by Alan Russell
Flamingo smiled, remembering them. “Red flowers, pink flowers, white flowers.”
Cheever had walked through the gallery’s outdoor garden at least half a dozen times, but he didn’t remember it as fondly as Flamingo. It was rectangularly shaped, about 250 feet by 200 feet. Flamingo was right about there being plenty of flowers, but there was also an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped by concertina wire. Bonnie’s killer had caught up with her in that garden. She was already wounded, probably running when she was grabbed from behind by the hair and her throat slashed. The crime scene told them that, if little else. Maybe Bonnie had thought she could hide in the garden, or maybe there hadn’t been any other place to run. Perhaps she chose to die among her flowers.
“Who’s going to water them flowers, Captain?”
Cheever shrugged. “Maybe it will rain.”
Flamingo looked up to the sky briefly, doubtfully.
“I’ll check on the flowers,” said Cheever.
“Thank you, Captain.”
Cheever wondered whether Flamingo had served in the military. The Navy had brought millions of men through San Diego; Cheever was one of many who had stayed. He reached into his wallet, found a five-dollar bill, and handed it to Flamingo along with his card. “If you hear anything, anything at all, I’d like you to call me.”
Flamingo offered something that resembled a salute, and Cheever returned the gesture.
TEAM IV WAS scheduled to meet at headquarters at five o’clock. For most of the day the four detectives and one sergeant had worked the field alone to get in as many interviews as possible. Cheever’s last scheduled appointment was with Reuben Martinez at his auto repair shop. He had talked with him the night before, but only briefly. Martinez was the block captain for the neighborhood watch and was in the habit of driving around the area each night. He had noticed Bonnie’s car on the street and the too dark gallery. From experience, Martinez knew Bonnie liked to spotlight her business. He had called the police at ten thirty, and they had responded before eleven. Early indications were that she had already been dead for several hours.
Martinez was on the phone at a metal desk shoved off in a corner of the shop. He was short, no more than five and a half feet tall, but stocky, with large, strong hands. There were tattoos on his arms, mostly military in nature. He was in his forties, his hair salt and pepper, though his thick mustache was still a dark black.
“So I can put you down for a thousand bucks?” he asked, tapping the desk with his fingers.
There seemed to be some resistance to that amount. “Listen,” said Martinez, “it’s not like there’s any guarantee you’re going to have to cough up that money. But we got to show we’re serious. Adams said he’d match whatever we came up with, up to twenty-five grand.”
He listened to the reply, rolled his eyes to show the detective what he thought about it. “Yeah, I know it’s easier for him to come up with the scratch, but we’re the ones doing business here. It’s our turf. So I can count on you for a grand? Good.”
Martinez finished the conversation, wrote down some numbers, then wondered aloud how he’d become the “damned community chest.”
“That’s the term, isn’t it?” he asked Cheever. “Community chest? Sounds like a strip club, but I remember it from Monopoly. It’s that card where the guy’s happily giving away money. Two hundred bucks, I think. Ever notice how people are a lot freer with Monopoly money?”
“What’s the fund-raiser?”
“Bonnie Gill’s the fund-raiser,” Martinez said. “We’ve started the Carnation Fund. You know what they say: money talks and bullshit walks. We’re looking for any information that nails the fucker, you know. That’s the kind of thing Bonnie would have organized, but since she’s not around anymore the rest of us are trying to do it.”
“How’s it going?”
“Nobody doing business around here has said no yet. That tells you something. We’re going to be dangling a carrot that’s got fifty grand written on it. That ought to make people remember, if anything will.”
And probably generate more false leads than there were Lindbergh baby sightings, thought Cheever.
“How’s your work goin’?” asked Martinez.
“So far no one’s given me a good reason for Bonnie Gill to be dead.”
“Reason?” Martinez laughed. “A crazy man don’t need no reason to do somethin’. The zoo’s not in Balboa Park, man. It’s right here.”
“How long did you know Bonnie?”
