Jan Burke - Goodnight, Irene

“That would be great. I really appreciate it, Rachel, and I’m sorry to bother you on your day off.”

“Ah, I make noise about it, but what else do I have to do?”

“Well, I still appreciate it.” I gave her the numbers for the paper and Lydia’s house.

I hung up and sat there brooding over the bits and pieces of information I had. I reached over and turned the computer terminal on, and went back to the sections of O’Connor’s notes on the mayor’s race. The election would be held in November. The primary had just been held during the first week of June, and for the first time in years, Longren had failed to take enough of a majority to avoid a runoff.

I looked over the two pieces of code that had caught my eye the last time I went through the files:

RCC-DA + MYR =o=. LDY? $ VS $ BLP AM W/C.

»MYR PD FR DA RCC $? CK W/AM @ BLP

Ann Marchenko and the Bank of Las Piernas. Now that I had talked to Guy about her job in the safe-deposit area of the bank, maybe I could see a new way of reading the messages on the screen.

In the first line of code, a question had come up in O’Connor’s mind about fund-raising moneys that concerned the district attorney and the mayor. After the rat nose, “LDY?” might stand for “laundry” or “laundering.” “$ VS $” might mean that the moneys accounted for in the campaign funding report didn’t match what one or both of the candidates had received. Somewhere, something didn’t balance out.

The second line of code was easier to figure out. “Mayor paid from district attorney’s fund-raiser money? Check with Ann Marchenko at the Bank of Las Piernas.”

Together, the two lines suggested that the district attorney might be laundering funds he raised and feeding them to the mayor through some kind of system that used the Bank of Las Piernas’s safe-deposit boxes.

I looked at a section of the screen just below the second line of code and saw a group of initials I hadn’t paid much attention to before:

A H

R M

E N

R L

I had originally thought them to be names of people O’Connor planned to call or interview. They weren’t phrases or anything I could make sense of. He would often put a person’s initials here or there. But it was uncommon for him to put four sets in a row without some kind of intervening commentary.

AH might be Andrew Hollingsworth, and RL, Richard Longren. But who the heck were RM and EN? I stared at this list of initials until I had a headache that was pulsing in time with the cursor on the screen.

“Patience,” I could hear O’Connor say. I snapped a pencil in half with my patience and shut the terminal down.

I walked over to Lydia. “I’ve got to get some air,” I said testily.

“I’m off in an hour,” she said. “Should I meet you somewhere for lunch?”

“Okay, how about the Tandoori?”

“Great. I haven’t had Indian food in a long time.”

By the time I stepped outside I was in a better mood. I decided that I would go by Kenny’s room and see how he was doing; maybe say hello to Barbara if she was there.

It was getting to be a little easier to walk into St. Anne’s. I strolled down the hall, but when I got to Kenny’s room, it was empty. I felt my knees buckle. Had Kenny died? I shook myself as if I were trying to throw off a chill. Nonsense, I told myself. His condition was improving. Barbara would have called if he had taken a turn for the worse.

One of the nurses who had seen me come by before told me that Kenny had been moved out of ICU and into another room. She told me how to find it. I thanked her, and she looked at me curiously. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You look a little pale.”

I told her I was fine, thanked her again and made my way to Kenny’s new room.

When I got there, he was alone. “Barbara?” he called out.

“No, Kenny, it’s Irene.”

He didn’t hide the disappointment. “Oh,” he said.

“How are you feeling?”

No answer.

“Look, Kenny, I know you and I haven’t always been bosom buddies, but maybe for Barbara’s sake we could try to be civil to each other.”

He looked over at me. “I feel lousy. What would you expect?”

“That you’d feel lousy, I guess.”

“Well, I do.”

I thought for a moment. Should I just leave? I decided I would at least give it one more try.

“Kenny, I know it’s a really hard time for you. You’ve been through a lot. I’m very sorry about your dad.”

“I’m not.”

“What!” I felt myself go into a cold shock.

“I said, ‘I’m not,’ as in, ‘I’m not sorry my father is dead.’”

The cold shock began to turn into a slow burn. I wanted to break a couple more of his lousy bones.

“You heartless, selfish little son of a bitch!”

“I’m just telling you the truth. You never could accept the truth about Dad. You idolized him. You worshiped him like some kind of god. You made him into something he wasn’t.”

“Oh, really.” I was trying very hard to get back into control of my temper.

“Really. The truth is, my father was an alcoholic who never gave a tinker’s damn about me because I couldn’t and wouldn’t be a newspaperman.”

“That is pure bullshit.”

“Is it?”

“He loved you, Kenny. You were his only son-his only child.”

“I was a responsibility to fulfill. An obligation. You were his only son, Irene. You were the one he adopted as his child. You were the son I could never be.”

“You are really one fucked-up individual.”

“You even talk like a man. You were tougher than I was. You still are.”

I held my tongue. My head was pounding. I took a lot of long slow breaths.

“You know, Kenny, maybe if I lived your life, I’d be as bitter as you are-but I doubt it.”

This was met with stony silence.

“I can accept the fact that your dad drank too much. You’re right. He did. But there was more to him than that, and you know it.”

“Go away, Irene.”

“He loved you, Kenny. He told me more than once how glad he was that you came to live with him. How a piece of him had been missing until you came back.”

“I said, go away.”

“He loved you. And if you don’t know it, that is about the saddest thing I can think of-that he died unaware that you didn’t believe in his love, and that you didn’t love him back.”

“I did love him,” he said quietly, and shut his eyes to me.

I walked out, my face a big mess, tears rolling down my cheeks. People stared at me as I went by, then turned away in embarrassment if I caught them looking.

Out on the sidewalk I was given a wide berth. I stopped and I got out my handy Kleenex packet, which up until recently was only used when other people started crying or sneezing, and tried to get myself together. After a few minutes I was okay again. I allowed myself a king-sized sigh. I couldn’t help Kenny. The old feeling I always had in connection with him.

As for my own sadness, I resolved that my love for O’Connor was not going to be my burden, but rather my strength.

ISTILL HAD a little time to kill before meeting Lydia at the Tandoori, so I walked around downtown, window-shopping. There are all kinds of specialty shops in downtown Las Piernas. I walked past a place that repaired typewriters, another that sold boots-no shoes, just boots-a glassblower, a used-book store, an antiques dealer, and a place that sold and repaired electric razors. About every fifth door led into a little cafй or restaurant. Most shops were kept up pretty well, but a few looked as if no one had dusted out the display case since 1935.

Like every downtown of every city of any size, downtown Las Piernas had pawnshops, bail bondsmen, fleabag hotels, and places that had what my grandfather called “girlie shows.” But that group of businesses was an endangered species in the wake of redevelopment. While 1930s-born Broadway still had many buildings with mythology-laden art-deco fronts and curving lines, they were fast becoming overshadowed by the shining, angular monoliths of glass and mirror that had recently grown up along Shoreline Drive. As soon as the ocean view had been walled off, I had no doubt the developers who spawned these architectural behemoths would trudge inland, and squash the griffins and centaurs and cherubs of Broadway. The Bank of Las Piernas and other more modern buildings had already taken the place of some admittedly funky predecessors.