Death of an Orchid Lover (36 page)

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP
M
ONDAY MORNING
, I
DECIDED
I
WAS
worthless. Not only couldn’t I carry on a decent relationship, but I’d reached an impasse in the only other worthwhile element in my life, the search for Albert and Laura’s killer or killers.

It took what seemed like hours to gather the wherewithal to crawl out of bed. I seemed to have no particular reason to do so. Finally my eyes focused on the socket I’d spirited away from Gartner’s. It had fallen on its side and rolled to within an inch of the nightstand’s edge.

I decided to take it back. Getting rid of it would make me feel a little more honest, a little less worthless. It would also give me an excuse to get in the car and go somewhere. It was a bad excuse but, hey, it was all I had.

The sky was clear, the temperature in the sixties. A cool, crisp, perfect Los Angeles spring morning. On another day I would have loved it, thought a morning like that was the most wonderful thing in the world.

The direct route to the Valley and Gartner’s would have been up the San Diego Freeway. But there really wasn’t any
hurry. So I made my way to Pacific Coast Highway, planning to turn up Topanga Canyon Boulevard and take the long way into the Valley, then double back to Reseda. That would eat up more of the day.

I passed Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. By the time I got to Topanga Canyon, I’d thought of another reason to take it. Austin and Vicki lived up there. Austin would probably be home. He’d have marijuana. I could get high and try to forget that I was worthless.

But once I came down from the temporary euphoria that smoking dope would bring, the miserable state of mind would return. In spades. I needed to think things out, figure out what I had to do to become a useful member of society again. Reverting to my days as a pothead wasn’t going to help that effort. I was afraid if I headed up Topanga, even if intending to go to Gartner’s, I’d end up at Austin’s and descend into reefer madness.

So I kept going on P.C.H., followed it as it turned inland, and drove all the way up to Santa Barbara. I spent hours wandering up and down State Street, first in the truck, then on foot, trying to shake the feelings I was experiencing, being wondrously unsuccessful at doing so.

Eventually I got hungry. I found a mini-mart, came out with some bananas and a bag of pretzel nuggets and a bottle of water. I ate a banana and some pretzels.

Sometime after two I got in the truck and headed back south. I was going to take the freeway all the way home, realized the only advantage to this would be getting there more quickly, and what advantage was that? So I turned off in Oxnard and drove back toward P.C.H. Around Port Hueneme I remembered the socket in my pocket. Too bad. But there was always another day for that. There was always another day when you worked only six days a year.

As I approached Malibu I remembered a rocky little cove full of rounded stones and driftwood, where sandpipers piped and pelicans flaunted their crops. A surfer girl I’d dated in my theater days had shown me the spot. It was a good place to think. I’d spent several fun-filled hours there after she dumped me.

I found it a mile farther on. I parked on the side of the road, grabbed my pretzels, picked my way down the rock-strewn slope. There was a tiny beach, a little oasis of sand among the stones. I found a place just beyond where the sand was wet, kicked away a chunk of Styrofoam cooler, sat down on a round gray rock. I could smell the salt of the ocean, marred by a subtle undertone of rotting vegetation.

Above me, gulls did their thing, swooping and calling. Down by the water, a couple of pelicans squatted on the beach. Just beyond the waterline, a sandpiper—or one of those birds I’ve always thought of as sandpipers—waded, constantly eyeing the surface and repeatedly plunging its beak in. It didn’t seem to be coming up with much.

To my right a taller bird, with a crest on its head, a crane or an egret or a heron, stood on one leg. It looked at me and it looked away. I couldn’t figure out what it was doing there. There weren’t any fish up on the beach. Maybe it was checking out what
I
was doing there.

I pulled a pretzel from the bag, scraped the salt off with a fingernail, threw a piece in the air. A gull caught it, dropped it, went after it on the ground. Another wheeled in for a landing. I threw it some too. More gulls clustered around, some gray with mottled feathers, others white with gray wings and an orange spot on their lower beaks. A couple of short-necked black ducks too. Or maybe they were loons.

I crunched another pretzel and threw the fragments on the sand. A whirlpool of gulls erupted. One of the white ones
opened its mouth and cried at the others,
weep-weep-weep-weep-weep.
Another picked up the call. Then a couple more.

I tried thinking about Sharon. She’d said she’d talk to me. What was she going to say? I spent an hour formulating conversations in my head. They all ended badly.

“Enough, I said aloud, and forced myself to move on to killers and victims and suspects.” I thought about Helen Gartner. About her husband, David.

I thought about Yoichi Nakatani. I knew I ought to turn him in. I knew I wouldn’t.

I’d gotten the feeling he was glad someone had found him out. But he probably could have gone on a long time without that happening. Why would anyone suspect him of being involved in plant smuggling?

Then I remembered that someone had.

