The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal)

by Walpow, Nathan

  I sensed rapid movement over to my left. Another yellow jacket was examining a pachypodium.

  A flash of gold and black to my right. A polistes cruised over some cacti. A few feet beyond it, a mud dauber was smashing itself against the wall.

  I shifted to a wide-angle view. At least a dozen wasps occupied the greenhouse. Panic froze me in place.

  I heard footsteps outside. “Help!” I yelled as I turned, just in time to see the door slam closed. I could see someone’s outline through the translucent fiberglass. Somebody not too big, maybe Gina’s size. I heard the clank of metal against metal. Then nothing but receding steps.

  “What the hell?” I said, pushing on the door. It didn’t budge.

  Another yellow jacket appeared from under a bench. I smashed my shoulder into the door. The greenhouse shook, but the latch held. “Who’s out there?” I said. No one was, not anymore.

  Another shot at the door. Nothing doing.

  I turned and surveyed the greenhouse. Wasps filled the airspace. Perhaps a score of the black-and-yellow guys—the yellow jackets and golden polistes—as well as a half dozen mud daubers. And somewhere off at the edge of my vision, I caught a glimpse of something bigger. Something that was black and orange and altogether too frightening to focus on.

  Buzzing came from overhead. A yellow jacket hovered not two feet above my scalp. I pulled my robe up over my head. The belt came undone and the robe drew open. I felt as if someone had drawn a bulls-eye on my penis. I jerked the robe closed, held it with one hand, turned back to the door. It had two fiberglass panels separated by a horizontal two-by-four. I could probably kick right through the bottom one. But then I’d have to crawl out through the opening, and that seemed a perfect opportunity for some gung-ho wasp to sting my ass.

  My right hand tickled. I looked down. A golden polistes rested atop my knuckle. Its hind end bounced up and down a sixteenth of an inch from my skin. I flailed. This had the desired effect on the polistes, which went up, up, and away. It had the opposite effect on the other wasps. They all came over to see what the fuss was about.

  I dropped to the floor and rolled under a bench. For a moment I was alone down there. Then one of the mud daubers joined me. It hung out across the aisle, secure in the knowledge it could have me any time it wanted me.

  I thrust at the walls with my feet. But the angle was lousy, and the large fiberglass panels had a lot of give, and I succeeded only in shaking the bench enough to tip something over. I mistook the dribbles of potting mix on the back of my neck for the wanderings of a wasp, and I drew away violently, smashing my head against the bottom of the bench. I cursed and yowled and vigorously rubbed the back of my head until I realized this behavior was an excellent wasp attractant and got myself under some semblance of control.

  I felt a sort of nauseated dizziness from my head way down to my bowels. My breathing was quick and shallow. I thought I would hyperventilate. I tried to force myself to take deep, even breaths. I got deep right, but even escaped me.

  One thing seemed apparent to my addled mind: Someone was unhappy with me. Knowing my overwhelming fear of wasps, they’d introduced a nice assortment into my greenhouse, then lurked in my yard, waiting to lock me in with them, knowing that in my frenzy I would smash into a wall and knock myself unconscious, after which the wasps could sting me at will. Maybe somebody was methodically killing off CCCC’s leadership. Unable to come up with an appropriately brilliant way of offing me with a euphorbia, they’d switched to the animal kingdom.

  But for the moment I was safe, I thought. Most of the wasps didn’t know I was down there. As far as they could tell, I’d just disappeared. Their pinhead-size brains weren’t capable of anything more.

  The simultaneous appearance of three yellow jackets under the bench proved that brilliant theory wrong. I had to get out of there soon. It was only a matter of time until the big stingfest.

  I tried another kick at the walls, drew the attention of a golden polistes, retreated into the corner. Up above, through the gaps in the bench, I could see the big black and orange thing, could hear the hum of its wings as it searched for a fat, tasty mammal to sting.

  The gravel beneath me was making my ass sore. Sweat ran down from my hair into my eyes.

