Death of an Orchid Lover Read online

  “She’s not here. Go home.” He was smiling. Damn him. He was enjoying this.

  I turned and stalked out of the place. I headed home. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

  It took me fifteen minutes to get there. When I did, a familiar Ford Tempo was parked out front, and Sharon was sitting on my doorstep.

  I sat down beside her. “Hi,” I said. “Been here long?”

  “No.”

  “How come you came?”

  She shrugged. “When I thought about things, I believed you. It took me most of the day to think about things.”

  “Gina is my best friend. Sometimes we stay over at each other’s places. On each other’s couches.” Yeah, and lately in each other’s beds too sometimes, but I wasn’t dumb enough to say that part aloud.

  She smiled and took my hand. “It was the naked legs that did it. When I saw her naked legs I just flew off the handle.”

  “Don’t most people sleep with their legs naked? At least in L.A. in springtime? Don’t you?”

  Her smile turned mischievous. “Maybe. What happened to your knee?”

  “I fell down.”

  She released my hand, stood, started out to the curb. “I have dinner fixings in the car. Come help me with them.”

  She had several bags full of “fixings.” She also had a present for me, an orchid with two little round leaves atop each of its three spindle-like pseudobulbs. “It’s a schomburgkia,” she said. “The ant plant.”

  “I like it,” I said. When we went inside, I put it in the kitchen window.

  She’d brought some fish and vegetables and ingredients for some kind of Middle Eastern pilaf thing. Also a bottle of white wine. I knew white went with fish, but the label meant nothing to me. It never does.

  I volunteered to help, but she said she had everything under control, so I went to take a shower. As I was getting undressed I discovered the socket from Gartner’s in my pocket. Stupid thoughts ran rampant. “Is that a socket in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” I stood the thing up like a little monument on my nightstand.

  I lingered under the shower spray, letting the jets of water pulse the dog costume sweat and the tire graveyard grit from me. I thought of Sharon, bustling around, being domestic. When I was done, I bandaged my knee, put on jeans and my Hawaiian shirt, and returned to the kitchen.

  Sharon smiled when she saw me. There was a phone call while you were in the shower. “I almost picked it up, but I thought it would be presumptuous.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Gina, I think.” She giggled. “Look at your face. It’s all right. I’m fine with her now. Why don’t you go listen to it? It’s about Yoichi.”

  I played back the message. Hi, it’s me. Sam hasn’t heard anything back yet. But listen to this. Yoichi’s alibi. It sucks. “Call me.”

  I looked over at Sharon. “Go ahead,” she said. Call. “If it will help find out who’s been going around killing people …”

  Gina picked up on the first ring. “It’s me,” I said.

  “How are you doing?”

  I smiled, looked over at Sharon. “Much better. What’s this about Yoichi?”

  “You know that meeting he was supposed to have been at last Saturday? It was canceled at the last minute. The host got food poisoning.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “I got some names from Sam and made some calls and like that. Legwork, I think they call it.” She gave me some of the details.

  “Wow.” I flung Sharon a glance. She was chopping vegetables. Something came over me. “So, about Dad’s tomorrow,” I said into the phone.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that. My mother called. She wants to hang out with me tomorrow night.”

  “Yes, it does sound like a great time.”

  “No, hanging out with my mother does not sound like a great time.”

  “He’s looking forward to seeing you too.”

  “Oh. Orchid Woman is listening, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You’re trying to make her jealous, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are a very bad boy.”

  “I feel that way too.”

  “Call me tomorrow.”

  “I will. Good night.”

  “Night.”

  Sharon had her head cocked. “What’s this about Yoichi’s alibi?”

  “Like the lady said, it doesn’t hold up.” I filled her in, then went to the stereo and put Neil Young on the turntable. After the Gold Rush.

  Sharon held out a glass of wine. Here. “Try some of this.” I came back over and took a taste. Pretty good, not too sweet. With nothing in my stomach but a piece of pie, it went right to my head. I nodded my approval.

  Sharon took a sip from her own glass. “I just wish it were a little colder.”

  “You could put an ice cube in it.”

  “I wanted to do that, but I thought you would think I was gauche if I put an ice cube in my wine.”

  “You’ve seen my house. You think I care about gauche?”

  She smiled and held out her glass. “Will you get me one?”

  I took the glass, went to the freezer, opened it. It was filled with ants.

  Hundreds of ants. Thousands.

  They were scattered among the long-forgotten half-loaves of bread and the frozen goodies from Trader Joe’s and the ice-cream dregs. Most of them weren’t moving. They were dead. Or at least in suspended animation.

  Usually, when whatever group consciousness runs an ant colony realizes none of the ones streaming off somewhere are coming back, they stop sending them. You spray pyrethrum around a potful of cacti, for instance, and soon the column of tiny six-legged bodies ceases. But this time was different. Some hymenopteran Jim Jones was at work, pushing them forward, convincing them curling up and being still was the way to ant nirvana. On they came, hustling up the side of the refrigerator, ignoring the relatively warm interior where jelly jars and rotting kiwi fruit beckoned, boldly stepping into the freezer, blithely riding like an ant Light Brigade, half an ant league onward into the Valley of Death.

