The Orchid Hunter

Being with Scooter always felt safe. When I first came to live with him after my parents died, he made me feel like I belonged here. Even though he didn’t have kids of his own, Scooter somehow knew how to guide me through my parents’ deaths in that car accident. It felt like he’d always be here, always just through the kitchen door, no matter what else was going on in my life.

I guess I was about nine when he blindfolded me and took me into the middle of a neighbor’s cornfield. He set me down between two rows and told me to count to a thousand, then take off my blindfold and come home. Maybe I counted to a thousand or maybe not, but I remember pulling off that navy-blue bandanna, squinting into the bright noon sky, surrounded by the smell of hot corn leaves going dry with summer sun, and thinking, “I better go that way.” Thirty minutes later, I was back at the Slapdash, not knowing how I’d known where I was or where I ought to head. I was just glad Scooter was waiting for me on the front porch with a glass of cold grape Kool-Aid and a hug. He’d patted my head and chuckled, then bragged about how sharp and capable I was to all his friends that night as they sat around the gleaming mahogany bar.

Now, beside the bar, Hank swung the kitchen door wider and Scooter barreled through, shoving his walker out in front of him like a battering ram. Two shuffling steps, shove. Two shuffling steps, shove. I noticed immediately the hair sticking out from under the baseball cap had silvered a lot. His face, a dull gray under a surface flush of either excitement or freshly chopped jalapeños, broke into the broad, toothy grin I remembered from the day I came to live with him. I’d been seven then and the teeth had been real.

When he cleared the door, I went to him and hugged him over the walker, feeling his loose-skinned old-man shoulders through his plaid cotton shirt. Two-day stubble scratched my ear and his arms tightened shakily around my back as he said, “Well, well. How ’bout that.” He smelled like garlic and mothballs and spearmint. If I could bottle that scent I’d remember him forever.

“Hello, old man,” I said.

“’Bout time you came back. I thought you’d done forgot me.” He winked one watery hazel eye to show me he didn’t mean it. “Marian! Bring my girl a beer.”

“What’ll you have?” she called.

“Saint Arnold.”

“You want a mug?”

“Nah.”

Scooter gestured to a table close to the kitchen. “You tell me where you’ve been this time.” He let Hank guide him into a wide-backed chair sporting a seat cushion. So Scooter had finally broken down and set himself up a receiving table. Hank settled in at Scooter’s right hand.

“I’ll do better than just tell you.” I set the brown paper bag on the chair next to me and took out Phalaenopsis donerii, a delicate beauty whose petals gleamed a pure, bright yellow. The lip—the insect pollinator’s landing platform—resembled a leopard’s skin, dark brown and golden. “Fresh from Micronesia,” I said. “She’s small, but she’s fertile. I made sure of that before I turned her siblings over to the boss.”

Scooter’s liver-spotted hand stopped trembling as he touched the plant’s shiny leaves. Just like some stutterers can sing flawlessly, so his hands became steady as a rock around an orchid.

“Wide leaves. Understory t’rrestrial,” he murmured, turning the pot gently. “Monopodial. Better not keep your feet wet, lovely girl.” His fingers lightly traced her lines. “What pests?”

“The usual. And spider mites on the underleaves.”

“Pollinator?”

“The male leopard moth. She blooms for two weeks before the female moths hatch.”

“So the gents make love to her until their lady friends show up.” He shook his head. “Somethin’ else, ain’t it?”

“Timing is everything,” I admitted.

“This is the prettiest since my Laelia anceps. My first orchid.” His voice softened. “Long time ago now.”

“What about the Draculas I brought you last year? Or the Brassia verrucosa the year before that?” I’d nearly broken my neck for the blood-red Brassia.

“There ain’t nuthin’ like the first.” He seemed to want to say more, but didn’t. His eyes sharpened when he tore his gaze from his orchid to look at me. “Couldn’t catch me a couple of moths?”

“You know I don’t do moths. I’m only licensed for plants.”

He nodded. “Appendix One?”

He was referring to the CITES, pronounced sigh-tees, regulations about transporting animal and plant products across international borders. Had I been caught in customs with Scooter’s little Phalaenopsis, I’d be in jail and facing a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. It would have been fun because I’d had four of them packed in my luggage at the time.

