Death of an Orchid Lover (7 page)

“I’ve never heard you say that before.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” He stripped off his garden gloves. “We write letters and we go to meetings and probably none of it ever saved one species. Sometimes I think CITES is a big joke.”

“You think the people you’re working against have anything to do with his death?”

“I suppose it’s possible. Didn’t we go down this route with Brenda?”

“We did. Can you think of anyone else who might have held a grudge against Albert?”

He mulled it over. “It sounds ridiculous, but …”

“What?”

“Albert’s an orchid judge. A couple of times he’s said things to me about someone who didn’t like the way their plant was judged. Somebody will act like a jerk because they don’t get the right score.”

I wondered if Sam knew he was still talking about Albert as if he were still alive.

Orchid judging’s far more rigorous than what we do. “And they do it more often. Some clubs have judging at every meeting.” He took a look at the aloe, put his gloves back on, knelt down to renew the attack. “They have a fancy point scale, and if you get a certain number of points you get to put some letters after the name of the plant, and if you get more points you get better letters. Pain in the ass, if you ask me. But the letters make the plants more attractive to buyers, so I guess if someone were pissed off enough at their score they could hold it against the judge.”

“He jerked the stem from the ground, said, Aha,” stood back up. “You’re going to play detective again, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to, but Laura asked me to.”

“Of course you want to.”

“I do?”

Yes. You enjoyed it last time, my boy. “I’ve never seen you so excited.”

“Well … I was sort of thinking of going to the orchid show in Torrance.”

“See? You’re at it already.” He licked his lips. “They have anything to drink around here?”

“There’s some water over on the patio.”

I think I’ll go get some. And you’d better see what those two ladies over there are doing. “It doesn’t look good.”

I turned. Rowena Small and Vera Berg, two of the more problematic members of the club, had somehow managed to
unearth a six-foot
Lemaireocereus marginatus
, a.k.a. fence post cactus. They were carrying it God knew where and had managed to get Vera pinned up against a yucca.

I went to the rescue. They both emerged unscathed. I came out of it with a spine in my thumb.

I
STOPPED AT HOME, TOOK A QUICK SHOWER, MADE IT TO
the Church of God in Torrance by a quarter after one. The name seemed redundant. Who else would it have been a church of?

A big orange sign with black lettering was propped up outside the boxy beige building:

The colors said get ready for Halloween. And someone had gotten hold of some black crepe paper and made a border around the edges, twisting the paper over and over to give it a kind of unintended—I hoped—festive look. Up in the corner someone had hand-lettered
TODAY’S SHOW IS IN MEMORIUM OF ALBERT OBERG.
Plant club people are not known for their spelling.

I stopped at a table in the lobby to give up my .50 cents admission. I was tempted to give the woman seated there a
penny and ask for my .50 cents change, but didn’t think it was a good time to be irritating the orchid people. So I handed in a dollar bill and got back two quarters and a little red ticket. “It’s for the door prizes,” the woman said. “We have some nice cymbidiums.”

“My favorites,” I said.

I walked into the display area, a small auditorium, and began checking out the show plants. I stopped at a table labeled
CATTLEYA ALLIANCE.
I asked an Asian woman with a name badge—I was beginning to realize a lot of Asians went for orchids—what the alliance thing was about. She said an alliance was a group of genera centered around one popular one. So the cattleya alliance included not only
Cattleya
, the big, frilly orchids they put in corsages, but also
Brassavola
and
Laelia
and several more, botanically similar and all judged together in the show. She pronounced the genus “cat-lee-uh,” with the emphasis on the “cat.” Whenever I’d seen it in plant books, I’d thought it was “cattle-yuh” and thought of cows.

I moved on to phalaenopsis, the moth orchids Albert had shown me in his greenhouse. The crewcut guy guarding the table told me, “They sell more of these than everything else put together.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

A voice from behind me answered. “Flower shops. Supermarkets. People at swap meets.”

It was Sharon Turner, the woman from Albert’s I’d vaguely considered asking out. She had on a T-shirt commemorating an orchid show and, again, black jeans. Her gray hair was in a ponytail. “Phals are easy to grow,” she said. “They bloom well in indoor light. Visitors say, ‘Ooh, what pretty flowers.’” She shrugged.

The crewcut guy nodded solemnly and turned back to his table. Not your favorites, “I take it?” I said to Sharon.

She smiled, a nice, even smile that showed nice, even teeth. “They’re just so …common.”

“Yet Albert, the big orchid expert, went for them.”

“He went for everything. Now I have it.”

“Have what?”

Where “I know you from. You’re the it-takes-a-bug man on TV, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“An actor.”

“That’s pushing it. I do commercials.” I sought something clever to say. “So. How’s the mood?”

“The mood?”

“Yes. Albert dying, all that.”

“Oh. The mood.” She made a what-can-you-do gesture with her hand. “Life goes on.”

“Any idea who might have wanted him dead?”

