Bloodlines

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?