door open? Maybe the second man-or woman- hadn’t latched it properly, and the wind had done the rest.
He made the trip back to the cars. Got back into the Nash, started the car, and turned on the heater.
Where could Ronden be? Had he left voluntarily, or was he lying dead somewhere in the woods, buried by snow? O’Connor wondered if he had nearly stepped on him, coming down the drive.
O’Connor shivered. He looked out the windshield at the Imperial as he tried to warm up. The car’s big, sweeping fins and distinctive trunk design, with the spare tire shape on it, gave the Imperial a kind of space-age look that the Nash would never have.
He thought of changing clothes before he headed back to Lake Arrowhead. He’d look for a pay phone there and call Norton. The thought of dry clothing was appealing, but the thought of getting out of the car to get his overnight bag out of the trunk…
The trunk. He stared ahead at the trunk of the Imperial. Ronden would have brought a change of clothes up here too. If Ronden’s suitcase was still in the trunk of the Imperial, then he hadn’t left the cabin voluntarily, and was probably dead. If it wasn’t, he had met someone here and left, and the chances of finding him were slim.
O’Connor put his gloves back on again and forced himself to leave the warmth of the Nash. Just as he reached the Imperial, he heard cars coming up the lane. He pushed the button lock and the trunk opened.
A San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department patrol car and Dan Norton’s T-Bird pulled up, but O’Connor scarcely spared them a glance. He didn’t even notice the set of keys, the ones he would later identify as Jack’s. All he knew was that he had found Gus Ronden, curled up in the space-age trunk, frozen solid and not bleeding from the bullet hole through his left eye.
PART II. THE BURIED
May 1978
19
“M Y HERO IS AN ASSHOLE.”
“Irene…” Lydia said in mild protest.
I said it sadly, not as a declaration of pride. I did not deliberately choose an asshole to be my hero. I discovered he was one in the way most of us make such discoveries: I got to know him.
Lydia, a friend since childhood, knew that I spoke of none other than Connor O’Connor.
At a distance, over years of reading my morning newspaper, I had come to admire O’Connor more than any other journalist, and that included Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein. I was in J-school during the Watergate years, so that’s saying a lot.
Both Lydia and I wanted to become reporters long before Watergate, and there was never any doubt in my mind that the newspaper I most wanted to work for was the Las Piernas News Express. The Express was the first newspaper I read-my father read its funny pages to me before I learned to read, then helped me with the big words when I started reading the articles themselves. By the end of grade school, I began looking for stories written by O’Connor, because I knew they would be good ones. I wanted to be like him.
When Lydia and I were in the fourth grade, we cajoled our neighbors into buying subscriptions to a self- produced newspaper that lasted one issue- Sister Mary Michael, catching us in the act of surreptitiously using the school’s ditto machine for edition number two, suspended publication.
We were on the school newspaper together in junior high, high school, and college. She was often an editor. That was fine with me. I just wanted to be a reporter, to write like the man who had inspired this dream, whose words had lured me into my career. O’Connor.
The asshole.
“He’s not, really,” Lydia said.
I just shook my head.
“Well, I will admit you have a reason to be upset,” she said.
Of course I had a reason to be upset. The legendary O’Connor had just stabbed me in the back.
“Would you be happier over in features?” Lydia asked.
I glared at her.
“No,” she said. “Stupid thing to ask.”
“You should be working in news, and we both know it.”
“I don’t want to have to deal with what you’re putting up with,” she said.
She meant the hazing I was experiencing in the newsroom.
My first job after college didn’t take me to the Express. The Express only had openings in features, not news. My first question on any job interview was, “Do women cover hard news for this paper?” The answer was seldom an unqualified “Yes.” At the Express, the answer was, “Once upon a time we did, but not now. Maybe someday, if we like your work in features, we’ll give you a shot at it.”
Someday wasn’t soon enough, so I went to Bakersfield, where there was an opening in news on the Californian. As an added benefit, I could get away from the embarrassment I felt when I was dumped by a creep I had dated in college-the number-one inductee in my Dating Hall of Shame.
Lydia stayed in Las Piernas and took a job in features. Not so many years earlier, the features section was known as the “women’s pages.” Lydia wrote about cooking. The editor of the food section left the paper about eighteen months later, and the next thing you know, Lydia was promoted.
I’d been gone from Las Piernas for two years. Now I was back, and thanks in part to Lydia’s help, I was able to land a job at the Express, too.
The first day I walked into the newsroom, I discovered with no surprise whatsoever that its occupants were almost all white (the sole exception: Mark Baker, who is black) and almost all old (I counted four who were under forty, and Mark was one of them). H.G., the city editor, was pushing sixty. He was a quiet, cynical man who smoked cheap cigars and whose rugged face seemed to have only two expressions: one indicated his usual state of unflappable, contemplative calm and the other mild, private amusement. He led me to my desk wearing the former and walked away wearing the latter. The cause of the change might have been the shock on the faces of his fellow newsmen. The leading caveman, who I later learned was known as Wildman Billy Winters, came up to me and said, “Honey, you’re in the wrong room. Women write for features-down the hall.”
I was ready to reply when the publisher, Mr. Winston Wrigley II, strode out of his office and said, “She’s in the right room, Bill. And she’s not the first woman to work here. Ask O’Connor-Helen Swan was one of his mentors. Ms. Kelly was taught by Helen-and Jack, too. That’s more than good enough for me.”
It took me a moment to recall that Helen Corrigan had been Helen Swan before she married. The journalism program at the college had three or four former staffers from the Express on the faculty. Helen was easily my favorite instructor at Las Piernas College.
Another favorite was Jack Corrigan, who had taught there, too. He had died of a stroke six months before I started working at the Express, while I was still up in Bakersfield. I hadn’t learned of his death until after the funeral. Hardly able to talk for crying, I’d called Helen. She told me it was quick, that he had been among those he loved when it happened.
“Every morning after he turned fifty, the first thing Jack would say was, ‘What a pleasant surprise,’” she said. “I suppose that was because he believed that anyone who had lived as hard as he did shouldn’t take any new day for granted.”
Thinking of her that first day in the newsroom of the Express, I vowed to find time to visit her.
My first weeks in the newsroom of the Express weren’t especially happy ones. About a third of the men were openly hostile or patronizing. I heard the word “honey” more times than a beekeeper. Some, like Bill Winters, treated me as an occupying force, my desk a beachhead taken by the enemy. Others tried to pretend I was invisible. A few didn’t seem to have any problem with it. Like H.G. and the news editor, John Walters, they were
