by Jan Burke
No way to know if Lydia had tried to reach me or not.
I decided I’d look through the contents of the two trunks in the comfort of my own home. Still uneasy about the other visitor to this floor, I crept toward the roll-up door on O’Connor’s unit, eased it higher, and looked up and down the hall before I pulled the flatbed cart inside. I loaded the two trunks on it, pushed it out, and started to close up the unit, then stopped and grabbed the box labeled “Jack” before locking up.
The elevator was at the other end of the hall. I pushed the cart past the unit that was occupied and paused briefly to listen, but the person visiting it wasn’t making any noise. I hurried out.
I wasn’t all that far from the house, and the parking lot of the Wrigley Building is far from secure, so I stopped off just long enough to place the trunks and box in our guest room, and close it off from our pets.
At work, I had about ten calls on my desk voice mail, but nothing that needed immediate attention. All around me, computer keyboards softly clicked away. Reporters furiously at work as they always were this late in the afternoon, trying their damnedest to make deadline.
Happily, I had earned the luxury of being able to work on long-term projects now, and knew that nothing in the day’s “budget” was being held up by me — there wouldn’t be a hole in the front page because I had become caught up in reading O’Connor’s first diary.
I should have felt relatively relaxed. I didn’t. Something was going on in the newsroom. But what?
More than twenty years of newspaper work had made me attuned to those times when someone on the staff was onto something hot. Any veteran could feel that. Some reporters could hide their excitement about a hot story from their fellow reporters, but I seldom met a first-year who could pull that off. You might as well play the William Tell Overture over loudspeakers in the newsroom whenever a green reporter was on the chase.
I looked around. Hailey looked bored. Mark Baker was over at the city desk, talking to Lydia and Ethan.
Ethan. That’s who it was. Lydia had something up on her screen, and Ethan was smiling as she talked to him about it, while Mark took notes. I left my desk and walked over to them.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Mark was saying.
“Find out about what?”
“Oh, hi, Irene,” Mark said. “I’m doing a sidebar for this A-one story of Ethan’s.”
“Ethan’s got a story on tomorrow’s front page? Hey, that’s great.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“What’s it about?”
Lydia answered. “He’s found disturbances of graves at Municipal Cemetery. Called someone from the Parks Department and the State Cemetery Bureau to see what they had to say about it, and he’s spent the afternoon covering their mutual investigation. Turns out the city subcontracts with a private company that gets paid for administering the burials there. This company was moving caskets from unmarked graves, burying them two-deep in marked graves, and then reselling the plots they had ‘vacated.’ And looting the caskets they moved — and that’s just what they learned today. It’s going to take months to sort the burials out and figure out who belongs where. Great story. Congratulate him.”
Instead, I said, “You little shit.”
Lydia’s eyes opened wide, and Ethan’s chin came up.
Mark said, “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you who’s the looter here — he is. He stole a story.”
“I did not!” he protested hotly.
“Hailey was asking me about this very subject this morning.”
“Irene,” Lydia said reasonably, “don’t jump to conclusions. Ethan came to me with this idea—”
“Hailey!” I called.
The muted clickety-clack of keyboards all across the newsroom came to a halt. It was like disturbing crickets that you hadn’t noticed until they stopped singing.
She sauntered over. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you talk to Ethan about your story idea, the one about the cemetery?”
“No,” she said hesitantly.
“Did you say anything about it within earshot of him? Leave notes about it out on your desk?”
She looked over at Ethan, who stared back at her defiantly. “No,” Hailey said quietly.
I glanced at Mark, saw him studying the two of them.
“Irene,” Lydia said. “It’s just a coincidence.”
“I’m sure Lydia’s right,” Hailey said. “You’re the only one I’ve spoken to, and when I talked to you about it this morning, Ethan was talking to Lydia. I remember because—” She seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “I remember because he made her laugh.”
“That’s right!” Lydia said, with obvious relief. “Ethan was telling me about an old roommate, one who works for the Bee up in Sacramento.”
“Satisfied?” Ethan said.
“Not by a long shot. Hailey, Ethan has just happened to discover cases of burials being moved and looted in Municipal Cemetery.”
There was a moment, just a brief moment, when Hailey’s sense of hurt and betrayal showed on her face. She hid it quickly and said, “Cool. I’ll tell my friend who mentioned it to me. You might want to talk to him about it for follow-up.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said.
Hailey murmured, “No big,” and hurried away from the city desk — and out of the newsroom.
“You see?” Lydia said to me.
“Oh yes, I see all right.” I walked away before I gave in to a desire to throttle someone.
I logged off my computer, thought about how close Ethan’s desk was to mine, then logged on again and changed my password.
I decided to try to talk to Hailey again. I called the security desk. Geoff said she hadn’t left the building. That being the case, my guess was that she had gone into the women’s bathroom.