I shrugged, noncommittal. Best I not admit to anything in front of Hank, who was, after all, the law. Better for Scooter, too. U.S. Fish and Wildlife raids on orchid growers, even here in the free United States of America, weren’t unknown. Heck, a well-respected Florida botanical garden got nailed a few years ago because they neglected to tell Fish and Wildlife they were preparing to formally register the previously undiscovered Phragmipedium kovachii.

Abruptly, Scooter smiled. “Good girl,” he murmured.

I swigged my ice-cold Saint Arnold while my gut warmed with pleasure. Getting rare orchids into the States under the noses of customs and wildlife agents satisfied us both—me because of the challenge and ultimate monetary payoff from von Brutten, and Scooter because he was a true conservationist.

Scooter had explained to me how the CITES rules worked when I first decided at the ripe old age of ten I wanted to find orchids for a living. It’s simple. You can’t take a plant listed in CITES Appendix One out of its country of origin. It doesn’t matter whether you want to conserve it, study it or clone it. It doesn’t even matter if everybody knows that same country of origin is about to bulldoze the last one under to build a road. That plant can be the only one in existence, and CITES won’t let someone like me save it by taking it out of the country. It’s just one of those things: good intentions gone bad.

Scooter got me started on orchids with his collecting hobby, but I’ve never had the love of the things he does. I like the grittier side. Ever since he told me the horror stories about the Victorian hunters—Roezl losing his arm but tramping across the Americas for the sake of a single orchid, the intrepid von Warscewicz hunkering down in the wildest Colombian floods with his foul-smelling guide—I’ve wanted to be a field collector. For me, it’s the chase, the challenge. If I have only the foggiest idea of what I’m looking for, nothing grabs my gut more than trying to track it down in the middle of a choking jungle. And the tougher the job, the better.

“What else you got for me, Ladybug?” he asked.

I spread five plastic sleeves across the table like a winning flush. As I named the powdery seeds inside them, Scooter’s smile got wider and wider until I thought his jaw must hurt.

“Marian!” he called. “Take these into the greenhouse office for me.”

“The plant, too?” she asked, sweeping up the sleeves.

“No.” He caressed the orchid’s pot with a tremorless hand. “I wanna look at it for a while.” He raised his liquid gaze to my face. “I’m glad you came to see me, Ladybug.”

“Me, too, Scooter.”

An hour later, I watched Scooter row himself to the office for his late-afternoon nap. Marian hovered over him like a hummingbird, carrying his orchid.

“His Parkinson’s is getting worse,” I said to Hank, “and his color’s bad. His skin’s gone gray. He was barely stage three when I left and now he seems like he’s gone all the way to stage four. Have you talked him into seeing the specialist yet?”

Hank tapped his beer bottle on its coaster. “You managed to do that your last visit.” He took a deep breath, his barrel chest broadening under a short beard just starting to grizzle, his craggy face grim.

“Thank God. One more trip to that witch doctor and I thought he’d start howling at the moon.”

“He’s dyin’, Jess.”

I waited a few seconds for him to add just kiddin’. Or to say that we’re all dying and Scooter is seventy-four, after all, so he’s just a little ahead of the game.

But when he continued, Hank said, “The doctors gave him a cocktail that was supposed to help the Parkinson’s, but it’s damaged his heart.”

“Okay, so they can fix that—”

“It’s irreversible.”

Tears stung the backs of my eyes. “Is that what the cardiovascular surgeon said?”

“It’s what a team of specialists—heart surgeons and neurologists—said.”

“They took an oath,” I protested. “What happened to ‘do no harm’?”

“They did their best.”

“No, they didn’t. They broke him.” My gut tightened. I knew the question to ask, but waited until I wouldn’t cry when I asked it. “How long?” I said finally.

“A month at the outside.”

After the next wave of pain passed, I asked, “What are they going to do?”

Hank shook his head, squeezing my hand once before letting go. “Nothin’. He’s too old.” Before I could get up a good head of steam, he added, “He wouldn’t let ’em do anything about it now even if they wanted to. You know him.”

“Yeah, I do. He’d rather waste his time and money carrying around rabbit’s feet and drinking herbal concoctions Old Lady Fenster cooked up in her backyard than take a vitamin.” I shoved away from the table and stood. “I need to have a talk with that old bat.”

