Death of an Orchid Lover

by Nathan Walpow

  Where “I know you from. You’re the it-takes-a-bug man on TV, aren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “An actor.”

  “That’s pushing it. I do commercials.” I sought something clever to say. “So. How’s the mood?”

  “The mood?”

  “Yes. Albert dying, all that.”

  “Oh. The mood.” She made a what-can-you-do gesture with her hand. “Life goes on.”

  “Any idea who might have wanted him dead?”

  “Now, there’s a question. Why do you care?”

  “You know Laura Astaire?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s this police detective who’s got a bug up his ass—sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For saying ass.”

  “That’s charming.”

  “It’s charming to say ass?”

  “It’s charming to think I might be offended. You were saying …”

  “He’s got it in his head that just because Laura found the body, she’s the logical suspect. She’s asked for my help in proving she didn’t do it.”

  “And you know she didn’t because …”

  “She has an alibi. She was out to dinner with a friend.”

  Sharon had a smile on, a tolerant one like a mother wears when her kid is talking gibberish. “What do you think of the show?” she said.

  “I just got started, but it’s a little overwhelming. Too many genera.”

  “Want a guided tour?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come.”

  By the time we were done an hour later, I knew enough about the family Orchidaceae to hold my own in any second-rate orchid conversation. They were characterized by having three sepals and three petals, which were modified in a bunch of weird ways to give the flowers their unique forms. The lowermost petal was called the lip, and its shape and color were often the most prominent features.

  Sharon showed me dendrobiums, with conelike stems from an eighth of an inch on up, some resembling miniature bamboo forests. And oncidiums, plants with tall flower stalks—or, as the orchid people referred to them, spikes—like the one on the table outside Albert’s house. There was an Oncidium Sharry Baby, which Albert had told me smelled like chocolate. It did, but only vaguely.

  I met the vanda alliance, some of which had purple-and-white-spotted flowers that I found appealing. They grew in hanging wooden baskets, with their roots dangling below. Rather than putting out a few leaves on each stem and popping new growth from the base, as so many of the orchids did, the vandas instead grew a succession of leaves on the same stalk. This growth form, Sharon said, was called monopodial; the other, the base-branching one, sympodial. When she told me this she seemed to study me, as if my reaction to this semitechnical bit of information was important. Whatever I said must have shown me to be on the proper wavelength, because she smiled, nodded, and went on. I’d passed my first test.

  The last group Sharon showed me was the paphiopedilums. Their common name was slipper orchids, because the lip formed a semienclosed structure that resembled the front of a slipper. They tended toward thick, glossy petals, and their colors and textures made them look like they came out of one of the Alien movies. They gave me the creeps.

  Sharon picked up on my reaction right away. “They do have that effect on some people.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s some inborn thing. Take me away from them.”

  As I learned about the plants, I tried to pick up what I could about orchidists. I’d already noticed how many Asians there were. Another thing: The orchid people seemed more affluent than the cactus crowd. I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt that; a little better cut of clothes, perhaps.

  We went outside to the sales area. They had three portable fabric pavilions set up, each housing half a dozen or so dealers. As soon as I hit the first table, the seeming affluence of the orchidists began to make sense. The plants were, in a word, expensive.

  At a cactus show you’ll find table upon table of plants, neatly labeled, mostly in plastic pots. Leafy ones, spiny ones, weird ones. You see rare plants at fifteen, twenty, thirty dollars on up, but the majority are five or less. Seedlings or rooted cuttings might go for two or three dollars. On the donation table you can pick up club members’ excess plants for a dollar, even a quarter for the little bitty ones. Thirty bucks at a cactus show will fill your windowsill.

  But not so here. The cheapest plants I saw were five dollars, and those were unrooted divisions, three-inch fragments lying forlornly in a tray. The least expensive potted plant was eight dollars, for one of the phalaenopses Sharon held in low regard. Everything else was ten bucks and up, with the emphasis on the up. Four-inch pots routinely went for twenty dollars. Numbers in the thirties and forties were common. Higher ones showed up with alarming regularity.

