photographs-the too vivid reds, yellows, and blues of the film processing of the time.
“Technicolor,” I said.
He glanced up, said, “Something like that,” and went back to work on unloading the box.
I began studying some of the photos more closely. There was a stack of photos of Katy as a child, often with Jack or Helen, others of her as a teenager. Most of the time, she was smiling or laughing. She was a beautiful girl, not favoring either of her parents, although Lillian had obviously been a looker, too. Katy had a great smile, one that reached her eyes and made you want to smile back at her. I had that response to a black-and-white image; in person she must have been a real live wire.
In one of the photos, I saw that she was holding a cigarette.
“She smoked?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, his brows drawing together. “Every now and then. I don’t remember her being a chain smoker. Smoking was thought to be sexy then, you know.”
“Do you remember her brand?”
“No, but Lillian might.”
He reluctantly gave me Lillian’s number, which he knew by heart, and I used the phone in the conference room to call her. She was understandably upset by the news of the past twenty-four hours, but seemed, if anything, grateful to me. I was surprised by this, until she explained that she had spent the last twenty years not really knowing what had happened to Katy. “Perhaps someday her killers will be punished. Conn tells me this Detective Lefebvre is very good.”
I agreed that he was and gradually worked my way around to asking about the cigarette brand. “Chesterfields,” she answered without hesitation.
Another thought struck me. “Did she use a lighter or matches?”
“She had a special lighter. A gift from Jack. Gold, and it had a Celtic design on it-rather unusual then.”
“Her initials on it?”
“Just the letter K, surrounded by a Celtic knot.”
After I hung up, I told O’Connor what she said and went back to the photos of Katy. I found myself wondering who she might have become if she had been allowed to live. She would have been in her forties now. Would she have aged well? Become a snooty socialite? A bitter divorcee? A pillar of the community?
O’Connor had written that she had been somewhat spoiled and head-strong, but all the same a lively, energetic person, someone who had made others laugh or smile-and really, if she hadn’t gone on to do anything more than that for the rest of her life, we had all been robbed by whoever killed her.
I moved to another stack. These seemed to have been taken in the 1940s and 1950s, and some were obviously taken without the subject’s awareness. Men and women dressed in the styles of the time. Twenty years changes nothing so much as cosmetics and hairstyles. I didn’t recognize anyone in the photos.
O’Connor had finished by then and called me over to where he stood. He had spent some time that morning at the public library and started with a photocopy of a map he had found there. It was a map of Las Piernas and surrounding areas, dated 1955.
“This is the closest I could find to the time,” he said. “But it will help us.”
It was hard not to get caught up in the novelty of seeing what the city looked like then. For one thing, about half the current streets were missing- the housing tracts of the 1960s and 1970s hadn’t been built yet. O’Connor also laid out two more current maps, one of Las Piernas, the other of Southern California.
“ ‘All things must change to something new, to something strange,’” he said.
I looked up at him.
“Longfellow,” he said.
“Oh.”
He seemed disappointed that I couldn’t quote the poet back at him. “Did you study poetry a lot when you were in college?” I asked.
“Never went to college,” he said. Without another word on poets or education, he used the old map to point out the place in the marshes where Jack Corrigan had been found, and where later, not far away, O’Connor had found the body of Bo Jergenson, one of the men who had attacked Jack. “Helen and Jack and I questioned a lot of small-time hoods, and so did Dan Norton, with the police. We slowly put together a list of people who might have been hanging around with Gus Ronden in those days. Jack’s memories of events that night were jumbled, but we learned that he was taken away from the party in a Bel Air. Based on descriptions I got from one of Gus’s neighbors, and comments made by others, I learned that one of Gus’s cronies was named Lew Hacker, a Hispanic man who drove a Bel Air.”
“He’s one of the ones who beat up Jack?”
“I doubt he had to do anything at all,” O’Connor said, “other than hold Jack while this lummox went to work on him.” He showed me a photo of Jergenson, who indeed looked like a giant.
O’Connor marked a place on the map that was roughly in the area where the car had been buried.
“No wonder you couldn’t figure out where Jack had seen the car. The farm is nowhere near the marsh, and there’s nothing around that spot for miles.”
“Back then, the whole of that area was farming,” he said. “But I wish I had looked a little harder. If I had found the place then…”
“Then you probably would have been buried with the car, too,” I said. “Will the DMV have records of the car registration?”
He shook his head. “Not going back that far.”
I thought about what he had written in the article. “Katy didn’t drive a Buick, right? She drove a little roadster?”
“Right. It was found at Thelma and Barrett Ducane’s home. And the elder Ducanes’ car was at the marina. Todd drove an old Hudson that was in the driveway at his own house. I saw it there that night.”
“So among all the people who might be connected in some way, who owned a Buick?”
He frowned. “I don’t know.”
I pointed to the stack from which he had taken the photo of Jergenson. “Who are these people?”
“Gus Ronden and friends, if you can call them that. I learned who most of them were in the weeks after Jack was attacked.”
He also showed me a couple of photos of Gus Ronden-including a set of mug shots. “I know you said his gun was in the Imperial, and was the one used to kill Jergenson. Was his gun found in the trunk, with his body?”
“No, under the front seat. It wasn’t used to kill Gus-the weapon that was used to kill him hasn’t been found.”
I started looking through the photos. “Some of these look as if they were taken with a telephoto lens.”
“Yes. Anytime I learned of anyone who had been known to hang around Gus Ronden, I tried to get a photo. Some photos I took myself, but the telephotos were ones I talked a former staff photographer into taking. There are some here that were given to me by friends of the subjects, or their families, because that was the only way to get a picture of them at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Ducanes weren’t the only ones who disappeared that night. A number of the people in these photos seemed to vanish from Las Piernas- although I think most of them left voluntarily and with money in their pockets.”
“Show me the ones you couldn’t find.”
He sorted a few out of the stack.
“Who made them disappear?” I asked as I looked through them.
“I can’t say with any certainty.”
I looked up. “But you have a guess.”
“Let’s just say that around this time, Mitch Yeager seemed to distance himself from some of his former friends. But I haven’t a shred of evidence to connect him to anything that went on that night. He himself wasn’t in town that weekend.”
I moved on to a photo of the yacht. “Do you think the Ducanes were ever out on the Sea Dreamer?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what you wrote was that the yacht was abandoned, but there was no sign of violence on it,
