The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) (9 page)

A weird expression crossed his face, somewhere between puppy dog and sex offender. “That’s right. Absolutely right.”

I’d gotten on his good side, but now what? This interrogating business was harder than it looked. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted Dr. Belinski dead?”

“I don’t think I want to go through this again.”

“Again?”

“Yes. That detective was here yesterday afternoon. What was his name? Carillo. Cabrillo.”

“Casillas,” I said. “I’m kind of working with him.”

“Then you should get the information from him. I don’t want to talk about Dr. Belinski any more right now.”

“You have no idea who might have wanted to kill her?”

“No! She was a wonderful woman. Why would anyone want to do that?”

“She could be nasty on occasion, couldn’t she? Was she ever that way to you?”

“If she was ever unpleasant she had her reasons.”

“The story goes that she stepped on a lot of toes, what with her pushing for tighter CITES enforcement.”

“If toes were stepped on, they deserved to be.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure that’s true, but I hear they’re desperate people, these CITES flouters. Did she ever receive any threats?”

“No. I’m sure Bren—Dr. Belinski would have told me if such a thing had happened. We were very close.”

“How close?”

“What do you mean?”

“Word on the street is that she got around.”

Silence. Lack of understanding. Or refusal to understand.

“That she had a lot of men friends. I was thinking maybe you were one of them.”

“Never. I would never even think of such a thing. Dr. Belinski was a fine woman, whose social behavior was none of my business.”

“Maybe,” I said, “one of her lovers did her in.”

Eugene Rand stared at me. Then he remembered his wheelbarrow needed to be somewhere else. He picked up its handles and marched it off toward a metal shack.

“Mr. Rand,” I said, “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’d really like to catch Dr. Belinski’s killer. They found the death plant at my place, you know.”

He stopped and put down the wheelbarrow. He seemed about to say something, but after a few seconds he hoisted the barrow again and disappeared into the shack.

“‘Death plant’?” I said aloud. “What the hell kind of thing is that to say? And what was that about ‘CITES flouters’?”

I hung around a few minutes, just in case the killer should show up to restock. He or she didn’t. I returned to the truck and got out of there just as the Parking Gestapo showed up.

Some freeways are dependable. For instance, you can pretty much count on the northbound San Diego just above LAX being jammed from seven till seven on any weekday. But the Santa Monica’s capricious. It’ll give you smooth
sailing at rush hour for several days in a row, then entrap you in some ludicrous jam at 1:00
P.M.

So it was this afternoon. Just past the National—Overland exit, traffic squealed to a stop. All lanes were packed for as far ahead as I could see. When a minutes delay stretched into five, I got curious. So did the suit in the Infiniti to my left. He climbed out of his car and craned his neck off to the east, never losing a beat in his cell-phone conversation.

“Get off the damned phone,” I told him. He didn’t hear me.

I picked up my Earth Opera cartridge and considered whether to chance the player. What the hell. You could always get new copies of your eight-tracks. I shoved the tape in. They were just kicking off “The American Eagle Tragedy,” their very sixties allegory of LBJ and Vietnam.

I slumped into the seat. The gods of traffic had dumped me there for a reason, I decided. I was to think about Brenda’s murder until I came up with something significant.

But nothing useful percolated up from the recesses of my underused brain. I got thirsty. I dug around under my seat and came up with a bottle of Mango Madness Snapple with an inch of orange liquid remaining. Lord knew when I’d dumped it there. I dropped it on the passenger seat in case I got desperate. I glanced over at Infiniti Man. He was still yakking.

Think, I told myself. What do you know?

It had to be somebody involved with succulents. The chances of some transient or old boyfriend using a
Euphorbia abdelkuri
as a murder weapon? Next to nil. Add dumping the thing at my place and I lost the
next to
.

But what if someone wanted me to believe exactly that? What if someone from another part of Brenda’s life had wanted to off her, had known about her involvement with
succulent plants, and had learned just enough about them to be dangerous? And what if that person had it in for me and wanted to see me implicated? Was there such a person?

There might be. Four years before, when I’d started dating Brenda, she was seeing a guy named Henry Farber. Another professor, English or history or some social-science thing. He’d lived on a boat down in Long Beach. Brenda had planned to dump him anyway, but when she started seeing me she accelerated the timetable.

