upset — so no guarantees. But I’ll try. That good enough?”

“That would be great. I really appreciate it, Rachel, and I’m sorry to bother you on your day off.”

“Ah, I make noise about it, but what else do I have to do?”

“Well, I still appreciate it.” I gave her the numbers for the paper and Lydia’s house.

I hung up and sat there brooding over the bits and pieces of information I had. I reached over and turned the computer terminal on, and went back to the sections of O’Connor’s notes on the mayor’s race. The election would be held in November. The primary had just been held during the first week of June, and for the first time in years, Longren had failed to take enough of a majority to avoid a runoff.

I looked over the two pieces of code that had caught my eye the last time I went through the files:

RCC — DA + MYR =o=. LDY? $ VS $ BLP AM W/C.

>>>MYR PD FR DA RCC $? CK W/AM @ BLP

Ann Marchenko and the Bank of Las Piernas. Now that I had talked to Guy about her job in the safe-deposit area of the bank, maybe I could see a new way of reading the messages on the screen.

In the first line of code, a question had come up in O’Connor’s mind about fund-raising moneys that concerned the district attorney and the mayor. After the rat nose, “LDY?” might stand for “laundry” or “laundering.” “$ VS $” might mean that the moneys accounted for in the campaign funding report didn’t match what one or both of the candidates had received. Somewhere, something didn’t balance out.

The second line of code was easier to figure out. “Mayor paid from district attorney’s fund-raiser money? Check with Ann Marchenko at the Bank of Las Piernas.”

Together, the two lines suggested that the district attorney might be laundering funds he raised and feeding them to the mayor through some kind of system that used the Bank of Las Piernas’s safe-deposit boxes.

I looked at a section of the screen just below the second line of code and saw a group of initials I hadn’t paid much attention to before:

A H

R M

E N

R L

I had originally thought them to be names of people O’Connor planned to call or interview. They weren’t phrases or anything I could make sense of. He would often put a person’s initials here or there. But it was uncommon for him to put four sets in a row without some kind of intervening commentary.

AH might be Andrew Hollingsworth, and RL, Richard Longren. But who the heck were RM and EN? I stared at this list of initials until I had a headache that was pulsing in time with the cursor on the screen.

“Patience,” I could hear O’Connor say. I snapped a pencil in half with my patience and shut the terminal down.

I walked over to Lydia. “I’ve got to get some air,” I said testily.

“I’m off in an hour,” she said. “Should I meet you somewhere for lunch?”

“Okay, how about the Tandoori?”

“Great. I haven’t had Indian food in a long time.”

By the time I stepped outside I was in a better mood. I decided that I would go by Kenny’s room and see how he was doing; maybe say hello to Barbara if she was there.

It was getting to be a little easier to walk into St. Anne’s. I strolled down the hall, but when I got to Kenny’s room, it was empty. I felt my knees buckle. Had Kenny died? I shook myself as if I were trying to throw off a chill. Nonsense, I told myself. His condition was improving. Barbara would have called if he had taken a turn for the worse.

One of the nurses who had seen me come by before told me that Kenny had been moved out of ICU and into another room. She told me how to find it. I thanked her, and she looked at me curiously. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You look a little pale.”

I told her I was fine, thanked her again and made my way to Kenny’s new room.

When I got there, he was alone. “Barbara?” he called out.

“No, Kenny, it’s Irene.”

He didn’t hide the disappointment. “Oh,” he said.

“How are you feeling?”

No answer.

“Look, Kenny, I know you and I haven’t always been bosom buddies, but maybe for Barbara’s sake we could try to be civil to each other.”

He looked over at me. “I feel lousy. What would you expect?”

“That you’d feel lousy, I guess.”

“Well, I do.”

I thought for a moment. Should I just leave? I decided I would at least give it one more try.

“Kenny, I know it’s a really hard time for you. You’ve been through a lot. I’m very sorry about your dad.”

“I’m not.”

“What!” I felt myself go into a cold shock.

“I said, ‘I’m not,’ as in, ‘I’m not sorry my father is dead.’”

The cold shock began to turn into a slow burn. I wanted to break a couple more of his lousy bones.

“You heartless, selfish little son of a bitch!”

“I’m just telling you the truth. You never could accept the truth about Dad. You idolized him. You worshiped him like some kind of god. You made him into something he wasn’t.”

“Oh, really.” I was trying very hard to get back into control of my temper.

“Really. The truth is, my father was an alcoholic who never gave a tinker’s damn about me because I couldn’t and wouldn’t be a newspaperman.”

“That is pure bullshit.”

“Is it?”

“He loved you, Kenny. You were his only son — his only child.”

“I was a responsibility to fulfill. An obligation. You were his only son, Irene. You were the one he adopted as his child. You were the son I could never be.”

“You are really one fucked-up individual.”

“You even talk like a man. You were tougher than I was. You still are.”

I held my tongue. My head was pounding. I took a lot of long slow breaths.

“You know, Kenny, maybe if I lived your life, I’d be as bitter as you are — but I doubt it.”

This was met with stony silence.

“I can accept the fact that your dad drank too much. You’re right. He did. But there was more to him than that, and you know it.”

“Go away, Irene.”

“He loved you, Kenny. He told me more than once how glad he was that you came to live with him. How a piece of him had been missing until you came back.”

“I said, go away.”

“He loved you. And if you don’t know it, that is about the saddest thing I can think of — that he died unaware that you didn’t believe in his love, and that you didn’t love him back.”

“I did love him,” he said quietly, and shut his eyes to me.

