Goodnight, Irene

13

INEEDED A PASSWORD to get into O’Connor’s files. Unlocking the desk and looking through its drawers, I realized that the detectives who had searched it had been thorough. No loose papers, no calendar, no notebooks. I was going to have to spend some time down at police headquarters if I wanted to go through anything handwritten.

Just as I was about to give up, Lydia stopped by the desk and handed me a small piece of paper with what looked like a license plate number on it. “It’s a new password,” she said. “You’ll need it to access O’Connor’s computer files. They had to override the old one so that the cops could copy the files onto a disk.”

“Thanks.”

I entered the password in the terminal. There was the usual delay while the computer looked for the files. Just as O’Connor’s notes were coming up on the screen, the phone rang.

“Kelly,” I said, picking it up.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I was trying to reach Mr. O’Connor. Is he in?”

Now what should I do? I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Mr. O’Connor is dead,” or “He won’t be in today,” or “Not at the moment.” I settled on “May I ask who is calling?”

“This is Dr. MacPherson at the Los Angeles College of Dentistry.”

“Mac teeth,” I said half-aloud. It had to be the man referred to in O’Connor’s notes.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, excuse me. This is Irene Kelly. May I help you with something?”

“Well, I’m not sure that he would want me to talk about this with anyone else, so maybe you could have him give me a call when he gets in.”

“Dr. MacPherson, I’m sorry to say that Mr. O’Connor was killed this past Sunday.”

“Killed!”

“Yes, someone delivered a package bomb to his home.”

“A bomb!”

The conversation wasn’t going at all like I wanted it to. I tried to get it back under control. “Dr. MacPherson, I think you can be of help. I’m a friend of Mr. O’Connor’s, and I’ve worked with him on many of his stories. I think I saw a reference to your name in his notes.”

“This is all so shocking! I just talked to the man last week.” He paused. “If he’s been murdered, I suppose I should talk to the police.”

I could tell he was going to be a tough nut, and that he was scared out of his pants by what I had blabbed to him so far. I could try to badger him into talking to me, but I doubted it would do any good. I thought it might be better if I could see him face to face. “I’ll be happy to have someone contact you. Where can you be reached?”

“I have classes to teach this morning, but I’ll be in my office this afternoon.”

“I’ll contact the Las Piernas Police and let them know you may have some information. If I can arrange to have someone from the police with me, could I talk to you at your office this afternoon? Say, about one o’clock?”

“Well, if someone from the police is with you, I suppose it would be all right.” He gave me directions to the campus in San Pedro.

I CALLED FRANK. He was as curious as I about what the good doctor might have to say, and we decided to meet for lunch before going over to the college. He told me he would pick me up at the paper at about eleven-thirty.

I spent about half an hour on the computer, but found I had no patience for it right at that moment. I kept wondering what MacPherson would be able to tell us. I thought about O’Connor’s obsession with Hannah. It was one of those aspects of his life that he kept to himself. He wrote the article every year, but for the most part it was usually more about missing persons and John Does in general than about Hannah herself. He would open with the story of the body being found, and note how many years had gone by without identification, but nothing more than that. And yet he was always trying to learn more about her.

The Hannah articles were among his most moving. Perhaps because of his family’s own loss, he had a way of writing about the victims in these cases-both living and dead-with a dignified empathy. He could portray the anguish of the families without being maudlin.

In these stories, he never actually wrote anything about his own sister.

I remember the night he told me about her. O’Connor drank, and on occasion got drunk, but he was seldom absolutely plastered. On this particular night, he was three sheets to the wind. By the time I got him home, he was sobering up a little, but was still pretty sloshed. I don’t remember now what brought it on, but he got on the subject of his sister.

With bitterness in every word, he told me about the night she disappeared. He was full of self-loathing and misplaced blame. He talked about the misery of the years she was missing, of his frustration that the murderer had never been discovered, of the injustice of it all. It was a difficult story to hear; it was painful to watch him tell it. He was not one to cry on others’ shoulders.

The next day, I had wondered if he would remember telling me about her. He did, 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.”

But of course he did, if not directly. He would muse aloud about how hard it must be for Hannah’s family not to know what had become of her. He would say that someday her murderer would be caught, and so on.

I knew he sought his retribution this way; he meant to be the one to do the catching.

