I was off the stool right away, thinking he was having some sort of attack. As he doubled over, I rushed to steady him. “What’s wrong?”
“The Strelitzia!” he sobbed.
A fatal disease? Some body part gone out of whack? “Say what?”
“Bird of paradise! It’s the focal point of the arrangement, what gives it it’s meaning! And I have none! One of my dunderheaded assistants must have used it!”
“If that’s the problem, my dad has one of those plants that he brought back from Hawaii-”
“No, you imbecile, I’m talking about the giant bird of paradise! Strelitzia nicolai. The bananalike leaves, the purple floral envelope! Without it, this arrangement is nothing! Even if I could locate a proper plant, getting the cuttings here on time would be impossible.”
“Can’t you substitute-”
Sylvester’s face scrunched up and got red, and he shrieked, “Substitute?”
Right then Lottie breezed in. “Shar sent me to-what’s his problem?”
“No Strelitzia. I’ll let him explain.” I went outside and took a walk over to Union Square. The most zoned-out homeless guy there looked normal after old Sylvester.
When I got back to the florist’s shop, Lottie was on the phone, and Sylvester lay on the floor doing deep-breathing exercises. “Bird of paradise,” Lottie was saying. “No, the giant variety…You don’t? Well, thanks anyways.” She hung up and gave me the evil eye. “While you’ve been out I’ve called thirty-three florists. Seems the giant bird of paradise is in short supply.”
“So use something else.”
Sylvester moaned dramatically. Lottie rolled her eyes. “He says the arrangement won’t look right, and that’ll ruin the effect.” She consulted a list, picked up the receiver again and punched in a number.
Till then I’d never realized how much like Shar she is. Single-minded and stubborn in the extreme. I watched as she went through the whole list without turning up any giant Strelitzia. Then she grabbed one of Sylvester’s reference books and stuck her nose into it. “There’s got to be something,” she muttered.
You’d think she’d give up. Wouldn’t you?
At around ten that night I was once again hunkered down in shrubbery-this time in the yew trees at the Ingleside house, with Shar on one side of me and Lottie on the other. The guy from Bay Alarm had already called Harry Homestead to tell him about a malfunction in the security system and the huge floral arrangement sitting on the front porch. Now he was waiting on the walk for Harry to arrive. And not far away, in deepest shadow, lurked a couple of San Francisco’s finest.
“You really think this’ll work?” I whispered.
“Yes,” Shar and Lottie said in unison.
I looked from one to the other. Their expressions were so fierce that I was reminded of a horror movie where these harpies ripped a poor helpless male to shreds.
A few minutes more and a car turned into the driveway. Its headlights moved over the yew trees, and even though we were well hidden, I ducked my head. The car door slammed, footsteps tapped on the concrete, and a figure in a trench coat hurried up the walk to the security guy. From my past surveillance, I recognized old Harry.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded.
The security man said something I couldn’t hear, turned on his flashlight, and shone it up the steps at the porch where the flowers were.
Homestead went stiff. He took a step toward the house, stopped and said, “How long has that been here?”
“It was here when I checked the place around nine. The malfunction came up on our command center screens at eight-fifteen.”
Homestead was still staring at the floral arrangement. “You sure it wasn’t a break-in?”
“Well, we can’t be a hundred percent certain, but there’s no evidence of tampering. All the same, if you’ll give me your keys, I’ll check around inside-”
“No! I mean, don’t got to the trouble. I’ll take it from here.”
“It’s no trouble-”
“Just go. Please.” The security guy shrugged and went down the driveway to his car.
Harry stayed where he was, staring at the dark porch. Finally he squared his shoulders and started up there. At the top of the steps he took out what I guessed was a Bic and flicked it. The flame flared, wavered and went out as he dropped the lighter. And Harry let out a sound that made the hair on the back of my neck standup. “Got him!” Lottie whispered.
Next I heard Harry fumbling with the lock. The door opened and banged back against the inside wall. Light came on overhead, and Harry pushed the flower arrangement aside and stumbled down the hallway. Other lights flashed on. Progressing from the front to the back of the house. Lottie murmured, “I’d say he’s as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers.”
A few seconds later the cops who had been watching nearby stepped out of the shadows and flashed us thumbs-up sign. Hands on their holstered guns, they climbed the steps to investigate whoever it was who’d entered a long-unoccupied house in one of the city’s most crime-ridden areas.
Shar stood up and brushed a piece of yew tree out of her hair. “The flowers really spooked him! Sylvester Piazza must’ve done one hell of a job.”
“Actually, the arrangement doesn’t exactly match Susan Cross’s original.” Lottie said.
“Oh?” Shar’s eyes were on the house.
“Yeah. Sylvester couldn’t come get any giant bird of paradise, so I came up with the idea of substituting something even more effective. Sansevierta.”
“What’s that?”
Lottie grinned wickedly. “Something that’s highly appropriate, given that Harry lured his wife here on the pretext that she was to meet his mother. The common name for Sansevierta is mother-in-law’s tongue.”
Shar started to laugh, and she was still laughing when the cops dragged a handcuffed Harry from the garage. They’d found him checking the freezer to make use Susan Cross hadn’t risen from the dead to create one last flower arrangement.
UP AT THE RIVERSIDE
“Duck if you see a cop, Ted.”
And so we were off on our mission: my boss, Sharon McCone; my partner, Neal Osborn; and me, Ted Smalley. She, the issuer of my orders, drove her venerable MG convertible. He sat slouched and rumpled beside her. I was perched on the backseat, if you could call it that, which you really can’t because it’s nothing more than a shelf for carrying one’s groceries and such. And illegal for passengers, which is why I had to keep a keen eye out for the law.
I think our minor vehicular transgression made Shar feel free-far away from her everyday concerns about clients and caseloads at the investigative agency she owns. I knew our excursion was taking Neal’s mind off the rising rent and declining profits of his used bookstore. And even though I entertained an image of myself as a sack from Safeway, my thinning hair ruffling like the leaves of a protruding bunch of celery, I still felt like a kid cutting school. A kid who had freed himself from billing and correspondence, to say nothing of keeping five private investigators and the next-door law firm in number-two pencils and scratch pads.
Soon we were across the Golden Gate Bridge and speeding north on Highway 101. It was a summer Friday and traffic was heavy, but Shar made the MG zip from lane to lane and we outdistanced them all. Our mission was a pleasurable one: a stop along the Russian River to look at and perhaps purchase the jukebox of Neal’s and my dreams, than a picnic on the beach at Jenner.