Page 16 of The Happy Month
When Vera was a girl her father drove an ice truck—which he continued to do through the Second World War, while her mother took in laundry. She didn’t do well in school and was considered ‘boy crazy’ in high school. That’s when it hit me that Vera was only a few years older than Sheila. She was twenty-five when she was killed, so she’d have been twenty-three or four when she became engaged to Patrick Gill. He was eight years older. Early thirties. Then I wondered,Did Vera know he was gay? Probably not. It wasn’t talked about the way it was now. People wouldn’t have thought it was possible. He wouldn’t have been the first gay man to become involved with an unsuspecting young woman.
“Tempted by the glitter of tinseltown, Vera came West at seventeen to take her chances with stardom.”
The book was certainly cheesy. Sheila had said it wasn’t exactly true, so I took this with a grain of salt. Either Vera did want to be an actress or it made a better story. It could have been that she just hated snow, but that was hardly dramatic.
Once she got to Los Angeles, she quickly got a job at a munitions factory producing ammunition for the war effort. She was clever and a good typist, so she spent most of the war as a secretary to the company’s president. After the war she found work at Security First National Bank and worked in their Hollywood office.
I’d finished eating so it was time to drive home. There would be just enough of the afternoon left to go into the office and help Karen pull together everything we needed for the Anne Michaels deposition. We’d make copies of her testimony from the original trial, my notes from theinterviews I’d done with her, my suggested questions along with Lydia’s, and finally a statement we’d taken from Larry himself covering the important details of their relationship in 1976.
As I was driving home, I got out the cellular phone Ronnie insisted I carry—mainly, I think, because that gave him a better deal on his—and called him.
“Hey,” I said when he picked up.
“Where are you?”
“On the 710. Your gaydar was right. Patrick Gill is gay.”
“I won the bet. Yay! What did I win?”
“I never actually took that bet. You didn’t win anything.”
“Bummer. How did you find out he’s gay?”
“He’s been making passes at the male nurses.”
“Ick. Isn’t he like, eighty?”
“Careful. You’re in love with an old man. Remember?”
“It’s different. When you’re disgusting and eighty, I’ll be disgusting and sixty-four. It evens out."
I wasn't sure it would work out that way, but I figured I'd let him think what he wanted.
“Anyway, I’m wondering if you can take Thursday off?”
“How come?”
“All this guy’s stuff is in a couple of storage facilities, and I could use some help looking through it all.”
“A treasure hunt? That’s fabulous. I’m in!”
CHAPTER FIVE
July 24, 1996
Wednesday afternoon
At one fifty, the bell over the door rang, a relic from the office’s retail days, and in came Anne Michaels née Whittemore. She was a hard looking woman in her late thirties, with haunted eyes and thin brown hair. She’d had a baby about eight weeks before and wore a lose top to hide what probably a loose belly. A baby carrier hung from one arm. In it an infant dressed in pink.
She gave me a ‘you again’ look and said, “Well, I’m here.”
Karen got up from her desk and said, “I’ll get Lydia.”
“Thank you for coming,” I said. “This will mean the world for Larry.”
“Yeah,” she said, without enthusiasm.
I tried a different tact, “What’s the baby’s name?”
