by Jan Burke
“Two years ago. According to the grandson, Baer’s will was vaguely worded, and there was a huge fight within the family — like I said, mostly over the beach property. But eventually, the heirs settled things, and the offer by the developer was generous enough to get everyone to agree to it.”
“Did you question him about the bodies in the car?” O’Connor asked.
“No — didn’t want to step on anything the two of you might be doing later.”
“Good work,” he said. “You learned a lot about that property in a short amount of time — thanks.”
Lydia left us, glowing from his praise. I asked O’Connor if he had learned anything from his phone call.
“Not yet,” he said. He relented a little, though, and said, “I called someone who works in the coroner’s office.”
“Oh, so that’s a cross, like a graveyard cross, and not a ‘t’ on that card? I guess that system makes it harder on the newsroom snoops.”
He looked surprised — genuinely, this time — then laughed and told me to stay the hell away from his Rolodexes.
I glanced at my watch and called home, and once again begged Mary’s help. She told me not to worry, that my father had slept most of the day and would probably be up and wanting to talk to me when I got home. “So it’s you who’ll have the long day,” she said. “Not me.”
O’Connor and I went to work on the story itself. We divided it along the lines of old and new — he would write the background material on the Ducane murders, and I would cover events at the construction site today. I called Woolsey’s office every half hour. The receptionist wouldn’t put the first few calls through, and told me to give up and call back at the time Dr. Woolsey specified. I didn’t give up, and two and a half hours after I had left his office, Woolsey gave a preliminary confirmation of the identities of the bodies as those of Kathleen and Todd Ducane, and their infant son, Maxwell.
I was still on that call when H.G. told O’Connor that he was wanted in Wrigley’s office.
When he came back, about twenty minutes later, he said that Mr. Wrigley had known Katy Ducane, too, and was a friend of Lillian Linworth. “This may seem strange to you, but… even though we’ve believed for years that Katy and Todd were dead, this is hard on everyone who knew them.”
“That doesn’t seem strange to me at all.”
He was silent.
“Katy was only twenty-one, right?”
“Yes. Younger than you are now,” he said wonderingly.
I did the math. “Weird, isn’t it? She’d be some middle-aged lady now, if she had lived.”
He smiled in an odd way, but said, “Yes.”
“She seems to have been someone who made an impression on people.”
“Spoiled rotten. Headstrong. Alive as anyone I’ve ever known. Jack and Helen adored her. Her husband — well, none of us were fond of Todd, but perhaps he would have matured into a better man. We’ll never know.”
“You wish you were with Lillian and Helen instead of here?”
He thought for a moment, then said, “No, Kelly, I’m where I need to be. This is what I do. And in all honesty, I’d be nothing but miserable anywhere else.”
I understood that, although I had far less time in as a reporter. The thought of his abilities and years of experience made me feel all the greener. A couple of hours later, with some trepidation, I handed him what I had written so far, and took a look at his own pages.
31
SHE SURPRISED HIM.
He had worried that writing together would be a trying, exasperating experience, one that would require twice as much effort to produce a story, and that he would need to constantly beware of offending her.
But when she came back from the coroner’s office, full of observations and questions about the Yeagers, he began to admire the way her mind worked, that she hadn’t taken Woolsey at face value. Hell, she hadn’t taken him at face value.
Perhaps because they were focused on the story, or perhaps because she was better at this than he had expected, it had gone smoothly. Even when she told him — brassy little bitch that she was — that he had missed something in his first draft.
“What?” he had asked.
“Katy. I don’t see her in here — not the way you described her to me. Not that girl in the portrait at Lillian’s house.”
He silently damned her for being right and went back to work.
He found himself pushing himself a little harder than he had been lately, concentrating on his own work in a way he had not done in the last few months, wanting to set an example — and aware of her scrutiny. A little unnerving, this new responsibility, but stimulating as well.
She made a few mistakes, but didn’t bridle at his suggested changes. If anything, she seemed eager to learn from him.
They wrote quickly — once he went back to work on it, the story didn’t need coaxing along — and finished in time to keep John Walters from losing a bet with H.G. that they’d make deadline.
She had looked so pleased when she handed it off to the copy desk, he smiled thinking of it.
The blend of their styles hadn’t been as jarring as he had worried it would be, either. In the most basic ways, hers was not so different from his own. He made a remark about this, and she said it wasn’t surprising. “Your writing has been a part of my life since I was seven or eight.”
That had taken him aback for a moment. The daily grind of putting out the paper made a man think about days from deadline to deadline, and not in terms of years.
She was younger than his son. He had been writing for the paper for several years by the time Kenny was born.
He wondered if her father worried about her, working in this business, seeing the hard side of the world, encountering lowlifes every day. He looked around him and frowned. Lowlifes in the newsroom as well. He resolved to have a word with the Wildman.
“Tomorrow, will you show me what’s in that box?” she asked.
“Sure. Tonight if you’d like.”
“Tempting, but I need to get home to my dad.”
They walked out to the parking lot together, not saying anything. He reached his car first and stood next to it, watching her walk to the little Karmann Ghia, seeing her fumble through her purse for her keys.
