Death of an Orchid Lover (33 page)

“Right on the money.”

“And did it work?”

Another one of those wry smiles. “Not exactly. I left his apartment a total wreck. I was crushed by his dumping me, yet I knew I had to get myself together for that evening. And I suspected what he was doing, and even that he’d planned it all along, that he’d taken up with me just to hurt me and make me a better actress, which sounds Machiavellian when you actually put it into words.”

“Did it work?”

“We never got the chance to find out. I was so upset I wasn’t paying attention to traffic and walked right in front of a taxi. I broke my leg in three places. They took me to the hospital. I tried my best to get out, but they wouldn’t let me. At one point I made it as far as the elevator. I was delirious—they’d given me drugs for the pain—and I thought that if I got in the elevator, when the doors opened again I’d be at the theater. And when they didn’t, when I found myself in the hospital’s basement, surrounded by carts full of towels and refuse, I totally broke down. They found me lying on the floor there.”

“And the play went on without you.”

“The understudy went on, and she was great. Not as good as I would have been, friends told me, but she did a wonderful job and her career took off. Then the director took up with her.”

“Adding insult to injury. How long were you in the hospital?”

“A week. I’d done something horrible to my leg during my elevator jaunt, and it took them a while to get that straightened out. Then I went home and was a vegetable.”

What could I say? Gee Sharon, tough break, but you could have picked yourself up and tried again. Would I have done that? “And?”

“I stayed a vegetable for two months. My leg healed, but my psyche didn’t. To have everything I was working for this close …” She held out two fingers a half-inch apart. Once I could function again, I packed up and moved to a small town in upstate New York. I went there to sort things out. “And to be away from the theater.”

“But eventually you came here.”

“Yes.”

“If you wanted to be away from show biz, Los Angeles was a strange place to pick.”

“I wanted to be away from the theater. Not necessarily from show business. L.A.’s not exactly the world’s greatest theater town. And, after all those years up north, I wanted to live someplace warm. As I told you before, I was sick of cold weather.”

It didn’t exactly ring true. I let it slide.

“I was trying to forget New York. I didn’t want anyone asking about it, so I made up a background about being in finance. That usually glazed people’s eyes enough that they never asked again, and if they did I made something up on the spot. I’m very good at that.”

She looked me in the eye. I haven’t let a man get close since. For five years I didn’t go out on a date. Eventually I began trying, but I never let anyone in. “And I never, never became physical.”

“You haven’t been with a man—”

“In almost ten years. No matter how nice they seemed on
the surface, I didn’t trust them. I thought I could be hurt again, and I’m afraid that my fear of that happening led me to hurt a few very nice men.” She looked into my eyes, touched a finger to my cheek again. “You’re a very nice man too.”

“Nice. Sweet. Those are my most popular qualities.”

“Now do you see why I’ve been so jealous of Gina? Why it was such a horrible thing for me to see her at your house, looking like she’d just spent the night with you? Here I was close to trusting you, and there was this other woman who seemed to have a part of you.”

“Uh-huh. But I told you—”

“Nothing’s going on.” Almost nothing. Just a little coed sleeping. And condom procurement.

“It’s time to move on,” Sharon said. “And I think you’re the man to do it with.”

“I think I’m the man to do it with too.”

“I’ll cook dinner and—why the look?”

“Just, I have tickets to the theater. Remember? My friend’s play just opened.”

“I totally forgot.”

“I promised to go. But if it would be too painful for you to see a play, maybe we can just have an early dinner. I can go to the play alone.” I grinned. “Or I can take Gina.”

Sharon shook her head. “I’ll go. As I said, it’s time to move on.” She stood. “I’d love to spend the day with you, but I promised to visit a friend in Agoura Hills. Her daughter’s having a birthday party. She’s one.”

“Like a one-year-old knows from birthdays.”

“I know, it’s so silly. But I promised.”

“About tonight. Why don’t I come pick you up?”

I waited for her to say no. That her house was a mess, or something.

She surprised me.“That would be good.”

She told me the address. We arranged that I would come by at six-thirty, exchanged a kiss, went off to our vehicles. I sat in mine for a minute or two, wondering how I was going to screw things up with Sharon. I knew I would somehow.

W
HEN YOUR DAY STARTS WITH
“W
E NEED TO TALK,” YOU
sometimes forget about the little things in life. Little things like people getting killed and you trying to figure out who did it.

So it wasn’t until I got home from my big tree rendezvous that I began thinking about murder again. I made myself a fried egg sandwich and took it out to the Jungle and watched the drivers on Madison Avenue negotiate the speed bumps.

I was thinking that Laura might actually have been Albert’s killer. They had a lovers’ quarrel. She got hold of a gun somewhere and plugged him, then ran home to feed the cat to establish an alibi for the part of the evening not occupied by her imaginary dinner with Helen.

Then who killed her?