MID-MORNING, I decided to see how Kenny and Barbara were doing. I told Lydia where I was going and then stopped by Geoff’s desk on the way out and asked him to tell Detective Harriman I was over at St. Anne’s and would be back soon.

I walked the two short blocks to the hospital and went into the main entrance. Behind the information counter, a thin woman with a pinched face peered at me over her glasses and refused to direct me to Kenny’s room.

“He’s in ICU. You can’t see him,” she sniffed.

“I’m a family member.”

“Oh, really?”

“Really.”

“Well, they still won’t let you see him.”

“A very pleasant day to you, too,” I said, and went back out the doors and around the corner to the emergency room entrance. I went into the waiting room and up to the counter, and sure enough, there was Sister Theresa.

“I need your help, Sister,” I said.

“Yes?” she asked with a smile.

“The lady at the main entrance won’t let me near my brother-in-law’s room. I know he’s not in any shape for visitors, but I’m sure my sister could use a little diversion by now.”

“I think you’re right,” she said. “Come along, I’ll take you to her.”

We went out a set of doors down a wide white hallway and took a set of turns that got us to the ICU. Sister Theresa nodded to the nurse at the unit’s central desk and guided me to Kenny’s room. I hate everything outside of the maternity wards in hospitals, and I could feel my heart beat faster and my palms grow clammy as we walked into the room.

Kenny was almost hidden by the array of tubes and monitors surrounding his bed. He was on a respirator and his heart was being monitored. He was being given intravenous medication. His head looked oversized and was swathed in bandages, with openings where his eyes, nose and mouth should be. His respirator tube went into his throat; he had evidently needed a tracheotomy to get the tube in. Most of his upper body was bandaged as well. He looked like a mummy whose head had been filled with helium. I fought the sensation of my stomach plummeting.

Barbara was holding on to his hand through the bedrail, staring at him. She turned when she heard us, and Sister Theresa said, “Your sister is here to see how you and your husband are doing. Why don’t I sit with Mr. O’Connor while you two take a little stroll?”

If I hadn’t had a nun with me, I doubt she would have left his side, so the lady at the front desk had done me a favor. Barbara got up slowly and walked out of the room with me.

“How is he?” I asked her in the hallway.

She shrugged. “He’s what they call semi-comatose. Every hour they come in and give him neurological tests-see if his pupils respond to light and if he reacts to mild pain-like having his skin pricked, things like that. So far, he has. They tell me that’s good,” she said woodenly.

“And what about you?”

“I’m okay. I try to talk to him and read to him. The nurses told me Kenny might be able to hear me.”

We walked in silence for a moment. We passed a couple who sat in a waiting area, tension etched into their faces. Who could help wondering about the stories behind the people in hospital hallways and waiting rooms?

“Barbara, if you need to get some sleep or do some errands or something, maybe I could come down and give you a break. I would be grateful if you’d let me help you out a little.”

“I’m okay,” she said again. After a moment she said, “But thanks.”

She was anxious to get back to the room, so we turned around and headed back. Sister Theresa walked me out the main entrance, right under the receptionist’s surprised nose.

“Patience, Irene,” she said to me as I left.

“Not my strong suit, Sister, but I’ll try.”

On the walk back to the paper I thought about Barbara’s devotion to Kenny. Had she stayed secretly attached to him through the years of being divorced? Or was she just so lonely now that she was happy to be needed by someone, even someone who could make no response? I wondered if my own anger with Kenny made it impossible for her to tell me that she would, in fact, jump at the chance to be back with him. She did complain about him to me, but maybe it was that brand of complaining that turns about-face if you agree with the complainer.

I had never thought Kenny treated her well, and though I couldn’t help being softened in my attitude toward him by his current condition, I wondered what would come of it-for Barbara’s sake. Could I have been wrong about him? Like any other couple, they had a life of their own together, a private one that I could not learn of from family gatherings and the like.

Truth be told, somewhere inside me a voice that would like to be mistaken for my conscience said, “You wished this on him.” All those times Barbara had cried to me on the phone about him, all those times I’d said, “Don’t worry, Barbara, someday Kenny will get his. It’s only a matter of time before he crosses someone who’ll teach him some manners.”

Of course, I hadn’t expected Amy Vanderbilt to be carrying a baseball bat, but I hadn’t exactly wished him well, either. So now he lay half-dead, while my sister spun a web of fragile hope around him.