The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (32 page)

“Can you be a little more specific?”

Not quite yet she couldn’t. “Are you really a friend of Dicks?” she asked.

“Yes. And Brenda Belinski’s. The woman who was killed first.”

“I knew her as well.”

So Brenda had known a poinsettia person. I had to be on the right track.

Annie Paul said, “You’re not the killer, are you?”

“No.”

She was silent for ten or fifteen seconds. I let her consider whatever she was considering. Finally she said, “Can you come down here?”

“Is there something you can’t tell me on the phone? Is someone listening?”

“Don’t be paranoid, Mr. Portugal. It’s just that the whole thing will be so much easier if you can see rather than just hear.”

“See what, Ms. Paul?”

“The plants, Mr. Portugal. I want you to see the plants.”

I
GRABBED THE WITCH HAZEL AND A BOTTLE OF DRINKING
water and was on the 405 south in ten minutes. An hour and three quarters later, I exited the freeway at the Encinitas exit, where a sign told me I was in the POINSETTIA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. I pulled into Paul’s Poinsettia Plantations parking lot at the stroke of twelve.

I renewed the witch hazel on my sting. The welt had ceased growing, and the itch threatened to surpass the pain in terms of irritation. When I’d finished nursing myself I stepped down from the truck and took stock. It was a bit warmer than it had been in L.A. The sky was cloud- and smog-free. Dozens of huge greenhouses lined up along a gentle slope to my right, filling an area equal to several football fields.

I walked toward the only building that didn’t seem to be a growing area, a long, low structure that had been added onto several times with little regard for architectural consistency. As I approached, a woman emerged from one of the stucco sections. She appeared to be about my age, with broad shoulders and hips and a well-tanned face. Her eyes were brown, her hair on a swift slide from brown into gray. She wore
khaki shorts and a long-sleeved denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and carried a black three-ring binder.

She walked swiftly toward me. “Mr. Portugal, I presume,” she said, offering a firm handshake.

“Call me Joe. Quite a layout you’ve got here.”

“And I’m Annie. Yes. It does spread, doesn’t it? Please come this way.”

She took me on the grand tour, showing me the various greenhouses, reciting the names of the plants within. She showed me the complicated arrangement of shades that enabled the plants to receive the six weeks of fourteen-hour “nights” they needed in order to bloom for the holiday season.

We stopped at a greenhouse way on the other side of the property, much smaller than the others, newer as well. She asked me to tell her what I knew. When I finished she undid a big padlock and slid the door open. “I wish I’d done something when Dick was still alive,” she said. “If I had, we might not have lost him as well.”

“What would you have done?”

“I don’t know, called someone. But it seemed so tenuous. Just an offhand remark Brenda made.”

“You’re being too vague for me.”

She shook her head. “Sorry. Let me show you. Then well talk about what it all means.” We went in. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of bloomless poinsettias lined the benches. She led me to a corner where a single tray of three-inch plastic pots sat alone. “Here they are.”

“They?”

She stood next to me and opened her binder. “Look.”

It was an eight-by-ten color photo in a plastic sleeve, showing a small poinsettia. It looked like any other poinsettia, except for one thing. The bracts, instead of being red or whitish or some mottled salmon color, bore chevrons of
alternating red and white. Just like the red and green ones on the mysterious
Euphorbia milii
.

“We wanted to call it Candy Cane,” Annie said. “But Dick insisted on Sweet Hope, and Brenda went along with him. They wouldn’t let us have the propagation rights unless we named it that. It was to have been a surprise for Dicks wife on their fortieth anniversary.”

“When did you get these?”

“Last winter. But we’d been talking about it for five years. Dick dropped by one spring and asked if we’d be interested in a poinsettia with striped bracts. Of course we said yes. We have our own genetic-research staff, look at thousands of new plants, and usually aren’t interested in cultivars from outside sources. But how could we turn this down? The market will be huge.”

“And Brenda cooked it up.”

“Yes. Something to do with gene-splicing, although where the gene came from I have no idea.”

I did, but didn’t see any point in telling her. “What happens next?”

“We propagate them. We’ll take cuttings, and in a year or two we’ll license them, on a limited basis at first. It’ll be several years before the public sees even the smallest amount. But a couple of Christmases after that you’ll be seeing it all over the country.” She turned the page, showed me another photo. A few more. They all looked pretty much the same.

“That offhand remark you mentioned. What was that all about?”

“When Brenda and Dick were down here last December, we were talking about the difficulties of developing new varieties. Brenda said she never wanted to go through that kind of thing again. It was too time-consuming. It took her away from her conservation efforts and all.”

“About that offhand remark…”

“I’m coming to it. It was one of the difficulties she was referring to. Evidently someone else was involved in Sweet Hope’s development. Brenda said that ca certain party’—and those were her exact words—was being a bit uppity. Dick agreed but said he was sure it was all bluster.”

All bluster
. The exact words I’d used to describe Henry Farber.

