Goodnight Irene Read online

  “INTRICATE PLOTTING” (THE WASHINGTON TIMES)…

  “CHILLING SUSPENSE” (CLIVE CUSSLER)…

  “CRISP, CRACKLING PROSE” (LIBRARY JOURNAL)…

  THE CRIME FICTION OF EDGAR AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR

  JAN BURKE

  HAS IT ALL!

  “Jan Burke’s Irene Kelly stories [feature] tense and thoughtful plots, writing that manages to be sharp and sardonic without calling attention to itself, [and] a Southern California setting that skips all the clichés…. [An] excellent series.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Gripping…compelling…Jan Burke doesn’t come up for air until every detail is nailed down.”

  —Michael Connelly

  “Spine-tingling, nerve-fraying, breath-suppressing suspense…in the mystery pantheon with Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton, Robert B. Parker and John Sandford.”

  —The Tennessean

  “I’ve always counted on Jan Burke’s Irene Kelly books as one of my favorite guilt-free pleasures.”

  —Janet Evanovich

  “Ever since her auspicious debut, Jan Burke has raised the emotional ante with each succeeding book…a witty and resourceful writer.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  National Acclaim for Jan Burke’s Irene Kelly Novels

  GOODNIGHT, IRENE

  “Readers who want nonstop action, spare dialogue, and a heroine who’s a combination of Nancy Drew, Katharine Hepburn, Lois Lane, and Lauren Bacall, should snap up GOODNIGHT, IRENE at the first opportunity.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Jan Burke writes with a verve that makes this an eminently satisfactory debut, one that bodes well for the future.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “As fresh and chilling as a winter sunrise.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Jan Burke has created a sharp, witty, and utterly endearing detective.”

  —Susan Dunlap, author of No Immunity

  SWEET DREAMS, IRENE

  “A compelling mystery…virtually nonstop drama. It’s hard to see how Burke can top this one.”

  —The Drood Review of Mystery

  “A highly readable mystery with a rapid heartbeat and a thoroughly modern point of view. [Burke’s] detective is a welcome addition to the world of the contemporary mystery.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “A joy…. A beautifully crafted book, played against an intriguing backdrop.”

  —Orange County Register

  DEAR IRENE,

  “Powerful…exquisite…entertaining…hard to put down.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “An exciting, well-plotted, edge-of-your-seat mystery.”

  —Indianapolis News

  “Top-notch…. Action-packed, riveting, and cleverly plotted.”

  —Booklist

  REMEMBER ME, IRENE

  “A splendid addition to an excellent series.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Burke is in top form here.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A deliciously tense mystery that hungry whodunit fans will devour.”

  —Colorado Springs Gazette

  HOCUS

  ”[An] intelligent and deftly paced thriller.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A story that will grab you on page one and just won’t let go!”

  —Robert Crais, author of Hostage

  “Heads above the average thriller…. Hocus shines with memorable characters…[and] tears through to its conclusion at a heart-stopping pace.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  Books by Jan Burke

  Flight

  Bones

  Liar

  Hocus

  Remember Me, Irene

  Goodnight, Irene

  Sweet Dreams, Irene

  Dear Irene,

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1993 by Jan Burke

  Originally published in hardcover in 1993 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-8334-6

  ISBN-10: 0-7434-8334-0

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To

  Antonia Adamo Fischer

  Velda Kuntz Fischer

  Eileen Stillman

  Martha Burke and

  Martha Otis

  in gratitude for their faith

  Author’s Note

  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.

  Acknowledgments

  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.

  1

  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.

  I sometimes hear about people knowing right away that someone they loved has died, that they feel the dead person’s spirit leave or something. O’Connor stuck around.

  I heard someone yell “Kelly!” and turned to see a tall black man walking toward me. It was Mark Baker, the reporter sent out by the Express. “Oh, God, Irene, I’m so sorry,” he said in a shaky voice. I wasn’t ready for sympathy, and looked away. He understood and stopped talking, just put one of his burly arms around my shoulders and guided me away from the crowd. Mark took me over to where Frank Harriman was trying to get some sense out of Mrs. Keene, then left to talk to one of the guys from the bomb squad.

