Run the Risk (3 page)

“Flower shipments. We contracted with one of the float designers. It was a big break for us.”

Wonderful, I thought. I could see the headlines:
MOTHER OF ROSE PAGEANT QUEEN SCANDAL HEADS FLOWER MURDER INVESTIGATION
. I could already hear the nitwit conspiracy theorists tinkering in their basements.

“The flowers in the back are all for a float?” Traver asked.

Breem nodded. “Yes, most are from greenhouses in Mexico, shipped in refrigerated trucks. Time is the critical factor.”

“Which float?”

“San Marino's Spirit of Diversity.”

More good news for the rose officials. Spirit of Diversity Leads to Murder. A wild thought that this was all some sort of strange hate crime against florists stuck in my head for a moment.

“How much cash was in the shop?” I asked.

“Several thousand dollars. Shipments were coming in tonight and some of the suppliers prefer cash.”

“Did you recognize the gunman?”

He shook his head. “He had on a mask.”

“What kind of a mask?”

“It was blue, no red . . . maroon, one of those ski things.”

“Did you give him the money?”

He nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes, everything . . . that's when Daniel tried to run out the back.”

“Why did he run? Had the gunman said something? Did he say he was going to shoot either of you?”

“No, I think he just panicked. I froze and the . . . He went after him and I hid in the display case.”

Breem fell silent for a moment, sadness spreading across his face like a flush of blood. “Then I heard the shot,” he said in a whisper.

“I know this is difficult, but sometimes this is the best time to remember events,” I said as understandingly as I could.

He nodded, trying to pull himself together.

“What did his voice sound like?”

“Daniel had a gentle—” He caught himself. “You mean the killer?”

I nodded. “Yes. Did he have an accent? Anything to distinguish it?”

“It was flat.”

“Like music?”

He shook his head. “Like he didn't care what happened. Like it meant nothing to kill some—” His eyes began to drift away.

“Is the camera in the back room taping?”

Breem had apparently forgotten about it and just realized there was a recording of the murder.

“Oh, God . . . yes.”

“Why isn't there a camera out front where the register is?” Traver asked.

“It was just being installed. We had some break-ins in back so we put the first one there.”

“Who would have known you had as much cash on hand as you did?”

“We have two part-time employees, and one temp we hired.”

“We'll need addresses.”

He nodded sadly. “I don't think any of them would do this.”

I looked around the office. There was a framed dollar bill; a gold plaque from the Florists Association; a chamber of commerce membership; a photo of the two partners and their wives standing on a dock in Mexico with a large sailfish hanging by a rope. This happy, sheltered world had just come apart like a rose dropping all its petals.

“Why was the front door unlocked?”

He looked up, surprised. “I don't understand.”

“The front door wasn't forced open, so it was either open or he was let in.”

“I was in back. I thought it was locked.”

I walked outside, leaving Traver to finish questioning Breem. The temperature had dropped and I could see the steam of the gathered cops' breaths evaporate like little jets into the night. The smell of smoked chilies had been swept away with a breeze blowing inland off the ocean. A tall row of Italian cypress swayed with the wind like characters in a silent movie. As one of the coroner's men walked by heading to the scene, I noticed the faint odor of menthol they use to mask the smell of death when it's had time to ripen. I walked to the edge of the crime-scene tape and played the few facts that we had out in my head. Most killings were exceedingly simple acts. Connect-the-dots sort of puzzles. Smart people, if they do kill, usually do it stupidly. This had all the makings of a bad paint-by-numbers canvas, but I've been surprised before.

Instead of standing outside at a murder scene I suddenly wanted to be sitting on the edge of Lacy's bed having the conversation I wished we had had in the car but didn't.

When I had dropped her off, she got out of the car, then turned and said, “So you have nothing to say to me?”

I sat silently for a moment, a thousand questions in my head, none of which I asked.

“Later,” I said. Exactly one word more than I had said to her the entire ride home.

Lacy took a deep breath, then shook her head. “That's perfect.”

I opened my mouth to reply but nothing came out.

“You always say there's going to be a later, but there never is.” She turned and walked into the house as I sat there silently.