Dottie Lennox had told me Yoichi was a smuggler. She’d actually said it was “a Japanese fellow, but even with all the Japanese-Americans in the orchid club, what were the chances more than one was a smuggler?”

Where would she have come up with that nugget? Could it be that she wasn’t as crazy as I thought? Why had I been so quick to throw away everything she had to say, simply because she saw the Red Menace where no one else did?

I went back over my conversation with her and realized something else. She’d known about, or at least suspected, the Gartner’s plan to turn tires into a growing medium. When I asked her about them, she told me, “Some people have funny ideas about orchid mix.” I’d dismissed it as pre-Alzheimerian free association.

Maybe I’d been too quick to discount what she said. She’d been in the orchid group longer than anyone. If only I could ask the right questions, and not be so linear in interpreting
the answers, maybe I could find out something about who killed Albert and Laura.

I got up to go. Only one bird remained nearby. A different kind of gull, smaller than the others, with brownish-gray wings and gray spots on its chest. It waited shyly, hoping for a crumb.

There was one pretzel left. I scraped off the salt, broke it in half, tossed the pieces at the bird. It gobbled one on the spot and flew off with the other. I climbed up the slope to the truck.

I felt a little better, but not much. Maybe I had a plan in mind regarding the killings, but my love life was still a shambles.

I stopped in Santa Monica to call my machine. Much as the idea of doing any more commercials pained me, I felt a responsibility to see if Elaine had come up with anything. She hadn’t. Nor had I gotten another miracle pardon from Sharon.

But there
was
the next best thing. Gina had left a message. “Guess what? Your girlfriend called. You’re forgiven. And she wants me to come over for coffee so she can get to know me better. She says she has some issues to work through. Everyone has issues these days, when they used to have problems.” There was a pause. Any longer and the voice activation feature would have cut her off. “I don’t know what I was talking about last night. Maybe I
am
jealous. Anyway, I’m going over at four. I’ll let you know what happens.”

Sometimes I suffer from bipolar disorder. What they used to call manic-depression before everything became so politically correct. It shows up only under certain circumstances.
Like the epileptic who’s touched off by a flashing light, I needed a romance to set off my condition.

At the words
you’re forgiven
, the gloom that had permeated my being evaporated. I went from woe to ecstasy in three seconds.

A little voice in the back of my head said, Gee, Joe, if she was going to forgive you, wouldn’t she have called you first? Rather than let you hear it secondhand through Gina? I chose not to listen to it.

I hit rush-hour traffic, and it was nearly six when I pulled up to the house on Grevillea Avenue. Dottie’s daughter, Maureen, was out front, wearing another Jane Austen dress. We got the hellos out of the way. “She’s not as crazy as she seems, I said.” Is she?

“No. But I thought it best that you find out for yourself.”

“Is she here?”

“Where else?”

“Can I see her?”

“Of course.”

I went through the house again, past the Hummels and the Wedgwood and the Oriental porcelain, all lovingly arranged in their cabinets. The door to the conservatory stood open, as if Dottie had known I was coming.

I entered and stood just inside the door. She was raptly watching the Casio again. I cleared my throat.

She looked up, waggled one frail hand in the air, waved me over. “Oh, goodie. Well, don’t just stand there.” Come in. Exactly how she’d greeted me the last time. She poked a button and cut off the TV. “Bring a chair, she said.”

“That’s okay.”

“Suit yourself. I’d like my catasetum.”

She pointed at a bench off to her left, where a small plant with a yellowish-green flower awaited. I brought it over and handed it to her. “They spit their pollen, you know. They have a little hair on the flower, and when you touch it they spit. Because they think you’re an insect.” She peered up at me. “I remembered why I was telling you about the bees and wasps.”

It took a second to recall the surreal conversation we’d had days earlier. “Why?”

“Because I was talking about those ancient Greeks. And what I wanted to tell you about was the bull semen and the horse semen.”

What had I been thinking? Her pegging Yoichi as a smuggler must have been a lucky guess. I was wasting my time.

“They thought bees came from dead bulls, and wasps from dead horses. And so they put that together with the orchid roots looking like testicles and they decided the ones whose flowers looked like bees came from where bull semen fell to the ground, and the ones whose flowers looked like wasps came from where horse semen fell.”

“Oh, those Greeks,” “I said.”

I tried to figure out how to leave gracefully. But before I could, she looked directly into my eyes. Her own were perfectly rational as she said, “You found out about the Japanese fellow.”

Hmm, I thought. Let’s not be hasty. “Yes.”

“You didn’t believe me when I told you.” She anticipated my apology, held up a hand to cut it off. “It’s all right. Sometimes I sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“How did you know about him?”

“I know everything that goes on in the orchid world.”
Always have, always will. She shook her head slowly. “There aren’t many of us left now. From when the club began.” She smiled, closing her eyes, as if picturing those days. “There was a lot less paperwork then.” We had the plants and we showed them off.