  “Stupid ants” was my clever reaction to all this.

  Sharon came up beside me and took a look. “How awful,” she said.

  “Fuck,” I said. Then, “Excuse my French.” I hate when people say, “Excuse my French.” Especially when it’s me.

  “I think a ‘fuck’ is called for, under the circumstances. Can I help?”

  “Please.”

  We unloaded the freezer, filling the trash with anything unidentifiable or more than a year old, dumping anything conceivably worth saving in the sink. I wet a couple of paper towels and began mopping the little guys up, an operation that was inefficient at best. Sharon shook her head. “You have a Dustbuster?” she said.

  “Under the sink.” The woman was a genius.

  She came back with it shortly, crevice tool at the ready. Before long she had the bulk of the ants sucked up. I imagined them coming back to life among the compressed dust bunnies, trying to figure out where their nest was.

  We rounded up the stragglers, tracking them back to their source. It seemed to be behind the refrigerator. I muscled it out from the wall and discovered they were emerging from a tiny crack along the baseboard. I wielded the pyrethrum spray. Within a couple of minutes the onslaught ended. Sharon went out to empty the Dustbuster, while I pushed the fridge back in place.

  When I finished, she was right behind me. “If only you’d had your schomburgkia sooner. Maybe they would have colonized it and left your freezer alone.”

  I turned. It seemed as good a time as any. I took her in my arms and kissed her. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to, until I actually did.

  She put one hand behind my back and the other in my hair. I felt stirrings that had been absent for too long. Mostly absent, except for the other night at Gina’s.

  Finally we drew away from each other. “That was pleasant,”
“Sharon said. We looked at each other for a few seconds more, until she swatted my butt and said, Out. I have to finish making dinner.”

  She made me sit in the living room with my wine and a plate of cheese and crackers. I picked up the Times and scanned the comics. Mary Worth was as insufferable as ever. The women who lived in apartment 3-G still hadn’t aged, and Baby Blues still made me laugh, even though I knew less about babies than I did about, well, wine.

  After a couple of minutes Sharon sat down beside me. “Another half hour,” she said. “Smells delicious.”

  “It will be.”

  She leaned against me and I put my arm around her. We sat like that for a minute or two. “Then I said, Why didn’t you tell me about David Gartner’s attitude toward the Japanese?”

  Her shoulders tensed. I thought I’d upset her by letting my investigation intrude on our romantic moment. Then I felt her shrug. I started to, remember? And then I never got around to it again. “It didn’t really seem that significant.”

  “He sort of attacked me with a torque wrench today.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I made the actual first move.” I pointed to the Band-Aid on my knee. “That’s how this happened.”

  She drew away, almost violently. A drop of wine splashed from her glass, fell on my couch. No one would ever notice the stain. That does it. “I want you to stop playing detective.”

  “Why the big reaction?”

  “I told you—I don’t want to invest a lot of emotional energy in someone who’s going to get himself killed.”

  “All right, I’ll try to stay alive. Come back here.”

  It took her a few seconds, but she laid her head back on my shoulder, and we forgot about murder for a while.

  Two hours later. We’d had a delicious dinner, I’d stacked the dishes in the sink, and we’d taken a walk around the neighborhood to work off our meal. We held hands the whole time. It had been years since I’d held anybody’s hand as much as I did that evening. We’d sat in the Jungle for a while, but the night got nippy and we went inside.

  Now we were back on the couch. I felt a growing urge to make a move. I hated that I was being so calculating about the whole thing. I wished I were free enough to just be organic, get physical when our bodies wanted to, without making everything into a head trip. But not me. I had to make a production.

  Finally she said, “Why haven’t you tried anything yet?”

  “I don’t know. I love being with you, but the fact that I keep having to think about whether to try something tells me that it isn’t time yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to make love to you, but …it wouldn’t be making love yet. It would still be just having sex.”

  “Good.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what this terse answer to my emotional unveiling meant. But I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to seem stupid.

  Shortly after that she said, “I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  “You need to go to bed.”

  “I do. I’m going to go home.”

  I walked her out to the car. “I have tickets to a play Sunday night. You want to go?”

  “A play?”

  “Yes, you know, where people get up on the stage and make believe they’re other people.”

  She smiled, but her mind was elsewhere. “Let me think about it, all right?”

  Okay. I’d sort of come to terms with Saturday night. But now she was wishy-washy about Sunday too. Had I, in my illimitable wisdom, somehow blown it?

  “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I’d love to see you Sunday, but I’m not much for plays.”

  “Oh.” I hate roller coasters. So do my emotions. “We could do something else.”

  “Call me at the shop after lunch.”

  “I have one of my Olsen’s things at the mall. I’m not sure I can get to a phone.”

  “Then call me later on. Or Sunday.” She frowned. “What do you think, if we don’t have any contact for a day I’m going to disappear? I’m not going to disappear.”

  I pulled her to me and kissed her again. It was nice. It was exciting. But why did I get the feeling she wasn’t totally into it? Why was I getting all these conflicting signals?

