The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (14 page)

“At the Loews in Santa Monica. I always stay there when in Los Angeles. It has a lovely view of the ocean.”

“So I’ve heard. Brenda’s sister is staying there too.”

“I shall have to make her acquaintance.”

I called him a cab, and we watched as he drove off into the night. It was just past eleven but still warm out. Next door a bug zapper zapped. A guy with one arm and one leg hobbled in; the big-haired Southern woman sashayed out. She saw me, said, “Hi, good buddy. I see you got dressed,” and waggled out to her El Camino, chuckling at her cleverness.

“What?” Gina asked.

“A wasp story.”

“Oh.”

Next door a bug fried particularly loudly. “Come on,” I said. “Don’t we have some e-mail to look at?”

“Its from Succuman at L.A. dot cheapnet dot com,” Gina said. “An unfortunate choice of ID, I’d say.”

“Any idea who it is?”

She shook her head. “No signature either.” She’d shown me earlier how some of the more ardent e-mailers attached signatures to their messages. Little blurbs that told who they were, maybe their affiliation, and whatever else they wanted to clog the phone lines with.

She passed the computer over to me. “Here, look.”

It took me awhile to tilt the screen to the right angle, and when I did it hardly seemed worth the effort. The subject was
This may help
. The message was
Look for the milii with stripes
.

I glanced over at Gina. “What the hell does that mean?”

“How do I know? They’re your friends.”

“There is no milii with stripes.”

“That’s the crown of thorns thing, right?”

I nodded. “Like on Dick’s head.”

“Maybe it’s some crank.”

“Maybe some crank killed Brenda. We have to follow up on it.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t have anything else to follow up on, that’s why.”

“Don’t get snippy with me, Portugal.”

“Sorry. Let’s put another message of our own out. Ask if anybody knows anything about it.”

Gina prepared our inquiry.
Anyone knowing about a
Euphorbia milii
with stripes please e-mail privately
.

“Well done,” I said. “Okay, send it. And send one direct to Succuman too. Ask who he is.”

Tap, tap, click, tap, tap, click. “Done and done. Now what?”

“In the morning I’ll call around and see if anyone knows anything about a striped milii.”

“And if that doesn’t pan out?”

“Maybe check up at the Kawamura. And after that…”

“What?”

“I have no idea. Look, I’m exhausted. I need to go to bed. You going to stay?”

“No, I’ve got to get to the Design Center early. I’ve got a full day, and then I have a date with Carlos.”

“You do?”

“Couldn’t put him off again. We’re going to Luna Park for performance art.”

I walked her out. She asked if I wanted a ride back to Dicks to pick up my truck. It was only a couple of miles, but it seemed like a million. I told her I’d figure something out in the morning, and she slipped into her Volvo. She fired it up, sat there a couple of seconds, switched off the ignition, came back out. “I have to tell you something,” she said.

“What?”

“Remember when you said it was hard to believe somebody you slept with was dead and I said I knew what you meant and you said how could I?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well…”

“What?”

“Come on, Joe, don’t make me spell it out.”

I’d have gotten it more quickly if I wasn’t so pooped. When I did I fixed her with a steely glare. “After all the times you gave me hell for supposedly hitting on your girlfriends, you slept with Brenda?”

“It was later, like two years after you and her. I ran into her at a yoga class, and one thing led to the proverbial other. It didn’t last long.”

“Thank heaven for small favors. A one-night stand?”

“Two.”

“Oh.”

“And Sunday.” “Sunday? Not all day?” She nodded.

“You did all day Sunday with Brenda? I never got to do all day Sunday with Brenda.”

“Well.”

“I didn’t know she was into girls.”

“Neither did she, until then.”

“You turned her into a lesbian.”

“No.”

“Into a bisexual, then.”

“No. She decided she didn’t like it.”

“It took her two nights and all day Sunday to decide she didn’t like it?”

“It only took her the first night. She didn’t like it emotionally. But she liked it well enough physically—”

“To keep it up all weekend. That’s our Brenda. Wait a minute. Is this why you were so hot to get me to dig into her murder? You weren’t carrying a torch, were you?”

“Of course not.”

“You sure?”

“sure I’m sure.”

I looked into her
eyes
. She wasn’t as sure as she said she was. “How come you didn’t tell Casillas about this?”

“He didn’t ask.”

“Withholding evidence? Hey, you didn’t kill her, did you?”

“Sure, and then I did Dick so it would look like a serial succulent killer. Joe? Are you okay with this?”

“Why shouldn’t I be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m fine. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

She shrugged, a kind of shrug I’ve come to recognize as I don’t really know and I don’t want to figure it out and I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I told her again everything was fine and I hugged her and when she drove away I stood in the street watching her taillights recede. Gina and Brenda. Who would’ve thought?

F
RIDAY MORNING THE JUNE GLOOM WAS BACK. I WOKE AT
eight but thought it was earlier because it was so dark outside. I flipped on the TV while I made my tea. The weather lady on Channel 6 was jabbering about the marine layer and the Catalina eddy. They were always talking about the Catalina eddy. Someday I’d have to find out what it was.

