The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (16 page)

I
’D BEEN SITTING IN THE TRUCK FOR A QUARTER HOUR
, chewing on my latest discovery, when it hit me. Brenda was recycling old lovers. If she were going through them in order, and if she’d just stayed alive a few more months, she would have gotten to me.

It had been a year and a half since I’d gone out with anybody more than once or twice. Or made love to anybody. If Brenda were still alive and dumped Henry again, I’d have found myself back under the blue canopy, engaging in the ancient Malagasy sexual arts, with the oils and the chants and—

But Brenda wasn’t still alive. She wasn’t going to be making love to anybody anymore.

Henry Farber was a professor, and since I was at UCLA it seemed like a handy place to start looking for him. I found a pay phone and called the English department. They’d never heard of him. I tried History next. They’d heard of him, but he had the day off. I called the number I’d gotten from Rand
and reached a machine. Leaving a message seemed a bad idea.
“Hi, this is Joe Portugal, the guy who took Brenda away a few years ago. Sorry I didn’t get the chance this time around. By the way, did you whack her?”

As long as I was on campus, I thought I might as well check out the Botany department. I talked my way into the lot at the Mathias Garden, parked in the shadow of the Botany building, and made my way in. I monkeyed around for fifteen minutes trying to find, in order, a bathroom, a directory, and Brenda’s office. The corridor I found the last of these in was plastered with announcements for esoteric plant workshops and cartoons reflecting lame graduate-student humor. Weird botanical items rested on the floor and on randomly placed tables. Cypress knees, dried pods, that sort of thing. A plastic pot with a dead-looking spider plant. But you can’t tell with spider plants. Unlike people, they can look dead and still come back.

Brenda’s office door was locked. What else did I expect? I stood with my hand on the knob considering which clever gambit to try next.

“May I help you?” It was a zaftig woman in a light blue blouse and jeans. She stood by one of the doorways halfway down the hall, carrying a white plastic bucket.

“I’m looking for Dr. Belinski.”

“Haven’t you heard? She’s dead.” She said it in the same cheerful tone of voice in which she would have said, “She went to Wisconsin to visit her sister.”

“Yes, I know.”
Don’t tell me she’s dead, lady, I found the damned body
. “I meant I was looking for her office.”

“You’ve found it.”

I walked down the hall to where the woman stood, now clutching her bucket close to her ample bosom. She was short, five-two or so, and younger than I’d thought at first, no more than twenty-five. I usually go for slim women, but I
liked the way the little bit of extra poundage worked on her. Her face was round and pink, almost cherubic, with no makeup. Her eyes were hazel and her hair a shiny blond that couldn’t have come from a bottle. I remembered seeing her at Brenda’s funeral.

“What’s in the bucket?” I asked.

“Kelp. The police don’t have any leads. Isn’t that fascinating?”

“How do you know that?”

“It was on the noontime news. I always watch the noontime news when I’m in the lab. It keeps me in touch. They had a detective on. Carillos or something.”

“Casillas.”

“Yes. Did you see the news too?”

“No, but it’s funny you should mention Detective Casillas. I’m helping him out with the succulent part of the investigation.” I held out a hand. “Joe Portugal. I was a friend of Dr. Belinski’s.”

“Iris Bunche,” she said as we shook. “Like the flower and the U.N. guy. Oh, just look at your face. Everyone looks like that when I tell them my name. My parents weren’t even thinking. Irises were my mother’s favorite flowers, they still are, and so when I was born—well, you get the picture.”

“Did you know Dr. Belinski well, Iris?”

“Sure I did. She was my faculty adviser.”

“I didn’t know she was into kelp.”

Confusion preceded a glance into the bucket. “Oh, this. This is for my garden. It’s used kelp. The algae people down in the basement are done with it.” She seemed to realize how closely she held the bucket and dropped it into a one-handed grip. “I have to go down to the herbarium now. Do you want to come with me? We can talk about Brenda.”

She deposited the algae inside a lab, and we went down to the ground floor and into a claustrophobic room lined with
row upon row of bound botanical journals. At the back of this repository, a steep metal staircase, barely more than a ladder, led upward. I followed Iris up it, trying to ignore the sway of her full but firm behind, and not succeeding.

The room at the top was filled with dozens of dark green metal cabinets. Each bore the name of one or more families of the plant kingdom. I’d never been in a herbarium before, but my boundless botanical knowledge told me the cabinets were filled with pressed plant remains.

Iris delved into the Didieriaceae, a family of spiny succulents endemic to Madagascar. She grabbed a sheaf of manila folders, positioned them carefully on a wooden table, and sat. I took a seat across from her and asked if the didierias and their friends were her research subject.

“They sure are. Everyone says the Portulacaceae are the closest other family to the cacti, but I’m out to prove that it’s the Didieriaceae. Its all in the DNA. That’s what Brenda always used to say, isn’t it?”

I’d never heard Brenda use those exact words, but no matter. “Yes. She often did say that. Have you done any work with euphorbias?”

