by Jan Burke
“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. S
he 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.
14
THIS KIND OF THINKING is not good for one’s optimistic outlook in life, so I was a little down when I reached the door of the Wrigley Building. As I opened it, I saw Frank politely signing in for Geoff, who took no one at his word. As he pushed the clipboard back across the counter, I realized how happy I was to see him. He gave me a smile. Just what the doctor ordered. “Sign him back out, Geoff, I’m making him take me to lunch.”
Geoff, another member of the “Coalition of Those Who Are Terribly Concerned About Irene Still Being Single,” gave me a knowing look.
Frank walked me out to his car, a battered, old gray Volvo. “Is this thing going to make it to L.A.?” I asked, trying not to laugh out loud. “What’d you do, steal it from Columbo?”
“Well, excuse me, Princess Di. Here I am, being a nice guy and offering to take you to lunch, and you give me grief about my car. I’m not a glutton for freeway driving — I’ll let you take us in your car, if you prefer, your highness.”
“I love to hear men talk that way. No, you can drive, and I promise to try not to make jokes about your car.”
“I just drive this thing to make the taxpayers feel good, anyway.”
Despite its external appearance, the car was very comfortable and clean on the inside.
“So where are we going for lunch?” I asked, as we pulled out of the parking lot.
“You’ll see,” he said. “By the way, I got in touch with Hernandez.”
“And?”
“He talked to O’Connor twice last month, once in person, once on the phone. O’Connor had come down to the morgue about the middle of May, to start gathering information for his Hannah article. The anniversary of the day they found her is next weekend — June seventeenth — and I guess that’s the day he does the write-up on the John Does. Hernandez told me it was the first time he’d met O’Connor, and he took a real liking to him. He wasn’t too happy when I told him what had happened.”
“So what happened in May?”
“Not much, I guess, except that Hernandez had never heard the Hannah story, so O’Connor told him all about it and about the annual articles. Hernandez talked to him about a couple of stiffs they haven’t been able to identify, and they shook hands like pals and said so long.”
Frank broke off long enough to negotiate getting on the 405 Freeway going north. Traffic was, as usual, ridiculously heavy. Where could all of these people be going at noon? We hunkered down for some “slow and go,” and Frank took up the conversation again.
“I guess O’Connor managed to spark his interest. He just took a real liking to the guy. Talked to each other for a couple of hours. They’re starved for the company of folks that can still breathe down there in the coroner’s office anyway — not too many people just go down there for a chat — and he said O’Connor was quite a talker.”
“That he was.”
“So after O’Connor left, Hernandez figured he’d go check out this Hannah story. He dug out the case file, and saw a reference to an evidence number. He was especially interested in the dental section of the report.”
Frank stopped talking, and seemed to be watching something in his rearview mirror for a moment. I turned around and looked behind us. A dark car changed lanes, and began to pass us on the left.
“Don’t do that,” Frank said. “It’s not the Lincoln.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t turn around and stare at somebody if you think I’m looking at them in the rearview mirror. If they’re following us, I’d like to know for sure before you spook them off.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’m pretty sure they’re just in a hurry to get past us.”
This seemed to be the case, as the car continued to weave in and out of traffic, moving on ahead of us.
“So what happened with Hernandez?”
“He got curious and put one of the assistants on the task of finding the evidence file. I guess the assistant wasn’t too happy with the job, since it was down in the morgue’s basement somewhere.
“Hernandez starts reading through the remarks about Hannah’s teeth. The autopsy report says that although her front teeth were broken, they found all the fragments and were able to reconstruct the jaw. No sign of decay, or of any dentistry work. Now, in 1955, Hernandez thinks, this isn’t too common, but it’s not unheard of.
“So he reads on. There were some tobacco stains, according to Woolsey. Hernandez looks back through the rest of the autopsy report and notices that there was no sign of nicotine in her blood work and that her lungs were clear and undiseased. He sets it aside and goes to work on something a little more recent.”
