The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (23 page)

I hadn’t been called a young people in quite a while, and the term made me grin. Amanda made a lukewarm attempt to get him to stay, but he said he had to get up early and arose from the table. I got up to shake his hand. He held my grip, got a faraway look in his eye, and temporarily lost his smile. “As I spend time here in Los Angeles,” he said, “I grow convinced plant smugglers had nothing to do with Brenda’s death.”

“Why is that?”

“This is not their milieu. I cannot imagine these people in this city. They are people of the desert.”

“I’ve read that climatically, L.A. qualifies as a desert.”

His eyes returned to the room, and his smile did too. “I have read that the same is true culturally. Although personally I do not agree.” He gave my hand a final squeeze and strode off through the lobby.

Amanda carefully placed her water glass in the exact center of her napkin, stood, put on her sweater. “Let’s walk outside.”

We went down to the concrete boardwalk along the beach. The sky was clear, with a fair number of stars. A faint marine odor ran through the air. To the north, Santa Monica
Pier jutted into the bay, filled with lights and tourists and skeeball games.

“Let’s walk up to the Promenade,” I said.

“You mean that big shopping center?”

“Just north of it. A pedestrian mall. Great urban-renewal story, yada yada yada. Restaurants, people-watching. Bookstores. You like bookstores?”

“It sounds fun. Let’s go.”

We’d gone halfway up the boardwalk when a grizzled old homeless guy, smelling of burlap, popped out of a doorway to ask for a handout. Amanda shrank back and took my arm. I dug in my pocket for some change. The man said, “God bless you,” which was big among the homeless that year, and returned to his lair.

A block later Amanda abruptly stopped and twisted me around to face her. Her hair fluttered in the breeze. Her eyes searched my face. “Why are you trying to find Brenda’s killer?” she said.

I studied her features. Her eyes so like Brenda’s. Her lips, cool and refreshing. “How do you know I am?”

“Call it woman’s intuition.”

“I see.” It was a good question. I still wasn’t sure of the answer. “She was a friend.”

“The police will find him.”

“Eventually, maybe. I think they’re off on the wrong track. They suspect me, for instance.”

“Did you do it?”

“Of course not. Did you?”

“No.”

“I thought not.”

She let go of my arms and got me walking again. We continued in silence, listening to the surf and the occasional insomniac sea gull.

T
HE THIRD STREET PROMENADE IS A MONUMENT TO UR
-ban regeneration. They took a three-block stretch you wouldn’t want to venture into after dark and turned it into a major entertainment center. It’s full of fun things to do, if you’re the type who’s into fun things.

Maybe the evening hadn’t started out as a date, but to the casual observer it would have looked like one. Amanda would touch my forearm to get my attention, then point at some street clown or balloon twister or fancy bubble blower. I would grab her hand to keep from losing her when we pushed through the crowd. We browsed in a used bookstore but didn’t buy anything.

Around nine-thirty we wandered into Yankee Doodles. The place was packed. People leaned intently over pool tables. A dozen TVs showed highlights of the basketball game earlier, as well as hockey and baseball, tennis and golf.

We found a place in the corner. The monitor nearby was tuned to what had to be Trash Sports Network. Bungee jumping and skyscraper climbing and reruns of
Battle of the Network Stars
. A waitress came and we ordered drinks, a
greyhound for me, a Manhattan for hen In old books, people were always drinking Manhattans. My mother liked them. I hadn’t seen anybody order one in years.

We watched the pool players and exchanged confidences on how bad we both were at the game. This seemed to demand signing up for a table. Twenty minutes and another drink later, one came available. After two games had confirmed our ineptitude, we turned in our cues and paid our bill.

We walked back south along the Promenade. I started picking up a two-ships-passing-in-the-night vibe. Like something meaningful, or at least not totally frivolous, was supposed to pass between Amanda and me that evening. What form it was going to take was unclear, and if we weren’t alert enough to spot it when it came along, it probably wouldn’t happen at all. The emotional buzz had been missing for a long time, and when Amanda reached out and took my hand, I felt a physical one as well. We walked silently for a block or two, thinking our own thoughts. As we turned west on Colorado, she said, “Brenda liked you a lot.”

“How do you know that?”

“She wrote me. We traded letters once or twice a year. She said she’d met this guy and he was something special.”

“Is that all?”

“I don’t remember the details. It
was
four years ago. I wrote back telling her how happy I was for her, and the next time she wrote she said that it was over.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to tell me what happened.”

“There’s nothing to tell. She got tired of me.”

She looked me over. “Self-pity doesn’t look good on you.”

My lips were dry. I licked them. “Sorry.”

“She just dropped you?”

“More or less. She went off to Madagascar and said she felt I should see other people while she was gone. And when she came back we just never got back together.”

“Did you try?”

I said nothing.

“You didn’t, did you?”

I shook my head. “No. I just sort of let the whole thing slip away.”

“Maybe she was waiting for you to come after her.”

“Maybe.”

She nodded, as if this explained everything. “But you remained friends.”

