Death in the Orchid Garden

by Ann Ripley

  The clicking noise abruptly stopped. “The police? What’s happened?”

  “Remember I told you about our three scientists, the ones appearing on our show?”

  “I don’t remember their names, but you described them well enough. The expansive millionaire nursery owner. The cute, kooky ethnobotanist. The righteous environmentalist. Has something happened to one of them?”

  “Yes. To Matthew Flynn. The ethnobotanist. He’s dead.” Her voice broke.

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Someone threw him off a cliff up there in the Na Pali coast.”

  “No, it happened right here at the hotel. They have a little cliff out on the beach. It’s a leftover piece of lava shelf. Kids dive off it into the ocean.”

  “Well, then, why didn’t he think to dive, if someone shoved him? Maybe he would have lived.”

  She was getting angry at her beloved husband. “Because the back of his neck was gashed open by somebody up there on the cliff.”

  “How could you know that for sure, Louise? Let’s not be overdramatic and make every accident into a crime.”

  Hurt by this remark, Louise felt tears coming to her eyes. Her voice choked up. “I know because I saw it when the medics picked him up and put him on the stretcher. His head seemed barely attached to his body.”

  Bill slowly said, “Louise, wait a minute. What are you saying . . .”

  “I tried CPR. But I couldn’t save him.”

  Silence at her husband’s end of the phone. “I am so sorry, dear. Forgive me. You poor thing. Quite frankly, I was so engrossed here writing this paper that I . . . I didn’t mean to be unkind. What a terrible ordeal for you to go through. So it wasn’t the fall that killed him?”

  With an effort, she held back her tears and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. It was an awful wound. And there are other things that were odd. For one thing, there was the sign on the path.”

  “A sign?”

  “I saw a ‘path closed’ sign that kept me and everyone else from going up that cliff last night. After I found Matthew Flynn, the police and I walked back and there was no sign around. So that might mean that a murderer lured him up on the cliff . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . And then put up the sign, hurried back up and killed him. Or something like that. Then there’s the rock that fell down on him when I was giving him CPR.”

  “Louise.”

  “It landed on him, not me,” she said. Her voice choked again.

  “Was this person trying to kill you, too?”

  “I’m beginning to think so. I’d been working on Flynn for about ten minutes when this rock came down. I happened to be sitting back on my haunches at that second or it would have—well, at least hurt me a lot. Bill, it must have weighed fifteen pounds.”

  Silence on the other end of the phone. “My God,” said her husband slowly. “But why would someone want to kill you?”

  “Police Chief Hau isn’t sure. Maybe the killer thought I saw him. And it might have been treated as an accident if I hadn’t come along and seen that sign, which was later removed. So if they’d found me dead, too, they might just think that Dr. Flynn and I . . . well, I don’t know what people would have thought.”

  “Me neither, Louise. I’d better come over there.”

  “Why don’t we wait and see if the police can find out what’s behind this. The scientists and the Corbins and John and I might have to stay on an extra day or so while they investigate. Needless to say, they questioned me a lot last night. We sat there in this big, empty conference room going over the details time after time. I need to get off the phone because they want to meet with us again at ten. It’s after ten already, but I couldn’t seem to get going this morning.”

  “Louise, hold on.” From the rustling sounds, she guessed Bill was looking for the hand computer he carried in his suit jacket. While he did this, she went to the closet and retrieved tan capri pants and a sleeveless white blouse to wear.

  Bill came back on the phone. “I’m looking at my schedule,” he said. “This comes at a hectic time, which, you know, is the reason I didn’t come to Hawaii with you in the first place. I have a big strategy meeting first thing Monday morning. Maybe by Monday night you’ll know if you can fly home Tuesday. If that doesn’t happen, all bets are off and I’ll fly over and get you.”

  “Another thing, Bill . . .” She was going to tell him about the injury to her hand, which had required a brief trip to the hotel’s in-house medical clinic. Though located in a corner basement room of the hotel, it was well equipped with a staff nurse, an X-ray machine, and a jovial, gray-haired doctor. He had quickly slapped a bandage on her, told her to keep it dry, and sent her on her way.

