The Rabbit Factory (23 page)

A team of other cops sifted through the witness reports and tlie physical evidence of the Lucas case, as if it were an isolated homicide, unrelated to Elkins.

Terry and I also researched the FBI database on serial killings in the past five years, looking for similar patterns. I personally began immersing myself in the facts and myths about

Dean Lamaar and his global empire. Big Jim's anecdotes from Monday night were helpful, but I knew they were the tip of the iceberg. Somebody hated this company enough to actually murder innocent employees. I corrected myself. There was nothing innocent about Eddie Elkins.

I told Terry that I had a date with the friend of Jim's who wore the Rambo wristwatch and who was a nurse at the same hospital as Jan Trachtenberg. I left out the part about visiting the fourteen-year-old boy who had terminal cancer. Over the course of the day, I became more nervous about my meeting with Hugo than my date with Diana. The kid hadn't asked for me. What he really wanted was to meet Super Cop, and I knew I couldn't live up to his expectations.

At 4:45, Terry told me to leave early. "It's Friday night. The 101 is going to suck no matter what. If you go now, it will suck that much less."

Instead of arguing with him, which would be my normal response, I agreed. "Thanks," I said. "I appreciate it. I'm coming in tomorrow. If you need some Saturday time with Marilyn and the girls, I'll cover for you."

"We'll see," he said, which meant he'd be in before me. "Have fun with Diana tonight."

"Thanks," I said again. I pulled my keys out of my pocket, locked my desk, then looked around as if I were leaving on a two-week vacation and I had to make sure the oven and the water were turned off.

Terry watched me procrastinate. "You want some fret advice?"

The look in his eyes told me this wasn't going to be a joke.

"Be you," he said. "Don't write the script for the evening.

Just be you and see what happens."

"She works in a children's cancer ward," I blurted out. "One of the kids has his heart set on meeting a homicide cop. Diana picked me." "Lucky kid," Terry said. "He couldn't ask for any better than you."

I stared at him, and as ugly as I know he is, all I could see was the crinkle-eyed smile emanating from his mug. No wonder women fell for him. "Thanks," I said for the third time. The 101 was not as bad as it could have been, and I got to Valley General by 6 p.m. As soon as I saw the sign that said Hospital, I realized I should have brought something for the kid. The Pediatric Oncology Unit was on the sixth floor. I expected it to be bright and cheery, but it outdid itself. It was sunny and colorful, and the walls were covered with artwork, all of which had been created by the patients. Not every painting was a masterpiece, but collectively they had a raw honesty and a powerful optimism. Some hospitals smell of despair. This one radiated hope. There was a circular nurses' station just inside the door, and one of the nurses behind the desk looked up as I entered. It

w;is Diana. Her face lit up when she saw me. Nobody had looked at me like that in a long time, and I melted. She came round to my side of the desk and took my hand. Then she live me a little peck on the cheek. "Thank you for coming. lugo is so excited."

She introduced me to several other nurses, one male, three frmak1, but I would be hard-pressed to identify them in a lineup. I did, however, take careful note of Diana's white uni(tiiin, pink cardigan sweater, blue eyes, and blonde hair. I had -- 263 -- y

forgotten how pretty she was. How could I possibly have ignored her that night at Jim's? Oh, yeah, because Jim had wanted me to pay attention to her.

She escorted me down the hall. "Hugo's parents went home about twenty minutes ago. They usually stay later, but he asked them if he could meet you on his own. He's in the Day Room. We encourage the kids to use the public space instead of having guests sit at their bedside. I'm so glad he's up to it. I'll leave you guys alone for fifteen minutes, then come back and bail you out."

The Day Room was like the inside of a rainbow. Color everywhere. There were so many colors on the walls, the floor, and the furniture, that it didn't matter what went with what. It was like going to the circus. You didn't say, "I think the orange clashes with the purple." It just all seemed to work. I'm sure nobody who spends a lot of time in this ward forgets why it exists, but the joyful decor certainly helped to make you forget about cold hard reality for a while.

Three family groups were sitting in various parts of the room, each with one kid and several adults. In a corner by himself, sitting in a wheelchair, was a boy who looked eleven years old, but I knew he was fourteen. "Hugo," Diana said, "this is Detective Mike Lomax. Mike, this is Hugo Cordner."

His father must have taught him how to shake hands, because even in his condition, he gave me a man's handshake. "What a grip," I said, rubbing my hand as if he had really hurt it.

