Death of an Orchid Lover (5 page)

“What do you want me to do?” I asked Laura.

“Get me out of here.”

“Where’s here’?”

“The police station on Wilcox. They said they’re about done with me. They offered to drive me home, but I don’t want to be home by myself. Wait.” I could hear her talking to someone else. When she came back on, she said, “please come get me.”

“What just happened?”

“Some new detective is here. He wants to ask me more questions. Just come get me, all right?”

“I’m on my way.”We hung up.

“Give,” Gina said. “Who’s dead?”

“Our friend fat Albert. Come on.”

Gina and I sat in the lobby of the LAPD Hollywood Division, wondering why Laura had chosen me to call. Maybe, we thought, it was because I was fresh in her mind. Or maybe she didn’t know anybody else well enough to call. All this time in L.A. and she had no friends. How tragic. How nice of us to make up a whole life for poor Laura.

Time stretched. I kept catching whiffs of cigar smoke from somewhere in the back. Cops escorted an assortment of lowlifes through. Big burly guys who’d had a bit too much to drink. Little men with anxious faces, speaking a variety of incomprehensible languages. Hookers from many lands, wearing hot pants and tube tops and shoes time-warped from the days of disco. The cold fluorescent lighting made them all look sick.

We sat twiddling our thumbs until someone said, “Jeez. Look what the cat dragged in.”

I looked up. The man standing in front of me was short, with a fringe of dark hair surrounding a bald pate. He had accusing brown eyes with well-defined bags under them, and a pair of half-glasses perched on his nose. He wore a well-cut gray suit, a pale blue shirt, and a tie with pheasants on it.

His name was Hector Casillas. He was an LAPD homicide detective. The previous spring my friend Brenda Belinski had been murdered. I’d been Casillas’s number one suspect. He was all over my tail, trying to prove I did it, showing up on my doorstep at inopportune times to ask me inflammatory questions. He was good at what he did, but he was a giant pain in the ass while he did it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I said.

“The real question,” he said, “is what the hell are
you
doing here?”

“I’m picking up a friend.”

“Let me guess. Laura Astaire.”

I nodded.

“Figures.”

“How come you’re up here in Hollywood?” I said. “You been transferred?”

He shook his head. “I’m in Robbery—Homicide now, not that it’s any of your business. Which means I get to deal with killers all over the city. Isn’t that nice for me?”

“What about Burns?” Detective Alberta Burns had been Casillas’s partner.

“She’s still at Pacific Division. Got a new partner now. What do you care?”

Good question. Damn. “Who needed to see Casillas again? So you’re involved in the Albert Oberg case?”

Sure am, not that that’s any of your business either. Look. Don’t get in my hair again. “
Capiche?
”

“I managed not to say, What hair?” Instead I told him that I capiched fine and asked where Laura was.

“I’m right here.” She came around a corner, looking haggard and drained. “They’re done with me now, so can you please take me home?”

Sure thing. “I brushed past Casillas, took Laura’s arm, and shepherded her toward the door.

Laura lived in Beachwood Canyon, up above Franklin. An area with a certain cachet, like the people who live there are on the good side of the hipness bell curve. In reality, the lower part, where Laura lived, is a bunch of apartment buildings just like the ones all over the rest of Hollywood and West Hollywood and North Hollywood and everywhere else unsuccessful actors live.

Her building—the same one she’d lived in way back
when—was like a million others in L.A. Two stories, eight apartments, with the front ones on the second floor jutting out over the parking area. Dingbat style, they called it. Decorations mounted on the taupe outside walls looked like alien hieroglyphics from a science fiction movie. Beneath them, a house number spelled out in words clung grimly, although the
Seven
was short a screw and dangled at an angle its designer never intended. There was a big jacaranda out front, with only a smattering of flowers.

Gina parked her Volvo on the street, and she and I got out. After a few seconds Laura realized we were waiting and emerged too. Just as she’d done the second we left the police station, she lit a cigarette, took a puff, stubbed it out on the sidewalk. She led us up the sloping driveway, around to the north side of the building, to her ground-floor apartment. A couple of orchid plants sat by the door. They didn’t look good. Probably weren’t getting enough light.

Laura unlocked the latch and the deadbolt and led us into her living room. Judging from the layout, and having been in dozens of similar apartments, I was almost sure it was the only room, other than the kitchen and, I assumed, a bathroom.

I couldn’t help sniffing when we walked in. But there wasn’t any cigarette odor. Either Laura only smoked outside, or, at one puff per cigarette, the stink just never accumulated.

She kept the place neat. A few more orchids were scattered around on tables and the counter that separated the living room and kitchen. The walls were jammed with pictures, awards, and posters. A photo of Werner Erhard. Three Drama-Logue awards, one for a play I’d actually heard of. Everyone in town had Drama-Logue awards. Most of them put them on their resumes, even though six hundred or so a year were given out. Even I had gotten one, for a mediocre
performance in a dreadful play. The critic was a little old lady who swore I looked just like her nephew. I’ll remember you,” she’d said, and she did, with one of her myriad awards.

