“Yes.”
“Why did she marry the Toad?”
“Ask her.”
“When I see her tonight.”
“Yes.”
“And who’s going to keep an eye on you? I don’t want to risk having someone come in here and finish what they started.”
“I’ll be fine. See Katy. Go over and find out if she’s okay.”
“Why don’t I just call her from the pay phone downstairs?”
“You’ll wake the baby and everyone else.”
O’Connor sighed. “It’s that important to you?”
“Please.”
“I’m on my way,” he said, grabbing his coat and hat. He paused as he reached the door. “Jack, where are your hat and coat?”
“I don’t know. Lillian’s? I’m not sure.”
“I’ll make a note to ask her about it before Hastings gives it away to charity.”
“The butler? He’s probably pressing it as we speak.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Can’t seem to avoid it…Hey, Conn?”
O’Connor waited.
“Thanks.”
“Just rest. I’ll let you know what the princess has to say.”
O’Connor drove his Nash Rambler through the rain, his window down a crack to keep the windshield from fogging up, allowing the rain to pelt in. He talked to himself over most of the distance, calling himself a sap to do the bidding of someone in Jack’s condition, a man who had been beaten so badly, he believed that he saw a car being buried on a farm.
Then again, O’Connor thought, maybe Jack really saw it. O’Connor was inclined to believe he did, but it made so little sense, he had to question Jack’s condition at the time. If not dazed by the beating, perhaps by the booze. Jack wasn’t usually one to see visions while drinking, but he had been a hard drinker for many years, so perhaps he had reached that stage where he had downed enough martinis to bring on the pink elephants.
O’Connor’s thoughts moved quickly to his bigger concern: that someone had been out to murder Jack. This big blond man he spoke of had knocked him out cold with one punch, Jack said. So why did he keep on beating an unconscious man? If he had done anything like that at the party itself, people would have intervened. So he had to have taken Jack away, and in full sight of witnesses. O’Connor began to feel more anxious to talk to Katy-perhaps she’d be able to tell him what had happened. Best of all, she’d know who was at the party.
He turned the corner to the Ducanes’ street, and braked hard to avoid hitting a police barricade.
10
T HE NASH FISHTAILED ON THE SLICK STREET, BUT HE MANAGED TO BRING it back under control and stop without hitting either of the grim-faced officers who were now shining flashlights through the windshield. They wore slickers, but the wind was gusting, and no ducking or turning of their heads prevented the rain from pelting into their faces. When one of them moved to the driver’s side, O’Connor rolled his window down a little more and showed his press pass. Even as the officer took it, O’Connor’s attention was drawn to the Ducanes’ home. The circular drive held a strange combination of vehicles: a battered black Hudson, which O’Connor took to be Todd’s old heap, a dove gray and black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, and the coroner’s wagon.
O’Connor felt his stomach lurch.
Along the street there were patrol cars as well, and a T-Bird that O’Connor had seen many times before. The T-Bird belonged to an old friend-Detective Dan Norton.
“It don’t take you creeps any time at all, does it?” the patrolman said, handing the pass back.
“What’s going on, Officer?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Who is it, Joe?” the other cop asked, walking over to the window. To O’Connor’s relief, it was someone he had met before, an officer named Matt Arden.
“A reporter,” the man called Joe said. “Only there is no such thing as ‘a’ reporter. It’s like one ant or one cockroach. They just don’t come in singles.”
“Officer Arden, we’ve met before,” O’Connor said.
Arden peered in and said, “Oh, it’s you.” He turned to the other officer. “He’s okay, Joe.”
“He’s waiting right here until I get the word. Go up and ask at the house.”
“Matt-what’s happened here?” O’Connor asked.
“Woman got herself killed,” Joe answered, before Matt could reply.
“A woman…my God…”
“Hey, Conn,” Matt said, “you all right?”
“Arden, why are you still here?” Joe said. “I thought I told you to get up to the house.”
Matt gave O’Connor a helpless look and hurried away.
“Now, be a good boy,” Joe said, “and move this jalopy over to the side of the road, so you can wait out of the way. Go on, move it.”
In a daze, O’Connor moved the car, parking beneath a large tree.
Between disbelief and sadness, one thought returned to him again and again:
What am I going to tell Jack?
Jack was in no condition to receive news like this. What might it do to him?
As cool as Lillian had been toward Jack over the years since the accident, she had never prevented Katy from becoming attached to him. That had happened because both Jack and Lillian were friends of Helen Swan.
O’Connor remembered those days. Helen had become angry at Old Man Wrigley not long after Jack’s accident, and she left the paper. To Wrigley’s chagrin, she went to work for his goddaughter, Lillian Vanderveer Linworth, who did everything she could to keep Helen from caving in to his efforts to recruit her back. Lillian even moved to her ski lodge in Arrowhead for a time and took Helen with her.
Eventually, Lillian returned to Las Piernas. Helen went back to work at the newspaper, but by then she was attached to Katy and would often baby-sit her. Jack got to know Katy through his close friendship with Helen. Even as a toddler, Katy took to Jack.
O’Connor recalled, with a mixture of amusement and shame, that he had felt jealous of Katy when he was a young boy. Maureen had helped him get over it, talking to him about Jack being the sort of person who would only stay attached to those who didn’t try to lay claim to him. “Grab on to him too tightly, Conn, and he’ll let go of you.”
When he saw the truth of this, he asked his sister how she had figured that out about Jack, since she had only met him once or twice. She said, “When you told me what happened that night at the diner, when Lillian Vanderveer complained that Jack was spending too much time with you? She was jealous of you. Showing it was her mistake.”
That had sounded like nonsense at the time. It had been many years before he could figure out how Lillian Vanderveer could possibly be jealous of him. But he trusted Maureen and took her advice: he hid his feelings.
Eventually he hid the jealousy of Katy so well it disappeared, perhaps because as he grew a little older he realized he had nothing to fear from her. In time she won him over, as she did almost everyone, and he began to think of her as a lively, if spoiled, younger sister.
For all the wealth of the Linworths, he thought, she might have been better off if she had been part of the O’Connor family. His own mother had never been as reserved as Lillian, and although Kieran had been difficult to live with, O’Connor never doubted his father’s love. Harold Linworth was as much an absentee father as he was an
