The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal)

by Walpow, Nathan

  “About…?”

  “Willy Schoeppe. He wasn’t. Wasn’t Willy, that is. He was Schoeppe.”

  While she demolished her sundae I filled her in on my encounter with the German, following that with Farber and Rand and the airborne euphorbia. When I was done I said I was sorry for disbelieving her, and she pooh-poohed it, and we gave each other a hug, and everything was all right in the world of Joe and Gina.

  I remembered something else. “I saw the guy who’s been following me again. I got his—”

  She clonked her palm to her forehead. “I’m such an idiot. I got a call from your friend Detective Burns. She tracked down that plate for you.” She peeled a fluorescent green Post-it off her phone table. “How’d you get such pull with the cops?”

  “Burns believes in community involvement.”

  She checked the note. “Do you know anyone named Salvatore Patronella?”

  “I knew it. Vicki was right. The Mafias after me.”

  “Not everyone named Salvatore’s in the Mafia.”

  “No, only the hulking ones who wear sunglasses and follow people around. What did I do to piss off the Mob?”

  “You horn in on any vending machines lately?”

  “This is serious.”

  “Call your friend Burns back if you’re worried.”

  “Good idea.”

  But Burns was out apprehending killers. I left a message, stealthily checked out the window for suspicious characters, and dropped onto the couch. I drummed my fingers. I scratched my leg. “Now what?”

  “Right about now we’re supposed to get a call from one of our informants.”

  “We don’t have any informants.”

  “We’ll have to cultivate some.”

  “You been keeping up with e-mail?”

  “Yeah. Nothing interesting. And no more word from Succuman.”

  “I wish we could look at some of Brenda’s older e-mail. But I don’t relish the thought of breaking into her house again. We’d end up in jail for sure.”

  She smirked. It was a hell of a smirk. “There might be another option.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We could dig through the garbage.”

  “You expect to find her secret e-mails in her garbage?”

  “Not her garbage. My garbage.”

  “For what?”

  “For the diskette.”

  “But it’s bad.”

  “The file is bad. The other ones on the diskette may not be.” She snatched up Fix Your Files! and shook it at me. “According to this, just because we can’t read one file on a disk doesn’t mean we can’t read the others. As long as the fat’s okay—”

  “Disks have fat? Do they have bones too?”

  “You’re a riot. It’s an acronym. It means file allocation table. If that’s not damaged we may be able to read the other files.”

  “And to think I discouraged your computing education. Go dig out the diskette.”

  “That’s your job. Why do you think I let you in?”

  “Dig it out” turned out to be more than just an expression. The garbage can overflowed with a variety of trash in various stages of decomposition, all exuding a vaguely unsavory aroma. I gingerly removed a coffee filter full of grounds and an old Häagen-Dazs container dripping brown goo. Several balled-up tissues and half a head of wilted lettuce later, the disk turned up. A glob of something red decorated its surface. I held it by two fingers, grabbed a paper towel, and wiped it off as best I could. Gina took it and jiggled the little metal door. “Seems okay.” She started up her computer and stuck the disk in. Up came a file.

  “Which year is this?” I asked.

  “Year before last. Right before the one we’ve already seen. Almost seen.”

  We paged down through the file but didn’t find anything of interest. Gina went for the one before that. Nothing there either. Soon only the earliest—six years old—remained.

  Pay dirt.

  The last e-mail in the file, dated December 27, was addressed to dickmca@aol.com and went like this:

  I’ve been thinking over your proposal from the Christmas party, and I must say it has some merit. But it would entail a lot of long, hard work, and frankly, I would be doing most of it, at least in the early stages. The whole thing wouldn’t exactly be kosher either. Using the university’s facilities for private gain. We might have to cut them in. None of this is a huge problem, but I have to take a hard look at what I have planned over the next few years and see if this fits in. As you know, I’m leaving for Madagascar next Thursday. Why don’t I think it over while I’m overseas and give you an answer when I return?

