Goodnight, Irene

2

FRANK ALMOST WAITED too long to come over. I was damned restless by late that afternoon.

Most of the time from when I left O’Connor’s house until Frank came over I spent stewing and pacing. I’m not good at sitting around, and it was a hot day. As the afternoon wore on, the Santa Ana winds began to blow, making my house a regular oven. Like most Southern Californians, I can only take so much of those desert winds before I go a little nuts anyway. I live a couple of miles from the beach in Las Piernas, which is on the coast, just south of L.A. Usually by late afternoon, there’s cool air off the ocean. But even with nothing but the front and back screen doors to slow down any little breeze that might come along, the old house was hot. It’s a little 1930s bungalow down in a section of town that can’t decide how to gentrify.

So I paced around, sat and tried to cry, but couldn’t. Got up and paced around again. Cody sat watching me, twitching his fat tail nervously. At one point I felt so wound up, I took off my shoes and hurled them as hard as I could against the wall. I didn’t pitch them anywhere near Cody, but he decided he’d had enough and took off through his cat door-converted from an old ice-delivery slot in the kitchen.

It was hard to find anything worth thinking about. If I thought about the past, I mourned the end of days with O’Connor. If I thought about the future, it was to cancel plans. Nothingness, sharp as a knife. I paced barefooted.

I knew that the time would come when I could really indulge in this feeling-sorry-for-myself stuff, but now wasn’t the time. If I could just get myself pointed in some direction, maybe I could find whoever did this to O’Connor. And kill them. Slowly.

In the midst of these thoughts I heard someone on the front porch. The silhouetted figure of a tall man stood looking in at me from my front door, shading his eyes with his hand against the screen.

“Irene?”

“Jesus, Frank. You startled me. How long have you been out there?”

“How about letting me in? It’s hotter than hell out here.”

I took off the latch and opened the door for him. I flopped down on the couch and gestured toward my big old-fashioned armchair, but he waved it off and leaned up against a table instead.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’ll get there. You know me.”

He smiled a little and said, “Yeah, I guess I do.” He was quiet for a minute, then he stood up straight. He was studying me, and I felt uncomfortable. I decided to watch my toes for a while.

He started over. “Look, I know you’re tough, but I also have some idea of what O’Connor meant to you. Nobody could see what you saw today and walk off whistling. So you don’t have to talk about this now if you don’t want to.”

I glanced up at him. He had a funny kind of concerned look on his face. It scared me or I probably would have started crying after all. Something in his sympathy moved my feelings to the surface. There he was, big, handsome, and a mere four feet away, looking concerned. But there was no room in me at that moment for old history or rekindled anything.

“Have a seat, Frank.”

He sat down. Tall as he is-somewhere in the neighborhood of six-three or six-four, I’d guess-the back of the chair was still taller. I love that big old chair. Nobody since my grandfather had looked that good in it.

“Go ahead,” I told him. “Take out your notebook. Ask questions. It’ll be good for me. At least I’ll be doing something. Maybe I can help somehow.”

He just sat there for a minute, still quiet, as if undecided. Then he reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a notebook.

“Why don’t you take that jacket off? I’m not so formal here with my shoes off.”

“Thanks,” he said, standing up again for a moment. He took off his suit jacket and folded it neatly over the back of the chair. Even in the long-sleeved shirt and shoulder holster, he looked a lot more comfortable. He sat back down, loosened his tie and flipped his notebook open to a clean page. I felt nervous again.

“Look, how about something cold to drink?”

He gave me that questioning look again. “Sure,” he said.

Hell’s bells, I thought. I’ve got to stop acting like an idiot. I realized that every time one of us was on the verge of discussing what had happened to O’Connor, we fumbled around and stalled.

I poured a couple of glasses of iced tea and brought them into the living room.

Outside the big picture window, the heat waves made the street look like a river. A big dark-blue car ferried its way past the window. I could see Cody stretched out in the sun on the lawn.

I handed Frank his iced tea and sat down again. “Sorry-I should have thought of offering you something sooner. I’m a little distracted, I guess. What do you want to know?”

“It’s okay. I guess I’m distracted too. Anyway, you saw O’Connor last night?”

“Yeah, we went out to Banyon’s. He was in a festive mood, you might say. He did quite a bit of drinking, but I was driving, so I quit after a Guinness. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.” I thought about O’Connor and the dancers. I stopped the story for a minute and looked outside. Cody had moved into the shade. I took a deep breath and went on.

“Anyway, we talked and watched people dance, and left sometime after midnight, probably about twelve-thirty. I drove him home. Got there around one. He got out of the car, sang ‘Goodnight, Irene’ to me on his way in. He likes to-he liked to sing that to me.”

Why was it so hard to tell something that I’d been thinking about all day? I looked out the window again; the blue car-a Lincoln, I noticed-was going slowly back up the street.

“Did you walk up to the house with him?” Frank asked.

“No, but I watched him go up the porch steps-he wasn’t too steady on his feet. There wasn’t any package there. Kenny was already home-at least, his car was in the driveway.”

