Death of an Orchid Lover

by Nathan Walpow

  I made tea and went outside for greenhouse rounds, wearing old Nikes instead of my usual karate slippers as a concession to the weather. My Gymnocalycium ragonesii, a South American cactus resembling a round gray rock, had bloomed. As I was inspecting it the sun broke through. The gymno’s white flower caught the first rays with that peculiar sheen cactus flowers have. A tiny bee or fly was busy gathering pollen among its stamens. I watched as it withdrew from the petals, waited while it had found its way outside, closed up the greenhouse.

  Over by the garage I spotted a golden polistes wasp. First one of the spring in the garden. I shivered and gave it a wide berth. Someday I was going to get therapy for my fear of the damned things. Sure. Right after I won my Emmy and raised a family.

  I went inside and took a shower. While I was in there I reviewed the conversation where Sharon and I arranged our date, wondering if she really wasn’t sure she wanted to go out with me. Or if maybe she was already involved with someone and was merely setting me up as a backup plan. That had happened before. Right in the middle of passionate sex, the woman pulled away and said she wasn’t really into it because she was waiting for her true love to return from visiting his family in Samoa. Because I’m a masochist when it comes to women, we continued seeing each other. A month later she said she was getting married. To the Samoan, I said, and she said no, to some guy she met at work. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to striking a woman, although it really wasn’t close at all.

  But the Samoan was history. He had nothing to do with my current situation. Why did I always have to view a date with apprehension? Maybe things would be great. Maybe there’d be a magic moment or two, a time when our eyes caught and held and we knew each other better than we had a right to. And maybe there’d be sex.

  Alberta Burns was the LAPD homicide detective I’d gotten to know during the Brenda business. She’d been Casillas’s partner before he got promoted to Robbery—Homicide, and had been much more receptive to my poking around than he had. I’d developed a small crush on her, but never pursued it, partially because I didn’t want to go out with a woman who could beat me up.

  She worked out of the Pacific Division, at Centinela and Culver, about two miles from my house. I got her on the line. “Burns.”

  “Joe Portugal here.”

  “I thought I might hear from you.”

  “You talked to Casillas.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re still in touch, then.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s what I can do for you. I’m going to buy you breakfast.”

  “And pick my brain?”

  “If you’ll let me.”

  I expected to be turned down. Surprise, surprise. “Pick me up in front of the station. Ten minutes.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I stepped outside into full sunlight. The front walk was nearly dry already. The truck was plastered with leaves that the rain had brought down from the weirdos’ elm. I ran the wipers to clear the windshield and hit the road.

  Burns was waiting out front when I got to the station. She jaywalked across Culver and hopped in the truck. Five minutes later we were at Western Bagel. Burns ordered a blueberry with cream cheese and a large black coffee. I had a pumpernickel with cream cheese and tea. I paid. We picked a table outside, under a green plastic umbrella. A few renegade raindrops dotted our chairs. I wiped them with a napkin and we sat down. As we were getting ourselves arranged, Burns caught me staring at her bagel. “What?”

  I shrugged. There are rules about what kinds of bagels should have cream cheese on them. Blueberry is not one of those kinds. Not that blueberries should be in a bagel in the first place. Mind you, I love blueberries, but—this is an inane way to begin a conversation. “How’ve you been?”

  “All right.”

  “Just all right?”

  “Things are going okay.”

  “You’re looking good. I like the hair.”

  “Thanks. I like it too.” She picked up her bagel. “It was time for a change.”

  My compliments were more than idle chatter. Burns had had her hair straightened when I’d known her before. Now she’d let the curl come out, and had it cut short so that it formed a black halo around her head. She’d also softened her look in clothing. The lines were less severe, a bit more feminine than before. Not enough to detract from her image as an all-business cop, but conspicuous to Joe Portugal, fashion authority.

  “This change,” I said. “Was it around the time Casillas got promoted?”

  She looked pretty silly, sitting there motionless with the bagel inches from her mouth. After a couple of seconds she took a bite, chewed, swallowed. Then: “You’re pretty perceptive.”

  “I try. You wanted a promotion too.”

  She put down the bagel and picked up her coffee. “Let’s not go there, all right?”

  “No, let’s.”

  She glared, sipping her coffee without taking her eyes off me. “All right, then,” she said. “Yes, I wanted a promotion too. He got one. He’s been on the job longer than I have. End of story.”

  “Your time will come.” Jeez, Portugal, can’t you come up with anything better than that?

  A misplaced sesame seed clung to my bagel. I carefully picked it off and put it on my plate. Finally I came up with something semi-intelligent. “You have a new partner, then?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Are you, like, mentoring him?”

  “Her. Like, I am.”

  We talked about work for a while, her new partner, my bug events at the malls. When we’d finished off our bagels, she said, “Casillas says you’re digging around in Albert Oberg’s murder. And that you discovered Laura Astaire’s body. You went, what, a year, without finding anyone dead. Not bad.”

  “Night before last,” I said, “Casillas came to an orchid society meeting because of a woman named Helen Gartner. The woman Laura was with the night Albert was killed.”

