Death of an Orchid Lover (18 page)

E
LAINE HAD PHONED.
I
HAD A CALLBACK AT THREE-THIRTY
the next afternoon for the toilet bowl cleaner commercial. I took down the pertinent info and called her back to confirm. She said I sounded funny. I said it was allergies. She reminded me I didn’t have any. I said I must be developing some.

French Market Place is a funky complex on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. It’s two stories, with the central area, where the restaurant is, going all the way to the roof. There’s a horseshoe of offices on the second floor; on the first a variety of shops surrounds the restaurant. A card place, a swimsuit store, stuff like that.

The restaurant has a New Orleans theme, with low brick walls, and vegetation hanging over the tables. It sounds like it should be tacky, but it’s not. Somehow it works. Or it
is
tacky and it works anyway.

Gina was waiting up front when I ran in from the rain
that had erupted from the cloud cover. She was wearing a yellow slicker and reading a copy of the
L.A. Weekly
from a stack near the door. When she saw me she snapped it closed, started to put it under her arm, instead threw it back on the pile. “I have enough crap to read already,” she said.

A guy in a black apron, with a shaved head and nine, count ‘em, nine earrings in his left ear, escorted us to a table in the corner, under a ficus that was standing in for a magnolia. A waiter came over half a minute later to ask what we wanted to drink. Gina told him she was ready to order. I said I hadn’t quite decided yet. Gina glared at me. I ordered a hamburger. Gina had a Denver omelet.

“I suppose you know about Laura,” I said.

“What about her?”

“She’s dead. Someone shot her. I figured you knew because everyone in the world seems to have heard about it.”

“I’ve been out of touch.” She stared at me. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“I don’t kid about stuff like that.”

“Then that’s it.”

“Then what’s what?”

“That’s it. No more looking into murders.”

“But I promised Laura, and now that she’s dead—”

Fuck Laura. You don’t owe her anything. “There’s someone dangerous out there and I don’t want them killing you too.”

I watched her, tried to think of a clever response. I couldn’t. Because she was perfectly correct.

“You won’t back off, will you?”she said.

“Probably not.”

She nodded. All right. I’ve played the voice of reason. “Tell me about Laura.”

I told her everything. When that got too depressing, I moved on to my upcoming date with Sharon.

Later when we got back to her place, Gina asked if I wanted to come up. I said no. She didn’t put up any resistance. I drove home in a continuing drizzle, listening to the Beatles. “All you need is love,” they told me. It sounded so simple.

I awoke Wednesday morning a little after seven. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still low. I switched on the TV to check the weather and found all the stations were running live coverage of some guy who’d stopped his pickup on the freeway, gotten out, and begun taking potshots at passing motorists with a shotgun. They’d blocked off the freeway—causing a traffic jam more massive than usual—and had hostage negotiators talking to him, even though there wasn’t a hostage.

Finally, after an hour, just when it looked like the guy was about to give himself up, he pointed the shotgun at his head and blew his brains to smithereens. The Channel 6 traffic chopper got a fine shot of it. One second his head was there, the next it wasn’t. The anchor apologized for letting us see such graphic footage. Then they showed it again. I turned off the TV.

I made tea and went outside for greenhouse rounds, wearing old Nikes instead of my usual karate slippers as a concession to the weather. My
Gymnocalycium ragonesii
, a South
American cactus resembling a round gray rock, had bloomed. As I was inspecting it the sun broke through. The gymno’s white flower caught the first rays with that peculiar sheen cactus flowers have. A tiny bee or fly was busy gathering pollen among its stamens. I watched as it withdrew from the petals, waited while it had found its way outside, closed up the greenhouse.

Over by the garage I spotted a golden polistes wasp. First one of the spring in the garden. I shivered and gave it a wide berth. Someday I was going to get therapy for my fear of the damned things. Sure. Right after I won my Emmy and raised a family.