“Since she opened the gallery. Almost five years. I thought it was a joke when I heard an art gallery was moving in. I said the only gallery that belonged in this neighborhood was a shooting gallery. But she made it work. How the hell Bonnie did it, I’ll never know. She even got me to buy a couple of paintings.”
Martinez shook his head, looked like he had half a mind to beat up on the smashed Camaro he was working on. The garage was small, couldn’t accommodate more than three wrecks at a time, which was two more than were there.
“Last night you said you’d served on some groups with Bonnie.”
“Yeah. You didn’t say no to her.”
“What kind of projects did she involve you in?”
“Business outreach, help the neighborhood bums, stuff like that. ReinCarnation Foundation do-gooding.”
“Did anyone around here have reason to dislike Bonnie? To want to hurt her?”
He shook his head without having to think: “No.”
“Sometimes there’s resentment against activists.”
“Hey, it’s not like some people didn’t think Bonnie’s ideas weren’t a little out there, but who’d be dumb enough to kill the fucking golden goose?”
“What do you mean?”
“Bonnie was trying to make things happen. She wasn’t just prettying up the neighborhood. The foundation, and her arts and crafts classes, kept bringing in outsiders with money. She had us talking together, trying to do stuff, and she kept coming up with these ideas of what could be. Lotta dreams died with Bonnie.”
His tone was angry, but his hands reached out for a cleaned-up oil can that held a bunch of cut carnations. It was the first time Cheever had ever seen flowers in a garage. The carnations were starting to wilt, and Cheever wondered if they would ever be replaced.
CHEEVER LOOKED OUT from his fourth-floor window down to the Edutek Professional Colleges on Fifteenth Street. The industrial building didn’t offer much of a view. Or maybe, Cheever realized, he brought his own gray landscapes to whatever he looked at. Over the years the names had changed on the building, though it had remained one land of vocational school or another. Cheever had seen the students filing in and had wondered what kind of careers they were being trained for. Sometimes he pictured himself joining one of the new classes and learning another vocation. It was a pleasant fantasy.
Except for Team IV, the homicide division was deserted. Most homicide detectives went home by four o’clock, but in the early stages of a case detectives were expected to work round the clock, if necessary for days without a break. Circadian rhythms went to hell and stayed that way. The cycles could be debilitating. Cheever knew some detectives who no longer knew how to fall asleep, only how to pass out.
From appearances, no one on Team IV looked like they would have any trouble falling asleep. The detectives sat at their desks yawning. They were tired, weren’t even sustained by the adrenaline of a lead. Cheever had the feeling this wasn’t going to be an easy one. The Kid must have been thinking the same thing.
“Gotta believe in that needle, right, Cheever?”
Cheever didn’t say anything at first, just looked at the Kid, made him sweat a little. The Kid’s real name was Cory Lincoln. He offered his question while styling his short dark hair with an Afro comb. The Kid was good-looking, but not as good-looking as he thought he was. The Kid spent most of his spare time working at weights. He had been with the team for a year, was the new guy on the block, at age thirty-four the youngest of all the
homicide detectives, which meant that most of the time Cheever treated him like a puppy not quite housebroken.
“Faith,” said Cheever in a monotone that suggested he was lacking in the same.
Jacoba Diaz and Will Hayes, the other two detectives on Team IV, turned their heads to Cheever in the expectation of his continuing. Cheever met their eyes, but didn’t immediately say anything. Not for the first time he thought the other detectives could have come out of Hollywood casting, with skin colors of black and brown and white. Cheever had made that observation aloud before: What’s black, brown, white, and red? Homicide Team IV working a murder. And where did he fit into the equation? The token old guy, he supposed.
They were still looking his way. The hell with all of them, he thought. It was his own fault, though. It served him right for having tried to explain something to the Kid.
In a tired voice Cheever said, “A needle in the haystack doesn’t mean the impossible. It just means something’s waiting to be discovered.”
