The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (2 page)

We passed through Brenda’s jumbled living room. She’d left one of the barred windows open and a fan going for the birds, but it was still stuffy. Scores of botanical texts, dozens of books on Madagascar, and an assortment of erotica competed for space on the mismatched bookshelves. Native artifacts, heavy on the zebu horn, filled the gaps. The curtains were a colorful print she’d brought back on one of her forays.

Canary cage number one stood on a brass stand in the corner. Muck and Mire chirped a greeting. “Hi, guys,” I replied.

“Can you talk to the birds later?” Gina said. “This stuff is eating away at my skin.”

We went down the hallway and into the bedroom. A brass bed with a gauzy blue canopy dominated it. In the far corner, next to the computer table, a vertical metal framework lined with chicken wire divided off the three-by-three area that was home to the rest of Brenda’s canaries: Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, Gummo, and Brillo. “Go on into the bathroom,” I said. “Ill find you a robe or something.”

“Okay.”

I turned to the walk-in closet and pulled the door open. A hint of Brenda’s perfume wafted out. Memories of evenings spent under that blue canopy flickered through my mind and brought a smile to my lips. I stepped in and searched for a bathrobe, but none turned up. “Hey, Gi,” I said. “No robe. Is there one in there?”

She didn’t answer. I exited the closet and yelled at the closed bathroom door. “Gi? Is her bathrobe in there?”

Still no response. I got concerned. Maybe she’d slipped and cracked her skull open. “Gina?”

Nothing. I rushed toward the bathroom. I’d nearly
reached it when the door opened. Gina stood there wearing a stricken expression. She seemed smaller somehow. Shrunken.

“What?” I said.

She didn’t reply, merely stared back over her shoulder toward the tub. For some reason I thought there was a dead animal in there. A squirrel had gotten in and starved to death, or a wild bird had come to visit its domestic buddies and bashed its head in on the sliding shower door. But then I, too, looked over Gina’s shoulder, and that was when I saw my friend Brenda Belinski.

She wore one of the loose tank tops she favored, a green and purple stripe. Whatever else she had on lay hidden behind the sliding door’s frosted glass. Her skin was waxy and her lips pale. Her auburn hair hung limply against the white fiberglass of the tub. Her eyes were closed tight, as if squeezing away some awful sight.

But it was her mouth that grabbed my attention. Rather, what was in her mouth. It might have been weirdly erotic under other circumstances, some Lewis Carroll rendition of fellatio, if she’d exhibited even the slightest hint of life. But she was deathly still. And the four inches
of Euphorbia abdelkuri
jutting out between her lips was merely obscene.

G
INA FINALLY FOUND HER VOICE, “I THOUGHT, WHY NOT
start the water first, because you never know how long it’ll take to get warm, so I slid the door open and there she was. Is she dead?”

“I think so,” I said “I’ve never
seen
a dead person before.”

I squeezed past Gina, knelt on the tile floor, slowly reached my hand into the tub. I carefully touched the euphorbia, avoiding the congealing yellow sap on the stem and on Brenda’s face. Euphorbia sap’s not to be trifled with. Depending on the species, it can be anything from a mild irritant to fish poison.

The plant, an inch or so in diameter, resembled a melting candle as much as it did a member of the vegetable kingdom. Its skin was gray, mottled with hints of white and dull green. No leaves, spines, or branches broke its knobby surface.

I hesitated, then lay my fingers on Brenda’s arm. It felt like an arm. A little cool, maybe. I don’t know what I expected.

I pressed the back of my hand across her cheek. Then my fingertips between her breasts, feeling for a heartbeat I knew I wouldn’t find. “She’s dead,” I said.

Gina whipped her head around. “I heard a noise out there.”

“One of the birds, probably.”

“It could be the killer.”

“What makes you think there’s a killer?”

“You think she choked herself with that thing?”

“Good point. We’d better call 911.” I stood, took one more look at Brenda, and pulled the shower door shut. Pushed Gina out of the bathroom and closed the door behind us.

“You’re touching things,” she said. “On cop shows they always say you shouldn’t touch things.”

I nudged her through the bedroom and into the kitchen. I took the phone down off the wall, sniffed the air, put the phone back. “You still need to wash that Cygon off.”

“Oh, fine,” she said. “Why don’t I just march back in there, nudge Brenda out of the way, and take a nice relaxing shower?” She dropped into a wooden chair. “I don’t think so. Not with that cactus sticking out of her mouth.”

“It’s not a cactus. It’s a euphorbia. Different family entirely.”

“Spare me the lecture and call the police.”

“Right.” I grabbed the phone again, hit 9, caught another whiff, hung up. “You
have
to get that stuff off you.”

“I don’t want to leave the scene of the crime.”

“And I don’t want to be dealing with
two
dead bodies. Go next door. This old lady lives there, Mrs. Kwiatkowski. I gave her a sansevieria once. You know, a mother-in-law’s tongue. She loves me. Tell her you have to use her shower. Tell her Joey the Cactus Boy sent you. Wait a sec, I’ll get you some clothes.”

I lurched back into the bedroom and found some sweats. Picked the underwear drawer on my second try and pulled
out a flowery blue one that seemed like it ought to work. But Brenda’s bras would be far too big; Gina’d have to go without. I tossed a look at the bathroom door before escaping back to the kitchen.

I pushed Gina out the front door, dialed 911, and immediately got put on hold. “Jeez,” I told any canaries within earshot. “What if the victim weren’t dead yet? They would be by the time these bozos answered.”

