Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

  “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, smil
ing 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.

  “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 t
he 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.