My heart started pounding in my chest and I had trouble catching my breath. My mind raced with questions and doubts like it had lost its brakes on a hill. Why didn't I say something to her? What harm could it possibly have done to open up to her and tell her what a complete failure I am as a mother? I wanted a drink, I wanted a cigarette, I wanted to cry. I felt a tear forming in the corner of my eye.

Traver walked out carrying the videotape from the surveillance camera and stepped up to me. I turned away, looked up at the mountains, and brushed the tear away with my sleeve.

“Shall we go look at this tonight?”

I nodded and took several deep breaths trying to regain my balance.

“You okay?”

I swallowed, trying to get some moisture back in my throat. “Yeah.”

Dave nodded and took a deep breath. I could see in his face that he was thinking about not sneaking into his twins' room to kiss them good night. He loved being a father, every exhausted minute of it. Somewhere inside him I'm sure he was convinced that if something were to go wrong in their lives twenty years from now, they'd trace the root cause back to a missed kiss on a sleeping forehead.

“They won't remember if you miss a kiss,” I said.

THE GRAINY
black-and-white surveillance tape showed Daniel Finley sorting through bunches of flowers blissfully ignorant of how little time he had left to live. Was he thinking about flowers, what he was going to have for dinner, his wife's birthday, an upcoming New Year's party?

He hears something behind him and turns just as the masked killer steps in pointing a short-barreled weapon at him.

“Looks like a twenty-five auto,” Traver said.

The killer was wearing jeans, a dark sweatshirt, and white basketball shoes, the Nike swoosh visible on the side. Finley stands dumbfounded for a moment as if frozen in fear. The shooter motions with the gun toward the door but Finley still stands there as if in disbelief. The shooter's head appears to move as if he's shouting, then he steps toward Finley and places the gun against Finley's head and pushes him out of camera range.

“Didn't Breem say he was in back and Finley up front?” I said.

Traver checks his notes and nods.

On the tape Breem steps into frame for a moment as if looking for something and then walks back out.

“That could explain why he thought he was in back and Finley up front,” Traver said.

“Doesn't explain how the shooter got the front door open, does it?”

I glanced at my watch and counted the seconds before what I knew was coming appears on screen. Twenty-five seconds later, Finley rushes back into frame and almost immediately goes down like a puppet whose strings have just been cut. At the edge of the frame a tiny puff of smoke from the round's discharge is all that is visible of the killer.

We looked at each other thinking the same thing: Why did the killer stop just short of camera range? Did he know it was there, or was it chance? But if he knew the camera
was there and avoided it, why had he walked into its view before?

“Probably doesn't mean anything,” Traver said.

“Probably.”

I sat back in my chair and looked out the window. The street below was empty except for a few parked patrol cars. The moon had set, and the snow on top of the San Gabriels no longer glowed with reflected light.

“Breem said he was shipping flowers from Mexico. What if they were receiving more than flowers?”

Dave turned the VCR off, stood up, arched his back, and yawned. He looked at his watch; it was three
A
.
M
. “I was hoping we could keep this simple.”

There was a knock on the office door. A young female officer walked in carrying a piece of paper.

“We got a hit on one of those names.”

She laid it on my desk and walked out. It was a rap sheet for the temp employee Breem had hired.

“Frank Sweeny, did thirteen months in Lompoc of a four-year sentence for forgery.” I turned to Traver, who was already playing out the implications in his head. All of which meant that the kiss on his twins' foreheads was getting farther and farther away.

“What was that you said about keeping it simple?” I said.

“It was just a thought.”

I handed him the rap sheet. He studied it for a moment then let the facts bounce around in his head as if he were jangling change in a pocket.

“How does a guy go from doing thirteen months for writing bad paper to executing a guy for two grand?”

“They don't,” I said.

“What if it was more than two grand?”

“What if it was something else?”

“Such as . . .”

“Tonight is not the night for me to make assumptions about anything.”

“Am I supposed to understand what you're talking about?” Traver asked.

“Not for another fifteen years.”

He tossed the rap sheet back on the desk. “Could be just what it appears to be. Some kid with a twenty-five auto who gets lucky and scores, then panics and steps up to the big time.”

“Then who opened the front door?”

