The mail was much the same, with the exception of one envelope. A scrawling, shaky hand was addressed to me, care of the Express, but marked “Personal Confidential” in one corner. The return address was unfamiliar. Inside was a sheet of paper with a handwritten message:
Miss Kelly,
I understand you are now back at the newspaper. I tried calling you at Malloy Marlowe to tell you I am deeply sorry about Mr. O’Connor. I have a few things to say, and no one left to say them to. I thought of you because I know you were his friend and co-worker, and I imagine you are now pursuing matters he left unfinished. This much I know of you.
As for Mr. O’Connor, it is important to me that you know that I always respected him. Had I known things would go so far, I would have told the truth long ago. But now I am tangled in a web I helped to weave. I cannot bear to live to see my forty-three years of service to this community overshadowed by what will undoubtedly follow. I ask you to forgive me for the unforgivable.
Emmet Woolsey
I re-read Emmet Woolsey’s letter a half a dozen times. I felt uneasy holding this letter from a man who could not live with himself, who had been dead for three days. I knew it was evidence of a sort and should be turned over to the police; I also knew I should show it to John; but both actions seemed a violation of some kind of trust Woolsey had placed in me. I thought about how unwelcome an apology may sometimes be. I wasn’t in a forgiving kind of mood.
I called Frank. It was early, but Sorenson answered on the second ring and told me they were both up and about. He handed the phone over to Frank.
“Good morning!”
His voice said he was in a cheerful frame of mind, and I immediately felt bad about calling. Maybe I wouldn’t tell him about the letter after all.
“Good morning, Frank,” I said, trying to lighten my tone.
“What’s wrong?”
I wondered if I was ever going to be able to fool anybody about anything.
“Emmet Woolsey mailed a letter to me; I guess it’s sort of a suicide note.” I read it to him.
“Hmm.”
I waited.
“They’re going to want to take it as evidence,” he said. “Do you have any problems with that?”
“None that I can’t live with, but I should show the note to John. Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll call in and ask someone to come by your offices.” He paused, then asked, “Are you upset that Woolsey picked you to tell it to?”
“A little. I feel awkward. I can’t forgive him. Not without knowing more than he’s told me here. I feel sorry for him, but that’s different.”
“Somebody apparently had something on him. Guess we better try to find out why he was keeping things hidden about this case. I’ll have somebody look into his background. Could you try back issues of the Express from around June and July 1955?”
“Sure, I’ll go downstairs to the morgue and see what I can find out.”
We said good-bye, and I got up and took the letter over to John Walters. He read it, grunted, walked over to a copier and ran off a couple of copies. “Here,” he said, shoving the original and one copy toward me. “I don’t even want to touch it. Goddamn coward worried about his fucking reputation. Makes me want to puke. You gonna find out who had his nuts in a vise?”
“Ooohwee. And I thought I was being stingy with him. Yeah, I want to know what he was afraid of. Must have been pretty bad if he stuck by his story through over thirty years of pestering by O’Connor.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going soft on me, Irene. Are you forgetting what’s happened because this bastard didn’t have the balls to speak up?”
“No, I’m not likely to forget it.”
“Hummph. Well, he’s not getting a dime’s worth of sympathy from me. You just think about Jennifer Owens’s mother not knowing what happened to her daughter for thirty-five years. Go on, get back to work.”
I went back to my desk and called MacPherson to bring him up to date and thank him for his help. Next I tried to call Barbara, but ended up just leaving a message for her at the nurses’ station; apparently she had stepped out of Kenny’s room for a moment. They wouldn’t tell me anything about Kenny over the phone, except that he was still in intensive care.
I gathered the mail into a neat stack, and threw away the out-and-out junk. As I cleared off O’Connor’s desk, I thought to myself that it was unnatural for it to be so clean. He never would have left it so orderly. I still felt like Goldilocks sitting in Papa Bear’s chair, but I wasn’t as uncomfortable as I had been a few days before.
I grabbed a notebook and headed down to the place where all the back issues of the Express were on file, as back issues were at any newspaper, in that place where dead news remains unburied-the morgue. And now, I thought, we’ll see if Lazarus will rise.
30
THE PAPERS from the fifties were on microfilm, and so I used one of the aging machines down in that darkened area of the morgue to check the reels for the first two months of summer in 1955. The same thing happened this time that happens to me every time I go down to the morgue. I got hung up reading old articles and advertisements that caught my eye. The first one I came across was for a 1955 Packard-“The Patrician.”
“One phone call delivers a new Packard to your door,” the ad said.
Then I started wondering if porterhouse and T-bone steaks really were eighty-five cents a pound, like the “women’s-pages” ads said. If they were, I supposed I could believe that a quart of ice cream was forty-five cents, too. There was a dress offered by a department store for $10.95, and it looked pretty snazzy. The models all wore gloves, hats, and pearl chokers. But what I really wanted was the “Davy Crockett Study Lamp” with six action scenes from his adventures.
I started paying more attention to news items. Neither the paper nor the town were as big in the 1950s as they were now, but there was still enough print to make me feel dizzy as the pages flashed across the screen.
Some of the headlines in mid-June 1955 looked sort of familiar, such as “Middle East Peace Talks Proposed,” “County Budget Proposal Is Largest Ever,” and “Soviet Minister Visits U.S.,” while others caught my attention because I knew how they turned out: “Peron Claims Argentine Rebellion Finished,” “Salk and Sabin Testify on Polio Vaccine,” and a much smaller article, “South Vietnam Reds Tell U.S. ‘Go Home.’” The local news included items such as “Downey Women’s Club Honors HUAC Members” and “Committee Studies Fire-Department Integration.”
Marilyn Monroe could be seen in The Seven Year Itch if you were willing to drive into L.A. to watch it at Grauman’s Chinese. Locally, it was easier to catch Jungle Jim and the Moon Men or The Creature with the Atom Brain.
I don’t know why I should have been startled by the large-type headline that proclaimed “Woman’s Mutilated Body Found Under Pier” on the front page of the June 18, 1955, issue. It was big local news, and there wasn’t a chance that it would have received less sensational coverage. But now, knowing the future of this case-and having met the mother of the victim-I couldn’t help but feel disturbed. O’Connor might have felt compassion for this anonymous victim and her family, but he had not been the only writer on the story; the other coverage was unflinching in its detail.
In issues over the next few days, the story had died down. With no clue to her identity surfacing, and little other progress being made, there was not much to feed to the public. Las Piernas City Councilman Richard Longren rallied his fellow council members to invest in better lighting by the pier and an expansion of the police force to increase beach patrols. I sat back thinking that our current mayor never missed a political trick, even then.