The Rabbit Factory (11 page)

"You're late. Should I start without you?" she said, laughing sexily.

"I have to cancel." It was the voice inside my head talking, but the words came out of my mouth, and, through the magic of wireless technology, went straight to her ear. "You breaking our date?" She sounded surprised. Not nearly as surprised as I was. "You working a night shift?" "No," I said, then added lamely, "family problems." "You got yourself a girlfriend, don't you?" I could tell she was smiling.

"No way."

"But you're working on it." She was enjoying this.

I didn't answer. I wasn't even sure I knew the answer.

"Hey, baby, I'm cool with it," she said.

"How's our college student doing?" I asked, changing the subject.

"Two As, two Bs, and he's writing a sports column for the school paper. I might apply to college myself. Could you write

me a reference?"

"Honey, I could write you a reference that would fog their glasses and get you a four-year scholarship." "You sure you wanna break this date? Sounds to me like you still got pussy on the brain." "I'll get over it," I said. We hung up, and for the rest of the ride home I tried to block the whole long day from my thoughts. But every now and then the voice inside my head would say, "Don't forget, you promised Big Jim you'd call Diana."

I made the trip back from Big Jim's about three minutes shy of my personal-best door-to-door time. Speeding without fear of catching hell is one of the perks of being a cop. I turned into my driveway and automatically looked down at the clock on the dash.

Joanie had this little game she invented called Dashboard Poker. Whenever you get to your destination, you look at your car's digital clock and make a poker hand out of the numbers. There's no winning or losing, but a good hand means the stars are lining up in your favor. You're not allowed to plot your arrival time. It has to be completely random.

I arrived home at thirty-four minutes after midnight. The eerie green digits that the Acura designers had foolishly thought only served to tell time glowed happily with the good news that I had just been dealt a four-card straight: 1, 2, 3, 4, all lined up in a row. According to Joanie's rules, the better your poker hand, the greater your reward, so I knew excellent things were in store for me. Maybe Elkins's killer would be sitting in my kitchen, cuffed to the table, writing out his confession.

Joanie wasn't a mystic or a kook or any of those other labels we give people who don't rigorously follow the Accepted Path of Logic and Reason. Like millions of other perfectly sane people, she believed there are powers beyond the observable physical world. She would read our horoscopes daily, knock on wood whenever the occasion called for it, and was always on the lookout for Signs From God. So Dashboard Poker became much more than a game. To Joanie, it was one of God's many ways of communicating with us. G-mail.

Joanie had more than a passing need to hear from God. She desperately wanted a baby. Each month as her unfertilized eggs would drop, and the blood and the tears would flow from her body, she would pray for God's blessings and ask for His help. Some nights I would see her kneeling at her bedside, the angelic little Catholic girl, hands clasped, her lips moving in silent prayer. Other times she would storm out of the bathroom, the EPT strip in her hand unmistakably negative, and she'd thrust it up to the heavens and yell, "Thank you, God, but this is not the fucking sign I was asking for."

Eventually, we turned to one of God's helpers on earth, Kristian Kraus, fertility doctor to the stars. His patients adored him, and from the moment you met him, you knew why. Kraus was about sixty, with silver hair, a golden tan, and blue eyes that radiated compassion, understanding, and most of all, hope.

But being a trained detective, I could see beyond the Marcus Welby facade. The man reeked of money. His suit cost more than my car. His Ferrari in the parking lot cost more than my house. And according to Joanie's estimate, he also had about $200,000 worth of limited-edition prints. And that was just in his waiting room. We were never invited to his home in Hancock

Park or the beach house in Malibu.

The receptionist handed us a horse-choking bill after our "initial consultation," which is an expensive way of saying "first visit." On the drive home I gently asked Joanie if we really needed this pricey a doctor. "No," she said. "There's another guy who works out of the Kmart on La Cienega. Let's take the bus down there tomorrow and check him out." The subject was closed.