From the corner of his eye, he caught a movement near the fence of the Wrigley Building parking lot. The light in the lot was dim, and beyond it he could see little more than shadows, but he couldn’t shake a feeling that someone was there. He watched for another sign of movement, listened for a footstep.
He heard Kelly say, “Good night, O’Connor. Thanks again.”
He turned to her and saw, for the briefest moment, the image of a very different young woman, a sister lost to him one long-ago evening. On her way home from work to a waiting father.
“Let me see you home safe,” he said to her. “I’ll follow you in my car, all right?”
She smiled. “I’ll be all right.”
“It’s late. Humor an old man. It will make me feel better.”
He was convinced that she wanted to refuse, but after a moment of studying him, she shrugged and said, “If you can afford the gas and you and that old Nash can keep up with me, fine.” She laughed and said, “You probably hear that old ‘Beep Beep’ song as often as I hear ‘Goodnight, Irene.’”
“Not so often these days,” he admitted. “I’m surprised someone your age knows that old song.”
“Then we’re even,” she said, getting into the car. “I’m still amazed that you listen to the Stones.”
He had no trouble keeping up with the noisy convertible. As it pulled out of the parking lot of the Express, he saw another car’s headlights come on. A BMW. Not the kind of car one usually saw parked in the alley near the paper. The fellow in the shadows? he wondered. It seemed to move forward as she made the turn, then stopped as O’Connor’s car followed hers.
He watched for several blocks, but he didn’t see the Beemer again.
; O’Connor followed her to a quiet suburban tract, one of the ones built in the postwar boom. Her street was lined with modest homes and well-kept lawns. The grass was a little long in the yard of the house where she pulled in, parking next to a red Mustang. The house itself looked neat and well cared for, so that he thought the neglect of the yard was recent. Lights were on, and as he rolled down his window to wave good night to her, he could hear the sound of laughter.
She waved back to him from her front porch, but still he waited until she had gone in.
He went to a pay phone and called Helen. She wasn’t home.
He thought of calling Lillian, decided against it, and drove back to the paper. He looked down the alley and saw, as expected, that the BMW was gone. He drove to a small Irish bar he liked, a place about five miles from the paper, and hoped that no one from the Express would trouble to travel that far to drink tonight.
No one from the Express was there, but he saw a familiar figure sitting at the bar.
“Have a seat,” Lefebvre said to him, motioning to an empty bar stool next to him. “I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Am I supposed to believe you’re here by luck?”
He shook his head. “No. I asked Norton where you liked to drink.”
O’Connor laughed. “And of a dozen places you picked this one?”
“I asked him where you liked to drink when you wanted to get away from reporters. He named three of them. I checked them out and took a chance that it might be this one.”
“You frighten me, Detective. And if I hadn’t shown up?”
“I’d have a drink, go home, and think of another way to find a chance to talk to you.”
O’Connor ordered a pint of Guinness on tap. “All right, Lefebvre. The luck was with you. What can I do for you?”
“It’s been a bad night for you, I imagine.”
“Not entirely.”
“Ah. Miss Kelly.”
“Now just a minute—”
“Relax. She’s a nice kid, but she’s too young for me, O’Connor. And for you, too, I assume.”
“Definitely.”
“I’m concerned about her — the Yeagers might have taken notice of her visit to the coroner’s office today. And she made Woolsey nervous.”
O’Connor smiled. “Good for her,” he said, hiding his own worry.
He took a long drink, and another. Lefebvre didn’t say anything, but the silence between them was comfortable. When O’Connor had drained the pint, Lefebvre ordered another one. O’Connor noticed Lefebvre wasn’t drinking much himself. That didn’t bother him. O’Connor knew his own head to be a damned hard one.
“You can tell me about them,” Lefebvre said. “It will help.”
“Whom?”
“Todd and Katy Ducane.”
“I mean, whom will it help?”
“It will help me find their killer, I hope.”
“Read the paper.”
“I will,” Lefebvre said. And waited.
O’Connor took a drink of stout and said, “You’ve been a pain in my ass for five years now.”
“That bad? I apologize.”
“No,” O’Connor admitted in fairness. “Not that bad. You’ve never lied to me or intentionally sent me off on a false trail. You’re just far less willing to talk to me than most. Are you offering to help us out now?”
“Not to an extent that will allow a murderer to escape prosecution. But otherwise, yes. And you have a reputation for being trustworthy. Norton swears you will keep a confidence.”
“No kidding. But somehow I think you already knew that. So why the change of heart about talking to me?”
“Thank one of your fans.”
“Norton?” O’Connor said, and laughed.
“No, Ms. Kelly.”
“She didn’t talk to you about me.”
“No. I watched how you treated her. That’s all.”
O’Connor took another drink and thought about the fact that if Lefebvre had seen him at a dinner party a few nights ago, he probably would have wanted to knock him off the bar stool.
He stayed quiet, but Lefebvre didn’t move, just bought him another round. He began to admire Lefebvre’s patience.
What the hell, he thought. I owe something to those bastards for Katy and for Jack. And the child. The poor child.
