“I picked up some brush crawling through your mini-forest. Before disturbing you, I wanted to see if you had a Titan Arum in your greenhouse and, hey, what do you think? You do. So how about it? Would you like to trade pollen with Dougal’s Titan?”
Glory shook her glass, but it was empty again. She slammed it down on the coffee table and again it didn’t break. Had to be Waterford.
“I hardly know what to say to you, Bliss. You admit you have been sneaking around like a spy? And now you want me to do something that will make Dougal happy?”
“You could say that.”
“I can’t believe it! I should fire your ass right now. I don’t accept disloyalty from my employees.” I wondered how many glasses of expensive Chardonnay had passed those glossy lips before I arrived. I really itched to slap her Lancômed face.
“Go right ahead. I have a waiting list of women who would die for me to clean their houses on Wednesday mornings.” We both knew I was right. I could clean two houses a day, five days a week, and not make a dent in the list.
“Well, I just think it’s rude, that’s all.” Glory wasn’t going to pursue my ass, as in firing of.
“Look, Glory, I don’t know anything about these enormous ugly plants, but if they’re as rare as Dougal says, wouldn’t you like to get some seedlings or saplings from the mother plant you’ve had for so many years?”
“Tubers,” she said absently, tapping her long pink fingernails against the empty glass. “They’re called tubers, or corms, once the seeds have matured enough to start growing the plants. And I wouldn’t mind having a few new specimens of Amorphophallus titanum in my greenhouse, but I don’t see why I should do Dougal any favours.”
“Okay, so he’s a jerk, but if both plants are pollinated, you’ll both benefit. Think about it, lots of little tubers, enough to go around.”
She sat silently for so long I thought she had nodded off into a drunken coma with her eyes open. I was ready to get up and pour her another glass of wine to revive her when she glared at me and said, “No, I’m sorry Bliss, you can tell Dougal I’m not interested in his proposition.”
“Are you sure?”
“What’s the matter with you? Are you deaf or something? I said no deal.”
“I know you don’t respect me, Glory, because the Weasel dumped me for a politically connected woman five years older, and I ended up with barely more than the clothes on my back. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m stupid.”
“Well, you should have seen it coming and raided the bank account.”
We were off topic. And she was pissing me off.
“Here’s the thing, Glory. I’m smart enough to know what marijuana looks like. If you co-operate and let me do the cross-pollination, I won’t tell anybody about the grass growing in your greenhouse, setting a very bad example for Sif.”
Glory’s reaction to blackmail was spectacular. I backed away to a safe distance, wishing my old BlackBerry had a camera feature to capture the Kodak moments as they unfolded.
Chapter
FOUR
Dougal’s face was bloodless. “I can’t go over there! That woman knows I can’t go outside. Why does she want to talk in person anyway? I’m paying you to handle it, so go handle it.”
He kept shaking his head and backing away like I was threatening to drag him bodily over to Glory’s. Although it might come to that.
“I don’t know why, but she wouldn’t budge on that point. You have to go there tomorrow evening at eight o’clock, or no deal.”
Watching Glory throw a tantrum was the most fun I’d had all day. It was the first time I had witnessed someone drumming her heels on the floor while tearing at her hair and shrieking she was going to kill herself. After killing me, Dougal, and, I believe, the Pope for good measure.
Her screams brought Pan on the run, white coattails flapping. Pan was her butler, houseboy, and all-season gofer. Only a few inches over five feet and almost as slight as me, Pan coddled Glory like the goddess she believed she was, pouring and serving and fetching, and God knows what else. He didn’t clean though.
Pan gave me a hard look as though he blamed me for the tantrum. I never could figure out how old he was, maybe thirty, or sixty? Splitting the difference, I thought of him as mid-forties. His black hair was brushed back from his face and secured in place with gel. His agate-hard eyes looked like they had seen it all, which was possible working for Glory. But unless he was a martial arts expert, I believed I could take him in a down-and-dirty.
We stood well out of range of Glory’s fingernails while she thrashed around and, when she finally slowed down and showed signs of fatigue, we helped her to a sitting position on the floor.
“It’s simple, Glory. Dougal wants to propagate his plant, and he’s paying me to arrange it, and I need the money. You have the only other Titan Arum in the same stage of development that we know about, so we have to use it. Nobody else needs to know about the marijuana.”
There was no point in being discreet around Pan, since he probably tended the crop. A goddess doesn’t carry watering cans or snip off dried leaves. And rolling her own joints? Forget it.
With one red eye peering through the curtain of hair and her full lips thinned almost to extinction, Glory finally agreed. But only if Dougal met with her face to face, on her turf. And, yes, she knew but didn’t care that he had agoraphobia. That was his problem. He should just get over it. Take it or leave it.
I took it. Now I had to convince Dougal that he could go out into that wide, never-ending world and not die from the experience.
I coaxed, “Look, Dougal, we’ll do it like this. Your car is in the garage, right? So we’ll get into it there, and you can lie on the back seat with your face covered. When we reach Glory’s, you keep your eyes closed while I lead you into the house. That way, you’ll never even see you’re outside.”
His fingers beat a desperate tempo on his chest. “Only one thing wrong with that. I sold my car, and my new Land Cruiser won’t be delivered till the end of the month.”
“So, we’ll walk. It’s less than two blocks. You keep your eyes closed, and we’ll be there in five minutes. You can stand that, can’t you?”
“No, I can’t. I’ve barely been out in the backyard. I can’t walk all that way by tomorrow night.”
The money was slipping through my fingers. “What if you smoke, you know … before we set out?” I was already a blackmailer, so moonlighting as a drug pusher seemed an attainable career goal.
“I’d have to smoke steady from now right through until tomorrow night to get mellow enough for that. Then I’d be too stoned to talk, let alone think. And you need your wits about you to negotiate with that succubus.”
“There’s only one thing left. We’ll go over on my motorcycle. Wait, let me finish.” But he whimpered and wandered away in the direction of his solarium. I followed and found him draped over his concrete pot. I swear he was talking to Thor.
I looked inside and said, “Hey, Glory’s spathe is starting to turn pink on the inside, too.”
In the few hours I had been gone, Thor appeared to have shot up several inches.
Dougal straightened. “It is? Are you sure?”
I nodded. “Her spadix might be a little taller, but not much.” I was tossing off those horticultural terms like nobody’s business.
He licked his lips. I knew he tasted the victory of pollinating such a rare plant,