Hank grabbed my arm. “Don’t, Jess. There’s nothin’ wrong with what she was doing. It may not have helped him, but it didn’t hurt him none, neither.”

“Didn’t hurt him? You mean when he didn’t go to the doctor early enough to get help or when she gave him false hope that she could stop the Parkinson’s?”

“It’s Scooter’s choice. It always has been.”

His grip felt like iron, completely unlike Scooter’s feeble grasp earlier. The contrast made my throat ache. “She had no right filling his head with that crap,” I said. “If he’d listened to me years ago and gone to a doctor then, they could have prescribed L-dopa to slow the symptoms.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Hank replied, his voice soft. He let go of me as I sat back down to listen. “This drug treatment they gave him is in trials.”

I stared at him for a moment while my brain struggled to work. “He let them experiment on him?”

“Only because he’s already so far gone. But now they know more about the side effects—”

“Let me get this straight,” I snapped. “The doctors turned a non-life-threatening disease into a death sentence because they wanted to test a cocktail that hasn’t seen FDA approval yet. And when that clinical trial failed, they decided to wash their hands of him and let him die because he’s old. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Hank’s shuttered expression told me I was wasting my breath. He was a bottom-line kind of guy, but I guess the bottom line I’d reached didn’t sit well with him.

“Look,” I argued, “I just wanted him to see if anything could be done. Not to throw himself into a bad science experiment.”

Hank nodded thoughtfully with the air of a parent letting his ten-year-old finish up a tantrum. It pissed me off. I clutched my sweat-slick beer bottle as he said, “He’s a grown man, Jessie. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. It’s not up to you to go tearing up Old Lady Fenster or parade over to San Antone to yell at the doctors. Especially since he’s been workin’ with ’em ever since you left.”

My radar went off. San Antonio wasn’t the Parkinson’s capital of Texas. Houston was.

“Talk to me about San Antone,” I said, shedding my anger a hair. “Why’d he go there?”

Hank toyed with a coaster. I knew I wasn’t going to like what came out of his mouth. “Your great-uncle decided last year he’d check into a cure on his own. He found a lab that was workin’ on one and talked to ’em.”

My heart sank. “Don’t tell me. They agreed to make him a guinea pig.” At his nod, I added, “And he chose them because they’re using an extract of some damned insect saliva in the formula.”

Hank looked at his hands as he said, “They’re still workin’ on the cure. The head guy at the lab, Dr. Thompson, he said the drug had been tested on mice okay. The San Antone fellas just need a little more time.”

I got mad all over again. “It doesn’t sound like they have time. What’s this outfit called?”

“Cradion Pharmaceutical.”

“And they’re hooked up to Scooter’s regular doctors how?” I demanded.

“They offered the trial drug and assigned Dr. Thompson to his case. His G.P. just oversees his checkups.”

“Did his insurance pick up the cost?”

“Not much of it. The Slapdash is mortgaged up to its neck.”

I bit my lip. Damned old fool and his damned fool ideas. “He should’ve paid a hit man. It would’ve been cheaper and faster.”

“Ever’body did their level best, Jessie. Sometimes it just don’t work out.”

“I should have tried harder.”

“We all could have.”

“No. I mean I should have gone to court, got him declared incompetent, and then put him in decent care when he was first diagnosed. I should have been here to make sure the doctors were going to help him, not hurt him.”

Hank stared at me, mouth tightening with what might have been anger. “He’d never forgive you for doing that to him. You got no call to be trying to run his life when he’s still kickin’ around like a mean old hoss.” His bearded chin stuck out a little as he said, “He wouldn’t have tried to tell you what to do.”

I waited for Hank to finish. Behind him, the band’s guitar player slipped the strap over his head and twanged a string, prompting a pretty brunette in tight jeans and boots to drag her man onto the scraped-up dance floor. A group of cowboys in the corner laughed over a hand of cards.

When Hank ran out of things to say, I stood. “See you around.” I headed for the door.

“Jessie,” he warned.

“It’s okay. I won’t bother anybody.” I threw a few bucks on the bar for Marian on my way out.

On the porch, cool wind brushed my cheeks. Only then did I feel the sticky wetness of tears. The man I knew as a father was dying because he was too stubborn to do anything else. A homeopath had given him false hope and some bogus pharmaceutical company had made him a guinea pig and thanked him for it by killing him.

