Goodnight, Irene

41

LYDIA WAS SURPRISED to see me walk back into the house, but didn’t say anything about the brevity of my visit with Frank. She may have been scared off by the dark scowl I found myself wearing as I came in. I realized I needed to smooth things over with her.

“Look, Lydia, about the Hollingsworth-Longren thing. I’m sorry I was so short with you this afternoon.”

“You’re just having a bad day, Irene. Besides, I’ve been sitting here thinking about it. I wondered how Jennifer could be pregnant by one of them, when Richard Longren had already been here for years and Andrew Hollingsworth was in his final year at Harvard.”

I felt the rug being pulled out from under my feet. I had been so concerned with proving it was Hollingsworth that I hadn’t asked myself the obvious questions about why it might not be him after all. Such as the fact that he was probably miles away from Jennifer when she got pregnant. “Lydia, you know how most people get wiser with age? I think I’m getting dumber.”

“Oh, you hadn’t thought of that?”

“No. Obvious as it is, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, wait a minute, Irene, maybe there is some way it could have happened. Let’s see. How far along was she?”

“Somewhere around two months.”

She counted back on her fingers. “June to May, one month, May to April, two months. April. Maybe she traveled to Boston or Las Piernas in the spring of 1955.”

“Not likely. She was poor. She didn’t even have enough money to buy her bus fare all the way to Las Piernas in June.”

“Hmm. Let’s consider it the other way around then. Maybe one of them went to Arizona.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, why not at least look into what was going on in April of 1955? Maybe something will ring a bell.”

“Maybe, but I can hardly go up to the two of them and ask, ‘Where were you in April of 1955?’ Besides, it could have been late March as well. They only estimated that she was two months along. And the father and the killer might be different people altogether.”

“What would make a young woman leave home like that unless she thought someone was going to take care of her when she arrived at her destination?”

“Yeah. And all they did was feed her a taco and kill her. I don’t know. Maybe when she arrived here in June, she never even got together with the guy who got her pregnant. Maybe some homicidal maniac got to her before she even met up with the guy again.”

“Oh sure, a homicidal maniac. After all that’s happened, you can’t possibly believe that. There’s got to be a connection-Elaine Tannehill’s murder would be proof enough.”

“You’re right. There is a connection. I just can’t figure out who’s holding the other end.”

“Well, let’s think about it. She got pregnant in March or April.”

We sat and thought.

“Spring break,” I said at last. “Andrew Hollingsworth could have spent his spring break in Phoenix.”

“Right! And Longren could have come up with some reason to be in Phoenix for a few days, too. He was already on the council then, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. I’ll check the microfilm for March and April of 1955. Maybe it will mention some trip.” I was excited again. If I could place either one of them in Phoenix during the time Jennifer would have become pregnant, I would have gone a long way toward building a case for at least linking them to all that had been going on.

“Have you talked to Frank about any of this?” Lydia asked.

“Sore subject.”

“You two fight?”

“No, I was just real bitchy to him. You know what I need, Lydia? A nap. I think I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

“Probably a good idea. But think about catching him up on all of this. I still worry that someone is after you, and I’d like the police to get to the killer before he gets to you.”

I yawned and nodded. “Okay, I’ll talk to Frank.” I went back into the bedroom and peeled off my clothes. I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I WOKE UP in darkness. I was completely disoriented for a few minutes. Cody walked up to my face and nuzzled me, and I felt a little calmer. I looked over at the clock radio. Nine o’clock. I had slept over six hours. I wondered how much that was going to screw up my sleep patterns.

I sat up and stretched. I went out into the living room. Lydia was gone, but there was a note saying she was going to meet Kevin Malloy and some reporters from the Express down at Calhoun’s and to join them if I felt like it. I considered it, but decided that I wasn’t ready to go out to a place I associated so strongly with O’Connor. God knows when I’d ever go to Banyon’s again.

I fidgeted around for a while and finally picked up the phone and called Frank. We did our now routine exchange of last names.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“An apology. Sorry about this afternoon. I’ve had some sleep now, so I can probably talk to you without biting your head off.”

“You had a rough morning.”

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t excuse my bad manners. Anyway, I apologize.”

“Well, I’ve had some sleep myself. I knocked off not long after you left.”

“Think you’ll be up for a while?” I asked.

“All night, I’m afraid. And I’ve got to report in tomorrow.”

“I’m in the same boat. If we don’t make too late an evening of it, want to go out for a drink somewhere?”

“Sure-how about the Stowaway?”

