by Jan Burke
I said, “Welcome back, Ethan.”
He nodded without looking up or saying anything. It occurred to me that he probably thought I was being sarcastic.
Lydia gave him every shit assignment that came into the city desk. She handed the plums to Hailey and other reporters. Ethan did his work without complaint. And without making eye contact with anyone in the newsroom.
He was careful to keep his eyes averted from the surfaces of other people’s desks, too, and looked at no computer monitor other than his own, staring down at his shoes whenever he got up to get a phone book or moved for any other reason. Sometimes I wondered how he made it across the newsroom without bumping into anything. Every now and then, I saw another reporter go out of his way to jostle him. Ethan would apologize and move on.
More than once, he had to call the computer folks to supply a new password. It seems any new one he came up with was soon discovered and then used to change it to another password without his knowledge. I thought he might have complained to management about it, because after about a week of that, at a staff meeting, John said, “The next person who fucks around with another reporter’s computer will be fired on the spot. I will set up security cameras in the newsroom if I have to. The fun’s over, boys and girls.” Ethan turned beet red and shook his head slightly.
I said, “John, who reported the problem to you?”
“Those propeller heads in the computer department,” he said without hesitation. “I can’t make sense out of half of what they say to me, so none of you are to make them talk to me again, understand?”
The next morning, I watched as Ethan navigated his way to his desk. He sat down and pulled a drawer open. All its contents fell out onto the floor with a tremendous clatter. Across the newsroom, there was laughter.
He said nothing, staring at the mess for a moment, then knelt on the floor and began picking up the scattered contents.
I stood up, went around to his desk, knelt next to him, and started helping.
“Please don’t,” he whispered.
“It’s an old trick,” I said, pretending I didn’t hear him. “Don’t open any of the others, they’ll be upside down, too. Someone takes a thin piece of cardboard, uses it to hold the contents in while the drawer is flipped over and reinserted. Very hard to detect first thing in the morning.”
At some point during this explanation, he stopped moving. Mark Baker and Stuart Angert came over and fixed the other drawers while I continued to hunt down paper clips, pens, loose change, and Post-it notes. The newsroom had fallen silent.
John’s hearing is never so attuned to anything as a lack of noise in the newsroom. He came to his door, glanced over at us, then turned to the rest of the room and shouted, “What the hell are you being paid to do?”
It broke whatever spell had frozen the others, and work resumed.
Ethan said, “Thanks,” as Stuart and Mark went back to their desks. Otherwise, he still hadn’t moved or spoken.
“Let’s get out of here for a few minutes,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. Meet you downstairs in five. Don’t forget your umbrella.”
“I don’t have one.”
“We’ll share mine, then.”
I stood up, grabbed my purse, jacket, and umbrella, and left.
He met me in the lobby just when I thought I might have to go back up into the newsroom and haul him out by his ear.
I started walking, and to stay dry, he had to keep up. “Where are we going?”
“Lucky Dragon Burgers. Serves a great breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry, really.”
“I am,” I said.
He didn’t say anything more until we were seated in a booth. I asked him if he was a vegetarian. “No.”
I ordered two Lucky Dragon omelets and a pot of coffee.
He was staring down at the table.
“I was trying to remember an acronym a friend taught me,” I said. “Maybe you can help. It was the word H.A.L.T. — the H stood for hungry, the A for angry. The T was for tired. The L?”
“Lonely,” he said. He looked up. “Your friend was in AA?”
“Yes.”
“How’s he doing?”
“She. That one is doing fine. Not always the story. But she remembers to do little things like taking care not to let herself get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Like a lot of things in AA, that’s not a bad idea for anyone, really.”
“Are you—?”
“In AA? No. But try not to hold that against me.”
“Actually, I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you. I need to apologize to you.”
“Working your steps?”
“No — I mean, I am, but it isn’t that. I’m not at that step yet. I’m — this is on my own. I just need to do this.”
The long apology that followed wasn’t something I needed, but I was fairly certain he had to get it off his chest. He spoke slowly and haltingly, in a manner far removed from that of the glib young manipulator who had put himself forward so often in recent months. The omelets arrived just as he was getting to the part about how he knew he had caused embarrassment to everyone on the whole newspaper.
“We’ll get over it. Don’t let that food get cold. Oh — thanks, and you’re forgiven, and don’t let any of this keep you from moving on from here.”
“That’s it?”
“No. Can I have your sour cream?”
He laughed a little nervously and dished it onto my plate. “It’s not good for you.”
“Oh yes it is. Hair shirts, on the other hand, are really bad for you.”
“Hair shirts?” he asked, puzzled.
I sighed. “I should make you look it up, but — people used to wear them as penance.”
“Oh. Okay.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes. He was, I noticed, starting to tuck into his breakfast with earnest.
My cell phone rang. I apologized to him — I usually turn it off in restaurants.
His mouth was full, but he motioned me to go ahead and answer it.
The call was from Frank. “Lydia didn’t know where to find you, so I worried a little,” he said.
