The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) Page 3

  “Yeah, right.”

  She sprang back to a sitting position and looked me in the eye. “No, really. God knows there are enough weird characters in that club. Maybe one of them got a bug up their ass about something Brenda did and euphorbiated her.”

  “Come on, Gi. They’re harmless.”

  “That’s what all murderers want you to think. I’ll bet it was one of them.”

  “Nah. It was plant smugglers or a spurned lover or some nonaffiliated euphorbia fetishist.”

  “You’re no fun.” She gestured with her spoon. “Is there anymore?”

  I peered into the ice cream container. Three spoonfuls remained. “Here, finish it.”

  A little later she roused herself and got her stuff together to go home. I walked her out to her Volvo, gave her a hug, and slammed the car door behind her. She jammed the transmission into drive and blasted off into the night. I went back in and to bed.

  I woke at seven to the sound of theremin music next door. The people there had moved in three years before, although which of the never-ending stream of slightly seedy characters actually lived there was something I’d never quite figured out. For a while I’d thought they were drug dealers. Then I decided it was a whorehouse. My current theory was that they were running a bookie joint. There was always some racket or other emanating from over the fence, wailing babies or barking dogs or chain saws. Now it was electronic music. Maybe they were auditioning for the remake of Plan 9 From Outer Space.

  I made some tea and went outside. The June gloom continued. It had shown up in May, just like every other year. Sometimes I enjoyed the succession of cloudy mornings, the result of some weather phenomenon I chose not to understand. Doves would coo and mockingbirds would mock, and baby possums would dash by inches from my toes.

  But sometimes the June gloom was a depressing thing, and this particular Tuesday morning, a perfect marriage of gray sky and chill air, was a prime example. I’d expected a night’s sleep would buffer me from the mortality I’d suddenly been getting in touch with. It hadn’t.

  I pulled my robe tighter and went into the greenhouse. It’s about twelve by eighteen feet, with benches all along the inner walls and another one down the middle. The ground is covered with gravel, and the walls and roof are corrugated fiberglass panels that have turned translucent from exposure to the sun. There’s a series of so-called automatic vents around the top of the walls, which work when they feel like it, as well as a temperature-activated fan at the far end. Five hundred or so plants live there in relative harmony, grudgingly sharing space with an assortment of seed and rooting trays.

  I started my rounds. Each morning I would meander through the greenhouse, dressed in a bathrobe and karate slippers, sipping a cup of tea. I’d note who’d put on a little growth spurt, who had buds or bugs, who needed a bit of extra water. Fortified with a reassurance that life went on, I’d be ready to face the day.

  Two minutes along I realized it was silly to think I could just carry on my ritual like nothing had happened. Every time I saw a euphorbia, I thought of the previous evening’s events. New buds struck me as inconsequential. Mealybugs seemed a really stupid thing to worry about. All the growth spurts in the world weren’t going to bring Brenda back.

  I abandoned my rounds and retreated to the house. I took a shower, ate some toast, and went out front to the Jungle. That’s what I call the patio at the southeast corner of my house, right by the front door. A gigantic elm on my oddball neighbors’ property blocks most of the direct sun, so I’ve filled it up with plants that don’t need a whole lot of light. It’s jammed with viny hoyas and ceropegias, rattail cactus and epiphyllums, jungle cacti with big showy flowers. I’ll sit in one of the wicker chairs and let the plants droop down around me and imagine I’m in Africa or Costa Rica or someplace. At dusk I’ll relax out there, pretend the trees lining Madison Avenue don’t exist, and imagine I’m watching the sun go down.

  I put my feet up on the railing and thought about the meeting that evening. Brenda’s presidency of the CCCC had been a good thing, in that her quirky energy brought some life to a lackadaisical crowd. The flip side was that she would get snide with people she thought were stupid or ignorant, occasionally embarrassing them in front of the whole club.

