The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (20 page)

T
HE LITTLE BOX ON THE COMPUTER SCREEN SAID SOME
-thing about a
fatal disk error
. And interesting choice of terms, I thought.

“I cannot goddamned believe it,” Gina said.

“But it worked in Brenda’s computer.”

“Sometimes this happens. You put a file on a diskette and go back to read it and you can’t. But usually I have another copy on my hard disk, so it’s no big deal.”

“So we go back and get another disk.”

“You go back. Hiding in the haunted bathroom when the cops came was quite enough excitement for one evening.”

“But this could be our big break.”

She made a show of taking the disk over to her kitchen sink and dropping it into the garbage can underneath. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “You’re exhausted. If we go back we’ll get caught again.”

“Maybe we can just sneak in, take the computer, and have at it at our leisure.”

“I believe they call that burglary.”

“Oh, yeah.” I was fresh out of clever ideas, and trying to
think of them hurt my head. “I’m going home to get some rest.”

“You could stay here.”

“I hate sleeping on your couch. It’s too sturdy.”

“I could sleep on the couch.”

“Gina, I’m not kicking you out of your bed.”

“We could both sleep in the bed.”

“I don’t think we should both sleep in the same bed.”

“Why? What could happen?”

“Nothing. That’s one reason I don’t want to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have no idea. Look, like you said, I’m exhausted. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m going to go home and get some sleep.”

Outside, the world was beginning to light up. It took
The Who Live at Leeds
, loud, to keep me awake long enough to get home.

I was dreaming of Amanda Belinski. She lay in Brenda’s bathtub, wrapped in a
lamba
, trying out various positions, asking me over and over, “Is this how you found her?”

The telephone rang. I groped for it, thinking it was Amanda, calling to ask why I hadn’t shown up last night. Just as I found the phone I realized that couldn’t be the case, because our appointment was on Saturday night and Saturday had just begun.

It was Lyle Tillis. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, I’ve been up for hours.”

“Good, good. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. It’s just been kind of crazy up here, with Dick’s getting killed.”

“No need to apologize. I probably shouldn’t even have
bothered you.” I got my hand around the alarm clock, twisted it so I could see it. Nine-fifteen. I’d had three hours’ sleep.

“Yeah, well, life goes on. Damn, I miss him already.”

“Me too.” I didn’t, though eventually I might. “Look, I thought of something yesterday that I wanted to bring to your attention. Brenda was the president of CCCC and Dick was vice president.”

“Right.”

“So somebody might be making their way down the list of officers.”

“Wow.” I heard braying in the background. Was Merlin inside the house? “So that would put me next.”

“No, it would put
me
next.”

“No, no, treasurers next.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Treasurer’s more important. No offense.”

“No, you’re right, but I think on the list in the newsletter I’m next. Isn’t that how they usually do it? Secretary’s always listed before treasurer. Let me go find a newsletter.” I jumped out of bed, dragging the phone with me.

“I have one right here. Hey, you’re right. You’re next.”

“But you bring up a good point. Would they be going in the listed order or in order of importance? Assuming there is a
they
and, if there is, that they’re going in any order at all.” It was too overwhelming to think about on three hours’ sleep. “When did you hear about Dick?” I asked.

“Hope called last night.”

“How’s she holding up?”

“Fair. Magda and I are helping her out as much as we can with the funeral and all. Well, not really a funeral; he’s going to be cremated after the cops are done with him, and there’ll be a private service. Although we’re talking about having a memorial on Monday. Anyway, were headed
down there in a little while to see Hope, so I’d better get going.”

“You be careful, okay? Just in case somebody really is after one of us.”

“Will do. See you.”

“Okay. Hey, wait a minute. What I called about yesterday—”

“Right, striped milii. No, I never heard of anything like that. Would be pretty weird though. Probably could sell a lot of them.”

After we said good-bye I continued standing in the bedroom, holding the phone, because I couldn’t get it together enough to do anything else. I had that gnawing feeling in my stomach from lack of sleep, and I thought I had to pee but wasn’t sure. Also, someone had stuffed cotton batting in my mouth.

The phone rang, startling me, and I dropped it noisily to the floor. When I picked it up I heard a tinny Austin Rich-man saying, “You there, man?”

I fumbled the handpiece to my face. “Yeah. How are you?”

“Fine, man. You still want those books? You could come and get them now if you want.”

I wanted. I could run up there and check on Sams stuff on my way back. I did my greenhouse tour and showered and gobbled some shredded wheat. When I opened the door to leave, I found Detective Hector Casillas on my doorstep.

He’s been talking to the uniforms, I thought. He knows I was poking around at Brenda’s last night, and he’s come to arrest me for trespassing in the first degree. “Hector,” I said, none too cleverly, “to what do I owe this visit?”

“Why didn’t you tell me your father was a hood?”

“I don’t think
hood is
quite the appropriate word.”

“He went to prison for murder. What would you call it?”

“My father is a fine man who was in the wrong place at
the wrong time.” Even I realized how lame that sounded. “And anyway, even if he was the Hillside Strangler, what’s that got to do with me?”

“Life father, like son, I always say.”

“Do you, now? What
did your
father do for a living?” He was a cop.

So much for that clever ploy. “Yeah, well, just because you followed in your father’s footsteps doesn’t mean I did. Listen, get this straight. I didn’t kill Brenda. Or Dick. I’m trying to help you guys figure out who did, because they were friends of mine.”

