“Have a seat, Frank.”
He sat down. Tall as he is — somewhere in the neighborhood of six-three or six-four, I’d guess — the back of the chair was still taller. I love that big old chair. Nobody since my grandfather had looked that good in it.
“Go ahead,” I told him. “Take out your notebook. Ask questions. It’ll be good for me. At least I’ll be doing something. Maybe I can help somehow.”
He just sat there for a minute, still quiet, as if undecided. Then he reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a notebook.
“Why don’t you take that jacket off? I’m not so formal here with my shoes off.”
“Thanks,” he said, standing up again for a moment. He took off his suit jacket and folded it neatly over the back of the chair. Even in the long-sleeved shirt and shoulder holster, he looked a lot more comfortable. He sat back down, loosened his tie and flipped his notebook open to a clean page. I felt nervous again.
“Look, how about something cold to drink?”
He gave me that questioning look again. “Sure,” he said.
Hell’s bells, I thought. I’ve got to stop acting like an idiot. I realized that every time one of us was on the verge of discussing what had happened to O’Connor, we fumbled around and stalled.
I poured a couple of glasses of iced tea and brought them into the living room.
Outside the big picture window, the heat waves made the street look like a river. A big dark-blue car ferried its way past the window. I could see Cody stretched out in the sun on the lawn.
I handed Frank his iced tea and sat down again. “Sorry — I should have thought of offering you something sooner. I’m a little distracted, I guess. What do you want to know?”
“It’s okay. I guess I’m distracted too. Anyway, you saw O’Connor last night?”
“Yeah, we went out to Banyon’s. He was in a festive mood, you might say. He did quite a bit of drinking, but I was driving, so I quit after a Guinness. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.” I thought about O’Connor and the dancers. I stopped the story for a minute and looked outside. Cody had moved into the shade. I took a deep breath and went on.
“Anyway, we talked and watched people dance, and left sometime after midnight, probably about twelve-thirty. I drove him home. Got there around one. He got out of the car, sang ‘Goodnight, Irene’ to me on his way in. He likes to — he liked to sing that to me.”
Why was it so hard to tell something that I’d been thinking about all day? I looked out the window again; the blue car — a Lincoln, I noticed — was going slowly back up the street.
“Did you walk up to the house with him?” Frank asked.
“No, but I watched him go up the porch steps — he wasn’t too steady on his feet. There wasn’t any package there. Kenny was already home — at least, his car was in the driveway.”
“What was O’Connor working on?”
“The paper wouldn’t tell you?”
“Haven’t been over there yet — figured you’d know more about what he was really up to than that jackass Wrigley.”
I had to smile at that. “You’re not just trying to get on my good side by saying that about the esteemed editor of the
“No, I decided he was a jerk long before Mark Baker told me why you left the paper. That just confirmed it.”
“Well, he is a jackass. But maybe it was a mistake to leave the paper. I probably shouldn’t have let him get to me. O’Connor was always pushing me to go back, said I’d let my Irish get the better of me. He was a real old- school newspaperman. The genuine article. ‘Duty to the public,’ and all of that. He wasn’t naive in any way about anybody or anything, but he hadn’t soured on the world like some do.”
“Same thing happens to cops,” Frank said.
“I know. We all get to see the underside of the rock, I guess. Hard to remember there’s anything else sometimes. Of course, in the line I’m in now it’s all sunshine and lollipops. God, I hate public relations work. I spent most of last night bitching about it to O’Connor. Anyway, he believed in what he was doing. I don’t believe in what I’m doing right now and it’s turning me into a real cynic.”
“You’ll do what you need to do.”
“You sound like O’Connor. Anyway, you asked what he was working on. Well, let’s see. He was spending time on a campaign-funding story — mayor’s office. That took most of his energy lately.”
“I didn’t really know him,” he said. “Just met him once or twice. Saw him around City Hall now and then, used to catch his column once in a while. One or two of the old-timers in the department told me O’Connor had some pet story about an unsolved homicide?”
“Oh, you mean Hannah. Yes, there was always Hannah. That wasn’t her name, that was just sick newspaper humor. Pretty gruesome story, really. Young woman, about twenty years old. Found her in the sand down under the pier. Somebody didn’t ever want her identified. Bashed in her face and cut off her hands and feet. Some wag in the newsroom named her ‘Handless Hannah.’ The autopsy showed she was about two months pregnant at the time. That was in the summer of 1955. O’Connor was about twenty-seven, I guess.
“Well, ten years earlier, O’Connor’s older sister went missing. She was about the same age as Hannah, about eighteen or nineteen. They found her body about five years later but never figured out who killed her. She had disappeared in the spring of ’45, just before the end of the war — on her way home from a defense plant. Didn’t find her until 1950. So that was only about five years before Hannah showed up on the beach.
“When he talked to me about his sister, he told about how it had driven his mother crazy; it was hard on the whole family, not knowing for those five years. He was really close to this sister. I guess he usually walked her