Traver took a deep breath and blew it out like he was expelling smoke.

“You want to wake the son of a bitch Sweeny up? Rattle his cage?”

“If he's involved, then the address he gave Breem will be worthless.”

“If he isn't, we're wasting our time and ruining his night of sleep, not to mention ours.”

I looked at the photograph of my daughter on my desk. It was from a camping trip when she was fourteen. She was standing in front of a giant sequoia in a plaid shirt and cutoffs, her arms held out to her sides, palms spread wide. She was looking up toward the sun with a huge smile on her face. It was taken two months after I divorced her father. My timing having always been impeccable in regards to matters of the heart, three months after the divorce he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He lasted five more hideous months connected to tubes and flooded with drugs. In Lacy's adolescent mind it was all somehow my fault, which was not all that different from the way I saw it. He was the one who cheated, and I was the one who felt like I had failed. His dying after I divorced him was just further confirmation in my mind that he was the real victim through it all instead of me.

I had thought for a long time that Lacy's smile in the photograph was because she had passed through some rubicon that had set us free from the baggage her father had dumped on us. Looking at it now I realized that wasn't it at all. She looked liked she was about to take flight, slowly circling up around a tree that had witnessed nearly a quarter of all of human history. What Lacy had found were kindred spirits, survivors, mute participants who silently endured
all the poison we could dump on them from the moment they rose out of the soil. Not so different from being a kid.

“I should have told her I loved her,” I said silently in my head.

Dave cleared his throat. “So what do you think? We gonna do this?”

I looked at Dave sitting anxiously on the edge of the chair.

“We'll pay him a visit in the morning,” I said. “Go home and kiss the twins.”

I WAITED
at the office until four
A
.
M
., when the coroner's investigator called and said he had cleared the body and sealed the scene. Then I cut the witness Breem loose to go home and placed the surveillance tape in evidence lockup. When I got in the Volvo, I slipped a Pablo Casals tape in the deck and drove to Lake Street, where I took a left and headed up toward the foothills, the lights of downtown Los Angeles in my mirrors.

I would give the case a rest for a few hours. I would get an hour and a half of sleep and then I would do what real mothers do: I'd make Lacy eggs, toast and jam, some orange juice, then I would sit at the breakfast table with her and say all the things to her that I should have said last night.

I turned onto Mariposa and headed for our house. A white Hyundai pulled out in front of me from the curb, nearly clipping my right front bumper, and the driver began tossing
The Star News
out the window onto driveways. I passed on the left and glanced at the driver. In the faint light he looked foreign, maybe European, late twenties, unshaven, the tired, sunken eyes of a recent immigrant who
had jumped ship for the American dream and found it contained two minimum-wage jobs and four hours of sleep a night.

Out of habit, I glanced one more time in the mirror at the Hyundai, then my lights caught the eyes of a coyote, glowing red in the darkness, standing in the middle of Mariposa. As I approached, it moved casually over to the side, then just as casually reclaimed its position in the middle of the street once I had passed.

Near the end of the block I hit the garage remote and pulled up the drive to my three-bedroom ranch. My breath caught as if I had been grabbed from behind. Lacy's yellow Honda wasn't in the garage. I sat there until I could take a breath, then got out, staring at the empty space next to my own car.

“Shit” quietly slipped out of my mouth. If I had only . . . Don't go there, but I wanted to. Why didn't I say something to her? What was I afraid of?

I heard the slap of the paper hitting the driveway and glanced toward the street. The white Hyundai sat at the end of the drive until I walked back and picked up the paper before it drove quickly away squealing its tires.

“If I had only been smarter,” I said, steam rising into the chilly air.

Over the top of the San Gabriels, the first hint of light tinted the dark purple of the sky with the warm glow of sunlight. A lizard rustled in the ivy that covered the hillside below the house. A crow sitting on top of a telephone pole croaked its first call of the day. I looked down the street and noticed that the Hyundai had driven on without tossing out any more papers. It seemed strange, but what the hell didn't at this point.

I opened the paper and glanced at the front page. The headline read:
A ROSE QUEEN BY ANY OTHER NAME
? Below it was a photograph of Lacy holding out the spray bottle, her mouth open in an angry shout.