“Yeah, well, just stay out of our way, why don’t you.”

“Yeah, well, go work on your body-dump case, why don’t you. Or do you suspect me of that too?”

“Smartass. We’ve got an eye on you. As soon as you make a mistake …” He raised the back of his suit jacket and showed me his handcuffs.

“Very impressive,” I said. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.” I stepped out, locked the door, and brushed past. Halfway to the curb I stopped and turned. “By the way, tell the guy you’ve got tailing me I like his car.” I left Casillas standing there with his mouth hanging open.

I took Pacific Coast Highway and turned up Topanga Canyon Boulevard. It’s an odd road to call a boulevard, a winding two-lane highway that zigzags up through a rocky cleft in the mountains. After a few miles it passes through the loose assemblage of buildings that’s the village of Topanga, eventually reaching the dreaded San Fernando Valley thirteen miles or so from where it started.

Topangans like to view their community as a place the
nineties haven’t yet reached, perhaps not the eighties, and on a good day not even the seventies. A countercultural refuge where the hippies never went straight and where, if you squint, you can imagine you’re living off the country. They’re fooling themselves, I think; it’s only a matter of time before Starbucks shows up.

Austin’s and his wife Vicki Neidhardt’s place lay two miles and three turns off the Boulevard, and if you didn’t know where it was you weren’t going to find it. I did know and still I barely made it. I walked around their gigantic A-frame and found Austin in the vast backyard knee-deep in squash vines. He was smoking something hand-rolled that was too fat to be a joint, one of his homemade cancer sticks.

His long blond hair was parted down the middle like an Allman Brother, and he had a Fu Manchu mustache to match. He wore overalls with nothing underneath, and Earth Shoes. He was the only person I knew who could say things like “far out,” “right on,” and “out of sight” and not seem like an idiot. He didn’t have a job and hadn’t in thirty years, though I’d always suspected he pulled in a certain income from a marijuana patch somewhere in the hills behind the house.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t work, because Vicki was a corporate stooge. I use this phrase only because she used it herself. She
liked
being a corporate stooge. She loved the commuting and the power clothes and the jetting around the country. She was a vice president of a major investment-banking firm downtown, and she probably made more money than anyone else I knew She and Austin had two teenagers, a boy and a girl, and, regardless of the apparent disparity in their lifestyles, were the second-closest couple I knew, surpassed only by Dick and Hope. Which I guessed meant they were now number one.

“Hey, man,” Austin said. “Come on over and check this out.”

“This” was crawling around his palm. A hairy caterpillar with little green spots on it.

“I found it munching on my squash leaves,” Austin said. “Can’t have that, you know. Let’s take it to higher ground.”

We trekked up a hillside that Austin had spent countless hours landscaping with cacti, euphorbias, agaves, and other desert plants. Little dust clouds rose up and made me sneeze. Austin found a suitable place for the caterpillar on a palo verde branch, stepped away, and sat down on a rock. “I heard about Dick on the radio,” he said. He began field-stripping his cigarette. “It’s a damned shame, man. What’s wrong with the world, Joe, do you think?”

“Don’t know, Austin.”

He nodded, solemnly, like I had said something significant. “It’s the truth. Shit, I try to think why anyone would knock off a cool chick like Brenda, and I just don’t get it.”

“I’ve been not getting it myself.” I found a rock of my own to sit on. “Fact is, Austin, I’ve been digging into the whole thing a bit.”

“Far out.” His face got all weird. I was afraid he was having an acid flashback. “That’s right. You and she were balling some time back. No offense meant.”

“None taken. It
was
a long time ago. But I just kind of felt I owed her something.”

“Cool. Find out anything?”

I filled Austin in on my adventures over the past few days. When I told him about Eugene Rand’s unrequited love of Brenda, he nodded thoughtfully, saying, “Now,
there s
an uptight dude.” When I got to the part about Gina and the e-mail, he put on this big serious expression and pointed a weather-beaten finger at me. “You ask me,” he said, “you and Gina need to get together.”

“I didn’t ask you,” I said with a smile on my face.

“Everyone needs a good woman.” He shrugged. “But suit yourself. So what happened with the e-mail?”

“Nothing much yet. Somebody told us to watch for a striped milii.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm, what?”

“I’ve got one.”

“Got one?”

“A striped milii.”

“You do? Where’d you get it?”

“Brenda gave it to me.”

“What? When?”

“Let’s see. Would’ve been three years ago.”

“Can I seek?”

“Sure.”

“Where is it?”

He pointed. “Right there over your shoulder.”

I flung my head and shoulders around but didn’t see anything.

“Higher up. Behind the golden barrel.”

I scrambled fifteen feet or so up the slope. “Holy cow.”

It was three feet high, branched both at the base and higher up. The gray stems were three quarters of an inch thick and studded with spines. Four-inch stalks displayed clusters of tiny flowers with blood-red bracts. The leaves were elliptical, three or four inches long. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

What
was
extraordinary was that the leaves were, as advertised, striped. Actually,
chevroned
is a better word. Each leaf was adorned with alternating V-shape areas of red and green. Each V pointed down toward where the leaf sprang from the stem, with the mid-rib at the base of the V. The stripes varied from a quarter to a half inch wide.