Laura asked if we wanted anything. We told her we didn’t. She insisted we did. We compromised on tea. She went into the tiny kitchen to make it. I sat on a worn sofa that felt like it had a bed inside, which it more or less had to. Gina considered an old easy chair resembling the father’s on
Frasier
, though minus the duct tape. The orange tabby upon it looked up at her and yawned. Gina wrinkled her nose and sat beside me.

Laura came out with tea in big green mugs and a plate loaded with Chips Ahoy! or their close relatives. She set them on a glass and fake wood coffee table and sat in the easy chair. The cat jumped onto the arm of the chair and crouched, looking peeved.

Laura took a sip of tea, a bit of cookie. “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you,” she said.

“Kind of,” I said.

I went through all the people I knew, and I didn’t want to be with any of them. Is that sad, or what? “And you were fresh in my mind.”

It was as good an explanation as any. Which was why I didn’t like it. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

She nodded. After you left this afternoon, I remembered reading about you in the paper last year. “When your friend was killed.”

The Brenda business. After I stumbled upon the murderer’s identity, I’d been a media sensation for about a day and a half.

I felt sheepish, not having remembered about that when I talked to you. Then, when all this police activity happened,
I thought you might be able to give me some help. “Since you’d been exposed to them before.”

That explanation worked a little better. But not much. I decided not to push her on it. “Tell me what happened,” I said.

It took her a beat or two to get started. “I was the last one to leave the party. I stayed on to help Albert clean up. He insisted his cleaning lady would come in and take care of things, and I said—but you don’t care about that, do you?”

“Not particularly,” Gina said.

“In any event, I left about seven.”

“Where’d you go?” Gina asked.

“I was with a friend.”

“Which friend?”

Laura stared at her before turning to me. “She’s as inquisitive as that Detective Casillas.”

“And,” Gina said, “she loves being talked about in the third person.”

“Sorry. I’m under a strain.”

Gina avoided saying something inappropriate and mounted a conciliatory smile. “You were about to tell us where you went.”

“Like I said, I was at a friend’s house. Helen Gartner. We had dinner.”

“Where’s she live?” I asked.

“Tarzana.” A residential area in the San Fernando Valley, so named because it grew up around Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ranch.

“How long were you there?”

“A few hours.”

“Anyone else see you there?”

She shook her head. “Her husband was at a hockey game in Anaheim. I left before he came home.”

“Why didn’t you call this Helen when the police came for you?” Gina said.

It took Laura a second. I just didn’t think of it. “I thought of Joe.”

“And after you left her place?” I said.

“I came back here to feed Monty.”

“Then?”

Laura looked blankly at me, going inside herself, as if doing some prep work before delivering a particularly difficult line of dialogue.

Laura? “After you fed the cat, you…”

“I went up to Albert’s.”

“How come?” Gina said.

“Well.”

“Well, what?”

“She got up, opened the door, lit a cigarette, stood half in and half out of the house. Albert and I were involved.”

“Romantically?” I said.

She indulged in a second puff before stubbing out the cigarette. She came back in, sat back down. “Is it so hard to believe? I know Albert isn’t—wasn’t the most handsome man, but he was intelligent and caring and—”

“Whoa.” I held my hands up. “No one’s putting down your choice of boyfriend.” I saw my hands up there, decided they didn’t need to be, dropped them to my lap. “And what happened at Albert’s?”

“I found him on the floor in the living room. He looked like a sleeping little boy. Except for the blood.” She focused on me. I suppose I screamed. That’s what people seem to do in that situation, and I suppose that’s what I did. “I called 911, but I was certain he was already dead.”

“How?” Gina said.

Laura shifted to face her. “I just was, all right?” She
gulped some tea and absently petted Monty, whose crouch had transmuted into a meat loaf position. “And I was right. The police said he would have died within minutes after those wounds, that there was nothing anyone could have done.”

“What kind of wounds?”

“Gunshot. The first thing they asked me was whether I owned a gun. Of course I don’t own a gun. What kind of person owns a gun?”

Gina and I exchanged looks. Gina owned a gun.

“In any event,” Laura said, “the paramedics came, and the police, and the hours after that are a bit of a blur. Eventually they took me down to the station, and asked me the same questions over and over. When they were done I called you, but while we were on the phone that Casillas character came along, and he asked me the same questions yet again, along with some new ones.”

“What kind of questions?” I asked.

“Mostly about where I was tonight, and my relationship with Albert. And if anyone would have had any reason to kill him.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I couldn’t come up with anyone. Albert was a lovely man. He didn’t have any enemies that I knew of. He really had few contacts outside the orchid world. Orchids were his life.”

“He ever have arguments with any of the people in the, uh, orchid world?”

“He’s had disagreements with various members of the orchid society, but nothing serious. No one in the group gets along with everyone.” She shook her head. “No. I haven’t a clue who might have shot him.”