Free The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal) by Nathan Walpow

should show up to restock. He or she didn’t. I returned to the truck and got out of there just as the Parking Gestapo showed up.

     
    Some freeways are dependable. For instance, you can pretty much count on the northbound San Diego just above LAX being jammed from seven till seven on any weekday. But the Santa Monica’s capricious. It’ll give you smoothsailing at rush hour for several days in a row, then entrap you in some ludicrous jam at 1:00 P.M.
    So it was this afternoon. Just past the National—Overland exit, traffic squealed to a stop. All lanes were packed for as far ahead as I could see. When a minutes delay stretched into five, I got curious. So did the suit in the Infiniti to my left. He climbed out of his car and craned his neck off to the east, never losing a beat in his cell-phone conversation.
    “Get off the damned phone,” I told him. He didn’t hear me.
    I picked up my Earth Opera cartridge and considered whether to chance the player. What the hell. You could always get new copies of your eight-tracks. I shoved the tape in. They were just kicking off “The American Eagle Tragedy,” their very sixties allegory of LBJ and Vietnam.
    I slumped into the seat. The gods of traffic had dumped me there for a reason, I decided. I was to think about Brenda’s murder until I came up with something significant.
    But nothing useful percolated up from the recesses of my underused brain. I got thirsty. I dug around under my seat and came up with a bottle of Mango Madness Snapple with an inch of orange liquid remaining. Lord knew when I’d dumped it there. I dropped it on the passenger seat in case I got desperate. I glanced over at Infiniti Man. He was still yakking.
    Think, I told myself. What do you know?
    It had to be somebody involved with succulents. The chances of some transient or old boyfriend using a
Euphorbia abdelkuri
as a murder weapon? Next to nil. Add dumping the thing at my place and I lost the
next to
.
    But what if someone wanted me to believe exactly that? What if someone from another part of Brenda’s life had wanted to off her, had known about her involvement withsucculent plants, and had learned just enough about them to be dangerous? And what if that person had it in for me and wanted to see me implicated? Was there such a person?
    There might be. Four years before, when I’d started dating Brenda, she was seeing a guy named Henry Farber. Another professor, English or history or some social-science thing. He’d lived on a boat down in Long Beach. Brenda had planned to dump him anyway, but when she started seeing me she accelerated the timetable.
    He came to my house one night and accused me of alienating her affections. I said I’d done no such thing, that they were alienated well before I came on the scene. He promised revenge. He was still there when Brenda happened to stop by. We had an ugly scene, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Brenda banished me to the greenhouse, and when she let me back in, Farber was gone, supposedly convinced I’d had nothing to do with her dumping him.
    But what if he hadn’t been? Or he had, but four years later, sick with regrets about a wasted life, he thought back to when things went wrong and pinpointed that moment at my house? He joined the Long Beach Cactus Club, borrowed a few volumes of the
Euphorbia Journal
, laid his nefarious plans. And one fine spring afternoon he ambushed her and stuck a plant both toxic and phallic down her throat, then left it at my place to make me the prime suspect.
    Given the obvious symbolism of the murder weapon, this new twist on the spurned-lover theory had a certain attractiveness. I’d have to look up Mr. Henry Farber.
    I needed to know more. I needed copies of the police reports. Oh, sure. I’d just march into the station. Find Casillas.
Hey, Hector, I need to know what the coroner had to say. If you’d be so kind, could you run me off a copy? Thank you so very much. I really appreciate it
.

     
    When