The Stowaway is a small, quiet, and casual bar that has a terrific ocean view. It’s not a place to go if you’re in a rowdy mood or up for anything fancy, which suited me fine.

“Sounds great,” I said. “You want me to drive?”

“I’ll come by for you. I don’t think I can handle the Karmann Ghia until my ribs heal a little more.”

“Give me about half an hour.”

I ran in and took a quick shower to wake myself up and changed into my favorite pair of jeans and a white blouse. I was just putting on my sandals when the doorbell rang.

Frank was wearing shorts again, and we spent a moment looking each other over. Cody came up to the entryway and gave him a yowl of greeting.

“Hey, there, Cody.” He picked the big lug up and scratched him affectionately.

“You’re brave,” I said, noticing that he still had a thin line on his face where Cody had dug the deepest.

“So is Cody. I’m glad to see he’s not afraid of me.”

He set Cody down gently and we made our way out the door.

We drove in silence to the Stowaway. The bar is dark and plain on the inside, no attempt to compete with the scenery outside its one wall of long windows. It was built on three levels, so that anywhere you sat, you had an unobstructed view of the water.

They weren’t crowded, so we were able to sit next to one of the windows, on the lowest level. Frank went up to the bar and brought back a Myers’s and OJ for me, a beer for himself. We watched the waves rolling in on the moonlit beach below.

I drank about half my drink while he sipped at the beer.

“Frank.”

He looked at me.

“I need to fill you in on a few things.”

He didn’t say anything, just sat up a little straighter. This was going to be business, and he subtly adopted a different posture. More distant. I didn’t like it, but it was too late.

I told him about seeing the degree from ASU, about my suspicions of Hollingsworth and Longren, about the connection of the DA and the mayor in all of O’Connor’s notes, about Ann Marchenko and Guy’s discussion of the safe-deposit boxes and money laundering. He asked a question or two for clarification here and there, but otherwise made no comment.

When I had finished, he said, “I really appreciate your telling me all of this, Irene. When are you talking to Guy St. Germain again?”

“I’m going to try to have lunch with him on Monday.”

He looked down into his beer. It seemed to me he was a little curt when he said, “Let me know what you learn, okay?”

“Okay, but I think we need to be cautious there, Frank. He’s sticking his neck out for me. He doesn’t want any negative publicity for the bank.”

“Publicity is your department.” Unmistakably curt.

I bristled at his tone for a moment, but suddenly it dawned on me that I hadn’t told Frank anything about how I had left things with Guy, and that he might be jealous.

“By the way, I’m bringing Lydia along when I go to lunch with Guy. I’m hoping they’ll hit it off with each other.”

He looked up at me. “Really?”

“Really. I can only handle making one guy pissed off at me at a time.”

“I’m not pissed off at you.”

“Give it another five minutes.”

He smiled briefly, then grew serious again. “Irene, look, let the department check Hollingsworth and Longren out. I’ll let you know what we find out and you can write your story from there.”

“I was wrong. It’s going to be less than five minutes.”

He took the hint and we sat there quietly for a while.

“I guess I’m a slow learner,” he said. “I’ve known all along that you were going to keep poking your nose into things until you got hurt. Just try to understand that it isn’t easy on me.”

“I might not get hurt. I might be able to help prevent other people from getting hurt.”

“That’s my job.”

“That’s both of our jobs.”

He shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

No reply. He looked out the windows, sighed and looked back at me.

“Please be careful,” he said.

“I will.”

He looked out the windows again. I couldn’t read him at all. It bothered me. Maybe he had decided to stop mollycoddling me. But I worried that instead he was only distancing himself from me.

“Let’s go,” he said at last.

He drove me home, walked me to the front door, and said a polite goodnight.

I lay awake a long time, angry by turns with myself and then with Frank. Finally I fell asleep.

I dreamed a memory-dream of O’Connor that night. It was a mixture of two separate evenings we had actually spent together, interspliced into one in the dream. We were laughing and drinking and watching fat women dance. He turned to me and said, “Remember what Sister Kenny once said.”

“Sister Kenny?” I said in the dream, just as I had the night he brought it up. “Is she someone who taught you in Catholic school?”

He laughed in the dream, as he had then. “No, my dear, I suppose you are too young to remember Sister Kenny. Elizabeth Kenny. She was an Australian nurse who developed a treatment for polio. And took a lot of guff along the way-but anyway, what she said was, ‘Better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.’”

“I like that.”

“I knew you would”-he smiled in the dream-“I knew you would.”