Goodnight, Irene

24

PETE CAME BY to pick me up just after Lydia had left for work. It was only about a fifteen-minute drive from Lydia’s place to the Las Piernas Airport. The airport was built in the late 1930s and it has a certain appeal because of it. The architecture has the curving chrome, brass, and green-glass look of the time. It’s small, just six gates. Only three major carriers use the Las Piernas Airport, but between them and the smaller airlines we get pretty good service and a hell of a lot less hassle than LAX. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a Hare Krishna recruiter there.

Our flight was on American Southwest Airlines. We pulled out our plastic and paid for our tickets. Pete checked his gun in with security; they put it in a special box for the flight. We walked about forty feet to the gate and had a seat. Pete offered me a piece of gum.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“I gotta have gum before a flight. I quit smoking fifteen years ago, but every time I get near an airplane I want to light up so bad, I can’t stand it.”

“Gum’s easier on your lungs.”

“Yeah, no kidding. You ever been a smoker?”

“Never really was a smoker. As a kid I tried it a couple of times-never really learned how to inhale. Thought I looked pretty cool just carrying one around, but the charm of that wore off fairly quickly.”

“Yeah, well, you’re lucky. Took longer for the charm to wear off for me. Now I’ve got what they call the zeal of the convert-I hate being around it, you know? But not when I’m in an airport-then it’s all I can do not to go into the bar and buy a pack of cigarettes. It’s crazy.”

“You afraid of flying?”

His cheeks colored. “Naw, I wouldn’t say that.” But after a moment he added, “I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah, I guess it does make me nervous.”

“I won’t tell a soul, Pete,” I said.

“Thanks.”

By the time they called our flight he had gone through half a large pack of Big Red Chewing Gum. He smelled like a cinnamon stick. I still preferred it to the smell of smoke. I stood up and started for the gate. He grabbed my arm.

“Not yet,” he said.

“You’re not going to completely balk at getting on the plane, are you?”

“We’re in no rush. I’d just prefer we let everybody else get to their seats. We don’t have any luggage or anything to put in an overhead compartment.”

I sat down again. I wondered if Pete was nervous about flying with one of Las Piernas’s leading targets.

Although they were supposedly boarding by sections, it seemed like most people just got on as soon as they could. Phoenix is a hub for American Southwest, so the flight was almost full. They got to the final boarding call. Pete looked around in the waiting area and didn’t seem to find anything out of the ordinary. We walked down the ramp and on to the plane.

People were still standing up in the aisle, trying to shove impossible amounts of carry-on baggage into the overhead compartments. Eventually we made our way back to our seats. Pete asked me to take the window seat, and he sat in between me and a kid who looked to be about sixteen.

The kid was dressed for effect. Except for his Day-Glo green shoelaces and a bleeding-skull-and-crossbones necklace that looked as if it came out of a gumball machine, he wore a basic black outfit, complete with knee-length jacket. He was listening to a radio whose earphones were smaller than his earrings. He had one of those haircuts that was what we used to call a “butch” on one side of his head, but from his crown forward was straight and about chin length. I wondered if a person could wear that haircut and feel in balance at all times. I admonished myself for this kind of thinking, remembering the guy I dated in high school whose hair was twice as long as my own, and how loudly I protested over my parents’ narrow-minded reaction to him.

The kid caught me looking at him. I smiled and said, “Hi.” Apparently reading my lips, he flashed me a peace sign. I think it’s still a peace sign.

Pete looked at me and rolled his eyes.

One more passenger came on board, a tall, thin man with hollow cheeks. He had hard, piercing eyes that roamed over the faces of the passengers as he walked down the aisle. He moved just past our row and sat down right behind Pete. I could think of no specific reason to feel uneasy about this man, but we had failed to be the last ones on board and I couldn’t help but wonder about the way the man had looked over the passengers.

I felt my palms break out in a sweat. There were only a few open seats left on the plane. Had he just been looking for an empty seat? No, he was looking at people, not just scanning the rows for an available place. Then I noticed that he had passed up one of the ones closer to the door.

Why sit right behind us? Was that his assigned seat, or did he just choose that seat on his own?

“Got any more of that gum?” I asked Pete.

“Sure,” he said, offering me a stick, and then holding one out to the kid.

“Thank you, sir, that’s very kind of you,” the kid said politely.

I know we both looked slack-jawed. I don’t know why. The hippie I dated in high school was the most well-mannered of any of the handful of guys I went out with.