After my greenhouse communion I pulled out the Nor-dicTrack, intending to do half an hour, ten minutes more than usual. I’d been missing quite a few mornings, and I was feeling guilty. I slid Volume One of Rauh’s
Succulent and Xerophytic Plants of Madagascar
off its shelf and carefully balanced the huge book on the rack I have hooked up to the machine. Nothing like a little light reading with your exercise.

Within thirty seconds Rauh was on the floor with a big ding in his corner. I climbed off and picked up the book. I glanced over at the NordicTrack. I looked back at the book.

The book won. The exercise gods would forgive me if I slacked off until the Brenda business was done.

I gathered some Grape-Nuts and half a cantaloupe and took them out to the Jungle, along with both volumes of
Rauh. I’d bought them when they came out, at over a hundred bucks a pop, looked through them once, and promptly put them back on the shelf to gather dust. They intimidated me. More than two thousand photos of the island’s plant life and an endless stream of descriptions.

Now I scanned the pages for anything about
Euphorbia milii
. The books’ arrangement frustrated me; they were laid out by region of the island, so that to look at euphorbias you had to go to one area, find them there, move on to the next, find them, et cetera, et cetera. It took me an hour of page-turning to satisfy myself that there was no picture of a
Euphorbia milii with
stripes.

But there were other books. The same publisher had produced a ten-volume set called the
Euphorbia Journal
, and CCCC’s library had most if not all of the volumes. Sometime today I’d have to get hold of our librarian, Austin, and convince him to turn them all over to me. Normally a member couldn’t get so many books at once, but I figured my position of authority in the club entitled me to some perks. After all, with Dick gone now, I was the highest-ranking officer, and—

“Holy shit,” I said.

I ran inside and called Gina. “Boy, am I glad I caught you.”

“I’m just on my way out the door. What’s going on?”

“Brenda was president of the cactus club.”

“So?”

“Dick was vice president.”

“Mm-hmm. What’s your point?”

“I’m the secretary. I’m next.”

“Next in line for the leadership? Congratulations. I’m glad you called to share this with me, but—”

“No. Next in line to be killed.”

Silence on the other end.

“Gi? You there?”

“Sure. Now, look. What do you think are the chances that whoever’s behind this is systematically knocking off the leadership structure of your cactus club?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Not to anyone I know.”

“Maybe it’s a disgruntled member.”

“And what? They’re going to kill off the whole board of directors? Oh, and then they work their way through the appointees. Let’s see, you’ve got the person who’s in charge of the refreshments, the—”

“Okay, stop already. I guess it is pretty far-fetched.”

“There’s got to be a connection between Brenda and Dick besides being club officers. Hey, look. I know it sounds weird, but maybe they—”

“Stop right there. If you knew Dick and Hope, you’d know how ridiculous the idea is.”

“Meaning?”

“I have never seen two people so in love. Even after all those years of marriage, they were always holding hands, whispering sweet nothings, all that kind of stuff. Trust me on this. There’s another connection. Maybe I was right. Someone really is going after all the officers.”

“If they plan to knock you off, why would they be setting you up for the other murders?”

“Because it’ll look like, filled with remorse, I did myself in. It’s a perfect scheme.”

“You think that’s how it works?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how criminals’ minds work.”

“Maybe it’s time you found out.”

I knew what she meant. I knew it like I knew where she got the gun from. I knew it like I always know when she’s talking about my father. “He wasn’t into this kind of thing.”

“Are we in heavy denial today?” She let me think it over. “He’s a good resource. You should use him.”

“Maybe I’ll run by over the weekend.”

“‘Maybe you should run by this afternoon.”

“Don’t you want to go?”

“I think you should see him alone.
Mano a mano
. You can talk about babes, and football, and killing.”

I glanced down and discovered I’d twisted the phone cord into a brainlike mass. Impenetrable, like the murders. “I’ll go over there this afternoon. I promise.”

“Do that. Look, I have to get off. You know how those boys in the showrooms get their panties in a knot when people are late.”

“Gina, if we’ve going to keep hanging out together, you’re going to have to stop with the homophobic remarks.”

“I’ll watch myself. Keep me posted.”

“Okay, see you—wait. Did you get any more interesting e-mail?”

“No. But I did find out they’ve got all the old messages archived, going back several years. You think it’s worthwhile downloading them?”

“Sure. Download away.”

“Okay, I’ll do it tonight while I make myself pretty for my big date with Carlos.”

“Carrying coals to Newcastle again?”

“You’re sweet.”

“Gi?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Sure, why?”

“I just wanted to make sure there were no aftereffects from the Cygon.”

“Not that I can tell. If I grow another head I’ll let you know. And now I really have to get going. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I wanted to ask somebody about the striped milii. Sam
would have been my best bet, but he was out of town. I’d gotten Brenda’s itinerary from him but stupidly forgotten to get his. Lyle seemed like a good alternative. I could tell him about my kill-the-officers theory too. He was the treasurer; he ought to know. I gave him a buzz at work, but he was in a meeting. I left him a message.

I thought about heading up to the Kawamura and remembered I had nothing to head up there in. Why hadn’t I let Gina drive me to my truck last night? Sheer idiocy was the only answer that came to mind.