Death of an Orchid Lover (15 page)

The paramedics came first, with a couple of uniformed officers at their heels. They hustled my new friends and me off to the sidewalk in front of the house. Another car or two showed up, and while the first pair of cops protected and served inside, their comrades strung yellow crime scene tape and kept an eye on me. Some length of time later—it might
have been five minutes and might have been thirty, things were a little hazy—Casillas showed up.

He was driving a big blue Chevy sedan with an antenna farm on the roof. It looked identical to the one he’d driven a year before, prior to his promotion. He got out and saw me and rolled his eyes. “Make sure this one doesn’t go anywhere,” he said, and he and the lanky guy who’d been riding shotgun went inside.

A crowd, a weird midmorning mix, gathered and gawked behind the yellow tape. Some senior citizens. Some young faces who had the look of out-of-work actors. Ambition tempered with the beginning of the realization that they hadn’t a chance in hell of making it in their chosen profession. They’d all have an interesting story to tell their waiter and waitress friends that evening.

There were a couple of street people too. One had a brown cardboard sign telling the world he was a Vietnam vet with diabetes. Maybe he was telling the truth about the diabetes. If he’d served in Vietnam, he was about six months old at the time.

They all stood making conjectures about what had happened. Somebody said a gas leak had killed someone. One of the old folks began a discourse on automatic earthquake shutoff valves. If there’s been one, he said, no one would be dead now. The cardboard sign guy pointed out that there hadn’t been an earthquake.

Finally Casillas came out. The bags under his eyes were darker than ever. He spotted me and said, “I’ll take this one,” like I was a burrito in the deli case at Vons. He led me under the overhang, where a skinny Filipino guy, one of ten or so crime scene types scurrying about, was poking around in Laura’s Accord.

I thought the first thing out of Casillas’s mouth would be
an accusation.
Tell me you did it
, I expected him to say.
Then we can all go home early.
But he simply pulled out his pad and cheesy wood pen. Okay. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened here today?”

“How the hell do I know?”

I mean when you came up here. “I’m assuming it was after she was dead, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I shrugged. The door was unlocked. I went in. I found her. “I called 911.”

“How come you happened to be over here?”

“Laura was going to take me to her acting class.”

“You need classes for commercials?”

“I thought I might get back to the theater.” Like he cared. He wrote something on his pad, looked up at me again. “Got any idea why she did it?”

It took me a second. What? “You think she killed herself?”

And Oberg too. “It makes a nice little package, doesn’t it?”

The scene in the kitchen materialized in my mind’s eye. “You’re assuming, just because the gun was in the general vicinity of her hand, it was suicide?”

“Sure. Felt guilty about Oberg.”

“But she has an alibi for the night he was killed.”

“She does, does she?”

“You know she does. She had dinner with Helen Gartner. Speaking of whom—”

“Time of death could have been after they say they went their own ways.”

“Could have been?”

“You think we can come in, see a body, know the minute they died? You been watching too much
Diagnosis Murder.”

“But she has an alibi after she left Helen too. She came back here to feed her cat. She must have told you this.”

“You believe the cat story, huh?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“It’s not much of an alibi. No one saw her doing it except the cat, and he’s not talking.”

“He didn’t yell for his food when I took Laura back to her place. So she must have fed him when she said she did.” My experience with cats was pretty much limited to
Garfield
, but the yelling thing seemed reasonable.

“You an authority on cats?”

“No, but you know how animals are when they haven’t been fed.”

He pursed his lips. I got the impression he agreed with me but didn’t want to admit it. “If she didn’t do it,” he said, “who do you think did?”

“You’re asking for my opinion?”

A small shrug. “Can’t hurt.”

“How about Helen Gartner?”

“What do you know about her?”

“I know you chased her into the parking lot last night. Why was that?”

“Let’s say I hadn’t. Why’d you think of her?”

Good question. One with no answer, other than some tenuous business association. “If you tell me what you talked to her about last night, I might be able to give you an answer.”

“Fat chance. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. She can account for her whereabouts.”

I jerked a thumb toward Laura’s apartment. “Her alibi’s lying in the kitchen in there.”

“So you’re willing to think the story of them being together could be bull if we’re talking about the Gartner
woman, but not if we’re talking about—” His turn to hook a thumb at Laura’s place. “Her.”

He had a point. But it got me thinking. What if the dinner story was an invention? What if Helen Gartner had killed Albert, and somehow gotten Laura to cover up for her? And then, when she thought Laura might crack and blow her alibi, she did away with her too.

Casillas snapped his pad shut and called over a young uniformed officer. “Take Mr. Portugal here into the station for a statement.”

“This way,” she said.

“Wait,” I said.

“What?” Casillas said.

“I have questions.”

“You’re not allowed to have questions,” he said. “You’re the civilian, I’m the cop.” He turned away to speak with the guy going over the Accord.

“This way, sir,” the officer said.

Another cop, a robust guy with a walrus mustache, came out of the building carrying Monty the cat at arm’s length. “I found this in the closet,” he told the world at large.“What should I do with it?”

The two kids burst from the crowd. “We’ll take him,” said the bigger one. “We take care of him sometimes.”

Casillas looked them over. “Why not?” he said.

The cop dropped the cat into the shorter kid’s arms. He took it and gently cradled it. The other one petted Monty’s head. It was funny. They’d seemed surly little boys, but you could tell from their faces they loved animals. Maybe there was hope.

Casillas saw me. “You still here?” he said.

I’m going, “I’m going.” I had to wait around at the station for a while. Once they
got to me, the statement took just fifteen minutes. I basically dictated what I’d told Casillas. I signed what they shoved in my face and was on my merry way.