I folded it under my arm and for an instant had the brief thought of running down the street and grabbing all the
papers before the neighbors wandered out in their robes and slippers. Up the block the yellow light from a kitchen came spilling into the predawn. Too late. I walked inside and closed the garage door behind me.

On the kitchen table Lacy had left a note.

“How can you be so clueless. . . . I'm at a friend's.”

I sighed and sat down. So much for breakfast plans. I looked at the refrigerator and then over at the stove. I couldn't remember the last time I had actually cooked a meal for the two of us. I remembered talking about it, I may have even bought groceries, but I didn't cook anything. I looked at the bowl of fruit on the table and realized I had no idea how it had come to be sitting in my kitchen. For all I know it might have grown from seed.

I grabbed a banana from the bowl, then turned the light out and walked through the dark house. I hesitated at Lacy's door and looked inside, hoping against all evidence to the contrary that she would be there. It was empty. I walked inside and lay down on her bed. I could smell the sweetness of her hair on the pillow. It reminded me of when she was a baby and her scent would linger in my arms long after I had put her down for the night. Her red taffeta dress from the pageant lay in a pile in the middle of the floor, along with some dirty socks, a bra, and a Green-peace sweatshirt.

“Clueless,” I whispered into the dark. Then I peeled the banana, laid it on my chest, and fell asleep without taking a bite.

FOUR HOURS LATER
I woke up. There were six messages on the phone machine that I hadn't seen when I came home; two were Lacy's friends who thought what she had done was totally radical, two were reporters from local television stations requesting interviews, and one was Lacy's school principal, who thought it might be a good idea if we got together and talked about Lacy's home environment. The last one was a fan of the Rose Parade who
thought the mother of such a child must be a piece of shit, a degenerate, a slut bitch who isn't fit to raise a chimp.

On the heels of receiving such good news I walked into the kitchen to defend my motherhood and scrambled two eggs, made toast, and had half a grapefruit. I overcooked the eggs.

I left a note for Lacy asking her to call me on my cell so I knew she was all right, and then told her I would be home later and we would talk, or more precisely, I would listen and learn about the depths of my cluelessness.

Stepping outside I noticed the first hint of a Pacific storm was bumping into the base of the foothills and dropping a steady light mist. Up in the mountains the white spiked flowers of yuccas glowed in dull gray light. A low bank of dark clouds hung just over the top of downtown L.A. on the distant horizon.

News of what my daughter had done was all over morning talk radio. Even the local public station jumped into the fray, though their point of view weighed heavily toward the broader geopolitical side of pesticides and habitat destruction, as opposed to a teenager just acting out to get her mother's attention. One caller actually described Lacy as the progeny of Rachel Carson.

At the plaza I noticed the first heads turning as soon as I stepped out of the car in the parking lot. This was how it was going to be from now on, I figured—heads turning, finger-pointing. “There goes the failed mother of that girl.” I would be the Typhoid Mary of the Rose Parade, the mother who let a hundred years of tradition slip through her fingers. Inside Homicide I received a standing ovation and then found half a dozen plastic spray bottles with concealed-weapon permits sitting on the desk in my office.

Traver knocked on the door and stepped in looking as solemn as a visitor to a funeral home.

“I heard,” he said, broaching the subject carefully. “We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”

“I don't,” I said.

“Maybe it would be good to talk about it.”

“For who?”

“How is she?”

“She stayed at a friend's house last night.”

“That's good.”

“Not for me.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

Traver stood there silent for a moment, his eyes looking like they were trying to find a destination on a map. Then he nodded and said, “If you do—”

“Thanks,” I interrupted.

“I'm here, whenever you're ready.”

“To talk?”

“Absolutely.”

I nodded. “I'm a degenerate slut bitch who isn't fit to raise a chimp,” I said, then started for the door to go question the temp employee Sweeny.

Traver looked at me for a moment not sure how to respond. Then he smiled and started out the door after me.

“I love chimps.”

THE ADDRESS
we had for Sweeny was one of six small white bungalows that lined a short drive off Mission in South Pasadena. They were one of the early attempts at postwar housing that dotted older neighborhoods and were now mostly filled with low-income Mexican immigrants.