  Suddenly, as if at a signal from the barely seen black and orange giant, half a dozen winged creatures surrounded me. Everywhere I looked, wasps gazed back at me through faceted eyes.

  Ten times. In the same place. Without dying.

  I pulled the robe over my head again and rolled out into the aisle. I vaulted onto the center bench, knocking over half a dozen plants. Across the aisle a spot amidst a batch of cacti looked big enough for my foot. I took a flying leap.

  I looped over the aisle, brought my right foot down right on target. I willed it to contribute just the extra bit of momentum I needed and pushed off on it, plunging forward, directing my shoulder at the corrugated fiberglass wall, hoping that I wouldn’t just bounce back, fall on the bench among the cacti, and become lunch for the wasps.

  As I hit the wall I was virtually certain that was exactly what was happening. I felt resistance, tensed for the bounce-back—

  —and crashed through the wall.

  I heard the crack and felt the shudder. Ragged edges scraped my skin. Suddenly the balding lawn was rushing up at my head. As was a rather large lava-rock planter, filled with dudleyas, a gift from Sam Oliver.

  I twisted in midair like a Flying Wallenda and managed to miss the planter. Almost. My head grazed the rock, then hit the dirt. The rest of me followed shortly thereafter.

  I lay there for several seconds, idiotically worried about the plants I’d knocked over during my escape. I threw a look at the greenhouse. A tear in one fiberglass panel followed a corrugation from the top of the bench to the roofline. The gap was only a couple of inches. I didn’t see how anything as big as me had gone through such a small opening. While I was trying to figure this out, a mud dauber peeked out of the crack, decided freedom was a good idea, and flew off.

  “They’re getting out,” I said.

  The dual blows my head had taken were affecting my thinking. I thought if the wasps escaped into the outside world, they’d all show up to harass me again. So I hopped up and grabbed some duct tape from the garage and gingerly fastened the edges of the crack back together. The vents remained stuck closed, and the metal flaps on the outside of the fan enclosure sealed that portal.

  Finally, all was quiet. No wasp-waisted fiend buzzed anywhere in my vicinity. Just a normal Tuesday morning in Culver City.

  Until, as the adrenaline drained, I realized I’d been stung.

  It started as a pinprick in my right side, near my waistline. Just enough to notice, to reach for, to begin to scratch. Suddenly it flared into its full painful glory. Like someone had stuck a hot wire a quarter inch into my skin and wiggled it around. I clapped my hand to the area just as the pain spread, flaring through my entire right side. A wave of nausea passed through me. Then dizziness. Next thing I knew I was lying facedown on the lawn.

  I got to my feet and bumbled inside and into the bathroom, ran cold water on a washcloth, slapped it to my side. For an instant the pain brightened, then the agony began to recede. My breathing approached normal. The nausea ebbed to a dull rumbling in my gut.

  When I dared to pull the cloth away, I discovered a red welt decorating my waistline, three, maybe four inches in diameter. At its center a tiny, redder spot, the assumed point of attack. I rewet the cloth, plastered it to my side, and went into the bedroom to use the phone.

  The woman at the exterminators’ said they could come Thursday. I told her it was an emergency. She said Wednesday. I said, “There’s a million wasps in my fucking greenhouse, lady,” and she hung up on me.

  I’d show her. I found a bug bomb in the garage left over from one of my biennial ant invasions. I pulled on long rubber gloves and brought the bomb over to the greenhouse. I jerked the U-bolt from the latch, got down on my knees, opened th
e door just enough to slip the bomb in with my gloved hands, activated it, and shut the door.

  The pain in my side had lessened to a dull roar. The welt was bigger now, six or seven inches, and a lovely rose pink.

  I went inside, considered phoning Burns, decided against it. What would she do, send the police entomologist? Instead, I called Gina. But she was with the city council lady and couldn’t talk. She said she’d come over around dinnertime and hung up on me.