"I'm not as weak as I look," he said, and smiled at me with a mouthful of metal braces. My mind went through a machine gun thought process of Hugo's parents making a decision to

spend thousands of dollars on dental work for a kid who might be dead before his teeth were straight enough to remove the braces. "Now that is one cool T-shirt," I said, and stole a peek at

Diana. Her eyes thanked me for remembering what she had said this morning. The T-shirt was white with a large press-on color photo of Hugo and his family on a ski slope. ms- "It's from Christmas two years ago. We went to Sundance."

"Let's see," I said pointing at the picture. "That's you in the middle. This must be your Mom and Dad. This has to be your big sister, whose name is...." "Sophia."

"Sophia. And this short one in the front is definitely your grandmother. Tiny woman, isn't she?" He laughed. "That's Grace, my little sister."

"Really," I said, trying to look completely baffled. "I'm not sure I had enough clues to solve that one. Cool shirt and a very cool hat." He had on a black baseball cap that had the words BAD HAIR DAY in white letters. "Sophia gave it to me." . "Well, I brought you a hat, but it's not nearly as special as trie one Sophia gave you." I produced a navy blue LAPD baseball cap that had been in my trunk only a few minutes before. "I'm afraid it's used, but if you don't mind a few cop cooties, it's yours." "Wow. Is this like a real regulation hat?"

"Totally," I said. "Very regulation. I'm sorry I didn't get you a new one. It's a little beat up, but at least it doesn't have any bullet holes in it." "This is better than new," he said. "Wait till I tell my Dad...

and my friends... and everybody." He took the BAD HAIR DAY hat off, and I saw lots of skin and a few wispy survivors of chemotherapy. Images of Joanie, equally ravaged by her own chemo, came flooding back. I shook them off. Hugo put the LAPD cap on, and it slid down, practically covering his eyes.

"That's the way the undercover cops wear it," I said. "Keeps them out of sight." I took the cap off, adjusted the strap, and put it back on. "That's better." "I'll see you guys later," Diana said, and headed toward the door.

"So you want to be a homicide detective," I said.

"I'm gonna be," Hugo said, as if there were no doubt. "If I don't die," he added, with the same matter-of-factness he would have used if he had said, "If it doesn't rain."

I

I

The fifteen minutes flew by. I outlined the steps Hugo would have to take to get from eighth grade to homicide detective. I've seen perfectly healthy cadets in Police Academy drop out when they hear all the work they have to put in, but this kid was undaunted. Then I told him some of my best war stories. Finally, as I knew he would, he asked if he could see my gun. Under ordinary circumstances I'd have told him he was too young. But this kid was not an ordinary circumstance. I took it out of the holster, emptied it, double-checked, triple-checked, then handed it K > him. He was inspecting it when Diana walked in. She put up her hands. Hugo knew enough not point it at her. He just put on a stern face and said, "You have the right to remain silent." She lowered her hands. "Fat chance. I am not famous for my wilence. You have a busy day ahead of you tomorrow," she said, uul I tried not to imagine what that entailed. "And so does Vtective Lomax." "I'll come back," I said. "I promise."

"Just one more story. Please."

"A short one. And I'm staying to make sure it's short, but first..." she said, trying to sound as tough as she could, "Drop the gun, Cordner." He handed me the gun, butt first, and watched as I carefully put it back in my holster. "Thanks," he said. "What's the first murder you ever solved?" "My first homicide? I was a teenager."

"No way."

"Way," I said. "I was fifteen. I didn't even want to be a cop like you do. My Mom was a stuntwoman, and I thought I was going to follow in her footsteps. We had a next-door neighbor, a sweet old lady named Mrs. Hovsepian. She loved to garden, and she would spend hours every day digging in her flowerbeds. I'd come home from school and there she'd be, trimming with a pair of scissors small enough to clip a baby's fingernails and talking to the flowers. She'd look up at me and say, 'Do you think I'm crazy?' And since I had read that talking to plants makes them grow better, I'd always say no. 'Well, Donny thinks I'm crazy,' she'd say." "Who's Donny?" Hugo asked.

"Her son. He was fifty years old, but he still lived with his mother. He was always friendly to me, but I thought it was a weird-friendly and kept away from him. One afternoon I came home, but Mrs. Hovsepian wasn't in the garden. She was being wheeled into an ambulance, wrapped in a black body bag. They said she fell down the basement steps. Donny had found her." "He killed her."