There were a few plastic children's toys scattered along the drive. Grass grew in tufts between cracks in the cement. The bungalows needed paint and new roofs. A few bedraggled-looking birds of paradise were planted along the foundation. The wet weather only seemed to heighten the sense that this housing built for returning GIs had seen better days.

Traver looked at the numbers then motioned toward the back.

“He should be in the last one on the right.”

As we walked to the end, I noticed a few curtains pulled
aside and suspicious brown faces watching us pass, before quickly disappearing when it was clear that we weren't there for them. From one of the bungalows came the sweet aroma of pork carnitas slowly roasting in an oven. In two of the others the tinny sound of TVs drifted out through the ill-fitting windows. We walked up to Sweeny's front door. Some yellow-stained shades were drawn over the window next to the door. A wet, pink flyer for carpet cleaning lay on the stoop, the color bleeding onto the damp concrete.

“Don't suppose they get a lot of business here,” Traver said, looking down at the flyer.

I knocked on the door. There was no response, no sound of any movement inside.

“What time was he supposed to be at work at the florist's today?”

“Not till later.”

I knocked again and said, “Police,” and again there was no response.

The mug shot we had from Sweeny's forgery arrest placed him firmly in the everyman category: dark hair, five-eleven, features designed to blend into whatever environment he was in.

“I'm going to walk around and see if there's a back door,” I said and started toward the side of the bungalow.

Traver grabbed the handle of the door and tested it.

“Hey, it's open.”

He pushed it open without stepping in and yelled, “Police!”

Through the side window I saw a white flash that was the ignition point. I started to yell to Dave but it was already too late. The explosion was shaped and directed to kill a person stepping inside. The speed with which my world changed was astonishing. A rush of hot air knocked me sideways, showering me with pieces of glass from the window. As I was falling I looked toward the front of the bungalow and saw Dave disappear in a cloud of dust and debris as the door blew off its hinges, somersaulting across the alley, where it stuck in the wall of the facing bungalow.

And then it was over. Barely the blink of an eye.

I was lying on the wet ground, the bitter taste of dust filling my mouth. Rising up to my knees, I felt the wet trickle of blood down the side of my face and out my nose, which also began to bleed. I reached up and found a nickel-sized piece of glass from the window had penetrated my scalp just above the hairline and was embedded in my skin. Though I wasn't aware of the sound of the blast itself, I was acutely aware of the silence that followed it. It was like a shroud had been placed over everything within the area of the explosion. The air itself felt dead, empty, like the blast had created a lifeless hole in space.

Unsteadily I rose to my feet and looked over at the front of the bungalow. The mist that had been falling had turned to rain as if shaken loose from the force of the explosion. The soft plops of raindrops hitting the ground broke the dull, strange silence. The acrid odor of explosives filled the air. I lost my balance for a moment then righted myself.

One of Dave's brown shoes sat on the first step of the bungalow, its laces still tied in a bow. Dave lay on his back in the middle of the drive, his shoeless foot resting on the other leg, his green sock hanging halfway off his foot like a little kid who had been playing in the yard without his shoes.

I walked over to him and knelt down. His unfocused eyes were open and unmoving. His face was covered in small cuts and thin spidery lines where blood vessels had ruptured from the concussion. Both his arms were outstretched above his head with his sport jacket pulled halfway up each arm. The buttons of his shirt had been blown off and the shirt lay open, exposing his chest. Drops of rain began to wash tiny lines of dust and grit down his stomach.

“Dave?”

If he heard me, he gave no indication. I placed my fingers on his neck until I found the faint rhythm of a pulse. His chest filled weakly with short breaths.

“Dave?” I yelled again.

The white of his right eye flooded with a hemorrhage, turning a bright, crimson red. He blinked several times, then focused on me for a moment as if I had just arrived for a surprise visit.

“Dave, can you hear me?”

A moment of understanding flashed in his eyes.

“There was an explosion. You're hurt.”

His lips moved as he tried to speak, but nothing came out. He tried again and then faintly said, “No shit.”

A frightened Mexican woman in her mid-thirties stepped out of one of the other bungalows.

“Do you speak English?” I yelled.

The woman nodded.