Death in the Orchid Garden Read Free Page A

But Marty always liked to review preparations.
    â€œJoel Greene is our so-called ‘associate producer,’” grumbled Marty. “I don’t how he’s gonna work out. He’s a film major from the University of Hawaii and probably gets paid squat. He doesn’t sound like he’s more than twenty years old, though he does come highly recommended by Bob Squires, the guy who runs the Honolulu station. Heaven only knows who they’ll send as shooter and audio engineer. Well, it seems first Joel had this great guy to interview, but he’s much in demand and something came up and then he didn’t have him. But now Joel has him again.”
    â€œHas what great guy?” asked John, his brow furrowed in confusion.
    â€œYou must mean Dr. Tom Schoonover,” said Louise, “another of our reasons for coming to Hawaii. He’s the foremost expert on Pacific Island plants. So Schoonover’s back in the picture?”
    â€œThat’s what Joel says,” said the producer.
    â€œWe’ll get him walking through the garden, showing us all the endangered species,” said Louise. “Nobody could know their way around there better than he does.”
    â€œYeah,” affirmed Marty. “It seems Schoonover just got back from one of his plant explorer trips to the southern Pacific. Apparently the guy’s pretty famous.”
    John raised an officious finger. “I’ve only heard this mentioned as a possibility. But since he wasn’t in the plans initially, we need a separate program segment—or maybe he could be our lead-in to the program. Show him taking a solitary walk down the botanic garden trails as he describes the fate of all those, uh, species.”
    Marty, who’d almost demolished his mahi mahi main course, sat back, his large brown eyes twinkling at John. “Just what Lou said. Have her walking with this guy through the gardens and descending cliffs to capture orchids or somethin’. Then you and Lou together will be handling the ‘Three Tenors’ and their conflicting agendas.”
    The Three Tenors. That was Marty’s cynical moniker for the trio of Doctors Bruce Bouting, Matthew Flynn, and Charles Reuter, the stars of their upcoming shoot. They were not expected to be easy to deal with; Louise had already confirmed that in her conversation with Bouting while swimming in the lagoon.
    â€œNow here’s what else I would propose . . .” continued John.
    Louise took a bit of square-cut seared ahi, dipped it into a delicate sauce, put it in her mouth, and let her mind wander. Later, she learned it was a mistake to daydream when John Batchelder was talking.
    When Marty had called two months ago with the long-awaited confirmation of the trip to Kauai to produce two Gardening with Nature shows, Louise had been busy. She’d been peering into a mirror in the harsh light of a January afternoon. To her surprise and horror she had discovered a change in her face.
    â€œSo the trip’s set,” she’d said to Marty, while still examining this unsettling change.
    â€œYeah. “You, me, Steffi, John Batchelder—we’ll all go together.”
    So Marty’s phone call had been a double whammy. At the same moment that she’d found that down line—that wrinkle —on the left side of her mouth, she’d heard that her younger cohost was coming on this location trip, the most important one in her four-year career as a TV garden show hostess.
    Louise was forty-seven—almost forty-eight—and married with children. She wouldn’t have cared about the wrinkle if she weren’t a TV personality with a video camera trained on her face. Not that she was a sex goddess by any means, but even garden show hostesses were supposed to uphold some standard of good looks, except for the occasional British crone who made it big on TV on the basis of outrageous quips and a deep knowledge of