  I got in the shower and let cold water beat down upon my sting. By the time I emerged I was functioning more or less normally. I dried off and applied some witch hazel. That helped some, though now an element of itchiness had joined the discomfort parade. I found some shorts whose waistband fell below the distressed area and went out to the Jungle to think.

  Who knew about my aversion to wasps? The sad answer was, just about everyone I knew. The insects were common in L.A., and anyone who’d spent any time with me outdoors had been subjected to my insane behavior when one showed up. Sam, for instance. “Nothing to worry about, my boy.”

  I wondered if he was right. Now that I’d actually been stung and lived to tell the tale, maybe my relentless fear over the last thirty-five or so years had been a gigantic waste of energy.

  But I’d only been stung once. What if it had been more?

  What if it had been ten times in the same place?

  I phoned Paul’s Poinsettia Plantation. “May I speak to Paul, please?”

  “Which one?” said the woman who’d answered.

  “How many are there?”

  “Four. Bill Paul Senior, Bill Paul Junior, Tommy Paul, Annie Paul.”

  “Oh. I thought Paul was a first name.”

  “Everyone does.”

  “Sorry. I’m with McAfee’s up in L.A. We’ve had a little change of management here, and I need to go over a few things.”

  “McAfee’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” Silence for several seconds. “This is Annie Paul. I handle the account. I was so sorry to hear about Dick. What did you say your name was?”

  I told her, then thought the hell with it and said, “Look, Mrs. Paul—”

  “Ms. I’m Bill Senior’s daughter.”

  “Ms. Paul, then. I don’t work for the nursery. The truth is, I’m a friend of Dicks, and I’m trying to figure out who killed him. And I’ve developed a suspicion the whole thing is somehow related to poinsettias.”

  “That sounds ridiculous.”

  “Yes, I know. And I don’t have any real evidence, but—”

  “It sounded ridiculous when I thought of it too.”

  Had I heard her right? “You thought of the same thing?”

  “I did. Thought of it right off. I just didn’t know what to do about it, and the more time that passed, the easier it was to think it was a silly idea.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  Not quite yet she couldn’t. “Are you really a friend of Dicks?” she asked.

  “Yes. And Brenda Belinski’s. The woman who was killed first.”

  “I knew her as well.”

  So Brenda had known a poinsettia person. I had to be on the right track.

  Annie Paul said, “You’re not the killer, are you?”

  “No.”

  She was silent for ten or fifteen seconds. I let her consider whatever she was considering. Finally she said, “Can you come down here?”

  “Is there something you can’t tell me on the phone? Is someone listening?”

  “Don’t be paranoid, Mr. Portugal. It’s just that the whole thing will be so much easier if you can see rather than just hear.”

  “See what, Ms. Paul?”

  “The plants, Mr. Portugal. I want you to see the plants.”

  25

  I GRABBED THE WITCH HAZEL AND A BOTTLE OF DRINKING water and was on the 405 south in ten minutes. An hour and three quarters later, I exited the freeway at the Encinitas exit, where a sign told me I was in the POINSETTIA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. I pulled into Paul’s Poinsettia Plantations parking lot at the stroke of twelve.

  I renewed the witch hazel on my sting. The welt had ceased growing, and the itch threatened to surpass the pain in terms of irritation. When I’d finished nursing myself I stepped down from the truck and took stock. It was a bit warmer than it had been in L.A. The sky was cloud- and smog-free. Dozens of huge greenhouses lined up along a gentle slope to my right, filling an area equal to several football fields.

  I walked toward the only building that didn’t seem to be a growing area, a long, low structure that had been added onto several times with little regard for architectural consistency. As I approached, a woman emerged from one of the stucco sections. She appeared to be about my age, with broad shoulders and hips and a well-tanned face. Her eyes were brown, her hair on a swift slide from brown into gray. She wore khaki shorts and a long-sleeved denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and carried a black three-ring binder.

  She walked swiftly toward me. “Mr. Portugal, I presume,” she said, offering a firm handshake.

  “Call me Joe. Quite a layout you’ve got here.”

