Death of an Orchid Lover Read online

  A play she’d been rehearsing was opening the following weekend. I’d asked her several times to tell me about it, but she kept blowing me off. She seemed sheepish about it, making me think it was one of those shows you do for exposure but would just as soon your friends didn’t know about. I told her I wasn’t going to let her leave the table until she filled me in.

  She shook her head. “It’s experimental yet commercial.”

  “That usually means at the end everyone takes their clothes off.”

  She laughed. “It’s really not bad. And only one person takes her clothes off.”

  “You?”

  “No, not me. The playwright’s the producer of Huff and Petty, you know, the cop show? And he’s getting some important people down to see it, and I have a pretty meaty part. Exposure, you know?”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Go Down Moses. It’s about a fictional conspiracy between Grandma Moses and Robert Moses.”

  “Who’s Robert Moses?”

  “Some New Yorker who was involved in transportation improvement and things like that. He was a boyhood hero of the playwright.”

  “When should I come see it?”

  “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “I want to.”

  “You’re sweet. Can you come next Saturday? Friday’s opening, we’ve papered the house to make it look good for the critics, but we’re trying to get some people in Saturday so we have an audience to work with. I can probably get you comps.” Theater talk for freebies. From the word complimentary.

  “Comps are good.”

  “I can get you at least two. Do you want to bring someone? I don’t really know a whole lot about you, Joe. I know you’re not married, but do you have a girlfriend or anything? Wait, I shouldn’t assume. Not in this business. A boyfriend?”

  Gina would go with me. We’d spent years being each other’s dates when the occasion demanded.

  Then I thought of Jill. Even after four months, I was having trouble remembering that Gina wasn’t available for me every Saturday night. And with Jill in San Francisco this weekend, there was a good chance Gina’d be tied up with her all the next. Maybe I could wait until later in the run to—

  “Joe? Hello?”

  “Sorry. Two for this Saturday would be great. And I’m straight, by the way.”

  “Good,” Diane said. “I mean, good that you’re coming. It really doesn’t matter to me if you’re straight or not.”

  “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “You’ll meet Tom Saturday. My other husband.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Gina came over at seven. We drove to Trader Joe’s and picked up some frozen shrimp and stir-fry vegetables and cheap portobello mushrooms. Then we went to the Baskin-Robbins on Venice and got a couple of hand-packed pints. I asked the teenage girl behind the counter why two scoops cost $3.55, while a hand-packed pint, which was twice as big, was only a quarter or so more. Gina berated me for giving the poor kid a hard time. “Why doesn’t the American public figure this out?” I asked, and Gina gave me a glare and I shut up.

  We cooked everything except the ice cream in my electric wok, then sat watching a National Geographic special on the giant squid. I complained that they never actually showed the beast, except in animation. Gina pointed out that they couldn’t do that, since nobody had ever seen a live one, and I said, “Still,” in that way you say “still” when you know the other person’s logic is faultless and you wish it weren’t.

  A commercial came on. Gina got up to spoon out dessert. I cycled the remote, stopping on the lipstick commercial with Ziggy Marley prancing on the beach with Tyra Banks and some other models. Gina came back in, with huge dishes of ice cream in hand, and saw me watching it. She seemed as if she wanted to say something, but she refrained.

  Three hours later. We were still on the couch, still munching, still soaking up mindless television. Ziggy Marley and his harem came on again. I perked up.

  “You know,” Gina said. “It’s really okay with me if you go out with the orchid woman.”

  “Thank you, O One-who-gives-permission.”

  “I mean, you do need a girlfriend.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She twisted around on the couch, put her hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye. “We’ve been over this a thousand times. It’s not you.”

  “I seem to be the common denominator, don’t I? Jeez, I haven’t had a Real Date since, what, last July with Iris.” In recognition of the ongoing spottiness of our social lives, Gina and I had long ago given Real Dates the capitalized status usually reserved for events like the Age of Reason and the Summer of Love.

  I focused on Gina, realized she didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry, Gi. I shouldn’t lay this on you. You have a nice relationship. I shouldn’t bore you with my lack of one.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I have a nice relationship.”

  There it was again. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything with Jill is fine.”

  “Gi, we’ve been friends long enough that I can tell when you’re bullshitting. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s something. What?”

  She let go of my shoulders and slumped back in a corner of the couch. She doesn’t slump very often. She looked very small. “I think she’s seeing someone else.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I get, like she has something to tell me that she can’t get up the courage to tell me. I know she’s up in San Francisco visiting friends, but I can’t help wondering if she’s really with somebody else. Because otherwise why wouldn’t she invite me?”

  A small admission: some part of me was happy at the prospect of Gina and Jill breaking up. Because, no matter that our relationship hadn’t been romantic for seventeen years, sometimes I wanted Gina all to myself.

  I shook my head. “She’s not good enough for you anyway. And if you break up, you’ll find someone else. You always do.”

  “Oh, eventually I do, but they never stick.”

  “Carlos would have stuck, if you’d let him.”

  “Carlos’s chief attraction was his ass.”