I walked out, my face a big mess, tears rolling down my cheeks. People stared at me as I went by, then turned away in embarrassment if I caught them looking.

Out on the sidewalk I was given a wide berth. I stopped and I got out my handy Kleenex packet, which up until recently was only used when other people started crying or sneezing, and tried to get myself together. After a few minutes I was okay again. I allowed myself a king-sized sigh. I couldn’t help Kenny. The old feeling I always had in connection with him.

As for my own sadness, I resolved that my love for O’Connor was not going to be my burden, but rather my strength.

I
STILL HAD
a little time to kill before meeting Lydia at the Tandoori, so I walked around downtown, window-shopping. There are all kinds of specialty shops in downtown Las Piernas. I walked past a place that repaired typewriters, another that sold boots — no shoes, just boots — a glassblower, a used-book store, an antiques dealer, and a place that sold and repaired electric razors. About every fifth door led into a little café or restaurant. Most shops were kept up pretty well, but a few looked as if no one had dusted out the display case since 1935.

Like every downtown of every city of any size, downtown Las Piernas had pawnshops, bail bondsmen, fleabag hotels, and places that had what my grandfather called “girlie shows.” But that group of businesses was an endangered species in the wake of redevelopment. While 1930s-born Broadway still had many buildings with mythology-laden art-deco fronts and curving lines, they were fast becoming overshadowed by the shining, angular monoliths of glass and mirror that had recently grown up along Shoreline Drive. As soon as the ocean view had been walled off, I had no doubt the developers who spawned these architectural behemoths would trudge inland, and squash the griffins and centaurs and cherubs of Broadway. The Bank of Las Piernas and other more modern buildings had already taken the place of some admittedly funky predecessors.

Even with my browsing, I got to the Tandoori before Lydia. The Tandoori was one of the few downtown lunch spots that didn’t close on Sundays. The air inside the restaurant was fragrant with curry and spices.

Lydia arrived and we were courteously guided to a booth near the back. There were about ten other people scattered around at the other tables, which just about made a full house.

We went about the business of studying the menu without saying much. Lydia chose a curried vegetable dish and I went for the murg sag and an order of garlic nan. The waiter left and Lydia looked over at me.

“Are you going to tell me about it, or should I pretend your eyelids aren’t swollen and your nose isn’t red?”

“Have you ever noticed that, in the movies, a woman can cry and neither her mascara nor her nose will ever run?”

“That’s Hollywood.”

“Yeah.” I told her about my conversation with Kenny. She shook her head silently.

“He’s lost his mind. Don’t let him get to you.”

“Too late. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy for even trying to talk to him. Double crazy for letting it bother me.”

“Truth be told, I probably would have strangled him on the spot.”

“What do you suppose brought him to say things like that?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Irene, if you haven’t been able to see how threatening you are to Kenny, you ought to start learning Braille.”

She had a point. Kenny had said as much to me.

Our food arrived, but my appetite had left. I picked at the soft thin bread covered with bits of garlic and made a stab or two into the spinach-and-chicken dish. But I couldn’t force myself to do much more.

“You know what we need?” said Lydia, watching me. “We need to have a memorial service or something for O’Connor. I mean, he hasn’t really been — I don’t know — put to rest.”

“Barbara wants to have an Irish wake. She wants to wait until Kenny is feeling better. I wonder if she’s even mentioned the idea to him.”

“What happens at a wake?”

“That’s the problem. We don’t really know except from hearsay and movies. But Barbara’s going to talk to my grandfather’s sister; Mary’s from the old country.”

“I’ll bet Kevin could help out.”

“You’re right. Kevin’s probably waiting to hear what we’re going to do.”

I thought of all the other friends of O’Connor, and felt a little better. For every Kenny, there were a hundred people like Kevin, who thought well of O’Connor and would not shun his memory.

“Ready to go?” Lydia asked. I felt bad about leaving so much food, so I asked to have the murg sag wrapped up to go.

When we got home, I was about to put the Styrofoam container into the refrigerator when Cody intercepted me, and I dished out some of the meal for him. Lydia sat on one of the barstools at the kitchen counter and listened to the answering machine. Her mother had called to invite her over to a cousin’s birthday party on Thursday. There was also a message from Frank. Lydia gave me a very meaningful look, although he had simply said, “It’s Frank — Sunday morning. Give me a call if you get a minute.”

Fortunately, Cody distracted her by having a sneezing fit after eating the murg sag.

I called Kevin, but he wasn’t home, and his machine wasn’t on. I tried Frank. He answered with the usual “Harriman.”

“Hello, Harriman,” I said.

“Hello, Kelly,” he said warmly. “Sorry about conking out so early last night.”

“It was kind of fun watching you sleep.”

Lydia, hearing only my side of the conversation, raised her eyebrows. I grabbed a section of the Sunday paper from the counter and swatted her.

“What was that?” Frank asked.

“There’s a fly in here.” Lydia stuck her tongue out at me.

“Do you have plans for the afternoon?”

“Nothing special. Are you going stir-crazy again?”

“You guessed it. Would you mind going out for a drive? I just need to get out of the house for a while.”

“I wouldn’t mind at all. Give me about an hour, okay?”

“Great.”

We hung up and I found myself being studied by Lydia.

“Okay, Irene. Give me all the details. What’s going on with you two?”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Lydia.”

“Oh, sure. ‘It was fun watching you sleep.’”

“Last night he fell asleep on the couch, with his head on my lap. We were both fully clothed. You’ll have to look elsewhere for your big romantic story.”