“I heard that, sir,” said a female voice at the other end.

“Excuse me. Just venting. I’d like to report a dead body.”

“Are you sure its dead, sir?”

“Just about. I’m not an authority. Can you get the police out here?”

“I’ll have to send the paramedics as well.”

“It’s probably not necessary.”

“We have to send the paramedics, sir. It’s policy.”

“Whatever you say. You know best.” I gave her my name and a bunch of other information and sat down in the living room with the canaries to await the LAPD’s arrival.

The first policeman to arrive was an African-American man about as big as Darth Vader. Before I could embarrass myself by spewing something about basketball he identified himself as Officer Benton, determined who I was, and came in. His partner followed. Her uniform was too tight and her hair too blond and her name tag identified her as Jones.

The paramedics showed up right on the cops’ heels and piled into the bathroom. One came back out a minute later. “She’s dead, all right.”

“Well have to call Homicide,” said Officer Jones.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m sure Brenda won’t mind if you use the phone.”

But Jones, after tossing me a dirty look, went out to call from their patrol car, returning a minute or two later to announce, “Casillas and Burns are on their way.”

Benton nodded. “You didn’t touch anything, did you?” he asked me.

“The body, to see if she was dead.”

“Shouldn’t have touched the body.”

“How the hell else was I supposed to tell if she was dead?”

The front door swung open. There stood Gina, carrying what I assumed were her clothes in a plastic garbage bag and looking terribly uncomfortable in a pink polyester jogging suit. Brenda’s sweats lay over her arm. “Mrs. Kwiatkowski made me,” she said, plucking at a sleeve. “Said she’d grown tired of the color and that it suited me perfectly.”

I went over and checked her out. “You still smell a little.”

“I stood under the shower for fifteen minutes,” she said. “Mrs. K. kvetched about me using all the hot water, so I got out.”

“Who’s this?” asked Officer Jones. I explained. We all stood around staring at each other. I picked up a magazine. “Don’t touch that,” Benton said. I put it down and went to sit. He gave me a look. I stayed on my feet.

Ten minutes later a short Hispanic man in a navy blue suit strode through the front door. A solid-looking African-American woman followed immediately behind. They quizzed Benton and Jones before heading for the bathroom. When they came back fifteen minutes later, the woman returned to the patrol officers, and the man came over to Gina and me. He looked to be about fifty, with a complexion a shade darker olive than Gina’s. Most of the hair was gone from the top of his head; what remained was near black. His deep brown eyes wore half-glasses and had that seen-everything look, and the bags under them were grayish.

He silently inspected me, with that look I get a lot where
somebody thinks they’ve seen me before. He caught me staring at his tie, a maroon one patterned with little cannons. I caught him catching me, and we played eye games until I looked away. He’d obviously played before.

The woman walked up. “I’m Detective Burns; this is Detective Casillas. I’ll be the primary investigator on this case.” Like she was telling us she going to be our waitress at California Pizza Kitchen. She was in her late thirties, I guessed, and wore a tan linen pantsuit over a white blouse, and from the way it fit and the way she moved, you could tell she took care of herself. She had superlative posture, and that made her seem taller than her height, which was no more than five-four. Eyes nearly black in a long face. A strong mouth. Her black hair was medium length, her earrings small gold hoops.

Casillas stood poised with a pocket-size leather-bound notepad and one of those pens you buy for $9.95 at the mall, the ones with a wood inlay that look like a great deal until you examine them closely. Burns had a more utilitarian pad but an identical pen. Maybe they’d gotten the quantity discount.

Burns consulted her notes. “You’re Joseph Portugal?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me about the dead woman.”

“Can’t we call her something besides ‘the dead woman’?”

“Yeah,” Gina said. “It gives me the creeps.”

Casillas butted in. His voice was high and reedy. “Homicide gives everybody the creeps, Miss—” He checked his book. “Miss Vela.”

Two men and a woman popped through the door, carrying cases and cameras and other items I assumed were crime-scene paraphernalia. Burns directed them to the bathroom. Casillas said, “Okay, talk to us.”

“What about?” I asked. Stupid, but I was nervous.

“Jesus,” Casillas said. “Are we going to have an attitude? Look, we can do this here or we can do it at the station. Most people’d rather not go to the station.”

“Joe, be nice to the nice detectives,” Gina said.

“If you insist, dear.”

“Detective Casillas,” Burns said. “Why don’t you interview Ms. Vela in the kitchen?”

He threw her a slightly dirty look and led Gina off. Burns turned back to me. “Go ahead, please.”

“Brenda taught at UCLA. Professor of botany. Been there over twenty years.”

“Seems young for that.”

“She was older than she looked. She’ll be—she would have been—fifty next month.”

Burns made notes in her little book. When she wrote, her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth like a three-year-old’s. “Go on.”

“She was supposed to be on her way to Madagascar,” I said. “I was taking care of her birds.”

“What’s in Madagascar?”

“Brenda had a thing for everything Madagascan. Or Malagasy, to use the right adjective, which few people do. I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

“You’re doing fine. Please don’t be nervous, Mr. Portugal.”

“Sorry. I’ve never known anyone who was murdered before.” I took a deep breath, let it out. “She first went to Madagascar twenty years or so ago and has been there maybe a dozen times since. Recently it’s been yearly. She loves the people, the culture…and the plants. She was real active in the succulent world.”

“The succulent world?”