Death of an Orchid Lover

by Nathan Walpow

  More tables along one side of the room held several dozen plants that were evidently up for judging. A handful of people walked around distributing them to the tables, all women except for one guy with a ruddy face and a shirt buttoned up to the neck. He was saying something about “a delectable paph” when we came in. One of the women was a nun, or enjoyed dressing like one.

  Sharon hesitated before selecting the table in the far right corner. We stood by while the judges there considered the plant before them. All but one were men, ranging from thirtyish to wrinkle city. The one woman had gray curls piled on top of her head.

  The center of attraction was a dendrobium, with a stem resembling a fat reed and seven or eight white flowers with red and purple highlights. It sat at the middle of the table, naked to the world. Every few seconds someone would reach out and turn it, knit his brows, lean back in contemplation.

  “Anyone?” said the guy who seemed to be running things. He had a wide face, reddish hair, a matching beard.

  There were a couple of headshakes, someone said, “Not with that color break,” and suddenly the ruddy-faced guy was there, whisking the plant away, promising another momentarily.

  Bearded Guy noticed us. “Hi, Sharon. What’s up?”

  “I wondered if we could sit in for a while.”

  He looked around the table. “Any objections?”

  “Long as they’re quiet,” said a long-faced man chewing on an unlit pipe.

  “Like mice,” Sharon said. “This is my friend Joe. He’s a novice. He’s interested in judging.” She told me everyone’s names. I immediately forgot all but Bearded Guy’s. He was Bob something.

  I got us a couple of folding chairs and we squeezed in at the end of the table, with Bob on my right. The nun brought another plant, a cattleya. It sat there only a few seconds. There was a questioning look on one face, the slightest of nods on another, and the plant went off toward the staging area. Next was a cymbidium with spikes full of bronze-colored blooms. Another subtle nod, and away it went.

  “This is the preliminary judging,” Bob told me. “We pass the plants around, and if anyone thinks one has a chance for an award we set it aside for a good look later.”

  “But you look at them for only a few seconds. How do you know—”

  “After you’ve looked at a few thousand, you know. You don’t know for sure what’s going to award, but you know what’s not.”

  “Do all these people vote on a plant?”

  “In the prelims it’ll go to all the tables, and anyone can pick it for final judging, where it ends up with only one group.”

  “And at the one table you just, what, average everyone’s scores?”

  “Not everyone. Just the full judges and the probationaries. The other folks at the table are student judges and clerks.”

  Another plant arrived. “Last of the preliminaries,” said the nun, standing by with a benevolent expression, like a parent indulging her children. Quick headshakes made their way around the table, and off the plant went, rejected in seconds.

  They took a break. Most of the people at the table got up to stretch. I noticed some guy at one of the other tables watching me. Blue oxford shirt, brown hair combed straight back over one of the highest foreheads I’d ever seen. I vaguely recognized him from Albert’s party. Our eyes met briefly.

  I turned back to Bob. “Why do you need monthly judging sessions? Why not just have judging at shows?”

  “If we waited for shows, a lot of the plants couldn’t be judged because they wouldn’t be in bloom.”

  “So really all you’re judging is the flower.”

  “Pretty much. Although there are cultural awards too, where we take the whole plant into consideration.”

  “Something else I’ve been wondering about. The names of the plants. They seem way too complicated.”

  “Let’s go through one.” He picked a book up off the table and showed me a picture of several flowers, mostly white, with one or two violet spots on each petal and sepal. The pattern on the lip resembled a tiny angel with outstretched yellow and purple wings and outsized purple boots. The caption said “Odontoglossum Boreal ‘Sunset Sunspots’ HCC/ AOS.”

  First is the genus, “Odontoglossum. Then Boreal is the grex, then—”

  “The which?”

  “It means a group of plants resulting from a crossing. Then Sunset Sunspots’ is this particular hybrid. HCC means Highly Commended Certificate, which is the lowest award. The AOS means the award came from the American Orchid Society.”

  “And these awards, I understand, can mean money for the grower.”

  Right. “If you can propagate an awarded plant, by divisions or ideally by mericloning—tissue culture, that is—you can make a significant amount of money.”

  I remembered people at Albert’s discussing tissue culture. I had only the vaguest idea how it worked. Something about stimulating certain cells to grow up into entire plants. Brave New World, here we come. “If someone were denied an award, and felt it was because of a particular judge, that person could be upset and want to take it out on the judge.”

  “You’re talking about Albert, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “But there are politics to the judging, right? In our cactus club, there are always people marking down plants because they know they belong to someone they don’t like. The entry tags are folded to hide the shower’s name, but if a judge has a thing about one of the entrants, they have a knack of recognizing the handwriting. Not to mention the plants. Once a plant gets to show size, it looks pretty much the same from year to year. You look at it, you say, I remember that, it’s John Doe’s plant. If you hate John Doe and you’re a judge you, whether consciously or not, tend to mark down his plants.”

  “It’s not that easy to recognize an orchid from year to year. But, yeah, we have some of that.”

  “Sometimes,” Sharon said, “the problem is that the judge doesn’t like the entrant’s lifestyle.”

