The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal)

by Walpow, Nathan

  “You never told her how you felt?”

  He shook his head. “She knew, of course. I knew she knew, and she knew I knew she knew, and so on in this great big complicated charade.”

  I wondered why he was being so reasonable all of a sudden. Perhaps I was too close on his trail and he realized his outburst would make me more suspicious. “It must have been tough working with her,” I said.

  “It was indeed. But I really love my job.” He saw the look on my face. “Oh, I know the place looks awful. But it’s only half as awful as it was when I started. Slowly but surely I’m making progress. As I told you the other day, we’re short of funds.”

  “I know this is difficult. But I have to ask. Do you know who Brenda was involved with before she died?”

  “Of course I do. Masochist that I am, I made it my business to know who all her lovers were.” He got up, went into the shed, and came out a minute later with some pencil scribblings on a Post-it. “He’s actually not a bad fellow,” he said. “Somehow, that made it a bit less difficult. Those of her lovers that I met, at staff functions or wherever, were all nice fellows. You’re a nice fellow too. I’m sorry I attacked you.”

  I glanced down at the note. Rand’s handwriting was miserable, but the letters and digits swam into focus. The phone number had an 821 prefix, which made sense since the address was a boat slip in Marina del Rey.

  The name I knew. Henry Farber. The guy Brenda’d broken up with four years earlier when she started seeing me. The guy who had promised revenge.

  13

  I’D BEEN SITTING IN THE TRUCK FOR A QUARTER HOUR, chewing on my latest discovery, when it hit me. Brenda was recycling old lovers. If she were going through them in order, and if she’d just stayed alive a few more months, she would have gotten to me.

  It had been a year and a half since I’d gone out with anybody more than once or twice. Or made love to anybody. If Brenda were still alive and dumped Henry again, I’d have found myself back under the blue canopy, engaging in the ancient Malagasy sexual arts, with the oils and the chants and—

  But Brenda wasn’t still alive. She wasn’t going to be making love to anybody anymore.

  Henry Farber was a professor, and since I was at UCLA it seemed like a handy place to start looking for him. I found a pay phone and called the English department. They’d never heard of him. I tried History next. They’d heard of him, but he had the day off. I called the number I’d gotten from Rand and reached a machine. Leaving a message seemed a bad idea. “Hi, this is Joe Portugal, the guy who took Brenda away a few years ago. Sorry I didn’t get the chance this time around. By the way, did you whack her?”

  As long as I was on campus, I thought I might as well check out the Botany department. I talked my way into the lot at the Mathias Garden, parked in the shadow of the Botany building, and made my way in. I monkeyed around for fifteen minutes trying to find, in order, a bathroom, a directory, and Brenda’s office. The corridor I found the last of these in was plastered with announcements for esoteric plant workshops and cartoons reflecting lame graduate-student humor. Weird botanical items rested on the floor and on randomly placed tables. Cypress knees, dried pods, that sort of thing. A plastic pot with a dead-looking spider plant. But you can’t tell with spider plants. Unlike people, they can look dead and still come back.

  Brenda’s office door was locked. What else did I expect? I stood with my hand on the knob considering which clever gambit to try next.

  “May I help you?” It was a zaftig woman in a light blue blouse and jeans. She stood by one of the doorways halfway down the hall, carrying a white plastic bucket.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Belinski.”

  “Haven’t you heard? She’s dead.” She said it in the same cheerful tone of voice in which she would have said, “She went to Wisconsin to visit her sister.”

  “Yes, I know.” Don’t tell me she’s dead, lady, I found the damned body. “I meant I was looking for her office.”

  “You’ve found it.”

  I walked down the hall to where the woman stood, now clutching her bucket close to her ample bosom. She was short, five-two or so, and younger than I’d thought at first, no more than twenty-five. I usually go for slim women, but I liked the way the little bit of extra poundage worked on her. Her face was round and pink, almost cherubic, with no makeup. Her eyes were hazel and her hair a shiny blond that couldn’t have come from a bottle. I remembered seeing her at Brenda’s funeral.

  “What’s in the bucket?” I asked.

  “Kelp. The police don’t have any leads. Isn’t that fascinating?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It was on the noontime news. I always watch the noontime news when I’m in the lab. It keeps me in touch. They had a detective on. Carillos or something.”

  “Casillas.”

  “Yes. Did you see the news too?”

  “No, but it’s funny you should mention Detective Casillas. I’m helping him out with the succulent part of the investigation.” I held out a hand. “Joe Portugal. I was a friend of Dr. Belinski’s.”

  “Iris Bunche,” she said as we shook. “Like the flower and the U.N. guy. Oh, just look at your face. Everyone looks like that when I tell them my name. My parents weren’t even thinking. Irises were my mother’s favorite flowers, they still are, and so when I was born—well, you get the picture.”

  “Did you know Dr. Belinski well, Iris?”

  “Sure I did. She was my faculty adviser.”

  “I didn’t know she was into kelp.”

  Confusion preceded a glance into the bucket. “Oh, this. This is for my garden. It’s used kelp. The algae people down in the basement are done with it.” She seemed to realize how closely she held the bucket and dropped it into a one-handed grip. “I have to go down to the herbarium now. Do you want to come with me? We can talk about Brenda.”

  She deposited the algae inside a lab, and we went down to the ground floor and into a claustrophobic room lined with row upon row of bound botanical journals. At the back of this repository, a steep metal staircase, barely more than a ladder, led upward. I followed Iris up it, trying to ignore the sway of her full but firm behind, and not succeeding.

  The room at the top was filled with dozens of dark green metal cabinets. Each bore the name of one or more families of the plant kingdom. I’d never been in a herbarium before, but my boundless botanical knowledge told me the cabinets were filled with pressed plant remains.

