“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.
“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 the 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.”
CHAPTER 45
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 to 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 silence. You have a busy day ahead of you tomorrow,” she said, and I tried not to imagine what that entailed. “And so does Detective 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 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.”
“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 the stationery store and bought flowered notepaper. And the next morning when Donny headed out to work, there was a clump 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 P
olice 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 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.”
“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.
Hugo let out a loud joyful hoot, then started clapping his hands. His laughter bounced off the walls.
As we wound our way down the corridor, all the nurses, doctors, patients, and parents within hearing distance stopped to smile and watch us go by. Joy of this magnitude does not go unnoticed in a place like the kids’ cancer ward at Valley General.
Diana blew me a kiss. I hadn’t felt this good in a long, long time.
CHAPTER 46
“Be you, be you, be you,” I chanted as I followed Diana’s Jeep Cherokee along Ventura Boulevard. It sounded lame. “Be Tom Cruise! Be Tom Cruise! Be Tom Cruise!” I yelled. Better. I just wasn’t sure how to pull it off.
We turned into a little strip mall on Ventura. “I couldn’t decide between this or the hospital cafeteria,” Diana said, as we walked up to a door that said Giorgio’s. “But this place definitely has the better wine list.”
She had changed from her uniform into a tan skirt and a pale blue sweater with a matching cardigan. She looked soft and warm and accessible. As I held the door I caught a light lemony fragrance as she brushed past me. I was fantasizing about wrapping my arms around her when another guy beat me to it. “Buona sera, Signora,” he said, as he and Diana exchanged double cheek kisses.
She introduced him as the owner, George Imbriale, who hugged me like I was a long-lost relative. He sat us and said he’d be right back with the vino and a special antipasto with all of Diana’s favorites.
“All your favorites,” I said, after he left. “I guess you’re a regular here.”
“I try to come as often as I can on a nurse’s salary.”
“Well, tonight you’re here on a cop’s salary.”
“Absolutely not. I asked you out.”
“No, you asked me to visit Hugo. I invited you to dinner. I’m paying. I’m very old-fashioned that way. And you may also recall that I am armed.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Did I look horrified when I walked in and saw Hugo with that gun?”
“I thought you handled it very well. I don’t normally let young children play with my weapon, but…”
“I know. Special circumstances. I can’t thank you enough for spending time with him and for promising to come back.”
“Actually, you have thanked me enough. Three times before we even left the hospital. If you keep on thanking me, I’ll have to keep apologizing for being such a jerk the other night. It wasn’t about you. I was pissed at Big Jim.”
“You think my father is any easier?” she said.
“What does he do?”
“He’s a rabbi.”
“Rabbi Trantanella?”
“Rabbi Silver, which is my maiden name. My husband was Italian.”
“Do you have children?”
“Just the cat.”
“Blanche, right?”
“You have a good memory,” she said.
“That’s because I’m still waiting to hear what Blanche thinks about me.”
“I haven’t mentioned you to her yet, but I will tonight. Promise.”
We talked about her job and my job and the relative plusses and minuses of each. We shared how difficult it was to lose a spouse. Joanie’s death had been a slow agonizing process, but at least it gave us time for closure. Diana’s husband Paul had blown her a kiss from a ski lift one sunny Saturday morning. Two hours later he was being carried off the mountain in a body bag.
Finally she asked me how long I waited to start dating after Joanie died.
“I waited till about seven o’clock this evening,” I said.
“This is your first date?” she said, genuinely surprised.
“I’m amazed that Big Jim hasn’t briefed you on that.”
“I’m… I don’t know, I’m honored. Thank you for asking me.”
“Thank you for accepting. I don’t think I could have handled rejection.”
Dinner was fantastico, and the service was attentive, without being in our face. We ordered espresso and one tiramisu for two. The waiter offered us an after-dinner drink “on-dee-owza,” which Diana explained meant “on the house.” I passed, already intoxicated with half a bottle of Chianti and two hours of gazing across the table at Diana.
A few days ago, I would have sworn I wasn’t ready to date, but now I had to rethink my decision. This was a woman I wanted to see again. There was something about her that seemed to fill an emotional void I didn’t even know existed. Maybe it was her concern and compassion for others, which had been Joanie’s most endearing quality. Then again, it just might be that I was one of the loneliest heterosexual men in Southern California, and I would have fallen for a fat lady with chin whiskers and a bad haircut.
She graciously let me pay the check, and I tipped too much, because I knew that even if I never came back, she would. The night was cool, so we walked briskly to our cars. Ten feet from the Jeep she pressed the electronic clicker and the door locks thunked up. “Thank you one last time for visiting Hugo, and thanks for a lovely evening,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. “I can’t wait to get home and tell Blanche all about you.” She opened the car door.
“What are you going to tell her?” I asked, all the while wondering if that little peck was the only good-night kiss I was going to get.
“I’m going to tell her you’re the real deal.”
“I don’t speak cat. What exactly does that mean?”
She took her hand off the door handle and turned to face me. Then she snuggled her body close to mine, put one hand gently behind my neck, and lowered my face to hers. Her lips were soft and sweet and tender, and it was all I could do to keep from wrestling her to the ground. The kiss was long and slow, but it ended about thirty or forty years too soon.
“Stop asking so many questions,” she whispered.
I watched her get into the car and drive off. I didn’t move from my spot until her taillights blended into the ribbon of red on Ventura Boulevard.
The voice inside my head cleared his throat. “If you dream about Amy Cheever tonight,” it said, “I will personally step outside your body and shoot you with your own gun.”
Fair enough, I replied.
CHAPTER 47
I was back on the 101, thinking about Hugo and fantasizing about Diana. But someone else kept cluttering up my head.
Ike Rose.
Something bothered me about him. Something he said; some
thing he did. Maybe it was something he didn’t say, or didn’t do. I called Terry at home.
“I didn’t expect to hear from you tonight,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering…is anything gnawing at you about Ike Rose?”
“The only thing gnawing at me is why you’d be calling me about Ike Rose in the middle of your date with Diana.”
“The date’s over.”
“It’s not even 10:30,” he said. “When I heard your voice I figured you were calling me because you forgot how to unhook a bra. What went wrong?”
“Nothing. She’s bright, attractive, charming. You’d like her.”
“I’d like her? How about the kid in the hospital? Would I like him too?”
“Yeah, he was terrific.”
“So then you had a good time.”
“I had a fantastic time.”
“Great. You can tell me all about it tomorrow. Good night.”
“Whoa, whoa. You don’t want to talk about the case?”
“Not tonight, Mike. And neither do you. You can play detective in the morning. At the risk of repeating myself, why don’t you spend the rest of the night being you. Good night.”
He hung up on me.
I was about to call him back, but the little voice inside my head stopped me. “Terry knows you better than you know yourself,” it said. “It’s only six months since Joanie died. You haven’t even finished reading the letters she wrote. You feel guilty about your attraction to Diana, so you want to quickly crawl back to the comfortable misery of a double homicide.”
But Terry wouldn’t let me. Which meant I had to spend the rest of the night being Mike.
There was a message on my machine from my father. It was uncharacteristically brief. “Hi. Frankie’s doing okay. I told him you’re coming tomorrow.” He paused. I know Big Jim. He was editing himself. “I’m glad you went out with Diana tonight. Hope you had a good time. Goodnight.”
Something cold and wet touched my hand. Andre wanted some attention. “Did you hear that message?” I asked him, as I scratched his ears. “It was the shortest, least annoying Big Jim message in history.”
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