  “And I’m Annie. Yes. It does spread, doesn’t it? Please come this way.”

  She took me on the grand tour, showing me the various greenhouses, reciting the names of the plants within. She showed me the complicated arrangement of shades that enabled the plants to receive the six weeks of fourteen-hour “nights” they needed in order to bloom for the holiday season.

  We stopped at a greenhouse way on the other side of the property, much smaller than the others, newer as well. She asked me to tell her what I knew. When I finished she undid a big padlock and slid the door open. “I wish I’d done something when Dick was still alive,” she said. “If I had, we might not have lost him as well.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I don’t know, called someone. But it seemed so tenuous. Just an offhand remark Brenda made.”

  “You’re being too vague for me.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. Let me show you. Then well talk about what it all means.” We went in. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of bloomless poinsettias lined the benches. She led me to a corner where a single tray of three-inch plastic pots sat alone. “Here they are.”

  “They?”

  She stood next to me and opened her binder. “Look.”

  It was an eight-by-ten color photo in a plastic sleeve, showing a small poinsettia. It looked like any other poinsettia, except for one thing. The bracts, instead of being red or whitish or some mottled salmon color, bore chevrons of alternating red and white. Just like the red and green ones on the mysterious Euphorbia milii.

  “We wanted to call it Candy Cane,” Annie said. “But Dick insisted on Sweet Hope, and Brenda went along with him. They wouldn’t let us have the propagation rights unless we named it that. It was to have been a surprise for Dicks wife on their fortieth anniversary.”

  “When did you get these?”

  “Last winter. But we’d been talking about it for five years. Dick dropped by one spring and asked if we’d be interested in a poinsettia with striped bracts. Of course we said yes. We have our own genetic-research staff, look at thousands of new plants, and usually aren’t interested in cultivars from outside sources. But how could we turn this down? The market will be huge.”

  “And Brenda cooked it up.”

  “Yes. Something to do with gene-splicing, although where the gene came from I have no idea.”

  I did, but didn’t see any point in telling her. “What happens next?”

  “We propagate them. We’ll take cuttings, and in a year or two we’ll license them, on a limited basis at first. It’ll be several years before the public sees even the smallest amount. But a couple of Christmases after that you’ll be seeing it all over the country.” She turned the page, showed me another photo. A few more. They all looked pretty much the same.

  “That offhand remark you mentioned. What was that all about?”<
br />
  “When Brenda and Dick were down here last December, we were talking about the difficulties of developing new varieties. Brenda said she never wanted to go through that kind of thing again. It was too time-consuming. It took her away from her conservation efforts and all.”

  “About that offhand remark…”

  “I’m coming to it. It was one of the difficulties she was referring to. Evidently someone else was involved in Sweet Hope’s development. Brenda said that ca certain party’—and those were her exact words—was being a bit uppity. Dick agreed but said he was sure it was all bluster.”

  All bluster. The exact words I’d used to describe Henry Farber.

  “Have you considered the possibility that you and the rest of your family might be in danger?”

  She nodded. “It has crossed my mind. But after the initial shock I began to think Brenda and Dick probably had a lot more in common than our business venture. If there was a connection it could have nothing to do with poinsettias. I understand they were both officers in some cactus club up in L.A. Maybe that’s the connection.”

  We left the greenhouse behind and walked back to where my pickup was parked. I shook hands and climbed in. “What do you intend to do now?” Annie asked.

  “Figure out who this mystery person is, I guess.”

  I waited for her to say, “Find the bastard.” She didn’t. I fired up the truck and started back for L.A.

  Catherine answered the door and ushered me into the living room, where Dad and Leonard were watching a Wiseguy rerun. Leonard looked up. “Hello, boychik?” he said.

  “Hello, Leonard.”

  “Hello, Joseph,” said my father. He had the remains of a cigar in his mouth, unlit, for all I knew the same one he’d had when I’d seen him last. His eyes were wary. He could tell by the look on my face that I’d sussed out his little surveillance scheme. Or Sonny had called him.