There was one wall in Kraus's office that had no expensive art. Just pictures of expensive babies. Girl babies, boy babies, fat babies, wrinkled babies, twin babies, triplet babies, black babies, Asian babies, and of course, hundreds of silver-spoon in-the-mouth, money-up-the-wazoo, rich white babies. Some of the kids posed with stuffed animals, some with real dogs, and some with easily identifiable People Magazine cover parents. In the middle of all those photos was a large plaque that read KrisHan's Miracles.

The wall was sacred, and every seat in the waiting room faced it. You sat there for never less than an hour, and the wall spoke to you. "This is what you're here for, folks. See how easy it is? We do it every day." To me it said, Did you see Dr. Kraus's . platinum Rolex and his ostrich-leather wing tips? Those are just some of the many things he spends your money on. This wall is dedicated to you. Thank you for your contribution.

After six visits that included poking, probing, sperm collecting, and various other procedures that were an amalgam of humiliation and comic relief, the good doctor announced his conclusions. "You appear to be in that very small category of couples where the tests are basically," he paused to clear his honeyed-voice throat, "inconclusive."

The fucker couldn't find a thing wrong with either of us. He was, he consoled us, terribly, terribly disappointed to put us through all those tests and come up with no definitive diagnosis. But not so disappointed that he didn't cash our checks. His best advice was don't give up. Keep trying for another six months, and if you don't get pregnant, we should consider in vitro. By "we" he meant me, Joanie, and our checkbook.

One night, during our Just-Keep-Trying-For-Good-Old Doctor-Kraus Phase, I got home around 9 p.m. I had just pulled my fourth sixteen-hour stakeout in a row, and I was cop-weary. I shucked my clothes in a heap on the floor and my body in a second heap on our bed. This is where my memory gets fuzzy, but I do remember bits and pieces of it. I had to rely on Joanie to fill me in on the finer points the next day.

Apparently two hours after I hit the pillow, she came home from a PTA meeting. Joanie taught third grade and loved it. She gently nudged me out of REM until she was convinced I had achieved a minimal state of auditory awareness. I, of course, couldn't hear shit.

"I had a rotten night," she said. "Suzie Dilallo's parents came directly from a cocktail party, and they were both half-sloshed. Doreen Riggins's father got so excited when I told him how well his daughter was doing in math that he threw his hands up and knocked over my diet Coke and spilled it on my next five reports." She waited for my usual husbandly concerned response. Getting none, she put her mouth to my ear. "Are you even listening to me?"

Technically I was listening, but I had not yet reached the stage where I could decipher. Her gentle nudging became aggressive prodding and quickly escalated into serious pum

--

120 --

meling. Somewhere short of assault and battery, my brain opened up for business, and I managed to grumble, "Mmm, lis'ning." "I'm sick and tired of going to PTA meetings as a T," she said. "I want to go as a 'P.' All the way driving home, I was totally bummed, and then bam! I pulled into our driveway at exactly eleven minutes after eleven. Four aces, right there on the dashboard clock. It's the best hand you can get, so I know God has something spectacular planned for me." "Hope you win the Lotto," I mumbled, still not opening my eyes.

"I'm ovulating, and I was thinking maybe a big handsome man would make mad passionate love to me and get me pregnant," she said. '"Morrow," I said. "Inna morning."

"Dashboard Poker payoffs don't carry over to the next day," she explained as if I were coherent enough to comprehend the rules. "Go way. Penis sleeping," I said.

"I have ways of arousing penises from their slumber," she said.

Indeed she did. The next day she told me that I had dozed off several times in the middle. I apologized. "No apologies required," she said. "It was very tender, very different. No heavy breathing. Just snoring." I still think dashboard clocks contain messages from above, but that night four aces wasn't a winning hand.

I parked the Acura, turned off the ignition, and the 12:34 faded into oblivion. As I walked up to the front door I found myself singing "OP Man River." It's one of my all-time favorites and whenever my ass is dragging, I like to dig into the real

soulful part about Ah gets weary. I always assumed it was an old Negro spiritual. Until my third date with Joanie. We were in her kitchen making pasta and small talk, when I heard "O1" Man River" coming from her stereo. I would never have had the balls to do it with any other woman, but I grabbed the slotted spoon, turned it into a microphone, and sang along to the best of my limited Caucasian ability.