She shook her head most delightfully. “No, they’re too nasty for me. That latex is horrible. Oh.”

“What?”

“I knew I knew your name. You found Brenda, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Can you tell me what she was working on?”

“Was it hard?”

“Was what hard?”

“Looking at her. I’ve never seen a dead person.”

I put on a sad face. It didn’t feel like one of my better ones. Eight years of acting only in commercials had dulled my instrument. “I’d rather not discuss that, if you don’t mind. Let’s talk about Dr. Belinski’s work.”

Maybe my instrument was sharper than I thought. Iris
reached a pink hand across the table and placed it gently atop one of mine. She wore a college ring with a big red stone. “You poor, poor man. I’m so sorry to bring up bad memories.” She patted my hand a couple of times, like you would a small dog, and withdrew her own.

I felt a stirring. Those pats were the most intimate feminine contact I’d had in months. My mind took off in unexpected directions. Ridiculous directions. Iris was barely half my age. “You were talking about Brenda’s research.”

“Oh, yes. She did some work with gene splicing, you know. And she was working on her new classification scheme for the Madagascar euphorbias. It was based on DNA sequencing.”

“Its all in the DNA.”

That elicited a winsome smile. “She hoped to publish her findings in about a year and a half. And now she never will. Poor, poor Brenda.”

Now it was Iris’s turn to look sad. I reached out and returned her pats from earlier. I left my hand on top of hers. After a bit she pulled hers out and mine clonked to the table. I could hear Gina.
“Serves you right, you dirty old man
,” she was saying.”

“Maybe you could pick up her research,” I said.

Iris gave me a look that said I clearly didn’t understand how this research stuff worked. “That would be impossible.” She glanced down at the folders. “Look at me. I haven’t even opened one of these yet. You’re a bad influence on me, Joe.”

“Maybe I ought to get going, let you do your work. Just a couple more things. Did you ever hear about a
Euphorbia milii
with stripes?”

“No. That would be odd, wouldn’t it?”

“It would. One last thing. You know about Brenda’s fight against the plant smugglers, right?”

“I know about it, but I don’t pay much attention to that kind of thing.”

“As far as you know, did anyone ever threaten Brenda because of that?”

“I never heard about any threats, no, but—it was funny In some ways Brenda was my friend, and in others … it was like she had compartments in her life. She never talked to me about the conservation stuff.”

I pulled out a pen, found a scrap of paper, wrote down my phone number. “If you think of anything else …”

“Then I’ll call.” She took the paper, tore it in half, slid the part I’d written on into a pocket. “It was very nice meeting you, Joe.” She wrote on the other half and handed it back. “And if you need to ask me any more questions, here’s
my
number.”

“Thanks. Nice meeting you too.”

I left the table, climbed down the infernal staircase, paused at the bottom. Some preposterous part of me wanted to go back up and ask Iris out on a date. Maybe I was old enough to be her father; so what? She
had
given me her number.

When I’d climbed back up to the herbarium, I found her with one of the didieria folders open, intently studying a desiccated scrap of vegetation. She looked up when she heard me and smiled. “Did you forget something?”

“Sort of. Forgive me if this is out of line, but I was wondering—”

“Yes?”

I couldn’t do it. She was too young, too blond, too…alive.

“I was wondering if Brenda ever mentioned a man named Schoeppe.”

“She did.
One
of the men she was going to meet over
there in Madagascar. I met him once.” She giggled. “Very cute. Nice beard. Did you ever wear a beard, Joe?” “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” “You’d look good with a beard.”

“So I’ve been told. Sorry to take up more of your time.” “You can take up more of my time anytime.” That seemed like an invitation. But could I be sure? I was terribly out of practice. Mumbling incoherently, I beat a hasty retreat. Too much was going on. I didn’t need to get involved with anybody while under suspicion of murder. Later, if—no, when—things turned out all right, I could march back here and ask her out and get my dollop of romance. Sex too, if the gods were willing.

I needed to go home to check the phone machine, which, a week or so earlier had mysteriously stopped delivering messages remotely. It wasn’t good for an actor, no matter how loosely you use the term, to be cut off from his telephone, and I’d intended to get a new machine this week. But with all that had happened since Monday night, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

I was on the southbound 405 when I spotted an early-seventies Chevy Malibu in the lane to my right, one car back. It was in beautiful condition, not a dent, not a scratch, with the sheen of new polish overlaying its bright red paint. I slowed down to let it pull even, admired it some more, shifted my eyes to check out the driver.

It was the big guy I’d seen at the funeral, sunglasses and all. Burns and Casillas were full of shit. They were tailing me.

I stomped on the brakes, letting him zoom past and provoking much horn-blowing and finger display from the Jeep behind me. I cut in behind the Malibu, zipped across three
lanes of traffic, and sped onto the ramp to the eastbound 10. Sunglasses Guy was boxed in and couldn’t follow. “Eat rubber!” I shouted out the window.