But I was the one who hadn’t been here. I hadn’t done what needed to be done.

If anybody had put the first nail in Scooter’s coffin, it was me.

Chapter 2

Hammarbya paludosa. The Bog Orchid. Officially extinct in Britain, the last wild one had been stolen in December of 2001 from a secret site in the Yorkshire Dales and sold on the black market, probably for around ten grand.

Normally when you think of orchids, you think of the gorgeous, vibrantly colored petals of Phalaenopsis, or the pure seduction of Paphiopedilum, commonly known as lady’s slipper. Orchids are the most blatantly sexual flowers of any on earth, rampant in their attractions, decadent in their enticements.

The Bog Orchid is a runt. It’s a dull stunted foxglove of an orchid—long spikes studded with greenish, waxy-looking leaves that are actually flowers. Ugly thing.

Kew Gardens never succeeded in reproducing it despite their best efforts. There may be a few in Northern Ireland, but no one’s saying if or where.

Most orchid collectors have a couple of rare orchids like this one to trot out at flowering parties and green their guests with envy. The idea is to have lots of different orchids to show one’s taste, one’s style, one’s sensibilities.

Linus Geraint Newark von Brutten III has over fifty Bog Orchids.

I knew because in the thirty minutes I’d been kept waiting in Building 6, I’d counted them: fifty-seven ugly plants, fifty-seven ugly flowering spikes, 942 ugly flowers.

Tardiness is the privilege of the billionaire who feeds me. Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind. It kept us honest; we always knew where we stood. But von Brutten had pulled me away from Scooter, and I was ready to get this show on the road. In the time I’d not been counting, I’d been mulling over how to tell him I wasn’t going on a fishing expedition for him, at least not while Scooter was still around.

“Dr. Robards.”

I turned. A bow-tied, black-jacketed butler stood in the greenhouse’s doorway. His high forehead sprouted a light humidity sheen. The Bog Orchid does need, after all, a bog.

“Hullo, Sims,” I said. “How’s it going?”

He bowed. “Mr. von Brutten requests your presence in the morning room.”

Well, hell. That’d be a twenty-minute walk. “Then why did he send me here when I arrived?”

“I am afraid I cannot say, Dr. Robards, but I am sorry for the inconvenience.”

I wondered if all butlers were taught to speak without either expression or gesticulation. Sims might be being truthful about what he didn’t know, or he might not, and I’d never know. Couldn’t help but like the guy. “Lead on,” I said.

Von Brutten’s estate, fancifully called Parsifal, was a sprawling thousand-acre ranch fetched up against a low ridge about an hour outside Spokane, Washington. The ranch had two lakes and a great view of the Columbia River. I’d been in about half of von Brutten’s greenhouses, Buildings 1 through 9. The other half he kept to himself. It rankled, not being trusted. But if I’d been robbed blind for my plants as often as he had, I might be a little picky about my buddies, too. The only reason I knew those greenhouses were there was because I’d seen the satellite photos. Sometimes it helps to date the right people.

When it came down to it, as much as I hated to admit it, I owed Daley for getting me this job. My first year out of grad school, I managed to track down Cattleya turneris in Costa Rica, a rare blue orchid the year blue was all the rage in collecting circles. Plucked it right out from under Daley’s nose, in fact. I got the call from von Brutten within a day of arriving back in the States: he wanted to hire me as Daley’s replacement. “Daley,” von Brutten had breathed over the phone line, “has not lived up to expectations.” I’d been collecting for von Brutten ever since.

The morning room faced east, and light cast down through the glass roof for only a couple of hours. I liked this room because it opened onto a little shade garden surrounding an irregularly shaped man-made pond. Von Brutten’s orders must have been to make the garden look like a jungle, with its bowing palms and water-loving bromeliads. It didn’t. This garden looked like a place you’d want to rest in, maybe take a nap.

The word jungle is from the Sanskrit jangala, meaning “impenetrable.” The jungle smothers you with noise and odors and fear. Its trees tower, woody vines dangle, insects bite, birds screech, monkeys howl, jaguars stalk, and the whole time heat rises through the air like somebody threw water on a griddle. You don’t penetrate the jungle. It penetrates you.

“Dr. Robards,” Sims announced, his deep voice echoing under all the glass.