“Now, there’s a question. Why do you care?”

“You know Laura Astaire?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s this police detective who’s got a bug up his ass—sorry.”

“For what?”

“For saying
ass.”

“That’s charming.”

“It’s charming to say
ass?
”

“It’s charming to think I might be offended. You were saying …”

“He’s got it in his head that just because Laura found the body, she’s the logical suspect. She’s asked for my help in proving she didn’t do it.”

“And you know she didn’t because …”

“She has an alibi. She was out to dinner with a friend.”

Sharon had a smile on, a tolerant one like a mother wears when her kid is talking gibberish. “What do you think of the show?” she said.

“I just got started, but it’s a little overwhelming. Too many genera.”

“Want a guided tour?”

“Sure.”

“Come.”

By the time we were done an hour later, I knew enough about the family Orchidaceae to hold my own in any second-rate orchid conversation. They were characterized by having three sepals and three petals, which were modified in a bunch of weird ways to give the flowers their unique forms. The lowermost petal was called the lip, and its shape and color were often the most prominent features.

Sharon showed me dendrobiums, with conelike stems from an eighth of an inch on up, some resembling miniature bamboo forests. And oncidiums, plants with tall flower stalks—or, as the orchid people referred to them, spikes—like the one on the table outside Albert’s house. There was an
Oncidium
Sharry Baby, which Albert had told me smelled like chocolate. It did, but only vaguely.

I met the vanda alliance, some of which had purple-and-white-spotted flowers that I found appealing. They grew in hanging wooden baskets, with their roots dangling below. Rather than putting out a few leaves on each stem and popping new growth from the base, as so many of the orchids did, the vandas instead grew a succession of leaves on the same stalk. This growth form, Sharon said, was called monopodial;
the other, the base-branching one, sympodial. When she told me this she seemed to study me, as if my reaction to this semitechnical bit of information was important. Whatever I said must have shown me to be on the proper wavelength, because she smiled, nodded, and went on. I’d passed my first test.

The last group Sharon showed me was the paphiopedilums. Their common name was slipper orchids, because the lip formed a semienclosed structure that resembled the front of a slipper. They tended toward thick, glossy petals, and their colors and textures made them look like they came out of one of the
Alien
movies. They gave me the creeps.

Sharon picked up on my reaction right away. “They do have that effect on some people.”

“I can’t help it. It’s some inborn thing. Take me away from them.”

As I learned about the plants, I tried to pick up what I could about orchidists. I’d already noticed how many Asians there were. Another thing: The orchid people seemed more affluent than the cactus crowd. I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt that; a little better cut of clothes, perhaps.

We went outside to the sales area. They had three portable fabric pavilions set up, each housing half a dozen or so dealers. As soon as I hit the first table, the seeming affluence of the orchidists began to make sense. The plants were, in a word, expensive.

At a cactus show you’ll find table upon table of plants, neatly labeled, mostly in plastic pots. Leafy ones, spiny ones, weird ones. You see rare plants at fifteen, twenty, thirty dollars on up, but the majority are five or less. Seedlings or rooted cuttings might go for two or three dollars. On the donation table you can pick up club members’ excess plants
for a dollar, even a quarter for the little bitty ones. Thirty bucks at a cactus show will fill your windowsill.

But not so here. The cheapest plants I saw were five dollars, and those were unrooted divisions, three-inch fragments lying forlornly in a tray. The least expensive potted plant was eight dollars, for one of the phalaenopses Sharon held in low regard. Everything else was ten bucks and up, with the emphasis on the up. Four-inch pots routinely went for twenty dollars. Numbers in the thirties and forties were common. Higher ones showed up with alarming regularity.

Yet the prices didn’t seem to be stopping anybody. There were as many customers as I’d ever seen at a cactus show, snapping up plants left and right.

Finally I asked Sharon about the prices. She’d been showing me a stanhopea, and telling me how old-time growers had tried in vain to bloom them until one day a “crock boy” accidentally dropped a pot and discovered that the flower spikes grew downward, into the medium, and hadn’t reemerged to bloom because the pot was in the way.

I checked the tag. Thirty-five dollars. “Are the prices related to how hard it is to raise orchids from seed?”

“Now how did you know about that?”

“Albert told me. Saturday, right before I met you.”

“That
is
a factor.”

“The reason I ask is that succulents are a lot cheaper, and they’re easy to grow from seed. You don’t have to send the seed off to some expensive lab. You sow them, you keep the fungus off, in a couple of years you have decent plants. Sometimes you don’t even have to sow them. My greenhouse is full of volunteers. Baby cacti at their mothers’ feet. Dorstenias, fat little ficus relatives, that spit their seeds all over the place and root in teeny little patches of dirt. I have anacampseros everywhere. Little African leaf succulents, related
to portulaca. Rose moss, you know, or moss rose, the plant books can’t seem to decide. I’m babbling, aren’t I?”