The Flower Girl

by Ronald Watkins

  Jared had been apprehended a short distance from the church when he darted in front of a speeding car, a policeman’s. When stopped for a routine warning he had denied doing anything “at the church” even though the officer had said nothing about the as yet unreported incident. When questioned after the minister called the police the boy had vehemently denied his quilt, both parents supporting him. The father retained a prominent local attorney, Alexander Burgoyne, while the investigation was ongoing.

  The highly emotional woman had been shaky in her identification and so the case was formally adjudicated in juvenile court with Jared receiving probation until his eighteenth birthday, seven months later. The prosecutor had feared, no doubt, that Burgoyne would tear their victim apart on the stand.

  While on probation, three weeks from age eighteen and adulthood, Jared had approached another flower girl, this time offering her money for sex. When he had persisted she had flagged a policeman who warned Jared away, wrote the incident off and shot it over to Juvenile Probation. The D.R, did not indicate disposition but Killian knew no action had been taken. It had been too minor and the boy was too close to eighteen anyway.

  Eight months later Jared was arrested for Aggravated Assault, the offense for which he was on adult probation. He had been spotted by a patrolman attempting to force a young female hitchhiker into his car. His family had retained Alexander Burgoyne again and Jared received three years’ probation with court ordered psychiatric counseling.

  Killian found the last D.R. the most interesting of all. Jared had bothered a third flower girl just six months before. She had complained that he had approached her for flowers. Then he had offered money for sex and when she refused had touched her breast. No charges were filed. Killian wondered why Worthington had taken no action since the subject had been on probation at the time.

  The guy has bad luck, Killian thought. Twice policemen had been virtually at the scene of the crime. Bad luck or he is very careless, Killian reconsidered. Also, Jared Pratt never admitted his involvement in any crime. Never. Offenders usually copped at least sometimes. Jared never had.

  This last incident with the flower girl confirmed something Killian had begun to notice. It had occurred only one block from the location of the first flower girl episode three years earlier, two blocks from the second incident two years before and one block over from the Presbyterian church where the secretary had been assaulted.

  All three times the flower girls had been on the same street, no more than three blocks apart.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Worthington was disturbed with Killian's information. "You mean to tell me that this clown pawed a flower girl in public, she complained to the police who prepared a Departmental Report and no one notified me?" he asked, irritation strong in his voice.

  "Looks that way," Killian said. He glanced about the small office crammed with two desks, pale green press wood walls only six feet high, hardly more than divides providing little privacy.

  "Well, I ought to be used to it by now but the police department has a notice requesting them to forward any new reports on our probationers to us," Worthington said pinching the bridge of his nose, glasses on desk.

  "Let me look at his record again." Worthington glanced through the D.R.'s and F.I. cards. "It certainly doesn't look good. I never knew anything about the F.I. card incidents because that information isn't sent over on our routine checks." Worthington stared at the cards and reports. "Is the dead girl in the desert a flower girl?" he asked at last.

  "We don't know," Killian replied.

  "You know something?" Worthington said. "If it turns out that girl sold flowers then..." He didn't finish the sentence.

  Killian stared steadily at the Probation Officer. "That's what I was thinking."

  ~

  Killian thought about it and decided a direct approach was probably best. He found, not surprisingly, that there was no listing in the phone book for the flower girl business. He asked around and learned that following a city council fight two years before only one operation sold flowers from city street corners. No one knew who ran it.

  Killian drove up to the street corner. The flower girl smiled brightly against the humid heat and bright sun as she approached his unmarked police car. "Want some flowers?" she asked. She looked eighteen and was only a trifle chunky. She was well tanned and had startling green eyes. Her smile was guileless.

  "No thanks, maybe later when I go out. They'd wilt now." When he showed his gold badge, her smile faded but was not replaced with fear or anger. Killian climbed out of the car and the two of them moved to the slender shade of the light pole to talk.

  "Do you know any of the other flower girls?"

  "A few," the pretty girl shrugged. "They change all the time, you know."

  Killian nodded "Have any you've known disappeared in the last two weeks?"

  "No. One went to California but I wouldn't call that disappearing."

  Killian smiled. "I'd like to talk to the owner," he said. "Do you know where I could locate him?"

  "No-o, but be here at seven and you'll see him. That's about when he picks me up."

  Killian nodded. "O.K. I'll come back a little before seven." He got all the way to his car door when he remembered what he had failed to ask. He looked to the girl. "The owner. What's his name," he called.

  She squinted back, then, "Bud. I don't know the rest."

  ~

  Her name was Chris and she told Bud she was eighteen. When Bud picked her up at the bus station eleven days before he had taken her to be about fifteen or sixteen years old though admittedly a little more developed than most at that age.

  Chris would turn fifteen in one month.

