Death of an Orchid Lover Read online

  “Actually, the time of death could have been after you two said good night.”

  “Do you have any reason to think she left my house and ran over to Albert’s and shot him?”

  Something was wrong here. She was asking me the questions. “No. Of course not. I’m trying to clear Laura, not convict her.” I caught her eye. “You knew, I suppose, that she was involved with Albert.”

  She blinked five or six times. “Of course I did.”

  “And how was that going?”

  “You were such close friends with her.” Her voice had picked up a harsh note. “Going out of your way to preserve her innocence. You should know.”

  What I’d been asking shouldn’t have brought on such hostility. But as long as she was getting antagonistic, I thought I’d try pushing some buttons. “I understand you had some sort of business dealings with Albert.”

  “Oh? Where did you hear that?”

  “Around.”

  She stood, revealing teal-blue pants of some fine material that looked like silk but that I suspected was a fashion phenomenon I wasn’t up on. She walked to the window that looked out on the sales floor. “We started out with two stalls leased from a gas station that didn’t do mechanical work.”

  “And now you have six. A two hundred percent increase in stall capacity. And as many magnetic car hats as you could imagine.”

  “Are you mocking my business?”

  “Of course not. I just don’t see why you’re telling me this.”

  She turned from the window and came to sit in the other green chair. “Whatever you heard, it’s wrong.”

  “You’ve had no business with Albert?”

  “You’ve been misled.”

  “Was Detective Casillas misled about whatever brought him to the orchid society meeting?”

  Her eyes went to the door. Mine followed. Her husband, David, stood there. He had on a nondescript striped shirt and brown slacks. His hairline was as high as ever. I wanted to tell him, Do something about that forehead, man. Comb your hair down. Or shave the whole thing. It’s very in these days.

  Helen said, David, this is Joe portugal. He’s a friend of Laura’s. “He’s trying to make sure her name isn’t besmirched.”

  David came in and held out his hand to be shaken. “It’ll blow over,” he said.

  “I’m sure it will.” The belt between my brain and my mouth broke. I hear you went to the hockey game last Saturday night. “Anybody see you there?”

  His lips went rigid. “Yeah. About fifteen thousand people. And the four buddies I sat with.”

  “Sorry. Asking you that was probably out of line.”

  He forced a smile. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I was just asking Helen about the two of you being in some sort of business arrangement with Albert. I’ve been told there was one, but Helen says it’s not true.”

  “You expect me to say she’s wrong?”

  “Of course not. I just thought—”

  “Look, we’re respectable businesspeople.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “So why are you—”

  I threw up my hands, both literally and figuratively. “I’ll drop it, okay?” I got out of my chair. “Forget I said anything.” I took a deep breath, looked from David to Helen and back. “But look, as long as I’m here … do either of you know anyone that might have had anything against Albert? Or Laura, for that matter?”

  “No,” they said simultaneously.

  “How about Yoichi Nakatani?”

  “What about him?” David said. His voice was too loud and too nasty. “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got a business to run. And if you’re not going to buy anything—”

  “Would you stick around if I bought some tires? Okay, fine. How about a nice set of Bridgestones? Ronnie out there said I’m about due.”

  “We don’t carry them.”

  “Your sign says you carry all brands.”

  “The sign’s wrong.”

  “How come you don’t have Bridgestones?”

  “Just don’t like them.” He seemed about to say something else, thought better of it. “I’ve got to go check on some stock.” He turned and walked out.

  I looked at Helen. “Was it something I said?”

  “No. David’s sometimes a little lacking in the social graces. Don’t take it personally.”

  “I won’t, if you answer my last question. Yoichi Nakatani.”

  “I know him from the club. I’ve bought a couple of plants from him. That’s all.”

  “I heard he got mad at Albert because of some judging a while back.”

  “I hadn’t heard that. I doubt it happened. Yoichi doesn’t care that much about judging.”

  “I’ve heard the scores can go a long way toward determining how a plant sells.”

  “Yoichi thinks if a plant is good it doesn’t matter how it’s been judged. Collectors will find it anyway.”

  I’d reached the point of diminishing returns. I thanked her for her time and headed for the door. I opened it, turned, said, Another answer I never got. What about Casillas? “What did he want from you the other night?”

  “Nothing. It was a case of mistaken identity.”

  No, it wasn’t. There was something there. I didn’t think I had much chance of her telling me what it was. Not yet. “See you around,” I said.

  Outside, someone had turned the temperature up another ten degrees. I got to the truck without Ronnie or anyone else trying to sell me tires, and headed up to the 118 Freeway and my date with a costume fitter.

  19

  ALL THOUGHTS OF MURDER TUCKED THEMSELVES AWAY when I reached Riverrun Studio and walked into the room where my costume awaited. It was a dog suit.

  “Whose idea was this?” I asked the guy from the production company.

  “We thought it would be clever if you and your wife were a dog couple.”

  “Dogs don’t use toilet bowls. Dogs shit in the street.”

  “These dogs don’t.”

