The Rabbit Factory by Marshall Karp Read Free Book Online Page B

got the word fat in it. Plus with that anal reference, it's got overtones of proctology. Don't quit your day job, Detective Biggs. Speaking of your day job..." "You want my take on all this?" he said. "It's not about Elkins. Don't be surprised if another fucking cartoon character gets whacked. Curry thinks so too. I guarantee you he's going to beef up security and keep a tight watch on those critters. He won't be letting them prance around the park with idiots like Noreen Stubiak." I know my partner. He sees innocent people get zipped into body bags every day, and his way of coping with the injustice of it all is to deflect his emotions with humor. But sooner or later it gets to him. I watched his jaw tighten and his eyes burn holes in the windshield. He smacked his hand down hard on the steering wheel. "Damn," he said. "What a shitty reason to die. Just because you dressed up like Donald Fucking Duck." He meant Dexter Fucking Duck, but I let it go.

CHAPTER 11
    We had one more stop to make before we could head for the office. We still hadn't solved last week's murder mystery, so we took the 405 to LAX to interview a JAL flight attendant.
    Kiro Hakai was built like a Japanese jockey. I've never been totally comfortable around tiny men, and the fact that he had shaved his head and his eyebrows made him extra creepy. He was also screamingly effeminate.
    We had proof that Hakai had been at Bottoms Up, a gay bar on Sunset, the previous Thursday night. We also had reason to believe that he had been in a stall in the men's room at the very moment that Alan C. Trachtenberg, a dentist from Sherman Oaks, wound up with a six-inch ice pick between his third and fourth ribs.
    Unfortunately, Hakai didn't remember being at said club on said night and swore he had spent that evening at the Galleria 12-Plex with a friend. We had no doubt that the friend would back him up. They always do.
    When we held up the grainy black-and-white photo of him,
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    dated and time-stamped by the surveillance camera at the front door of the bar, Mr. Hakai remarked that there was a slight resemblance, but then don't all Japanese men look alike. Only the ones who shave their eyebrows, I thought.
    I know when to throw in the towel with a hostile interviewee, but Terry wouldn't quit. "What movie did you and your buddy see that night?"
    "Pearl Harbor," he said, with a smirk. An hour later the hairless little bastard was on a 777 bound for Tokyo.
    We had already asked Trachtenberg's widow what her husband was doing in a gay bar. She swore up and down that the man was straighter than Warren Beatty. There aren't too many reasons why heterosexual men find themselves surrounded by the other team, so I asked her the next obvious question. Did the good doctor use recreational drugs? This time she did not swear up, down, left, or right. She started crying.
    Our pint-sized flight attendant friend probably thought he screwed us by not cooperating. But his reluctance to talk said a lot. Truly innocent bystanders are quite vocal when it's a crime of passion. They clam up when drugs are involved. Usually, on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate them.
    A drug-deal-gone-sour seemed like a worthwhile avenue to pursue, so I called my old buddy Irv Ziffer in Narcotics. Ziff the Sniff they call him, because he's probably caught more drug pushers than the entire K-9 Corps at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. Ziff knew the bar in question and asked me if the stabbing had occurred last Thursday night. Bingo. I asked how he knew.
    Apparently he keeps flow charts of when stuff hits the streets and when the supply dries up. That Thursday was a
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    buyer's market after a ten-day product shortage. But the sellers are particularly paranoid after a long drought, plus there was a full moon that night. "In a volatile business environment," Ziff said, "shit happens." He's quite the philosopher. He also knew who was dealing at the clubs in that area, and it was clear to me