“See this?” I asked, pointing to them. “It’s a rat’s nose and whiskers. O’Connor used those to mean, ‘I smell a rat.’” I smiled, thinking of him making the rat-nose notation, a hound on the trail of some faint scent. “I once asked him why all his political notes weren’t covered with these rat noses. He told me I should watch out, that working for newspapers had made me a real cynic and that was just another way of losing objectivity. Then he laughed and said, ‘Besides, this means a real rat, not every little mouse that thinks he’s a rat.’”
Frank laughed, and his laugh made me feel good. The O’Connor in these notes was alive; his wit and sense of humor, his curiosity, his ability to puzzle it all out. I went back to reading them, feeling as if they were letters from home.
“You miss him, don’t you?” asked Frank, watching me.
“Oh, yeah, sure I do,” I said. “I keep asking myself, ‘How would O’Connor handle this? How would he pursue it?’ So many times I saw him stop and examine some minor point the rest of us had just sailed right by. It would turn out to be the key to everything.”
“He must have been quite a character. I’ve known some cops who were the same way — just doggedly pursued something until it gave out. I think I’m just now getting to be old enough to really appreciate that kind of patience and persistence.”
We sat quietly, going back over the notes more slowly. I stopped when I came to a page I had missed the first time through. The heading was “JD55,” O’Connor’s way of writing, “Jane Doe 1955.”
“Here! Look at this, it’s about Hannah! ‘JD55’ was his code for her. He’s got all these arrows — he doodled arrows when he thought something seemed like it was an important break in a story. Let’s see. It’s shorthand for ‘Mac teeth,’ and then here’s the letter
“Great, when can I make an arrest?”
I looked up at him. “Remember what O’Connor said about being a cynic, smart-ass. It goes double for cops.”
“Why not? Everything else does.”
Frank stood up and stretched, and walked into the living room, which was off the kitchen, and started pacing around. Out of what I took to be some kind of innate detective nosiness, he was reading the titles on the spines of Lydia’s books and looking at her family pictures.
I tried to make out another section on the page about Hannah.
“Hey, Frank — do you know someone in the coroner’s office by the name of Hernandez?”
“Yeah,” he said, walking back over, “Dr. Carlos Hernandez. He’s the new coroner. He took over about a year ago, when old Woolsey retired. Why?”
“He’s in the notes. Something about Hannah’s teeth. Has he talked to you about seeing O’Connor?”
“No, but he hasn’t been around the last few days. He had to fly back to Colorado to testify in a murder trial. That’s his previous jurisdiction.” He leaned over my shoulder again. “What do the notes say about Hernandez?”
“It says, ‘Old Sheep Dip wrong about teeth’ — Sheep Dip is Woolsey. O’Connor had a rather strained relationship with him.” I felt a little embarrassed to mention this nickname for Dr. Emmet Woolsey, coroner of Las Piernas for over forty years, but when I glanced at Frank, I could see he was amused by it.
“Woolsey felt like O’Connor was pointing out some failing of his when he talked about Hannah in the paper every year,” I explained. “He was bitter over it. On the other hand, as I’ve said, the same column sometimes helped to identify a John or Jane Doe left in the morgue, so Woolsey had to grudgingly acknowledge O’Connor’s help.”
“Woolsey could be a real pain in the ass. I’ve never thought much of him. Always preferred to deal with just about anybody else in that office. Hernandez, on the other hand, is sharp. He came on board just before that double homicide down at the beach last year — his work on that really helped me out.”
“Any way to reach him?”
“Shouldn’t be too hard. I can at least get word to him, ask him to get in touch.”
Frank pulled out his notebook and wrote a memo to make the call. He folded it up and put it back in his pocket. He had a grin on his face. “Old Sheep Dip, huh? Are all these nicknames so colorful?” He sat back down next to me. “I wonder if Hernandez will know what ‘Mac teeth’ means. Are you sure that’s what it says?”
“I think so,” I said, and tried to puzzle it out again. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it says ‘Mac teeth.’ Look, I’ll get into his computer files tomorrow. You have copies of those?”
“Yes, but other than stories he was actually in the process of writing or ones he had already filed, it’s this same gobbledygook. Without the help of arrows or whiskers.” He sat leaning on the counter with his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes. He suddenly looked tired again. I watched him for a moment.
“You’d better get some sleep,” I said, standing up.
I straightened out the papers and put them back in the envelope, trying to keep my idle hands from temptation. “Can I keep these?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “If you can manage to keep going over them, I think we’re bound to get a better handle on this.”
“When I get into his computer files tomorrow I’ll have more to work with.”
“I guess you were right about working at the paper,” he said, looking down. “Sorry if I got a little hot under the collar this afternoon, I just…” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he shrugged and said, “Well, be careful anyway, okay, Irene? For my sake?” Quickly he added, “I’d hate for you to get killed before I learned what the hell ‘Mac teeth’ means.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He laughed and said goodnight.
That night I dreamed again and again that I was buried under sand, suffocating. I couldn’t move my hands or