  Bob glanced over at her. “There’s some of that too.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  It took him a few seconds to answer. “See that guy over there?”

  “The one with the hair,” Sharon said.

  I looked. “Stalin?”

  “Yes.” She giggled.

  “What about him?”

  Bob: “He, uh …”

  “Just say it, Bob,” Sharon said. “The man’s a homophobe. If he knows a plant’s entered by one of the gay members, he’s almost certain to downgrade it.”

  “It’s kind of embarrassing,” Bob said.

  “Since we realized what was happening,” Sharon said, “when some of the gay members put plants in for judging, they have someone else fill out the entry form so he doesn’t recognize the handwriting.”

  “But can’t he just read the names?”

  “They go in with identification numbers.” She glanced toward another table, at which the guy with the big forehead sat kneading his earlobe and staring at a plant. “And the aides generally know about judges’ prejudices, and will try to keep certain plants away from them for the final judging.”

  “That’s probably enough, Sharon,” Bob said.

  “You’re right. He’s going to think we’re a bunch of bigots.”

  The woman judge returned to the table. “Time to get going,” she called out, and the others took their places. The nun arrived with the first of the finalists.

  It was a phalaenopsis called ‘Pollo Loco’ and it had white flowers with bright red highlights. All eyes were on it while the nun distributed score sheets and made sure everyone had a writing implement. Suddenly they were all talking about whether something was feathering or whether it was a color break. After a couple of minutes they marked their sheets. One of the guys tabulated the scores and announced that the average was 72.5. No award for this plant.

  I asked Bob how one became a judge.

  “There’s a
training program. After a while you get to be a probationary and eventually, if you play things right, a judge. And there are senior judges. Albert, for instance, though I’d heard he was on the verge of giving it up.”

  “How come?”

  “Politics,” Sharon said.

  Suddenly I was aware of how close to me she was sitting, how her thigh was barely touching my own. And I was experiencing feelings I’d gotten unfamiliar with. And I was thinking, this woman certainly is intelligent, and attractive, and gee, Joe, you haven’t been with anyone in a while, have you?

  She saw me looking at her leg. Our eyes caught. She smiled, looked away.

  “Oh, just look at this baby,” Bob said.

  The “baby” was, I soon found out, a member of the genus Pleurothallis, no more than three inches across, with flowers at most three quarters of an inch wide. These, Bob told me, were the core of a group of miniatures known as pleurothallids. They were what the woman at Albert’s had been regaling us about, and now I knew why. The petals were iridescent, with green and purple predominant, the purple so dark it was almost black. Minute hairs grew from their edges.

  Each person at the table wore a broad smile. There was no discussion, save for the guy with the pipe asking what the parents were. A couple of minutes later, the clerk added up the scores. 87. An Award of Merit. Someone slapped his hands together, and I thought they were going to break out into applause. Cooler heads prevailed.

  I sat through a couple more plants, wanting to switch tables, maybe see Stalin in action, but not knowing how to do so politely. I decided to watch one more, then go back upstairs and compare notes with Gina.

  When the next orchid was put on the table, I got a glimpse of its entry form, filled out in an unusual handwriting that slanted to the left. The plant was an oncidium called ‘Nagano Snow.’ It had at least a hundred flowers on a spike four feet tall. Each bloom was an inch across, with a pale yellow background and purple edges. There was red mixed in there, too, and some green, and some color I couldn’t even put a name to. The inflorescence shimmered above us, luminous even in the harsh light.

  “What are the parents?” Pipe Guy said.

  Someone read them off, and they got out a book and looked at pictures of both. Bob leaned over to me. “A plant has to show the influence of both parents to get awarded.”

  They dwelled a while on the plant, kicking around this and that aspect of it, before putting it to a vote. It got a 74. Just short of an award. Bob told me if it would have scored higher had it shown more of the pollen parent’s characteristics.

  I thanked everyone and excused myself. Sharon and I went out and closed the door behind us. “That last one,” I said. “It belongs to a guy named Yoichi, doesn’t it?”

  I wouldn’t be surprised. “He’s been hybridizing oncidiums for years. Why did you think that?”

  I bought a plant from him yesterday. On my way out. The handwriting on the receipt matched what was on the entry form. “It’s very distinctive.”

  How clever. “You really may be cut out for this detective business.”

  “Is he here? I haven’t seen him.”

  “Probably not. Someone else usually brings his plants in. He generally goes to a club down in Orange County, but they don’t have judging.”

  “Oh, there you are.” Gina came bounding down the stairs. I thought maybe you got eaten by one of the plants. Like in “Little Shop of Horrors.”

  Sharon put a hand on my arm. “I’ll see you later.” She headed upstairs. I watched her go, evidently with enough interest for Gina to comment on. “You’re hot for her.”

  “I am not.”

  Of course you are. “I know the signs. You did the nostril thing.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did. Flared wider than I’ve ever seen ’em.”

  I smiled guiltily. “She is attractive.”

  “I don’t like her.”

  “You don’t get a vote.” Slight pause. “Why don’t you like her?”

  “General principles. And what’s with the hair? Hasn’t she heard of L’Oréal?”