I stopped at home, changed clothes, got up to the Kawamura at a quarter to two. Eugene insisted on telling me more about his ice-skating adventure with Sybil two nights before. “I kept falling down,” he said. “And she would help me up, and I wasn’t embarrassed about falling down. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“It sure is. Listen, I’ve got a visitor coming up in a little bit, that I’m going to show around. Hope you don’t mind. It won’t take long, and then I’ll get to the euphorbias.” I didn’t say anything about Laura. It would invite a conversation I didn’t want to have.

He was miffed that I didn’t want to continue reviewing his date. “Yes,” he said. “The euphorbias.” He stalked off.

Sharon showed up precisely at two. She was back to black jeans, along with a lightweight knit top that clung nicely to her breasts.

“There’s some bad news,” I said.

“I heard it on the radio.”

“It’s on the radio already?”

“Yes.”

“Did the radio say I discovered her body?”

She registered the appropriate degree of surprise. “No. How did that come about?”

I told her.

“If you don’t want to play tour guide now,” she said, “I’ll understand.”

I shook my head. “It’ll be good for me. Get my mind off Laura.”

“Should we get started, then?”

“Yes.” I swept an arm around the conservatory. This is it. “Second-biggest succulent collection in the greater Los Angeles area.”

“It’s very impressive,” she said.

Actually, it was. Eugene and a cadre of CCCC volunteers had dumped most of the dead plants, cleaned up the live ones, and generally spiffed up the place. We’d ripped out a bench against the east wall, amended the soil, and put a bunch of specimen plants in the ground. Three big agaves—century plants—one against the far wall, two at the near corners of the plot. A dozen columnar cacti, a mix of North and South American species, formed a border in the back. Big mounds of mammillarias, cacti with tiny tubercles instead of ribs, were more or less artfully arranged among some rocks liberated from someone’s yard. A few of the mams were in bloom, with rings of white or purple flowers around each of their many heads. An assortment of leafy succulents filled in the gaps.
Echeveria setosa
, for example, a pale green rosette of furry leaves, whose blooms mimicked pieces of candy corn.

Another major improvement: The plants on the benches were now arranged by families. Cacti had been segregated to the west end. The aloes and other lily relatives congregated in one area, the ice plant family in another. The euphorbias, the so-called succulent spurges, were jammed in on the ground in a corner, awaiting transfer to a new bench Eugene had built to replace one that had rotted.

“Are all of these cacti?” Sharon said.

That’s where it usually starts when you’re showing non-succulentophiles around the conservatory. “No,” I said,
pointing. “Just the ones down at that end. And some of the ones in the ground.”

She picked up a pachypodium seedling. “This looks like a cactus to me.”

“It’s not. It’s actually in the oleander family.”

“That’s a bit hard to believe.”

“If it were in bloom, you’d see the flowers are very similar to an oleander’s. It’s all in the flowers. And the areoles, or lack thereof.”

“Areoles?”

I grabbed a notocactus, a big ball of not-too-sticky yellow spines. “See how the spines come out of the white spots on the stem?”

“Sort of.”

“The spots are called areoles. Only cacti have them. The flowers come from them too, and new stems.” I put down the notocactus and took the pachypodium from her. “If you look at the spines on this, they’re just an outgrowth of the skin. So it’s not a cactus.”

“Where’s it from?”

“Madagascar. An awful lot of succulents are from Madagascar.”

“Orchids too.”

“Not cacti, though. They’re New World plants. Except there are a couple of species of rhipsalis, which are epiphytic cacti, in Madagascar, and in Sri Lanka too, but they think birds brought them there.”

“‘They’?”

“The cactus gurus.” I grinned. “The succulent equivalent of orchid judges.”

She wandered down the bench, stopping here and there to inspect a flower or lightly touch the surface of a plant. There’s a big sign near the entrance that says not to do that,
but it’s there mostly for kids. I could steer her away from the occasional plant with white powder on the leaves that you really could mess up by handling. “I didn’t want her to think I was an anal personality whining Don’t touch that,” at the slightest provocation.

After a while I got the feeling she was wandering aimlessly. “You don’t have to look at any more,” I said. It’s like me with the orchids. “You don’t hate looking at the plants, but you don’t really—”

My words degenerated into a shriek. My arms windmilled around my head. Two definite signs that Joe Portugal has encountered a wasp.

It was a yellow jacket, the first one of the spring in the greenhouse, and it had picked a hell of a time to show up. It buzzed by my head once, twice, and zoomed off to bang itself against the roof.

“It was just a bee,” Sharon said.

“Actually, it was a yellow jacket,” I said, trying to gather my dignity. Bees I don’t have trouble with. Bees are our friends. “I just have this thing about wasps.” I not-so-subtly checked up above to see if it was going to make another run at me.

She shrugged, came to me, put a hand on my shoulder. “We all have our fears.” Even through my shirt, my skin felt tingly where her fingers lay.

“Still, it’s embarrassing.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Her hand gave a little squeeze and departed.

This was good, I told myself. She’d seen me at my worst. Anything else had to be an improvement. “Where were we? Oh, yeah, you were about to tell me you’d seen enough.”

She smiled. They
are
interesting, and I mean that literally. And beautiful. “It’s just that—”

“Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

“Maybe not one. But after a couple of dozen, they all look alike to me.”

“I understand.”

“I haven’t hurt your feelings?”

“Of course not. I appreciate your coming up here to see them.”

“Though you know that’s not the only reason I came up.”

“Oh?”

She paused, seeming embarrassed, glancing up as if inspiration floated somewhere above. Then she looked right at me. “There does seem to be something going on here, doesn’t there? Some sort of … attraction?”