Run the Risk (2 page)

THE YELLOW CRIME
-
SCENE TAPE
was already strung by the time I arrived at Breem's Florist at 1360 East Orange Grove. Four black-and-whites and two motorcycle units were parked on the street. Two of the squads had their yellow flashers working. A uniformed officer recognized me and lifted the tape so I could pull into the small parking lot where there was one more black-and-white, two unmarked squads, and the van from the ME.

As I stepped out of my car I glanced at my watch. 11:19. The scent of jasmine in the air had been replaced by the rich smell of smoked chilies from a taco stand down the block.

“Lieutenant.”

It was a young officer I recognized by the name of Baker, the kind of straight-backed kid who looked like he had come unglued and fallen off a recruiting poster.

“You take the call?”

He nodded.

“Tell me.”

“Received a shots-fired call at . . .”

He checked his notes; Officer Baker was a very thorough note taker.

“. . . Eight thirty-five. I arrived at eight forty-two. I waited two minutes for backup, and then entered. No sign of forced entry. Found the victim in the shipping garage, facedown, deceased from apparent gunshot. I set up a two-block perimeter when other units arrived.”

“And?”

My mind drifted back to the scene in the auditorium when Lacy began opening up with her spray bottle and pageant attendees dove for cover.

“Nothing. Two male Hispanics carrying open containers were detained and released. When I returned inside I found the other owner hiding under a display case.”

“Is he the one who called it in?”

“I haven't checked. He was pretty shook up. Apparently they were robbed and the perps killed his partner.”

There are times I feel like a den mother when I listen to young cops talk like they are on a TV show, and right at that moment I had had enough of being a mother to last me several lifetimes.

“The witness inside?”

“Yeah, Detective Traver took over the scene.”

Thank God for small miracles. I left Officer Baker to his note taking and walked over to the front door. The exterior of the business was cedar with that Big Sur, “I'm in touch with every living thing in the universe” sort of feel. Hanging on the door was a carved wooden sign that read
GREEN IS OUR COLOR
. I glanced at the lock; it was untouched. Print dust covered the handle where the crime-scene investigators had dusted. The salesroom had several large walk-in refrigerated display cases with dozens of different flowers in black plastic pots of water. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers, the roses being particularly distinctive at the moment. And there was another odor, barely detectable but still present, mixing with the fragrances of Dublin Boy and Queen Mother: the acrid smell of spent gunpowder.

“So, how'd she do?”

My partner, Sergeant Dave Traver, was standing in the doorway to the back room. He was a big man: six-foot-one, 220, early thirties, with the exhausted, sunken-eyed look of the father of two-year-old twin girls. He carried himself like a man who had once been an athlete, junior college football, though all evidence of it was becoming fainter and fainter with each passing year. He had a smile on his face like someone about to hear a secret. I think he thought of himself as the Skipper and I was his Little Buddy, even though I was nearly seven years older and his senior on the force.

“She won, didn't she? I can tell by the look on your face.”

“That's not the look you think it is.”

Dave has certain blind spots when it comes to anything to do with kids. The thought that tiny, perfect creatures like his daughters could actually grow up to disappoint, or worse, was beyond his field of vision. It was a trait that made him difficult to dislike, though it was not always an aid in being an effective cop.

“So, come on. Did she do it?”

I pictured people ducking behind seats as Lacy shouted the last words of her beauty pageant career. “You're all killers!”

“She did ‘it' all right.”

Dave's eyes grew as large as silver dollars with excitement. I longed to just walk past him and examine the victim. Some people, civilian people, escape their own lives by going to the ocean or taking long Thoreau-like walks, or jogging until every last ounce of body fat has been sucked dry. I prefer crime scenes. The minutiae of my own life vanishes as soon as I step beyond the yellow tape. There's only the silence of a victim and a story to discover.

I looked through the doorway leading to the shipping room where the violence had occurred. Sanctuary.

“Are you going to tell me?” Traver asked impatiently.

I finally managed to look at him and say it. “She didn't win.”

He seemed to take my reticence as profound disappointment and he put his big arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “She still gets to be in the parade, right?”

There was no way in hell I figured he was ever going to survive twin teenage girls.

I stepped up to the door into the large shipping and receiving area. It was maybe forty by seventy feet, a large roll-up loading door closed at the far end. Four-foot-high stacks of flowers took up most of the available floor space; half appeared to be roses of every imaginable color, the other half, exotic flowers I had no idea even existed. The overhead rows of fluorescent lights drained just a shade or two of color from every flower in the room, giving some of the wild tropical plants the appearance of plastic.

Protruding around the end of a large sorting table stacked with cut roses, the feet of the victim were visible on the concrete floor. He had been wearing sandals and bright orange socks. One of the sandals had fallen off and lay upturned on the floor several feet from him. Winding out through the stacks of flowers, a stream of blood had found the floor drain in the center of the room. Strangely, it was the only thing in the room whose color wasn't muted by the fluorescent lights: a bright red stream working its way downslope to join the shopping carts, plastic bags, and empty milk cartons on their way to the Pacific via the L.A. River.

“Why the hell would you shoot someone wearing orange socks? It's not right,” my partner said.

