“Worth taking a look, but I think Dan Norton was pretty thorough.”
I intended to do that the next morning, but the doorbell rang just as Frank and I sat down to breakfast. Max Ducane stood on my doorstep. Before he gave me his news, I could tell by the look on his face what the DNA test results had revealed.
“Sorry to bother you so early, but I didn’t know where else to go. I can’t face Lillian or Helen right now.”
“Max-come in.”
He smiled ruefully. “Maybe you can help me come up with yet another name for myself,” he said. “Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that I’m not Max Ducane.”
61
P UBLICLY, HE HANDLED ALL THE RUDE COMMENTS, MEDDLESOME QUESTIONS, double takes, and stares that were to come his way over the next few weeks with a kind of fortitude and dignity that made all of us who loved him proud to know him. Privately, if you didn’t know him well, he might have fooled you into thinking he was getting on with his life.
The Express broke the story about the DNA tests, and what that brought to Max made me wish something I rarely wished-that I didn’t work for a newspaper.
Because we’re friends, I didn’t write any of the stories that directly involved Max, but Hailey did a good job on them. If it had all stopped there, he still would have faced a lot of public reaction. There wasn’t a chance on earth it was going to stop there.
The story got picked up by the wires. He was a natural for national media attention. He was rich, good-looking, and quotable. His origins were mysterious. He had advantages that came to him through sheer luck and those he had obviously earned through his own abilities, but some of the media chose to insinuate that he was a charlatan who had slyly conned two tragic, wealthy families into handing over a fortune to him.
After a week or so, the story probably would have dropped off the public radar had it not been for an announcement from the Ross family. As the whole country soon learned, Max was an eligible bachelor again. Gisella had called him to break off their engagement just minutes before her father gave a press conference.
For a brief time, I fantasized retribution on Gisella Ross and her parents. As it turned out, my fellow media members did the work for me unbidden- after painting her as incredibly shallow, they found some dirt on her family that made Max’s heritage seem noble by comparison.
“I’m so sorry this has happened to her,” he told me, more upset by those reports than by anything that had been said about him.
He told us this over dinner at our house. Tuna casserole-lifestyles of the rich and famous.
He was spending a lot of time with us these days. Frank didn’t seem to mind. They had formed their own friendship, and even though Max was now without a fiancée, I guess Frank had figured out what Max and I had figured out a long time ago.
“I wish I could be sorry for her,” I said, “because it would fool everyone into thinking I am a much better person than I am. She didn’t deserve you.”
He shook his head. “She wasn’t ready for what happened-all the publicity. She’s a private person.”
I decided not to respond to that.
He must have seen something of my thoughts, though, because he smiled and said to Frank, “God help anyone who harms someone Irene cares about.”
“True,” Frank said. He’s smarter than I am, though, because he immediately changed the subject by asking questions that led to an animated discussion about the ways GPS could help with law enforcement. Max forgot his troubles for a while. He talked about how cargo containers could now carry signaling devices that could help locate stolen goods.
“Lots happening in the area of tracking the movements of parolees,” Max said. “They could be tagged with lightweight devices and you would always know where they were. And even have the devices programmed to send a call to local law enforcement if, say, a sex offender goes into an area near a school or playground.” Which was fine as far as it went, I thought, but I stayed quiet and didn’t spoil their mood by asking if anyone had read any George Orwell lately.
At the end of the evening, just as he was leaving, Max said, “I have to try to find out what became of that child. The two of you understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what we could do.”
“So have I,”he said. “Frank, I know it didn’t help much last time, but I want to offer the reward again. Maybe after all these years, someone will finally come forward. I’ll up it to two hundred and fifty thousand. I’ll add a grant to the department to help staff phones, if that’s what it takes. I don’t know what’s allowed and what isn’t, but-can you help me with this?”
“Sure,” Frank said. “Let me run it by my lieutenant. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
The reward made our phones ring again. Sometimes the callers hadn’t even been born at the time of the kidnapping. We got one “repressed memory” case of a woman who believed her father had buried the child in the family backyard, but real estate records showed the family hadn’t moved to Las Piernas until 1961 or purchased the home in question until 1964.
I kept hoping Betty Bradford would call.
In the meantime, DNA tests on the scrapings from beneath Maureen O’Connor’s nails excluded Bennie Lee Harmon-at least as the person who had been scratched when she fought off her attacker. Harmon was doing better now, but had become less talkative.
“The business of the graves bothers me,” Frank said. “Harmon was mostly a drifter, didn’t stay any one place for long. When he was here, though, he must have confided in someone. Or he was followed. I started to wonder if he had married or had a girlfriend, or had a crush on someone from work.” Frank had looked up Harmon’s Social Security records. “He was 4-F, so he wasn’t in the military. No army buddy. I thought he might have worked for the aircraft plant, and maybe found someone nearly as odd as he was there. Or maybe he had been followed from there out to the grove.”
“By someone who also knew Maureen. It makes sense,” I said.
“Except he didn’t work at the aircraft plant. He worked as a driver for a company that sold agricultural supplies,” he said. “Probably how he chose the orange grove in the first place. He basically doesn’t play well with others, so his job choices were usually ones where he could be alone much of the day.”
“And he might have used the company truck to haul young women off to an orange grove?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Did he ever tell you why he chose April as his big month?”
“No, but that was something he told one of the other investigators this past week-I guess it has to do with Easter, not April. His mother died on Easter in 1939. His killings all took place within seven days after Easter.”
“Then the person who knew about the graves in the orange grove didn’t just follow him out there. The person who killed her knew about the Easter thing, too. Maureen was killed within a week of Easter.”
“Damn. Once I knew it wasn’t him, I didn’t check the date against the Easter calendar. You’re sure?”
“Yes. The last photo O’Connor had of his sister was taken on Easter Sunday, just a few days before she died.”
Ethan came back to work. He looked as if he had lost about fifteen pounds. He didn’t have fifteen pounds to spare. He also looked as if he hadn’t been getting much sleep. His desk had been moved back near mine, placed just on the opposite side of it.
I said, “Welcome back, Ethan.”
He nodded without looking up or saying anything. It occurred to me that he probably thought I was being sarcastic.
Lydia gave him every shit assignment that came into the city desk. She handed the plums to Hailey and other reporters. Ethan did his work without complaint. And without making eye contact with anyone in the newsroom.