by Jan Burke
Jack had been O’Connor’s salvation. It was Jack who had talked Mr. Wrigley, the publisher, into promoting his copyboy to general assignment reporter. O’Connor later learned that Jack had support for this idea from an unexpected quarter: Helen Swan.
“I told the old man the truth,” she said when O’Connor asked about it. “I told him Jack was giving you writing lessons, and if they turned out not to be good ones, I’d give you better ones myself, because I could see when some half-pint had ink in his veins, even if Wrigley couldn’t.”
He knew of no one who talked back to Mr. Wrigley the way Helen Swan did. He remained in awe of her.
It had taken him a while to realize that there was a strong friendship beneath the rivalry between Helen and Jack. In the spring of 1936, she left the paper for a little more than a year, not long after Jack’s car accident. O’Connor was still a paperboy then, and he began to see that Jack missed her terribly.
O’Connor was convinced that it was her relentless needling that pulled Jack out of the misery he had fallen into when he was hospitalized after the accident. “Get up off your ass,” she said the first time she visited him. “I’ll let you set it down again in a room across the hall. There’s a blind guy in it. He can’t see you pity yourself.” Jack had winced, and she added in an angry voice, “So you’ll have a limp. There are other people around here who’ve lost more than that.”
O’Connor gathered up his courage and told her to leave Jack alone.
Helen stared at him, apparently just realizing he was in the room. “I thought the hospital didn’t allow kids under sixteen into patients’ rooms.”
“They don’t,” Jack said. “But the doctors ran some tests and figured out that O’Connor has never been younger than forty-two.”
“All right,” she said, coming to her feet, “bowing to his seniority, I’ll do as Conn asks.”
“No, don’t go, Swanie,” Jack pleaded. “Make her stay, Conn.”
Conn started to try to convince her, but she raised a hand to cut him off. She sat down again and sighed. “Jack Corrigan, I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve the boy’s loyalty.”
O’Connor always thought it was the other way around. Looking back, he wondered at the patience Corrigan had shown. More than once, as an adult, O’Connor had asked Jack what on earth had caused him to all but adopt him from the time he was eight — why he had troubled himself over such a grubby little brat. Corrigan usually laughed and said, “You chose me. Not the other way around. Same way all stray dogs operate — easier to let you follow me than to keep kicking you away.” O’Connor thought there was some truth in the jest — the times when Corrigan roared at him to leave him the hell alone, his scathing criticisms of O’Connor’s writing, the bouts of heavier-than-usual drinking when Jack would become quiet and withdrawn — none of these had the power to keep O’Connor away from him for long.
Helen Swan had been right about the writing lessons. All those years ago, when O’Connor asked Jack to teach him to be a newspaperman, Jack had taken him seriously — for reasons O’Connor was never entirely sure of.
Even at eight, O’Connor was reading at a level beyond that of most children his age, and Jack began by giving him assignments — most of which taught him to read the paper with an eye toward the way it was written. Jack asked him now and then if he was still keeping the diary, but never asked to see it. O’Connor asked him once how he knew that O’Connor was really writing in it. “Because I believe you are an honorable young man.” That was, O’Connor knew, the highest praise Jack could give anyone, and no reward could have been greater for his work.
And work it was. There were lessons on finding the heart of the story, on writing clean, clear prose to tell it. He learned to notice differences in style. Jack would read to him, and ask him to tell him which reporter wrote the story. Corrigan’s and Helen Swan’s he began to recognize for their skill. Others, he could often spot because of their weaknesses.
He learned to observe and to describe what he saw. At first, the descriptions were delivered verbally, and sometimes breathlessly during a boxing lesson. Later, he wrote small stories for Jack, who did not spare his feelings when critiquing the results.
So it was that by the time O’Connor was added to the staff of the Express, Mr. Wrigley got a reporter who was far from the greenhorn he expected. One day as he stood talking to Helen Swan in the newsroom, Wrigley walked up to them and said to her, “Seems I won’t be needing to give you teacher’s pay.”
She smiled and made O’Connor blush by saying, “Imagine what you’ll be getting out of him five years from now. Keep this boy challenged, or you’ll be reading his bylines in the Herald or the Times.”
The challenge of reporting for the Express was the only thing that kept him from going crazy after Maureen disappeared. He thought at first that Jack might have believed that all he needed was distraction, something to keep him from dwelling on her disappearance.
He had underestimated Corrigan.
Jack had no more given up on the idea of finding Maureen than O’Connor had.
Jack spent time with him in the paper’s morgue, going through clipping files on disappearances. O’Connor had been astonished at the number of them.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Jack told him. “There are young runaways mixed in here, and plenty of people who are lost because they don’t want to be found. Women whose husbands beat them, men who want to escape debts or responsibilities, teenagers who have cruel parents, parents who — well, of a terrible kind — so terrible the paper can’t print the details.”
“But there have to be some missing girls who are like Maureen,” O’Connor protested. “She wasn’t a runaway, no matter what the coppers say.”
“I know that and you know that. But after you’ve read enough of these, you’ll understand why detectives are skeptical people.”