  Frank and I had met when he was a rookie cop in Bakersfield and I was on my first crime beat as a fledgling reporter. Now he was a homicide detective with the Las Piernas Police Department. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, since before I quit the paper, but this wasn’t the time to renew old acquaintances.

  As I stood to one side, Frank noticed me and gave me one of those very protective “are-you-okay?” looks. I tried to avoid his eyes, and turned away from him, but to my horror looked up to see a coroner’s assistant bagging a little piece of something soft.

  Thank God I’m not a fainter. I must have looked bad, though, because Frank took me gently by the elbow and said, “Go home, Irene.” I just stared at him.

  “You still live in the same place?” he asked.

  I nodded, because I didn’t trust my voice. I was also busy with a tug-of-war—one minute I was trying to take it all in, the next, trying to shut it all out. I heard Frank say something about wanting to ask me some questions, later. I figured Mrs. Keene had told him about the previous night’s serenade, but I was past caring. I heard the camera shutters of the forensic team, and out of the corner of my eye kept seeing the coroner’s assistants with their goddamned plastic bags and forceps. I felt sick and weird…disconnected.

  Frank was quiet for a minute; then he asked a cop to drive me home, but I shook it off and told him I could manage. I made sure he had my address, then left. I could feel him watching me as I walked to my car. I didn’t look back at Frank or the house as I drove off.

  As I rounded the corner I saw Kenny’s red Corvette heading toward the house. For the one-millionth time, I felt sorry for him. He wasn’t equipped for everyday life, let alone something like this. And for the two-millionth time, I knew I couldn’t do anything about it.

  IT WAS A LONG TIME before I asked myself what had made Kenny get up and at ’em so early on a Sunday morning.

  2

  FRANK ALMOST WAITED too long to come over. I was damned restless by late that afternoon.

  Most of the time from when I left O’Connor’s house until Frank came over I spent stewing and pacing. I’m not good at sitting around, and it was a hot day. As the afternoon wore on, the Santa Ana winds began to blow, making my house a regular oven. Like most Southern Californians, I can only take so much of those desert winds before I go a little nuts anyway. I live a couple of miles from the beach in Las Piernas, which is on the coast, just south of L.A. Usually by late afternoon, there’s cool air off the ocean. But even with nothing but the front and back screen doors to slow down any little breeze that might come along, the old house was hot. It’s a little 1930s bungalow down in a section of town that can’t decide how to gentrify.


  So I paced around, sat and tried to cry, but couldn’t. Got up and paced around again. Cody sat watching me, twitching his fat tail nervously. At one point I felt so wound up, I took off my shoes and hurled them as hard as I could against the wall. I didn’t pitch them anywhere near Cody, but he decided he’d had enough and took off through his cat door—converted from an old ice-delivery slot in the kitchen.

  It was hard to find anything worth thinking about. If I thought about the past, I mourned the end of days with O’Connor. If I thought about the future, it was to cancel plans. Nothingness, sharp as a knife. I paced barefooted.

  I knew that the time would come when I could really indulge in this feeling-sorry-for-myself stuff, but now wasn’t the time. If I could just get myself pointed in some direction, maybe I could find whoever did this to O’Connor. And kill them. Slowly.

  In the midst of these thoughts I heard someone on the front porch. The silhouetted figure of a tall man stood looking in at me from my front door, shading his eyes with his hand against the screen.

  “Irene?”

  “Jesus, Frank. You startled me. How long have you been out there?”

  “How about letting me in? It’s hotter than hell out here.”

  I took off the latch and opened the door for him. I flopped down on the couch and gestured toward my big old-fashioned armchair, but he waved it off and leaned up against a table instead.

  “You okay?” he asked.