“I’m having breakfast at the Lucky Dragon. What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said about Maureen O’Connor. Harmon worked for Eden Supply of Las Piernas. Ring any bells?”
“Eden Supply? No, and there’s nothing about it in O’Connor’s notes that I can recall. Was it owned by some other company?”
“Haven’t had a chance to look it up. It’s not around now, though.”
“I’ll see if I can find anything about it in the newspapers from the 1940s. Maybe they advertised with the Express.”
“Okay, but don’t run anything in the paper yet — I’d rather Yeager didn’t know we were looking in this direction.”
When I hung up, Ethan said, “That was about O’Connor?”
I felt a little rise of anger.
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” he said quickly.
“You could hardly help it. That’s not what’s bothering me. It’s that—”
“That you were close to O’Connor and I stole from him.”
“Yes.”
“That was wrong, I know. You probably won’t believe this, but — the reason was — I mean, I should never have done it, but — but I love the way he wrote.”
“I do believe that.”
“It makes it all worse, really.”
“Ethan, if we could go back in time and pull all of O’Connor’s writing out of your articles, believe me, I’d jump into the time machine right now. We can’t. You have to live with that. But I knew O’Connor really well, and I know what he’d tell you.”
“ ‘Why’d you steal from me, you stupid son of a bitch?’”
I laughed, which surprised him. “No. He’d tell you to keep your head up.”
He looked down at the table, caught himself, and met my gaze. “Why are yo
u being nice to me? You hated me.”
“When I first came to work for the paper, I hid in the men’s room of the Express one day, and eavesdropped on O’Connor insulting the hell out of me.” I told him about some of my early troubles with O’Connor.
“What I’ve done,” he said, “is pretty different from that.”
“Yes, it is. But you aren’t the first reporter to get off to a rough start at the Express, Ethan. You have talent. You’ve just got to show people what you’ve got, that’s all. Never mind trying to impress them any other way — just use your own skill. Let it speak for itself.”
“What if that’s not enough?”
“If that isn’t enough, nothing else ever will be. You’ll need to find another line of work.”
“No — this is all I want.”
I smiled. “You’ll be all right.”
“I don’t know. They’ll never forget about this.”
“You think you’re so important that they’ll remember your mistakes more than anyone else’s?”
He smiled back a little. “When you put it like that, no.” He drank some coffee, then said, “Thanks.” After another few sips, he said, “It’s going to be hard, because … I really fucked up. I’m not too proud of myself. And it’s also going to be hard because … well, because until lately, it’s been so easy. I know that doesn’t seem to make sense, but what I mean is, no one ever stopped me before. I know how to get away with things, but now … I can’t do it that way. Even if I know I won’t get caught.”
“You have to catch yourself.”
“Right. So… I kind of have to reinvent myself. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I think so.” I stared out the window of the Lucky Dragon, watching a steady stream of downtown workers, panhandlers, shoppers, and others walk by. Each one a little bundle of troubles on legs, determined to make it through the day. I looked back at Ethan. “I’ve got a project for you. Something to do with O’Connor, so maybe it will be a way of paying him back.”
“What?”
“A little background work for a story — nothing we can run with yet, but maybe it will go somewhere if you find a connection. Go down to the morgue…” I stopped, seeing his face go pale. “You can’t avoid going in there forever, Ethan.”
“No.”
“All right, use the public library, then, but be careful not to mention to anyone else exactly what it is you’re looking for. Find out if a company named Eden Supply, which was operating around here in the 1940s, was owned by anyone else — a larger company, for example. The city might have a record of it, although only with luck would that still be available. Try the ads for it first.”
“Okay. If you don’t mind my asking, what does this have to do with O’Connor?”
“It’s the company Harmon worked for.” I told him about the possible connections to Maureen’s murder. “While you’re at it, read up on her disappearance.” I gave him some dates.
We talked about O’Connor for a while. I told him about the papers in the storage locker, and that O’Connor’s brother Dermot would be visiting the States soon. It became clear to me, as he mentioned O’Connor’s work, that he had read a great deal of it, and his enthusiasm for it made conversation easy between us.
I paid for our breakfasts, over his protests. The rain had let up, and it looked as if the skies were clearing. We walked back to the paper in a companionable silence. He seemed lost in thought, but at least he was lost with better posture. He was keeping his head up.
I thought he’d follow me into the newsroom, but he went downstairs to the morgue instead.
Until that moment, I wasn’t really sure — for all my speeches over breakfast — that much could be made of Ethan Shire.
62
FOR A WHILE, I THOUGHT THAT GIVING ETHAN A CHANCE WAS GOING TO cause a bigger fight between Lydia and me than the one we had over him before. Somewhere along the line we both saw that, pulled back a bit, and she (a little gleefully, I thought) told me she thought it would be a good thing if I took him under my wing. “He’s all yours,” she said.
Not exactly what I had in mind, but I couldn’t really back down.
Mark Baker, who was too tied up with writing stories about current criminal activities to be very active in the historical ones, told me that he wouldn’t mind working with Ethan if I didn’t want to be his scoutmaster.
“If it doesn’t work out,” I said, “you’re my backup.”