Traver had an unusual sense of justice that was difficult to disagree with. Looking down at the body, I couldn't imagine what threat someone wearing orange socks could possibly present that would require a bullet to the back of the head.

“You got an ID?”

“Daniel Finley, co-owner.”

I slipped some surgical gloves on, knelt down, and looked over the body. He wore jeans and a yellow polo shirt, the collar stained red with blood. He had sandy-colored hair that was matted with blood over the back of his head where the round had entered his skull. When he had fallen he landed facedown, arms at his sides, breaking his nose so it was pushed to the left side of his face. The streams of blood from both the head wound and the broken nose met about three feet from his body to form the larger stream that flowed to the floor drain. I imagine he never felt the cartilage and bone in his nose snap. The force of the round entering his head had knocked him flush out of one of his sandals as he tried to run from his killer. By the time he hit the floor the last conscious sensation he would have felt was terror, and even that would have been disappearing into the ether.

“Forty-eight years old, married, lives in South Pas.”

I inspected the front of his skull as best I could without touching it.

“No exit wound.”

Traver shook his head. “None that I saw, but I didn't poke around too much. I was thinking thirty-two and it ballooned or splintered inside the skull.”

I leaned in and examined the hole in the back of his head. It was smaller than the tip of my little finger, and I have small hands—it wasn't a .32. It had likely traveled through his head and bounced off the other side of his skull, making mincemeat of his brain in the process.

“Thirty-two's too big. I would guess a twenty-five or a twenty-two.”

“A fifty-dollar popgun,” Traver said.

Three kinds of people use guns like this: gangbangers, addicts, and wealthy white women in gated communities who keep them in their nightstands next to the bed. If I remember correctly, Nancy Reagan kept one in the White House.

“Where's the other owner?” I asked.

“He's sitting in the office.”

I glanced once more around the room to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I noticed another door next to the roll-up marked
FIRE EXIT
that I hadn't noted before.

“Both rear doors locked?”

“Yep.”

Above the door, right up against the ceiling, fifteen, eighteen feet up, nearly obscured in shadow was a small video camera. If I hadn't noticed it in the relative order of a crime scene, then it was a good bet that the shooter may have missed it.

“Do we know if there's tape from the camera?”

Dave glanced up to the corner where the camera hung. It was clearly news to him. He looked like a kid caught stealing cigarettes.

“We're checking.”

We started walking back toward the office. Halfway there I noticed a smile forming on Traver's face.

“Goddamn shadows.”

“Right,” I said.

It was a game we played at crime scenes: who saw this and who missed that. It was harmless and lacked the kind of competitiveness that the same game would hold if played by two men.

“How'd Lacy take it . . . not winning?” Traver asked, sticking the missed camera firmly in the past.

How was she taking it? Jesus. What kind of question is that to ask a mother who had just discovered her daughter lived an entirely different life from the one she had imagined? Not that I actually “imagined” her life at all. She had managed to become a stranger while I stood by and let it happen.

“She took it pretty well,” I said.

“It's quite an honor to be a member of the queen's court. There's important duties and responsibilities. Being a member of the court can lead to things.”

It was the thing I liked most about Traver as a cop. His failures were mostly small ones, and they never penetrated the skin. I should do so well as a mother. I hardly knew
where to think Lacy was headed at that moment, so I didn't try.

“Lacy won't be a member of the court.”

“Of course she will. All the finalists are.”

At the end of a short hallway I could see through an open door to the office. A uniformed officer stood just inside looking bored and tired of baby-sitting the witness. Across the room the other owner was sitting on a small couch, bent over, his head in his hands. He had the physical appearance of a wilting flower slowly sinking to the ground.

I thought of Lacy standing on the queen's float spraying herbicide at parade watchers instead of waving. I thought about trying to tell Dave what had happened in the auditorium, but couldn't find a starting point to explain it to myself, let alone him.

“They changed the rules this year—no court, no float.”

I could feel the outrage in Traver building like a shaken bottle of soda. The skin in his face began to flush. The doting uncle.

“The sons of bitches can't do that!”

Every head within fifty feet turned to see what it was the sons of bitches couldn't exactly do.

“They aren't sons of bitches; they're killers,” I said, smiling for the first time since walking Lacy out of the auditorium.

EVANS BREEM
looked up from his seat on the couch as we walked in and said, “Jesus God, oh, Jesus God.”

He was in his mid-forties with a soft, middle-aged face, green eyes, his brown hair streaked with gray. Even for a man who had just been witness to violence he had the appearance of someone who worried too much. You could see the stress lines around the corners of his eyes. I imagined he had a lot of headaches. Not the picture of a florist that Hallmark sells.

“I should have done something. I should have. We talked about having a gun in the shop, but I was . . .” His focus drifted for a second. “The neighborhood has changed a lot since we started here.”

He looked at us like he had suddenly discovered he wasn't alone.

“I'm sorry, it's just that—”

“I understand,” I said, cutting him off. “Tell me what happened.”

He searched his memory for a moment as if it were a five-hundred-piece puzzle that had just been dumped on the coffee table. I've seen the same look dozens of times at crime scenes. That blank look of “How could this have happened?”

Traver looked at me and then glanced down at his watch. Breem was a man on the edge of coming undone and badly in need of direction.

“Why were you in the shop at night?”

He took a breath and seemed to focus.