“And that’s it?”
“No, there’s more. Over an hour goes by, and the assistant comes back, mad as hell because he’s had to really dig around to find this evidence file. He’s carrying a box labeled ‘Jane Doe 6-17-55’ with the matching evidence number on it. Hernandez opens the box, and guess what he finds?”
“Her teeth?”
“Her skull.”
“Good Lord,” I said. The thought of Hannah buried without her skull disturbed me. I didn’t know why it should; it all happened so long ago, and she was dead. But it just seemed you ought to have your head with you when you’re in your grave. Of course, you ought to have your feet and hands, too.
Frank negotiated an exit onto the Harbor Freeway. We headed south, toward San Pedro. The campus was down near the L.A. Harbor. I figured he had picked out a place near the harbor for lunch.
“So what else was in the box?” I asked, getting impatient for him to pick up the story again.
“What? Oh, sorry. No, nothing else in the box. But there’s more to the story. Hernandez is convinced that the teeth are not tobacco stained, but that the stain is something different. He said he’s pretty sure it’s a condition called fluorosis. It’s usually caused by drinking water that has too much fluoride in it, especially before the age of ten, when teeth are coming in.”
“I thought fluoride was good for teeth.”
“It is, at the right level. Too little, and you’re more prone to cavities. Too much, and your teeth can be mottled or stained. He told me that in some parts of the country fluoride occurs naturally in relatively high levels, and people from around these areas will get this staining on their teeth.”
“How does a coroner know so much about tooth stains?”
“Colorado is one of the places that has pockets of high-fluoride water supplies, and Hernandez had seen this staining on the teeth of some of the older people who were brought into the morgue there.”
I caught myself running my tongue over the surfaces of my teeth.
“He called O’Connor the next day,” Frank went on, “and told him to get in touch with this Dr. MacPherson, who’s an expert on forensic dentistry. He lectures all over the country. Hernandez sent the skull to MacPherson for some kind of special analysis on the teeth. He said they could tell more if they had the rest of her bo
nes, but he had thought it could give them a start. They could always do an exhumation later.”
WE GOT OFF THE FREEWAY and went down Gaffey. We wound our way around to the cliffs of Palos Verdes. The scenery was soon distracting me from my morbid thoughts of Hannah. He turned down a small road and pulled off to the side. We were high above the ocean, the harbor off to our left.
Frank turned and said, “This is it.”
I knew there weren’t any restaurants or other buildings out on these cliffs. Watching my face, he laughed, and got out of the car. He went around to the trunk and opened it. I got out and walked back to see him taking out a blanket and a large white paper sack. “Ever eat at the Galley?” he asked. “It’s a great deli down on Hermosa Avenue. I picked up a couple of ham on ryes. That okay?”
“Fine,” I said, still caught off guard. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“All pleasant ones. Just thought you might need a little change of scenery.”
WE WALKED ABOUT HALFWAY out to the edge of one of the zigzagging cliffs and spread the blanket. Good thing I wear sensible shoes. He gave me a sandwich and then handed me a small carton of milk. “Hope it didn’t get too warm,” he said.
The milk was very warm. “Perfect,” I said. After all, who cared?
The Pacific spread out below us, whitecaps tossing in the wind. Sailboats glided effortlessly behind and beyond the breakwater, while huge ships made their way more cautiously. Who cared about anything but feeling the sun and the wind?
We sat there and ate a leisurely lunch. We didn’t say a word to one another, but enjoyed one of those rare companionships that are comfortable in silence.
15
WE ARRIVED AT THE CAMPUS at a little before one, and wound our way to the visitors’ parking lot. A student at the parking kiosk pointed us in the right direction, and we walked across a common to a tall brick building. As we walked, I was struck by how young the students looked to me. I stopped to calculate the number of years it had been since I got my bachelor’s, and realized why. To these people, the Beatles were what the Andrews Sisters had been to me — something your parents had danced to.