"And now I discover yet another facet of Detective Lomax," she said, applauding and kissing me on the cheek. "He does show tunes."

It was the first time she had kissed me so spontaneously, as if we were a couple who gave little cheek kisses all the time. I made a check mark on my mental scorecard and wondered if kitchen kissing could lead to bedroom kissing, which had been on my agenda since Day One, but which was as yet unchecked. It took me a few seconds to return to earth and realize that I couldn't process her post-kiss comment. "What do you mean 'show tunes'?" I said.

"That song is from Showboat. Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. If you eat all your pasta like a good boy, I'll buy you the album."

I stared at her in all my cultural ignorance. "It's a show tune?"

"Don't be upset," she said. "Just because you can sing show tunes doesn't necessarily mean you're gay." Then she turned the burner off under the pasta, removed the spoon from my hand and kissed me for real. A few minutes later she gave me the chance to prove how absolutely heterosexual I could be.

I am now totally secure in my musical masculinity. I do, however, have difficulty reconciling the fact that my father, who bawls at Puppy Chow commercials, can dismiss a genius like

Hammerstein, yet be totally enthralled by lyrics like my wife ran away with my best friend, and I sure do miss him.

I unlocked my front door. Andre was sacked out on the sofa. He stretched his legs, arched his back, and started to get up. "Stay," I said. "I have to make a phone call." He understood the 'stay' part and went back to sleep.

It was too late to call Terry at home, but I knew he'd check his office voicemail before he drank his first cup of coffee. I left a message with the highlights of my conversation with Big Jim, starting with his observations on the finger in the flipbook and ending with Danny Eeg and his billion-dollar motive.

I hung up the phone. "Oh, and one more thing," I said, once I was sure the connection was broken. "Someone has a contract out on my brother Frankie. But that's my problem."

I went to the fridge and took a few gulps of orange juice straight from the carton. The sugar hit would jolt me awake for about ten minutes and then I'd come down faster than an Austrian bobsled team. I just needed to stay awake long enough to re-read one of Joanie's letters.

I opened the back door, and before I let Andre out, I said, "Business!" which he knows means 'No sniffing for squirrels or other frivolous dog diversions. Just body functions.'

I stripped to my boxers, pressed the Oral B electric to my teeth for about one-tenth of the 120 seconds they recommend, and tended to my own business. Andre was waiting at the door when I got there. I locked up, turned off the TV, got Letter Number One from its wooden box, and crawled into bed.

The first letter was seventeen pages. An epic. Longer by far than any of the ones that followed. I'd be lucky if I could stay awake long enough to read two pages. But I was jonesing for a connection with Joanie. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had met, and, okay I'll say it, mentally undressed not one but two women today. Amy Cheever and Diana...

Fuck! I couldn't remember Diana's last name. Fried cop brain. It didn't matter. It's not like she was a murder suspect and I needed to get it right for my report to Kilcullen.

What's the suspect's name, Lomax? It's Diana, sir. Diana something or other. Darned if I can remember her last name, but she was wearing this cool Rambo Rabbit watch. You're fired, Lomax. Thank you, sir. Can I please read the letter from my dead wife now, sir?

I pulled a fistful of paper from the envelope and turned to page one.

Dearest Mike,

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Well, that's a good way to start. I've been trying to write this letter for weeks, but it keeps coming out maudlin or depressing or just plain dumb. Would you believe that the first ten drafts started out with, "By the time you read this, I'll be dead." I should have said, "By the time I write this, I'll be dead." I've torn up so many versions of this letter that I'm starting to feel guilty about how many trees I've killed.

Fuck it. No more striving for perfection. This is the last draft.

The whole idea of writing to you came to me when I was lying in the hospital watching the chemo drip. For months they've been pumping my body full of this evil poison that has left me weak and hairless and no fun to be married to. They tell me it's the only way to kill the even more evil poison that is rotting out my insides. But that day on that table I realized it's not going to work. The cancer is going to win.

Don't try to argue with me, because if you're reading this, then I really am dead, which means I've won the argument.