  “The woman she said she was with.”

  “Fine, whatever you say. He talked to Helen when she left. I want to find out what about.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  She just stared at me.

  “What?” I said. “I have cream cheese on my nose?” Her deep brown eyes wouldn’t let me go. Finally I turned away. I spied the sesame seed on my plate, licked a finger, picked up the seed, ate it.

  We sat there silently for half a minute. “You don’t get it, do you, Joe?” she said at last. She’d never called me by my first name before.

  “Don’t get what?”

  “Criminals are bad people. You get mixed up with them, you put yourself—and those you love—in danger.”

  “I’m being careful.”

  “Are you? Tell me just how you’re being careful.”

  “I—” Of course, I couldn’t come up with anything. Because I wasn’t being careful at all. Disregarding the admonitions of my father, ones now repeated by someone who should know, I was blithely careening around among a bunch of possibly dangerous characters.

  “Look,” she said, I have to get back. Regardless of what you might think, “I’ve got cases of my own to worry about.”

  “Can you find out from Casillas why he was after Helen Gartner?”

  “Why should I?”

  “For old times’ sake.”

  She sighed. I just know this is a bad idea, but … “I’ll see what I can dig up.”

  “There’s one more thing I’d like you to dig up.”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “I’d like to know whether Laura killed herself.”

  “Now how on God’s green earth am I supposed to find that out?”

  “Ask Casillas.”

  “And what makes you think he knows?”

  The police can always tell. Powder burns, bullet trajectories, stuff like that. “Like on Homicide. Come on, don’t tell me they haven’t been trying to figure that out already.”

  Nex
t to the word baleful in the dictionary, they have a picture of the look Burns was giving me. “I’ll see what I can find out,” she said.

  I took her back, dropped her off, watched as she strode back into the station. I liked the way she walked. Powerful and womanly. Nice ass.

  Jesus. Why was I thinking about Burns’s ass? Gina was right. Investigating homicides made me horny.

  15

  ORANGE COUNTY IS ALIEN. THAT’S THE ONLY WORD THAT seems to do it justice. When I pass one of the big green freeway signs that say I’m entering it, I immediately feel like an interloper, and like everyone who sees me will know it and treat me appropriately.

  O.C. is a hugely conservative area, one of the last bastions of the Reagan dream. But my discomfort is more than just political. The women with their frosted blond heads might as well be of another species. The men, perfectly coiffed with caterpillar mustaches, could be from another planet. I have nothing in common with them. They are interested in phenomena I have no knowledge of.

  Even the traffic lights in Orange County are weird. They travel to the beat of a different electronic drum, so when you’re driving one of the long straight streets you end up waiting for two or three minutes at a time, while cars go in every direction but yours, and turn left from places you didn’t know existed. Then you move on a couple of blocks to do the whole thing all over again.

  At a little before noon Wednesday, I found myself on one such stretch. Beach Boulevard, in Stanton, a small city I knew only because there’s a cactus nursery there that I used to go to once a year, until I realized I was buying something only because I was embarrassed to leave empty-handed. I passed a lot of ugly apartment buildings and uglier shopping centers, spending the interminable traffic-light intervals listening to Moby Grape’s third album, a ninety-nine-cent Tower Records find.

  Finally I found the avenue the Thomas Guide told me to turn left at. I made another left onto the street on the receipt Yoichi Nakatani had given me and found the long rutted driveway that led to his place. I bounced down it on shocks that were new when Jimmy Carter was in the White House, taking in the colorful cymbidiums planted in tubs alongside, and pulled to a stop in front of a greenhouse. It was typical of those at specialty plant dealers. Sections poked off at odd angles. Saggy benches were haphazardly propped up. At least four kinds of shade cloth drooped over various areas. The electrical wiring would meet no building code on the planet. Plants sat on every horizontal surface and hung from most of the vertical ones.

  Yoichi emerged from a house trailer across the driveway from the greenhouse. Its undercarriage was covered with plywood sheets that were nailed in and painted to match the trailer. A variety of plant benches surrounded it: planks on cinder blocks, constructions cobbled together from fiber-board and two-by-fours, metal racks from Home Depot. All were loaded with orchids. Most of them were shaded by the big sycamores and eucalyptus that dotted the lot, though they would have gotten some direct sun in the morning.

  I left the truck behind and picked my way through the plant gauntlet to him. His olive-green shorts reached below his knees. He wore the same orchid T-shirt Sharon’d had on at the show, but his was beat up, with a ripped seam on one shoulder. On his feet were rubber gardening shoes, the kind they sell for exorbitant prices at Smith and Hawken.

  His hand was clammy, his handshake weak. “I thought I would see you again,” he said. The lure of the orchid is very strong. “You must have more.”

  “Something like that.”

  He had a giant plastic cup of iced tea, and asked if I wanted some before we hit the greenhouse. I told him it was an excellent idea. He led me into the trailer.

  The door opened on the kitchen. Yoichi pointed me to a tiny table accompanied by seats consisting of benchlike wall projections with cushions. He poured me some tea from a pitcher he got out of a refrigerator that seemed way too big for the space, and sat down at right angles to me. Our knees banged. “Sorry,” I said, even though he was the one who’d clobbered me.