  “This is humiliating.”

  “Nonsense. You’ll make a great dog.”

  The suit weighed a ton and looked hotter than hell. I struggled into it and checked myself out in the mirror. I didn’t look like a dog. I looked like a person in a dog suit.

  The actress playing my wife showed up five minutes later. It was Diane. I hadn’t seen her at the audition, hadn’t even known she was up for the toilet bowl cleaner spot.

  Shortly after she put on her costume, the director bubbled into the room. He took one look at the two of us and pronounced us “The perfect dogs.” “Then he told us the powers that-be had deliberately cast us together because Everyone is used to you as a couple now, because of the bug spots, and they’ll buy the relationship even if you’re dogs.”

  I turned to Diane. Maybe we should audition for everything together. “We could do cats and birds and fish next.”

  “What would our agents think of that?”

  “They don’t get a vote.” I scowled at the director. “They don’t have to dress up as basset hounds.”

  Some costume guy looked us over for three seconds each and pronounced the dog suits a perfect fit. For this we schlepped all the way to Sunland?

  We ditched the suits and went out to our cars. Diane told me she was nervous about the preview for her play that night. After I made the proper calming comments, I told her I was apprehensive about my evening too. “I have a date,” I said.

  “A Real Date?”

  “Uh-huh. Second night in a row with the same person.”

  “That’s something. I do feel for you. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with dating anymore. What’s her name?”

  “Sharon. Sharon Turner.”

  “Hmm. I knew someone by that name once. Let me Think …”

  “It couldn’t be that uncommon a name.”

  “I guess not.” She unlocked her car. “Do you still want to come to the play?”

  “Of course I do.”

/>   “We talked about Saturday.”

  “That won’t work. A family thing. How about Sunday?” It was important to show my support for Diane early in the run. With L.A.’s theater scene, you never knew if early in the run might end up being the whole run.

  “Sunday’s good,” she said.

  The director came running out. He’d gotten a bright idea. Maybe Diane should be a cat. “A mixed marriage kind of thing, like the interracial couple in the IKEA spots.”

  “Maybe you should make us both the same sex,” I said. “Like the gay couple in the IKEA spots.”

  “America isn’t ready for that,” he said.

  “America’s ready for a mixed animal couple, but not a gay animal couple?”

  “But of course.” He grabbed Diane’s arm and tried to herd her inside.

  She shrugged him off. “I’ll have your comps waiting at the box office.”

  “Great. Just one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Where’s the box office?”

  “I didn’t tell you? I thought I told you. It’s the John Diamante Theatre.”

  I’d heard the name before. “Didn’t that used to be—”

  She was nodding. “Yes. It used to be the Altair. Where we

  first met, all those years ago.” She let the director drag her inside.

  I first got involved in theater in 1974, at twenty-one, when a band I was in was hired to work in one of the many rock musicals flooding the stages of L.A.’s smaller theaters. The play lasted only a couple of weeks, but it opened my eyes to a new creative outlet. Over the next few years I got more and more into theater work—both acting and behind the scenes—while finding less and less time for my guitar. Then, in ‘78, I was working at the Altair when the guy who ran the place found some leftover acid from his hippie days, had a life-changing trip, and went off to join the Hare Krishnas. I found myself in charge, right in the middle of a production of Equus. I guess things went okay, because when the run was over the board of directors offered me the job full-time. It didn’t pay a whole lot, but it paid enough.

  I did the serious theater guy thing, putting on shows and occasionally acting in them, dealing with lighting people and program printers and a myriad of others. Then, after seven years, it got old. I pictured myself at sixty, still painting sets and fixing toilets, and hearing the conversations between the ingenues. “Oh, that’s Joe,” one would stage-whisper. “He’s been here forever. It’s his whole life.” I didn’t want the theater to be my whole life, at least not a little ninety-nine-seat house like the Altair.

  Two years later I left the place. I traded it in for my “career” as a TV commercial actor, and I’d been rolling along with that ever since, associating with other actors only at auditions and shoots. Now, suddenly, after talking with Diane about her play—and Laura about her class—I was feeling an urge to tread the boards again. And being reminded of the Altair threw me into a funk. What had I done with the last decade?

  I went home and called my father. I hear you’re planning a family thing Saturday night. “When were you going to get around to telling me?”

  “Today maybe. Or tomorrow. I knew you could come.”

  “Why do you assume I have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than hang out with my family?”

  “Do you?”

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  “Do you want to bring the girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “You sound funny. There has to be a girl.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am seeing someone.”

  “Seeing? What’s that mean?”

  “Dating. Going out with.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “No, I hate her. I just go out with her because she gives green stamps. Of course I like her.”

  “My son, the comedian. You should bring her Saturday.”

  “Oh, right. That’d be the end of the relationship for sure.”

  “Relationship? This is a relationship already?”

  “No. Not yet. Which is why I’m not ready to have her meet my family. Too much pressure. We’ve only been going out for—” Hmm. We’d only been going out for one day. “For a little while.”