  “And a fine ass it was.”

  “Not fine enough to make up for his …” She reached out a hand, as if expecting to pluck the word from midair.

  “Vapidity is the word you’re looking for. Okay, you’re right about Carlos.”

  She looked at me sadly. “Sometimes I think …” She stopped, seeming to wonder if she should go on, and phrasing in her head what she would say if she did. The telephonerang.

  We looked at each other stupidly. “Are you going to answer it?” Gina asked.

  “I guess so.” I checked my watch. Ten after midnight. I pulled myself up and went to the phone. “Hello.”

  “Joe?” The voice was familiar but not instantly identifiable.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Laura.”

  “Oh. Hi.” A sequence of thoughts cascaded through my head. She wanted to convince me to get back into acting. She’d had a sudden urge to reinvestigate est and wanted me to come along. She wanted to ask me out on a date. “How are you?”

  “Not good.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Albert.”

  “Albert? Albert-from-this-afternoon Albert?”

  “Yes. He’s dead.”

  “Dead? What happened?”

  “He was murdered. And they think I did it.”

  4

  GINA WAS PRACTICALLY JUMPING UP AND DOWN ON THE couch, trying to get me to tell her what was going on. I held up a hand to get her to wait.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked Laura.

  “Get me out of here.”

  “Where’s here’?”

  “The police station on Wilcox. They said they’re about done with me. They offered to drive me home, bu
t I don’t want to be home by myself. Wait.” I could hear her talking to someone else. When she came back on, she said, “please come get me.”

  “What just happened?”

  “Some new detective is here. He wants to ask me more questions. Just come get me, all right?”

  “I’m on my way.”We hung up.

  “Give,” Gina said. “Who’s dead?”

  “Our friend fat Albert. Come on.”

  Gina and I sat in the lobby of the LAPD Hollywood Division, wondering why Laura had chosen me to call. Maybe, we thought, it was because I was fresh in her mind. Or maybe she didn’t know anybody else well enough to call. All this time in L.A. and she had no friends. How tragic. How nice of us to make up a whole life for poor Laura.

  Time stretched. I kept catching whiffs of cigar smoke from somewhere in the back. Cops escorted an assortment of lowlifes through. Big burly guys who’d had a bit too much to drink. Little men with anxious faces, speaking a variety of incomprehensible languages. Hookers from many lands, wearing hot pants and tube tops and shoes time-warped from the days of disco. The cold fluorescent lighting made them all look sick.

  We sat twiddling our thumbs until someone said, “Jeez. Look what the cat dragged in.”

  I looked up. The man standing in front of me was short, with a fringe of dark hair surrounding a bald pate. He had accusing brown eyes with well-defined bags under them, and a pair of half-glasses perched on his nose. He wore a well-cut gray suit, a pale blue shirt, and a tie with pheasants on it.

  His name was Hector Casillas. He was an LAPD homicide detective. The previous spring my friend Brenda Belinski had been murdered. I’d been Casillas’s number one suspect. He was all over my tail, trying to prove I did it, showing up on my doorstep at inopportune times to ask me inflammatory questions. He was good at what he did, but he was a giant pain in the ass while he did it.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said.

  “The real question,” he said, “is what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m picking up a friend.”

  “Let me guess. Laura Astaire.”

  I nodded.

  “Figures.”

  “How come you’re up here in Hollywood?” I said. “You been transferred?”

  He shook his head. “I’m in Robbery—Homicide now, not that it’s any of your business. Which means I get to deal with killers all over the city. Isn’t that nice for me?”

  “What about Burns?” Detective Alberta Burns had been Casillas’s partner.

  “She’s still at Pacific Division. Got a new partner now. What do you care?”

  Good question. Damn. “Who needed to see Casillas again? So you’re involved in the Albert Oberg case?”

  Sure am, not that that’s any of your business either. Look. Don’t get in my hair again. “Capiche?”

  “I managed not to say, What hair?” Instead I told him that I capiched fine and asked where Laura was.

  “I’m right here.” She came around a corner, looking haggard and drained. “They’re done with me now, so can you please take me home?”

  Sure thing. “I brushed past Casillas, took Laura’s arm, and shepherded her toward the door.

  Laura lived in Beachwood Canyon, up above Franklin. An area with a certain cachet, like the people who live there are on the good side of the hipness bell curve. In reality, the lower part, where Laura lived, is a bunch of apartment buildings just like the ones all over the rest of Hollywood and West Hollywood and North Hollywood and everywhere else unsuccessful actors live.

  Her building—the same one she’d lived in way back when—was like a million others in L.A. Two stories, eight apartments, with the front ones on the second floor jutting out over the parking area. Dingbat style, they called it. Decorations mounted on the taupe outside walls looked like alien hieroglyphics from a science fiction movie. Beneath them, a house number spelled out in words clung grimly, although the Seven was short a screw and dangled at an angle its designer never intended. There was a big jacaranda out front, with only a smattering of flowers.