  As if her husband were reading her mind, he said, “Are you really all right? You didn’t get hurt last night, did you?”

  “I have abrasions on one hand is all. Otherwise, I’m okay.”

  He said, “Good. Take a sleeping pill if you’re having nightmares about that scene on the beach. It isn’t fun dealing with dead bodies, even if you didn’t know the guy very well.”

  “I’ll do that. I’ll admit I didn’t sleep well. Waking or sleeping, I still see those lifeless eyes. Bill, I didn’t realize how badly he was hurt until the emergency crew turned their lights on him, or I might not have tried to save him.”

  “Aw, Louise,” commiserated her husband, “I wish you hadn’t had to go through that. Tell me, what kind of a man was he, this Dr. Matthew Flynn?”

  “What kind of a man? I’m not sure. He was a loose cannon in the eyes of some in the scientific community. But he was likable and he believed in the work he did down there in the Amazon; in fact, he seemed to be obsessed with the desire to catalog all the plants in that region before many of them became extinct. He did discover at least one plant that turned out to be valuable to medicine, I hear, but flunked out on a lot of others. He seemed to like to shock people—he had to tell us all about his and his sidekick’s use of hallucinogenics in the jungle, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s part of what they do,” said Bill. “There’s a book called The River, all about Dr. Richard Schultes, the dignified Harvard prof who was the best known of that bunch. He plunged into the study of those drugs and was one of the first to learn of the effects of the peyote mushroom, only by sampling it himself. Scientists like him have made incredibly valuable discoveries among those jungle plants.”

  “Yes, we heard all about that,” she said wearily. “I think Flynn’s assistant, George Wyant, still uses mushrooms, if you know what I mean.”

  “A drug user, eh? I guess I’m not surprised. But let’s get back to you, Louise. You sound tired. And no wonder—trying to resuscitate that poor Flynn must have really taken it out of you. You were very brave to try to save him.”

  “Anyone would have done what I did.”

  “I wonder if that’s true. But now, looking forward, Louise, the usual caveats apply.”

  She laughed. “They do?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “You sound like Soames again.” When Bill fell into his bossy mode, she reminded him he was acting like the difficult husband in The Forsyte Saga and it usually brought him out of it. “You’re telling me the conditions under which I may remain in Hawaii.”

  “Not exactly. What husband would dare tell his wife what to do?”

  She laughed weakly.

  “Look, my sweet,” continued Bill, “I don’t want to sound officious. I love you and I want you to come home in one piece. You know this is for your own good. You’ve lived through a terrible summer; you don’t need more of the same or you’ll have to go somewhere for a rest cure. Ironically, I thought it would be restful for you to go to Hawaii.”

  “So did I. It has been relaxing, up until now.”

  “All I’m saying, darling, is try to let the cops there do the investigating and stay out of it.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “
Now give me the names of the other people involved. I’ll do background checks on them.”

  With his vast network of contacts in government, especially in his role as an undercover CIA agent with State Department cover, Bill could usually pull in favors.

  “But I thought you said I was to stay out of it.”

  “Louise, I know you. It’ll be impossible for you not to do some looking around. I don’t want you messing with people who might be dangerous. And obviously, at least one of them is dangerous. The least I can do is help you to know who you’re up against.”

  She smiled, as she quickly donned her clothes. Her husband knew her better than she knew herself.

  16

  Louise stepped out of the elevator into the wide marble-and-carpet hall and walked in the opposite direction from the conference room where she was supposed to be twenty minutes ago. She was accustomed to being on time for appointments and it made her nervous to be late, but she desperately needed a cup of coffee from the dining room to take to the police briefing.

  Immediately, she realized things had changed in the hotel. It was as if everyone knew what happened last night on Shipwreck Rock. Otherwise, why were the guests, who only yesterday smiled amiably at one another, now shooting suspicious glances at her?

