The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (8 page)

But I couldn’t sleep. I’d eaten too much and given myself a stomachache. The air in the bedroom was too still, and the fan hadn’t made it in yet from the garage, where it liked to spend the winter. I lay there thinking about the fix I found myself in. This led me to Gina’s notion of poking into things ourselves. This led me to Gina.

We’d first met in 1981, when I was managing and acting at the Altair. She’d recently moved back to L.A. after ending a four-year affair with another Harvard alumna she’d met in her senior year there. Someone recommended her to design sets for our revival of
Private Lives
, We hit it off and steamed into one of those fast and furious flings theater people are so adept at. It burned out around opening night, and when the run ended we lost touch.

Fast forward eight years to a Passover seder at my cousin—and commercial agent—Elaine’s. It was the first seder I’d ever been to. When I was growing up, my father’s Judaism and my mother’s Catholicism neatly canceled one another out. We had Christmas, and that was about it.

The doorbell rang, I opened it, and there stood Gina. She was doing the interior of Elaine’s new office in Westwood, and Elaine had invited her on the pretext of expanding her religious horizons but with the ulterior motive of fixing us
up. Gina and I were uncomfortable—for the first thirty seconds or so. By the end of the evening we were the best of friends. She brought me up to date; she’d gotten married and divorced, been through a punk phase, and started her own interior-design business.

We were a couple of jerks that evening, ignoring everyone else except Lauren—Elaine and her husband Wayne’s daughter—who was nine and a fine audience for our antics. By the time the last matzo was eaten, Gina and I had arranged four or five activities together.

Being in the entertainment world—however loosely you use that phrase—meant I’d always had female friends. But there was generally an undertone of sexual tension, on my part at least. I’d treat the women as buddies and secretly plot some way to get them into bed. It happened once or twice and ruined the friendship.

But when I ran into Gina again, I felt no chemistry. We’d used it up back in ‘81. She obviously felt like I did, and besides, her social life was already complicated enough. She’d been juggling two lovers, one male and one female, for several months. Before our reacquaintance was a week old, she’d related all their shortcomings to me—
all
of them. I responded with similar complaints about the woman I’d been seeing on and off It was great. It was like suddenly having the sister I’d never had, except you couldn’t talk to your sister about blow jobs.

Being a guy, I was more interested in what went on with Gina’s female lover. She would demand to know why men were so aroused by the thought of two women together. I could never think of anything to say other than, “It’s a big turn-on,” at which point she would ask how I would respond to the sight of two men together. I would mouth platitudes about how everyone had the right to whatever orientation
they chose, then curl my nose and say that actually seeing two men together sounded icky.

I smiled in the dark. “I still think it sounds icky.”

“What’d you say?” It was Gina, standing in the doorway to my room, her slim form outlined by the light of the moon.

“Nothing. What are you doing up?”

“I had to pee. You?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Casillas and all.”

Her silhouette nodded. “Forget him for now. Get yourself some rest, baby.”

She slipped off toward the bathroom, and I was asleep before she came back out.

O
N WEDNESDAY MORNING, WITH GINA STILL ASLEEP IN THE
living room, I washed my six days’ growth of beard down the drain and left the house at six-thirty. My destination was West Covina, one of a patchwork of small cities to the east of Los Angeles. It’s along Interstate 10—which is the Santa Monica Freeway in my part of town but the San Bernardino out there—and out past the 605. The 605 has a name too, but no one can ever remember it.

The whole commercial thing had gotten pretty routine. Every couple of months one of my auditions would work out and I’d find myself on a soundstage or in some rented house. The other actors would be obsessing about pictures and resumes and casting-director workshops, and I’d be daydreaming about pachypodiums. Acting was so important to some of my competition that occasionally I felt guilty for nonchalantly taking some of their jobs. But not often. Especially not when the residual checks came.

I got off the freeway and followed the fluorescent-orange signs with OLSEN’S lettered in Magic Marker to an address on a residential street. Equipment trucks lined the block; a covey of crew clustered around the honey wagon. I found a
spot half a block away, checked in, and went to my dressing room—a trailer segment—to await my makeup call. I ran into the woman who’d been cast as my wife, played the game where we tried to figure out where we knew each other from, finally realized she’d been in a visiting production at the Altair.

I lay on my tiny bunk thinking about Brenda. My mind must have considered this a huge imposition; next thing I knew a knock on the door startled me awake. The assistant director poked her head in. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.” It was a quarter to nine.