“Yeah. A year or so later we worked together on a succulent exhibit for the county fair, spent a couple of days out in Pomona together, and we found we still enjoyed each other’s company. So we began to hang out. She was one of my closest friends.”

“Your closest being this Gina woman who keeps creeping into your conversation.”

“Does she?”

“Like clockwork.”

I looked away, pondering the significance of what she’d said. The guy who’d been following me was across the boardwalk. He stood on a staircase leading down to the beach, several steps from the top, with only his head and torso visible. He’d ditched the suit and wore one of those fancy polo shirts gangsters in the movies have on when they’re taking calls at poolside. He still had his shades though.

I told Amanda, “Stay here,” and dashed out to intercept him. When I reached the staircase he was gone. I stomped halfway down to the beach, far enough to see that he wasn’t down there.

When I got back to the top, Amanda was waiting for me. “What was that all about?”

“The damned cops have somebody following me around. Come on. I’m going to find him.”

I pushed through the crowd, headed back toward land, more or less dragging Amanda by the hand. I nearly knocked down a woman tending an incense stand. Somewhere not too far away a calliope chugged. “The carousel,” I said.

Everyone’s seen Santa Monica’s resident merry-go-round in
The Sting
. It reopened a few years ago after a long period of inactivity and delights kids of all ages once more. We ducked in and plunged through the throngs inside. The calliope clanged out “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Little kids screamed for just one more ride. Horses took riders up and down, while less adventurous folk rode benches.

We followed the wheels perimeter and stopped directly across from the entrance. I scanned the crowd, but I knew I wasn’t going to find Sunglasses Guy. “Damn it,” I said.

“Are you giving up?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m not going to find him. He must have taken Melting Into the Crowd 101 at the academy.”

She laughed. “Too bad,” she said. Another laugh. “That was a lot of fun.”

I turned to her. “Fun?”

She was a little out of breath, and a tiny bit of perspiration stood out on her forehead. Her eyes were slightly glazed. “Yes, fun. Like being Julia Roberts in a thriller movie. This kind of thing never happens in Bow Springs.”

Julia Roberts, was she? If she could be Julia Roberts, I could be Mel Gibson. I put my arm around her and pulled her tight and I kissed her. I expected her to resist. I was wrong.

It was a lovely kiss, nearly a perfect kiss. Earlier, her lips had looked cool and refreshing. They were refreshing all right, but warm, very nicely warm. They were soft, too, and pressed up against mine sweetly, at first tentative and then
with more insistence. The quickest brush of tongues, and suddenly it was over.

Somewhere in there she’d gotten her hand entangled in my hair. She gently pulled my head back and looked quizzically at me. “Oh, my,” she said.

“Oh, yours indeed.”

We stared at each other for a moment, then turned simultaneously and began to walk toward the exit. I slipped my arm around her shoulders. There’s a delicious feeling of anticipation that goes with putting your arm around a woman for the first time. Will she, in turn, place hers around your waist? Or will she decline to do so, leaving your limb lying there like a dead fish, until you can find some excuse to remove it without feeling like too much of an idiot?

The question was answered quickly. After only two or three seconds of suspense, she slid her hand across the small of my back and snapped it into place against the waistband of my Dockers. I leaned over and kissed her hair and escorted her off the pier. I threw a perfunctory look over my shoulder, in case the cop should be following, but when I didn’t see him I let him disappear from my mind.

As we turned south on Ocean I felt a chill. Probably that darned Catalina eddy. I drew my arm a bit tighter around Amanda. Ten minutes later we came to the Datsun. “That’s my truck,” I said.

“Really? You don’t seem the pickup type.” She giggled and disengaged herself from me. She went to the truck and peeked in the window.

“Its kind of dirty,” I said.

“So I see.” She inspected the truck bed, ran a finger along the side, stood by the cabin. “I want to sit in it,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

I unlocked the door and held it for her and she got in. She
inspected the interior wonderingly, as if she were in some mansion instead of the cab of a ’72 Datsun, touching the gearshift and the steering wheel and the sun visor, looking very much like a woman who’d never been in a pickup truck before.

She rolled down the window and smiled out at me. “I’ve never been in a pickup truck before,” she said, then patted the seat on the driver’s side and added, “You come sit too.”

I went around and got in next to her. She smiled again and took both my hands in hers and gazed into my eyes. “Take me back to your place,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

“I wouldn’t want us to do anything we shouldn’t.”

“We won’t, Joe.”

That was good enough for me. I started the engine and pulled out into the waning Saturday night traffic.

H
ER LOVEMAKING WAS ACCOMPLISHED WITH QUICK, PRE
-cise movements, as if what she was taking in would soon be gone. Our rhythms didn’t mesh, but it didn’t matter because we were both so in need that the whole thing was over in a minute or two. Afterward we lay there watching each other’s eyes in the flickering light from the candles I’d lit beforehand. She began to cry, not the huge, racking sobs I’d pictured at the funeral, but a tiny flow of tears, slipping off her face onto the pillowcase. I reached out a hand to comfort her and she smiled. “I’m so silly,” she said, and I felt wetness in my own eyes. When the first drop trickled out she kissed it away. Her lips drifted down to mine and lingered.