  A blond woman in a lime-colored suit and high-heeled lime green wedgies made her way down the hall a few paces ahead of Louise. She was schmoozing noisily with each guest she encountered, talking about the superb weather and the upcoming evening’s entertainment. Apparently, thought Louise, she felt obliged to resell Kauai-by-the-Sea to visitors, wordlessly begging them not to check out and to disregard the fact that a man may have been murdered a stone’s throw away.

  Louise tried to avoid the woman by hurrying ahead of her to the end of the hall, then ducking quickly into the greenery that surrounded a huge brass parrot cage. The parrot, resplendently blue and yellow, with a distinguished feather tuft on his forehead, looked down at her for a long moment. Then he let her have it: “Bad baby . . . bad baby . . .”

  She put her index finger to her lips. “Shhh!” she told him.

  “Bad baby!” he screeched, even louder.

  It attracted the eye of not only the woman in the lime green suit, but desultory guests as well. They turned and stared at her, causing her face to flame with embarrassment.

  Louise rose slowly out of the plants like Venus out of the sea.

  The woman came up to her and with a world-weary smile said, “That’s what you get, dear, for trying to evade me. I was just trying to cover all the guests, you know, and you’re one of the guests.”

  Distracted by the woman’s enormous lime green hanging earrings, Louise said the first thing that popped into her head, “I don’t need positive reinforcement, because I’d never give up the lagoon.” Then she marched off with as much dignity as remained, which wasn’t much.

  Once out of the woman’s range, Louise let out a deep, shuddering sigh and picked up speed. Bad enough to have a bird chastise her, but a bird and a bureaucrat were too much.

  The reaction of the hotel guests was puzzling, she reflected. How did word get around so fast, even in this small environment? Kauai had a population of only sixty thousand and the hotel a complement of probably four or five hundred guests. Suddenly she thought of an answer. The “oracle” could have spread the news of Matthew Flynn’s death. Not only his death, she realized, but his violent death. For though she’d barely registered it at the time, the swarthy man with the surfboard who inhabited the beach at sunset had turned up right after the police arrived.

  The beach oracle naturally would have been attracted to Shipwreck Rock, what with all the commotion and sirens. The response team was bent on lifesaving at first, not securing the scene. The barefoot man would have had no trouble getting a close look at the fallen man. The floodlights had shone on the pathetic tableau, affording him a detailed view of Flynn’s broken body and the blood leaking out of the back of his injured head.

  It would have made complete sense for the garrulous surfer to conclude that Matthew Flynn was murdered. And if he thought this, he undoubtedly told everyone he saw and phoned the rest.

  As Louise hustled down the steps toward the dining room, she realized what a shock this messy incident was for the hotel. Although Shipwreck Rock was not on Kauai-by-the-Sea’s property, it was immediately adjacent; it was definitely “guilt-by-association,” she thought grimly. She guessed the woman in the lime suit was in the public relations department and her one-on-ones with guests were part of damage control. In her current punchy condition, Louise wasn’t sure she was guessing right about any of this, for her head felt woozy and her mind was not functioning logically. On the other hand, her visual sense seemed laser sharp. She found herself noting irrelevant details such as the parrot’s yellow head tuft, the fact that the woman’s wedgies had been brand new, and, from the look of them, hellishly expensive.

  Of one thing she was sure: No matter how the hotel tried to soft-pedal the tragedy, it could not deny the fact that the deceased, Matthew Flynn, had been a registered guest.

  Louise marched through the elegantly chandeliered room, hoping to catch the eye of a helpful waiter. She slowed up when she heard someone call to her.

  “Mrs. Eldridge, hold up there.” She turned. It was Police Chief Randy Hau. “G’morning,” he said, in a neutral voice. “I was trying to catch up with you.” He raised his wrist and looked pointedly at his watch. “We’ve already gathered the rest of the people together for our meeting.”

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said. “But I need—”

  He interrupted, smiling. “Coffee? Food? I’m having breakfast brought in to our meeting room. Will that be good enough?”

  “More than enough.”

  “Well,” said Chief Hau as they walked back up the steps and down the long corridor to the conference room, “I heard something about you this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, that you’re somewhat of an amateur detective back where you come from.”

