Bloodlines

28

B RIAN O’MALLEY LET US BORROW HIS OFFICE. THE CONSTRUCTION TRAILER was roomy, but the tension between O’Connor and Lefebvre seemed to shrink it.

O’Connor set his dusty cardboard box down next to me, but instead of sitting, he leaned against the dark paneling on one of the office walls. I was itching to open up the box and have a look through its contents.

Lefebvre relaxed a little when we agreed that anything he told us about the scene-anything I hadn’t seen myself-would, for the time being, be off the record.

“What did you see?” O’Connor asked me.

I described the remains. O’Connor’s face lost all color about halfway through my account. When I said the couple appeared to be in evening clothes of some sort, his attention suddenly sharpened. When I added that I thought I had seen a few diamonds on the floor of the trunk, he suddenly sat down on the other side of the box and buried his face in his hands.

I stopped talking and looked at Phil Lefebvre.

Lefebvre looked at me, then back to O’Connor.

“You know who they are,” Lefebvre said.

O’Connor nodded. Without raising his head, he said in a strained voice, “Lillian Vanderveer Linworth’s daughter, Katy. Katy Ducane and her husband, Todd. My God…”

“They drowned twenty years ago,” I said, baffled. “That’s what Kyle said, anyway.”

“Kyle?” Lefebvre asked.

“Kyle Yeager. He’s called Max Ducane now,” I said quickly, seeing O’Connor look up and afraid that we were going to end up arguing about Kyle.

“Ah, yes,” Lefebvre said. “The new multimillionaire. I’ve read the stories in the Express about the… missing heir. As I recall, the bodies of the Ducanes- the younger Ducanes-were never found, right?”

“Not until now,” O’Connor said, his voice still unsteady.

“You’re so sure?”

So O’Connor told us the story of the night Corrigan saw the car buried, of going through the murder scene at the Ducanes’ mansion with Detective Norton, and learning that Lillian had given Katy the Vanderveer diamonds that night. Of finding a body in a swamp, and another in the mountains. “Eventually Dan Norton admitted that even if the Ducanes drowned by accident-which I never believed-Jack’s beating was connected to the disappearance of the child and the murder of the maid.”

“You were bothered by something other than the timing?” Lefebvre asked.

“Yes, because we were able to connect Bo Jergenson, the giant, with Gus Ronden, whose body we found in the mountains. And when Norton and his men looked through Ronden’s house here in Las Piernas, they found blood on clothes in his laundry hamper that matched the blood type of Rose Hannon, the murdered maid. And he found the knife Ronden presumably used.”

“But since Ronden also ended up murdered,” Lefebvre said, “Norton wasn’t able to track down others who might have been involved?”

“We had some theories, we both followed every lead we could-to nothing but a dead end.”

“Norton is retired now,” Lefebvre said, “but I’ll get in touch with him about this.” He hesitated, then added, “I truly appreciate the help you’ve given us today. The remains may or may not be those of the Ducanes, but at least we will have a starting place to try a comparison of dental records and so on. That alone may save us a great many hours.”

I wondered if O’Connor was going to pressure him for a return favor, but O’Connor waited in silence, and I followed his lead.

Lefebvre smiled, almost in appreciation, I thought. Then he said, “I can tell you something more, but I must stress that it is not yet for publication- I would caution you against mentioning it to anyone, especially Mrs. Linworth.”

He waited until we both nodded our agreement.

“There were small bone fragments wrapped in a blanket, crushed, it seemed, beneath the weight of the remains of the adults.”

“The baby?” O’Connor said. If I had expected him to feel some triumph because he had doubted that Kyle was Max Ducane, I was wrong. He seemed more upset than before.

Lefebvre held up his hands, palms out, in a halting motion. “Do not, I beg of you, jump to conclusions. The coroner’s office will be able to tell us more. I’m giving you this information as a favor-only so that you can, let’s say, be ready for any announcement that may come from Dr. Woolsey.”

“Will he be able to tell who the baby’s bones belong to?” I asked. “I mean, there won’t be any dental records, right?”

“No, but if the adults are the Ducanes, it is unlikely that any other infant would have been with them.”

O’Connor never opened the cardboard box while we spoke with Lefebvre, and I began to feel as curious about it as Pandora once felt about another. Before I could mention it, O’Connor said something about deadlines, and we thanked Lefebvre, then O’Malley and his crew, and left.

We walked to my car, so that I could drive O’Connor over to the distant place where he had parked his. He explained to me that he had been avoiding the television vans.

The Karmann Ghia’s passenger seat barely provided room for a man his size, and he further crowded himself by holding the box on his lap. He was holding on to it in a way that made me decide not to offer to put it in the trunk.

