Death of an Orchid Lover (16 page)

“Well, yes, now that you mention it.” I cracked a smile. “Yes, Sharon, I’m attracted to you. That’s why I’ve already asked you out twice. Let’s go on a Real Date.”

She sucked in her cheeks. “Yes. Let’s do that.”

“You seem uncertain.”

“I’m certain.”

She wasn’t. There was something going on, some doubt about the advisability of going out with me. “How about tomorrow night?” I said. I wanted it to be that very night, but I already had plans with Gina. Besides, I didn’t want to seem too eager. Great. I hadn’t even gone out with her, and already I was playing games.

“Tomorrow?” she said.

“Yes. Tomorrow. Wednesday.”

“Tomorrow will be fine.”

“We’ll have dinner. A time-honored first-date tradition.”

“All right.”

“It’s set, then.”

“Yes. All set.”

I had a Real Date. What a concept.

We got the details out of the way, and Sharon said she had some errands to get to. I walked her to her car, a Ford Tempo, which she’d parked in a handicapped spot. She saw me looking at the blue marking on the pavement. “I couldn’t find another spot anywhere that wasn’t a mile away.”

“It’s all right.”

“You think less of me now.”

“Stop it. That’s ridiculous.”

One of the Ten Warning Signs of Infatuation: not caring if the other party exhibits behavior you customarily hate. Ordinarily, normally abled people who park in handicapped spots piss me off. But I was willing to overlook Sharon’s transgression. Because when you’re just getting into someone, you hide their faults, put them away in a little silk purse in the back of your head, to be opened only when the affair has ended disastrously and you’re looking for things to make you say, “I should have known.”

She got in her car, rolled down the window, leaned on the door. “Are you okay to talk about Albert for a minute?”

“Did you think of something?”

“She nodded. It has to do with Yoichi.”

“Yoichi Nakatani?”

“How many Yoichis do you know?”

“Good point.”

“He had a phragmipedium hybrid. Like paphiopedilum, the slipper orchids that made you uncomfortable, but the petals hang down two feet.”

“No way.”

She nodded. He was very proud of it. He brought it to the judging a year or so ago. Albert was one of the judges,
and his score was considerably lower than anyone else’s. “Enough to bring the average down to an HCC.”

“Remind me again.”

“Between seventy-five and eighty. The lowest award. Yoichi thought it deserved more. He confronted Albert.”

“Sounds terribly déclassé.”

“It’s definitely not done. But Yoichi is a bit of an enfant terrible of the orchid world.”

I tried to think of some more French, but the only thing that came to mind was
soixante-neuf.
“So what happened?”

“There was some yelling in the hallway. Yoichi said some very bad things to Albert.”

“Like what?”

“He said he had the eyes of a newt.”

“He didn’t.”

“And the judgment of an ass. It was awful. It was like listening to a train wreck, if I can mix a metaphor.”

“Did Albert get mad too?”

“No, he just said that Yoichi would do better next time. Yoichi kept saying it was a glorious plant and Albert said, yes, it was, but it didn’t show enough of one parent’s influence. And it was clear that Yoichi placed the whole blame for the score on Albert.”

I remembered Sam mentioning such behavior to me, though not with any particular grower’s name attached. “But how could he know? Aren’t the scores secret?”

Her look said, Boy are you dumb, Joe. “They let
you
in to watch.”

“But I didn’t have an interest in any of the plants. Surely they don’t let the entrants watch their plants being judged.”

“They do. For instance, the judges are growers too. Sometimes they have plants in.”

“They get to vote on their own plants?”

During the preliminaries they’ll just keep quiet. If a plant of theirs comes to their table for final judging, they’ll step away, or not turn in a sheet. “But generally the aides know enough to keep the plants away from the table where the submitter is.”

Wait. I thought you said Yoichi didn’t come to your club. “That he went to one in Orange County.”

I said usually. “That night, he brought his own plant in.”

It’s a little hard to believe Yoichi held a grudge since then, enough of one to shoot Albert. “And it doesn’t say anything about Laura’s death.”