  Yet the prices didn’t seem to be stopping anybody. There were as many customers as I’d ever seen at a cactus show, snapping up plants left and right.

  Finally I asked Sharon about the prices. She’d been showing me a stanhopea, and telling me how old-time growers had tried in vain to bloom them until one day a “crock boy” accidentally dropped a pot and discovered that the flower spikes grew downward, into the medium, and hadn’t reemerged to bloom because the pot was in the way.

  I checked the tag. Thirty-five dollars. “Are the prices related to how hard it is to raise orchids from seed?”

  “Now how did you know about that?”

  “Albert told me. Saturday, right before I met you.”

  “That is a factor.”

  “The reason I ask is that succulents are a lot cheaper, and they’re easy to grow from seed. You don’t have to send the seed off to some expensive lab. You sow them, you keep the fungus off, in a couple of years you have decent plants. Sometimes you don’t even have to sow them. My greenhouse is full of volunteers. Baby cacti at their mothers’ feet. Dorstenias, fat little ficus relatives, that spit their seeds all over the place and root in teeny little patches of dirt. I have anacampseros everywhere. Little African leaf succulents, related to portulaca. Rose moss, you know, or moss rose, the plant books can’t seem to decide. I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make me stop.”

  She smiled. “You already have.”

  Sharon went off to the rest room, and I went over what I’d seen. Aside from the higher prices and a slight modification in the ethnicity of the average attendee, there wasn’t a whole lot that was different from a cactus show. You had your pompous dealers pontificating on botanical trivia, and your perceptive ones who realized some customers just wanted something beautiful and easy to care for. You had folks who wore business suits on a Sunday afternoon rubbing shoulders with people schlepping shopping bags and holding conversations with themselves.

  There were many familiar sights. Collectors running into each other and exchanging information about their latest discoveries. The looks of excitement on people’s faces when they stumbled across something they’d been looking for. The expressions of “Oh, what the hell” when that something cost more than they wanted to spend.

  A plant caught my eye, a tiny specimen, with slightly succulent leaves, attached to a piece of tree bark. It was a common method of display, in both the show and sales areas, and I remembered seeing dozens of them in Albert’s greenhouse. The combination of plant and mounting had a certain gestalt that I thought would work well in my Jungle. The price sticker said nineteen dollars.

  A guy with a persistent smile, maybe a few years older than I was, staffed the table. I plucked the plant from the chicken wire it was hooked to, waited while he finished selling an orange-haired old lady two hundred dollars’ worth of plants that would have fit in a shoebox, and asked him if my choice was a rare species.

  “No, not particularly rare.”

  “Then why is it so much money?”

  “There’s a lot of labor involved.”

  “I see.” I checked out the orch
id, a Nanodes discolor, more closely. A couple of the heads had the beginnings of flower spikes. “I’m just starting. I don’t know that I want to spend this much on such a tiny plant.”

  “No problem.” He smiled, as if he were just as happy to have me look at the plant as to buy it.

  I hung it back on the rack and said, “Maybe I’ll come back later.”

  “You will be back. That plant’s meant for you.” He broadened his grin and turned to the young couple and their shirt-tugging kids who were clamoring for his attention.

  Sharon came back. She’d taken the elastic thing off her ponytail and her hair hung handsomely on her shoulders. I found myself wondering what it would look like if she masked the gray.

  I told her I was orchided out. She said she could use a rest too, and we found seats in the back of the auditorium. Over to the right, tiny snores escaped a sleeping man. He had the look of a plant spouse, dragged to the show by his significant other. He’d probably gamely walked the tables for ten minutes before sneaking off to napland.

  I turned to Sharon. “So how did you get involved in orchids?”

  “A friend. She was in the club, she brought me to a meeting.”