  “No problem,” he said.

  He watched as I took several swallows of iced tea. It was good, freshly brewed, unsweetened. I waited for him to say something. He didn’t, so I did. “Quite a spread you’ve got here.” Quite a wordsmith, that Portugal.

  He nodded and took a long draught of tea. While he still had the glass up to his mouth, I said, “I saw the judging at the Palisades Orchid Society the other night.”

  There was a slight hitch to his swallow. He finished off his tea, put the glass down. “You said you were a newcomer to orchids.”

  “So?”

  “Why were you at the judging?”

  “Call me precocious. Did your plant do as well as you expected?”

  “No, it didn’t. More tea?”

  “Your glass is empty, not mine.”

  He looked down at it. “Ah, yes.” He got up, refilled it, sat down again. “I did expect a higher score. At least an HCC.”

  “Why do you think you didn’t get it?”

  He shrugged. “Who can tell with orchid judges? They get things in their heads. They don’t like a genus, they don’t like a grower. They didn’t get what they needed the night before from their wives.” He smiled. His teeth were too even, too perfect. “Or, in a few cases, their husbands. Or whoever.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, putting months and years into a plant, then having it judged down in a matter of minutes?”

  Another shrug. “That’s the rule of the game. What about Olympic sprinters? They train for four years, and some of them, the ones eliminated in the heats, are out of the competition in ten seconds.”

  “You weren’t there Monday night.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Would you like to see my lab?”

  “Where were—”

  “Of course you would. Come. Please leave your tea behind. And …”

  “Yes?”

  He pointed to the minuscule sink. “Would you mind washing your hands?”

  “Not at all.”

  I scrubbed up using soap from a push-button dispenser and wiped my hands on paper towels. Yoichi produced a trash can, took the towels, made the can disappear again. He went through a door and I followed.

  The room I found myself in was perhaps thirty feet long, filling that whole end of the trailer. It was chock-full of scientific apparatus. Test tubes, beakers, pipettes, and a load of other stuff vaguely remembered from high school chemistry class. Cases with meters on the front, some with dials, some digital.

  Racks of flasks filled with something green lined a ten-foot section of the wall. Strong fluorescent fixtures lit the place clearly. Over in a corner, a security camera on a bracket gave everything the once-over.

  “This is pretty amazing,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I walked over to the racks with their dozens of flasks. The green things within were little plants, a couple of dozen in each. They didn’t really resemble orchids. There wasn’t any soil; instead, the plants were stuck into some goopy substance lining the insides of the flasks, each of which had a computer-printed label bearing plant names and dates. “What’s all this?”

  “These are some of my creations.”

  Great. I’d tracked down “Dr. Frankenstein. Creations?”

  “My hybrids.” He pulled a flask from the rack, jogged over to a workbench, shuffled some papers, came back with a couple of photos. “The plants in this flask, for instance, are a cross between these two angraecums.”

  They had long stems up which pairs of leaves climbed like a ladder, and big white star-shaped flowers. “I don’t know angraecums.”

  “A very interesting genus. You see the nectar spurs?”

  “Those long pointy things dangling from the flowers?”

  Yes. “They’re designed for one pollinator and one pollinator only.”

  Nature. “Isn’t it wonderful? Where are they from?”

  “Madagascar.”

  I nodded. Madagascar has a lot of wonderful plants. “Too bad they’re des
troying so many of them.”

  He gave me a funny look. “Who is?”

  “The locals. With their deforestation.”

  “Oh. Them. Yes, it is too bad.”

  I pointed to the flask. “Did you sprout them yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard that orchid seed is really small and hard to get going.” What else had Albert told me? “And that a lot of people send it out for germination.”

  “Ah. I germinate my own. All the best growers do.”

  I took the flask from his hand. He gave it up grudgingly. “So you just grow them in these flasks until they get big enough to pot up themselves?”

  “Oh, no. This is how I sell them.”

  “Why do people buy them like this?”

  “They grow them on. They want to see what will develop. You never know what two parents will come up with. Like humans, hmm?” He took the flask back, placed it on the rack, dropped the photos on the workbench. “So tell me, Mr. Portugal. What is the real reason for your visit today?”

  “I thought I might learn some more about—”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “No.”

  “Then tell me why you’re here.”

  I drew in a big breath, let it out slowly. “I’m investigating Albert Oberg’s death. And, now, Laura Astaire’s as well.”

  “And what gives you the right to do that?”

  “The right?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you, you know.”

  “But why wouldn’t you, if you have nothing to hide?”

  “Did someone imply I had something to hide?”

  “Everyone has something to hide.”

  “Yes.” He sat in a leather desk chair, decided he didn’t like it, got back up. “Go ahead with your questions.”

  You had an argument with Albert some time ago. “About judging.”

  “I did?”

  “You said, among other things, that he had the eyes of a newt.”

  He smiled. “And so you came down here expecting to find out I put a bullet into him.”

  Not really. “If it were as simple as that, I expect the police would have carted you away long ago.”