  23

  THE BIGGEST EXCITEMENT OF SATURDAY MORNING’S GREENHOUSE rounds came when I went to pluck a renegade particle of pumice off one of my mammillarias. When I touched the multiheaded spiny mass, it moved. This is not supposed to happen. I nudged it again. The whole thing collapsed. It was nothing but a skeleton of spines surrounding a heinous mess of orange goo.

  This wasn’t that unusual; cacti are very susceptible to invasion by various agents of fungal and bacterial rot. Overwatering is usually a factor, but if anything I’d been too conservative with the water lately. And sometimes the infection will get in when the pot is dry as a bone, and turn your prizewinning plant into a pile of mush overnight.

  I took the thing to the garbage can. I saw the food scraps from the night before. Usually when I see food remnants in the garbage, I feel guilty for not composting. But on this particular sunny spring morning, I just felt a little sad. Sharon and I had had a lovely evening, and I was certain I would find a way to screw things up. I felt like a character in a Greek tragedy; the gods were conspiring to dole me out little scraps of love, leaving me pining for more.

  I went inside, called my father, and asked him if Mrs. Vela could come to the family gathering. He said that since he considered Gina a member of the family, her mother must be one too, and of course she could come. Then I called Gina, briefed her on my date, and told her what I’d arranged about that evening. She said it sounded like a great idea. All the extra people would make being with her mom less stressful.

  I went in to shower. I found myself fantasizing about Sharon. She was in the shower with me, the water coursing down her body, her nipples erect from the cold spray. Why the spray would be cold I had no idea, but it seemed a good way to get her nipples erect. Then I realized it was my fantasy and they could be erect for any damned reason I pleased. Like maybe because being with me turned her on. So I granted us some warm water.

  Just a couple of days before, I hadn’t been able to picture Sharon naked. What fine progress I was making.

  I was about to leave for my Olsen’s gig when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Joe Portugal?” said Hermann Schoeppe.

  He was a plant smuggler. I didn’t like what he did, but I liked him. He was charming, he was helpful, he was practical. We’d become acquainted during the Brenda business.

  I wasn’t surprised to hear from him. After all, I’d set Gina and Sam to tracking him down. How are you, Mr. “Schoeppe.”

  “Fine,” he said. “And you?”

  “Just fine.”

  “And your friend Ms. Vela?”

  “She’s fine too.” Everyone was fine. How nice for us. “Where are you calling from?”

  “The Gambia. But please, enough small talk. Transatlantic rates are high. I understand you have been trying to reach me.”

  “I have. I need to ask you something.” “Has someone been murdered? Do you suspect me?” I laughed. Feebly. “Yes to the first question. No to the second.” I gave him the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books version of the past week’s events. Then I said, “Do you do orchids?”

  “Do?”

  “Do, as in smuggle. Do you deal in orchids?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “But not a lot.”

  “No. I work in succulents. Only if something shares a site and is too charming to ignore do I take orchids. Otherwise I leave them for others. I do not infringe on their territory, nor they on mine.”

  Honor among plant smugglers. What a concept. “So you know some of the, uh, orchid men.”

  “Yes. We meet sometimes, talk about business. You know how it is.”

  I pictured them sitting around at the Plant Smugglers’ Benevolent Society, reviewing species they’d ravaged, habitats they’d plundered. “In your
contact with these gentlemen, has the name Yoichi Nakatani ever come up?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Schoeppe said. “Should it have?”

  “Possibly. I believe he might be involved in your profession.”

  “Involved?”

  “Goddamn it, do we have to be so damned polite? I think he’s a plant smuggler. I don’t care if he’s a plant smuggler—well, I do, but it’s significant to me right now only if it has something to do with the murders. I just need to know. I’m not going to do anything about it unless he’s involved with the killings. Do you think you can find out anything about him?”

  “I can try.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” I gave him Gina’s cell phone number as a backup and rang off.

  My Olsen’s gig at Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks went smoothly. I quizzed Diane on her opening. She said everything had gone well. There’d been three or four reviewers in the house and audience response was good. But since the place was papered with the cast’s loved ones, that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  A couple of times I was on the verge of calling Sharon. Just to check in, to not let a day go by without contact. But each time, I gathered a shred of self-respect and found something else to do instead.

  I was done at four. I pulled up at a traffic light on Ventura Boulevard, next to a bus that had stopped to let off passengers. There was an advertising placard on the side. I was supposed to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Channel 5 on Tuesdays. Good thing we had buses in L.A. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what was on TV. What had that other sign been for, on Melrose, on the bus that nearly ran me over? Oh, yeah. Nash Bridges. Friday nights on CBS.

  Friday nights?

  Was that what it had said? I closed my eyes, tried to picture the words emblazoned between the smiling faces of Cheech Marin and Don Johnson.

  Somebody honked. My eyes snapped open. The light was green. I cut in front of the bus and pulled up by a magazine stand a block ahead. I hopped out, grabbed a TV Guide, shuffled pages.

  Yup. Nash Bridges was on Fridays.

  I drove to Hollywood. Up Beachwood Drive to Laura’s neighbor’s place. I took the stairs two at a time and rang the doorbell. Rustling sounds inside. Eventually, “Who is it?”