  “I see.” I looked out at the crowd. “Funny to think one of those people might be a murderer.”

  “Funny isn’t the word I would have chosen.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re sure you don’t know anyone who had it in for Albert?”

  She looked at me. She seemed to be gauging whether to trust me. Then: “Well … no, it’s probably nothing.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.” Right. Detective Portugal. Arbiter of who’s a valid murder suspect and who’s not.

  “All right, if you insist. There’s a couple. Helen and David Gartner.”

  “And?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “You said that.”

  “All right. They had some sort of business dealings with Albert.”

  “Oh?”

  “I overheard something at an orchid society meeting. Something about contracts.”

  “And, what, you think these dealings went sour and these people got mad enough to whack Albert?”

  She looked sheepish. “It does sound pretty silly.”

  But, I thought, worth following up on. “Where would I find these people?”

  “I could get their number from the membership list. They run a tire store in Reseda. Gartner’s Tires.”

  Hearing the name again helped me make the connection. “Gartner, you said. Helen Gartner.”

  “Yes. What about it?”

  “That’s the woman Laura had dinner with last night.” “How coincidental.”

  A heavy guy wearing a hideous checked jacket walked by with a box full of plants. “See the one with the tall pseudo-bulb and the two little leaves at the top?” Sharon said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s a schomburgkia. Sometimes the pseudobulbs are hollow and ant colonies live in them.”

  “We have those too. Hydnophytum. They call them ant plants. Would you be interested in going out with me sometime?”

  She looked at me and smiled. “Nice segue.”

  “I’m nervous.”

  Her eyes looked sad. “I’m very flattered. But I don’t think so.”

  I’d been so sure she’d say yes that when she didn’t, it took me several seconds to formulate a reply. When I did, it was no gem. “Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  “It’s just that—well, it doesn’t matter what it is.”

  “I see.” I got to my feet. “I ought to get going.”

  “I hope I haven’t hurt your feelings.”

  “No,” I said. “Not at all. I just have to get home to check on my eggplant.”

  7

  LOTS OF PEOPLE BUY THINGS WHEN THEY’VE SUFFERED DISAPPOINTMENTS. Clothing. Banana splits. BMWs. I buy plants. I found the vendor with the little plaques and bought the one I’d been looking at. His name was Yoichi Nakatani, and he invited me to visit his nursery. “The address is on the receipt,” he said. “I’m usually there.” I glanced down. His place was in Stanton in Orange County. The receipt was written with that peculiar slant some left-handed people have.

  When I got home, I hung the orchid in the Jungle, then took the Sunday Times into the canary room. I sat with the paper unopened, wondering why Sharon had turned me down, finally deciding it was her loss, not mine. Yeah, right, I told myself. And if you believe that, I’ve got some swampland in Fresno to sell you.

  I pulled out the Calendar section and read Robert Hilburn’s facile ramblings about the rock music flavor of the month. In Opinion I discovered that crime was down and learned why the experts thought that was. I looked in the magazine section and read about a restaurant I would never go to.

  I put the paper down and stared out the window. Shadows crept up the wall as I listened to the canaries’ chirping, wondering what it would be like not to have to worry about anything except where your next dish of seed was coming from.

  I got up and called Gina. “I was just getting in the shower,” she said. “Jill’s back and she’ll be over in twenty minutes.”

  “You want to hear about my detecting adventure today?”

  “I’d love to, but I’m standing here naked—”

  “Oh, baby.”

  “—and I’m freezing my ass off. So call me in the morning.” The phone clicked.

  I put out the eggplant salad and some pita bread and chips and pretzels, arranged soft drinks and beer in the fridge. I dug out Laura’s card, gave her a ring, got her machine. Very concise, very professional. None of the show tunes or whooping birds actors like to put on their recordings. No piteous supplications on the order of “If this is a producer or casting director, please, please, please find me.”