I got up from my chair and walked through the Express’s warren of hallways. As I made the hike, I kept thinking that in the course of two decades, it should have occurred to someone to spend a little money to put a women’s room closer to the newsroom, and a men’s room closer to features, but Wrigley claimed that all the funds available for updating the building had gone into earthquake retrofitting.
As recently as two years ago, features would have been jumping at this time of day, but Wrigley had decided to pick up the vast majority of our features content from wire services — the result being massive layoffs in this department. The room was completely deserted — a journalistic ghost town.
As I stood near an abandoned desk, Hailey came out of the bathroom. She froze when she saw me.
“You and I need to have a little talk,” I said, sitting down in a big rolling chair, and motioning her toward another.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure if she was going to deny everything, run back into the bathroom, or try to make it past me. Then her shoulders slumped, and she sat down in a nearby chair. “I’m not going to try to take that story from him.”
“The way he took it from you?”
“Past experience tells me I won’t be able to prove that. He’s very slick when it comes to computer stuff. Besides … you don’t know Ethan.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She bit her lower lip, looked toward the door, then said, “He’s a troublemaker.”
“No shit.”
“I mean — he makes trouble for people who cause him problems. In school? He had the chair of the J-department completely by the balls.”
“How?”
“He starts by kissing up. But he does research — finds out things about people.” She paused, then said, “It’s so weird. He can do good work, really good work. But he’s lazy. And I think he has problems with…”
I waited. When she didn’t say more, I said, “Problems with what?”
“He likes to party, that’s all. I don’t know if it’s that,” she added quickly, “so I shouldn’t be saying that about him.
Besides, I don’t think it’s the biggest reason he acts like he does. I mean, he has all this talent, right?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “When he focuses on something, that’s apparent.”
“But the problem is, he spends more time covering his butt and playing games than he does working.”
“Maybe if you told Lydia—”
“Forget it. I told you. He kisses ass. He’s already done it here. Mr. Wrigley thinks he has a new hotshot.”
“So why would you cave in to him, the way you did today?”
“Just trying to stay on his good side, I guess. You don’t want Ethan to think of you as anything but a friend.”
I sat thinking for a moment, then said, “Have you filed your story for today?”
“Yes. Not that it’s going to set the world on fire or anything.”
I smiled, remembering saying something like that about the first stories I covered.
“What’s so funny?”
“I won’t bore you with tales of my life on the frontier.”
She looked at me curiously. “Is it true that you were the first woman reporter here?”
“No. No, there were others before me. You want to meet one of the first women reporters?”
“Sure,” she said.
I laughed. “I was going to suggest that you interview Helen Swan, but not if you’re just being polite.”
“No, I wasn’t just being polite.”
“You’d better be telling the truth,” I said, “because Helen’s one tough old lady. If you are just being polite, she’ll make you cry for your mommy before the dust settles.”
She swallowed hard.
“Go down to the morgue — I mean, the library — and ask for microfilm of the Las Piernas News from around 1936—”
“Microfilm! It’s not on the computer?”
“Don’t try my patience. Now, get this straight — you want the film for the News and not the Express. We were two papers back then, and Helen worked for the morning paper. Read a few issues before you talk to her. I have a feeling this assignment will help you. Helen has a way of inspiring people.”
She left a few minutes later. I stayed in my ghost town, thinking up ways to trap a troublemaker.
53
“MOVING INTO THE GUEST ROOM?” FRANK ASKED. HE WAS SURROUNDED by two adoring dogs, who pressed up against his legs while our cat, Cody, yowled a greeting.
“No,” I said, standing up and stretching over the menagerie to give him a hug. “Just going over some papers from O’Connor’s childhood.”
“His childhood?” He hugged back. Still had his gun on. His face had been chilled by the night air — and felt wonderful.
“Yes. Believe it or not, he was keeping a diary when he was eight. He started writing little stories for Corrigan around that same time. You should read a few of them — they’re hilarious. He was such a bright kid. And Corrigan obviously had a gift for teaching — O’Connor was learning how to identify reporters’ work by their style. He made a game out of it.”
“That’s wild. I hate to think what I would have been writing at that same age.” He gave me a kiss.
“I saved some chicken for you,” I said. He had phoned at five to say he had caught a new homicide case, and might be delayed. I glanced at the clock on the desk. “Only eight — you got out of there faster than I thought you would.”
He grinned. “Case went to L.A. County Sheriff’s. Turns out it all started in their jurisdiction.”
He changed into jeans and a sweater and put the gun away. It isn’t easy for me to watch that man get undressed and dressed again without making him keep his clothes off for a while in between, but he was hungry, so I didn’t interrupt the process. Still, I noticed a certain knowing light in his eyes, one that told me he was completely aware of the direction my thoughts had taken.
We went into the kitchen and talked about the day while he had dinner.
We’ve had to work out rules with each other, given our occupations — he doesn’t talk about my work at his workplace, I don’t talk about his at mine. He won’t tell the police what’s going on at the newspaper, I won’t tell the newspaper what’s going on in his department. I don’t ask him for information that would compromise an investigation, he doesn’t ask me for information that would cause me to reveal sources.
