The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) Read Online Free Page B

been getting in touch with. It hadn’t.
    I pulled my robe tighter and went into the greenhouse. It’s about twelve by eighteen feet, with benches all along the inner walls and another one down the middle. The ground is covered with gravel, and the walls and roof are corrugated fiberglass panels that have turned translucent from exposure to the sun. There’s a series of so-called automatic vents around the top of the walls, which work when they feel like it, as well as a temperature-activated fan at the far end. Five hundred or so plants live there in relative harmony, grudgingly sharing space with an assortment of seed and rooting trays.
    I started my rounds. Each morning I would meander through the greenhouse, dressed in a bathrobe and karate slippers, sipping a cup of tea. I’d note who’d put on a little growth spurt, who had buds or bugs, who needed a bit of extra water. Fortified with a reassurance that life went on, I’d be ready to face the day.
    Two minutes along I realized it was silly to think I could just carry on my ritual like nothing had happened. Every time I saw a euphorbia, I thought of the previous evening’s events. New buds struck me as inconsequential. Mealybugs seemed a really stupid thing to worry about. All the growth spurts in the world weren’t going to bring Brenda back.
    I abandoned my rounds and retreated to the house. I took a shower, ate some toast, and went out front to the Jungle. That’s what I call the patio at the southeast corner of my house, right by the front door. A gigantic elm on my oddball neighbors’ property blocks most of the direct sun, so I’ve filled it up with plants that don’t need a whole lot of light. It’s jammed with viny hoyas and ceropegias, rattail cactus and epiphyllums, jungle cacti with big showy flowers. I’ll sit in one of the wicker chairs and let the plants droop down around me and imagine I’m in Africa or Costa Rica or someplace. At dusk I’ll relax out there, pretend the trees lining Madison Avenue don’t exist, and imagine I’m watching the sun go down.
    I put my feet up on the railing and thought about the meeting that evening. Brenda’s presidency of the CCCC had been a good thing, in that her quirky energy brought some life to a lackadaisical crowd. The flip side was that she would get snide with people she thought were stupid or ignorant, occasionally embarrassing them in front of the whole club.
    Now the duty of keeping things going fell on Dick McAfee, the vice president, who was as far from Mr. Excitement as a saguaro is from a petunia. He would ramble on and on about the most inane little thing, be it botanical or whatever, worrying a subject to death even after it had expired. Not only that: He mumbled. He’d start a sentence and you’d think you were following, and then you’d realize that you hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about.
    I pictured them all sitting in their folding chairs at theOdd Fellows Hall. Dick would be up there saying, “Brenda is dead; somebody killed her; they stuck a
Euphorbia abdelkuri
down her throat. An interesting thing about
E. abdelkuri:
In its native habitat the goats make it into canoes.” Or at least that’s what it would sound like. But with Marble-mouth Dick you couldn’t tell; that might really be what he was saying.
    I was going to have to take charge. I was, after all, now next in line for the presidency. I’d taken the secretary’s job because no one else would, which was basically how anybody got any job in the club. Except Brenda; she’d actively campaigned to be president—against no opposition—because she thought she could then get the members interested in volunteering at the conservatory. She’d had the post for almost five months, and in that time the most notable foray by CCCC members up to UCLA had been by an elderly couple who got lost and ended up trimming bamboo at the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden.
    I got together a few sentences that didn’t