Jan Burke: Goodnight, Irene

The first book in the Irene Kelly series

Naturally occurring high levels of fluoride can be found in the ground water of a number of areas of the United States, including some places in Arizona. However, the Arizona town used as one of the settings for this story was chosen because of its proximity to both the California border and Phoenix, not because of its water. I never came across the “five old crabs” when I visited there.

Deep appreciation is given to the many people who helped me with the research for this book, especially Debbie Arrington, of the Long Beach Press Telegram; Bob Flynn, retired Evansville Press political reporter; Don Smith, National City Police Department; Sergeant John Conely, Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department; the Cypress, California, Police Department; Liz Martin-Snow of the California Dental Association; Skip Langley, for his expertise on fire and explosive gases; Garry Dougan of the Southern California Gas Department; Gary Wuchner of the Orange County Fire Department; Jacqueline Prebich, R.N.; Mark Prebich, R.R.T.; Ed Dohring, M.D.; Kelly Dohring, R.N.; Enda Brennan, Public Defender extraordinaire; Tonya Pearsley, Sandra Cvar, Paul Blevins, Peggy Lausin, Vera and Laurie Speake, and Sharon Weissman. A great deal of help in researching the book was given to me by the librarians at the Long Beach Public Library, the Angelo M. Iacoboni Library, and California State University, Long Beach Library. My thanks also to my friends and family, who were so supportive of this effort.

I am especially grateful to my father, John Fischer, who told me a story that led to writing this one, and to my husband, Timothy Burke, who encouraged me to write, shared the computer, read the drafts again and again and was supportive in a number of other ways.

While I acknowledge the help I’ve received from these and many other people, the errors are my own.

HE LOVED TO WATCH fat women dance. I guess O’Connor’s last night on the planet was a happy one because that night he had an eyeful of the full-figured.

We had gone out that Saturday night for a drink at Banyon’s, and somehow an honest-to-God bevy of bulging beauties had ended up in the same place. O’Connor never got up and danced with any of these women himself; I’m not sure he really would have enjoyed being the dancer as much as he did just watching them swing and sway with amazing grace. I don’t think he heard a word I said all evening, which is just as well, since I was only grousing on a well-worn set of subjects. He just sat there, with an expression crossbred between reverence and desire, whenever some big old gal got up to shake and shimmy.

O’Connor and I had managed to remain friends through one of the ugliest divorces in the state of California -the divorce of his son, Kenny, and my older sister, Barbara. We were friends before their romance started and we both thought it was doomed from the word go. My sister has been a glutton for lousy relationships for years, so no surprise there. But I’m still mystified about how a great-hearted guy like O’Connor could have had anything to do with the gene pool of a nasty little bastard like Kenny.

My guess was that O’Connor’s ex-wife was a real harpy, even though he never talked about her to me. Barbara told me they had split up when Kenny was a baby. Kenny had lived with his mother until he was fourteen, at which time she had packed him up like worn-out clothing and sent him to live with O’Connor-no note, no warning, just a call saying the kid was coming in on a flight from Phoenix that afternoon. She had taken off for parts unknown-no one had heard from her for years afterward.

THE DANCING LADIES called it a night, and we decided to do the same. As I drove him home, he started telling Irish jokes, a sure sign he’d had a few too many. The jokes were old, but O’Connor could make me laugh just by laughing this ridiculous laugh of his. It started as a kind of noiseless shaking, then guffawing, on to tears, and he ended by taking out his handkerchief and blowing his big nose. I could never watch this performance with a straight face-by the time the handkerchief came out, I was a goner.

Kenny’s red Corvette was parked in the driveway, so I pulled up at the curb. O’Connor climbed slowly out of the car. “You’re dear to me, Irene,” he said with a wink and little drunken bow.

“O’Connor, please don’t sing it. It’s one o’clock in the morning. People are trying to sleep.”

I should have known better; he was going to sing it anyway, and my plea only made him relish doing so all the more. He laughed as he turned and took his bearings on the front door, heaved his big shoulders back as he took a deep breath and began to belt out “Goodnight, Irene” at the top of his lungs as he shambled up to the darkened house. This was old hat to me and his neighbors, but next door Mrs. Keene felt honor-bound to turn on her porch light to register annoyance. O’Connor grinned and went on in, waving as he closed the door.

THE MORNING AFTER our night at Banyon’s, somebody left a package on O’Connor’s front porch. Mrs. Keene was out watering her lawn and later she said she saw him come padding out in his bare feet and bathrobe to pick up the paper. He was a little hung over, I guess, because she said that he didn’t see the package until the return trip. She was a little embarrassed to see him in his robe, so she didn’t call out a “good morning” or anything, but she’s a nosy bird and she was curious about the package.

Nobody knows exactly what happened after that, except that the explosion knocked Mrs. Keene on her keister and sent little pieces of O’Connor just about everywhere they could go.

I WAS AT HOME, having a lazy morning, hanging around in an old pair of pj’s and reading the paper with the supervision of my big gray tomcat, Wild Bill Cody, when the phone rang. It was Lydia Ames, an old pal of mine over at the newspaper where I used to work, the Las Piernas News Express .

“Irene! Does O’Connor live on Randall Avenue?”

“Who wants to know?” I asked, wary of her tone.

“Shit, Irene!”

Now Lydia has only cussed one other time in her life that I know of, and that was when Alicia Penderson showed up at our high school prom in a gown identical to Lydia’s-a strapless affair, only on Alicia it seemed to be working harder to defy gravity.

So all of a sudden here’s Lydia on a Sunday morning, talking blue and sounding like she was about to cry. I told her O’Connor’s address. She didn’t say anything for about four hours, or so it seemed, but I guess it was really about half a minute.

“ Lydia, what the hell is going on?”

“Shit, Irene…” Now she was crying. “Irene, I think you better get over to O’Connor’s place. We just got a report that there’s been some kind of explosion-Baker’s on his way to cover it.”

The whole time I was getting dressed and driving over to O’Connor’s, I kept telling myself that Lydia was pretty hysterical and that I didn’t really know that anything had happened to O’Connor. Maybe just his house, maybe not O’Connor but someone else, maybe some other house.

That all started to change when I saw the rising smoke from half a mile away. A slow, cold numbing started in my throat and eventually froze me in place on the sidewalk across the street from his house. Clusters of firemen formed tense huddles with cops. The place was surrounded by fire trucks, police cars, the bomb-squad van, the coroner’s ambulance. The house was smashed as if it were nothing more than an egg; a yolk of mud and debris was spilling out of its broken shell. I wanted to find O’Connor. I felt certain that if they would just let me look, just let someone who had cared about him look, I’d find him.