  “Makes sense. You don’t want to burden the girl. You tell me when you want us to meet her.”

  “I will, Dad. I will,” I said, and signed off.

  I sat on the couch, thought about Albert and Laura and all the supporting players, found myself getting nowhere but sleepy. I took off my shoes and lay down. My eyes kept fluttering shut. I tried to keep them open, couldn’t, said the hell with it and let myself nap.

  My eyes opened. They focused on the VCR. It was blinking 12:00. In many households this is a normal state of affairs; in mine it isn’t. I looked at my watch. Just past six. I got up off the couch, checked in the kitchen. The clock on the stove said twenty till. There’d been a power failure. Not that uncommon in my part of Culver City. I fixed all the clocks and went out to the Jungle.

  I felt like crap, worse than just the dry mouth and general sweaty feeling I always experience when I wake up from a nap. And the crappiness wasn’t just physical. I was undergoing depression and dread and a bunch of other negative emotions I couldn’t put names to. I knew it was time to confront something I hadn’t been ready to deal with: the fact that I felt responsible for Laura’s death.

  The thought had come inching into my consciousness at various times over the last two days, and I’d always pushed it away. But while I was asleep on the couch, it had worked its way to the forefront. I had the inescapable feeling that if I hadn’t agreed to look into Albert’s killing, Laura would still be alive. Someone knew I was sticking my nose in, knew who I’d been seeing, and felt if such contact continued they might be exposed. So they took care of that possibility.

  And there was more. Maybe the killer suspected I now knew something he or she didn’t want me to, and was going to deal with me as well. They just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  Monica Shriver, the little girl from two houses down, yanked me from my contemplation. She drove by on her Big Wheel, headed directly for a VW Thing in the wackos’ driveway. I jumped up and dashed to the rescue. As I grabbed the Big Wheel a car pulled up. I half expected someone to jump out with a tommy gun and mow me down. Little Monica too. Or maybe just Monica. I’d be guilt-ridden forever.

  Then I recognized the car, and someone did get out. “I’m early,” Sharon said.

  I pointed Monica in the right direction and she pedaled toward home. I looked at Sharon. “I know.”

  “I got free earlier than I expected, and I was looking forward to seeing you, and—well, here I am. I hope I’m not intruding.”

  “Of course not.”

  She walked up and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re sure I’m not too early? I can go wait at a coffeehouse.”

  “Come up on the patio with me.”

  “All right.” She passed in front of me, and I put my hand to my cheek and held it there, as if some trace of magic had been deposited and I didn’t want to let it get away.

  I followed her and brushed off a wicker chair. A daddy longlegs fled down its side, scurried across the planking, dropped over the edge into the shrubbery below. “Here,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  She did, and I regained mine. She was wearing a sleeveless top like the one she’d had on the first time I met her, this one pale green. Her legs—at least, all I could see of them between the hem of her cotton skirt and her white canvas tennies—were slim and nicely tanned.

  “I call this the Jungle,” I said. “I keep a lot of epiphytic plants here, stuff that needs a fair amount of shade. It’s a south exposure, which you’ve probably figured out already, but that big elm shades it most of the day. Maybe I could grow some orchids here.”

  “Maybe. You know, you don’t look very good. Your face is pale.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s nothing. It’s something. Tell me.

  �
��I hardly know you. I don’t want to lay heavy stuff on you so soon.”

  “Go ahead and lay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Here goes. I feel responsible for Laura’s death.”

  “How so?”

  I have a feeling the killer thought she either told me or was going to tell me something incriminating. So they offed her. “And if I hadn’t been sniffing around, no one would have been threatened, and she’d still be alive.”

  “You’re still thinking it wasn’t suicide.”

  “No one’s said for sure one way or the other.”

  “I see. All right, then consider this. What are the chances she told you something she didn’t tell the police?”

  “I’m not sure where you’re leading.”

  Where I’m leading is, if she was murdered because the killer thought she would say something incriminating, it would have happened whether you were around or not. Because who would expect her to reveal something to you that she hadn’t told the police? “No offense meant, but you’re not exactly a professional detective.”

  “Maybe you have a point.” I shook my head. “Do you know anything about her funeral?”

  “I was talking to one of the other people in the club this morning and found out she’s being cremated, just like Albert. After the police are done with her body, I suppose. That sounds so macabre. Her body.’ There’s no service. I think Albert must have convinced her that was the way to go.”

  We were silent. There was a light scent in the air, something very springtime, floral but not cloying. “I like your perfume,” I said.

  “You do? I don’t often wear any, but tonight I—oh, I should just shut up.”

  More silence. Once or twice she looked over and smiled, before turning back to watch the sycamores across Madison waving in the breeze.

  “Finally I said, Where are we going tonight?”

  She turned her chair a few degrees toward mine. “I worried about that all day. After the nice place you came up with last night I wanted something special. But nothing seemed right.”

  “We don’t have to go to a restaurant.”

  “We don’t?”

  “We can order in. We can stay out here and then have someone bring food.”