“Norton said Todd Ducane was a lady’s man,” Lefebvre said.
O’Connor looked over at the detective. “Jack always called him ‘the Toad’…”
32
TWO THINGS KEPT ME FROM GETTING MUCH SLEEP THAT NIGHT — THINKING about what I had seen in the trunk of a buried car, and reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. I was close to the end of the book, and until that evening, it had been scaring the bejesus out of me in a delicious kind of way. It was due back to the library the next day, and I had planned to try to finish it that night, but finding the remains kind of put me off reading about dead people. I decided I’d turn it back in and buy the paperback and read it when I could handle the idea again.
The living person named Max Ducane — or Kyle Yeager, take your pick — called me at work the next morning. He asked if he could meet me for lunch.
“I’m not even sure what to call you,” I said.
He sighed. “Max. Legally, it’s my name now.”
“Max it is, then.”
O’Connor came over to my desk, carrying his “Jack” box. I motioned him to take a seat. He was looking a little bleary-eyed.
Into the phone, I said, “So why, exactly, do you want to meet me for lunch?”
“I don’t suppose you’re allowed to date anyone you might be writing about?”
“No,” I said. I could see O’Connor watching me more closely now, shamelessly eavesdropping. I held the receiver a little closer to my ear.
“Okay,” Max said. “Not a date. I’ll tell you more about what’s going on when I see you — if I can see you?”
“All right. When and where?”
“How about if I meet you in the lobby there at noon?”
“Okay. See you then.”
I hung up and wondered if I was making a mistake.
“Who was that?” O’Connor said.
“He says his name is Max Ducane.”
“Oh, the former Kyle Yeager, is it? Well, I hope he’s nothing like his adoptive father, or you had better take a bodyguard.”
“You’ve met him — I think I’ll be fine, don’t you? Or do you want to come along?”
He seemed to space out for a moment when I asked — seemed so distracted I wondered if he had heard my question. But then he said, “Thanks, but no. I’ve already got lunch plans today.”
“When you said I should have a bodyguard — did you mean I’d better take a chaperone?”
“No. I meant bodyguard, but forget it. Kyle Yeager isn’t much like Mitch.”
“You think I’d need a bodyguard with an old man like Mitch Yeager? He’s a just a rich businessman.”
“That’s what he’d love for everyone to believe, isn’t it?” O’Connor said bitterly.
I stared at him. Clearly I’d struck some nerve.
“There is more than one way of doing business,” he said. “People complain of politicians being crooked? They’ve got nothing on certain members of the business community.”
“So why don’t you write about him?”
O’Connor glanced toward Wrigley’s office. “I did now and again, as your friend Max noted, but not nearly as much as I would have liked to have written.”
“This about advertising dollars?” I asked.
“Mr. Yeager and some of the friends who had invested in his companies made it clear to the first Mr. Wrigley that they’d never buy another inch of advertising if the Express continued its ‘campaign’ against Mr. Yeager. That was forty years ago, and if you think Yeager is a weak old man now, you’re wrong.”
“You really hate him.”
“Hate him?” He looked surprised. “No. But I dislike his way
of doing things. He likes to intimidate people. He tried it with me when I was no more than a child.” He smiled. “I’m happy to say I had caused a bit of trouble for him even then.”
He made something of a show of looking at his watch, then said, “Wrigley’s letting me use one of the meeting rooms to go over some background of the Ducane story with you. You’ve already heard it in bits and pieces, but…”
“Sure. Let’s go.”
I followed him to one of the conference rooms.
He closed the door behind us and shut the curtains to the windows that looked out onto the newsroom — and through which most of the newsroom had been looking in — then set the box on the wooden table at the center of the room. I leaned against a credenza with a phone on it and watched while he put on a pair of cheaters, opened the box, and began taking items out of it, looking at each through the bifocals, then peering over the top of the lenses as he arranged the items on the table.
I strolled around the table as he worked. Some of the materials were photographs, some newspaper clippings. Most were reporter’s notebooks and loose, indecipherable notes. With effort, I could make out the handwriting — but like the cards in his Rolodexes, the notes were apparently written in some sort of private code.
I had supposed the contents of the box were disorganized — O’Connor’s desk always looked as if someone had busted a piñata full of pink telephone message slips and scraps of paper over it, so it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had simply tossed items into the box over the years. I was wrong about that, though — there was a method to the way in which he was laying things on the table. He wasn’t sorting them as they came out of the box. They were already in an order of some kind.
The photographs ranged from curling black-and-white glossies to the slick squares of 1950s color photographs — the too vivid reds, yellows, and blues of the film processing of the time.
“Technicolor,” I said.
He glanced up, said, “Something like that,” and went back to work on unloading the box.
I began studying some of the photos more closely. There was a stack of photos of Katy as a child, often with Jack or Helen, others of her as a teenager. Most of the time, she was smiling or laughing. She was a beautiful girl, not favoring either of her parents, although Lillian had obviously been a looker, too. Katy had a great smile, one that reached her eyes and made you want to smile back at her. I had that response to a black-and-white image; in person she must have been a real live wire.