  I looked up. “The Christmas party? The only Christmas party she and Dick were likely to have been to together was the CCCC one.”

  “I didn’t know he had e-mail. Maybe we can go through his and discover something.”

  I shook my head. “Nah. Hope told me he just had it for a little while.”

  She popped the disk out. “So now that we have this fascinating disclosure, what does it do for us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I got up and paced around, trying to decide what to do next. My pacing took me to the window, and I stopped there, gazing out on West Hollywood as the light diminished and the nightlife began. Two couples strolled by hand-in-hand across the street. One was an old man and woman, Russian immigrants perhaps; the other consisted of two shirtless young men.

  My vision shifted downward, to our side of Havenhurst. I could see my truck parked out front. Gina was right. It did need a bath. But I didn’t think the guy peeking into the cab was there to give it one. It was Salvatore Patronella.

  “Get me your gun,” I said.

  “What in Gods name for?”

  “Mafia Man is outside.”

  “I’m not getting you the gun. If I get you the gun, he’ll get hold of it in the struggle and shoot you.”

  “How do you know there’ll be a struggle?”

  “There’s always a struggle. You’re out of your mind, Joe. Call the police. Call your friend Burns.”

  “No. I want to deal with this myself.”

  “Call—the—-fucking—police.” She stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at me.

  “Gi,” I said. “I promise if it looks like there’ll be a struggle, I’ll back off. I’ll just feel better if I have it in my pocket.” I ran into the bedroom with Gina at my heels and went to the closet. “You said it was in here, didn’t you?”

  She interposed herself between the closet and me, pressing her arms back across the door like Scarlett O’Hara repelling the Yankees. I grabbed her shoulders, gently shoved her out of the way, opened the door, and reached up on tiptoe to explore the top shelf. “This bastard may have killed Brenda and Dick. I’ve got to get him now.” I spied a Ferragamo box way in the back and slid it forward. If it held a pair of shoes, they were for the Tin Man.

  “Fine,” Gina said. “Just don’t expect me to arrange your funeral.”

  “Deal.” I lugged the box down, dropped it on her bed, and took off the top. A gun and a couple of metal cases were inside. It wasn’t a very big gun, but it still seemed like it could seriously damage someone’s anatomy. I hoped it wouldn’t be mine.

  Gina elbowed me aside. “If you’re going to do this, you might as well do it right. Here.” She grabbed one of the metal cases. “This is the magazine.” She jiggled a little doohickey on the gun. “This is the safety. If it’s on, like this, the gun won’t shoot.”

  “Which way is that again?”

  “Like—” She threw me an exasperated look. “You’re going to get yourself killed.” A giant sigh of resignation. “I’ll take the gun.” She did some stuff to it, and suddenly she was at the front door. “Come on, let’s go.”

  We tiptoed down the two flights of stairs to the lobby, though why we tiptoed I don’t know, since our adversary was outside and couldn’t hear us. Gina held the gun straight down by her side like La Femme Nikita. I didn’t think the
y’d taught her that at the Beverly Hills Gun Club.

  I peered outside. Our quarry was diddling with the driver’s side door. Great. He’d was going to plant a bomb. Pieces of Joe Portugal would litter the sky from Melrose to Sunset.

  I smelled something and decided it was me. The scent of raw fear, or maybe I’d just gone too long without a shower. “I’m going out there,” I whispered, and before Gina could object I did just that. I snuck right up behind the big guy. He didn’t know I was there, or didn’t care. I looked back at where Gina still lurked inside the doorway. She shrugged.

  Bold action was needed. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Salvatore,” I said. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  He jumped about a foot and let out a sound like Chewbacca hacking phlegm. He pirouetted and stumbled back simultaneously, leaving him sprawled against the trucks cab. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You scared the shit outta me.” Another weird wheeze emerged, not quite the strength of its predecessor. His face took on a slight purple cast. “Nobody calls me Salvatore.”

  “Sal, then. Why’d you do it?”

  “The name’s Sonny”.

  “Why’d you kill Brenda and Dick?”