  “I’ll take your disapproval under consideration. You get tired of the shenanigans upstairs?”

  “They’re on a break. They did a repotting demonstration. The woman doing it wore surgical gloves. Said something about ‘the ever-present threat of virus.’ Then they had a slide program on Madagascar. What is it with plant people and slide programs on Madagascar? If I ever see another cute picture of a lemur, I’ll puke. Come back upstairs with me, before all the goodies are gone.”

  We returned to the meeting room, filled plates with cookies and fruit, dropped a couple of bucks in the paper cup, watched the crowd. I told Gina about the judging session. When I finished, she said, “Maybe Albert had some secret prejudice and marked someone down and they knocked him off.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  “You don’t know. He could have been a real Nazi.”

  The public address system squealed. A lanky guy in his forties, the only one in the room wearing a jacket and tie, asked for everyone to take their seats. He held the cordless microphone in a death grip. “He’s the president,” Gina said. “Name’s Dean something, or something Dean. I think you should wear a tie when you run your cactus meetings. It’s very presidential.”

  We found places on the aisle halfway back. Dean waited for everyone to sit. He would have waited forever if Ms. Buzz-cut hadn’t stood up and shouted, “Everyone find your goddamned seats,” evoking laughter from some, nervous looks from others, the requested behavior from all.

  Dean positioned himself behind a podium bearing a sizable gold cross. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Many, nay all of you know that our longtime member and dear friend Albert Oberg was, uh, killed last Saturday night.”

  “Did he say nay’?” Gina whispered.

  “Aye, he did,” I whispered back.

  A diminutive woman sitting in front of us turned around and put a finger to her lips.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Dean went on. Some have asked about Albert’s funeral service. I’m afraid there won’t be one. In accordance with Albert’s wishes, he will be cremated, and the ashes spread in his greenhouse. There will be a memorial service later on. “So.” He seemed relieved to be done talking about the service.

  Tonight we have a special guest. Tonight we have here with us someone involved in the investigation of Albert’s death. He may seek you out to ask questions. I beseech you to answer these truthfully and honestly, and to give him your fullest cooperation. “For only through his efforts can we determine the perpetrator of this terrible crime.”

  Huh? How did he know I was investigating Albert’s death? What was I going to say when I got up to speak? And was the perpetrator—as the president put it—in this very room, and would he or she jump up the moment I reached the podium, shout, “Die, cactus-collecting scum,” and launch a plant stake at my heart?

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Dean. “From the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Hector Casillas!”

  11

  CASILLAS MARCHED UP FROM THE BACK OF THE ROOM, wearing a gray suit and a kindly smile. I hadn’t seen him back there. Maybe he was hiding behind a cymbidium.

  He whisked to the podium, shook hands with Dean, took the mike, waited while Dean got it that Casillas didn’t want him standing there. When the president stepped away, Casillas tapped the mike, saying, “Is this thing on?” He smiled sheepishly when feedback erupted from the speakers. His ingratiating manner, admirable a year before, had been honed to a fine point.

  I didn’t know which was worse. That I’d nearly made a fool of myself with my self-aggrandizing image of Joe Portugal, criminal catcher, or that my nemesis Casillas was there, addressing the orchid crowd much as, the previous spring, he’d done the same at a meeting of the Culver City Cactus Club.

  He went around the podium to lean against the raffle table. “First,” he said, “let me express my sympathy at t
he loss of your friend. I understand he was a fine man.” Someone in the back began to applaud, and a few more folks picked it up, before Casillas gestured for silence.

  “Like Mr. Dean said, as part of our ongoing investigation, I’d like you all to know that I may be calling on you to ask questions about Mr. Oberg and his associates. Please be assured that any questioning you undergo does not necessarily mean you are suspected of a crime.”

  “Notice the necessarily,” I said. The woman in front of me did the finger thing again.

  Casillas did some PR, took a couple of questions, asked a few of his own. I sat there with my arms crossed over my chest. I didn’t know why Casillas affected me so viscerally. Maybe it was because he represented authority, and ever since my days as a somewhat-out-of-control rock-and-roll kid I’d had a problem with authority. Maybe it was because authority had sent my father to prison when he should have been home teaching me to hit a curve ball.

  After fifteen minutes Casillas thanked everyone profusely and walked out into the hallway. Dean regained the podium and told everyone it was their last opportunity to buy chances at the raffle, touching off a small frenzy around the buzz-cut woman and her roll of orange tickets. When they called a halt to sales, I got up. Gina didn’t. She pulled out a strip of raffle tickets. Go figure.

  I made it into the hallway just as they began calling numbers. Casillas was waiting for me, leaning against the wall and chewing a toothpick. “Expected you’d be here,” he said.

  “Who are you checking up on?”

  “What makes you think I’m checking up on anyone?”

  “You wouldn’t waste your time here if there wasn’t someone you wanted to watch.”

  He tossed his toothpick in a potted palm. “If that’s the case, why aren’t I back in there watching them?”

  An excited squeal escaped the meeting room. Someone had gotten the plant of their dreams. I pointed at the door leading back inside. “That’s the only way out of there. You can watch just fine from here.”