  Nevertheless, at fourteen she possessed streetwise sophistication the equal of someone several years her senior, all cloaked in an outward shell that appeared pert, cute and virginal. Chris was a user accustomed to the ways of her world with the morals of an alley cat, the loyalty of a hooker and the absorption of one totally concerned with self.

  Still, she was only fourteen and vulnerable in many ways, though not to one such as Bud. She had gone with him to the Ranch that first night but six months in a commune along the Klamath River in northern California had taught her a great deal and she had until this past weekend successfully avoided Bud and his macho machinations.

  The other three girls now at the Ranch, one having left for San Diego Saturday, did not like Chris which suited her perfectly. She didn't like them either, finding them vain, self-centered and catty. In short, she saw in them her own most prominent character traits.

  Saturday night at last she had allowed Bud to take her to his bed. He had been elated at success after struggling with her for a week and her performance had left him intoxicated. Chris now sat beside Bud in the van, hand resting on his right thigh as she smoked a cigarette. I wonder how much he's got, she thought smiling up at him sweetly.

  Work was terrible, sales down, absenteeism high, but Bud was ecstatic at his success with Chris. He had been a fool to think her a virgin, he thought. It's so much better this way. He saw her smile up at him, sucked in his stomach, nonchalantly glancing down at her as he did.

  A piece of cake, a fuckin' piece of cake, Chris thought as the van arrived for the pickup.

  ~

  Killian had returned to the street corner at six-thirty, sat in the shaded heat of the abandoned service station and listened to a losing Dodger ball game, sipping a cardboard container of orange juice.

  He watched the flower girl struggling with her final sales as the rush hour traffic was replaced by men going home late or those leaving for an early date. Killian saw the girl still had many bundles left. The one he bought when he arrived lay in the back seat. He doubted if it would be presentable when he went to Rachel's later.

  Killian watched the dusty van wheel into the asphalt parking area and lurch to a stop, the boyish driver springing from the vehicle and sweeping up the unsold flowers, his manner hurried and impat
ient. As the detective approached Killian raised his initial assessment of age from early twenties to late twenties and upon closer examination still again to mid-thirties. Shit, he thought, this guy’s older than I am.

  "I'd like a talk with you," he said showing his badge to Bud who swallowed then smiled slightly. "Sure, but I'm kind of in a hurry."

  "This will only take a minute."

  Killian walked a short distance from the van, confident Bud would follow. He did.

  "What's your name?" Killian asked.

  "What's this about?" Bud asked pointedly.

  "Routine. What's your name?" Killian repeated.

  "Bud Everhart."

  "What's your full name?"

  Bud swallowed again. "Martin, it's Martin Joseph Everhart but I go by Bud."

  "Let me see your driver’s license." Reluctantly Bud produced it. "How long have you been in the flower business here?"

  "Oh, I don't know. About five years, I guess. What's this about? I've got my license and permits for all my locations."

  Killian ignored the question. "Where do you get your girls from?"

  Bud shrugged. "They come to me. Sometimes from the paper."

  Killian had observed the four girls in the van, noting that two of them were probably under aged.

  "Are they local girls mostly or transients?"

  Bud was more confident now. "How would I know? I don't ask their life history." He looked down at his license still in Killian's hand.

  "Do you keep records of your employees?"

  "Naw. What for? They work straight commission and come and go so often no one stays long enough for me to keep many written records. Look, I gotta go, I got others to pick up." Bud was impatient now.

  "You pick your employees up every day?"

  "Yeah. Some of them. Some just show up and I drop the flowers off."

  Killian nodded his head reluctant to ask, knowing the response already judging from Bud's attitude thus far. "Did any of your girls disappear suddenly on you about two weeks ago?"

  Bud blinked, took a deeper than usual breath and casually replied, "Naw. Nothing like that. One left for California over this weekend, that's all."

  "Have any of your girls complained about being bothered by anyone?"

  "Naw, I gotta go."

  Killian handed the license back and followed Bud to the van, walking along the passenger side passed the hostile glare of the occupants. A pretty, petulant blond with deep blue eyes stared boldly at him. Fifteen going on forty, he thought. He was still standing beside the van as it drove hurriedly off.

  ~

  Tension had grown over the weekend in the Pratt's household. Jared determinedly avoiding his father, Viola spending most of her time at the country club. Herbert rather uncharacteristically remained home, guzzling beer, stalking about the house, unshaven, foul tempered.

  Saturday night he vented his rage against his son, bodily tossing him out the kitchen door screaming that he would kill the boy if he ever stepped into the house again.

  Jared slept in the backyard.