We started down the runway and I saw Pete’s knuckles go white. I thought about how odd it was-here was a guy who could handle resuscitating a bloody man who was buried alive in sand, but he was scared silly by an airplane’s takeoff. For my part, few sensations were better than the rush of being airborne.

It was a short flight. They barely had enough time to hand out peanuts and drinks before we landed. Pete seemed to be bothered even more by landing. We were going to have to buy more gum before the day was over.

Once we were on the ground, Pete gradually relaxed. But as we pulled into the gate, he motioned to me to stay seated. “Wait,” he said.

We watched all the other passengers leave. The man whom I had started to think of as “Hawkeyes” was one of the first ones off the plane. Maybe I was imagining things after all.

Not having any baggage makes flying a totally different experience. Except for my windbreaker and purse, I had nothing to keep track of. We retrieved Pete’s gun from Phoenix Airport security, then went down to the car-rental counter to pick up the compact Fred had reserved for us. As I gave the information for the rental contract, Pete leaned with his back against the counter, watching the people around us.

Outside, the morning was already turning warm. Only 9:00 A.M. and it must have been about eighty degrees out. I asked Pete if he would mind if I did the driving. He didn’t, and after accidentally turning the windshield wipers on while trying to adjust the steering wheel, we were on our way to Gila Bend.

Traffic in Phoenix was a bitch, so it took us a while to get clear of the city and its immediate neighbors on U.S. 10. The road became less and less crowded as we moved west. We passed the dark-green swath of farmlands along the Gila River, crossing over the river itself near Buckeye. We made the turnoff on Highway 85, and the landscape changed as we went south through clusters of dry Arizona mountains.

For miles we saw few signs of human inhabitants. Scattered here and there were vacant farm houses along the road. Broken windows gave them a forlorn look, as if they were ashamed of their shabbiness. Already scrub brush and cacti were reclaiming the abandoned fields.

Pete yammered away throughout the trip.

“I grew up in upstate New York,” he told me. “Like a friend of mine says, ‘Only penguins should live there.’ You ever been to upstate New York? No? Well, I suppose for some people it’s got attractions. But every time I even start to miss it, you know what I do? I go out to my garage. I got a snow shovel out there. Honest to God. I’m probably the only guy in southern California with a snow shovel in his garage. Yeah, I just look at that snow shovel and think about what it feels like when there’s a good windchill factor and a driveway full of snow, and I say, ‘Just sit there, you bastard, I’m never picking you up again in my lifetime.’ No kidding. That’s what I do.”

Outside the car, it was probably nearing a hundred degrees, and I was listening to stories about snow shovels.

“How long you known Frank?” he asked.

“We met years ago in Bakersfield, but I haven’t seen much of him until-well, until this week,” I said, thinking of that morning on O’Connor’s front lawn. Was that only a few days ago?

“No foolin’? You knew him back in Bakersfield? I’ve just known him since he’s been in Las Piernas-what, about five years now? Smart guy. Really smart guy. You know, I’m not saying he’s Poindexter or anything, just sharp-you know what I mean? I mean, he never makes anybody else feel dumb. He’s good that way. You know, a lot of guys want to be homicide detectives, so when somebody gets promoted quickly, there might be resentment. But Frank, he’s the kind of guy that made it easy on everybody. They just like him. Works hard, doesn’t put anybody down, doesn’t go around with his nose stuck up in the sky-he’s a good cop. He doesn’t make the guys in uniform feel like lackeys.

“Yeah, I worked with him on his first case here. It was tough on him then, getting used to Las Piernas, new guys to work with. Plus, he broke up with his girlfriend. I guess he transferred down here partly because of some broad he knew in Bakersfield. She gets a job in Las Piernas, begs him to move; he no sooner gets transferred and she quits and goes back to Bakersfield. God knows why. She was with the Highway Patrol. He shoulda known right there. You know her? No? I don’t know what he saw in her. I told him, ‘Good riddance-a woman like that will make you crazy.’ But he hasn’t really been with anybody special since. You know, dated here and there, but nobody special.”

He gave me a meaningful look, and I casually tried to steer the conversation in another direction. “I didn’t know you and Frank had worked together so long.”

“Aw, five years is all. I’ve been tracking down corpse-makers for ten years-before that I spent another seven in uniform-all of it in Las Piernas. Place grows on you, you know what I mean?”