Were he true to the stereotype, von Brutten would have been huddled over a Dendrobium, clutching a watering can and muttering diabolically to himself about humidity. Instead, he relaxed his small, elegantly suited frame into a Lucien Rollin chair and smiled a frosty smile over his silk jabot.

“Dr. Robards,” he breathed. “Please, sit and enjoy a little something.” He snapped his fingers. Food and juice appeared, carried by silent bow-tied wait staff.

“Just tea for me, thanks.”

A French press of tea sat at my elbow. Poof. Just like that. Maybe money was the secret of Houdini.

“Did you enjoy your flight?”

“I always enjoy the Lear, thanks,” I said. “Very nice.”

While we traded meaningless social niceties, I studied him. His pale, even features seemed vaguely threatening in repose, but I’d gotten used to that. He resembled the guy who’d share his last smoke with you before smiling benignly and dropping you headfirst into a shark tank. Small eyes, aquiline nose, a thin-lipped mouth, a closely trimmed goatee. In some circles he might be considered genteelly attractive. I didn’t move in those circles. As far as I knew, there was no Mrs. von Brutten, nor was there a boy-toy wandering around. Von Brutten appeared to be either extremely celibate or extremely circumspect.

Or maybe he just got his rocks off pollinating nearly extinct orchid species.

After he asked me a polite question about my limo ride from Spokane to Parsifal, I realized he was desperately excited about something.

The more excited he was, the less likely he was to act that way. But I needed him to hurry up so I could get back to Scooter. The trick was to hustle him up without appearing to want to.

“Your jet’s much nicer than the crate I took out of Micronesia,” I said casually. I wished I smoked, so I could blow a stream negligently into the air while glancing away.

“A successful trip.” His hand strayed in the general direction of Building 3, where the siblings to Scooter’s Phalaenopsis were being studied in a high-tech laboratory.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Did you…have fun…in Micronesia?”

I shrugged carelessly. “I ran into Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh’s errand boy.”

“And you took care of him.”

“He came away empty-handed, as usual.”

A smile fled across von Brutten’s silvery eyes.

I waited. You can’t push someone like von Brutten too hard. And he was enjoying my news too much for me to rush him. Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh had consistently beaten him to the punch until I came along, and von Brutten had made sure I knew he was pleased with my performance. My ability to outwit and outcollect the handful of professional field collectors in the world meant von Brutten stayed top dog in the insulated and obsessive world of ultra-high-dollar orchid collecting. We had a gentleman’s agreement: he paid me generously and I didn’t work for anyone else.

The ten or so other professionals tended to freelance, sometimes for private collectors like von Brutten and sometimes for legitimate botanical institutions. Not that the institutions would admit to being party to breaking the CITES Treaty. The only other monogamous employer-hunter relationship I knew of was Mrs. Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh and Lawrence Daley.

I sipped my excellent tea, poured for me by someone I hadn’t noticed.

An irregular chuffing noise started up from von Brutten’s direction. I glanced over to see him holding an embroidered handkerchief to his mouth. His eyes wrinkled at the corners. Was he choking? I nearly got up to administer the Heimlich, but the chuffing stopped and he removed the hanky from his mouth.

Laughing. He’d been laughing at my dumping Daley. I felt bizarrely honored.

“Hmm,” he said, then surprised the hell out of me by saying, “Tell me about your great-uncle.”

“He’s not your business,” I replied.

“He’s ailing, is he not?” Von Brutten’s left hand twisted a gold ring around his right hand’s index finger. “Victim of a pharmaceutical experiment?”

“That’s not—”

“It’s a shame that someone who raised you after your parents died—car accident, wasn’t it?—should now be facing imminent death as well as the loss of everything he owns.”

I stood up, tossed the linen napkin onto the table. “Thanks for the Earl Grey. I’m glad you liked your flowers.” I walked toward the door.

“I know what it’s like to lose all of one’s family,” he called.

He could go screw himself. I kept walking.

“My sources tell me Cradion has a record of concealing its failures no matter the cost.” And when I didn’t stop, he added, “I can repair the damage they did to your uncle.”

I spun. There was no point in shouting How do you know about Cradion? How do you know about Scooter? because of course this was Linus Geraint Newark von Brutten III. I kept my mouth shut and glared at him instead.

He inclined his head toward me. A conciliatory gesture. “But I need your help to do so.”

“Surprise me.”