“Have you considered the possibility that you and the rest of your family might be in danger?”

She nodded. “It has crossed my mind. But after the initial shock I began to think Brenda and Dick probably had a lot more in common than our business venture. If there was a connection it could have nothing to do with poinsettias. I understand they were both officers in some cactus club up in L.A. Maybe that’s the connection.”

We left the greenhouse behind and walked back to where my pickup was parked. I shook hands and climbed in. “What do you intend to do now?” Annie asked.

“Figure out who this mystery person is, I guess.”

I waited for her to say, “Find the bastard.” She didn’t. I fired up the truck and started back for L.A.

Catherine answered the door and ushered me into the living room, where Dad and Leonard were watching a
Wiseguy
rerun. Leonard looked up. “Hello,
boychik?
” he said.

“Hello, Leonard.”

“Hello, Joseph,” said my father. He had the remains of a cigar in his mouth, unlit, for all I knew the same one he’d had when I’d seen him last. His eyes were wary. He could tell by the look on my face that I’d sussed out his little surveillance scheme. Or Sonny had called him.

“Hi, Dad. We need to discuss something. Can we go out back?”

He tucked the cigar butt in his shirt pocket. “Sure, Joseph.”

When we sat down outside he saw me scratching my side. I told him I’d been stung. He said see, it wasn’t so bad. I told him yeah, once wasn’t so bad. But ten times in the same place would be bad.

He hesitated, then did something he’d never done in all the years since he’d gotten out of prison. He reached across the table and took my hand, pulled it toward him, wrapped it in both of his. “I was worried about you, Joseph.”

I wanted to pull away, tell him I was a big boy. I was forty-four years old, for God’s sake, and I didn’t need a Mafia nanny to keep me out of trouble. But, sitting there with my hand enclosed in his warm, gnarled ones, all the anger drained. “I appreciate that, Dad.”

“With your mother gone you’re all I have left. I didn’t want some cockamamy killer sticking a posy up your ass.”

“I can watch my own ass, Dad.”

He watched my face, then nodded slowly. “Sonny agrees.”

“Dad, about Sonny, he was doing a hell of a job; it was only by accident I got—”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry about Sonny. That old wop and me go back a long way.”

“Dad!”

He held up a hand. “Don’t start with that politically correct stuff. Sonny and me are old friends. I call him a wop, he calls me a kike. It’s no big deal.”

“Old friends or no, how’d you manage to talk him into trailing me for you?”

Dad patted my hand with one of his and pulled both of his back. I felt like someone had ripped a cozy blanket off me on a winter morning.

Slowly the feeling receded. My father still hadn’t answered. “How, Dad?”

“We go back a long way—”

“I know that, Dad, get to the point.”

“Sonny owed me a favor, that’s all. Now we’re even.”

“What—”

“Joseph.” With that one word I was eight years old again. “It’s nothing you should know about.”

“Okay,” said eight-year-old Joseph.

“Good. So tell me, how are you doing with your investigation?”

I returned to adulthood and briefed him on the high points.

“So now you’ll find this mystery man,” he said.

“Or mystery woman.”

He shook his head. “This is a man. Trust me. A woman would have slipped a letter opener into their hearts.”

“That’s awfully sexist, Dad.”

“Again with the politically correct. If this is a woman I’ll eat my hat.”

“You do that, Dad. Look, I’ve got to go. Gina’s coming over, and I don’t want her to have to wait for me.”

“Call her up; bring her over here. They had some nice chicken at Ralphs. Leonard and me bought plenty.”

“Another time. I promise. As soon as this murder stuff is over, I’ll bring Gina over and the five of us will have a nice evening together.”

“That would be good. I like Gina. Even if she is a little crazy with this lesbian stuff.”

I stuck my head in the greenhouse and sniffed. A vague chemical smell remained, but the air seemed healthful
enough. As the day heated up the fan would have come on and drawn the toxic fumes out.

I stood in the entrance and scanned the premises. Nothing moved. A couple of feet down the center bench, an inch from the edge, a yellow jacket lay motionless. I went over and hesitantly poked it with a plant label. It didn’t respond. It was, I decided, dead.

A cautious inspection revealed several other dead wasps, along with an assortment of other insects who’d been caught in the crossfire. I felt a twinge of guilt. Now, with most of my mental capacity in place, I knew it would have been all right to simply leave the greenhouse door open and let the wasps find their way out. They may have been frightful, but they weren’t evil, and I’d mercilessly bug-bombed the life out of them.

All such thoughts evaporated when I came across the giant invader I’d merely caught glimpses of in the morning. It lay at the base of my white-haired
Cephalocereus senilis
, a.k.a. Mexican old man cactus. The wasp, even in death, was the scariest thing I’d seen since the original
Alien
. It was two inches long, with substantial red-orange wings. The body was a nasty blue-black, with a delicate wasp waist and a huge stinger at its nether end. Even in death it gave me the shivers.