“Yes. I’ve lived in Las Piernas most of my life. There are only a handful of places in southern California where people really settle down, and Las Piernas is one of them. Lots of third generation locals. I suppose that’s no big deal compared to some parts of the country, but in the L.A. area…”

“You’re right. People are born and die in Las Piernas, and you look around and most people in neighboring towns are moving every few years. I love the place.”

We reached the outskirts of a town that looked like it hadn’t changed much in fifty years. A pockmarked sign announced that this was “Gila Bend-Home of 1700 Friendly People and Five Old Crabs.” The highway joined up with Interstate 8 at Gila Bend, and in turn became Pima Avenue. It looked as if Gila Bend was struggling through some tough times. Every third or fourth building stood abandoned. There were four or five motels designed on varying themes, and about as many fast-food places and gas stations. A couple of convenience stores rounded out the picture. I had just about reached the end of the town when I spotted the City Hall, which was attached to the Gila Bend Museum and Arizona Tourist Information Center.

“You passed the sheriff’s station several blocks ago,” Pete said, as I started to pull in to ask directions.

“If you knew that, why didn’t you speak up?”

“I wanted to see the rest of the town.”

Exasperated, I turned the car around and headed back up the street.

Soon we came to a fairly new one-story building of brown brick with Spanish tiles on the roof. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. I pulled into a parking space.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s find out what they have on Hannah.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Pete warned.

We opened the car doors and were met with a blast of dry heat. We made our way into the building and felt the chill of air conditioning inside. “Out of the frying pan, into the freezer,” mumbled Pete.

It was a small station that also served as a part of the court system and as a detention center. We went up to a window and pressed an intercom button. A woman detention officer came to the window. Pete showed his ID and asked her if she would please let a deputy sheriff know we were there. A few minutes later, a door to our left was opened, and a tall man in a tan uniform came out to greet us. There was a warm smile on his rugged features. “You must be the folks from California. I’m Enrique Ramos,” he said. He was a big man, but he moved with ease and grace. I guessed him to be about fifty.

Pete extended a hand. “Pete Baird. I think I talked to you on the phone. This is the friend of Mr. O’Connor’s I told you about, Irene Kelly.”

Ramos gave me a firm handshake. “Sorry to hear about Mr. O’Connor. I got a kick out of talking to him on the phone. I was looking forward to meeting him in person. Come on back.”

He motioned us to follow him through the door to a small back office.

“You know, as slow as it is around here sometimes, I don’t think anybody but your friend could have talked me into going through our old missing-persons files from the 1950s. But he kind of got my interest going with all his talk about teeth and so on. Besides, I figured him to be the kind of person who would bug the hell out of me if I didn’t respond to his request.”

“You figured right,” I said. “He always tried the friendly approach first, but he could make a royal pain out of himself if need be.”

Ramos smiled. “I thought so.” He gestured to a couple of straightback wooden chairs and we sat. He pulled a folder out of a filing cabinet and sat behind his desk.

“Had to go into the old archives to find stuff like this-all on microfiche now. Well, anyway, when you’ve only got a few hundred people in town, you don’t have many go missing in a year. In 1955, we weren’t the great metropolis we are now. I know it’s hard for people from a big city to imagine this place being any smaller than it is now, but it was.” He opened the folder and looked over some notes.

“In 1955, we had three missing persons. One was an old woman who probably had what we now call Alzheimer’s, and she wandered off along the fence of the damned gunnery range-it’s just across the road-the MPs found her, but it was winter and she never really recovered from her time outdoors.

“You might say we also found a young boy who ran off from home, but really he came back on his own; according to the notes here, no worse for the adventure.

“There was one more we didn’t find: a young woman, about twenty, who worked in the feed store. She was still living with her folks at the time. Her mother reported her missing on June 16, 1955, but there was evidence that she left on her own; she had purchased a bus ticket to San Diego the previous evening. Couldn’t trace her from there. Guy at the Greyhound depot here said she gave him just about every last cent she had to go to California, and San Diego was as far as it would take her. So we figured she might have just got tired of life in Gila Bend. We checked around and a girl she worked with said she had talked a lot about how she was going to marry a rich kid from Phoenix. Well, we couldn’t figure out why she’d go to California if the rich kid was in Phoenix, but maybe he was going to meet her there.”

“Had she ever mentioned this kid to her parents?” I asked.

“No, but it was pretty clear she hadn’t been abducted, and she was over eighteen, so there wasn’t much we could do about it. Her folks never made much out of it once we told them about the bus ticket.