This has driven our employers crazy at times, and every now and then the pressures we’ve each been under at work have put a strain on our marriage. But over the long run, it has helped us to stay together. In our workplaces, others may suspect us of being less than loyal to our employers, of something akin to consorting with the enemy, but at home, our trust in each other remains.
And every once in a while, we manage to help each other.
“I left a voice mail message for Mark Baker about something you might be interested in,” he said, putting his dishes in the sink. “There’s an old prisoner up in Folsom who claims he’s got religion and wants to confess to a couple of murders he committed here in the 1940s.”
“In the 1940s? Wow. How old is this guy?”
“They told me he’s seventy-seven.”
“You know which cases?”
“Yes. He named them — a couple of young girls who were buried in an orange grove. Carlson’s handed the cases to me.”
“You’ve been getting a lot of these lately.”
“We can do more with these cases than we could before — even five years ago, the DNA testing wasn’t where it is now. It’s not just the DNA, either — we can do much more with fingerprints and other lab work than we could back when the murders took place.”
“Who were the victims?”
“Young women. I don’t have the information with me — haven’t even had a chance to go into storage and pull what we have on them. But ask Mark to give me a call tomorrow morning and I’ll fill him in on it.”
“Great. Hoping for some local help?”
“You never know. Sometimes people come forward. But I don’t expect it. Bennie Lee Harmon isn’t going anywhere, even if they don’t.”
“Harmon — that name is familiar…”
“He was paroled in the late 1970s — model prisoner and all that. About two years after he was released, he attacked and killed a woman in Riverside. But at that point he had a sheet, we had better labs and computers, and he was caught.”
“Wait, now I remember him. He had been serving on death row up in San Quentin. He got out when the court overturned all those death penalty convictions in the 1970s.”
“Right.”
“O’Connor wrote about him. He was upset that he was going free.”
“Well, O’Connor was right. Harmon’s confessing to seven murders, two of them here in Las Piernas.”
The phone rang. I answered it.
“Irene? It’s Max.”
“Max! Are you in town for a while?” I saw Frank frown. It always takes him a moment to remind himself that Max is a friend and not a former boyfriend.
“Yes, I’m here for a few weeks. In fact — well, I called to let you know I’m engaged.”
“Engaged!”
Frank’s frown became a grin. I was grinning, too.
“Yes, well, you weren’t available any longer, so I had to pick someone else.”
“Oh, right. As if you aren’t the most sought-after bachelor I know.”
He laughed. “You’ll like her, Irene. She’s as good for me as Frank is for you.”
“Then she must be perfect for you. And in that case, I’m sure I will like her. Does this perfect woman have a name?”
“Gisella. Gisella Ross.” The way he said her name told me all I needed to know. Max Ducane, who had withstood more matchmaking attempts, more women chasing after him, more flat-out onslaughts on his single status than any man I know, had fallen for someone.
“Is she here with you in Las Piernas?”
“Not right now. She’s going to join me here in a few days. Actually… I was wondering, do you think I could get
together with you and Frank sometime before Friday?”
“You want Frank to do a background check on her?”
He laughed. “No. I’ve met her family. Very upper-crust New Englanders.”
“I’ll read up on my Emily Post before we meet. I don’t want to embarrass you.”
“You couldn’t do that. Besides, she’s not as stuffy as her parents are.”
“Hang on,” I said. I talked it over with Frank, then said, “Are you free tomorrow night? Why don’t you come over?”
He agreed to it, and we arranged for him to come by at about seven. I hung up and looked over at Frank. “Wonder what’s on his mind?”
“I don’t know,” he said, gently pulling me closer and nuzzling my ear. “How about if I tell you what’s on mine?”
I have always liked the way Frank’s mind works.
54
AT WORK THE NEXT MORNING, I FORGOT TO USE MY NEW PASSWORD, AND was immediately locked out of my computer. Computer services was tied up on another problem and couldn’t help me right at the moment.
“I thought I was supposed to get three tries before it locked me out.”
“You do,” the technician said. “I’ll check on that when I get a minute.”
I was going to try persuading him to take that minute right now, but one of my outside lines was ringing, so I hung up. It was Frank, calling from LAX.
“Hi, sorry I didn’t call you earlier, but everything has been rushed this morning. I’m flying up to Sacramento.”
“Today? I mean, of course you’re going today, but—”
“I need to talk to Harmon. Just a preliminary interview.”
“Oh.”
“Look, I haven’t forgotten about our dinner plans — I might be able to make it back, since it’s only an hour’s flight, but I might not. So — you and Max go on ahead without me if you haven’t heard from me by six, okay?”
“I can call Max, try to reschedule…”
“No, don’t do that. He’s excited about the engagement, and you’re the one he really wants to talk to, anyway.”
“Frank—”
“You’ll make me feel bad if you cancel. I’ll call you when I leave Folsom to let you know what’s going on.”