He read them, and had to admit that in many cases, it was as Jack had said. He found two other stories, though, in which young women near Maureen’s age had gone missing in the month of April, although in other years — young women who seemingly had no reason to disappear. Less, he admitted to himself, than Maureen had. Anna Mezire. Lois Arlington. Both twenty years old. The coincidence was too strong to ignore.
“I want to talk to their families,” he told Jack.
“Fine, but remember — both of them are old news as far as the Express is concerned. Don’t try to do anything about it on company time.”
The mothers of the missing women, wary at first, became more open with him upon hearing that his own sister had disappeared. He spoke to them separately and learned that they were each unaware of any other cases. Anna had disappeared on April 30, 1943. Lois on April 18, 1941. But neither woman had any more information about her daughter’s disappearance than what he had read in the paper. He took down the names of a few of the girls’ friends, but he found that the ones who hadn’t moved away had little to tell him. “I think about her,” one of Anna’s friends said. “I think I’m always going to feel sad in April. My brother’s a policeman, and he said that Anna’s probably dead, and I should just accept that as a fact. But I can’t, you know? It would be easier — I hate to say it, but it would be easier to know that she was dead.”
O’Connor had been hard put to hide his feelings as she spoke, not to let her see how angry these words made him. He would never give up hope, he thought as he took a streetcar back to the paper. He would never want to learn that Maureen was dead.
But before many months had passed, he decided that anything would be better than not knowing — anything. He could and did imagine so many horrific possibilities for her fate, the notion of her being beyond harm ranked far from the worst of them. Please, not suffering, became his evening and morning prayer, his silent plea throughout the day.
One afternoon he learned that Jack — who seemed to have a “pal” in every government office and on every street corner of Las Piernas — was getting calls from a worker in th
e county coroner’s office whenever a Jane Doe was brought in. O’Connor insisted on going with him to view the next body.
“You sure you want to do that?” Jack asked. “It’s seldom — well, it’s not the sleeping beauty parlor, if you take my meaning.”
“Then why do you go?”
“Why do you think I go, kid?”
O’Connor was silent for a moment, then said, “Thanks. But I’ll be going with you from now on, if you’ve no objection.”
“None whatsoever.”
O’Connor got sick the first time, but Jack still brought him along the next time.
They made these trips for five years.
Each miserable April, O’Connor watched for reports of missing women that might fit the pattern, but there were none.
In April 1949, in San Marino — about thirty miles north of Las Piernas — a three-year-old girl went out to play in a field overgrown with weeds. She fell into an abandoned well — ninety feet down, through a fourteen-inch-wide opening. Her parents heard her crying and called police and firemen. Word of the rescue effort spread, and in Las Piernas the city editor of the Express looked up from the wire reports to see who was available to cover it. There was only one unassigned reporter in the newsroom. Young O’Connor. The editor sent him on his way to San Marino.
The scene was already crowded when O’Connor arrived. Heavy equipment, rescue workers, volunteers, neighbors — even diminutive adults who offered to be lowered down the pipe. Well-diggers were urgently excavating a parallel shaft.
“Not a sound out of her since the first hour,” a patrolman said to O’Connor. “Jesus, I got a little girl not much older than her.”
Next to them, a man from the Herald suddenly said, “What the hell is that?” They turned to see trucks laden with odd-shaped equipment approaching the scene.
“Television,” a reporter from the Times said. “KTLA. Saw them out at the electroplating plant fire over on Pico a couple of years ago. Looks as if they’re getting more sophisticated.”
The cop and the man from the Herald looked amused.
O’Connor didn’t. He was thinking about something Jack had given him to read recently, a report on television.
The man from the Times was saying, “It’s no joke, my friends. Two years ago there were a little over three hundred televisions in Los Angeles. You know how many there are now?”
“About twenty thousand,” O’Connor answered.
“Bingo. Trust the cub to know. What paper are you with?”
“The Express.”
“The Express? You know Jack Corrigan?”
For the rest of the long hours there, the man from the Times took him under his wing, introducing him to others, getting him as close as possible to the rescue itself.
After fifty hours of frantic effort, the rescue crew reached the little girl — to the heartbreak of everyone who had worked or watched or waited, they reached her too late. The coroner would later determine that she had died not long after rescue efforts began.
When O’Connor got back to the Express, tired, dirty, and thoroughly depressed, the city editor said sourly, “I don’t know why you should bother writing it up. Everyone has been watching it on televisions. Twenty-seven hours straight, and people who own sets had their neighbors camped out in their dens. Never seen anything like it. At least Jack has that angle covered.”
After O’Connor filed his story, Jack took him drinking.
“It was amazing, Conn,” Jack told him. “Everyone huddled around the screen, feeling as if they were right there.” He took a pull off a cigarette and exhaled slowly, shaking his head. “The world is not going to be the same place tomorrow morning.”
“It never is,” O’Connor said absently. “Like it or not.”
Jack studied him. “What’s on your mind, Conn?”
“I’m just thinking that I’ll find out about wells in Las Piernas.”