Cheever hadn’t told the Kid that’s why most detectives didn’t last in homicide. The Kid would probably understand better when he put in for his own transfer in two or three years. Most detectives didn’t last more than five years in homicide, about the time Cheever figured it took them to get half decent in their work. To be a good homicide detective required unnatural patience. That’s what the Kid still needed to learn. A good homicide detective never rushed a case. You had to learn to be methodical, to almost work a case in slow motion. As if you were looking for that needle.
“You becoming one of those mystics, Cheever?” Will Hayes asked the question with a sneer. Hayes looked like a walrus, and that’s what they called him. He had a mustache that was long and brown and drooped southward. His face was meaty and red, making him look older than his forty-odd years.
Cheever didn’t answer. He went back to gazing out the window, looking at the vocational school and thinking about that different career, wondering how his life would have turned out if he had been a plumber or an electrician. Probably not too different, he thought. It wasn’t that he needed a new job so much as a course on being a new person.
The room became quiet again. In the days preceding their current case everyone on the team had been antsy, the result of having been “up” on the rotation for a week. Their call had been overdue and the anticipation had gotten to them. They weren’t ghoulish, no more than a firefighter who scans the horizon looking for a wisp of smoke. They were trained to do a unique job. In a department with close to two thousand sworn officers, less than forty worked homicide. They had wanted the case, God help them.
Sergeant Falconi walked into the work area and sat down in his chair with a loud sigh. Everyone was eighteen-hours tired, him included. SDPD homicide sergeants work the case with their team. It was the sergeant’s turn to be the “crime scene guy,” which meant he was in charge of all the paperwork and had to work with the evidence tech documenting and collecting evidence. The scene guy also had to attend the autopsy, which was scheduled for the next morning.
Falconi stretched out, and the motion threatened to break his chair. He was a big man. A few people had made the mistake of thinking he was a fat man. He reminded Cheever of a forty-five-year-old Jackie Gleason. The extra pounds were a part of him. He had the coordination and grace of a slim man, but the heft of someone who knew how to throw around his more than two hundred pounds whenever the situation called for it.
“Lots of phone calls going on today,” Falconi said. “Rollo Adams called the mayor, who called the chief, who called the captain, who called the lieutenant, who called me into his office.”
“Enter Rollo,” said the Kid, “and the brass follow.”
Everybody knew the name. It was hard not to with as many buildings as it had been splashed on. Adams was a developer who had seemingly been involved with every major downtown building project in the last ten years.
“Rollo was friends with Bonnie Gill,” Falconi said. “Lots of people were. No one likes it when a saint dies.”
“Church doesn’t mind,” said the Walrus.
“Takes the church a long time to figure out who’s a saint and who isn’t,” Jacoba said. If anyone knew what was entailed in canonization proceedings, she would. Jacoba wasn’t a stereotypical detective. She was in her late thirties, had thick glasses, put her dark hair up in a bun, and was soft spoken. The glitter-crusted prayer card and family pictures that decorated her workstation reflected her concern for God and family first—but murder was a close second.
“We got an easier job,” Cheever said. “We just have to figure out who the devil is.”
Their talk sounded flat, even to them, but that didn’t stop Jacoba from crossing herself at his comment.
“Show-and-tell time, kiddies,” Falconi said. “Show-and-tell.”
Falconi looked to the Kid, a cue for him to talk. “Like you say, Bonnie Gill’s got lots of friends, and a few of them are rich.”
“Best kind to have,” the Walrus said.
“They’re mad and they’re organized,” the Kid said. “They’ve already put together something called the Carnation Fund. Rollo Adams has gone public telling everyone that the fund’s offering at least fifty thousand for any information leading to the conviction of Bonnie Gill’s murderer.”
If justice couldn’t be bought, you could at least grease the skids. Cheever listened to the tired voices, and when his turn came he covered his day. Though everyone was exhausted, it was clear that this one mattered. When Cheever had first started working homicide, there had been a term for lowlife murders: NHI—no humans involved. No one got too worked up over the death of a gangbanger, or a hooker, or a dealer. They worked the case—their way of doing justice to the dead or at least the system—but they really didn’t care because they knew the victim had chosen to live out on the edge and had just paid the consequences.