  Now the duty of keeping things going fell on Dick McAfee, the vice president, who was as far from Mr. Excitement as a saguaro is from a petunia. He would ramble on and on about the most inane little thing, be it botanical or whatever, worrying a subject to death even after it had expired. Not only that: He mumbled. He’d start a sentence and you’d think you were following, and then you’d realize that you hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

  I pictured them all sitting in their folding chairs at the Odd Fellows Hall. Dick would be up there saying, “Brenda is dead; somebody killed her; they stuck a Euphorbia abdelkuri down her throat. An interesting thing about E. abdelkuri: In its native habitat the goats make it into canoes.” Or at least that’s what it would sound like. But with Marble-mouth Dick you couldn’t tell; that might really be what he was saying.

  I was going to have to take charge. I was, after all, now next in line for the presidency. I’d taken the secretary’s job because no one else would, which was basically how anybody got any job in the club. Except Brenda; she’d actively campaigned to be president—against no opposition—because she thought she could then get the members interested in volunteering at the conservatory. She’d had the post for almost five months, and in that time the most notable foray by CCCC members up to UCLA had been by an elderly couple who got lost and ended up trimming bamboo at the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden.

  I got together a few sentences that didn’t sound too maudlin and began strolling around, practicing my delivery. I was on my third run-through, declaiming on what a, wonderful person Brenda was, when Detective Hector Casillas, who’d stealthily insinuated himself halfway up the front walk, said, “Very impressive,” and frightened me half to death.

  “Jesus,” I said, after returning from the stratosphere. “Do you always go sneaking up on people like that?”

  “Sure. They give a course at the academy, Sneaking Up 101. I got an A. Seen today’s paper?”

  He waggled a piece of the Times in the air. The Metro section. When I shook my head he came the rest of the way up the walk, handed me the paper, and sat down in one of the wicker chairs. He sat idly fingering the dangling, pencil-thick branches of a rhipsalis while I scanned the front page. I skipped over PROBE POINTS TO HIGH-LEVEL INVOLVEMENT and LOTTERY WINNER GIVES TICKET TO DIOCESE, and then there it was. UCLA PROFESSOR KILLED WITH PLANT.

  “Nice picture of the victim, huh?” Casillas said.

  It showed Brenda a couple of hairstyles ago, displaying plenty of cleavage. The photo was probably from some fund-raising thing. She was always hobnobbing with the semi-rich and almost-famous, digging up cash for her botanical activities.

  I read a few paragraphs. They got the plant’s name right, but capitalized abdelkuri. Not proper nomenclatural practice. I handed the paper back.

  He looked down and said, “I like this part. The body was discovered by actor Joe Portugal, forty-four, best known for his role in a breakfast cereal commercial. I thought you looked familiar.”

  I made a little bow.

  “You make a living off that stuff?”

  I shrugged. “More or less. I do about a half dozen commercials a year. Shoot one tomorrow, as a matter of fact.”

  “What for?”

  “Olsen’s Natural Garden Solutions.”

  “Haifa dozen gives you enough to live on?”

  “My expenses are limited. My dad owns the house.” I sat in the other chair. “Mind telling me the purpose of this visit, Detective?”

  He plucked one of last years fruits off the rhipsalis. White, about the size of a BB, the reason they call rhipsalis “mistletoe cactus.” He squeezed it between his fingers. Pulp and seeds spurted out. “Jeez,” he said. “What a stupid thing
to do.” He pulled out a pocket pack of tissues and wiped his fingers. “I’m a cop; I like to investigate things. Sometimes I get into things I shouldn’t.” He was trying to ingratiate himself with me, and not doing a bad job of it. “But to answer your question, information gathering is what we call it. This succulent-plant stuff. Burns and me don’t know anything about it. I called the guys at Scientific Investigation Division. They don’t know anything about it either. I thought maybe you could fill me in.” He began fingering the plant again.

  “Could you not diddle my rhipsalis?” I said.

