The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (33 page)

I suspected it was a tarantula hawk. I bent in for a closer look.

“Joe? You in there?”

I screamed like the heroine in a Wes Craven movie, sprang back, nearly fell on my ass.

“This has got to do with wasps, I just know it,” Gina said. She stood just outside the greenhouse, wearing a polo shirt and jeans and carrying a weird flower arrangement.

“How’d you guess?” I tried and failed to regain a smidgen of composure. “Someone tried to do me in with them.”

I was expecting a wisecrack, but I guess the look on
my face told her this wasn’t your everyday wasp panic. She came in and put down her flowers and wrapped her arms around me.

After she got me calmed down, I told her about my wonderful day, starting with the ordeal in the greenhouse. When we finished trying to decide who’d locked me in, I reported on my pilgrimage to the poinsettia capital of the world. We kicked around the identity of the mysterious third party before moving on to my tête-à-tête with Harold the Horse.

I concluded with the discovery of the outsize insect corpse. “I have a book inside I want to check it against.”

“Go get it,” she said. “I’ll bag the wasp.”

I went in and pulled Hogue’s
Insects of the Los Angeles Basin
from its shelf. By the time I came back outside, Gina had retrieved the dead tarantula hawk. She had it in the palm of her hand.

“Put that down,” I said.

“Why?” she said. “It’s dead. It’s harmless. Just ID it so we can get rid of it.”

A quick review of Hogue determined I was right. “It says that people who’ve been stung by one describe it as extraordinarily painful. Are you sure it’s dead?”

She deposited the wasp on the bench and poked it with her finger. “Deader than a doorknob.”

“I think that’s ‘doornail.’”

“It’s deader than that too.”

I consulted the book again. It said tarantula hawks were uncommon in our area, although they were occasionally seen out in the hills. “Kind of out of its element,” I said. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to capture this. This and all the other ones.”

“I suppose so.”

“Why would anyone go to all that trouble? Not to kill me. When I was in there with them, I thought that was what
was going on, but I was temporarily insane. If someone is trying to do away with me, there are better ways.”

“Maybe they just wanted to scare you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re getting too close.”

“Too close to whom? If I’m getting close to somebody, I sure as hell don’t know who it is.”

“They think you do.”

I sighed. “This is starting to get to me.”

“Starting?”

I pointed at the wasp. “What do you think we ought to do with that?”

“Stuff it and mount it over your mantel.”

“I’m serious.”

“Throw it in the garbage. What else would you do with it?”

“I don’t know, dust it for fingerprints maybe.”

She rolled her eyes at me.

“Okay, let’s toss it. And the others too.”

When we were done dumping the casualties in the trash, I picked up the flowers Gina had been carrying, a ridiculous arrangement in a bulky vase shaped like the Venus de Milo. Haifa dozen beautiful red roses poked out of it, but that was where normalcy ended. The stargazers had little bows on them, and the anthuriums had been painted silver, and the whole thing was rife with long skinny leaves stapled into loops. “Hey, what’s this all about?”

“Oh, that. Carlos made it for me. A sign of his affection, as he put it.”

“He actually gets paid for this kind of stuff?”

“Big bucks.”

“And you thought you could fob it off on me.”

“That wasn’t my intention, but now that you mention it… no, I just thought you could use a laugh.”

“You dragged it over here to give me a laugh?”

“Yeah. You’ve been kind of sour lately.”

“I guess I have.” I checked out the flowers again. “This thing is a crack-up. It ought to be in the Smithsonian.”

“You should have seen me trying to keep a straight face when he brought it over. I mean, the roses are sweet, but the rest of it…”

I pictured her at her front door, biting her cheeks, shifting her weight from foot to foot like she does when she’s trying to get rid of somebody, and suddenly I was giggling. Then I was into a big, full-bodied chortle, and before long I was cackling my head off. Gina started in too, and soon the two of us were in conniptions. Somewhere in there I dropped the vase and the flowers went all over the place and Venus was missing more than just her arms, and that got us started all over again. Every time I thought I was calming down, I’d catch a glimpse of her hysterics, and that would set me off anew.