“A follow-up story? Sure. Good idea.”
Honesty made O’Connor shake his head. “No, Ames Hart is already working on that one.”
“Should have known. Anything that might end up being some kind of reform, Hart’s on it.”
“I’m only thinking… you know, maybe… Maureen,” O’Connor ended on a whisper.
Ames Hart told O’Connor that a law was going to be passed, mandating the capping of wells. And more gently, he mentioned that none of the abandoned wells in Las Piernas was so wide that an adult woman would have been likely to have fallen down it.
O’Connor waited for another April.
April 1950 was a strange April — colder than most. A fraction of an inch of snow fell in Los Angeles, and in Las Piernas as well. That might have been the biggest local story that April, if work done in an orange grove damaged by frost had not uncovered three bodies.
Maureen O’Connor, Anna Mezire, and Lois Arlington were no longer missing.
9
THE NIGHT AFTER MAUREEN’S FUNERAL, O’CONNOR DRANK HIMSELF into a stupor. He awoke the next morning to find himself lying next to a woman who (he decided) was better-looking than he had any right to expect her to be. He looked around, saw that he was in his own apartment, and stared at the ceiling as memories of the previous evening came back to him — of leaving his parents’ home with Corrigan, going to a bar, and drinking steadily. Two women joined them. Jack left with one, he stumbled out with the other.
This one. He remembered the fumbling, desperate way he had taken her, and — worst of all — weeping as he had not wept at the funeral. She had held him and not said a word. He had eventually fallen asleep.
He got out of bed and dressed quietly, his movements slowed more by his shame than by his hangover. He was not one to pick up women in bars and bring them home on any occasion, and he believed that to have done so after his sister’s funeral revealed him to be the worst sort of man.
He wondered if the woman was a prostitute, and what he might owe her if she was, or if he had already paid her. He looked in his wallet — hard to tell what he had left at the bar, but he didn’t seem to be down much from where he had been the day before.
She came into the kitchen while he was making coffee. She was dressed and was smoking a cigarette. “Good morning,” she said, although she appeared to be just as hung over as he was.
“Good morning.” He hesitated, then added, “Care for some coffee?”
“Thanks, Conn. I’d love some.” She smiled a little crookedly, then said, “Vera, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Vera. Of course.”
The smile widened a little. “Listen, maybe I’ll skip that coffee. I should get going.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said.
“That’s okay. Do you see my coat? Wait — there it is, by the door.” She moved to get it, but he reached it first and held it for her as she put it on. She turned toward him and briefly embraced him. “Nothing to worry about, Conn. Nothing at all.”
“I’d like to see you again,” he found himself saying.
She shook her head. “I’m leaving town today, remember? Or maybe you don’t — anyway, if I come back through here, I’ll look you up, all right?”
“Wait—” He hurried back to his wallet, pulled out a business card. “If you should need anything, give me a call.”
She took it, gave him a quick kiss, and left.
He hadn’t even asked her last name, he realized.
Except to reprimand himself for dishonoring his sister’s memory, he forgot about Vera. He concentrated on trying to find some lead in Maureen’s murder. The owner of the orange grove was an old woman, nearly blind, who was so upset over the discovery of the remains on her property, her grown children feared for her health. No one had worked in the grove through every year of the disappearances, and police were convinced that none of the workers had any idea of the grave’s existence. The other two bodies might not have been identified if O’Connor had not previously brought attention to the similarities in the women’s disappearances. Maureen�
�s body was fully clothed. One of the detectives said to O’Connor that he could be relieved about that, because the other two were buried nude.
Corrigan, who had been tipped off about the discovery in the grove before O’Connor, had gone with him to the police department. He had watched O’Connor as the detective told him these and other details. Jack finally told the man to shut the hell up.
A young detective just making his way up through the ranks, Dan Norton, was kindest to him, and kept in touch with him long after others in the department began avoiding him — as the likelihood of solving the cases seemed more and more remote, the less welcome his unanswerable questions were to them.
Norton told O’Connor that he didn’t think all three women were necessarily killed by the same person.
“Why do you believe that?”
“The coroner found similar fractures on each of the other women’s skeletons — a kind of ritual, you might say, something that indicates they were tortured.”
O’Connor went pale.
“Conn, the other two. Bad, I know, but at least your sister was spared that, as far as anyone can tell. We didn’t find those same fractures on Maureen. She was clothed. There were other differences. Things like that make me wonder. Guesswork on my part, and it still leaves the big question of how killer number two knew about the grave. Seems to me either he saw one of those burials, or killer number one squawked.”He paused, and added, “I swear to you I won’t let this case go, and you can call me and ask me about it anytime. I like you and I like Jack, but if you’re going to keep covering the crime beat, and you don’t want to find guys ducking out of here when you walk in the door, forget asking anyone else if they’ve made any progress on the case. For some of these guys, it’s like being handed an ‘F’ on a report card on a daily basis. Truth is, we don’t know much and we may never know much. That’s hard to hear, I know, but I’m not going to feed you bullshit just to make myself look good.”
