The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (17 page)

There were two calls on the machine. The first was from Elaine.

Back in the late sixties and early seventies, after Dad went away and Mom died, Elaine was my roommate at my parents’ place. She’s five years older than me, which was just enough to make her an authority figure, and she kept me from going off the deep end while I spent my teenage years getting in and out of a dozen bands and twice as many serious fixes. She moved out when she married Wayne, leaving me to fend for myself, at least until Dad got out of stir.

Years later, when she became an agent, she kept trying to make a client out of me. But by then I was too much of a theater snob to try out for commercials. Finally, in ’88, when I’d just given up on the Altair, I broke down. I let her send me out for a Toyota spot, and I got it. That was the beginning of my commercial career. It was also the end of my theatrical one.

Elaine’s message said the client was very pleased with my work on Wednesday and was considering a long-term campaign. Also, I had an audition at ten-fifteen Monday for Burger World. Unlike McDonald’s commercials, which tended to play a couple of weeks and disappear, Burger World spots ran and ran and ran. If I got it I’d be set for six months and would get to gorge on free burgers all day.

The second call was from Detective Alberta Burns. Just checking in, she said. Had I had any thoughts that might help out their investigation?

I reached Burns at the station. I told her I had nothing new. I didn’t bother complaining about their damned tail,
but in retribution I kept the striped milii stuff to myself. I asked if they’d gotten anywhere tracking down Brenda’s men friends. She said they were following up on all appropriate leads. I asked if they’d checked Henry Farber—they had—but didn’t reveal what I knew about his recent reappearance on the scene. Follow me around, would they?

After I hung up I realized I hadn’t asked Burns anything about Dick. My subconscious was trying to soft-pedal the possibility the two killings were related, because to admit they were gave credence to the theory that I was next in line.

Thinking of Dick reminded me I hadn’t called Hope with my condolences. I looked up their number but got a busy signal.

I called Elaine back. I confirmed my appointment for Monday, and we chatted about the Olsen’s shoot and her daughter Lauren’s boy problems. That killed a quarter of an hour.

Now what? I could call the Huntington and check on striped miliis. But you could never reach anyone up there. I could drive up instead, seek out the curator of the Desert Garden. But the prospect of schlepping all the way to San Marino and finding out nothing was too discouraging. Although it might be fun trying to lose my tail at one of the Pasadena Freeways five-mile-an-hour exits.

I tried Hope again and got another busy. I gave Austin Richman a call. If he was home I’d drive over there and pick up the ten volumes of the
Euphorbia Journal
. I could spend the rest of the afternoon paging through them, looking for God knew what.

But Austin wasn’t home or, more likely, was out in the yard and ignoring the phone. I left a message.

I ransacked the refrigerator and came up with an overripe mango. I ate it with my fingers, letting the juice run down my chin, enjoying a rare primitive moment. Upon my return
to civility I flossed the strings from between my teeth. I considered the mango pit and decided to plant it. By the time I’d picked out the right soil and the right pot, I’d killed half an hour. It was two o’clock.

I checked out the backyard. I checked out the greenhouse. I went inside and looked in the refrigerator again. I ate a sour pickle.

I examined the driveway light. It had simply unscrewed from its socket. I screwed it back in.

I got out my checkbook in preparation for a trip to Best Buy for a new phone machine. I got halfway to the front door and stopped. Because I knew what I was doing. I was stalling. I was stalling because the next significant thing I had to do was visit my father and have a conversation I’d been putting off for years.

I could quit stalling if I gave up the idea altogether. But I couldn’t give it up. Because I’d promised Gina I would, and I never broke a promise to Gina.

Dad got out of prison in ‘79, during the period I was managing the Altair. He moved back home, and the two of us constituted a household for four years. Then, at age sixty-two, he suddenly got religion. He started talking about moving up to the Fairfax district, “where all the Jews are.” One day he said, “The house. It’s yours.” He’d made some wise investments with his ill-gotten gains before he went up the river, and money was not an issue. Next thing I knew he was living on Hayworth Avenue with Leonard, who’s Jewish, and Catherine, who’s not.

When I got up there around three-thirty, Leonard answered the door. He’s barely over five feet, has one clouded eye and one glass one, and always wears a blue yarmulke
perched atop his bald spot. I’ve never been able to figure out what trick of physics he uses to keep it on, and he’s never volunteered the information.

Leonard said my father was in the backyard, “tending to his posies.” Dad discovered gardening in his golden years, which gave us at least one point of reference. As Leonard led me back through the place, Catherine popped out from the kitchen. She’s thin, almost severe, and has jet black hair by Clairol. Though Dad would never admit it, she looks a lot like my mother.

