The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) Read Online Free

air, stripped of pollutants by the previous night’s rain, smelled strangely clean. Kids played ball, while their parents watched them with half an eye. All was right with the world, except someone I knew was dead.
    We stopped at Hurry Curry to pick up a couple of combination plates and got back to my place around eight-thirty. The motion-detector light in the driveway didn’t go on. Whoever’d offed Brenda had disconnected it. He was lying in wait for me. He had a master plan to kill off all the succulent-plant collectors in Los Angeles in order to win all the trophies at the Intercity show.
    I made it through that fantasy and we went inside, where I jumped in the shower while Gina dished out the food. I was rinsing off when I heard her say, “Anybody dead in here?”
    I poked my head around the shower curtain. She’d ditched Mrs. Kwiatkowski’s polyester and had on my ProcolHarum T-shirt and my purple sweatpants, all bunched around her calves. “Very funny,” I said.
    “What do you want to drink?”
    “A beer,” I said. “Beer goes good with Indian food.”
    She nodded. “I’ll have one too.”
    “You don’t drink beer.”
    “Ill make an exception.” She disappeared back into the kitchen.
    Five minutes later we were arrayed on the couch. I sniffed. Either the Cygon smell had worn off or I’d gotten used to it.
    Gina’s method of distributing our food had been to place each Styrofoam container on a plate and cut off the tops. While we ate we exchanged summaries of our interviews, after which she said, “Do you really think she was murdered?”
    I downed a forkful of lentil curry, took a sip of my beer. It was the only thing I could taste. “Even given Brenda’s fondness for cylindrical objects in her mouth, I don’t think she put this one in.”
    “Whoever did picked a particularly weird one.”
    “It is more bizarre than most, isn’t it?” I got up, took
Succulents: The Illustrated Dictionary
down from the bookcase, and leafed through until I found
E. abdelkuri
. “Uh-oh.”
    “What?”
    “It says here it’s from Socotra.”
    “Why is that an uh-oh?”
    “I told that lady detective it was probably from Africa.”
    “I don’t think being wrong about that is a felony. You did say ‘probably’ Where is Socotra, by the way?”
    “The Middle East somewhere, I think.” I grabbed an atlas and riffled pages. “It’s an island off the coast of Somalia, although it looks like officially it’s part of Yemen.”
    “That’s more or less Africa.”
    I was already back in the succulent book. “This also points out that the latex is yellow, which I noticed when we found Brenda.”
    “Latex?” Sap.
    “So what if it’s yellow?”
    “Most euphorbia sap is white.”
    “Is this significant?”
    “How the hell do I know? I’m just making observations.”
    “You’re supposed to know these things. I’ll give you another chance. Do you think she was poisoned to death, or did she strangle on that thing? Or what?”
    I shrugged. “We succulent people are always talking about how euphorbias are poisonous. How you shouldn’t get the sap—”
    “Latex.”
    “—in your eyes or in an open cut. This book makes a point of saying abdelkuri’s is poisonous.” I scanned some other euphorbia entries. “It doesn’t point that out on any of the others. So maybe abdelkuri’s is especially bad. I wonder if the killer knew that.” I put the book away and returned to the couch. “Gi, I don’t have any idea how it killed her. Maybe it got in her stomach and was digested and poisoned her blood, or maybe it just closed up her breathing passages, or—”
    “Enough already,” she said. “The whole thing gives me the creeps.”
    “To quote our friend Casillas, ‘Homicide gives everybody the creeps.’”
    I ripped off some
nan
, wadded it into my mouth. A little burned piece tumbled from my lips and fell in my lap. I brushed it off, pursued it into the crack between the cushions, pushed it out of