The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (15 page)

After a brief flirtation with calling a cab, I decided to walk. I took Venice Boulevard, passing a string of South American and Caribbean restaurants and dozens of the ubiquitous two-story apartment buildings with fan palms or giant birds of paradise or yuccas with elephantine bases out front. I hoped the repeated impact of my feet on the pavement would jar a clever idea from some crevice in my brain. It didn’t happen.

The overcast began to burn off. At Inglewood Boulevard a car backfired, and I jumped a foot up in the air. When I came down a couple of Latino teenagers across the intersection were in hysterics. They had shaved heads and long T-shirts and baggy shorts. I threw them a weak smile. “Too much
café
man,” one yelled.

By the time I reached Centinela Feed and Pet, I could see my shadow. By the time I turned north on Beethoven, I wished I’d worn shorts, and by the time I crossed Rose, my shirt was stuck to the small of my back and I was panting like a puppy.

I got to Dicks at a quarter to eleven. A length of yellow police tape littered the lawn. I wondered if such trimmings were still apparent at Brenda’s. Or if it were opened up now, so her sister, Amanda, could go in and gather effects, so
someone could collect the canary supplies and take them to whatever new home the birds managed to find.

All the aloes fronting the Kawamura Conservatory had been torn out of the ground. A couple of broken-off leaves were the only hint they’d ever been there.

The front door wouldn’t budge, so I walked around the building in search of another entrance. A chain-link fence, about six feet high, followed the buildings perimeter, I guessed to keep vandals from breaking the glass and wandering around inside. Around back, additional fencing lined with vertical redwood slats outlined a sort of patio under a slanting Plexiglas roof. The gate into it was open, and I went in. Plastic pots sized from two inches up to five gallons formed neat stacks along one side. Sacks of soil and amendments were piled along the other. A bag of pumice had fallen on its side, and the eighth-inch particles formed a little white mountain where they’d spilled out.

At the far end of the supply area, an open door led into the conservatory. I stuck my head in. “Hello?”

No answer. I carefully made my way in through a corridor between two fifteen-foot plant benches topped with vertical lathwork. Vining cacti had overgrown the lath, forming a tangled nest of snakelike stems. Selenicereus, the “queen of the night,” along with the rest of the royal court. Some had reached the top of the lath and been trained over to the other side, forming a living arbor. New buds thrust, and spent blossoms drooped.

I moved down to the end and stuck my head around the corner. “Hello? Anybody here?”

I knew what I would find. I’d make my way over to the
euphorbias and discover Eugene Rand lying there, his eyelids knitted together with tiny spines. An old hollow euphorbia stem would pierce his jugular. His blood would stain the gravel.

Resisting the urge to flee, I continued between the benches, throwing a hello out here and there, always making sure I had an escape route.

The place looked like the world’s biggest botanical garage sale. Dozens of pots hung from a peaked roof. Succulent plants of all shapes and species, in various stages of neglect, cloaked the benches. I spotted a multiheaded mammillaria—a nipple cactus—that had rotted from within. All that remained was an exoskeleton of hooked spines. Over near the wall a whole tray of sansevierias had turned to tufts of brown. It was supposed to be impossible to kill a sansevieria, but there you were.

Within the green hodgepodge, though, you could find some gems. Amidst a cluster of gallon pots holding what looked suspiciously like poinsettias, I spotted the biggest
Pachypodium decaryi
I’d ever seen, with several four-foot stems poking out from a football-shape and -size caudex. Big oval leaves and oleanderlike white flowers burst from the tips.

Although the vents just below the roof were wide open, the air was hot and humid. The first was good, the second hot. Fungi love succulents. I located the exhaust fans; they sat motionless.

I worked my way over to a concentration of euphorbias, craning my head, looking for bodies. Just as I realized I’d reached a dead end, I heard a tiny noise behind me. I whipped around and jumped back. “Go away,” I shouted.

Eugene Rand’s reaction was a mirror image of my own. “Ack!” he cried as he leapt backward.

He wore thick leather gloves and in them clasped a three-foot chunk of
Euphorbia ammak
, one of the tree species from
Africa. Thick half-inch spines studded its four-sided stem. He held it like you would a baseball bat, if you’d never played baseball before. When he sprang back, the tip clobbered a hanging pot of rosary vine. It removed itself from the water-line it hung from and smashed to the ground at his feet. Strings of heart-shape leaves detached and scattered. “Ack!” he repeated. Again the ammak smacked a pot overhead, but this one, a foot across and filled with the spindly leafless stems of
Euphorbia antisyphilitica
, merely swayed alarmingly.

“It’s me,” I told him.

“Me, who?”

“Me, Joe Portugal. Remember? I was here the other day.”

He squinted mightily. Just before the tip of his nose reached his forehead, he recognized me. “You.”

“Right. You want to put your bat down before you destroy any more foliage?”

He stared at his club like he’d never seen it before. Then down at the rosary-vine wreckage. Then back up at me. “Right,” he said. He leaned the euphorbia up against a bench. It promptly slid to the floor. White latex oozed from multiple wounds. “You can’t be too careful.”

“No,” I said. “You can’t.”

“First Dr. Belinski, and now this McAfee fellow—I’ve just chosen to prepare myself.”

“And you’ve done it well. That’s quite a bat you’ve got there.”

“I have several distributed throughout the conservatory. The parent plant is rather unattractive now, but it’s a small price to pay.”

“Speaking of euphorbias, did you ever have an abdelkuri inhere?”