I rose and shone, got made up, and went out to the backyard, where they were shooting. They were getting the kid scenes out of the way first so the dear little tykes wouldn’t get overtired and become pains in the ass. My “daughter” explained to my “son” how she felt safe playing in the yard now that Mom and Dad had stopped using those nasty chemical insecticides. “Son” replied that it was fun watching all the ladybugs. They shot the thing a dozen times, took a break, shot a half dozen more. Around eleven they had what they wanted, dismissed the kids, and moved on to my “wife” and me. They set us up by some rosebushes, where I, as the somewhat befuddled husband, held a pack of ladybugs up to my eye, while my wife, the clever one, told me how each one could eat eight gazillion times its weight in aphids. We rehearsed it twice, I developed just the proper look of amazement, and we shot the thing. We were such professionals that we got it right on the seventh take. I left for home at twelve-thirty.

Gina’d left a note saying she had a couple of clients to see and would call me in the late afternoon. I considered a swing
through the greenhouse to make up for the one I’d missed in the morning because of my early call. But that special connection I always felt on my early-morning jaunts was never there later in the day. Trips to the greenhouse in the afternoon were for practical purposes, watering and disposing of bugs and removing detritus.

Such tasks seemed most unappealing at the moment, so instead of going out back I entered the Jungle with the itinerary Sam had given me. It said Brenda’s flight had been scheduled for five-twenty, Monday evening. She had a three-hour stopover in Paris, then on to Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. She would have spent a day there before leaving for the bush.

I looked up. Maybe I could have saved her if I’d been more insistent. I’d offered to drive her to the airport, but she preferred the shuttle. It avoided those tearful good-bye scenes, she said. I pointed out we were several years beyond tearful good-byes. She laughed and said, “You never know.”

Now I shook my head. “You never do, do you, Brenda?”

The night before, Gina and I had talked about interrogating somebody. It was time to start. But with whom?

Half an hour later I pulled in next to a decrepit lime-green Renault Le Car in the Kawamura Conservatory’s tiny parking lot. My spot was marked STAFF ONLY. I silently dared the Parking Gestapo to do something about it.

The conservatory was in the northwest quadrant of the gargantuan UCLA campus, near Pauley Pavilion. A ramshackle wooden sign announced it was only open to the public on Saturdays and alternate Tuesdays. This was because they had no funding. The reason they had no funding, according
to the late Professor Belinski, was pure unadulterated asininity on the part of the administration. Brenda’d been fond of pointing out how the football team always had all the money they wanted, even though they sucked a lot of the time. She never did get it about college football.

I found the full-time staff of the conservatory, one Eugene Rand, in front of the entrance, digging up an aloe that had been infested with aloe mite. Not even a tub of Cygon will cure aloe mite.

Rand was in his mid-thirties, a failed graduate student unable to find his place in the world, who’d migrated to the conservatory because he liked plants more than he did people, and who Brenda kept on staff because he would work cheap. He’d lost his hair early and blown large portions of his meager salary on unsuccessful grafts. Something to do with an allergy to his own skin. The result was a red blotch resembling a map of Argentina right above where his hairline would have been if he’d still had one. I knew all this because Brenda had told me, which made me wonder what kind of privileged information about me she’d shared with other people.

Watery blue eyes studied me from beneath Rand’s mistreated pate. “Hello,” he said, tossing the uprooted aloe into a wheelbarrow. He was no more than five foot five, with skin dark from his hours in the sun. He wore a plain white T-shirt and a pair of threadbare denim shorts.

I told him who I was. He got a funny look on his face. “The article in the paper. You’re the one who found her.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for your loss.” A little trite, but serviceable. “I just came up here to see if there was anything I could do.”

“Do? Do? Just look at this place. It’s falling to pieces. We have whiteflies and blackflies. I don’t have money for fertilizer. My tools are all broken. And now, with Dr. Belinski
gone, who’s going to raise even the little bit we did get?” He nudged the wheelbarrow with his foot. “You see this? I bought it with my own money.”

“I’ll bet that hurt,” I said.

“What did that mean?”

I smiled charmingly. “Just that universities aren’t known for their generosity with their staffs. I’ll bet you’re not paid half of what you’re worth. You could probably get a better job somewhere else. It’s only your love for the conservatory that keeps you here.”