  He let go of the plant, absentmindedly swabbed his fingers with the remains of the tissue. “See, I need some help here. And I thought, here’s this smart guy, he knows all about this plant stuff, and he’s probably interested in seeing justice done, am I right? On account of he knew the victim. So I put two and two together and came on out here.”

  “Do you always drop by without calling first?”

  “See, I’m still confused about cacti and euphorbias and stuff. You got some you can show me? Maybe I can learn the difference.”

  I couldn’t see a good reason not to, so I got down off the patio and led him down the driveway and into the backyard. The June gloom had mostly burned off, and the yard was bathed in pearly sunlight.

  “Watch for the wet spots,” I said. “It’s still kind of mushy from the rain Sunday night. Did you check Brenda’s yard for footprints? With the rain they would have shown up nicely, I would think.”

  “Sure we checked.”

  “What about fingerprints, stuff like that?”

  “We checked all that. You’re not dealing with a bunch of amateurs here.”

  “No, sorry, I—”

  “Who’d you think all those other people were, hanging around the crime scene? The National Enquirer?”

  “No, of course not. Any idea who did it?”

  “We figure someone she knew. No sign of forced entry. Where were you yesterday afternoon, by the way? Around three o’clock?”

  “That when she died?”

  “That’s what the coroners office says.”

  “I was at home. Watching the hockey playoffs, working in the greenhouse. Uh—”

  “Yeah?”

  “What was the actual cause of death?”

  “Evidently, that saps pretty bad stuff. Her windpipe closed up, shock, tissue damage, all sorts of things. Girl who did the autopsy said she saw things she never saw before. Oh, there was some blunt-force trauma around the back of the head too, but she probably would have gotten over that.”

  “She wasn’t, uh…”

  “Sexually assaulted? Uh-uh.”

  We went into the greenhouse. Casillas spotted the gallon of water and stack of paper cups by the door and raised his eyebrows. I said, “Sure.”

  While he was pouring himself a cup, the fan kicked in. Six years I’d had that greenhouse, and still every time the fan went on it gave me a start. It was a big fan. “Kind of jumpy,” Casillas said.

  “I guess I’m a little scared. There might be a serial succulent killer around.”

  “‘Serial succulent killer.’ I like that.” He pointed at a plant with inch-thick branches growing from a swollen main stem. Foot-long flower stalks were tipped with yellow bell-shape flowers. “That a euphorbia?”

  “No. Pachypodium horombense. Related to the oleander.” I led him over to some euphorbias, and I picked up one with a spindle-shape stem about eight inches tall and a nice head of elliptical leaves. “This is Euphorbia pachypodioides” I said.

  “Which is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it a euphorbia or a pachy-whatever?”

  “It’s a euphorbia. Its specific name comes from it looking like a pachypodium.”

  “Its like that one you showed me a minute ago, except thinner.”

  “To the untrained eye, yes, but—” It probably wasn’t too clever telling a detective about his untrained eye. “Its all in the flowers.”

  “What is?”

  “How you classify plants. A euphorbia’s a euphorbia because of the flower. All the euphorbias in the world, from the tiniest spurge up to the biggest tree species, have flowers with the same basic parts in the same basic arrangement.” I grabbed an E. flanaganii, one of the medusa-head species, and pointed out the little yellow cyathia, which is what you call euphorbia flowers, unless there’s only one, in which case it’s a cyathium. “Like this. And that pachypodium I showed you has flowers like an oleander, which it’s related to.”

  “You said something about spurge. My wife’s always complaining about that. She shows me this weed.”

  I nodded. “A euphorbia. In fact, they call the family the spurge family The flowers are tiny, but the structure’s the same.”

  “So they’re not all what you call succulent.”

  “No. Poinsettias, for instance. They’re euphorbias too. Like I told your partner, they all have sap you want to stay away from, although I read somewhere that poinsettia sap’s not so bad, that you’d have to eat five hundred leaves or so to kill yourself.”

  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.

  FOR 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.

&
nbsp; 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.