He came to my house one night and accused me of alienating her affections. I said I’d done no such thing, that they were alienated well before I came on the scene. He promised revenge. He was still there when Brenda happened to stop by. We had an ugly scene, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Brenda banished me to the greenhouse, and when she let me back in, Farber was gone, supposedly convinced I’d had nothing to do with her dumping him.

But what if he hadn’t been? Or he had, but four years later, sick with regrets about a wasted life, he thought back to when things went wrong and pinpointed that moment at my house? He joined the Long Beach Cactus Club, borrowed a few volumes of the
Euphorbia Journal
, laid his nefarious plans. And one fine spring afternoon he ambushed her and stuck a plant both toxic and phallic down her throat, then left it at my place to make me the prime suspect.

Given the obvious symbolism of the murder weapon, this new twist on the spurned-lover theory had a certain attractiveness. I’d have to look up Mr. Henry Farber.

I needed to know more. I needed copies of the police reports. Oh, sure. I’d just march into the station. Find Casillas.
Hey, Hector, I need to know what the coroner had to say. If you’d be so kind, could you run me off a copy? Thank you so very much. I really appreciate it
.

When at last I got home, I decided to call Lyle Tillis. He was as active as anybody in the succulent subculture. Maybe he could provide me with a clue. I dialed him at work, and we arranged to meet at his place in the Valley at six.

I took a shower and walked naked into the backyard to air-dry. Gina thinks this practice is barbarous, but she’s just jealous because she doesn’t have a backyard. I stood in the sun, stretched my arms to my sides, enjoying the cooling effect of the water evaporating from my skin. The way things were arranged out back, a neighbor would really have to be trying if they wanted to see me. And why would they? I had nothing spectacular to show them.

When I was dry I pulled the U-bolt from the greenhouse door latch, went in, and considered my euphorbias. I had forty or so, not counting the less sun-tolerant ones in the shade house, where Casillas had found the abdelkuri stub. Tall ones, round ones, leafy ones, bald ones. The genus is huge, two thousand species or so, with four hundred of them succulent. Everything from
E. obesa
, the “baseball plant,” to the virulent but widely grown
E. tirucalli
, known as the “pencil cactus” even though it isn’t one. Plus giant tree forms, semisucculents like the crown of thorns, and, as we succulent enthusiasts are so fond of pointing out, the poinsettia.

As I’d told Casillas, it was all in the flowers. The true reproductive organs were always the same—a pistil and a few stamens, maybe some glands. Simple and elegant. What people thought of as the flowers were bracts, colorful leaves that had evolved to serve the same insect-attractant function as petals did on other plants. The gaudy red things on poinsettias were a prime example.

I picked up one species after another. There had to be some clue. I just needed the proper stimulus to pry it out.

I was standing there trying to divine what that stimulus might be when the golden polistes landed on my thigh.

Or maybe it had been there awhile. I don’t know. I do know that I felt a tickling sensation, and when I looked down I found an inch-long yellow and black wasp exploring my leg three inches from my bare privates.

M
Y ABSURD DREAD OF WASPS BEGAN THE SUMMER I WAS
nine, at Camp Los-Tres-Arboles. A kid named Bobby Jewell was crying his head off one day, and the next he was gone. I asked my friend Norman Gonzalez if he knew what happened. “A wasp got him,” he said.

“What do you mean, jelly bean?”

“A wasp can sting you ten times in the same place without dying. Each ones worse than the last one. If you’re really unlucky you could die.”

Since Norman had developed a reputation of knowing all sorts of neat stuff about nature, I took him at his word. And so a week later, when I was walking a log that stretched across Tres Arboles Creek, and when something big and black began buzzing around my head, I screamed my little lungs out, lost my balance, and tumbled into the streambed.

When I regained consciousness they showed me my bandaged temple in a mirror and told me the damage was from a rock. But I knew better. I knew a wasp had stung me. Only once, possibly twice. Enough to let me know that, given the chance, it would inject enough venom to kill me dead.

That was the start of it. From then on—even though I
quickly realized that Normans grasp of natural history was questionable at best—the mere mention of a wasp drove me into a frenzy More than once in my ensuing teenage years, I turned off some cute young thing by acting like a total maniac when we encountered one.

I mellowed somewhat with age, and got to the point where a yellow jacket taking a bite of my hamburger merely induced partial hysterical paralysis. I never got stung. But deep down inside I knew someday I was going to be. Ten times in the same place. The wasp wouldn’t die. But I might.