Bloodlines (50 page)

We never did, directly. We often did, in a thousand other ways.

Neither of us ever forgot Maureen O'Connor.

PART III

LEX TALIONIS

"Did I appeal to the law--I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the king drink for him?"

--MARK TWAIN, Life on the Mississippi

February 2000

**CHAPTER 51

WHEN THE DOGS STARTED BARKING, FRANK WAS IN THE SHOWER AND I was in the bedroom, getting dressed. I had just pulled my pantyhose up around my knees when the doorbell rang. I glanced at the clock. Seven-thirty on a Wednesday morning. Who the hell was at my door at this hour?

I hastily pulled the pantyhose up the rest of the way, got a big run in them as I quickly put on some shoes, swore, and went to the door. I opened it to see--to my utter surprise--Kenny O'Connor.

Kenny was not the same man who had walked into that cafe all those years ago. He and Barbara had married and divorced, and were talking seriously about remarrying now.

Over those twenty years or so we had all changed to some degree, I suppose, but Kenny's growing up had been recent. He had received a savage beating at the business end of a baseball bat, a beating that had left doubt about whether he'd live, and, if he survived, whether he'd walk, be able to speak without slurring his words or stop seeing double. The latter two problems cleared up fairly quickly. After years of rehabilitation work, he was walking now, with the help of a cane, and although his features were perhaps not as handsome as they had once been, anyone who had seen him immediately after the beating was now a believer in the wonders of plastic surgery and dental prosthetics.

He still worked in construction, but had been forced to sell his own company to pay medical bills. Now he was employed by O'Malley's company, as a supervisor. Working for O'Malley had been good for him--better for him, in many ways, than working for himself. These days, Kenny never took his job-- or much of anything else--for granted.

"Hi, Irene. Mind if I come in for a minute?"

"Sure, great to see you. I was just about to make breakfast. Have you eaten?"

"Yes--I've eaten. But don't let me hold you up."

I motioned him inside. "Come and talk to me while I get busy in the kitchen."

"Is your husband here?"

"Yes, he's in the shower. Let me tell him you're here."

"That's okay--I came here to talk to you, anyway. I just thought--well, I'll ask him later."

He followed me into the kitchen, sat at the counter, and accepted an offer of coffee. He watched while I put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster.

"So, what's up?" I asked.

"Barbara tell you we're moving?"

"Yes. A house not too far from here, right?"

"Right. Thought we'd make a fresh start this time around."

"You'll like the area," I said, not commenting on the fresh-start part. I kept trying to make myself forgive him for some of the horrible things he had said to Barbara when he was going through man-o-pause. For fooling around on her. I supposed I should get over it, since obviously she had.

There is a distance between "should forgive" and "have forgiven" that is sometimes hard to cross.

"Well..." he said, then stalled.

I waited. Eventually he started up again. "I have some old stuff of my dad's. I thought you might like to have it."

"Stuff of your dad's? Kenny, I saw what was left of his house when he was...when he died. Everything burned to the ground. You lost everything ...right?"

"Yeah, everything." He fell silent again. The toast popped, and I set it on a plate. Maybe Frank would want it. My appetite was gone.

Deke, one of our big mutts, sidled up to him. "Well," Kenny said, reaching down to pet her, "you might not remember this, but after Barbara and I separated, I moved back in with my dad. He had filled my old room up with a lot of papers and stuff, and so when I came back home, he dumped it into boxes and carted it all over to this storage place." He opened his wallet and pulled out a business card and handed it to me.

"U-Keep-It Self-Storage," I read. I flipped it over. Scrawled on the back, in a hand I would have recognized anywhere, O'Connor had written "#18B."

"It might just be junk," Kenny said quickly.

"Haven't you looked through it?"

He paused, went back to petting Deke, then said in a low voice, "I can't."

After a moment, I said, "I understand."

He nodded, not looking up at me. Dunk, our other dog, saw what he was missing and crowded him on the other side of the chair.

"If they're getting obnoxious, I'll put them out," I said.

"No. No--I like dogs. Might have room for them at this new place."

"You've been paying the rent on this storage place all this time?"

He nodded again. He reached for his keys and pulled one off. "Almost forgot. You'll need this to open the padlock. The code to get into the gate is four-six-four-five."

I frowned. "Everyone who rents there knows that code?"

"No, Dad made that one up for himself. Each person has his or her own. And there are cameras all over the place. But you can change the code if you want to--just see the guy at the counter, and he'll put your new one in the computer. I guess he was a friend of Dad's."

"He made them wherever he went."

Kenny smiled. "True."

"You sure you want me to have whatever is in there? Maybe there will be things you'll want."

"If it's just papers and stuff like that, I don't really want them. Otherwise--you can let me know if there's something you think I'll want. I trust you."

That statement left me speechless.

Frank came out then, and Kenny visibly relaxed. "Hey, Frank--how's it going?" They shook hands and almost immediately began talking about weekend sports.

Frank glanced over at me, his gray-green eyes full of amusement, and reached for the cold toast.

"Let me heat it up for you," I said, a bit of domesticity that made him raise his brows even as he thanked me. I put the toast back in the toaster.

Kenny said, "Do you know much about this DNA stuff, Frank? I mean, being a homicide detective and all, of course you do, but ...well, can I ask you about it?"

"Sure. What's on your mind?"

"My dad's only living brother is coming over from Ireland in a couple of months."

"Dermot?" I asked.

"Yes. What I was wondering is--I've heard you can tell about paternity from DNA, even if you don't have a sample from a living parent."

"Yes, that's true. You just need a relative descended from the same person."

"So I could find out if my dad was really my dad from a sample of Dermot's blood?"