If I had half a brain, I would let the police deal with that question, stop sticking my nose where it didn’t belong, and get on with my life and especially with romancing Sharon. It would end my dealings with plant smugglers and crazy old ladies. And it would eliminate the torque wrench—wielding maniacs chasing me around piles of tires.

I pictured myself lying dead, out of sight of the traffic on Reseda Boulevard, buried under a dozen or two radials, to be reported on someday on the local news.
Mysterious skeleton found in Reseda. Film at eleven.

Hold on.

Piles of tires?

Why were there piles of tires? Tire people used to take the old ones and put retreads on them. Did they still do that? And even if they didn’t, wouldn’t the tires have some salvage value? Why would the Gartners keep them around?

Then I remembered something I’d seen at Albert’s. And the piles of tires began to make sense.

I phoned the tire store. The machine said they were closed on Sunday. I remembered Laura telling me the Gartners lived in Tarzana. I called directory assistance and sweet-talked the operator into giving me the address as well as the number. When I dialed and Helen answered, I nearly did the Otto thing, but just hung up instead. Once more I drove up to the Valley. Once again the heat far exceeded that on the Westside.

The house was a white ranch, indistinguishable from thousands of others out that way. The smell of cut grass filled the air out front, where David was pushing a mower that seemed way too loud. He was shirtless, covered with sweat. He had no hair on his chest. No wrench, either, and the mower seemed a mite too cumbersome for him to attack me with.

“Where’s my socket?” he said the moment I got out of the truck.

I had to raise my voice to make myself heard over the racket. “Sitting on my nightstand.”

“You intending to keep it?”

“No.”

“Then bring it back sometime, okay? Those things are expensive.”

“Fine. I will. Look, I want to talk to both of you. Where’sHelen?”

“Why?”

“Is she here?”

He must have known he wasn’t going to get rid of me. “She’s in the back.”

He turned off the mower. My ears continued to throb. We went down the driveway and through a gate, into a backyard loaded with orchids. Racks, tables, hanging pots, bark plaques. A greenhouse about the size of mine occupied a corner. Next to it was a pepper tree whose trunk was virtually covered with blooming specimens.

Helen had on a tank top and shorts and sandals. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Typical suburban mom, minus the kids. Somehow I knew there weren’t any kids.

She saw me and shook her head. “I had a feeling we’d be seeing you again.”

“And I didn’t want to disappoint you. Tell me something. Whose idea was it?”

“Was what?”

I picked up a five-inch pot housing a bloomless dendrobium. The particles filling the pot were black, not the usual red-brown. There were quite a few plants around in a similar medium. “The plan to turn your old tires into orchid mix.”

They traded surprised looks, returned to me. “How did you figure it out?” David said.

“Actually, it was a guess. But, judging from your expressions—and the number of plants I see around here growing in the stuff—it was a good one.” I put down the pot. “Once I got to thinking about why you kept all those old tires around, it kind of made sense. I mean, if people are going to use an orchid mix made out of old tires, what better source than a tire store?”

David decided bravado was called for. “Yeah. So you figured it out. So what of it?”

He really didn’t seem like that bad a guy, once you got past the bluster and the racism and the penchant for threatening people with hand tools. “So this,” I said. “People overheard you talking to Albert, and what they overheard pointed to you guys being in business with him. So I figure it’s this tires-to-mix thing. You grind up your tires, throw them in bags, sell the stuff to all the orchid people. Make a million dollars. Albert told me the tire mix had promise.”

“Albert had nothing to do with it,” David said. “Where’d you get that idea?”

I ignored his question. I was on a roll. Here’s what I don’t understand. You look like you’re doing well at the store. This is a nice place. Nicely kept up. “No kids, I’m guessing, to suck up your income.”

Something on Helen’s face told me I was on the money about the kids. And that she wasn’t entirely happy about it.

“You two aren’t lacking,” I said. “How come you had to go to Albert for money?”

“We didn’t go to Albert for money,” David said.

The next piece of the puzzle slid into place. Of course. It wasn’t money. It was expertise. Albert was such a big orchid maven, he would help you figure stuff out. Like how big to make the pieces, maybe. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

Helen smiled. It’s nice to know you have everything
worked out. It’s almost a shame that you’re so wrong. “Please believe me when I say Albert had nothing to do with our plans.”

“You’re telling me you didn’t need his expertise?”

“Or his money.”

“I know as much about orchids as Albert did,” David said. “Jeez, Hel, we don’t need to listen to this.”

“Jeez, Dave,” I said, “I think you do. So tell me. If you didn’t need Albert’s help, if you had everything you needed, money, expertise, how come you haven’t gone ahead with this grand scheme of yours?”

“There’s no market,” Helen said. She picked up a pink-flowered phalaenopsis, potted in the rubber fragments. “We made up a batch of the mix and grew some of our plants in it until we were sure it was worthwhile. And it is. It doesn’t compact, and we have to repot less often. But when we researched the market we decided that until the medium becomes more accepted, the numbers just aren’t there. The start-up costs would be too great.”