“What was O’Connor working on?”

“The paper wouldn’t tell you?”

“Haven’t been over there yet-figured you’d know more about what he was really up to than that jackass Wrigley.”

I had to smile at that. “You’re not just trying to get on my good side by saying that about the esteemed editor of the Express, are you?”

“No, I decided he was a jerk long before Mark Baker told me why you left the paper. That just confirmed it.”

“Well, he is a jackass. But maybe it was a mistake to leave the paper. I probably shouldn’t have let him get to me. O’Connor was always pushing me to go back, said I’d let my Irish get the better of me. He was a real old-school newspaperman. The genuine article. ‘Duty to the public,’ and all of that. He wasn’t naive in any way about anybody or anything, but he hadn’t soured on the world like some do.”

“Same thing happens to cops,” Frank said.

“I know. We all get to see the underside of the rock, I guess. Hard to remember there’s anything else sometimes. Of course, in the line I’m in now it’s all sunshine and lollipops. God, I hate public relations work. I spent most of last night bitching about it to O’Connor. Anyway, he believed in what he was doing. I don’t believe in what I’m doing right now and it’s turning me into a real cynic.”

“You’ll do what you need to do.”

“You sound like O’Connor. Anyway, you asked what he was working on. Well, let’s see. He was spending time on a campaign-funding story-mayor’s office. That took most of his energy lately.”

“I didn’t really know him,” he said. “Just met him once or twice. Saw him around City Hall now and then, used to catch his column once in a while. One or two of the old-timers in the department told me O’Connor had some pet story about an unsolved homicide?”

“Oh, you mean Hannah. Yes, there was always Hannah. That wasn’t her name, that was just sick newspaper humor. Pretty gruesome story, really. Young woman, about twenty years old. Found her in the sand down under the pier. Somebody didn’t ever want her identified. Bashed in her face and cut off her hands and feet. Some wag in the newsroom named her ‘Handless Hannah.’ The autopsy showed she was about two months pregnant at the time. That was in the summer of 1955. O’Connor was about twenty-seven, I guess.

“Well, ten years earlier, O’Connor’s older sister went missing. She was about the same age as Hannah, about eighteen or nineteen. They found her body about five years later but never figured out who killed her. She had disappeared in the spring of ’45, just before the end of the war-on her way home from a defense plant. Didn’t find her until 1950. So that was only about five years before Hannah showed up on the beach.

“When he talked to me about his sister, he told about how it had driven his mother crazy; it was hard on the whole family, not knowing for those five years. He was really close to this sister. I guess he usually walked her home from work, but he had a hot date that night. Lots of guilt over what happened. On top of everything else, the date stood him up.”

“So because of his sister, he got caught up in the story of this Jane Doe without the hands?”

“Right. The old bulldog kept trying to figure out who she was. It was an obsession, really. When the coroner’s office got tired of holding her in the morgue, O’Connor spent his own money to arrange for a decent burial and a tombstone for her.

“He would even use his vacations to try to figure out where she had come from, what she might have been doing here. Every year, on the anniversary of the day they found her, he’d write his famous ‘Who Is Hannah?’ story. He wrote about her case and any recent Jane or John Does lying around in the morgue. Sometimes the story would get picked up by out-of-town papers. He actually helped to get the identification on a couple of bodies. But nobody ever claimed Hannah. Every year someone looking for a missing daughter or sister or wife would contact him, but it wouldn’t turn out to be Hannah. Now and then he’d tell me he thought he had a lead on it, but I don’t think he ever really learned much.

“‘Irene,’ he’d say, ‘somebody misses that girl. Every night they go past her room and wonder if she might still be alive, if maybe she has amnesia, if she secretly hated them and ran away, if she has been tortured or treated cruelly. They miss her. And somewhere some black-hearted bastard knows he killed her, knows where her hands and feet are buried. I aim to make him feel a little worried.’”

Frank stretched and sighed. “Thirty-five years ago. The killer may not even be alive now, let alone worried.” He stood up and walked around a little. “I guess O’Connor ruffled a few feathers along the way.”

“I’ve thought about that,” I said, standing up too. “This town’s so thick with potential enemies, you can’t stir ’em with a stick. Lots of people who didn’t like what he had to say about them, people with the power to do something about it. He got death threats occasionally. Didn’t mention any lately, though.”

There was a knock at the front screen door. We turned to look, and it appeared that no one was there.

“Cody. Wild Bill Cody, my cat,” I explained. “He’s got a cat door, but this way he can make a nuisance of himself.” I opened the door and let him in. He pranced over to sniff Frank’s shoes-shoes must be to cats what crotches are to dogs, although cats are more delicate about it-and Frank bent down and picked him up. Cody is a sucker for affection, and even with the heat he was happy to be scratched between the ears. Frank stood there holding Cody and looking out the window. He seemed to be staring at something, when suddenly he dived toward me and knocked me to the floor, landing on top of me and knocking my breath out. Cody went tearing out from between us just as three gunshots blew out the window.