“Frank.”
He looked at me.
“I need to fill you in on a few things.”
He didn’t say anything, just sat up a little straighter. This was going to be business, and he subtly adopted a different posture. More distant. I didn’t like it, but it was too late.
I told him about seeing the degree from ASU, about my suspicions of Hollingsworth and Longren, about the connection of the DA and the mayor in all of O’Connor’s notes, about Ann Marchenko and Guy’s discussion of the safe-deposit boxes and money laundering. He asked a question or two for clarification here and there, but otherwise made no comment.
When I had finished, he said, “I really appreciate your telling me all of this, Irene. When are you talking to Guy St. Germain again?”
“I’m going to try to have lunch with him on Monday.”
He looked down into his beer. It seemed to me he was a little curt when he said, “Let me know what you learn, okay?”
“Okay, but I think we need to be cautious there, Frank. He’s sticking his neck out for me. He doesn’t want any negative publicity for the bank.”
“Publicity is your department.” Unmistakably curt.
I bristled at his tone for a moment, but suddenly it dawned on me that I hadn’t told Frank anything about how I had left things with Guy, and that he might be jealous.
“By the way, I’m bringing Lydia along when I go to lunch with Guy. I’m hoping they’ll hit it off with each other.”
He looked up at me. “Really?”
“Really. I can only handle making one guy pissed off at me at a time.”
“I’m not pissed off at you.”
“Give it another five minutes.”
He smiled briefly, then grew serious again. “Irene, look, let the department check Hollingsworth and Longren out. I’ll let you know what we find out and you can write your story from there.”
“I was wrong. It’s going to be less than five minutes.”
He took the hint and we sat there quietly for a while.
“I guess I’m a slow learner,” he said. “I’ve known all along that you were going to keep poking your nose into things until you got hurt. Just try to understand that it isn’t easy on me.”
“I might not get hurt. I might be able to help prevent other people from getting hurt.”
“That’s my job.”
“That’s both of our jobs.”
He shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
No reply. He looked out the windows, sighed and looked back at me.
“Please be careful,” he said.
“I will.”
He looked out the windows again. I couldn’t read him at all. It bothered me. Maybe he had decided to stop mollycoddling me. But I worried that instead he was only distancing himself from me.
“Let’s go,” he said at last.
He drove me home, walked me to the front door, and said a polite goodnight.
I lay awake a long time, angry by turns with myself and then with Frank. Finally I fell asleep.
I dreamed a memory-dream of O’Connor that night. It was a mixture of two separate evenings we had actually spent together, interspliced into one in the dream. We were laughing and drinking and watching fat women dance. He turned to me and said, “Remember what Sister Kenny once said.”
“Sister Kenny?” I said in the dream, just as I had the night he brought it up. “Is she someone who taught you in Catholic school?”
He laughed in the dream, as he had then. “No, my dear, I suppose you are too young to remember Sister Kenny. Elizabeth Kenny. She was an Australian nurse who developed a treatment for polio. And took a lot of guff along the way — but anyway, what she said was, ‘Better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.’”
“I like that.”
“I knew you would” — he smiled in the dream — “I knew you would.”
42
LYDIA AND I drove separately on Monday morning. I went back down to the morgue and checked out microfilm rolls for the last week in March and all of April 1955. Throughout both months Richard Longren was mentioned frequently. Nothing about his leaving town. And during Easter week, he was featured in an article almost every day, in connection with some special committee that was looking into the polio-vaccine controversy and which vaccine should be used by the health department in Las Piernas.
So that let Longren off the hook as far as an opportunity to get together with Jennifer Owens.