“I didn’t know Jack lost his eye because of a beating,” I said with a shiver.

“No?”

“No. I never asked him about it myself, because I noticed that when other people did, he came up with some outlandish tale about it. Never the same tale twice.”

O’Connor smiled and smoothed his fingers over the box.

I started the car. I had forgotten that I had left the radio on-“Miss You” blasted at us for a moment. I turned it off and apologized.

“I like music,” he said. “Including the Stones.”

Right, I thought, trying to imagine anyone over forty listening to the Rolling Stones. I left the radio off.

He asked me if I would be willing to stop by the coroner’s office to try to learn when they’d be scheduling the autopsies.

“You want me to take you there now?” I asked.

“No-what I meant was, would you go there alone? Before you head back to the paper? I’d go myself, but I think you’ll have a better chance of getting information out of Woolsey.”

“Because I’m a woman?”

“Because he dislikes me.”

“Why?”

He shrugged, then said, “Maybe it’s the Hannah articles. I’m told he thinks they make his office look bad.”

“Because he fails to come up with an identification once in a while?”

“More than once in a while. He’s especially bothered that I bring up the case of Hannah herself-sees me as the one who brings up an old failure year after year.”

“I love those articles. They’re important-and, I don’t know, something in the way you write them really makes the reader feel for the families.”

He seemed a little uncomfortable with the praise, but he said, “Thanks.”

I handed him the roll of film I had shot. “The first few are of the ceremony, and then there are some of the crew. I know the paper won’t publish the most graphic ones of the car, but I’d like to see prints anyway. They might help me…or someone else…with writing the story.”

“I’ll ask them to get to work on these first thing. With luck, they’ll be printed by the time you get back to the paper, or not long after.”

I began to wonder if he was sending me on an errand to the coroner’s office as a way of helping me save face, so that I wouldn’t have to sit in the newsroom while he wrote the story. I had never written about a murder case, old or new.

When we reached his car, he said, “About this story we’re working on now-what would you like me to do next?”

“What would I…? You’re kidding, right?”

“No. It’s still yours.”

I didn’t answer right away. I had a feeling my answer wouldn’t just determine what happened on this one story. I could have some really fine payback out of this, make him miserable, and test his sincerity about working together. Or I could let him know what I had meant to tell him all along, if we had managed to get off to a better start.

“I want to work together,” I said, “but not as equals.”

“As I said, you’re the boss.”

“No. I mean, work together, but you help me to do this right. I covered crime in Bakersfield, but never a murder-just small-time police blotter stuff. Auto thefts and burglaries. Things like that. Never a high-profile case. And I’ve only been on the job for two years, and you’ve been on it for…”

“I’ve worked for the Express for forty-two years.”

“Forty-two! You aren’t that old!”

He smiled. “I started at eight, as a paperboy.” He glanced down at the box, then gazed out at something beyond the windshield. I looked, but there was no view to speak of, just an empty side street and the cinder-block wall of a suburban housing tract, edging up to the fields that would soon become a shopping mall. I watched his face, saw him wince as if some ache troubled him. He turned toward me again and said, “I was a copyboy after that. I didn’t sell a story until I was fourteen.”

“Gee, so you’ve only been a reporter for a lousy thirty-six years…I’ve been one for two. So for the good of the story, I think we’d be better off if you called the shots.”

“Wrigley wouldn’t hear of it.”

“That’s right, he won’t.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Don’t be afraid to give this a try. I promise I’ll speak my mind if I think you’ve missed something or gone in a wrong direction.”

I glanced at my watch. “We haven’t got time to argue.”

“As a first decision, that’s a good one.”

Have it your way, I thought. “Tell me what’s in the box.”

“Notes and a few photos I took years ago. Nothing that will need to go into the story today, but I’ll go over them with you after we get this first one in.”

“All right. When you get to the paper, talk to Lydia Ames.”

“The food editor?” he asked, raising his brows.

“You know exactly who she is, because you’ve been pumping her for information about me. Wrigley’s wasting her talent in features, but never mind that now. She’s been looking up the history of the ownership of the mall property-the farm. Is the name Griffin Baer familiar to you?”

“No…I don’t think so.”

“Well, maybe she’ll find out that the owner in 1958 was someone else. You’re more likely than I am to recognize that name.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“The back story on the disappearance of the Ducanes. Can you write about that?”

“Sure.”

He got out of the car, taking his box with him. He closed the door, then leaned his big frame down and spoke through the open window. “Maybe it would be better if I went to the coroner’s office, Irene. It’s not… pleasant.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m not afraid of the dead.”

“You should be. They sometimes cause more trouble than the living,” he said, and walked away.