Leonard and Dad like to refer to Catherine as “our little shiksa,” even though she’s taller than either of them. When they say this they exchange glances and get this creepy carnal look in their eyes. Or at least Dad does; Leonard doesn’t get much of any kind of look in his eyes anymore. They insist everything is platonic, and at their age I tend to believe them. But who knows? Sometimes I think Dad gets more nookie than I do.

I would have sworn he couldn’t see me when I came through the back door, but the second I did he said, “That you, Joseph?”

“Sure is, Dad.”

“Come here. Help me with my posies.” Anything short of a rosebush is a posy to him.

He was kneeling on the foam-rubber knee protector I’d bought him, planting a patch of impatiens, a plant he loves and deposits in every available cranny. I went over, got down on my knees, and troweled out a hole. He dropped in a pink-flowered specimen and carefully tamped the soil around it. “Good job, son.” He stood slowly, pulled out a checkered handkerchief, and wiped his face. “Nice day.”

Dad has all the requisite wrinkles, but they don’t make him look old, merely a little less young. He’s got most of his hair, though it’s all gone gray. His blue eyes are as piercing as
ever. He’s gotten skinny though, almost too much so, and sometimes I worry about that.

The handkerchief barely made a dent in the perspiration coating his head and sticking his Farmer’s Market T-shirt to his spindly chest. “You should take it easy, Dad,” I said.

“Eh,” He flapped a hand to dismiss the thought. “So I keel over here in the posies. So you and Leonard can bury me, and the rabbi can do a
barucha?
”

We sat at the teak table and chair set Gina had gotten them for nearly nothing in some freight-claim fiasco. Catherine brought out a tray with iced tea and some Hydrox cookies. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked,” she said.

“These are fine,” I said, and thanked her, and she went inside.

Dad pulled off his garden gloves. He took one of the cookies, twisted the halves apart, and scraped the good stuff with his teeth, which he still had all of. “So,” he said. “What brings my son Joseph to see me on a Friday afternoon?”

“I was wondering if you remembered what our original name was.”

He knew I was full of crap, but he answered anyway. “Patchkivatchki. Something like that.”

Each time I asked he came up with a different name, with only the initial
P
in common. Once it was Poltergeist.

“How did they get Portugal out of Patchkivatchki?”

“How do I know? Was I there? You didn’t schlep all the way up here to ask about Ellis Island.”

“Uh…”

“Come on, boy, spit it out.”

“I need your special expertise, Dad.”

“What kind of special expertise does an old man like me have? I tend my posies, I read my science fiction, I go to shul on Saturday.”

“You know what I mean, Dad.”

“So say it. Don’t beat around the posies.”

I sighed. “Okay, then,” I said. “I need to talk to you about murder.”

U
NTIL I WAS TEN I THOUGHT MY FATHER WORKED AT AN
office. Because I was at school all day, I never realized how irregular his schedule was. And during summer vacations, when they sent me off to Camp Los-Tres-Arboles, I was having too much fun to care. Later I found out that was exactly why they sent me to sleep-away camp—so I wouldn’t start asking questions about Dad’s weird schedule.

As my eleventh summer began, I fell victim to a hepatitis outbreak that they traced to a sewage backup in the school cafeteria. Five days after school ended and four before camp was to begin, I got terribly sick. Dr. Greene figured out what was wrong right away and put me in the hospital. Dad came each day and spent the whole afternoon with me. When I went home he stayed with me a couple more days until I got my appetite back. Only then would he trust Mom with me.

Over the next couple of weeks, I started to notice how weird his hours were. Some mornings he would be up and out before the crack of dawn; others he wouldn’t leave until noon. He’d work evenings on occasion, even stay out all night. I’d already known this last part, but other kids’ dads
worked nights sometimes, and it didn’t really seem strange until I put it together with his daytime schedule.

Then there were his business associates. They dropped by once in a while, and they’d always bring me presents. But they scared me. They had sharp faces and sharp outfits. Whenever one would come by, he and my father would go off into the den and close the door, and a night or two later Dad would stay out all night.

After five or six weeks at home, I was feeling fine, just waiting for my bilirubin to come down to par so I could go outside. I was crazed, and I was crazing my mother too. I’d done about a hundred jigsaw puzzles and knew all the characters on
The Guiding Light
.

Finally, I asked her. “Mom, who does Dad work for?”

“He’s a businessman, honey.”

“But who does he
work
for?”

She looked at me with those warm brown eyes. “He’s an
independent
businessman, Joey.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means he works for different people. He’s kind of a consultant. Do you know what a consultant is?”

She was a smart lady, my mother. She got me off the subject. But the next week they had a
Highway Patrol
festival on Channel 6. Two episodes a night instead of one. Somewhere among all the 10-4’s I figured it out.

“Dad’s a crook, isn’t he, Mom?” I said one morning over Sugar Smacks.