  Iris delved into the Didieriaceae, a family of spiny succulents endemic to Madagascar. She grabbed a sheaf of manila folders, positioned them carefully on a wooden table, and sat. I took a seat across from her and asked if the didierias and their friends were her research subject.

  “They sure are. Everyone says the Portulacaceae are the closest other family to the cacti, but I’m out to prove that it’s the Didieriaceae. Its all in the DNA. That’s what Brenda always used to say, isn’t it?”

  I’d never heard Brenda use those exact words, but no matter. “Yes. She often did say that. Have you done any work with euphorbias?”

  She shook her head most delightfully. “No, they’re too nasty for me. That latex is horrible. Oh.”

  “What?”

  “I knew I knew your name. You found Brenda, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Can you tell me what she was working on?”

  “Was it hard?”

  “Was what hard?”

  “Looking at her. I’ve never seen a dead person.”

  I put on a sad face. It didn’t feel like one of my better ones. Eight years of acting only in commercials had dulled my instrument. “I’d rather not discuss that, if you don’t mind. Let’s talk about Dr. Belinski’s work.”

  Maybe my instrument was sharper than I thought. Iris reached a pink hand across the table and placed it gently atop one of mine. She wore a college ring with a big red stone. “You poor, poor man. I’m so sorry to bring up bad memories.” She patted my hand a couple of times, like you would
a small dog, and withdrew her own.

  I felt a stirring. Those pats were the most intimate feminine contact I’d had in months. My mind took off in unexpected directions. Ridiculous directions. Iris was barely half my age. “You were talking about Brenda’s research.”

  “Oh, yes. She did some work with gene splicing, you know. And she was working on her new classification scheme for the Madagascar euphorbias. It was based on DNA sequencing.”

  “Its all in the DNA.”

  That elicited a winsome smile. “She hoped to publish her findings in about a year and a half. And now she never will. Poor, poor Brenda.”

  Now it was Iris’s turn to look sad. I reached out and returned her pats from earlier. I left my hand on top of hers. After a bit she pulled hers out and mine clonked to the table. I could hear Gina. “Serves you right, you dirty old man,” she was saying.”

  “Maybe you could pick up her research,” I said.

  Iris gave me a look that said I clearly didn’t understand how this research stuff worked. “That would be impossible.” She glanced down at the folders. “Look at me. I haven’t even opened one of these yet. You’re a bad influence on me, Joe.”

  “Maybe I ought to get going, let you do your work. Just a couple more things. Did you ever hear about a Euphorbia milii with stripes?”

  “No. That would be odd, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would. One last thing. You know about Brenda’s fight against the plant smugglers, right?”

  “I know about it, but I don’t pay much attention to that kind of thing.”

  “As far as you know, did anyone ever threaten Brenda because of that?”

  “I never heard about any threats, no, but—it was funny In some ways Brenda was my friend, and in others … it was like she had compartments in her life. She never talked to me about the conservation stuff.”

  I pulled out a pen, found a scrap of paper, wrote down my phone number. “If you think of anything else …”

  “Then I’ll call.” She took the paper, tore it in half, slid the part I’d written on into a pocket. “It was very nice meeting you, Joe.” She wrote on the other half and handed it back. “And if you need to ask me any more questions, here’s my number.”

  “Thanks. Nice meeting you too.”

  I left the table, climbed down the infernal staircase, paused at the bottom. Some preposterous part of me wanted to go back up and ask Iris out on a date. Maybe I was old enough to be her father; so what? She had given me her number.

  When I’d climbed back up to the herbarium, I found her with one of the didieria folders open, intently studying a desiccated scrap of vegetation. She looked up when she heard me and smiled. “Did you forget something?”

  “Sort of. Forgive me if this is out of line, but I was wondering—”

  “Yes?”

  I couldn’t do it. She was too young, too blond, too…alive.

  “I was wondering if Brenda ever mentioned a man named Schoeppe.”

  “She did. One of the men she was going to meet over there in Madagascar. I met him once.” She giggled. “Very cute. Nice beard. Did you ever wear a beard, Joe?” “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” “You’d look good with a beard.”

  “So I’ve been told. Sorry to take up more of your time.” “You can take up more of my time anytime.” That seemed like an invitation. But could I be sure? I was terribly out of practice. Mumbling incoherently, I beat a hasty retreat. Too much was going on. I didn’t need to get involved with anybody while under suspicion of murder. Later, if—no, when—things turned out all right, I could march back here and ask her out and get my dollop of romance. Sex too, if the gods were willing.

  I needed to go home to check the phone machine, which, a week or so earlier had mysteriously stopped delivering messages remotely. It wasn’t good for an actor, no matter how loosely you use the term, to be cut off from his telephone, and I’d intended to get a new machine this week. But with all that had happened since Monday night, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

  I was on the southbound 405 when I spotted an early-seventies Chevy Malibu in the lane to my right, one car back. It was in beautiful condition, not a dent, not a scratch, with the sheen of new polish overlaying its bright red paint. I slowed down to let it pull even, admired it some more, shifted my eyes to check out the driver.

  It was the big guy I’d seen at the funeral, sunglasses and all. Burns and Casillas were full of shit. They were tailing me.

  I stomped on the brakes, letting him zoom past and provoking much horn-blowing and finger display from the Jeep behind me. I cut in behind the Malibu, zipped across three lanes of traffic, and sped onto the ramp to the eastbound 10. Sunglasses Guy was boxed in and couldn’t follow. “Eat rubber!” I shouted out the window.

  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 ci
vility 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.