The death of a Bonnie Gill struck closer to home. She could have been a wife, or a friend, or a lover, or a sister.
“Midnight,” Falconi said, interrupting Cheever’s musing. He studied the detectives. “Hayes and Diaz, you got the call tonight. Start at the gallery and work the interviews four blocks out.”
“Shit,” said the Walrus, “I better wear a body condom.”
Jacoba didn’t say anything. It made sense for her to be out there, but she got stuck with more than her share of neighborhood interviews because of her bilingual abilities. They called her the “cómo se llama mama.” Because San Diego’s a border town, almost half of its homicide cases called for someone fluent in Spanish.
The assignments and areas of concentration for the next day were discussed and divvied. Tomorrow they’d work some more angles and pound some more pavement. And hope. For a phone call, for a break. Maybe Cal ID would match one of the fingerprints on the scene with some notorious felon. Or maybe, thought Cheever, pigs would fly.
Falconi made it a short show-and-tell. Hayes and Diaz needed to get some sleep before they went out that night. The team had turned the stones and looked under them, and were going to turn some more, but not today. Falconi dismissed everyone by saying, “Get some sleep.” It wasn’t something he had to tell them.
Cheever’s phone rang. He looked at it suspiciously before picking it up. Phone calls at the end of a long day were usually best avoided. “Detective Cheever.”
“This is O’Brien.” He was the officer working the desk. “You got a visitor. Name of Holly Troy. You want me to let her up?”
Cheever’s eyes dropped to an athletic bag on the floor. Holly Troy’s. She’d left it at the gallery, had up and disappeared right after he’d yelled at her. Cheever had turned away for a moment and she’d been gone. He’d thought about leaving the bag at the gallery, but had decided to take it with him for safekeeping. And because he was curious about what was inside. The bag was filled with black clothing, men’s and women’s. There also were several black wigs. Color seemed to be the only thing the items had in common.
/> Officer O’Brien cleared his throat. He was still waiting for his answer. Civilians couldn’t gain entrance to headquarters, or homicide’s fourth floor, without clearing their visit with a uniform in the lobby. For some reason, Cheever didn’t feel like letting the sculptor see his domain.
“No,” Cheever said. “I’ll come downstairs.”
He took his time putting some paperwork in order and was the last detective to leave the office. Bag in hand, Cheever hummed the line from “Amazing Grace” about being lost and then found, and took the elevator downstairs. The words were for the bag, not him.
She had her back turned to him, was looking out the glass doors toward the fountain. Besides the uniform behind the desk, there were only two other people in the lobby. When Holly turned and faced him, Cheever was surprised, although he tried not to show it. She had a shawl over her two-tone hair that tempered her look, made her appear almost nunlike. Her face was freshly scrubbed, pink. He had seen her in jeans and a T-shirt that morning, but now she was wearing a white dress with a high collar. Her earrings were gone, and so was all of her jewelry, save for her medical alert bracelet. She looked naked without her trinkets, and must have felt it. Her arms were held tightly over her breasts, shielding them as if they were exposed.
“Detective Cheever,” she said.
Even her voice was different. It was higher. And beseeching. That wasn’t the kind of tone he had figured was in Holly Troy’s repertoire.
When she dropped to her knees Cheever was even more surprised. She reached her hands up and said, “Detective Cheever, I do care.”
Everything going on in the lobby stopped. All was quiet. Everyone was watching them.
“I care,” she said, bowing her head and resting it against his legs.
Her hunched-over pose revealed a bloody stain on her upper back. She tilted her neck back and looked up at him. There was a second red stain, this one under her collar. Cheever carefully reached down, loosened two buttons, and gently pulled her collar back. There was a slight wound on her neck, what looked to be a laceration. The injury was bleeding, beginning to redden the front of her dress.
