Jan Burke - Dear Irene

“I had the dogs with me,” I protested.

This did not appease him in the least. We argued while he drove me to work. We argued in the parking lot. The argument wasn’t really settled before I got out of his car. Throughout the morning, I wondered if it would ever be settled.

JOHN WAS PLEASED with the stories Mark and I had turned in the night before, though as usual, we didn’t learn that directly from him. He works very hard at keeping his staff from thinking too highly of themselves.

Mark got a break on another story he had been working on, and wasn’t free to see Mrs. Parker. John asked me if I wanted to take Frank with me. He could see that I was surprised at the suggestion. “Just consider this a little belated Christmas gift from me to you, Kelly.”

“A gift from you ?”

“Look, no use having you take any chances.” He smiled at my scowl and added, “If Thanatos kills you, Wrigley will probably freeze your position, and I’ll be out a reporter.”

“Now, that’s more like the old Ebenezer Walters we’ve all come to know and love.”

I figured this was a sign from on high and called Frank.

“Harriman,” he answered. He sounded unhappy. I hadn’t thought our argument affected him that much.

“Hi, Harriman. Still want to talk to Louisa Parker?”

“Irene? Yeah, I do. More than ever.”

“What do you mean, ‘more than ever’?”

“I guess Hobson Devoe hasn’t called you yet.”

“No, why?”

“Hope we don’t need to look up anything else in those personnel records we went through.”

“Mercury had a change of heart?”

“I wish it was something that simple. The records have been wiped out.”

“Wiped out? How?”

“Apparently it’s the work of a hacker. Wiped out all kinds of records, not just the war years.”

“A hacker? At an aircraft company? Don’t they have security systems on their computers?”

“I asked the same thing. They have very sophisticated protection on the computers that store accounting design, production, and other records. A small percentage of employee records, mainly those of people with very high-level government security clearances or people connected with sensitive projects, are well-protected records. But most of the personnel records, especially the older ones, aren’t as difficult to gain access to – the ones we looked at were just used for J.D. Anderson’s studies. And Devoe said the hacker really knew what he or she was doing.”

“When did this happen?”

“About three o’clock this morning, but they’re not exactly sure that’s significant. Could have been a destructive program someone planted before then. It may not be connected to Thanatos; Devoe said the other records included a group of pending workers’ compensation cases. In some ways, that’s more likely, because the cases include those of two people who worked on computers in Human Resources. They’re out with carpal tunnel syndrome complaints.”

“Do you believe that’s who did this? Workers’ compensation complainants?”

There was a long pause before he answered, “I don’t know. To be honest, I’m just too close to this. Carlson has someone else checking that out, which is fine with me.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute.

“Irene? You want to have lunch with me?”

“Sure. How about meeting me at the Galley?”

“Great. I could go for a pastrami sandwich. And I may have something for you on Pauline Grant by then.”

He told me his afternoon plans were all things that could be shuffled around or handled by Pete, so I was free to set up the appointment with Louisa Parker for whatever time worked out best.

When I called her, she was quite excited about talking to me, and had no objections to having Detective Harriman join us. She was taking an art class and wouldn’t be free until the late afternoon. We made an appointment for three o’clock.

FRANK WAS A little late for lunch, but he made up for it by handing over some startling news.

“I tried to look up Pauline Grant’s probation records,” he said. “I figured she would have been paroled a long time ago, but that maybe I could track her down.”

“And?”

“And she’s dead.”

“Well, I guess that’s not too much of a shock. She probably would have been about seventy-something by now, right?”

He shook his head. “No, I mean, she never made it out of prison.”

“What? I thought she was only up for manslaughter.”

“She was. And to be honest, I’m surprised they made that stick.”

“So what happened to her?”

“She was killed in prison. Not long after she was sentenced, in fact. I don’t have all the details yet, but from what I could learn, she was stabbed to death by a group of inmates.”

“Good Lord.” I thought about the interviews Mark and I had conducted the night before, how Justin Davis and Howard Parker had talked of Jimmy Grant. Bad enough to have been separated from his mother for a few years; worse yet, he had been orphaned. “Any idea what became of her son?”

“Not yet. The usual procedure would be to place him with family members. If no family members could be located, he would have been placed in foster care, maybe adopted, although he would have been hard to place at that age. The records are in L.A. County and too old to be readily accessible. Besides, for this kind of information, I’d need a warrant. That will take some time.”

“If the Department of Social Services is reluctant to open his records, what else can you do?”

“Oh, we’ll still have some options. Track down his mother’s Social Security records, see if anybody is collecting her payments. Look for school records, things like that.”

“A lot of work.”

“Yes, and a lot of time. No telling if he’s the one we want. He could be dead by now, or living in some other part of the country, maybe not even aware all of this is going on. But the victims sure as hell point back to somebody connected with what happened that day.”

“I can’t think of anyone who would have a stronger motive for revenge than Jimmy Grant. Alex Havens and Edna Blaylock testified against his mother. He was separated from her, and later she was killed.”

“But why did he wait so long? He has to be about fifty-four years old himself. Why didn’t he do this when he was in his teens or his twenties? And why involve you – choose you as his Cassandra?”

“I don’t know.” I doodled on my napkin as I thought about it, then noticed I was drawing figures shaped like fawns. I was the only person on earth who could discern them as such, of course. Film animators have nothing to fear from me.

“The people we’ve talked to so far were all children at the time,” I said. “Maybe Louisa Parker will be able to tell us more.”

He smiled. “I’m kind of surprised you asked me to come along with you to talk to her.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

There went the smile. “Still pissed off at me?”

“No, but I’m thinking of seeing a doctor. Something’s really wrong with me – I can’t hold a grudge like I used to.”

At least the smile was back, and he did have the good sense to withhold any arrogant remarks on his ability to charm me out of a bad mood. He skated dangerously close to the edge, though, when he started whistling as we walked out to the car.

LOUISA PARKER LIVED in an area called Kelso Park, an older part of town. It was an oddball neighborhood; little wood-frame houses built in the 1930s were sandwiched between large buildings of fifty or more condos each.

Developers would buy a couple of the old houses, which were on large lots, tear them down, and replace them with four-story buildings. At most, the builders provided one parking space per condo in underground, gated lots. Street parking was a bitch.