  “Huh? You think I—” He began breathing in little short pants. He flung open his jacket with his right hand and reached in with his left. I blundered backward and fell flat on my ass.

  “Freeze, sucker.” It was Gina. She stood three steps outside the doorway with her legs spread and the gun stuck out in front of her with both hands.

  Sonny continued poking around inside his jacket.

  “This is your last warning,” Gina said.

  “Stop with the warnings,” he said. “I’m not even carrying a piece. I’m just trying to find my inhaler.”

  “Inhaler?” I said, rubbing my injured butt. “What inhaler?”

  “My asthma inhaler. Where the hell—there it is.” Out came his hand, holding a little metal canister in a plastic shell. He exhaled noisily, stuck it in his mouth, breathed in.

  We maintained our ridiculous tableau until Sonny’s breathing attained some semblance of normalcy. Gina came closer, gun still at the ready. She kept throwing sidelong glances, as if afraid the neighbors would see she was a pistol-packer.

  There wasn’t any reason to stay on the ground, so I got up. “Okay,” I said, “why don’t you tell us why you’ve been following me around.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “If you don’t I’m going to have Gina fill you full of lead.”

  “Jeez.” He took a look at her and evidently thought she might do just that. “All right, I’ll tell you. But he’s gonna be pissed off.”

  “He who? Who sent you to follow me? Was it Schoeppe? Farber? Eugene Rand, for Gods sake?”

  Sonny stared at me. He took a look at his inhaler, deciding if this latest turn of events required another hit, before stuffing it back in his pocket. “He’s gonna be real pissed off,” he said. “He was pretty mad when you told him you’d seen me, and I think I did a pretty good job since then staying hid. Until now.”

  “He who?” Gina said. “Who was pretty mad?”

  He took off his sunglasses and looked into my eyes. “Harold the Horse,” he said. “Your father. That’s who sent me.”

  24

  SONNY WALKED INTO GINAS CONDO AND HEADED FOR THE sofa. “Nice place you got here, lady.”

  “Thanks, I think.” She went into the kitchen and stuck the gun in the refrigerator. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Oxygen tent?”

  “Nah, I’m okay.”

  She joined him on the sofa, while I grabbed a dining room chair and sat catty-corner to him at the end of the coffee table. He sat there telling us how wonderful his asthma medicine was. He didn’t look all that threatening anymore, but an undercurrent of menace remained. Twenty, thirty years earlier he would have given me the absolute shakes.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “maybe we could make a deal so Harold wouldn’t find out you got the drop on me.”

  “It’s not going to happen, Sonny.”

  “How come you know my name?”

  I told him about catching his plate number. He shook his head. “When I was younger I could a trailed you for days without you knowing. Now my eyes aren’t so good; I gotta stay closer.”

  “You trail many people lately?”

  “To tell the truth, you’re the first one since I got out of the slam.”

  “Which was?”

  “In ‘75. I’ve sorta gone straight. I’ve been working at House of Suits for the last twelve years or so. But you know how it is. You always want to keep a finger in. Hey!”

  “What?” I said.

  “You want a nice suit? You don’t tell Harold about this, I’ll get you a—”

  “Why’d he send you?”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “He was worried about you. He read about you in the paper after the Belinski woman was knocked off. He thought you needed protection.”

  “Some protection.” I smiled at him. “You didn’t even have a piece.”

  He smiled back. I saw the flash of gold I’d noticed at Brenda’s service. “Yeah, but I could still smack some heads.”

  “Why’d you let me see you at the funeral?”

  Another shrug. “I figured if you saw me once it wouldn’t be any big deal. If you saw me again you might think something was up.”

  “Sonny,” Gina said, offering her most charming smile. “It’s sweet that you’ve been taking care of Joe like this, but he really doesn’t need it.” She gestured toward the refrigerator and the firearm within. “We can take care of ourselves.”

  “You can, lady, that’s for sure. Him I’m not so sure of.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  They both looked at me. “Don’t worry about Joe,” Gina said. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “Yeah,” Sonny said. “I think you will.”