  “You’ve been checking me out with the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Yes, ma’am. One of your colleagues also mentioned it. You know it’s part of my job, checking everybody out. I talked to a Detective Mike Geraghty. He had good things to say about you.” No smile went with this compliment. The chief was not an emotive type of man.

  Louise had difficulty, after four days in the lush tropics, mentally conveying herself back to her woodsy northern Virginia home in Sylvan Valley. It was a place where she was not only known for hosting a TV garden show, but also for becoming embroiled in murder. She didn’t need her lurid history known by people in this resort. But now the police chief knew.

  “Detective Geraghty probably exaggerated,” she said crisply.

  They’d arrived at the meeting room. Hau opened one of two big double doors, which were made of koa wood carved with a flower motif. Stepping aside so she could go first, he said, “Please take a seat with the others. The food should be along any minute.”

  As she entered, twenty-one solemn people turned their heads and gazed at her. It was clear that they had all been affected by a colleague’s violent death, but was she being paranoid in thinking they were looking at her too closely?

  Seven visiting botanists from the conference were there—Matthew Flynn had made the eighth. Because Louise had not bothered to tune in on the botanic conference sessions, the only ones who were familiar were Charles Reuter and Bruce Bouting, though she recognized a third, Ralph Pinsky. Pinsky gazed at her through unblinking, large gray eyes. It was the first time she’d looked into his long, colorless face. Apparently, he was so sure of himself that he had no qualms about staring. Unsettled, she turned her attention to the others.

  As usual, people sat in clusters, with the “planets” surrounded by their “moons.” Christopher Bailey and Anne Lansing huddled dutifully on either side of Dr. Bouting and as usual the scientist’s head was bent in busy, quiet
consultation with the two of them. Nate Bernstein sat attentively on one side of his boss, Dr. Reuter. Ralph Pinsky was on the other.

  Making a group all of their own were Marty, encircled by Steffi and John and the young TV crew headed by Joel Greene. Marty waved her over.

  Tom Schoonover also beckoned, as if saying, “Come sit with us.” Clustered around him were his NTBG colleagues, Tim, Sam, and Henry.

  Unsure of where to perch, she peered into the far corner of the room and made up her mind.

  The dead scientist’s associate, George Wyant, blond hair disheveled, beard unshaven, and clothes rumpled and soiled looking, was holding up a back corner by himself. Slumped far down in a chair, he stared into space with eyes that seemed as dead as Matthew Flynn’s. The young man wasn’t high, she was relieved to see. In fact he was very low: sober, straight, and low. He saw her and tilted his head a degree or two to indicate that he’d like her to join him. She nodded back.

  But first, she raised her nose and sniffed. The aroma of good coffee was filling the air and there was the rattle of dishes. Breakfast had arrived and was set on a table against the wall. Louise made a beeline to the buffet for her own drug of choice, caffeine. She noticed the enticing odors had caused Wyant to rise from his chair and shuffle over to the coffee urn like a wounded animal heading for an oasis.

  17

  “Hello, Mr. Wyant,” she said, as she settled in a chair beside him.

  “Hey,” he replied. Louise realized hey was George Wyant’s version of aloha.

  “I’m so sorry about Matthew Flynn, Mr. Wyant.”

  He turned and looked at her. “I’m too young for ‘Mr. Wyant.’ Call me George and I’ll call you Louise. Yeah, I’m sorry about Matt, too. We were good friends.” He took a sip from the cup balanced on his lap. He had forgone food, making Louise feel a little sheepish, for in addition to coffee, she’d piled up fruits, miniature rolls, and cereal on her tray. She offered him some of the food, but he refused.

  Sitting next to him gave her a close-up of his remarkably modish spike hairdo. When meeting him before, she’d thought the blond streaks might be dyed; now she could see they were the product of a bleaching tropical sun. His eyebrows, too, she noticed, were blanched almost white. With an effort she turned her eyes away, popped a small quiche into her mouth, and tried to pay attention to what he was saying.