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

at last I got home, I decided to call Lyle Tillis. He was as active as anybody in the succulent subculture. Maybe he could provide me with a clue. I dialed him at work, and we arranged to meet at his place in the Valley at six.
    I took a shower and walked naked into the backyard to air-dry. Gina thinks this practice is barbarous, but she’s just jealous because she doesn’t have a backyard. I stood in the sun, stretched my arms to my sides, enjoying the cooling effect of the water evaporating from my skin. The way things were arranged out back, a neighbor would really have to be trying if they wanted to see me. And why would they? I had nothing spectacular to show them.
    When I was dry I pulled the U-bolt from the greenhouse door latch, went in, and considered my euphorbias. I had forty or so, not counting the less sun-tolerant ones in the shade house, where Casillas had found the abdelkuri stub. Tall ones, round ones, leafy ones, bald ones. The genus is huge, two thousand species or so, with four hundred of them succulent. Everything from
E. obesa
, the “baseball plant,” to the virulent but widely grown
E. tirucalli
, known as the “pencil cactus” even though it isn’t one. Plus giant tree forms, semisucculents like the crown of thorns, and, as we succulent enthusiasts are so fond of pointing out, the poinsettia.
    As I’d told Casillas, it was all in the flowers. The true reproductive organs were always the same—a pistil and a few stamens, maybe some glands. Simple and elegant. What people thought of as the flowers were bracts, colorful leaves that had evolved to serve the same insect-attractant function as petals did on other plants. The gaudy red things on poinsettias were a prime example.
    I picked up one species after another. There had to be some clue. I just needed the proper stimulus to pry it out.
    I was standing there trying to divine what that stimulus might be when the golden polistes landed on my thigh.
    Or maybe it had been there awhile. I don’t know. I do know that I felt a tickling sensation, and when I looked down I found an inch-long yellow and black wasp exploring my leg three inches from my bare privates.

 
    M Y ABSURD DREAD OF WASPS BEGAN THE SUMMER I WAS nine, at Camp Los-Tres-Arboles. A kid named Bobby Jewell was crying his head off one day, and the next he was gone. I asked my friend Norman Gonzalez if he knew what happened. “A wasp got him,” he said.
    “What do you mean, jelly bean?”
    “A wasp can sting you ten times in the same place without dying. Each ones worse than the last one. If you’re really unlucky you could die.”
    Since Norman had developed a reputation of knowing all sorts of neat stuff about nature, I took him at his word. And so a week later, when I was walking a log that stretched across Tres Arboles Creek, and when something big and black began buzzing around my head, I screamed my little lungs out, lost my balance, and tumbled into the streambed.
    When I regained consciousness they showed me my bandaged temple in a mirror and told me the damage was from a rock. But I knew better. I knew a wasp had stung me. Only once, possibly twice. Enough to let me know that, given the chance, it would inject enough venom to kill me dead.
    That was the start of it. From then on—even though Iquickly realized that Normans grasp of natural history was questionable at best—the mere mention of a wasp drove me into a frenzy More than once in my ensuing teenage years, I turned off some cute young thing by acting like a total maniac when we encountered one.
    I mellowed somewhat with age, and got to the point where a yellow jacket taking a bite of my hamburger merely induced partial hysterical paralysis. I never got stung. But deep down inside I knew someday I was going to be. Ten times in the same place. The wasp wouldn’t die. But I might.

     
    I did my dance. To the wasp’s credit, it didn’t sting me. Nor did it go anywhere.
    My yells attracted one of the ding-a-lings