"That's what I thought. And when we went to her funeral he was crying, 'Mama, Mama,' throughout the entire service. But

The Rabbit Factory

I didn't buy it. He didn't seem real. A few days after the funeral, I came home from school and saw that a big patch had been cut out of one of Mrs. Hovsepian's flowerbeds. It was so cruel, so mean, after all her hard work. Donny did it, I thought. First he killed his mother, and now he was killing her flowers.

"I went to the police and told them that I thought that Donny killed his mother because she paid more attention to the flowers than to him. He was jealous, and now he was wiping out her precious garden. The detectives told me they suspected she might have been pushed, but they had no evidence. They thanked me for my detective work, but there was nothing they could do."ŚŚŚm''<

"But I bet there was something you could do," Hugo said.

Diana put her hand over her mouth to cover a smile, but I could still see her eyes. They were glistening as she watched Hugo hang on my every word.

"At first I was very upset," I said. "I thought Crazy Donny had gotten away with murder. But I wouldn't give up, and a few days later I came up with this wild idea. If I couldn't prove Donny did it, I would get him to confess."

"How could you do that?"

"Well, I knew he was crazy. So I did something just as crazy. I called my plan The Revenge of the Flowers. I went to the nursery and bought trays and trays of flowers. Then I went to I he stationery store and bought flowered notepaper. And the next morning when Donny headed out to work, there was a dump of fresh daisies right in the middle of a section of the garden he had destroyed. Along with the daisies was a note."

"What did the note say?"

"Hey, no jumping ahead. This is my story. I had been

looking out my window, and I could see the horror in Donny's eyes when he saw the daisies. He tore them out of the ground, shoved the note in his pocket, ran to his car, and drove off to work. The next morning when Donny came out of the house, there was another note and another bunch of fresh flowers. This time it was violets. Donny went ballistic and ripped them out too."

"Cool."

"Every night I planted new flowers and left another note. I knew he was watching the garden, but it was dark enough for me to belly crawl and not get caught. On the seventh morning, I left roses, which were Mrs. Hovsepian's favorite. Instead of ripping out the flowers and going to work, Donny just sat down on the ground and cried. Then he went back in the house.

"Ten minutes later I heard the sirens. The cops came and banged on the door. Donny came out with his hands up. He was crying, saying 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' He had called the cops, and he had confessed. Case closed. My first one."

Hugo was in awe. "He confessed because of you."

"That's what the detectives told me."

"What did the notes say?"

"Each one said the same thing. 'Donny, you bad boy. We know what you did. Confess or we will come for you.' Each one was signed with a different woman's name. Daisy. Violet. Iris. Petunia. Lily. Fern. Heather. And the last one was Rose."

"All flowers. The Revenge of the Flowers. How cool."

"The Chief of Police didn't think so. He and I had a long talk about how far the cops can push a suspect. He said I had gone too far, but since I wasn't a cop, nothing I did was against the law. Then he invited my parents to a private ceremony in his office and gave me a Civilian Hero Award for excellent police

The Rabbit Factory

work, plus a letter that accepted me to the L.A. Police Academy, if I ever decided to make it my career. From that day on, I forgot about being a stuntman." "Would you like Detective Lomax to wheel you to your room?" Diana said.

"Sure." He turned to me. "Do you really promise you'll come back?"

"Are you kidding? Now that I finally found someone to listen to my boring stories, I'm definitely coming back." "Yeah, sure," he said. "Thanks for coming, Detective Lomax."

"You can call me Mike."

"Is it okay if I call you Detective Lomax?"

"It's fine. Don't you like Mike?"

"Yeah, but I have an Uncle Mike. And there's this kid in my class, Mike Jackman. And one of the nurses, his name is Mike. So there's plenty of people I can call Mike, but it's really cool to have a friend named Detective Lomax." I

"Well, I think it's cool to have a friend named Hugo Cordner." I stuck out my hand and he shook it hard. "Ow, ow, ow!" I yelled, rubbing my palm and contorting my face in mock pain. I turned to Diana and pointed at Hugo's LAPD cap. "I'm reporting this man to the Department. He practically broke my hand." I stepped behind his wheel chair and began to push. Diana was laughing. "Police brutality!" I called out as we rolled down the hall.