Finally the laugh level diminished, and as I began to catch my breath, I began to appreciate what she’d done, lugging that thing over just to cheer me up. For the millionth time I realized just how much having a friend like Gina meant to me. Someone who would put up with my plant mania and my wasp phobia, who would bare-handedly pick up a winged invader from the hills so I could ID it. Someone with whom I could share anything, no matter how stupid, no matter how small. Someone who—

Time compressed. I went from point A to point M for murder in two or three seconds. And I wasn’t even stoned.

I stopped laughing. A second or two later Gina realized I’d quieted down and her giggles petered out too, although she was still snickering when she asked, “What happened? Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“You stopped so suddenly, I thought you hurt yourself. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

“Everything’s okay. Everything’s more than okay. Want to know why?” “Sure.”

“It’s simple,” I said. “I figured out who did it. I know who killed Brenda and Dick.”

W
E DROVE EAST ON CULVER UNTIL IT MERGED WITH
Venice, then north on La Cienega. I think Gina knew I was headed to her place, and I think she knew why, but she didn’t say anything about it. When we got there I made a couple of calls and we got what we needed from the kitchen.

We headed west on Santa Monica Boulevard. I pulled to the curb in front of A Different Light, the gay bookstore, where once I’d helped Gina search the stacks for something to explain why she couldn’t decide on girls or boys. Across the street was the West Hollywood sheriff’s station. Part of me wanted to run in there and say, phone your friends in the LAPD, tell them what I found out.

Instead, I rejoined the flow of traffic, cut north to Sunset, and drove through the glare of the Strip. We passed the Roxy, which, Annie Paul had told me, had once been a poinsettia packinghouse. On around the curve where the lights ended, and through the mansions of Beverly Hills, before turning left onto the UCLA campus.

We threaded our way around Circle Drive until the bulk of Pauley Pavilion blotted out the night, and drove into the tiny lot at the Kawamura Conservatory. I turned off the
engine, pocketed the key, and turned to Gina. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“Of course I do.”

We sat for ten minutes. My sting itched like crazy. A car clattered up. The engine cut out, and the vehicle settled on creaking springs. The driver got out and walked silently to my window. “Hello,” said Eugene Rand.

“Hi, Eugene,” I said. “I’m glad you could make it.”

“Of course I made it. I would do anything to catch Brenda’s killer. You know that.”

I introduced him to Gina. He hardly took notice. He walked toward the conservatory’s front door, but I jumped out of the truck and asked him to stop. “Does the back entrance open from the outside?”

He turned. In the dim light filtering in from the road, I thought his expression had turned peevish. “Yes.”.

“Lets go in that way. I’d like to keep this door locked.”

He shrugged and disappeared around the side of the building. Gina exited the truck and followed. I grabbed my flashlight and brought up the rear. A couple of big eucalyptus overhung the conservatory’s side. I could barely make out Gina’s outline in that stretch. I snapped on the flashlight and pointed it at the ground in front of her.

Gina reached the end and disappeared around the corner. I anticipated a crash, a scream, some out-of-the-ordinary sensory event that would tell me I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. None came. Seconds later I, too, rounded the corner. Gina stood in the glimmer of the one dim floodlight back there, while Rand sorted through a ringful of keys. He opened the padlock on the gate. We passed through the supply area. The
Aeonium lindleyi
no longer sat in the dimness atop the first-aid kit but had a new place in a new pot out where it would get its full complement of sun.

Rand unlocked the back door and we went in. I directed
the flashlight beam down the entry corridor. A dozen large white flowers reflected it back at me. One was a foot or more across.
Selenicereus macdonaldiae
I guessed; it had the biggest flower of all the cacti. A strong floral scent filled the air, pleasant if a bit cloying.

“These are amazing,” Gina said.

“They’ll all be dead by morning.”

She glanced back over her shoulder.

“Don’t say it,” I told her.