“He’s not going to be your problem,” Mark said. “Hailey is going to pitch a fit.”
He was right. When I told Hailey that we were going to share our research with him, she told me I was crazy, that he was using me, and went on and on about it. “Ethan is going to be working with us,” I said, interrupting her. “If you don’t want to work with him, you can find something else to do.”
She stood up. She didn’t quite go so far as moving to the door, but I wouldn’t have laid money on her staying. The success of the interview with Helen had produced a foreseeable side effect — Hailey, not exactly humble to begin with, now thought fairly highly of herself. I found myself half-wishing she’d walk away.
“Why should I be forced to put up with him?” she asked.
“You’ve never needed a second chance, I suppose? Or maybe you’re looking for an excuse to go home earlier in the day.”
She sat down, but said, “I love what we’re doing, but — I don’t trust Ethan!”
“I can’t make you trust him. Not going to try. But if you want to keep working on stories with me, you’re going to work on stories with Ethan.”
He met us late that afternoon in a conference room just off the morgue. I learned that he had kept up with our stories about the old cases of 1958 and 1978, which had been running in the Express as a series in the weeks before Max’s DNA test results were known. Hailey recapped what we had been looking into now — stories about the business connections between the Ducanes, the Linworths, and the Yeagers, as well as whatever personal backgrounds we could come up with.
“We think the Linworths and Ducanes screwed Mitch Yeager out of some money while he was under arrest in 1936,” Hailey said. “His bail was set high, and he needed cash. He needed money to pay his attorneys, too.”
“Wasn’t his family wealthy?” Ethan asked.
“His family had been involved in rum-running,” I said, “but Prohibition had recently ended, so bootlegging wasn’t profitable.”
“Barrett Ducane offered to help Yeager raise cash by buying some of his assets, assets that were worth much more than Ducane paid for them,” Hailey said. “Linworth bought a few things as well, and those deals were in his favor, but not as lopsided as Ducane’s. Ducane and Linworth both knew that money was going to be made from the coming war in Europe and elsewhere — so they chose companies that could be easily retooled to make aircraft parts and munitions and things like that.”
“What did you find out today?” I asked Ethan.
“It’s probably not worth anything,” he said.
Hailey smirked.
He took a deep breath and explained to her why he had been researching Eden Supply. “It was owned by Granville Enterprises. Granville owned a lot of smaller, agriculturally related companies. Granville was a family name — Mitch Yeager’s grandfather.”
“Who was dead long before 1945,” Hailey said, “so the company was Mitch’s in those years.”
“Which doesn’t prove he knew that one driver in one subsidiary was taking a truck out to that particular orange grove after hours,” Ethan said. “Or that he knew Harmon was killing and burying women all around a four-county area. If Yeager did know, it will be hard to show it.”
“This is always the problem with him,” I said. “He’s there, but just out of reach.”
“What do you mean?” Ethan asked. “I thought it was his nephews and minions who did all the killing.”
“Which is why he’s out of reach,” Hailey said impatiently.
I tried giving her
a look that told her to back off. Hailey doesn’t really get the whole “back off” thing, which helps her as a reporter but makes working with her a pain.
“Tell me more about this,” he said, looking at me.
“You’ve read the original confessions Eric and Ian made, the ones they recanted?”
“Yes.”
“O’Connor said something to me about the statements they made — their theories about how to best punish someone. He called it the Yeager catechism.” I flipped to a page in my notes and read, “‘You want to make your enemy suffer, you kill the people he loves and hide the bodies — you make him wonder if they’re alive or dead. Nothing is worse than that.’”
“That was Eric,” Hailey said, pulling out her own notes. “Ian was almost word for word the same — ‘If you kill the people he loves and hide the bodies, you kidnap them and never let them be found — you make him wonder if they’re alive or dead, if he’ll ever see them again, and he starts to think about what might be happening to them. Then your enemy suffers all his life. Nothing you could do to him is worse than that. Nothing.’”
“O’Connor once told me that when he heard those statements, he wondered if he could have become Mitch Yeager’s enemy before he was eighteen,” I said.
“He was seventeen when his sister disappeared,” Ethan said. “I spent some time reading about that today. But what could he have done to harm Mitch Yeager?”
“He was a reporter,” Hailey said. “He could have written something to harm Yeager’s businesses.”
“None of his early stories were about Yeager,” Ethan said. “He seldom had any stories published with a byline until late 1945.”
“You’re the expert on O’Connor, all right,” Hailey said.
Ethan looked mortified.
“Grow up or go upstairs,” I snapped at Hailey.
She cast a dark look at Ethan, as though he were to blame for my loss of temper.
“Ethan’s right,” I said. “O’Connor didn’t cause problems for Mitch Yeager as a reporter. He caused them for him when he was a child. A paperboy. He stood on a street corner after school each day and hawked newspapers. He managed to sneak into a courtroom gallery in 1936 and observe some jury tampering. He didn’t know it by that name, of course. He just saw one of Yeager’s louts obviously threatening someone who looked like the brother of a juror. He told his hero about it.”