  After Sonny left I found Gina in the kitchen, staring at her empty sundae cup. “I need another,” she said.

  With Quicksilver Messenger Service in the tape player, we drove down Crescent Heights and turned left on Melrose. Our destination was the Baskin-Robbins near the Groundlings Theater. Our route took us through L.A.’s erstwhile center of cool. Wacko and the Soap Plant were gone. The trendy boutiques looked sparse and sad. A guy with a purple mohawk slouched by, a dispirited punk relic.

  On the side streets off Melrose, though, things went on as always. Turn up Sierra Bonita or Gardner or Vista and you’d find Orthodox Jews raising bumper crops of girls in long dresses and pint-size rabbis-to-be. Down Martel or Fuller or Poinsettia, senior citizens sat on their porches, not caring that Melrose had indeed been terminally hip.

  It hit me three blocks later, as I pulled into Baskin-Robbins’s lot. The guy inside was just locking the door, but Gina dashed out, banged on it, and convinced him to let her in. When she realized I wasn’t with her, she looked out at me. I waved the back of my hand and she returned to getting her fix.

  I sat in the truck and thought. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. When Gina got back in I said, “The street sign. Poinsettia Place.”

  “What about it?”

  “It clued me in.”

  “You’ve lost it, Portugal, you’ve really lost it this time.”

  “The connection between Brenda and Dick. Its got something to do with poinsettias.”

  “It does?”

  “They’re all over the place. I saw some at the Kawamura, right before Rand tried to brain me. Why would they have poinsettias in a greenhouse full of succulents? And Dick was the poinsettia king of Los Angeles, yet Hope said Brenda brought him one around Christmas a couple of years ago. Now, why would anyone bring the poinsettia king of Los Angeles a poinsettia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either, but I intend to find out. Give me your phone.”

  She pulled it out and I called Hope McAfee. “I’ve had an idea, and I
need to follow up on it.”

  “What is it?”

  “You know how you said Brenda brought Dick a poinsettia the one time she came over that wasn’t for a board meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, Dick ran a nursery that sold probably thousands of poinsettias every year. Wouldn’t that be a funny thing for her to bring?”

  “I guess. I didn’t really think about it. Everybody brings everybody a poinsettia around Christmas. It’s the social thing to do. Dick knew that, that’s why he stocked up so much, why we did so well with them. For all I know, Brenda bought it at McAfee’s.”

  “Did you see it clearly? I’m sorry to put you through this, but—”

  “Ssh. Let me try.” She was silent half a minute. “I’m sorry. All I remember is a poinsettia.”

  “That’s okay. Where did Dick get his poinsettias from?”

  “A place called Paul’s Poinsettia Plantation, down in Encinitas. He was their biggest retail customer. He used to go down there once or twice a year to look at new varieties.”

  “Do you have their number?”

  “Let me go look in his book.”

  She got me the number and we signed off. I called Paul’s and got a machine.

  I drove Gina, then myself home. I thought about things for a while and went to bed. In the morning my worst nightmare came true.

  I’d set the clock for seven but woke up before it went off. I lay there, letting my day sort itself out in my head, then got up, made the bed, went through my bathroom routine.

  I padded into the kitchen in my robe and karate slippers, made a cup of a nice Darjeeling, went out the back door and into the yard. It was cool, around sixty. The June gloom had taken a hiatus; we had a clear sky but for a few high clouds and a rapidly fading moon. I stared up at it, thinking how weird it was that thirty years ago men had walked there, odder still that we’d given up on it so soon after.

  I tossed the tea bag in the trash bin and approached the greenhouse. I pulled the U-bolt, undid the latch, put the bolt back through, opened the door. I took a step inside. I saw wasps.

  Just two at first, a yellow jacket and a golden polistes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart when they’re aloft, but the polistes have an odd way of letting their legs drag down behind them that’s usually a tip-off. Both of them were buzzing around near the top of the A-shaped roof.