The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (5 page)

I kept spouting succulent lore, and he kept lapping it up. We’d just covered what made a cactus a cactus when he said, “You got one like was in the victims mouth?”

“No.”

“Any of your friends have one?”

“A couple.”

“If you saw the one we pulled out of the victim, could you recognize it?”

I shook my head. “Abdelkuri just grows straight up. They look pretty much alike until they get big and get some character.”

“Sort of like dicks, huh?”

The only thing I could do was stare at him.

He held up a hand. “Sorry about that. A lousy try at a guy thing. They got all this sensitivity bullshit going on in the department; sometimes I just have to do a guy thing. Jeez, it’s hot in here.” He downed the rest of his water, walked back down the aisle, and exited the greenhouse. I followed. When I got outside he was mopping his substantial forehead with another tissue. He crumpled his cup and I took it from him.

He asked how I’d gotten interested in succulents. I told him how I’d stumbled into CCCC’s annual show at the Veterans’ Auditorium seven or eight years back and fell in love with a cyphostemma, a grape relative with leathery leaves and white, peeling bark. That’s how a lot of people get into succulents. They’ll see one plant that turns them on, and before they know it they’re up to their eyeballs in them.

He got ready to leave. “Thanks,” he said. “This has been real helpful. If you think of anything, give us a call.” He started to go, then pointed at the little lean-to where I keep my dwarf Madagascar euphorbias. “What’s in there?”

“Stuff that doesn’t need much sunlight.”

“Really? I thought all this shit grew out in the desert.” He wandered over and poked his head in. “Hey,” he said. “There’s one plant in here that’s real interesting. Come on over and tell me about it.”

Like I said, I’d seen it before. Somebody would think
succulents were an utter waste of time, and then one particular plant would fascinate the hell out of them, and they were hooked.

I was
so
wrong.

Sitting there among all the Madagascar plants in my shade house was one plant that didn’t belong. It was from a different island, the island of Socotra. A
Euphorbia abdelkuri
in a four-inch green plastic pot. Or rather, the remains of one, a couple of inches of stem with the tip snapped cleanly off.

F
OR AT LEAST THE SIXTH TIME I SAID, “IT’S NOT MY PLANT
.” I was in an interrogation room at the LAPD’s Pacific Division. I’d driven past the building hundreds of times, at the broad, dusty intersection of Centinela and Culver boulevards, a site that’s always lonely no matter how many day workers are congregated there looking for a few hours’ pay. I’d even been in the lobby once to borrow an electric engraver to carve my social-security number into my so-called valuables. But never past the front desk. Never into the bowels of the place.

It had been an hour since Casillas brought me there in his Chevrolet sedan. I wasn’t in custody, but it had been abundantly clear that if I hadn’t come with him voluntarily I would have been.

The room was utilitarian and too hot. Urine-colored perforated sound-insulation panels lined the walls. I sat at a Formica table decorated with gouges and stains, on a hard metal chair with one short leg. Across from me Casillas looked up from his notebook. Burns stood in a corner with her arms crossed over her chest.

Casillas slapped the book shut and tucked it and his cheesy pen into his pocket.

“Look,” he said. “There’s an easy way and a hard way.”

“Please, Detective, spare me the clichés. No matter which way you cut it, it’s not my plant and I don’t know how it got there. Somebody else obviously does though. Whoever called and told you where to find it. Any idiot could guess that.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Not that I’m implying you’re an idiot.”

He didn’t say anything. He just regarded me like I was a particularly ugly crime-scene artifact.

I couldn’t stand the silence. I knew he was playing some sort of cop head trip on me, yet I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “I can’t believe I told you all that stuff about succulents while all the time you were intending to bust me. What kind of crap is that?”

He pulled out one of those damned tissues and blew his nose. He took out the pen again and tapped it on the table.

I realized they were stalling. They knew even if I’d killed Brenda, I wasn’t dumb enough to leave the plant sitting around. “I’m not under arrest or anything, am I? And since you’ve run out of new questions and are asking the same ones over and over, I can probably go, right?”

Burns sighed, came and leaned over the table, put her hands flat down on it. “Yes, you can go.”

Casillas said, “But I’m going to be keeping—”

“An eye on me. I know, I know.”

I went out into what had turned into a glorious spring day, wondering if I should be looking into getting a lawyer. I rejected Burns’s offer of a ride home and walked east along Culver, past block after block of run-down two-story apartment buildings. Past the five-for-$10 T-shirt place, past the mamas and the babies and the preteen boys in their pregang
outfits. I walked straight out of Los Angeles and back into Culver City, my hometown.

I called Gina on her cell phone. This masterpiece of modern technology is one of our few bones of contention. Well be riding in her Volvo and she’ll whip it out to call some client or manufacturer’s rep, coming a whisker from losing control of the car, and I’ll yell and she’ll yell at me for yelling at her. I’ll threaten to throw the phone out the window. She’ll threaten to throw me out the window. Rituals such as this form the foundation of our friendship.

I found her locked in traffic on the Hollywood Freeway. “How are you holding up?” she asked.

“I had a visit from Casillas this morning.”

“Are you a suspect?”

“Evidently. He took me down to the station.”

“No way.”

“He thought it an appropriate course of action.” I filled her in on my visit to Pacific Division.

“Sounds like someone’s trying to frame you,” she said when I finished.

“Or just throw the scent off themselves.”

“We might want to poke into things a little.”

“Could be an idea. I don’t feel like just sitting around waiting for Casillas to come up with something else he thinks incriminates me. Or finding out about Dad.”

“There is the Dad thing.” She was quiet for a moment. “I better get off.”