  I began to leave a message. Laura picked up. “I’ve been screening my calls. So many people have been calling. Reporters. Can you believe it?”

  “I can,” I said. “Look, I think we should talk some more.”

  “Now?”

  “No, I’m tied up. How about tomorrow sometime? I’ve got an audition in the morning at Stoneburg Studios, not far from you. I could come over after that.”

  “I’m working on a scene with my scene partner at nine. How about eleven?”

  “Sounds good.”

  The doorbell rang. I looked at the clock. Seven on the nose. I said goodbye to Laura and hung up.

  Vera Berg was at the door. Vera wasn’t on the board, but we always made a point of inviting all the club members to board meetings. No one who wasn’t on the board ever came, except Vera, who would commandeer the chair most convenient to the snacks and spend the evening hogging them.

  Some more people showed, including Austin and his wife, Vicki Neidhardt, she of the beautiful red hair. She wasn’t on the board. She wasn’t even a member. But she was an investment banker—which somehow meshed with Austin’s hippie routine—and she was going to advise us on what to do with five thousand dollars recently willed to the club by a member who’d gone to that big cactus garden in the sky.

  Rowena Small came in next. She has radar. It homes in on whoever’s least interested in hearing her chatter. Much of the time this is me.

  “Did you hear?” she asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “About that orchid man who was killed.”

  “Yes, Rowena, I heard about that orchid man who was killed.”

  “But did you hear the latest?”

  “The latest?” Okay, I was interested. “What’s the latest?”

  “It was on the six o’clock news. The police think a ring of plant thieves might be responsible for his death.”

  “You mean smugglers?”

  “No, Mr. Smarty-Pants, I mean thieves. They think someone came to his house to steal his plants and he found them and …” She mimed shooting a gun. She appeared to be enjoying it.

  I tuned Rowena out—not difficult with all the practice I’d had—
and thought about what she’d said. I’d heard the tales through the years. How the cycads disappeared from Manny Singer’s place in the Valley. How a huge bursera walked out the door at Grigsby’s in San Diego. How several hundred valuable seedlings were stolen from Arid Lands in Tucson. These seemed isolated incidents, but what Rowena had said might have merit. What if there were organized plant thieves? Orchids would be a better target than succulents. The plants were more valuable. And they probably traveled better; dump a bunch of succulents in a loot bag and they’ll all spine each other. Suppose someone had invaded Albert’s greenhouse to glom on to some of his plants. He stumbled upon them. They panicked, shot him, and ran away without any booty. The theory had a sort of simplistic attraction.

  Nearly two hours later. Austin, Vicki, and I were lounging around the living room. Everyone else had left except Vera Berg, who wouldn’t be gone until the last crumb of food was.

  The doorbell rang. I went to answer it. Eugene Rand stood at the door.

  Eugene was thirty-five, short, and bald, with a discolored spot shaped like Argentina marking a failed hair transplantation attempt. He was an odd little guy who was never very comfortable around other people. He’d been Brenda’s assistant at the Kawamura, and when she died he’d more or less taken over the place. This increased responsibility, coupled with some serious therapy, had gone a long way in the last several months toward taming Eugene’s antisocial tendencies. He was still a weirdo, but one a lot nicer to be around than he’d been the previous spring, when his chief positive attribute was that he’d probably saved Gina’s and my lives.

  “Hi, Joe.”

  “Hi, Eugene. The meeting’s pretty much over.”

  “I didn’t come for the meeting. But I knew you’d be here because of it, and I wanted you to be meet someone.”

  He turned and gestured out to the lime-green Renault Le Car parked in front of the house. A woman emerged and came up the walk.

  Eugene’s “someone” was at least four inches taller than he was. She was thin, just this side of Ally McBeal. Fine brown hair hung to her shoulders. In fact, everything about her was brown. Her clothes. Her shoes. Her eyes, bright, curious, with a hint of mischief.