“Now along comes your friend Mr. O’Connor, thirty-five years later, with his story. I did a little more digging around and found this. A picture from her high school graduation, in 1953.” He pushed a small black and white photo across the desk, and Pete and I both rose from our chairs to look at it.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” said Pete.

Except for small differences in her looks, a little something about her nose and lips, there was no mistaking the resemblance to MacPherson’s computer composites.

“It’s Hannah,” I said.

“Who?” asked Ramos.

I handed the computer drawing over to Ramos. “Hannah’s sort of a nickname we’ve used for her over the years.” I didn’t want to tell him why. “What was her real name?” I asked.

“Assuming this is the same woman-and I agree, it looks a lot like her-her real name was Jennifer. Jennifer Owens.”

“Jennifer Owens,” I said aloud, then repeated it in my mind. Suddenly, I felt tears well up in my eyes. O’Connor should have been the first one to hear her name. She had been his obsession for thirty-five years. It was his work that had led us this far. He had come so very close to learning who she was. God, how proud he would have been. It might have eased a little of that pain he carried around for his sister.

Ramos was looking at me. “You okay, Miss Kelly?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Just thinking of how pleased O’Connor would have been. He was…especially concerned about Hannah-Jennifer. Had been from the start. It’s hard to explain.”

“He told me about his sister,” Ramos said.

I was surprised, and didn’t hide it. Ramos met my look with an understanding smile. “I think he was afraid I wouldn’t take this seriously.”

Pete was looking between us, but neither of us offered him an explanation. “So,” he asked Ramos, “are her parents still around?”

“Yeah, her mother is still living,” Ramos said. “Old man’s been dead some years now. But her mother lives out in a trailer off Highway 85. You probably passed it on the way here. She doesn’t have a phone. I’ll take you out there if you want to go.”

Pete stood up. “Yeah, if you don’t mind.” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never get used to this part of the job.”

We climbed into the front seat of a large green-and-white Jeep Cherokee that had the sheriff’s logo on its doors. About five miles back on Highway 85, we turned off onto a dirt road that ran through some fenced acreage with cattle here and there. It was easy to see why a four-wheel-drive vehicle was necessary. We jolted our way down a road that had so many potholes, NASA could have tested lunar-landing vehicles on it. Finally we came to a stop outside an opening in the barbed-wire fence; from the opening, a gravel drive led back to a trailer. Ramos honked and waited awhile. Soon the trailer door swung open and a thin gray-haired lady stared out and then waved to us. Ramos slowly pulled into the drive, trying not to raise dust.

“Hello, Enrique!” she barked out in a raspy voice. “Who you brought with you?”

“A couple of folks from California, Mrs. Owens.”

“California! Well, come on in out of the sun. It’s hotter than hell out. A couple of old devils like Enrique and I can take it, but you folks are probably just about baked.”

The trailer was an old silver one, with light wood paneling. By the time the four of us had squeezed in, it felt as if we had quite a crowd in there.

After introductions, she motioned us to sit down on a couch behind a Formica table. On a shelf below a window were several framed photos of Jennifer. Baby pictures, family pictures. Jennifer with another young girl. Jennifer standing outside the trailer. A larger version of the graduation photo. She had been a beautiful blonde with a shy, closed-mouth smile.

Mrs. Owens went over to the refrigerator and came back with a big pitcher of lemonade. She brought out four ornate glasses on a tray covered with an old lace doily.

I felt like shit. I glanced at Pete, and knew he felt the same.

“So what brings a police officer all the way out from California to see a seventy-year-old desert rat?” she asked.

“Why don’t you sit down for a minute here, Mrs. Owens?” Ramos suggested.

She gave him an inquisitive look with her china blue eyes and slowly sat down. “What’s this all about, Enrique?”

“It’s about Jennifer, Mrs. Owens.”

“Jennifer? My Jennifer?”

He nodded.

“My God, she’s dead. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I’m sorry, we believe so, yes.”

She began to cry. She got up from the table and stumbled back into a bedroom and shut the door, which didn’t muffle the rising wail of grief. We sat immobilized, none of us looking at the other. After a while we heard water running. She stepped out, drying her face on a pink towel.

“I’m sorry,” she said to us. “You’d think after thirty-five years I wouldn’t care if I ever saw her again. But I’ve always hoped-” She broke off.

“Of course, ma’am,” Pete said, “that’s only natural. And we are very sorry to have to be the ones to end those hopes.”

“What about my grandchild?” she asked suddenly.

We were all startled.

“Grandchild?” repeated Ramos.