She fastened her seat belt, started the engine. You’re probably right. “It’s not much.”

“It may not be much, but it’s one of the better leads I’ve come across.”
Leads?
Who was I, Joe Friday? “I’ll follow up on it.”

She reached out and gave my hand a squeeze. “Be careful if you do,” she said, and drove off.

Eugene and I had gotten all the euphorbias nicely arranged. The Madagascar ones were together, with the shade-loving dwarves getting some cover in the shadow of a big yucca. The medusa-heads were grouped, as well as the tall ones, the shrubby ones, the leafy ones. Eugene seemed satisfied.

He walked me to my truck. He seemed reluctant to let me leave, commenting on trivial things, inventing questions for me to answer. “Finally I said, You want to talk about something?”

“How could you tell?”

“You’re acting weirder than—you’re acting weird.”

“Oh. Yes. I want you to tell me how not to lose Sybil.”

“What makes you think you’re going to lose her?”

“Isn’t that what happens with boyfriends and girlfriends? Don’t most people go through a bunch of them before they find the right one?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s taken me so long to find the first one. If I lose her I’ll be alone forever.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t know what to do to keep her.”

“Just be yourself. That’s what attracted her in the first place.”

“But—”

“What makes you think I’m such an authority? Have you ever seen
me
with a girlfriend?”

“You know your way around women.”

“Like I know my way around Watts.”

He stared at me, not knowing what to make of such a stupid analogy. Frankly, neither did I.

“Look,” I said, “whatever you’re doing is working. It’s no good to try to change it, because if there’s one thing I
have
learned about women, it’s that they want you to be yourself. But stop worrying about this stuff. You’ll drive yourself crazy. Just enjoy the thing while it lasts.”

“While it lasts? Does that mean you think it won’t last?”

“Eugene, get a grip. She likes you a lot. Anyone could see that the other night. Go with the flow. And, speaking of going, I’ve got to.” I slipped into the truck and escaped, leaving him standing there, baffled and inept when it came to women and their whole unfathomable world. Just like I was.

I
DROVE DOWN
W
ESTWOOD
B
OULEVARD, UNWILLING TO
dare the freeway. I finally let my mind deal with what it had been unable to tackle for the last couple of hours: the gun by Laura’s hand.

Had she really killed Albert, and then herself? Hard to believe. Somehow, even if she had murdered her boyfriend, the Laura I knew, the one who had lived through two or three decades of scrabbling to make it as an actress, didn’t seem like the kind of person to take her own life if things got rough.

And if she had indeed knocked off Albert, why on earth would she ask me to look for the murderer? She would have enough trouble with the cops; why bring a wild card like me into the picture?

Now my agreement—and there was another est word for you,
agreement
, they tossed it around like confetti—to investigate Albert’s murder loomed larger. With Laura dead I felt a responsibility to do what I’d said I would, try to track down Albert’s killer, even if it turned out to be Laura herself.

And there was another thing. If the culprit was somebody
else, I was probably the only one around with the slightest interest in clearing Laura’s name.

I needed to get my mind back into an investigative set. I’d been distracted by my attraction to Sharon. And while I could rationalize and say my time with her was useful because she had lots of insights into the orchid people, I knew it was time to talk to someone else. But who?

There was Bob from the meeting, but I didn’t remember his last name and hadn’t the slightest idea how to get in touch with him. I supposed I could—

Of course. Dottie Lennox.
If it has to do with orchids around here, I know about it
, she’d said.

She’d also said,
Come anytime.
I dug in my wallet for the scrap of paper she’d given me. I consulted my
Thomas Guide
and braved the freeway after all.

Hawthorne Boulevard had a small-town feel, a sense that two or three blocks to either side of the main drag the houses petered out and woods sprang up. Virtually nothing was more than two stories. The signs in and above the front windows had a certain quaintness. The taco stands and discount furniture places and used-car emporia emanated the aura of another era. The hard, crass edge of the nineties hadn’t reached the area yet. It was still steeped in the not so hard, not so crass edge of the seventies.