“We did, and we still do.”

“How about a milii with stripes? Ever seen one of those?”

“A milii?”

“Yes.”

“With stripes?”

“Yes indeedy.”

He squinted again. I could almost hear facial muscles contorting. “No.”

“Word is that Dr. Belinski was working on a striped milii.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

I thought he did. “Word is that she had several specimens right here in the conservatory.” It was nice to know my new talent for making it up as I went along hadn’t atrophied overnight.

“Word is this, word is that. Everyone says they know the word about Dr. Belinski. Even the people on the television. They don’t know anything about her. You don’t know anything about her.”

Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of being a prick. Not often, but when I choose to do so, I do a real good job of it. “Oh, I’d say that isn’t true. I know a fair amount about her. I used to sleep with her, you know.”

Every muscle in his face distorted. His jaw slid down. His nostrils flared, once, twice. His ears wiggled. “You bastard,” he said. “You perfect bastard.” He snatched up the euphorbia bat.

This was why I’m not a prick very often. It always gets me into trouble. “It was a long time ago,” I said, mounting a conciliatory smile. “And only a couple of times.”

“You weren’t good enough for her.”

“Yes, you’re probably right. I wasn’t good enough for Ker. She thought so too. Which is why the whole thing never happened. I made it all up.”

He swung the euphorbia. He had a swing like a rusty-hinged barn door, but when your bats a spiny, virulent-sapped
plant, that’s not necessarily a liability. He missed me by three feet and moved in for another try.

I needed defense. I spotted a length of pipe under a bench, bent, grabbed it just as he swung again. This time he was closer. A foot and a half.

Trying to remember everything I’d ever learned from Jackie Chan, I held the pipe at arm’s length in front of me, parallel with the ground. Rand untwisted himself and prepared for another pass. I fixed my eye on his weapon. Once more he wielded it. The tip flew by, mere inches from my face. It continued down, smacked into the pipe, and fractured.

The tip went flying one way. Rand let go the rest and it glided off in another. Sap flew. I instinctively closed my eyes. It sounded like Eugene Rand had not. He was screaming.

I opened my eyes. He had his hands over his. He whirled around and around, certain to crash into something. I dropped the pipe and rushed over to him. “Your eyes?” Joe Portugal, master of the obvious.

“Yes,” he wailed. “Help me. Please help me.”

I threw my arm around his shoulders. “Is there a hose? A sink?”

He stuck an arm out. “A sink. Over there.” Unfortunately, he was pointing at a blank wall.

“Right.” I got him going and moved up an aisle. Down another. Eventually I found the sink, almost hidden by some epiphytic cacti. I maneuvered him over there, turned the water on, and stuck his face underneath. “Keep the water on your eyes,” I said. “I’m going to get help.”

“Aeonium,” he said.

“Whatever you say. Hold on tight.” I straightened up, ran halfway out, realized what he had said. I scurried back. His wailing continued. “Where is it?” I asked.

“Outside. With the first-aid kit.”

I ran out and found it in the pot-storage area. A mangy little cluster of leaves in a three-inch plastic pot sat atop the first-aid kit. It was missing its label, but the pale green rosette said aeonium to me. And, unless I missed my bet, it
was Aeonium lindleyi
. Supposedly a treatment for euphorbia sap. I grabbed it, ran back to him, snapped off a couple of leaves, and poked him in the eye.

I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. Within seconds his agonized writhing ceased. His eyes were red and raw, but he had no trouble keeping them open. I broke off another leaf and prodded some more.

“I guess I shouldn’t react so strongly when someone admits to being one of Brenda’s lovers,” Eugene Rand said. He’d given up the pretense of calling her “Doctor.”

We were sitting on a couple of cheap plastic lawn chairs in the shade of the Kawamura’s toolshed. Rand held a piece of aeonium leaf between his fingertips, and every little while he’d jab himself in the eye with it.

“Not that I’ve ever taken after anyone with a piece of euphorbia before. It’s just all the pressure, the killings and all.” He poked his eye again. “It’s not like she was promiscuous, you understand. But she was never without a man. When she was done with one, she would move on to the next. Before I would ever have a chance to make my intentions known.”

“You never told her how you felt?”

He shook his head. “She knew, of course. I knew she knew, and she knew I knew she knew, and so on in this great big complicated charade.”

I wondered why he was being so reasonable all of a sudden. Perhaps I was too close on his trail and he realized his
outburst would make me more suspicious. “It must have been tough working with her,” I said.

“It was indeed. But I really love my job.” He saw the look on my face. “Oh, I know the place looks awful. But it’s only half as awful as it was when I started. Slowly but surely I’m making progress. As I told you the other day, we’re short of funds.”

“I know this is difficult. But I have to ask. Do you know who Brenda was involved with before she died?”

“Of course I do. Masochist that I am, I made it my business to know who all her lovers were.” He got up, went into the shed, and came out a minute later with some pencil scribblings on a Post-it. “He’s actually not a bad fellow,” he said. “Somehow, that made it a bit less difficult. Those of her lovers that I met, at staff functions or wherever, were all nice fellows. You’re a nice fellow too. I’m sorry I attacked you.”

I glanced down at the note. Rand’s handwriting was miserable, but the letters and digits swam into focus. The phone number had an 821 prefix, which made sense since the address was a boat slip in Marina del Rey.

The name I knew. Henry Farber. The guy Brenda’d broken up with four years earlier when she started seeing me. The guy who had promised revenge.