“Jennifer ran away because she was pregnant. She ran off to be with the father. Who is he? And what became of my grandchild?”

If I had doubts that Hannah and Jennifer were the same person, this last question ended them. Jennifer looked like the woman in the pictures, came from a Southwestern town with high levels of fluoride in the water, disappeared near the date Hannah was found, and she was pregnant.

We all exchanged looks. I went over to her and put an arm around her. “This is a very difficult story to tell, Mrs. Owens. Please sit down.”

For a moment it seemed she would resist this idea, but then she meekly allowed me to lead her back to the chair.

I sat back down, across from her.

“Tell me,” she said quietly.

“On June 17, 1955,” I began, “a woman’s body was found on the beach in Las Piernas. We now believe that woman was Jennifer.”

“1955! Dead since 1955!” she exclaimed, but then fell silent.

“The woman was guessed to be about twenty years old. She was two months pregnant when she died. She was murdered.”

“Murdered! Why? Why would anyone want to kill Jennifer?”

“That’s one of the reasons we’re here, Mrs. Owens. We don’t know. Whoever killed her-” I tried to find the right words. “Whoever killed her took steps to make it hard to identify Jennifer.” I rushed on. “A friend and co-worker of mine was a reporter on our local paper. His own sister had been killed and hadn’t been found for five years. That happened a few years before Jennifer was found. He sort of adopted the case of this unidentified woman and tried to learn all he could. He ran a column about it every year. He used to tell me that he knew somewhere someone worried about her, the way his family had worried about his sister.

“Not long ago, a new coroner came to work in our city; he found new evidence about Jennifer. He got help from a forensic dentist. Did Jennifer have stains on her teeth?”

“Yes, poor dear,” she said, glancing up at the photographs. “She was always so self-conscious about them. From the water here, you know. Too much fluoride.”

“More than anything, those stains led us to Gila Bend. Unfortunately, my friend died before he could learn your daughter’s identity. He knew that this would be very sad news to you, but I know he hoped it would be better than always wondering what became of her.”

She was quiet for a while, then said, “It’s true. At least now I know. Thirty-five years of hell. I’ve sat here and wondered why she hated us so much that she could never write so much as a postcard. I wondered if she was married, if the baby was a boy or a girl. I wondered why she wouldn’t at least let the child see his grandmother. I wondered if she was dead. I wondered if she was being tortured. I wondered if she had amnesia. You wouldn’t even believe some of the things I’ve wondered. At least that’s over.”

“How did you learn she was pregnant?” I asked.

“Oh, I nearly beat that information out of a cousin of hers. The weekend before she left, Jennifer had gone up to Phoenix to see her cousin Elaine. Elaine Owens-she’s the daughter of my husband’s brother. My husband was never more than a cattleman, and God rest his soul, not a very good one at that. But his brother did real good for himself. Made some money up in Jerome on copper, and sold out long before the bottom dropped out of the market. Went on to invest in God knows what all, but he certainly had the Midas touch.

“Elaine and Jennifer were about the same age, and even though they never paid much attention to us, the family was fond of Jennifer, and she got invited up to Phoenix pretty regular. I don’t know. Looking back on it, it seems that was the cause of a lot of trouble.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Jennifer was always so unhappy when she came back. Who could blame her? She lived high on the hog the whole time she was there. Elaine would loan her clothes and they would go to parties with rich kids and so on. Then she’d come back here to little old Gila Bend and the feed store and this tiny little trailer.

“Anyway, this last time she went up to see Elaine, she came back in a real state. She would cry for no reason. Next thing I know, she’s taken a bus to San Diego.”

“Did you know anyone there?” Pete asked.

“Not a soul. So I drove up to Phoenix and just about skinned Elaine alive. She finally told me that Jennifer was pregnant and had gone off to California to find the father. I always figured that little snot knew who the father was, but she swore up and down that Jennifer didn’t tell her his name and I couldn’t get it out of her. Needless to say, we never had much to do with that side of the family after that.”

“Do you still have their address?” Pete asked.

“Well, I’ve got one from back then. They might still be there, but I don’t know. It’s been a long time. Let me see.” She got up and pulled open a kitchen drawer full of papers, and picked out a little address book. She put on a pair of reading glasses and read off a Phoenix address as Pete wrote it down.

She looked up over the rim of the glasses. “Did you find a little gold ring? Her daddy’s mother gave her a gold ring with a little ruby in it. Was she wearing it?”

Pete and I looked at one another.

“No, ma’am,” he said quietly, “we didn’t find a ring.”