  Gina parked her Volvo on the street, and she and I got out. After a few seconds Laura realized we were waiting and emerged too. Just as she’d done the second we left the police station, she lit a cigarette, took a puff, stubbed it out on the sidewalk. She led us up the sloping driveway, around to the north side of the building, to her ground-floor apartment. A couple of orchid plants sat by the door. They didn’t look good. Probably weren’t getting enough light.

  Laura unlocked the latch and the deadbolt and led us into her living room. Judging from the layout, and having been in dozens of similar apartments, I was almost sure it was the only room, other than the kitchen and, I assumed, a bathroom.

  I couldn’t help sniffing when we walked in. But there wasn’t any cigarette odor. Either Laura only smoked outside, or, at one puff per cigarette, the stink just never accumulated.

  She kept the place neat. A few more orchids were scattered around on tables and the counter that separated the living room and kitchen. The walls were jammed with pictures, awards, and posters. A photo of Werner Erhard. Three Drama-Logue awards, one for a play I’d actually heard of. Everyone in town had Drama-Logue awards. Most of them put them on their resumes, even though six hundred or so a year were given out. Even I had gotten one, for a mediocre performance in a dreadful play. The critic was a little old lady who swore I looked just like her nephew. I’ll remember you,” she’d said, and she did, with one of her myriad awards.

  Laura asked if we wanted anything. We told her we didn’t. She insisted we did. We compromised on tea. She went into the tiny kitchen to make it. I sat on a worn sofa that felt like it had a bed inside, which it more or less had to. Gina considered an old easy chair resembling the father’s on Frasier, though minus the duct tape. The orange tabby upon it looked up at her and yawned. Gina wrinkled her nose and sat beside me.

  Laura came out with tea in big green mugs and a plate loaded with Chips Ahoy! or their close relatives. She set them on a glass and fake wood coffee table and sat in the easy chair. The cat jumped onto the arm of the chair and crouched, looking peeved.

  Laura took a sip of tea, a bit of cookie. “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you,” she said.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  I went through all the people I knew, and I didn’t want to be with any of them. Is that sad, or what? “And you were fresh in my mind.”

  It was as good an explanation as any. Which was why I didn’t like it. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  She nodded. After you left this afternoon, I remembered reading about you in the paper last year. “When your friend was killed.”

  The Brenda business. After I stumbled upon the murderer’s identity, I’d been a media sensation for about a day and a half.

  I felt sheepish, not having remembered about that when I talked to you. Then, when all this police activity happened, I thought you might be able to give me some help. “Since you’d been exposed to them before.”

  That explanation worked a little better. But not much. I decided not to push her on it. “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  It took her a beat or two to get started. “I was the last one to leave the party. I stayed on to help Albert clean up. He insisted his cleaning lady would come in and take care of things, and I said—but you don’t care about that, do you?”

  “Not particularly,” Gina said.

  “In any event, I left about seven.”

  “Where’d you go?” Gina asked.

  “I was with a friend.”

  “Which friend?”

  Laura stared at her before turning to me. “She’s as inquisitive as that Detective Casillas.”

  “And,” Gina said, “she loves being talked about in the third person.”

  “Sorry. I’m under a strain.”

  Gina avoided saying something inappropriate and mounted a conciliatory smile. “You were about to tell us where you went.”
>
  “Like I said, I was at a friend’s house. Helen Gartner. We had dinner.”

  “Where’s she live?” I asked.

  “Tarzana.” A residential area in the San Fernando Valley, so named because it grew up around Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ranch.

  “How long were you there?”

  “A few hours.”

  “Anyone else see you there?”

  She shook her head. “Her husband was at a hockey game in Anaheim. I left before he came home.”

  “Why didn’t you call this Helen when the police came for you?” Gina said.

  It took Laura a second. I just didn’t think of it. “I thought of Joe.”

  “And after you left her place?” I said.

  “I came back here to feed Monty.”

  “Then?”

  Laura looked blankly at me, going inside herself, as if doing some prep work before delivering a particularly difficult line of dialogue.

  Laura? “After you fed the cat, you…”

  “I went up to Albert’s.”

  “How come?” Gina said.

  “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “She got up, opened the door, lit a cigarette, stood half in and half out of the house. Albert and I were involved.”

  “Romantically?” I said.

  She indulged in a second puff before stubbing out the cigarette. She came back in, sat back down. “Is it so hard to believe? I know Albert isn’t—wasn’t the most handsome man, but he was intelligent and caring and—”

  “Whoa.” I held my hands up. “No one’s putting down your choice of boyfriend.” I saw my hands up there, decided they didn’t need to be, dropped them to my lap. “And what happened at Albert’s?”

  “I found him on the floor in the living room. He looked like a sleeping little boy. Except for the blood.” She focused on me. I suppose I screamed. That’s what people seem to do in that situation, and I suppose that’s what I did. “I called 911, but I was certain he was already dead.”

  “How?” Gina said.

  Laura shifted to face her. “I just was, all right?” She gulped some tea and absently petted Monty, whose crouch had transmuted into a meat loaf position. “And I was right. The police said he would have died within minutes after those wounds, that there was nothing anyone could have done.”