I gave Rand the flash, and Gina and I followed him to the light switch. He’d obviously watered that day; the air was humid and had that peculiar musty smell greenhouses get, and a few puddles remained on the ground. He clicked the switch, and a couple of fluorescent fixtures, four bulbs in all, lit up over to our left where the potting bench was. One of the bulbs buzzed and blinked and decided to go back to sleep.

“It’s kind of spooky, don’t you think?” Rand said.

I looked at the poor schlub standing there, wondering about what I was doing. What right did I have, taking the law into my own hands like this? I looked at my watch. Nine-twenty.

I got my flashlight back and promptly dropped it. Twenty seconds of switch-pressing convinced me I’d blown out the bulb. I put the flash on a bench and began to sort through the upright Madagascar euphorbias sprinkled about. Gina and Rand stood awkwardly by. “Nice euphorbia,” Gina said, fingering the small oval leaves on a two-foot cylinder of spines.

“That’s an alluaudia,” Rand said.

“So it is. Light’s not too good.”

I looked up from where I was poking around under a bench. “It does kind of look like some of the Madagascar euphorbs. It’s a good example of convergent evolu—”

“Spare me the botany lesson,” Gina said. She opened her purse, checked its contents, snapped it shut.

Five minutes later I had what I was looking for. It was way at the back of a bench; a fockea’s vining stems had draped themselves around it, nearly covering it. It only had a few leaves, and of those only one was striped.

I disengaged it and brought it over to Gina and Rand just as a vehicle pulled up. The driver gunned the engine and shut it off. “He’s here,” I said.

Footfalls sounded on gravel. “Anybody there?” said a voice outside.

“Around back,” I shouted. “To your right.”

His appearance took longer than expected; I worried he’d taken a wrong turn, would keep going until he reached Sunset Boulevard. But then we heard footsteps in the entry corridor and he appeared. “Hello?”

“Over here, Lyle,” I said.

He saw us and came closer. “Haven’t been here at night before. Spooky.”

“That seems to be the general consensus. Lyle, have you met Eugene Rand?”

He glanced over at Rand. “Yeah. At Dicks. How are you?” No one made any move to shake hands.

“Fine, I guess.”

“Good, good.” He saw the plant I still had in my hand. “What are we, giving out door prizes?” No one responded. “So, Joe, what’s so damned important we had to come out here this time of night?”

I looked at each of them in turn. Rand. Lyle. Finally Gina, who’d sidled a few steps away. “I’ve solved Brenda’s and Dicks murders. I need your help in apprehending the killer.”

A silly little grin grew around Lyles mouth. “You devil. You figured it out.”

I nodded, put down the plant, leaned against a bench. “Once upon a time a plant called
Euphorbia milii
grew in Madagascar. Then one day explorers came along and saw its vibrant red flowers and said, We have to have this. So they took some away and spread it throughout the world, and they called it crown of thorns because they thought it looked like what Christ wore on his head when he was crucified. It probably wasn’t, given that the Romans never heard of Madagascar.”

“What did they know?” Gina said.

“That plant became very popular among succulent collectors, even though it’s not really very succulent, and—”

“Excuse me, Joe,” Lyle said. “I know all this, and I’m betting Rand here does too, and you can tell your girlfriend on your own time. It’s kind of late.”

I held my hands up in front of me. “Forgive me. I was just trying to set the scene.” I pushed myself away from the bench. “One day a milii seedling appeared unlike any other. Instead of the normal, green leaves, this one had leaves like a sergeant’s stripes. Alternating red and green. An interesting curiosity, to say the least.” I picked up the milii again. “Like this one.” I brought it over to Rand. “Somehow Brenda got hold of this unique plant. One day she showed it to Dick McAfee. And Dick got an idea. What if Brenda could isolate the gene that caused the stripes? And what if that gene could be transferred to that other well-known euphorbia, the poinsettia? Dick relished his position as the poinsettia king of Los Angeles and thought a plant like that would be a sensation.”