"Yes. You'd each have to provide a blood sample, and you'd have to have it done by a private lab. It can be expensive--about fifteen hundred or more. Takes about four to five weeks."

"Oh. Well, that makes sense, I guess."

"Is that something you want to do?"

"I don't know. I'm just thinking about it, that's all." He sniffed the air and said, "I think your toast is burning."

Later that morning, I sat at O'Connor's desk in the newsroom. It was my desk now, at least as far as the newer staffers were concerned, and I called it mine, but that was for convenience' sake. I could never truly think of it as mine rather than his, and I know most of the staffers who had known him felt the same way--I was a tenant, not a proprietor. It's one of the last of the old-style desks in the newsroom, and I have resisted all attempts to get me to exchange it for a piece of plastic on metal tubes. The publisher has heard me threaten to quit if it's moved an inch from where it is.

Winston Wrigley III, the jerk who inherited his late father's job, knows that isn't an empty threat. I quit the paper in the late 1980s after he failed to fire someone for sexually assaulting another staff member. I was gone from the Express for a couple of years. I came back because it was the only way I was going to find out who had killed one of my closest friends--my mentor, Conn O'Connor.

The same people who had been responsible for Kenny's beating had been responsible for O'Connor's murder. O'Connor had died because he got too close to the truth while covering a story. I followed the leads he had worked so hard to discover, and his killers were brought to justice. It didn't ease the loss.

The homicide detective working on the case was a man I had known in Bakersfield, Frank Harriman. Though he moved to Las Piernas in 1985, we didn't manage to reconnect until O'Connor's death. To the shock of everyone who had written me off as a woman who would be single all her life, we had married.

I'm Irish enough to think O'Connor's spirit had a hand in that.

Maybe because I held the key to his storage unit in my hand, I could feel him looking over my shoulder in the newsroom that morning. I still missed him terribly and often wished I could hold another conversation with him, to tell him he was right, that newspaper work was in my blood, and that I had wanted to come back to the Express all along--but mostly to listen to his voice, his laughter, at least one more time.

I looked around me and wondered if he would want to work here these days. Not so much as a whiff of cigarette smoke, but that wouldn't have bothered him. A bigger problem would be that a Starbucks Double Latte was about the strongest drink anyone kept near his desk.

No, that wouldn't be the biggest problem. The biggest problem would be that someone had come by, vampirelike, and sucked the life's blood out of the place while we were all trying to make deadline.

Nearby, I heard other reporters murmuring into headsets and the soft snicking of computer keyboards. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead provided the loudest noise in the room. Quiet as a damned insurance office, and looked like one, too.

A few faces would be familiar to him. John Walters, Mark Baker, Stuart Angert, and Lydia Ames--who was now the city editor. Most of the men who had been hired in the late 1950s and 1960s had taken advantage of retirement packages in recent months, unable to watch the paper change as it had under Winston Wrigley III's latest overhaul. We were losing a lot of people who had ten to twenty years in, too.

Circulation was down, and Wrigley was engaging in desperate measures these days. In the past few months, photographs had taken up more room than text on the front pages of every section. "What are we afraid of--readers?" one veteran reporter had said to me, just before he left. "Soon we'll be giving out crayons to new subscribers."

Another plan involved keeping stories to about two column inches each. All right, that's an exaggeration, but as one of my colleagues said, "We used to have sidebars longer than these stories."

The paper would have been even worse off if Wrigley's father had not foreseen that his son might not be up to the job. While he had spoiled his son to a large degree, by the end of his life he had become less willing to excuse his only child's weaknesses, and grew impatient with his lack of judgment. He couldn't bring himself to deny him the position held for two generations by men named Winston Wrigley, but he made sure that Wrigley III didn't inherit controlling stock, and established a Publisher's Board that his son had to answer to.

Wrigley had less-than-subtle pressure from the board to keep me around, and John Walters covered my back--a loyalty I tried hard to continue to deserve.

To keep costs down, Wrigley insisted that John replace veteran staffers who left the paper with young reporters fresh out of J-school. I didn't mind working with these newcomers, but I stopped expecting to get to know them very well, because most of them left us after a few months to work for bigger papers. We were becoming a "nursery paper"--a training program for people who would win the Pulitzers at some other paper. That was another sore point among the older staffers. They became unwilling to invest time and effort into teaching the ropes to people who would be gone in less than a year.

My tolerance--and my friendship with Lydia, who had reign over the general assignment reporters--had earned me the keep of two of these fledglings, Hailey Freed and Ethan Shire. They had been assigned desks near mine. As I logged on to my computer that morning, I felt tired just thinking about them.

They had graduated in the same year from the journalism department of Las Piernas University (formerly Las Piernas College--my own degree was issued before the upgrade, and I shuddered to think what they might make of that fact). They had a lot of confidence in themselves and were competitive as all get out, but otherwise, they were as different as they could be from each other.

I sometimes wished they had a little less confidence. Hailey was fairly sure that two years on the campus paper and a summer internship meant she already knew it all and ought to be left alone so that she could pry journalism from the clutches of crones like me, abandon our archaic methods, and improve the paper for the twenty-first century. She didn't mind letting me know she resented my old-school style of journalism. Clean writing, balanced coverage, fact checking--boring stuff. A little more of her beautiful, semi-poetic but inaccurate reporting and I was going to FedEx her to Tom Wolfe, to force him to live with the results of what seeds he had sown. I would have, until she told me that Wolfe was an old man and that was the old new journalism--she was going to be part of the new new journalism, a revolution on the World Wide Web. I couldn't wait. In the meantime, I tried to teach her that the lead--the most essential and dramatic information in a news story--was not an acorn to be buried beneath several other paragraphs.