Free Death of an Orchid Lover by Nathan Walpow

conversation I was having with myself.

    Stoneburg Studios was on Hollywood Boulevard, east of the run-down tourist disappointment around Vine. All the street parking was metered, and I didn’t have any change. I parked in the lot at the Pep Boys across the street, went into the store through the lot entrance and out the front, jaywalked over to the studio.
    It was an audition for Mighty Blue toilet bowl cleaner. The copy reinforced my recent pigeonholing as the dumb husband with the smart wife. I was to be scrubbing my fixture when she came in with her squeeze bottle of Mighty Blue and showed me what a cleaning ignoramus I was. The tag was, “Don’t spend so much time in the bathroom.”
    I knew the actress I read with—you see the same faces over and over at these things—and afterward we stood on the sidewalk and talked. She told me she’d been in a pilot that had a good chance of making the next year’s midseason replacement schedule. She described it as
“Melrose Place
in Santa Fe.” She seemed very happy about it, and I congratulated her. She asked what I’d been up to. I told her about the Olsen’s mall things. “Wow,” she said. “Sounds great. Easy money. Ever do any near Studio City? I’ll come visit you.” I had one scheduled for Sherman Oaks that very weekend, but told her no, they did them only on my side of the hill. Ididn’t want people I knew seeing me stand around a mall selling ladybugs.
    She went off to an acting class. I went off to the Pep Boys and thence to the truck.

    There were a couple of beat-up bikes lying in Laura’s driveway, with a couple of eight- to ten-year-old boys standing over them. At first I thought they were playing hooky. Then I remembered that a lot of the schools in L.A. are on a year-round plan. At any particular time, a third of the students are on the streets. The kids are in school for four months, take two off. Then four more on, two more off. No wonder they’re mixed up.
    I nodded a hello. The kids grunted back. I headed to Laura’s apartment. One of the cars under the overhang was a Honda Accord, close to twenty years old. Its light blue paint was wearing off in that peculiar way you always see on old Hondas. The car hadn’t been there the other night. Laura’d had a similar model back in the Altair days, and I was willing to bet this one was hers.
    She came to the door with Monty the cat flung over her shoulder, wearing jeans and an ancient red sweatshirt that said YOU’LL NEVER KNOW IF YOU DON’T TRY. I looked at her and asked myself, Could this woman have committed murder? It didn’t seem likely. But I still wasn’t sure.
    She ushered me in, gave me some iced tea, pointed me toward her sofa, took the
Frasier
chair. Monty sniffed my pants leg and lay down at her feet on the one-step-up-from-shag carpeting.
    “You know,” I said, “I still can’t get over how we hadn’tseen each other in fifteen years and now I’m playing Paul Drake for you.”
    “Paul who?”
    “The detective on the old
Perry Mason
series. The guy that went around digging up clues for Raymond Burr.”
    “You’re upset that I called you. Your resent that I brought you into this.”
    “
Upset
is too strong a word.
Puzzled
is more like it. I still don’t know why you didn’t call your friend Helen when the cops took you to the station. Or a lawyer.”
    “I don’t know any lawyers. And I can’t afford one. As for Helen, she has problems of her own.”
    “What kind of problems?”
    She shook her head slightly. “That didn’t come out how I meant it. All I meant was that I didn’t think to drag her into this.” She smiled. “I thought to drag you into it.”
    “Because of my vast knowledge of the criminal justice system.”
    “Yes.”
    There was a pay stub from Apple One, the temp agency, on the coffee table. “You’re still temping,” I said. She’d been temping when I’d known her fifteen years before. She’d be doing it forever.
    “I can’t hold myself