O’Connor had been hard put to hide his feelings as she spoke, not to let her see how angry these words made him. He would never give up hope, he thought as he took a streetcar back to the paper. He would never want to learn that Maureen was dead.
But before many months had passed, he decided that anything would be better than not knowing-anything. He could and did imagine so many horrific possibilities for her fate, the notion of her being beyond harm ranked far from the worst of them. Please, not suffering, became his evening and morning prayer, his silent plea throughout the day.
One afternoon he learned that Jack-who seemed to have a “pal” in every government office and on every street corner of Las Piernas-was getting calls from a worker in the county coroner’s office whenever a Jane Doe was brought in. O’Connor insisted on going with him to view the next body.
“You sure you want to do that?” Jack asked. “It’s seldom-well, it’s not the sleeping beauty parlor, if you take my meaning.”
“Then why do you go?”
“Why do you think I go, kid?”
O’Connor was silent for a moment, then said, “Thanks. But I’ll be going with you from now on, if you’ve no objection.”
“None whatsoever.”
O’Connor got sick the first time, but Jack still brought him along the next time.
They made these trips for five years.
Each miserable April, O’Connor watched for reports of missing women that might fit the pattern, but there were none.
In April 1949, in San Marino-about thirty miles north of Las Piernas-a three-year-old girl went out to play in a field overgrown with weeds. She fell into an abandoned well-ninety feet down, through a fourteen-inch-wide opening. Her parents heard her crying and called police and firemen. Word of the rescue effort spread, and in Las Piernas the city editor of the Express looked up from the wire reports to see who was available to cover it. There was only one unassigned reporter in the newsroom. Young O’Connor. The editor sent him on his way to San Marino.
The scene was already crowded when O’Connor arrived. Heavy equipment, rescue workers, volunteers, neighbors-even diminutive adults who offered to be lowered down the pipe. Well-diggers were urgently excavating a parallel shaft.
“Not a sound out of her since the first hour,” a patrolman said to O’Connor. “Jesus, I got a little girl not much older than her.”
Next to them, a man from the Herald suddenly said, “What the hell is that?” They turned to see trucks laden with odd-shaped equipment approaching the scene.
“Television,” a reporter from the Times said. “KTLA. Saw them out at the electroplating plant fire over on Pico a couple of years ago. Looks as if they’re getting more sophisticated.”
The cop and the man from the Herald looked amused.
O’Connor didn’t. He was thinking about something Jack had given him to read recently, a report on television.
The man from the Times was saying, “It’s no joke, my friends. Two years ago there were a little over three hundred televisions in Los Angeles. You know how many there are now?”
“About twenty thousand,” O’Connor answered.
“Bingo. Trust the cub to know. What paper are you with?”
“The Express.”
“The Express? You know Jack Corrigan?”
For the rest of the long hours there, the man from the Times took him under his wing, introducing him to others, getting him as close as possible to the rescue itself.
After fifty hours of frantic effort, the rescue crew reached the little girl- to the heartbreak of everyone who had worked or watched or waited, they reached her too late. The coroner would later determine that she had died not long after rescue efforts began.
When O’Connor got back to the Express, tired, dirty, and thoroughly depressed, the city editor said sourly, “I don’t know why you should bother writing it up. Everyone has been watching it on televisions. Twenty-seven hours straight, and people who own sets had their neighbors camped out in their dens. Never seen anything like it. At least Jack has that angle covered.”
After O’Connor filed his story, Jack took him drinking.
“It was amazing, Conn,” Jack told him. “Everyone huddled around the screen, feeling as if they were right there.” He took a pull off a cigarette and exhaled slowly, shaking his head. “The world is not going to be the same place tomorrow morning.”
“It never is,” O’Connor said absently. “Like it or not.”
Jack studied him. “What’s on your mind, Conn?”
“I’m just thinking that I’ll find out about wells in Las Piernas.”
“A follow-up story? Sure. Good idea.”
Honesty made O’Connor shake his head. “No, Ames Hart is already working on that one.”
“Should have known. Anything that might end up being some kind of reform, Hart’s on it.”
“I’m only thinking…you know, maybe…Maureen,” O’Connor ended on a whisper.
Ames Hart told O’Connor that a law was going to be passed, mandating the capping of wells. And more gently, he mentioned that none of the abandoned wells in Las Piernas was so wide that an adult woman would have been likely to have fallen down it.
O’Connor waited for another April.
April 1950 was a strange April-colder than most. A fraction of an inch of snow fell in Los Angeles, and in Las Piernas as well. That might have been the biggest local story that April, if work done in an orange grove damaged by frost had not uncovered three bodies.
Maureen O’Connor, Anna Mezire, and Lois Arlington were no longer missing.
9
T HE NIGHT AFTER MAUREEN’S FUNERAL, O’CONNOR DRANK HIMSELF into a stupor. He awoke the next morning to find himself lying next to a woman who (he decided) was better-looking than he had any right to expect her to be. He looked around, saw that he was in his own apartment, and stared at the ceiling as memories of the previous evening came back to him-of leaving his parents’ home with Corrigan, going to a bar, and drinking steadily. Two women joined them. Jack left with one, he stumbled out with the other.
This one. He remembered the fumbling, desperate way he had taken her, and-worst of all-weeping as he had not wept at the funeral. She had held him and not said a word. He had eventually fallen asleep.
He got out of bed and dressed quietly, his movements slowed more by his shame than by his hangover. He was not one to pick up women in bars and bring them home on any occasion, and he believed that to have done so after his sister’s funeral revealed him to be the worst sort of man.
He wondered if the woman was a prostitute, and what he might owe her if she was, or if he had already paid her. He looked in his wallet-hard to tell what he had left at the bar, but he didn’t seem to be down much from where he had been the day before.
She came into the kitchen while he was making coffee. She was dressed and was smoking a cigarette. “Good morning,” she said, although she appeared to be just as hung over as he was.
“Good morning.” He hesitated, then added, “Care for some coffee?”
“Thanks, Conn. I’d love some.” She smiled a little crookedly, then said, “Vera, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Vera. Of course.”
The smile widened a little. “Listen, maybe I’ll skip that coffee. I should get going.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said.
“That’s okay. Do you see my coat? Wait-there it is, by the door.” She moved to get it, but he reached it first and held it for her as she put it on. She turned toward him and briefly embraced him. “Nothing to worry about, Conn. Nothing at all.”
“I’d like to see you again,” he found himself saying.
She shook her head. “I’m leaving town today, remember? Or maybe you don’t-anyway, if I come back through here, I’ll look you up, all right?”