A couple of minutes later Frank Baiter, Brenda’s lawyer, called. I’d met him a few months before when he gave CCCC’s officers some advice on nonprofit status. He told me Brenda had left an envelope to be opened in the event of
her death. Just like in the movies, I thought. She’d known someone was after her and identified the killer.

No such luck. The envelope gave instructions for her burial. She had a plot picked out at Final Haven up in Pacific Palisades, L.A.’s premier multicultural burial ground. A friend of hers was to handle the details. “This friend has quite an unusual last name,” Baiter said.

“Razafindratsira?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“I met him at a party at Brenda’s.”

Baiter had already spoken with him and told me the funeral was going to be at three o’clock Thursday. Brenda’s instructions asked for me to be in charge of calling the succulent crowd. The family, what there was of it, had been informed, and her sister, Amanda, was flying in from Wisconsin that evening.

I almost asked Baiter to recommend a good criminal lawyer, just in case, but I didn’t. I was innocent, damn it, and I wasn’t going to give the cops the pleasure of making me spend money on an attorney.

After we hung up I slouched on the couch, trying to identify what I was feeling. Presently I identified it as anger. I’d basically had two friends, and now someone had taken one of them away. I still had all the cactus people, but I wasn’t really close to any except Brenda. And I’d long since lost touch with all my acting cronies. So it had been Gina and Brenda, and now it was just Gina. A good thing no one had offed her; she was more than a friend. She was my alter ego. If anyone had hurt her I would have done anything to bring them to justice.

But I cared about Brenda too. Sure, she could be strident and pushy. But after our romance ended and our friendship began, she’d learned how much bullshit I would put up with and acted accordingly. I was getting pissed off that someone
had had the nerve to kill her and cut my stack of friends in half. I needed to do something about it. For her. And, since people were starting to think I did it, for me too.

Around one I went out to my pickup. It’s a 72 Datsun that I bought back in 79, when I began managing the Altair Theater. It’s been faithful to me ever since, and I to it. I stuck Blind Faith in the eight-track. Stevie Winwood complained that he couldn’t find his way home. I pushed the button to switch tracks. Squeaks, then silence. I popped the cartridge. Out it came, except for the long strand of tape that was jumbled in the works. Perhaps it was time for one of those newfangled cassette players.

I backed out of the driveway, went up to the corner, and followed Braddock Drive through the amoeba-shape enclave called Culver City Braddock runs east and west a couple of blocks south of the studio, which used to be MGM and now belongs to the Japanese. I followed the tree-lined streets until I came out on the stretch of Jefferson Boulevard where there’s a tire store on every block. I passed Sorrento Italian deli, where a million kinds of olives occupy the claustrophobic aisles. Then on past the Western-wear shop with the huge cactus out front. They used the place in a movie called
Eight Million Ways to Die
. Everywhere in L.A. you saw stuff from TV or the movies. Sometimes it was fun. This afternoon it was old.

I took the San Diego Freeway north to Sunset and headed west. Soon I was winding uphill along a narrow Pacific Palisades road. I turned right onto a long snaky driveway. Halfway up it the native plants gave way to exotic ones. Tree aloes on the left; giant Bosch-esque philodendrons to the right. The puyas, huge terrestrial bromeliads, were all
in bloom; turquoise and violet-blue flowers reflected the broken light with the sheen of carved wax. Under a huge buttress-rooted ficus, dozens of epiphyllum hybrids dangled, bearing a multicolored profusion of flowers, some as big as dinner plates.

The jungle parted and I reached the clearing at the top of the hill. A log cabin and a greenhouse, larger than the cabin, occupied it. Sam Oliver knelt out front, tending to a bed of pale green thick-leafed rosettes.
Dudley a
, his favorite genus. He wore dark green shorts and a T-shirt commemorating the Intercity cactus and succulent show from a few years back, the rare variation with “eighth” misspelled as “eigth.” A pair of glasses dangled from his neck on a red and green cord.

Sam had been an active member of succulentdom for well over a generation. He’d been president of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America and was a life member of every local cactus club. He spent at least two months a year overseas, in Botswana or the upper Amazon or some godforsaken corner of Borneo, seeking out new plants. Succulents, bromeliads, orchids, aroids—anything rare or weird.

He was about eighty, but you would have thought he was twenty years younger. He had pale blue eyes in a thin face. He hadn’t lost a lick of his brown hair, and neither it nor his goatee carried more than a trace of gray. He’d had a couple of minor skin cancers removed but was otherwise healthy as the proverbial horse.

The air was cooler than at my place, and as I exited the truck a bit of breeze tickled my skin. The ground was moist but not mushy; it looked like they’d gotten less rain up there.

“Hey, Joe,” Sam said. “Want an omelet? I’ve got some eggs to use up before I leave.”

The fact that he was leaving explained what I was doing there. He was headed for Tucson that night to spearhead one of his succulent symposiums. This would be followed by a
week of botanizing in Baja. I’d agreed to come up and check on things a few times while he was away and to do a watering or two. Today he was going to show me what needed special attention. I hoped to have better luck sitting his babies than I’d had with Brenda’s.

I said yes to his omelet offer, and we went into the cabin’s one big room. “You heard, I suppose?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, terrible thing. Gives euphorbias a bad name. You want mushrooms?”

“Mushrooms would be good. I’m just trying to get my mind around this whole thing. I knew her pretty well.”

“As did I, my boy. Cheese?”

“No. Yes. Forgive me for saying this, but you don’t seem very upset.”

He pointed the skillet at me. “I’ve seen a lot of people die lately. They’re dropping like flies. When you get to be my age—shit, Joe, you don’t need to hear this. I spent the morning feeling bad. When you’re as old as I am, that’s all you can afford.” He shook the pan. “Hard or runny?”

“Hard, please. Want to hear something funny? The police suspect me.”

“Did you do it?”

“Of course not.”