  Monday morning, thirteen days after the discovery of the desert corpse, Viola and Jared moved his things into the original garage converted by the previous owner into a cottage. Although fallen into disuse, everything required functioned and by late afternoon Jared moved his car from the front street, around the corner and down the dirt alley where he parked it against the back wall of his new quarters.

  Viola cleaned and scrubbed, making the small bed up with fresh white sheets. The cottage had a small kitchen arrangement but except for plugging the noisy refrigerator in, no attempt was made to restore it.

  "You can still eat up at the house," Viola said. "I'll bring you some cokes and snacks to keep here."

  "What about Dad?" Jared mumbled.

  "I don't know, I just don't know. Stay out of his way. You can see when his truck's gone. Come up then. He wasn't very happy to hear I'd put you out here but I don't believe he'll cause more trouble."

  Viola looked at her son and wondered as she had almost every day since his birth what was wrong with him. She had been a reluctant mother and holding her frail, quiet, immobile child in her arms at the hospital had actually frightened her. He had kept himself apart from her even then, never cooing or giggling or causing a fuss. He had been as an infant what he was as an adult, a quiet, withdrawn individual, different from others, sullen and odd. Motherhood gave Viola no joy.

  Jared looked about the cottage indifferent to his mother's attempt to clean it up. He looked at the cardboard boxes on the linoleum and found himself pleased. When his father had bodily thrown him from the house Jared had feared he could never return. Certainly that had seemed his father's intent. Now in the oleander shrouded cottage with its private alley access he realized he would at last have the privacy he had heretofore lacked.

  Jared said nothing to his mother as she left for the home. He turned the television on to kill the silence and started emptying the boxes. He pulled a pair of feminine underwear from a pillow case, smelled it slightly before placing it under his own pillow in the new bed. Laying on the freshly made bed he stared at the ceiling, anxious and with increasing uneasiness.

  ~

  At four thirty-five Detective Lawrence Graff stacked his last bicycle theft report into the out box, marked “exceptionally cleared”, meaning he did not believe anyone would be apprehended with any reasonable prospect of successful prosecution.

  All of his old homicide cases were cleared now, all but the desert case. No leads had come in and lacking anything, absolutely anything to go on, he saw nothing left to do with the case. Tomorrow would make two weeks since he had seen the body and as he had known that day, the case was a dead end.

  He had written the latest brief supplemental to have typed and attached to the original departmental report. It couldn't close the case because officially unsolved homicides were never closed. Unofficially they ceased being assigned to anyone after a time and until a break occurred were for all intents, closed.

  Graff glanced at his watch, shifting slightly in the hard seat. Four forty-eight. Early but what the hell, he thought, getting up to go. Fuck 'em, fuck 'em all.

  ~

  Rachel placed the wilted carnations into a crystal vase, the one her grandmother had presented her on her sixteenth birthday and went to check dinner. Killian relaxed on the sofa, content just to be in out of the heat and in the company of Rachel.

  "So what are you working now?" he called out. Beside him was the largest fichus he had ever seen, reaching tree-like to the ceiling. How the hell does she do it, he asked himself since all his plants routinely died within a month.

  "Swing," she shouted back, walking into the living room, a white wine in two canister glasses, thick with crushed ice. Rachel wore a thin embroidered cotton Mexican dress without undergarments. He thought he detected a slight wave of perfume as she sat beside him.

  "Patrol just like the last sixteen months," she finished. "It's alright. Usually interesting." She sipped the wine looking at him approvingly over his selection. "Nice," she complemented.

  "I never liked patrol very much," Killian admitted. "I always wanted plainclothes and made the switch as quickly as I could."

  "I can understand that," she said. "It gets monotonous and what excitement there is tends to be the same kind over and over." She was thoughtful a moment then said, "It's hard."

  "Police work?"

  "Yeah. But not the work really. What it does to you. Like my divorce. I married a cop and when the department opened up for women I was one of the first to be accepted. My husband liked his job and I thought I would too." She looked at him questionably. "Do you want to hear this?"

  Killian nodded.

  "The first year was terrible. We never worked the same shift or even had the same days off. He'd get up just as I came in. What little time together we had was spent in bed because there were precious few opportunities for sex as it was. We became strangers that year. Good in bed but neve
r talking or just being together. Then we received the same shift and it was worse. All day or night it was police work than home to my cop husband and more police talk. Two years of living and breathing police work every day. I knew one of us had to quit but by then I liked my job more than I liked him. That's not a very nice thing to say, is it?"

  "It happens," Killian replied.

  "So what do I do? I have an affair with my married sergeant. Stupid. I was lucky to get out of it with my job. Who would have thought I could be that dumb?" Pause. "My divorce went alright. It was harder on him than me. It's always harder for the one who doesn't want it. I transferred away from the sergeant and vowed no more cops.

  "So why am I seeing you?" she asked.