I sat up and stretched. I went out into the living room. Lydia was gone, but there was a note saying she was going to meet Kevin Malloy and some reporters from the Express down at Calhoun’s and to join them if I felt like it. I considered it, but decided that I wasn’t ready to go out to a place I associated so strongly with O’Connor. God knows when I’d ever go to Banyon’s again.
I fidgeted around for a while and finally picked up the phone and called Frank. We did our now routine exchange of last names.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“An apology. Sorry about this afternoon. I’ve had some sleep now, so I can probably talk to you without biting your head off.”
“You had a rough morning.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t excuse my bad manners. Anyway, I apologize.”
“Well, I’ve had some sleep myself. I knocked off not long after you left.”
“Think you’ll be up for a while?” I asked.
“All night, I’m afraid. And I’ve got to report in tomorrow.”
“I’m in the same boat. If we don’t make too late an evening of it, want to go out for a drink somewhere?”
“Sure-how about the Stowaway?”
The Stowaway is a small, quiet, and casual bar that has a terrific ocean view. It’s not a place to go if you’re in a rowdy mood or up for anything fancy, which suited me fine.
“Sounds great,” I said. “You want me to drive?”
“I’ll come by for you. I don’t think I can handle the Karmann Ghia until my ribs heal a little more.”
“Give me about half an hour.”
I ran in and took a quick shower to wake myself up and changed into my favorite pair of jeans and a white blouse. I was just putting on my sandals when the doorbell rang.
Frank was wearing shorts again, and we spent a moment looking each other over. Cody came up to the entryway and gave him a yowl of greeting.
“Hey, there, Cody.” He picked the big lug up and scratched him affectionately.
“You’re brave,” I said, noticing that he still had a thin line on his face where Cody had dug the deepest.
“So is Cody. I’m glad to see he’s not afraid of me.”
He set Cody down gently and we made our way out the door.
We drove in silence to the Stowaway. The bar is dark and plain on the inside, no attempt to compete with the scenery outside its one wall of long windows. It was built on three levels, so that anywhere you sat, you had an unobstructed view of the water.
They weren’t crowded, so we were able to sit next to one of the windows, on the lowest level. Frank went up to the bar and brought back a Myers’s and OJ for me, a beer for himself. We watched the waves rolling in on the moonlit beach below.
I drank about half my drink while he sipped at the beer.
“Frank.”
He looked at me.
“I need to fill you in on a few things.”
He didn’t say anything, just sat up a little straighter. This was going to be business, and he subtly adopted a different posture. More distant. I didn’t like it, but it was too late.
I told him about seeing the degree from ASU, about my suspicions of Hollingsworth and Longren, about the connection of the DA and the mayor in all of O’Connor’s notes, about Ann Marchenko and Guy’s discussion of the safe-deposit boxes and money laundering. He asked a question or two for clarification here and there, but otherwise made no comment.
When I had finished, he said, “I really appreciate your telling me all of this, Irene. When are you talking to Guy St. Germain again?”
“I’m going to try to have lunch with him on Monday.”
He looked down into his beer. It seemed to me he was a little curt when he said, “Let me know what you learn, okay?”
“Okay, but I think we need to be cautious there, Frank. He’s sticking his neck out for me. He doesn’t want any negative publicity for the bank.”
“Publicity is your department.” Unmistakably curt.
I bristled at his tone for a moment, but suddenly it dawned on me that I hadn’t told Frank anything about how I had left things with Guy, and that he might be jealous.
“By the way, I’m bringing Lydia along when I go to lunch with Guy. I’m hoping they’ll hit it off with each other.”
He looked up at me. “Really?”
“Really. I can only handle making one guy pissed off at me at a time.”
“I’m not pissed off at you.”
“Give it another five minutes.”
He smiled briefly, then grew serious again. “Irene, look, let the department check Hollingsworth and Longren out. I’ll let you know what we find out and you can write your story from there.”
“I was wrong. It’s going to be less than five minutes.”
He took the hint and we sat there quietly for a while.
“I guess I’m a slow learner,” he said. “I’ve known all along that you were going to keep poking your nose into things until you got hurt. Just try to understand that it isn’t easy on me.”
“I might not get hurt. I might be able to help prevent other people from getting hurt.”
“That’s my job.”
“That’s both of our jobs.”
He shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
No reply. He looked out the windows, sighed and looked back at me.
“Please be careful,” he said.
“I will.”
He looked out the windows again. I couldn’t read him at all. It bothered me. Maybe he had decided to stop mollycoddling me. But I worried that instead he was only distancing himself from me.
“Let’s go,” he said at last.
He drove me home, walked me to the front door, and said a polite goodnight.
I lay awake a long time, angry by turns with myself and then with Frank. Finally I fell asleep.
I dreamed a memory-dream of O’Connor that night. It was a mixture of two separate evenings we had actually spent together, interspliced into one in the dream. We were laughing and drinking and watching fat women dance. He turned to me and said, “Remember what Sister Kenny once said.”
“Sister Kenny?” I said in the dream, just as I had the night he brought it up. “Is she someone who taught you in Catholic school?”
He laughed in the dream, as he had then. “No, my dear, I suppose you are too young to remember Sister Kenny. Elizabeth Kenny. She was an Australian nurse who developed a treatment for polio. And took a lot of guff along the way-but anyway, what she said was, ‘Better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.’”
“I like that.”
“I knew you would”-he smiled in the dream-“I knew you would.”
42
LYDIA AND I drove separately on Monday morning. I went back down to the morgue and checked out microfilm rolls for the last week in March and all of April 1955. Throughout both months Richard Longren was mentioned frequently. Nothing about his leaving town. And during Easter week, he was featured in an article almost every day, in connection with some special committee that was looking into the polio-vaccine controversy and which vaccine should be used by the health department in Las Piernas.
So that let Longren off the hook as far as an opportunity to get together with Jennifer Owens.
I looked up at the clock. I had spent over two hours looking at microfilm. I decided to go upstairs and call Guy.
Guy was his charming self and said that he would love to meet for lunch. “I also have something on that matter we discussed the other day,” he said.
“What did you find out?”
“I think it would be better if we waited on that,” he said, and I realized that someone must be standing near his desk. He went on. “By the way, why don’t you have your friend with the spark join us? He may find it interesting as well.”
“Okay, I’ll meet you at the bank at about eleven. I’ll bring both friends if I can.”
“I think it would be better if I met you.”
So someone was nearby.
“I take it we don’t want to meet at some banker’s hot spot.”