Bloodlines (34 page)

"I will," Lefebvre said. And waited.

O'Connor took a drink of stout and said, "You've been a pain in my ass for five years now."

"That bad? I apologize."

"No," O'Connor admitted in fairness. "Not that bad. You've never lied to me or intentionally sent me off on a false trail. You're just far less willing to talk to me than most. Are you offering to help us out now?"

"Not to an extent that will allow a murderer to escape prosecution. But otherwise, yes. And you have a reputation for being trustworthy. Norton swears you will keep a confidence."

"No kidding. But somehow I think you already knew that. So why the change of heart about talking to me?"

"Thank one of your fans."

"Norton?" O'Connor said, and laughed.

"No, Ms. Kelly."

"She didn't talk to you about me."

"No. I watched how you treated her. That's all."

O'Connor took another drink and thought about the fact that if Lefebvre had seen him at a dinner party a few nights ago, he probably would have wanted to knock him off the bar stool.

He stayed quiet, but Lefebvre didn't move, just bought him another round. He began to admire Lefebvre's patience.

What the hell, he thought. I owe something to those bastards for Katy and for Jack. And the child. The poor child.

"Norton said Todd Ducane was a lady's man," Lefebvre said.

O'Connor looked over at the detective. "Jack always called him 'the Toad'..."

**CHAPTER 32

TWO THINGS KEPT ME FROM GETTING MUCH SLEEP THAT NIGHT--THINKING about what I had seen in the trunk of a buried car, and reading Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. I was close to the end of the book, and until that evening, it had been scaring the bejesus out of me in a delicious kind of way. It was due back to the library the next day, and I had planned to try to finish it that night, but finding the remains kind of put me off reading about dead people. I decided I'd turn it back in and buy the paperback and read it when I could handle the idea again.

The living person named Max Ducane--or Kyle Yeager, take your pick-- called me at work the next morning. He asked if he could meet me for lunch.

"I'm not even sure what to call you," I said.

He sighed. "Max. Legally, it's my name now."

"Max it is, then."

O'Connor came over to my desk, carrying his "Jack" box. I motioned him to take a seat. He was looking a little bleary-eyed.

Into the phone, I said, "So why, exactly, do you want to meet me for lunch?"

"I don't suppose you're allowed to date anyone you might be writing about?"

"No," I said. I could see O'Connor watching me more closely now, shamelessly eavesdropping. I held the receiver a little closer to my ear.

"Okay," Max said. "Not a date. I'll tell you more about what's going on when I see you--if I can see you?"

"All right. When and where?"

"How about if I meet you in the lobby there at noon?"

"Okay. See you then."

I hung up and wondered if I was making a mistake.

"Who was that?" O'Connor said.

"He says his name is Max Ducane."

"Oh, the former Kyle Yeager, is it? Well, I hope he's nothing like his adoptive father, or you had better take a bodyguard."

"You've met him--I think I'll be fine, don't you? Or do you want to come along?"

He seemed to space out for a moment when I asked--seemed so distracted I wondered if he had heard my question. But then he said, "Thanks, but no. I've already got lunch plans today."

"When you said I should have a bodyguard--did you mean I'd better take a chaperone?"

"No. I meant bodyguard, but forget it. Kyle Yeager isn't much like Mitch."

"You think I'd need a bodyguard with an old man like Mitch Yeager? He's a just a rich businessman."

"That's what he'd love for everyone to believe, isn't it?" O'Connor said bitterly.

I stared at him. Clearly I'd struck some nerve.

"There is more than one way of doing business," he said. "People complain of politicians being crooked? They've got nothing on certain members of the business community."

"So why don't you write about him?"

O'Connor glanced toward Wrigley's office. "I did now and again, as your friend Max noted, but not nearly as much as I would have liked to have written."

"This about advertising dollars?" I asked.

"Mr. Yeager and some of the friends who had invested in his companies made it clear to the first Mr. Wrigley that they'd never buy another inch of advertising if the Express continued its 'campaign' against Mr. Yeager. That was forty years ago, and if you think Yeager is a weak old man now, you're wrong."

"You really hate him."

"Hate him?" He looked surprised. "No. But I dislike his way of doing things. He likes to intimidate people. He tried it with me when I was no more than a child." He smiled. "I'm happy to say I had caused a bit of trouble for him even then."

He made something of a show of looking at his watch, then said, "Wrigley's letting me use one of the meeting rooms to go over some background of the Ducane story with you. You've already heard it in bits and pieces, but..."

"Sure. Let's go."

I followed him to one of the conference rooms.

He closed the door behind us and shut the curtains to the windows that looked out onto the newsroom--and through which most of the newsroom had been looking in--then set the box on the wooden table at the center of the room. I leaned against a credenza with a phone on it and watched while he put on a pair of cheaters, opened the box, and began taking items out of it, looking at each through the bifocals, then peering over the top of the lenses as he arranged the items on the table.

I strolled around the table as he worked. Some of the materials were photographs, some newspaper clippings. Most were reporter's notebooks and loose, indecipherable notes. With effort, I could make out the handwriting-- but like the cards in his Rolodexes, the notes were apparently written in some sort of private code.

I had supposed the contents of the box were disorganized--O'Connor's desk always looked as if someone had busted a pinata full of pink telephone message slips and scraps of paper over it, so it wouldn't have surprised me if he had simply tossed items into the box over the years. I was wrong about that, though--there was a method to the way in which he was laying things on the table. He wasn't sorting them as they came out of the box. They were already in an order of some kind.

The photographs ranged from curling black-and-white glossies to the slick squares of 1950s color 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."