I went inside and took a shower. While I was in there I reviewed the conversation where Sharon and I arranged our date, wondering if she really wasn’t sure she wanted to go out with me. Or if maybe she was already involved with someone and was merely setting me up as a backup plan. That had happened before. Right in the middle of passionate sex, the woman pulled away and said she wasn’t really into it because she was waiting for her true love to return from visiting his family in Samoa. Because I’m a masochist when it comes to women, we continued seeing each other. A month later she said she was getting married. To the Samoan, I said, and she said no, to some guy she met at work. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to striking a woman, although it really wasn’t close at all.

But the Samoan was history. He had nothing to do with my current situation. Why did I always have to view a date with apprehension? Maybe things would be great. Maybe there’d be a magic moment or two, a time when our eyes caught and held and we knew each other better than we had a right to. And maybe there’d be sex.

Alberta Burns was the LAPD homicide detective I’d gotten to know during the Brenda business. She’d been Casillas’s partner before he got promoted to Robbery—Homicide, and had been much more receptive to my poking around than he had. I’d developed a small crush on her, but never pursued it, partially because I didn’t want to go out with a woman who could beat me up.

She worked out of the Pacific Division, at Centinela and Culver, about two miles from my house. I got her on the line. “Burns.”

“Joe Portugal here.”

“I thought I might hear from you.”

“You talked to Casillas.”

“Yes.”

“You’re still in touch, then.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s what I can do for you. I’m going to buy you breakfast.”

“And pick my brain?”

“If you’ll let me.”

I expected to be turned down. Surprise, surprise. “Pick me up in front of the station. Ten minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I stepped outside into full sunlight. The front walk was nearly dry already. The truck was plastered with leaves that the rain had brought down from the weirdos’ elm. I ran the wipers to clear the windshield and hit the road.

Burns was waiting out front when I got to the station. She jaywalked across Culver and hopped in the truck. Five minutes later we were at Western Bagel. Burns ordered a blueberry
with cream cheese and a large black coffee. I had a pumpernickel with cream cheese and tea. I paid. We picked a table outside, under a green plastic umbrella. A few renegade raindrops dotted our chairs. I wiped them with a napkin and we sat down. As we were getting ourselves arranged, Burns caught me staring at her bagel. “What?”

I shrugged. There are rules about what kinds of bagels should have cream cheese on them. Blueberry is not one of those kinds. Not that blueberries should be in a bagel in the first place. Mind you, I love blueberries, but—this is an inane way to begin a conversation. “How’ve you been?”

“All right.”

“Just all right?”

“Things are going okay.”

“You’re looking good. I like the hair.”

“Thanks. I like it too.” She picked up her bagel. “It was time for a change.”

My compliments were more than idle chatter. Burns had had her hair straightened when I’d known her before. Now she’d let the curl come out, and had it cut short so that it formed a black halo around her head. She’d also softened her look in clothing. The lines were less severe, a bit more feminine than before. Not enough to detract from her image as an all-business cop, but conspicuous to Joe Portugal, fashion authority.

“This change,” I said. “Was it around the time Casillas got promoted?”

She looked pretty silly, sitting there motionless with the bagel inches from her mouth. After a couple of seconds she took a bite, chewed, swallowed. Then: “You’re pretty perceptive.”

“I try. You wanted a promotion too.”

She put down the bagel and picked up her coffee. “Let’s not go there, all right?”

“No, let’s.”

She glared, sipping her coffee without taking her eyes off me. “All right, then,” she said. “Yes, I wanted a promotion too. He got one. He’s been on the job longer than I have. End of story.”

“Your time will come.” Jeez, Portugal, can’t you come up with anything better than that?

A misplaced sesame seed clung to my bagel. I carefully picked it off and put it on my plate. Finally I came up with something semi-intelligent. “You have a new partner, then?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you, like, mentoring him?”

“Her. Like, I am.”

We talked about work for a while, her new partner, my bug events at the malls. When we’d finished off our bagels, she said, “Casillas says you’re digging around in Albert Oberg’s murder. And that you discovered Laura Astaire’s body. You went, what, a year, without finding anyone dead. Not bad.”